. Books and bookmen ... theirown supplies of meat and drink. The negli-gence testifies to a notion that very old ghostsare of little account, for good or evil. On theother hand, as regards the longevity of spectres,we must not shut our eyes to the example ofthe bogie in ancient armour which appears inGlamis Castle, or to the Jesuit of QueenElizabeths date that haunts the library (and avery nice place to haunt: I ask no better, as aghost in the Pavilion at Lords might cause ascandal) of an English nobleman. With thesei7istanti(e contradictories, as Bacon calls them,present to our minds, we must
. Books and bookmen ... theirown supplies of meat and drink. The negli-gence testifies to a notion that very old ghostsare of little account, for good or evil. On theother hand, as regards the longevity of spectres,we must not shut our eyes to the example ofthe bogie in ancient armour which appears inGlamis Castle, or to the Jesuit of QueenElizabeths date that haunts the library (and avery nice place to haunt: I ask no better, as aghost in the Pavilion at Lords might cause ascandal) of an English nobleman. With thesei7istanti(e contradictories, as Bacon calls them,present to our minds, we must not (in thepresent condition of psychical research) dogma-tise too hastily about the span of life allotted tothe sinmlacrtwi vulgare. Very probably hischances of a prolonged existence are in inverseratio to the square of the distance of timewhich severs him from our modern days. Noone has ever even pretended to see the ghost ofan ancient Roman buried in these islands, stillless of a Pict or Scot, or a Palaeolithic THE SIMULACRUM VULGARE. 62 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. welcome as such an apparition would be tomany of us. Thus the evidence does certainlylook as if there were a kind of statute of limita-tions among ghosts, which, from many points ofview, is not an arrangement at which we shouldrepine. The Japanese artist expresses his own senseof the casual and fluctuating nature of ghosts bydrawing his spectre in shaky lines, as if themodel had given the artist the horrors. Thissiimdacrum rises out of the earth like an exha-lation, and groups itself into shape above thespade with which all that is corporeal of its lateowner has been interred. Please remark theuncomforted and dismal expression of the sijnu-lacnim. We must remember that the ghostor Ka is not the soul, which has otherdestinies in the future world, good or evil, butis only a shadowy resemblance, condemned,as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell in thetomb and hover near it. The Chinese andJapanese have their own definite th
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