“Modern researches in Spiritualism have led to one practical result—the discovery of a ghost. Not of an ordinary old-fashioned ghost, appearing in the midnight hour to people with a weak digestion, haunting graveyards and old country mansions, and inspiring romance-writers into the mischief of three-volume novels; but of a well-behaved, steady, regular, and respectable ghost, going through a prescribed round of duties, punctual to the minute—a Patent Ghost, in fact. This admirable ghost is the offspring of two fathers, of a learned member of the Society of Civil Engineers, Henry Dircks, Esq., and of Professor Pepper, of the Polytechnic. To Mr. Dircks belongs the honour of having invented him, or, as the disciples of Hegel would express it, evolved him from out of the depths of his own consciousness; and Professor Pepper has the merit of having improved him considerably, fitting him for the intercourse of mundane society, and even educating him for the stage. After having bowed to the public at the Polytechnic Institution, he some weeks ago made his _début_ upon the boards of the Britannia Theatre, in a new and highly original drama, entitled, ‘The Widow and Orphans,—Faith, Hope, and Charity,’ in which piece he continues to present himself nightly to crowded audiences with the greatest imaginable success. “Possibly, all Britons do not know where the Britannia Theatre is situated, and it may not be necessary, therefore, to state that it has its place in the metropolitan suburb of Hoxton, inhabited chiefly by toy-makers and doll-dressers, and marked under the letter =N= by the Postmaster-General. Sceptics may smile at the idea of a Patent Ghost making his first appearance in a neighbourhood so little fashionable, and so far removed from the residence of Master Home, commander-in-chief of spirits and mediums, and solicitor-general of demons, ghosts, and shadows of the universe. It is no mere accident; for it appears that there are good spiritual reasons why the ghost should have come out at Hoxton and nowhere else. Here, in this toy-making quarter, there lived, about a hundred years ago, a worthy citizen and officer of the Lord Mayor, Mr. Francis Bancroft, who was haunted all his life long with the one great idea that his body was predestined to arise visibly from the dead, and to wander over British earth in the shape of a tangible ghost. So deeply impressed was he with this belief that, while walking in the flesh, his chief object was to take measures towards insuring his safe and speedy resurrection. With considerable faith in the celebrated maxim of Luther’s active Roman antagonist, indulgence-selling Monk Tetzel: ‘_Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt Die Seel’ aus dem Fegfeuer springt_’ (As soon as the money rattles in the boxes, The soul jumps out of purgatory.)