"O, proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which you said Led you to Duncan! O, these flaws and starts (Impostors to true fear) would well become A woman's story at a winter's fire,[5] Authorized by her grandam. Shame itself! ... When all's done, You look but on a stool!" There is a great truth embodied in a portion of the king's reply, that-- "If charnel-houses and our graves must send Those that we bury, back, our monuments Shall be the maws of kites." The gay and dissipated Thomas Lyttleton, son of Lord George Lyttleton, and his successor in the peerage, has been the subject of "a well-authenticated ghost story, which relates that he was warned of his death three days before it happened, in 1779, while he was in a state of perfect health, and only thirty-five years of age." This is what says a biographer. Now let us present the truth of the matter. He was a dissipated man. He was subject to fits. A gentleman present at the time of his seeing a vision, says "that he had been attacked several times by suffocative fits the month before." Here, then, was a _body diseased_. The same authority says, "It happened that he dreamed, three days before his death, that he saw a _fluttering bird_; and afterwards, that he saw (dreamed) a woman in white apparel, who said to him, 'Prepare to die; you will not exist three days.' [Illustration: PREPARE TO DIE!] "His lordship was much alarmed, and called his servant, who slept in an adjoining closet, who found his master in a state of great agitation, and in a profuse perspiration." Fear blanches the cheek; perspiration is rather a symptom of bodily weakness, and the result of a laborious dream, or even a fit. He had no fear, for, on the third day, while his lordship was at breakfast with "the two Misses Amphlett, Lord Fortescue," and the narrator, he said, lightly,-- "'If I live over to-night, _I shall have jockeyed the ghost_, for this is the third day.' That day he had another fit. He dined at five, and retired at eleven, when his servant was about to give him some prescribed rhubarb and mint-water, but his lordship, seeing him about to stir the mixture with a toothpick, exclaimed,-- "'You slovenly dog, go and fetch a teaspoon.' "On the servant's return, he found his master in another fit, and, the pillow being high, his chin bore on his windpipe, when the servant, instead of relieving his lordship from his perilous position, ran away for help; but on his return, found his master dead." He had strangled. Is it anything strange that a dissipated, weakened man should die after having a score of suffocative fits? It had been more surprising if he had survived them. Then, as respecting the dream, it was the result of a "mind diseased."