The jealous ghost is somewhat common of late, showing that human emotions are carried over into the life beyond. In various stories we find the dead wife interfering to prevent a second marriage, or to make life wretched for the interloper even after the ceremony. But the most extreme case of jealousy--even exceeding the instance of the man whose wife and physician conspired to give him an overdose to put him out of the way and who is frantic to prevent their marriage--is found in Arnold Bennett's novel, _The Ghost_. Here the spirit of a man who has madly loved an opera-singer haunts every suitor of hers and either drives him to abandon his courtship or kills him, till finally the singer begs the ghost to spare the man she loves, which he sadly does, and departs. This is reminiscent of one of Marie de France's _lais_. The varying motives for appearance may be illustrated by reference to a few ghosts in modern fiction, such as the woman[132] who comes to drive away a writer's sense of humor,--than which there could be no greater spiritual brutality,--and set him to writing vile, debased tragedies. Perhaps she has transferred her attentions to other authors than the one in the story! Other instances are the little Gray Ghost in Cornelia A. P. Comer's story by that name, who impels a stranger to take her child from an orphan asylum and adopt it, much against his will; the immortal lovers that haunt a woman who has made a marriage of convenience--which has turned out to be a marriage of inconvenience for her husband[133]; the talkative spook in Andrew Lang's _In Castle Perilous_, that discourses learnedly on its own materialization, speaking in technical terms, pokes fun at Shakespeare for the glow-worm on a winter night, and the cockcrow in his _Hamlet_, and--but these are perhaps enough. If one may judge from ghostly fiction, death subtracts nothing from human emotion but rather adds to it, so that the spectral impulses are more poignant and intense. The darker passions are retained with cumulative power, and there is a terrible immortality of hate, of jealousy and revenge. [132] In _A Psychic Invasion_. [133] In _The Long Chamber_. There is no more impressive revenant than one Coleridge gives in his _Wanderings of Cain_, the mournful phantom of Abel appearing to Cain and his little son, Enos. The child says to his father, "I saw a man in unclean garments and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentations." Cain asks the unhappy spirit, "But didst thou not find favor in the sight of the Lord thy God?" to which the shape answers, "The Lord is God of the living only. The dead have another God!" "Cain ran after the shape and the shape fled shrieking over the sands, and the sands rose like white mists behind the steps of Cain but the feet of him that was like Abel disturbed not the sands."