But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. “When shall their glory fade” asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay? Never—I hope. A resident at Bethlehem Hospital—he wasn’t either a doctor or a keeper, but wore, habitually, a strait-waistcoat, took shower-baths very frequently, and kept his head close shaved—once divided the world into two classes: people who were mad, and people who would be mad. I, too—but out of Bedlam, thank heaven!—have made a somewhat analogous classification. I divide the world into people who have and have not seen Ghosts. I belong myself to the first class. I am continually seeing ghosts. I shake hands in the street with friends who have been dead these ten years. A dear dead sister comes and sits by me at night when I read, and tells me, with a kiss, that I am a good boy for coming home so early. I was troubled some years ago with a man with his head off, who, in that unseemly position, and holding his head on his knees, sat continually before me. I dismissed him at last as being an unworthy hallucination, and not a genuine ghost. I meet a good many ghosts now—friendly ghosts, pleasant ghosts—but chiefly do they favour me with their company at places of public entertainment. It may be that I am a bad listener to music or theatrical dialogue, that I am absent in mind, and _distrait_; but so surely as I go to a theatre or concert, so surely do I fall a conjuring up mind-pictures, till the theatre or the hall, and its occupants, quite fade away, and I find myself in entirely different company, talking to people who are mouldering in their graves, or who are thousands of miles away.