and those of alcoholism, fanaticism, sorrow, or anxiety.  Now the common mistakes in dealing with this topic have been to make too much, or to make too little, of the coincidences between the hallucinatory appearance of an absent person, and his death, or some other grave crisis affecting him.  Too little is made of such coincidences by Dr. Hibbert, in his Philosophy of Apparitions (p. 231).  He ’attempts a physical explanation of many ghost stories which may be considered most authentic’.  So he says, but he only touches on three, the apparition of Claverhouse, on the night of Killiecrankie, to Lord Balcarres, in an Edinburgh prison; the apparition of her dead mother to Miss Lee, in 1662; and the apparition of his wife, who had born a dead child on that day in England, to Dr. Donne in Paris, early in the seventeenth century.

Dr. Hibbert dedicated his book, in 1825, to Sir Walter Scott, of Abbotsford, Bart., President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  Sir Walter, at heart as great a ghost-hunter as ever lived, was conceived to have a scientific interest in the ’mental principles to which certain popular illusions may be referred’.  Thus Dr. Hibbert’s business, if he would satisfy the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was to ’provide a physical explanation of many ghost stories which may be considered most authentic’.  In our prosaic age, he would have begun with those most recent, such as the tall man in brown, viewed by Sir Walter on the moor near Ashestiel, and other still remembered contemporary hallucinations.  Far from that, Dr. Hibbert deliberately goes back two centuries for all the three stories which represent the ‘many’ of his promise.  The Wynyard ghost was near him, Mrs Ricketts’s haunted house was near him, plenty of other cases were lying ready to his hand. {189} But he went back two centuries, and then,—­complained of lack of evidence about ‘interesting particulars’!  Dr. Hibbert represents the science and common-sense of seventy years ago, and his criticism probably represents the contemporary ideas about evidence.

The Balcarres tale, as told by him, is that the Earl was ’in prison, in Edinburgh Castle, on the suspicion of Jacobitism’.  ‘Suspicion’ is good; he was the King’s agent for civil, as Dundee was for military affairs in Scotland.  He and Dundee, and Ailesbury, stood by the King in London, to the last.  Lord Balcarres himself, in his memoirs, tells James II. how he was confined, ‘in close prison,’ in Edinburgh, till the castle was surrendered to the Prince of Orange.  In Dr. Hibbert’s tale, the spectre of Dundee enters Balcarres’s room at night, ‘draws his curtain,’ looks at him for some time, and walks out of the room, Lord Balcarres believing it to be Dundee himself.