The attitude of the medical profession of that day is exemplified in Dr Jorden's curious treatise Of the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), dedicated to the College of Physicians in London: "It behoveth us, as to be zealous in the truth, so to be wise in discerning truth from counterfeiting, and natural causes from supernatural power. I do not deny but there may be both possessions, and obsessions, and witchcraft, &c., and dispossession also through the prayers and supplications of God's servants, which is the only means left unto us for our relief in that case. But, such examples being very rare nowadays, I would in the fear of God advise men to be very circumspect in pronouncing of a possession, both because the impostures be many, and the effects of natural diseases be strange to such as have not looked thoroughly into them."

"Devils have a greater game to play invisibly than by apparitions," is the observation of Baxter in his World of Spirits. "O happy world!" exclaims he, "if they did not do a hundred thousand times more hurt by the baits of pleasure, lust and honour, and by pride, love of money, and sensuality, than they do by witches."

In Scotland the vulgar notion, according to Ramsay (1721), was that a ghost could not be laid to rest until a priest spoke to it and got to know what disturbed it

This view is confirmed by the Statistical Account (1794). Of the parish of Lochcarron, in the county of Ross we read: "There is one opinion which many of them entertain, and which indeed is not peculiar to this parish alone, that a Popish priest can cast out devils and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy have no such power. A person might as well advise a mob to pay no attention to a merry-andrew as desire many ignorant people to stay from the priest.'

Anciently, according to Pliny, houses were hallowed against evil spirits with brimstone. Later times have converted this charm into what Churchill, the satirist, in his Prophecy of Famine calls “a precious and rare medicine;" and it is now used-presumably with greater success-in exorcising those of our unfortunate fellow-creatures who feel themselves possessed with a certain teasing fiery spirit, said by the wits of the South to be well known, seen and felt, and most troublesome in the North.

As observed by a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1732, the nursery with its bugbear stories originates the delusion, and thence the transition is easy to the traditionary accounts of local ghosts, which, like the genii of the ancients, have been reported to haunt certain family seats, and cities famous for their antiquities and ruins. To this class belong the apparitions at Verulam, Silchester, Reculvers, and Rochester; the dæmon of Tidworth, the black dog of Winchester,

and the bar-guest of York; while suburban ghosts owe their origin to petty printers and pamphleteers. Thus the story of Madam Veal was of singular use to the editors of Drelincourt on Death. When we read, proceeds the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, of the ghost of Sir George Villiers, of the piper of Hammel, of the dæmon of Moscow, or of the German colonel mentioned by Ponti, and when we see the names of Clarendon, Boyle, and suchlike writers associated with these accounts, "we find reason for our credulity, till, at last, we are convinced by a whole conclave of ghosts met in the works of Glanvil and Moreton."

The author of the New Catalogue of Vulgar Errors (1767) speculates upon the singularity of sailors, who are as a class so indifferent as to what befalls them, being so terrified at the idea of apparitions; which form the chief subject of their songs, and in the existence of which they firmly believe. In this connection may be introduced the narrative of a sea captain attached to the port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. On a voyage home the cook of the ship happened to die. The honest fellow, by reason of one of his legs being somewhat shorter than the other, used to walk in the way vulgarly expressed as "with an up and a down." A few nights after his body had been committed to the deep, the mate in extreme alarm roused the captain with the intimation that the cook was walking before the ship, and that all hands were on deck to see him. After discharging an oath or two at this invasion of his rest, the captain directed them not to disturb him further, observing that they would soon see who got to Newcastle first, whether the cook or the ship; but, when he turned out in compliance with the importunity of the crew, he frankly owned that he was like to have caught the contagion of superstition, for on seeing something move after the manner of the deceased cook, and recognising, moreover, the familiar cap he used to wear, he verily believed there was more in the report than he had originally been inclined to believe. A perfect panic ensued; and, when he ordered the ship to be steered towards the object, no one would alter the helm. When he did this himself, he discovered shortly that the ridiculous cause of all their commotion was the fragment of a main-top, the survival of some wreck, floating in advance of them. But for this verification, the story of the walking cook doubtless would have been added to the ample list of nautical yarns.

