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A clearer day has dispelled the marvels, which showed themselves in heaven above and in earth beneath, when twilight and superstition went hand in hand. Horace's

as well as Milton's

have all been found wanting when reduced to the admeasurements of science; and the “sounds that syllable men's names, on sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses,” are quenched in silence, or only exist in what James Hogg most poetically terms

The inductive philosophy was “the bare bodkin” which gave many a pleasant vision “its quietus.” “Homo, naturæ minister,” saith Lord Bacon, “et interpres, tantum facit et intelligit, quantum de naturæ ordine se vel mente observaverit: nec amplius scit nec potest.”—Nov. Organum, Aph. I.

The fabulous dragon has long acted a conspicuous part in the poetry both of the north and south. We find him in the legends of Regnar Lodbrog and Kempion, and in the episode of Brandimarte in the second book of the Orlando Inamorato. He is also to be recognised as the huge snake of the Edda, and figures with ourselves in the stories of the Chevalier St George and the Dragon—of Moor of Moorhall and the Dragon of Wantley—in the Dragon of Loriton—in the Laidley Worm of Spindleton Haugh—in the Flying Serpent of Lockburne—the Snake of Wormieston, &c. &c. Bartholinus and Saxo-Grammaticus volunteer us some curious information regarding a species of these monsters, whose particular office was to keep watch over hidden treasure. The winged Gryphon is of “auld descent,” and has held a place in unnatural history from Herodotus (Thalia, 116, and Melpomene, 13, 27) to Milton, (Paradise Lost, book v.)—

Of the many mysterious chapters of the human mind, surely one of the most obscure and puzzling is that of witchcraft. For some reason, not sufficiently explained, Lapland was set down as a favourite seat of the orgies of the “Midnight Hags.” When, in the ballad of “The Witch of Fife,” the auld gudeman, in the exercise of his conjugal authority, questions his errant spouse regarding her nocturnal absences without leave, she is made ecstatically to answer—

“Like, but oh how different,” are these unearthly goings-on to the details in the Walpurgis Night of Faust, (act v. scene 1.) “The phantom-hunters” of the north were not the “Wilde Jäger” of Burger, or “the Erl-king” of Goethe. It is related by Hearne, that the tribes of the Chippewa Indians suppose the northern lights to be occasioned by the frisking of herds of deer in the fields above, caused by the haloo and chase of their departed friends.

It is very probable that the apparitional visit of “Alonzo the Brave” to the bridal of “the Fair Imogene,” was suggested to M. G. Lewis by the story in the old chronicles of the skeleton masquer taking his place among the wedding revellers, at Jedburgh Castle, on the night when Alexander III., in 1286, espoused as his second queen, Joleta, daughter of the Count le Dreux. These were the palmy days of portents; and the prophecy uttered by Thomas of Ercildoune, of the storm which was to roar

was supposed to have had its fulfilment in the death of the lamented monarch, which occurred, only a few months after the appearance of the skeleton masquer, by a fall from his horse, over a precipice, while hunting between Burntisland and Kinghorn, at a place still called “the King's Wood-end.”

Wordsworth appears to have had the subject in his eye, in two of the stanzas of his lyric entitled Presentiments, the last of which runs as follows:—

The same incident has been made the subject of some very spirited vorses, in a little volume—Ballads and Lays from Scottish History—published in 1844, and which, I fear, has not attracted the attention to which its intrinsic merits assuredly entitle it.