Thoughts and Recollections (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1825 Excerpt: ...a note on one, and it will vibrate in the other. This illustration, I find, has been prettily versified by one of our old authors: Two lutes are strung And on a table tuned alike for song: Strike one, and that, which none did touch, Will, sympathizing, sound as much. Think then this world which Heaven enrolls, Is but a table round, and souls More apprehensive be. This general disposition of mankind explains why the law objects to leading questions being put to witnesses, who, even without a motive for falsehood, will correspond in their answers to the thing suggested to them; and a story is told of a barrister, who, wishing to persuade a friend of the effect of such interrogatories, called up his groom and asked him if he did not recollect seeing I forget what, in crossing Wimbledon common two nights before. "Yes, Sir, to be sure I do," said the man;--" Yet we saw nothing," said the lawyer, when the man had left the room. Ben Jonson has painted this propensity in human nature very happily in his Alchymist, where a set of witnesses are introduced peremptorily asserting things and denying them, as they receive their impression from the interrogator. the house of a relation, in which he was staying. On going up-stairs to his bed-room in this, he saw the likeness of the priest, pale and cadaverous as he had left him, sitting in an elbowchair, by his bed-side. He approached the figure, which neither stirred nor spoke, and, being determined, like Almanzor, or some other of Dryden's tragic heroes, As to the second class of ghoststories; i. e. those which derive authority from the event being verified, which was apparently indicated by the appa r rition. I observed, in studying the doctrine of chances, that there was often quite as extraordinary...