wonderful effects,"-adding his attested instance, and recommending that a man be taken to the corpse of a woman, é contra, for cures of great moment "Compatriot trav'lers o'er life's barren heath, listen well to that. The dread, or revulsion, which seizes some of the boldest of men on suddenly encountering a corpse, and that tone of feeling by which some can sit during the night to watch the body of an acquaintance, but shudder if it be that of a stranger, are considered to be the inherent tokens of a knowledge of the future state, by those sages who study the difference between nonentity and identity. We witnessed an instance wherein a sturdy seaman, having taken in his grog, was reeling from "east to west"-like Sir Satyrane in the Faerie Queene-ready to quarrel, or even " to do the die" with any living wight, unexpectedly stumbled upon a dead body. Staring "with all the eyes he had," his whole gait and deportment instantly altered, and, as a poet would say— "His soul was struck with paralysing fright, His tott'ring limbs opposed a backward flight"so there he stood and gazed himself into almost instant sobriety. A singular proof of the power of mind. To make an impression on points connected with the public, ghosts make their appearance in shoals, as, according to the evidence of Sir John Temple, in 1642, those at Portnedown Bridge did, after the Irish massacre. So also Admiral Hosier and his sailors haunted the Bastimentos-" all in dreary hammocks shrouded"—until the fall of Porto Bello,—a rumour to which we owe the popular ballad by Glover. But particular offences are usually visited in a more direct and personal manner, to the accomplishment of that superstitious remorse which so severely punishes crime. In illustration of this, we were about to give a singular instance of a guilt-formed phantom in the words of our reciter; but we find the same story so admirably told by Sir Walter Scott-who produced a work on Demonology almost as remarkable as that of Reginald Scott-that we prefer his version: "Our mariner had, in his youth, gone mate of a slave-vessel from Liverpool, of which town he seemed to be a native. The Captain of the vessel was a man of a variable temper, sometimes kind and courteous to his men, but subject to fits of humour, dislike, and passion, during which he was very violent, tyrannical, and cruel. He took a particular dislike at one sailor aboard, an elderly man, called Bill Jones, or some such name. He seldom spoke to this person without threats and abuse, which the old man, with the license which sailors take in merchant vessels, was very apt to return. On one occasion Bill Jones appeared slow in getting out on the yards to hand a sail. The Captain, according to custom, abused the seaman as a lubberly rascal, who got fat by leaving his duty to other people. The man made a saucy answer, almost amounting to mutiny, on which, in a towering passion, the Captain ran down to his cabin, and returned with a blunderbuss loaded with slugs, with which he took deliberate aim at the supposed mutineer, fired, and mortally wounded him. The man was handed down from the yard, and stretched on the deck, evidently dying. He fixed his eyes on the Captain, and said, 'Sir, you have done for me, but I will never leave you.' The Captain, in return, swore at him for a fat lubber, and said he would have him thrown into the slave-kettle, where they made food for the negroes, and see how much fat he had got. The man died: his body was actually thrown into the slave-kettle, and the narrator observed, with a naïveté which confirmed the extent of his own belief in the truth of what he told, 'There was not much fat about him after all.' "The Captain told the crew they must keep absolute silence on the subject of what had passed; and as the mate was not willing to give an explicit and absolute promise, he ordered him to be confined below. After a day or two he came to the mate, and demanded if he had any intention to deliver him up for trial when the vessel got home? The mate, who was tired of close confinement in that sultry climate, spoke his commander fair, and obtained his liberty. When he mingled among the crew once more he found them impressed with the idea, not unnatural in their situation, that the ghost of the dead man appeared among them when they had a spell of duty, especially if a sail was to be handed, on which occasion the spectre was sure to be out upon the yard before any of the crew. The narrator had seen this apparition himself repeatedly; he believed the Captain saw it also, but he took no notice of it for some time, and the crew, terrified at the violent temper of the man, dared not call his attention to it. Thus they held on their course homeward with great fear and anxiety. "At length the Captain invited the mate, who was now in a sort of favour, to go down to the cabin and take a glass of grog with him. In this interview he assumed a very grave and anxious aspect. I need not tell you, Jack,' he said, 'what sort of hand we have got on board with us-he told me he would never leave me, and he has kept his word. You only see him now and then, but he is always by my side, and never out of my sight. At this very moment I see him. I am determined to bear it no longer, and I have resolved to leave you.' "The mate replied, That his leaving the vessel while out of the sight of any land was impossible. He advised, that if the Captain apprehended any bad consequences from what had happened, he should run for the west of France or Ireland, and there go ashore, and leave him (the mate) to carry the vessel into Liverpool.' The Captain only shook his head, gloomily, and reiterated his determination to leave the ship. At