They will next believe (if they be, in the words of Captain Bobadil, “so generously minded”) in the transatlantic trance-speakers “who professed to speak from direct inspiration”, Mrs. Cora Hatch, Mrs. Henderson, and Miss Emma Hardinge; and they will believe in those eminent ladies having “spoken on Sundays to five hundred thousand hearers”—small audiences, by the way, compared with the intelligent concourse recently assembled in the city of New York, to do honour to the Nuptials of General the Honourable T. Barnum Thumb. At about this stage of their spiritual education they may take the opportunity of believing in “letters from a distinguished gentleman of New York, in which the frequent appearance of the gentleman’s deceased wife and of Dr. Franklin, to him and other well-known friends, are unquestionably unequalled in the annals of the marvellous”. Why these modest appearances should seem at all out of the common way to Mr. Howitt (who would be in a state of flaming indignation if we thought them so), we could not imagine, until we found on reading further, “it is solemnly stated that the witnesses have not only seen but touched these spirits, and handled the clothes and hair of Franklin”. Without presuming to go Mr. Howitt’s length of considering this by any means a marvellous experience, we yet venture to confess that it has awakened in our mind many interesting speculations touching the present whereabout in space, of the spirits of Mr. Howitt’s own departed boots and hats.