Among the many superstitions which have terrified and degraded mankind, that which has received the name of Vampyrism is, perhaps, the most horrible and loathsome. The Vampyre, or Blood-sucker, has been forcibly described as “a corporeal creature of blood and unquenchable blood-thirst,--a ravenous corpse, who rises in body and soul from his grave, for the sole purpose of glutting his sanguinary appetite with the life-blood of those whose blood stagnates in his own veins. He is endowed with an incorruptible frame to prey on the lives of his kindred and his friends--he re-appears among them from the world of the tomb, not to tell its secrets of joy or of woe, not to invite or to warn by the testimony of his experience, but to appal and assassinate those who were dearest to him on earth--and this, not for the gratification of revenge or any _human_ feeling, which, however depraved, might find something in common with human nature; but to banquet a monstrous thirst, acquired in the tomb, and which, though he walks in human form and human lineaments, has swallowed up every human motive in its brutal ferocity.” It is manifest that a being of this kind must be infinitely more terrible than the common race of ghosts, spectres, and fiendish visitants. But there was another circumstance which inexpressibly heightened the horror excited by the dread of being attacked. Wasting illness, closed by death, was not all that the victim had to endure. He who was sucked by a Vampyre was doomed to become in his turn a member of the hideous community, and to inflict on others, even on those who were nearest and dearest to him, the same evils by which he had himself suffered and perished. When a grave was opened in order to search for one of these pests, to put a stop to his career, the sanguinary offender was recognised by the corpse being fresh and well preserved, the eyes open or half closed, the face of a vermilion hue, the limbs flexible, the hair and nails long, and the pulse beating.