Another infantile recollection is memorable, as thus.  My father’s annual holiday happened one year to be at Bognor, where a patron patient of his, Lord Arran, rented a pleasant villa, and he had for a visitor at the time no less a personage than George the Third:  it must have been during some lucid interval, perhaps after the Great Thanksgiving at St. Paul’s.  My father took his little boy with him to call upon the Earl, not thinking to see the King; but when we came in there was his kind-hearted Majesty, who patted my curls and gave me his blessing!  How far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected my after career believers in the divine rights and spiritual powers of a king may speculate as they please.  At all events I got a good man’s blessing.

I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a dream.  My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy’s Hospital, from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the wounded after the battle of Copenhagen.  He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of those days, when, on the night before embarking, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he crossed the churchyard and fell into an open grave.  Telling this to his parents at “The Pollet,” they would not let him go, with a sort of superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the smack was seized on its voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were consigned—­for twelve years—­to a French prison!  I have heard my father tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr. Watts’ awkward line, “On little things what great depend.”  I might say more about warnings in dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences.  For instance, my “Dream of Ambition” in Proverbial Philosophy was a real one.  And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on “Truth in Things False,” which has several times occurred to myself, as this, for example:  Years ago, in Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing through a town—­I think it was Crediton—­and I had the strange feeling that I had seen all this before:  now, we changed horses just on this side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had foreseen,—­a market-place with the usual incidents.  Now, if reasonably asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soul may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real and ideal.  But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a judgment upon the famous Horatian philosophy of “more things in heaven and earth,” &c.

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