NOTE 10. The number of quotations I can find to prove the universality of the thought that the dead and other spirits change their shape as they please is but lessened by the fewness of the books that are near my hand in the country where I am writing. John Heydon, "a servant of God and secretary of nature," writing in 1662 in _The Rosie Cross Uncovered_ which is the last book of his _Holy Guide_ says that a man may become one of the heroes: "A hero," he writes, "is a dæmon, or good genius, and a genius a partaker of divine things and a companion of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal angels who live according to their vehicles a versatile life, turning themselves proteus-like into any shape." And Mrs. Besant, a typical writer of the modern Theosophical School, insists upon these changes of form, especially among those spirits that are most free from the terrestrial body and explains it by saying that, "astral matter takes form under every impulse of thought." Swedenborg I have already quoted in my long essay, but to prove that the shape-changer is a part of general literature--I have but Wordsworth and Milton under my hand. When the white doe of Rylstone shows itself at the church door according to its Sunday custom, one has one tale to tell, another another, but an Oxford student will have it that it is the faery that loved a certain "shepherd-lord." "'Twas said that she all shapes could wear." And Milton writes like any Platonist of his time: "For Spirits, when they please, Can either sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their essence pure, Not ty'd or manacled with joint or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose, Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, Can execute their aery purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfil."