“It is true,” as Lord Chesterfield wrote in 1653, “I know that God can make any such things to appear, but because he _can_, therefore to conclude that he _doth_, is ill argued: and though divers books are full of such stories, yet the soberest sort of men in all ages have doubted the truth of them.” I might add to these the visions which have been so strangely warped to interpret a subsequent event. Those of William Rufus, and Innocent the Fourth, and Henry the Second of France, and a thousand others from ancient history, between the assumed prophecy and fulfilment of which, there is about as much truth as when Lady Seymour dreamt of having found a nest of nine finches, and soon after was married to Finch, Earl of Winchelsea, and was blessed with a brood of nine children. With the coincidences of life we have all been struck; the ignorant and timid and superstitious among us with wonder: but how comparatively trivial are these tiny drops in the wide ocean of events, and what myriads of dreams and visions from which there are no results! A simple incident occurred to me in the autumn of last year, which was so complete in its association as to be for a moment startling to myself. Influenced by a sort of veneration for the memory of the good Gilbert White of Selborne, I made a pilgrimage to that calm and rustic village, so exquisitely embosomed among green meads, and beech-crowned chalk hills, and forests embrowned with heath and fern. On my entrance to the village, I was reflecting on the “idiot boy” who fed on honey which he pressed from the bees he caught, when lo! at the first door a figure, which grinned at me, and mowed and muttered, but without the slightest _verbal_ utterance. He was an idiot, but not White’s idiot; yet a visionary mind might readily for a moment believe it to be a phantom of the foolish boy, immortalized, as it were, in the “Natural History of Selborne.” There was an imposing occurrence also, during the funeral procession of Sir Walter Scott to Dryburgh. A halt took place for many minutes (in consequence of an accident) precisely on the summit of the hill at Bemerside, where a beautiful prospect opens, to contemplate which, Sir Walter was ever wont to rein up his horse. “In 1811,” writes Lord Byron in a letter to Mr. Murray, “my old school and form fellow Peel, the Irish secretary, told me he saw me in St. James’s Street; I was then in Turkey. A day or two afterwards he pointed out to his brother a person across the way, and said, ‘There is the man I took for Byron:’ his brother answered, ‘Why, it is Byron, and no one else.’ I was at this time _seen_ to write my name in the Palace Book. I was then ill of a malaria fever. If I had died, here would have been a ghost story.”