weep; whether he had assisted at a religious meeting or a farce; whether he had been in the company of a mortal fitted for a solemn mission to an idle and adulterous generation seeking after a sign, or whether all he had seen and heard was but the clever manœuvring of a clever professor of legerhave to take his stand with the Brothers Davenport and other doubtful mediums who have had their day. The Spiritualists in this country set great store by Home. They have never been able in our cold climate to raise mediums worth talking about. The latter have been chiefly American importations. Mr. Harris came as a preacher of Spiritualism, and, after a few Sundays at Store Street, vanished like a spirit, and was heard of no more. A _Spiritual Magazine_ was started. Mrs. Marshall and her niece, of 22, Red Lion Street, Holborn, were declared by that—we presume official authority—to be “Media.” Then came the solid testimony of a learned American judge, declaring “the first thing demonstrated to us is that we can commune with the spirits of the departed; that such communication is through the instrumentality of persons yet living; that the fact of mediumship is the result of physical organization; that the kind of communion is effected by moral causes; and that the power, like our other faculties, is possessed in different degrees, and is capable of improvement by cultivation.” But the sect did not prosper. Then came grotesque indications of spiritual presence. Not content with table-rapping, the spirits had recourse to all kinds of antics, and the subject of Spiritualism became more and more distasteful to the intelligent, and more and more popular with that large class of idle wealthy men and women who have no healthy occupation, and are always in search of excitement. The climax was reached when the _Cornhill_ told how Mr. Home floated in the air, how heavy tables would leap from one end of the room to the other, how music was produced on accordions, “grand at times, at others pathetical, at others distant and long-drawn,” when those accordions were held by no mortal hands. “I can state,” wrote Dr. Gulley, of Malvern, “that the record made in the article ‘Stranger than Fiction’ is in every particular correct; that the phenomena therein related actually took place, and moreover that no trick-machinery, sleight of hand, or other artistic contrivance, produced what we heard and beheld. I am quite as convinced of this last as I am of the facts themselves.” Well might the Spiritualists crow; had not Robert Owen and Lord Lyndhurst also believed? Was it not uncharitable to say that they were in their dotage? The testimony of such men settled everything.