The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 3 | Page 8

or sounds as of a person in lamentation."
This went on, at intervals, for a year, when the ghost found a voice, and
told them to tell the cure to come there; and when he came he said he
wanted three masses said for him, and alms given to the poor. The
author has the following sensible observations on the modes in which
ghost stories originate:--

"We call to our assistance the artifices of the charlatans, who do so
many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes of the ignorant.
Philosophers, by means of certain glasses, and what are called magic
lanterns; by optical secrets, sympathetic powders: by their phosphorus,
and, lately, by means of the electric machine, show us an infinite
number of things which the simpletons take for magic, because they
know not how they are produced. Eyes that are diseased do not see
things as others see them, or else behold them differently. A drunken
man will see objects double; to one who has the jaundice they will
appear yellow: in the obscurity people fancy they see a spectre, where
there is but the trunk of a tree.
"A mountebank will appear to eat a sword; mother will vomit coals, or
pebbles. One will drink wine, and send it out again at his forehead;
another will cut off his companion's head, and put it on again. You will
think you see a chicken dragging a beam. The mountebank will
swallow fire, and vomit it forth; he will draw blood from fruit; he will
send from his mouth strings of iron nails; he will put a sword on his
stomach, and press it strongly, and instead of running into him, it will
bend back to the hilt. Another will run a sword through his body
without wounding himself. You will sometimes see a child without a
head, then a head without a child and all of them alive. That appears
very wonderful; nevertheless, if it were known how all these things are
done, people would only laugh, and be surprised that they could
wonder at and admire such things."
If we are so easily deceived in these matters, is it strange that in
peculiar states of mind or body, we are so completely imposed on in
others? At p. 353 we have the story on which Goethe has founded a
singular exploit of Mephistopheles in the cellar of Auerbach.
"John Faust Cudlington, a German, was requested, in a company of gay
people, to perform in their presence some tricks of his trade. He
promised to show them a vine loaded with grapes, ripe and ready to
gather. They thought, as it was the month of December, he could not
execute his promise. He strongly recommended them not to stir from
their places, and not to lift up their hands to cut the grapes, unless by

his express order. The vine appeared directly, covered with leaves and
loaded with grapes, to the astonishment of all present. Every one took
up his knife, awaiting the order of Cudlington to cut some grapes; but
after having kept them some time in that expectation, he suddenly
caused the vine and the grapes to disappear. Then every one found
himself armed with his knife, and holding his neighbor's nose with one
hand; so that if they had cut off a bunch without the order of
Cudlington, they would have cut off one another's noses."
The book is curious and interesting and calculated to do away with
much of the superstition which now appears to be gaining ground in
almost every part of Christendom.
[Footnote 1: THE PHANTOM WORLD: a Philosophy of Spirits,
Apparitions, &c. By AUGUSTINE CALMET. Edited by Rev. Henry
Christmas.]
* * * * *

AUTHORS AND BOOKS.
George Sand, as elsewhere noted, has written her "Confessions," in the
style of Rousseau, and a Paris bookseller has contracted to give her a
fortune for them. The three greatest--intellectually greatest--women of
modern times have lived in France and it is remarkable that they have
been three of the most shamelessly profligate in all history. The worst
of these, probably--Madame de Staël--left us no records of her
long-continued, disgusting, and almost incredible licentiousness, so
remarkable that Chateaubriand deemed her the most abandoned person
in France at a period when modesty was publicly derided in the
Assembly as a mere "system of refined voluptuousness." Few who have
lately resided in Paris are ignorant of the gross sensualism of the
astonishing Rachel, whose genius, though displayed in no permanent
forms, is not less than that of the Shakspeare of her sex, the
forever-to-be-famous Madame Dudevant, whose immoralities of
conduct have perhaps been overdrawn, while those of De Staël and

Rachel have rarely been spoken of save where they challenged direct
observation. We perceive that Rachel is