The current superstition respecting the Red Sea, as the place to which shadowy visitors were remitted for confinement, is indicated by Dr. Johnson, who protests that, if he had any malice against a walking spirit, he would, instead of laying him in the Red Sea, condemn him to reside in the Buller of Buchan; and the antiquity of the existence of spirits given to disturbing households by knocking is attested by a passage in Osborne's Advice to his Son (1656), where he speaks of unhappy marriages, which must, he says, "needs under their sleepe unquiet that have one of those Cadds or Familiars still knocking over their pillow." Could the author have known of the affair in Cock Lane, he might have been equally happy in alluding to Miss Fanny's scratching.

Shelly-Coats are explained by Allan Ramsay to be those spectres of which the ignorant vulgar stood in such dread and told such strange stories; namely, that the coat of shells with which they were clothed made" a horrid rattling" as they moved about, and that they would certainly destroy those they encountered unless running water were interposed between them. Curiously enough, women with child they 66 dare not meddle with."

The word Ghost-a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon gare, spiritus, anima-in the north of England is pronounced "guest." According to tradition, the streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne used to be haunted at night by "a guest" that assumed various shapes, among others that of a mastiff, to the terror of those who met it; and numerous were the stories recounted of its operations.

Of the Bar-guest of York, Drake in his Eboracum notes that he entertained a lively recollection as one of the terrors of his childhood; and he therefore could not help throwing away an etymology upon it. The word comes, he supposes, from the Anglo-Saxon buph, a town, and gart, a ghost, signifying a town-spirit; and he calls attention, on the authority of Langwith, to the circumstance that in the Belgic and Teutonic re is softened into Gheest or Geyst.

GIPSIES.

FROM some striking proofs derived from their language it should

seem that the gipsies originally came from Hindostan, where they are supposed to have been of the lowest class of natives, the Pariah to wit. Their migration thence took place, it has been conjectured, about the year 1408 or 1409, when Timur Beg ravaged India in the course of his violent propagation of the religion of Mahomet This involved the reduction to slavery and the destruction of so many thousands that a universal panic ensued, and a very large proportion of the terrified inhabitants sought safety in flight. The country to the north and east being closely beset by the enemy, it is most probable that the territory below Moultan, to the mouth of the Indus, was the first asylum and rendezvous of the fugitives. This is called the country of Zinganen; and here they continued in safety till the return of Timur from his victories on the Ganges. Then they effected their complete emigration, and probably were attended by a considerable number of the natives; which circumstance will explain the meaning of their original name. The exact track by which they came to us cannot now be ascertained. If they went straight through the southern Persian deserts of Sigistan, Makran, and Kirman, along the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Euphrates, they might thence have got, by way of Bussorah, into the vast deserts of Arabia, afterwards into Arabia Petræa, and so have reached Egypt by the Isthmus of Suls. Unquestionably they must have been in Egypt before reaching us, else we cannot comprehend how the report originated that they were Egyptians.

In Grellman's Dissertation on the Gipsies, of which an English translation appeared in 1787, a very copious catalogue is given of

gipsy and Hindostani words collated; by which it appears that every third gipsy word is Hindostani, or rather the proportion is as twelve to thirty. This lingual correspondence will impress the reader as being most striking, when it is recollected that the gipsy vocabulary has become familiarised to us but recently; in other words, after a separation from their presumed native country of near four entire centuries, and after a sojourn among people talking totally different languages, which the gipsies themselves had to adopt, and which necessarily must have had the effect of considerably altering their own. Grellman also institutes a comparison of them with the Indian caste of the Sudras; but we should lay the greatest stress upon proofs derived from similarity of language. In the seventh volume of the Archæologia is a paper by Marsden, entitled Observations on the Language of the Gipsies, which embraces a collection of words obtained personally from the gipsies here, and another, procured by correspondence from Constantinople, of words used by the Zingaris thereabouts; and the result of comparing these two collections, and the words supplied in Ludolph's Historia Ethiopica, with the vulgar tongue in Hindostan, is pronounced to be the establishment of the identity therewith of the gipsy language. According to Grellman, the gipsies first arrived in Switzerland, near Zurich and other places, in 1418, to the number, including men, women, and children, of fourteen thousand souls.

