In January, 1824, one, whose relationship commanded my affection, was about to leave England with his family for a distant part of the world. The day or two preceding his departure I passed with him and his wife and children. Our separation was especially painful; my mind was distressed, and I got little sleep. He had sailed from Gravesend about three days, and a letter that he had promised to write from the Downs had not arrived. On the evening of the 29th I retired late, and being quite wearied slept till an unusually late hour the next morning, without a consciousness of having dreamed, or being, as I found myself, alone. With my head on the pillow I opened my eyes to an extraordinary appearance. Against the wall on the opposite side of the room, and level with my sight, the person, respecting whom I had been so anxious, lay a corpse, extended at full length, as if resting on a table. A greyish cloth covered the entire body except the face; the eyes were closed, the countenance was cadaverous, the mouth elongated from the falling of the jaws, and the lips were purpled. I shut my eyes, rubbed them and gently raising my head continued to gaze on the body, till from weariness of the attitude and exhausted spirits, I dropped on the pillow, and insensibly sunk to sleep, for perhaps a quarter of an hour. On again awaking, the spectre was not there. I then arose, and having mentioned the circumstance to some of my family, caused a memorandum to be made of what I had seen. In the course of the forenoon a person arrived who had gone round with the vessel to the Downs, from whence he had been put ashore the morning before, and saw the ship in full sail. He was the bearer of the letter I had expected from the individual aboard, whose appearance I had witnessed only a few hours previous to its being put into my hands; it of course relieved no apprehension that might have been excited by the recent spectre. “That the dead are seen no more,” said Imlac, “I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which, perhaps, prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those, that never heard of one another, would never have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.”