house was coming down; I went to see the garret, and there was nothing amiss. A few days afterwards, Mr Higgon of Pont-Faen's son died. When the carpenter came to fetch the boards to make the coffin, which were in the garret, he made exactly such a stir in handling the boards in the garret, as was made before by some spirit, who foreknew the death that was to come to pass. In carrying the body to the grave, the burying stood where the light stood for about a quarter of an hour, because there was some water cross the way, and the people could not go over it without wetting their feet, therefore they were obliged to wait till those that had boots helped them over. The child was buried in that very spot of ground in the church-yard where I saw the light stop after it came out of the church. This is what I can boldly testify, having seen and heard what I relate,-a thing which before I could not believe.

MORRIS GRIFFITH." "Some have been so hardy as to lye down by the wayside where the corpse-candle passed, that they may see what passed; for they were not hurted who did not stand in the way. Some have seen the resemblance of a skull carrying the candle, others the shape of the person that is to die, carrying the candle between its fore fingers, holding the light before its face. Some have said that they saw the shape of those who were to be at the burying. I am willing to suspend my belief of this, as seeming to be extravagant, though their foreboding knowledge of mortality appears to be very wonderful and undeniable."

VI.-The Kyhirraeth.

"I am now going to give you an account of the Kyhirraeth, a doleful foreboding noise before death, and inquire into the cause of this, and of the appearance of the corpse-candles.

D. P. of Lan y Byther parish, a sober sensible man, and careful to tell the truth, informed me, that in the beginning of the night, his wife and maid-servant being together in the house, which was by the wayside, they heard the doleful voice of the Kyhirraeth; and when it came over against the window, it pronounced these strange words, of no signification that we know of Woolach, Woolach; and sometime after a burying passed that way. I confess a word of this sound, especially the latter part of the last syllable sounding in Welsh like the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet, at least as they pronounced it formerly in the schools, pronounced by a spirit of the night near at hand, with a disagreeable horrid-sounding voice, was very terrible and impressive upon the mind and memory. The judicious Joshua Coslet, who lived on that side of the river Towy which runs through the middle of Carmarthenshire, where the Kyhirraeth is often heard, gave

me the following remarkable account of it: -That it is a doleful disagreeable sound, heard before the deaths of many, and most apt to be heard before foul weather: the voice resembles the groaning of sick persons who are to die-heard at first at a distance, then comes nearer, and the last near at hand; so that it is a threefold warning of death-the king of terrors. It begins strong, and louder than a sick man can make; the second cry is lower, but not less doleful, but rather more so; the third yet lower and soft, like the groaning of a sick man almost spent and dying; so that a person well remembering the voice, and coming to the sick man's bed who is to die, shall hear his groans exactly alike, which is an amazing evidence of the spirits' foreknowledge. Sometimes, when it cries very loud, it bears a resemblance of one crying who is troubled with a stitch. If it meets any hinderance in the way, it seems to groan louder. It is, or hath been, very common in the three commots of Ynis-Cenin. A commot is a portion of ground less than a canttref, or a hundred; for three commots make up the hundred of Ynis-Cenin, which extends from the sea as far as Landilo-Fawr; containing twelve parishes, viz. Landilo-Fawr, Bettws, Lanedi, Lannon, Cydweli, Langenich, Penfre, Lanarthney, Langyndeirn, &c. which lie on the south-east side of the river Towy, where sometime past it cried and groaned before the death of every person, as my informant thought, who lived that side of the county. It sounded before the death of persons who were born in these parishes and died elsewhere. Sometimes the voice is heard long before death, yet three quarters of a year is the longest time before hand. But it must be a common thing indeed, as it came to be a common thing for people to say, by way of reproach, to a person making a disagreeable noise, Oh 'r Kyhirraeth ; and sometimes to children crying and groaning unreasonable."

The Parish of Machen.As J. W. James was going towards Bedwas, with a young woman (whom he pretended to court) towards Risca, and before they came opposite Machen Hill, they saw, on the east side of it, facing the parish of Risca, the resemblance of a boy going before them; and while they were looking at it, they saw it put its head between its legs, and transforming itself into a ball of fire, rolling towards the top of the hill; it being as easy for a spirit to go up as to come down. Presently after they heard the jingling sound. of iron, with which they saw many horses drawing a load; they went beyond Pont y Meister Bridge, and then turned to a cross lane leading towards a house where there was a man laying dead. When they went a little farther, they saw the earth cleaving and opening, and out of it came a pillar of fire, which, waving in the air, singed the young woman's handkerchief of a yellow colour, which could never be washed out,

but continued as long as any of the handkerchief remained. The man after

wards seriously confessed, that it was his intention to debauch the young woman in his journey, but this dreadful sight prevented his evil intention."

"Walter Watkins of Neuath, in the parish of Landdetty, in the county of Brecon, being at school at Carmarthen, and as he and some other scholars, who lodged in the same house with him, were playing ball by the house, late in the evening, heard the dismal mournful noise of the Kyhirraeth very near them, but could see nothing which was very shocking to hear. Though these sort of men are incredulous enough, yet they were soon persuaded that it was the voice of neither man nor beast, but of some

spirit, which made them leave their play and run into the house. Not long after, a man who lived near the house died. This kind of noise is always heard before some person's death.

"The woman of the house where these scholars lodged, related to them many such accounts, which they heard with contempt and ridicule, believing nothing of what she said. One morning they asked her, sportingly, what she had seen or heard of a spirit that night? She readily answered, that she heard a spirit come to the door, and passing by her while she sat by the fire, it seemed to walk into a room where a sick man was, and after some time I heard it coming back, and as if it fell down in a faint and was raised up again. Soon after the sick man rose up, thinking he was able to walk, came into the room where the woman heard the

fall, and fell down dead in that very part of the room where the spirit made the same kind of stir which his fall made, and was made by those that raised him up."

