If I may trust the flattering eye of sleep, Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. Immediately, a messenger comes in to announce Juliet's death. In Act iii. Sc. 2, of King Richard III. Hastings is represented as rising in the morning in unusually high spirits. Stanley says: The Lords at Pomfret, when they rode from London, Were jocund, and suppos'd their states were sure, And they, indeed, had no cause to mistrust; And yet, you see, how soon the day o'ercast. This idea runs through the whole scene. Hastings is beheaded. Before dinner-time, Shelley, the poet, whose life was a dream of romance, a tale of mystery and grief, strongly entertained this feeling: "during all the time he spent in Leghorn, he was in brilliant spirits, to him a sure prognostic of coming evil." The following incident is strange, but scarcely comes within our purpose. At an inquest held in Feb. 1853, concerning the death of a poor girl, supposed to have been murdered by her paramour throwing her into the Regent's Canal, one of the witnesses deposed that the girl was in high spirits, and insisted upon singing the song, "I've wander'd by the brook-side." The deceased then left in company with the accused; and met with her death within half an hour after. There is a prejudice existing, generally, on the pretended danger of being the thirteenth at table. If the probability be required, that out of thirteen persons of different ages one of them at least shall die within a year, it will be found that the chances are about one to one that one death at least will occur. This calculation, by means of a false interpretation, has given rise to the prejudice, no less ridiculous, that the danger will be avoided by inviting a greater number of guests, which can only have the effect of augmenting the probability of the event so much apprehended.-Quetelet, on the Calculation of Probabilities. This superstition obtains in Italy and Russia, as well as in England. Moore, in his Diary, vol. ii. p. 206, mentions there being thirteen at dinner one day at Madame Catalani's, when a French countess, who lived with her upstairs, was sent for to remedy the grievance. Again, Lord L. said he had dined once abroad at Count Orloff's, who did not sit down to dinner, but kept walking from chair to chair, because "the Naristiken were at table, who, he knew, would rise instantly if they perceived the "Thirteen to Dinner." 113 number thirteen, which Orloff would have made by sitting down himself." The following instance is related by Rachel, the celebrated tragedienne. When she returned from Egypt, in the spring of 1857, she installed herself in a villa in the neighbourhood of Montpellier. There she received the visit of the poet Ponsard, and Arsène Houssaye, who was making a tour as inspector of departmental museums. "Do you recollect the dinner we had at the house of Victor Hugo, at the close of the repetition of L'Angelo?" she said to the former director. "You remember there were thirteen of us? There was Hugo and his wife, you and your wife, Rebecca and I, Girardin and his wife, Gerard de Nerval, Pradier, Alfred de Musset, Perrée, of the Siècle, and the Count d'Orsay. Well! where to-day are the thirteen? Victor Hugo and his wife are in Jersey; your wife is dead; Madame de Girardin is dead; my poor Rebecca is dead; Gerard de Nerval, Pradier, Alfred de Musset, are dead. I-say no more. There remain but Girardin and you. Adieu! my friends. Never laugh at thirteen at a table." WHAT IS CHANCE? Chance is frequently personified and erected into a chimerical being, whom we conceive as acting arbitrarily, and producing all the effects the real causes of which do not appear to us; in which sense the word coincides with the rúxn, fortuna, of the Ancients. The ancient sortilege or chance, M. Placette observes, was instituted by God himself; and in the Old Testament we find several standing laws and express commands which prescribed its use on certain occasions. Hence the Scripture says, "The lot or chance fell on Matthias," when it was in question who should fill Judas's place in the apostolate; and hence also arose the sortes sanctorum, or method of determining things, among the ancient Christians, by opening some of the sacred books, and pitching on the first verse the eye rested on as a sure prognostic of what was to happen. The sortes Homerica, Virgiliana, Prænestina, and the like, used by the heathens, were resorted to with the same view, and in the same manner. St. Augustin seems to approve of this method of determining things future, and owns that he had practised it himself, grounding his doing so on the principle that God presides over chance. Premature Interment. TRANCE. How prevalent is the fear of being "buried alive" may be gathered from the number of instances in which men have requested, that before the last offices are done for them, such wounds or mutilations should be inflicted upon their bodies as would effectually prevent the possibility of an awakening in the tomb. Dr. Dibdin relates that Francis Douce, the antiquary, requested, in his will, that Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon, should sever his head from his body, or take out his heart, to prevent the return of vitality; and his co-residuary legatee, Mr. Kerrick, had also requested the same operation to be performed in the presence of his son. Sometimes the burning of the body has been enjoined as an assurance against living interment. Dr. Paris tells us, that, the daughter of Henry Laurens, the first President of the American Congress, when an infant, was laid out as dead of the small-pox; upon which the window of the apartment, that had been carefully closed during the progress of the disease, was thrown open to ventilate the chamber, when the fresh air revived the corpse, and restored her to her family: this circumstance occasioned in her father so powerful a dread of living interment, that he directed by will that his body should be burnt, and enjoined on his children the performance of this wish as a sacred duty.