Philostratus, in his _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_ (iv. 25, p. 165), says that the long intercourse which took place between a female spectre and the Corinthian Menippus was but a prelude to the feast of flesh and blood in which she meant to revel after their marriage. Some have described the Hebrew _lilith_ as a vampire, but the _Jewish Encyclopædia_ states that: “There is nothing in the Talmud to indicate that the _lilith_ was a vampire.” She was regarded as a nocturnal demon, flying about in the form of a night-owl, and stealing children, and was held to have permission to kill all children sinfully begotten, even from a lawful wife. The _lilith_ is held to have the same signification as the Greek _strix_ and _lamiæ_, who were sorceresses or magicians, seeking to put to death new-born children. The ancient Greeks believed that these _lamiæ_ devoured children, or sucked away all their blood until they died. Euripides and the scholiast of Aristophanes mention the _lilith_ as a dangerous monster, the enemy of mortals; and Ovid describes the _strigæ_ as dangerous birds, which fly by night and seek for infants to devour them and nourish themselves with their blood. The _aluka_ of Proverbs xxx. 15 is more akin to the vampire. It is a blood-sucking, insatiable monster; the word is synonymous with _algul_, the well-known demon of the Arabian popular stories, “the man-devouring demon of the waste,” known as the ghoul or goule in the translated edition of the _Arabian Nights_. Goethe, in his ballad _The Bride of Corinth_, describes how a young Athenian visits a friend of his father, to whose daughter he had been betrothed, and is disturbed at midnight by the appearance of the vampire spectre of her whom death has prevented from becoming his bride, and who, when detected, says:— From my grave to wander I am forc’d, Still to seek The Good’s long-sever’d link, Still to love the bridegroom I have lost, And the life-blood of his heart to drink; When his race is run, I must hasten on, And the young must ’neath my vengeance sink. There is one scant reference to the subject in Shelley’s poems. Byron, in his poem _The Giaour_, has the following passage:— But first on earth as vampire sent Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent: Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race. Dryden relates:— Lo, in my walks where wicked elves have been, The learning of the parish now is seen— From fiends and imps he sets the village free, There haunts not any incubus but he: The maids and women need no danger fear To walk by night and sanctity so near. Scott, in _Rokeby_, has the following lines:— For like the bat of Indian brakes, Her pinions fan the wound she makes, And soothing thus the dreamer’s pains, She drinks the life-blood from the veins.