212 contemporaries, and dig up the sins of the dead to smother the living; neither let us omit to praise them for decorum and moral bias, when we accuse them of deficiency in that dangerous though dazzling style, which was so thickly studded with indelicate allusions and dissolute principles. AN INQUIRY WHY CANDLES INVARIABLY BURN BLUE IN THE PRESENCE OF A GHOST. O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! THIS mysterious subject has exercised the faculties of some of the world's most erudite scholars and found thinkers. The learned German Blumenberprogius,* after maintaining that candles derive their name from Candaules, King of Lydia, who first made use of them when he showed his wife unattired to his minister Gyges, for which he lost his crown and life, enters into a scholastic but somewhat far-fetched argument, to prove that, as that * De Bluit. Candel. vide Joseph Drippinginus, in his Talamon Ajax. Chronic. in Edit. Georg. Homedida. Seriem Godoliæ Tradit. Hebraic. Corpus Paradoseon. Titulo Dips. c. 1. s. 8. monarch was a great magician, and in habits of frequent intercourse with ghosts and spectres, he endued his candles with this inexplicable property, that he might learn the approach of his supernatural visitants. Suetonius, however,* who took his name from the circumstance of his being a tallowchandler, on which trade he has left a learned treatise, altogether derides this solution as fantastical and vain, asking very pertinently why this ghostindicating quality, even if originally imparted, should have descended to posterity: and proceeds to argue, first-that the colour assumed is not blue, but purple, such being the proper translation of the ancient word purpureus; and secondly, that this being the colour sacred to kings and bishops, the number of those personages in the lower regions may have so saturated the air with purple, that all revisitors of our purer atmosphere give it out, like a halo, and impart its hue more particularly to the lights that surround them. This seems to me a fond conceit, and moreover savouring of the same illiberality that made Barry so prodigal of stars, garters, and mitres, when painting his scene of Judgment for the Arts and Sciences in the Adelphi. Certain mysterious ignes fatui always assume spon * Vide Suet. de Spect. et Apparit. lib. 4. cap. 2. where he strenuously avers, in opposition to Blumenbergius, that candles came originally not from Lydia, but from Greece, and were dedicated to Pan by the Dryopes; whence, probably, our recipient of fat intended for candles is termed dripping-pan. taneously a bluish tint. In the Pyritegium, or Curfew Act, passed by the Conqueror, is the following exceptive clause:-" Hoc nonobstante liceat ut Gulielmus de Wispo, alias Johannes de Lanternâ, det lucem cæruleam quocunque quotiesque vellet." "Be it enacted nevertheless, that Will-o'-the Wisp, alias Jack-o'-Lanthorn, have permission to show his blue light wheresoever he will."-Whence we learn, that so early as the Conquest this was the prevalent colour of all supernatural flames, and that they were specially exempted from the jurisdiction of extinguisher or snuffers. Swift, in a note on his lines— This squire he dropp'd his pen full soon, While as the lights burnt bluely,— hazards a conjecture, that as none but the ghosts of the wicked reappear, and candles, if properly made, are themselves wick-ed, there may be some secret sympathy or affinity between them; in support of which hypothesis, he affirms that they give out generally a faint blue whenever there is a thief in them. He asserts also, plausibly enough, that there may be a visual deception produced by the prevalent expectation of this coloured light; that nothing is so varying or uncertain as the hues which the same object assumes to different optics; that men seem to take a perverse delight in confounding the whole theory of colours, as one sees constantly written up over various shops--Grey, greengrocer, - Brown, * Vide Hawkins's Brief Abridgment of the Statutes, folio, vol. clxxi. p. 129. blacksmith,-Black, whitesmith,-Scarlet, blue-maker, &c.; while Nature herself has given us the cameleon as a puzzle; and has so confused one of our fieldfruits in its progress to maturity, that we may say with strict regard to truth, “All blackberries are either white or red when they are green, (i. e. unripe). Men moreover," he acutely remarks, "never see spectres except when they are in a fit of the bluedevils, which may impart their tone to surrounding objects; and that blue-devils are superinduced by the parties getting into hot water, which circumstance alone may account for a change of hue as violent as it produces on lobsters and fleas, and occasion the patients to imagine every thing blue, as men in a calenture fancy the whole world to be green. These lucubrations appear to me profound and philosophical, but I doubt whether we may implicitly adopt them without farther inquiry. Dr. Plot, in his Natural History of Oxfordshire, informs us that— "Soon after the murder of King Charles I. a commission was appointed to survey the King's house at Woodstock, with the manor, park, woods, and other demesnes; for which purpose they met on the 13th of October, 1649, and took up their residence in the King's new rooms, sitting in the Presence Chamber for the dispatch of business. On the 16th of this month, in the midst of their debate, there entered a large black dog howling, who overturned three of their chairs, crept See his and Sir Isaac Newton's joint Essay on Chromatics, which won the prize from the Board of Longitude, Philosoph. Trans. vol. vii. under a bed, and vanished, although all the doors had been kept carefully locked. The next day, sitting in a lower room, they heard persons walking overhead, though the chamber was locked up; the wood of the King's oak was brought from the dining-room, and thrown with great violence into the Presence Chamber; the chairs, stools, tables, and other furniture, were forcibly hurried about the room; the papers containing the minutes of their transactions were torn, and the ink-glass broken; the doors all the while remaining fast, and the keys in the custody of the Commissioners. The night following, Sharp the secretary, and two of the servants, being asleep in the same room, had their beds' feet lifted up so much higher than their heads, that they expected to have their necks broken, and then were let fall again with a violence that shook the whole house. On the night of the 19th, all being a-bed in the same room for greater security, and lights burning by them, the candles in an instant burnt blue, and then went out with a sulphureous smell; and that moment the wooden trenchers whereon they had eaten the day before, and which had been locked up in the pantry, were hurled about the room with great violence. On several following nights the candles changed colour as before, strange noises were heard, their Honours received sore bruises from logs of wood and other substances thrown upon them,which kept rolling about the room all night, though next morning nothing could be seen. On the 29th, about midnight, the candles went out bluely as usual something walked majestically through the room, and opened and shut the windows; great stones flew about in all directions; and at about a quarter after one, a noise was heard as of forty cannon discharged together, and again repeated at about eight minutes' distance; which being heard through the country for sixteen miles round, brought all the neighbourhood into their Honours' room, where they gathered up the great stones, fourscore in number, and laid them by in the corner of a field, where, in Dr. Plot's time, they were still to be seen. The Commissioners during this visitation gave themselves up for lost, crying aloud for help; and Giles Sharp, snatching up a sword, |