So they say the sun is himself dark as a planet, and his atmosphere alone the source of light, through the gaps in which his common earth is seen. I am tempted—but it would be idle, and I refrain—to quote an expression or two, or a passage, from Shakspeare, exemplifying his wonderful turn for approximating to truths of which he must have been ignorant—where lines of admired and unaccountable beauty have unexpectedly acquired lucidity and appositeness through modern science. While, to make a quaint comparison, his great contemporary, Bacon, employed the lamp of his imagination to illuminate the paths to the discovery of truth, Shakspeare would, with random intuition, seize on the undiscovered truths themselves, and use them to vivify the conceptions of his fancy. Let me now turn to explain a ghost of a more positive description—the churchyard ghost. The ghost will perhaps exclaim against so trivial a title, and one so unjust in reference to old superstition; but it will be seen he deserves no better. In popular story he had a higher office; his duty was to watch the body over which church rites had not been performed, that had been rudely inearthed after violent death. As thus— There was a cottage in a village I could name to which a bad report attached. More than one who had slept in it had seen, at midnight, the radiant apparition of a little child standing on the hearth-stone. At length suspicion was awakened. The hearth-stone was raised, and there were found buried beneath it the remains of an infant. A story was now divulged how the last tenant and a female of the village had abruptly quitted the neighbourhood. The ghost was real and significant enough. But here is a still better instance from a trustworthy German work, P. Kieffer’s _Archives_. The narrative was communicated by Herr Ehrman of Strasburg, son-in-law of the well-known writer Pfeffel, from whom he received it.