How poor, comparatively speaking, are the incidents, how uninteresting is the machinery, of a modern fictitious narrative!--sudden and unlooked-for reappearances of those who were thought to be dead, discoveries of substituted births, with various chances and misnomers--"antres vast, and deserts wild!" One good, tall, stalking ghost, with its compressed lips and pointed fingers, with its glazed eye and measured step, is worth them all! Oh for a real "_white lady_" under the twilight of the year seventeen hundred and forty! When the elegant Greek or warlike Roman walked abroad or dined at home, he was surrounded by all the influences of an interesting and captivating mythology--by nymphs of the oak, of the mountain, and of the spring--by the Lares and Penates of his fireside and gateway--by the genius, the Ceres and the Bacchus of his banquet. When our forefathers contended for religious and civil liberty on the mountain--when they prayed for it in the glen, and in the silent darkness of the damp and cheerless cave--they were surrounded, not by material images, but by popular conceptions. The tempter was still in the wilderness, with his suggestions and his promises; and there, too, was the good angel, to warn and to comfort, to strengthen and to cheer. The very fowls of heaven bore on their wing and in their note a message of warning or a voice of comforting; and when the sound of psalms commingled with the swelling rush of the cascade, there were often heard, as it were, the harping of angels, the commingling of heavenly with earthly melody. All this was elevating and comforting precisely in proportion to the belief by which it was supported; and it may fairly be questioned whether such men as Peden and Cameron would have maintained the struggle with so much nerve and resolution if the sun of their faith had not been surrounded by a halo--if the noonday of the gospel had not shaded away imperceptibly into the twilight of superstition. In fact, superstition, in its softer and milder modifications, seems to form a kind of barrier or fence around the "sacred territory;" and it seldom if ever fails to happen that, when the outworks are driven in, the citadel is in danger; when the good old woman has been completely disabused of her harmless fancies, she may then aspire to the faith and the religious comforts of the philosophy of Volney.