this moment the mate was called to the deck for some purpose or other, and the instant he got up the companion ladder, he heard a splash in the water, and, looking over the ship's side, saw the Captain had thrown himself into the sea from the quarter-gallery, and was running astern at the rate of six knots an hour. When just about to sink, he seemed to make a last exertion, sprung half way out of the water, and clasped his hands towards the mate, calling- By· Bill is with me now!' And then sunk to be seen no more. Closely allied to this credence is that sort of second-sight, in whichwhether sleeping awake or in waking sleep-wraiths and apparitions announce the deaths of themselves, or acquaintances, to friends at a remote distance. Innumerable are the recorded facts of such communication. An officer in the army, connected with Dr. Ferrier, "and certainly addicted to no superstition," was reading to a Scottish chieftain, who was confined to his bed by indisposition. The night was stormy, and the fishing-boat belonging to the castle was at sea. The old gentleman repeatedly expressed much anxiety respecting his people, and at last exclaimed My boat is lost!" The Colonel replied-" How do you know it, Sir?" He was answered-" I see two of the boatmen bringing in the third drowned, all dripping wet, and laying him down close beside your chair." The chair was shifted with great precipitation. In the course of the night the fishermen returned with the corpse of one of the boatmen! Again.-An Admiral on the West India station was visited one evening, in his cabin, by the shade of a friend whom he had left in England. The spectre looked at first most pleasingly at him, but as the officer became agitated, it began to frown, and gradually, from a comely aspect, assumed the form of a loathsome skeleton. A sudden noise on deck had the effect of arousing the Admiral from his waking vision-he shook himself violently-turned towards the unwelcome guest "'Twas gone-the spell dissolved-but still his eye In this state he was found by the Captain, who came to report, that the noise was occasioned by bringing a vessel to, which had just arrived from Portsmouth. Her dispatches were soon brought on board, and the first letter which the Admiral read, informed him that the body of his friend, who had been missing some time, was found in a coppice in a state of decomposition. The timing of these appearances and affrights with contemporaneous events, has been the means of establishing many a phantom tale, and forms the basis of a multitude of historical ones. This descends to things as well as the words and thoughts of men, and also to the falling out of every-day events, till accidental and permanent connexions are confounded together. Thus a Livy or a Plutarch would have linked the late disturbance in Canada with the burning of the Royal Exchange; and there happened a circumstance of which much could have been made. At twelve o'clock, when the flames had just reached the north-west angle of the building, and were rapidly making their way to the tower, the chimes struck up, as usual at that hour, the old tune "There's nae luck about the house, There' nae luck at aw; There's little pleasure in the house, It was the last time, for the whole machinery, bells, clock, and chimebarrels, were quickly melted by the intense heat, or broken to pieces. But what made the coincidence as well as the effect more extraordinary, and aided the conflagration, was the fact, that the man whose duty it was to have remained all night on the premises, had locked the gates and departed for his private ends. In consequence of this no water could be brought to bear upon the interior of the building till its fate was sealed, for it was not till after a considerable time that the great gates were battered open. Having, we hope, pointed out the sources, we shall close our remarks on Nautical Superstition. But if there be those who still arrogate, that seamen ought to be more involved in the censure due to credulity than the other classes, we exhort them to look at home. It was not by them that the meanest rites of superstition were made prolific of numerical configurations and mysterious stimulants to lottery adventure, or that lucky numbers, suggested by dreams, were followed up. They were not the cause of the recent sale of upwards of sixty editions of a trumpery 'Weather Almanac,' in the course of three or four weeks; nor is it to their gullibility and shameful ignorance that every newspaper of the day, and the wrappers of all the periodical literature, are disgraced by vamping infallible universal elixirs and deleterious quack poisons. Let the sneerers at Jack recollect the numbers of those who are, at least, classed among the educated, who still believe in La Soeur Nativité-in his Highness Hohenlohe-in Edward Irving-and in Madame de Krudner, and be humble. It is those of straight-hair and artificial groans, who see either the devil or an angel in every public or domestic transaction, and who swear point-blank to all their impious ravings. Sailors never descended so low. It was the blue-light squad who established a mansion in the metropolis, under a most blasphemous designation, where passports to heaven were actually sold for a few shillings each; and a whole people waited, in implicit confidence, for months, for the parturition of a septagenarian virgin, and the resurrection of Joanna Southcott. But where are we to stop? Was not Napoleon himself, the meteor of the age, so infected with the Sabæan superstition of the natal hour, as to repose his faith in the destinies of a lucky star! SPECTATOR IN REPLY TO COLONEL MITCHELL ON PROMOTION BY PURCHASE. WHATEVER may be the merits of Colonel Mitchell's theory of promotion, he himself must admit that his views are new: indeed he takes credit for having originated them within these two years. In resuming, therefore, the former argument, it may be permitted to remind him that, as the proposer of change, he is not warranted in supposing that he alone has a right to set down his antagonists, who support the results of experience, as already overthrown by the arguments which he has brought forward. As for "Britannicus," Colonel Mitchell appears to think he has set him at rest by calling him, ironically, "a distinguished logician," and by telling him that his arguments resembled those which caused the Spanish auto da fé, a strange and far-fetched simile, which may puzzle, but can scarcely persuade, the general reader, who, Colonel Mitchell must be aware, is in fact the judge in the cause, and not he himself. Nor will such a judge be influenced by the joke (if meant as such) that "poor little Britannicus is no Grand Inquisitor." Now, whether "Britannicus" be tall or little, he seems to write in an unaffected and plain style, and he has in that respect, at least, an advantage over his opponent. It will not do for one who agrees in most of the arguments of "Britannicus" to affirm that he had the best of it. It will be a less presumptuous course to leave the decision to the reader, first protesting, however, against Colonel Mitchell's inference," that any one who dissents from his theories cannot have read them." "Spec.," as he calls the writer of this paper, begs to assure him he has read many passages of his arguments more than once, in the hope of making out their meaning; but "Ter frustrá comprensa manus effugit imago Par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.” Colonel Mitchell complains that, although when he wrote on tactics, several officers of distinction essentially differed from him, they treated him with courtesy in their replies, but that, when he touched on Mammon, by which very odd epithet he is pleased to call "Promotion by purchase," courtesy and logic (he is very fond of quoting logic) were set aside, and that his adversaries never ventured to quote or face a single one of his arguments. Now, has he a right to say this, or is the reader to be allowed the usual privilege of judging for himself? In the same. spirit he requests his reader, in Latin, to restrain his laughter,—“ risum teneatis"-at the idea of any one supposing him, Colonel Mitchell, to be a military agitator. Let the reader again have his privilege of laughing or not, but there seems nothing to excite merriment in so dry a subject. It is recorded of Molière that, when he desired to put to the test the drollery of any particular dialogue of the comedy he was writing, he used to send for his old housekeeper, and watch her countenance while he read it aloud to her, for he knew by repeated trials that what made her laugh usually had the same effect on the audience. Now, if Colonel Mitchell will try the same plan, by requesting any old housekeeper he may know of to listen to his intended sallies before he commits them to print, he may perhaps better be able to find out what is comical and likely to make his reader laugh. Colonel Mitchell calls it a proof of want of encouragement in our Service that we have no strategical treatises, though he admits that our officers have published excellent works on gunnery, fortification, &c. Now, does he really think that it is from ignorance that Lord Hill, Sir G. Murray, Sir J. Kempt, Sir John Colborne, and other leading officers of the Peninsular War, do not publish some ponderous volumes on the Art of Strategy, after the model of General Jomini? Colonel Napier, it is true, has attempted to introduce, in his History of the War, several imposing lectures on strategy, which, unfortunately for the credit of his book, have been sadly pulled to pieces by a reviewer, who, from the important information to which he had evident access, appears to have been an officer of rank on the Staff of the Peninsular Army. Possibly that able reviewer, and many other such officers, may think Picton's Field Orders, in duodecimo, a better military treatise than many tomes of German strategy. One thing is clear, that, whether the Penin sular Generals were authors or not, they were a class who will go down' to posterity with the reputation of no small knowledge of the art of war.' To return, however, to the question of Promotion by Purchase, all the logic of Colonel Mitchell, and the arguments of those antagonists he treats so scornfully, come within a small and easily-defined compass. If you could make sure of a tribunal not only perfectly free from all bias, but possessing a more than mortal insight into character,and if, besides this, you could have an annual campaign, and promote by merit at the end of each autumn, the same as you give commissions to Cadets at Sandhurst in exact proportion to their proved acquirement,→→ Colonel Mitchell might reasonably maintain promotion by merit to be feasible to a great extent. But, without such means of trial, who is to say what is merit in each case? Suppose a regiment ten years in cantonments in India, what magic or instinct would enable the Horse Guards to discover which of the thirty subalterns was most deserving of promotion; and suppose them to make the most judicious cast, how are they to convince the other twenty-nine that each of them is inferior to the favoured merit man? One may have distinguished' himself by some casual act of individual courage, another may shine in the management of soldiers' tempers and habits, a third may be expert at geographical knowledge of country, a fourth may have re |