-Medical Jurisprudence, p. 5. In 1703, a sermon was preached in the Presbyterian chapel of Lancaster, "On the Duty of the Relations of those who are in dangerous Illness, and the Hazard of Hasty Interment;" wherein it is stated by Dr. Hawes that thirty years previously, M. Bruhier, the physician, of Paris, in a work entitled The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, clearly proved, from the testimonies of various authors, and attestations of unexceptionable witnesses, that many persons who have been buried alive, and were providentially discovered in that state, had been rescued from the grave, and lived for several years afterwards. Notwithstanding these numerous instances, the custom then remained in full force. As soon as the semblance of death appears, the bed-clothes are removed, and the body is exposed to the air; which, when cold, must extinguish the little spark of life that may remain, and which, by a different treatment, might be kindled into flame. Mrs. Godfrey, mistress of the Jewel Office, and sister of the great Duke of Marlborough, is stated to have lain in a trance, apparently dead, for seven days, and was even declared by her medical attendants to have been dead. Colonel Godfrey, her husband, would not allow her to be interred, or the body to be treated in the manner of a corpse; and on the eighth day she awoke, without any consciousness of her long insensibility. The authority assigned for this story is Mr. Peckard, Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge, in a work entitled Further Observations on the Doctrine of an Intermediate State. Stories are also told of a Mr. Holland, improperly treated as dead, who revived,-only to die, however, from the effects of exposure to cold in the grave-dress; and of a Mrs. Chaloner, a lady of Yorkshire, who was buried alive, and who was found, on the re-opening of the vault in which she was interred, to have burst open the lid of her coffin, and to be sitting nearly upright in it. Dr. Doddridge, at his birth, showed so little signs of life that he was laid aside as dead; but one of the attendants perceiving some motion in the body, took the infant under her charge, and by her treatment the flame of life was gradually kindled. In 1814, Anne Taylor, the daughter of a yeoman of Tiverton, being ill, lay six days insensible, and to all appearance dead: during the interval she had a dream, which her family called a trance, an account of which was subsequently printed. On awaking from her stupor, by her request a person wrote down all she had to relate, which she desired her father would cause to be printed. This request he evaded until, as she told him, it would be too late. She died the same evening. Next morning her voice was heard by the person who wrote the narrative, inquiring if it was printed. Between ten and twelve o'clock the undertaker's men placed her in the coffin; and while the family were at dinner her voice was again heard, saying, "Father, it is not printed." This was attested by six witnesses; but, after her death, Mr. Vowles, a dissenting minister of Tiverton, in a sermon, was considered to have proved the fraud of the whole story. More veracious is the case of the Rev. Owen Manning, the historian of Surrey, who, during his residence at Cambridge University, caught small-pox, and was reduced by the disorder to a state of insensibility and apparent death. The body was laid out, and preparations were made for the funeral, when Mr. Manning's father, going into the chamber to take a last look at his son, raised the imagined corpse from its recumbent position, saying, "I will give my poor boy another chance;" upon which signs of vitality were apparent. He was therefore removed by his friend and fellow-student Dr. Heberden, and ultimately restored to health. He had another narrow escape from death; for becoming subject to epilepsy, and being seized with a fit as he was walking beside the river Cam. he fell into the water, and was taken out apparently lifeless; Heberden, however, being called in, again became the means of Manning's restoration. A monument in St. Giles's church, Cripplegate, has strangely been associated with a trance story. In the chancel is a tablet in memory of Constance Whitney, representing her rising from a coffin: and the story relates that she had been buried while in a trance, but was restored to life through the cupidity of the sexton, which induced him to disinter the body to obtain possession of a valuable ring left upon her finger.* In Smith's History of Cork, vol. ii. p. 428, we find recorded that "Mr. John Goodman, of Cork, died in January, 1747, aged about fourscore; but what is remarkable of him, his mother was interred while she lay in a trance; having been buried in a vault which she found means to open, she walked home, and this Mr. Goodman was born some time after." Raikes in his Journal, under August 3rd, 1837, mentions the horrible death of the Cardinal Somaglia, who recovered from his trance for one moment to put away the surgeon's knife, which had begun the preparatory incision before embalming,—and then died in agony Peter Klaus, the goatherd, a tradition of the Hartz, furnished Washington Irving with the plot of Rip Van Winkle. There are several German traditions and ballads which turn on the unsuspected lapse of time under enchantment; and we may remember, in connexion with it, the ancient story of the Seven Sleepers of the fifth century. (Gibbon, vi. 32.) That tradition was adopted by Mahomet, and has, as Gibbon observes, been also adopted and adorned by the nations from Bengal to Africa, who profess the Mahometan religion. The next step is to animate the period dropt from real life-the parenthesis of existence with characteristic adventures, as in the story of the Elfin Grove in Tieck's Phantasus; and as in the Dean of Santiago, a Spanish tale from the Conde Lucanor. There is a very pretty story in the Turkish Tales, (of a Sultan of Egypt and a Mahometan doctor,) the morale of which is: The doctor took this occasion of instructing the Sultan that nothing was impossible with God; that He, with whom a thousand years are but as one day, can, if He pleases, make a single day, nay, a single moment, appear to any of His creatures as a thousand years. Emerson, in The Over-Soul, says: * From Things not generally Known, Second Series. |