The British Critic supplies a passage that exhibits proof of a different tendency. It reports the fact of Blumenbach having laid before the members of the Royal Society of Gottingen a second decade of the crania of persons of different nations. In the first variety was the cranium of a veritable gipsy who had died in prison in Clausenberg, between which and the cranium of the Egyptian mummy exhibited in the first decade the resemblance was very striking. Both of these differed essentially from the sixty-four crania of representatives of foreign nations in the possession of the author; a circumstance contributing to confirm the opinion of Meiners that the Hindoos, from whom Grellman derives the gipsies, themselves originally came from Egypt. In his Description of England prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicle (1587), Harrison's enumeration of the various cheats practised by the begging community contains this reference: "Moreover, in counterfeiting the Egyptian Roges, they have devised a language among themselves which they name canting, but others pedlers French, a speach compact thirty years since of English and a great number of odd words of their own devising, without all order or reason: and yet such is it as none but themselves are able to understand. The first deviser thereof was hanged by the neck; a just reward, no doubt, for his deceits, and a common end to all of that profession."

Two or three centuries ago the beggars used to proclaim their want by means of a wooden dish with a movable cover, which they clacked to show it was empty. Thus in the comedy entitled the Family of Love (1608) we read

· Foreign Catalogue, vol. ii. p. 226.

"G. Can you think I get my living by a bell and a clack-dish? D. By a bell and a clack-dish? How's that?

G. Why, by begging, Sir;"

and the stage direction in the second part of Edward IV. (1619) runs thus: "Enter Mrs. Blague, very poorly,-begging with her basket and a clap-dish."

The general account of the gipsies given by Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors is that they are

"A kind of counterfeit Moors to be found in many parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. They are commonly supposed to have come from Egypt, from whence they derive themselves. Munster discovered in the Letters and Pass, which they obtained from Sigismund the Emperor, that they first came out of Lesser Egypt, that having turned apostates from Christianity and relapsed into Pagan Rites, some of every Family were enjoined this penance, to wander about the World. Aventinus tells us that they pretend, for this vagabond course, a judgement of God upon their forefathers, who refused to entertain the Virgin Mary and Jesus, when she fled into their country."

Bellonius, however, who met great droves of them in villages on the banks of the Nile, where they were accounted (as by us) strangers and wanderers from foreign parts, pronounces against their Egyptian origin. Indeed, it seems pretty clear that the earliest of them were Asiatics, brought hither by the Crusaders on their return from the Holy Wars; but to this view it is objected that there is no historical trace of them at that time. Ralph Volaterranus affirms that they first proceeded, or strolled, from among the Uxi, a people of Persia; and Sir Thomas Browne cites Polydore Vergil as accounting them originally Syrians; Philip Bergoinas, as deriving them from Chaldea; Eneas Sylvius, as from some part of Tartary; Bellonius, as from Wallachia and Bulgaria; and Aventinus, as from the confines of Hungary. He adds: "They have been banished by most Christian princes. The great Turk at least tolerates them near the Imperial City he is said to employ them as spies: they were banished as such by the Emperor Charles the Fifth."

Blackstone gives the following account of them in his Commentaries

"They are a strange kind of commonwealth among themselves of wandering impostors and jugglers, who first made their appearance in Germany about the beginning of the sixteenth century. Munster, it is true, who is followed and relied upon by Spelman, fixes the time of their first appearance to the year 1417: but, as he owns that the first he ever saw were in 1529, it was probably an error of the press for 1517, especially as other historians inform us that, when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one Zinganeus; whence the Turks call them Zinganees; but, being at length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties all over the world, where their supposed skill in the black art gave them a universal reception in that age of superstition and credulity. In the compass of a very few years they gained such a number of idle proselytes (who imitated their language and complexion, and betook themselves to the same arts of chiromancy, begging, and pilfering) that they became troublesome and even formidable to most of the States of Europe. Hence