"In Montgomeryshire. Edward Lloyd, in the parish of Langyrig, being very ill, those that were with him heard the voice of some person very near them; they looked about the house, but could see no person; the voice seemed to be in the room where

they were. Soon after they heard these words, by something unseen, Y mae Nenbren y Ty yn craccio (the uppermost beam of the house cracketh); soon after, Fe dorr yn y man (it will presently break); then they heard the same voice say, Dyna fy yn torri (there it breaks): he died that moment, which much affected the company.'

"A woman in Carmarthen town, protested to Mr Charles Winter, of the parish of Bedwellty (who was then at the academy, and since became a preacher of the gospel), that she heard like the sound of a company, as it were a burying coming up from a river, and presently as it were the sound of a cart coming another way to meet the com

pany; and the cart seemed to stop while the company went by, and then went on. Soon after a dead corpse was brought from the river from one of the vessels, and a cart wet the burying, and stopped till the com

pany passed by, exactly as the woman heard. Mr W. was no man to tell an untruth, and the woman no self-interest to serve by telling an untruth. The wonder is, how these spirits can so particularly forshow things to come. Either their knowledge of future things near at hand must be very great, or they must have a great influence to accomplish things as foreshown. Be it either way, the thing is wonderful! of the very minute and particular knowledge of these spirits in the manner of death and burials."

The reader will be at no loss to perceive the resemblance of the above superstitions to those of the Highlands of Scotland. The same book contains about the devil, balls of fire, &c. but a great variety of miscellaneous stories I have sent you all the passages that appeared to me worthy of transcription. If this communication be acceptable, you shall hear from me again ere long. T. P. C.

Bristol, May 4th.

LETTER FROM Z. TO LEIGH HUNT, KING OF THE COCKNEYS.

SIRE,

YOUR Majesty, the King of the Cockneys, having signified your royal resolution to preserve an inviolable silence towards me, the unfortunate Z., who am said to "think the green leaves black," and to be " ignorant of all noble theories," (I refer your Majesty to one of your late edicts in the Cockney Court-gazette,) I shall, notwithstanding, as it becomes a good and faithful subject to do, continue to pay a little further homage to your Majesty; and I therefore now seek, with a fitting tribute, once more to approach your throne. In the first place, then, I humbly suggest, that you give yourself too many of those regal airs so natural to a crowned head, and that you conduct yourself, at your court at Lisson Grove, with a stateliness and hauteur that may be considered, by the youthful nobility of Cockaigne, a perfect model of monarchical dignity, but is, in fact, risibly characteristic of your plebeian origin and education. Your Majesty is also subject to unseemly fits of passion, which you try to smile off before your courtiers with an aspect alarmingly ghastly; yet, on the whole, your personal appearance, which with wincing soreness you ac

66

cused me of having caricatured, is not uncaptivating. What with your " ivy crown "shed nodding over both eyes," as it was fixed there by the delicate hand of young Mister Keats, -what with " your ripe locks and fair light limbs," and the " yellow breeches." celebrated by me in my first address, and which, to better eyes than mine, may, for any thing I know, seem sky-blue scarlet,”—your Majesty must be a most formidable personage to the Maids of Honour about court; and such bodily accomplishments and attractions quite sufficient to justify that harmless personal vanity which "the many men so beautiful” have in general exhibited, whether fate have kept them, throughout life, in a private station, or elevated them, like Leigh Hunt, to a throne.

are

That I may not feel myself too much constrained, however, by this image of royalty regularly carried on throughout, I propose now to address you sometimes as plain Leigh Hunt, sometimes as the editor of the Examiner newspaper, sometimes as the author of the incestuous " Story of Rimini," sometimes as the gatherer of "Foliage" and "Green-woods," and sometimes as the potent and august King of the Cockneys. And if, in following out this method, I occasionally depart from that respectful language which the vulgar prejudices of the ignorant may think due to majesty, I hope that the Cockney King will extend to me his gracious pardon, while he calls to mind his own youthful imprudences in that sort, and those many melancholy prison hours, when he sought to beguile the punishment inflicted on him for the outrage he had committed against his sovereign, by the whisper of that Italian Muse who "visited his slumbers nightly," and breathed into his ear all the agonies and all the transports of an incestuous passion.

It appears then that you, Leigh Hunt, after ten years' unintermitted abuse of your sovereign and of the government of your country, and after the publication of many hundred libels, both of a public and private kind, have suddenly fallen into convulsions at the first frown of a 66 poor creature," whom, nevertheless, you pretend to despise; and after having lain in a speechless state for some weeks, you

have awaked raving, and subject to uncouth peals of hysterical and sardonic laughter. That clever actress, Mrs Bartley, could not have recited Collins's Ode to the Passions with greater variety of action and gesticulation, with more "whisks and whirrings" of frenzied emotion, than did Leigh Hunt peruse my Critique. Anger, pity, fear, and revenge, alternately ruled that royal bosom,

"Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting, Possess'd beyond the Muse's painting.'

What a fine subject for a series of pictures! "Collins's Ode to the Passions, illustrated by a series of views of Leigh Hunt in appropriate costume. Engraved by Landseer, from the original paintings by R. Haydon;" with this motto,

Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet.

These you might have framed, and hung up in that magnificent chamber able but infatuated bardling, Mister of yours at Lisson Grove, where, amiJohn Keats, slept on the night when he composed his famous Cockney Poem

in honour of

"Him of the rose, the violet, and the spring, The social smile, the chain for freedom's sake,"

and other mighty masters of the lyre, that often as you are sickened with the follies and sins of mankind, (a complaint to which, you weekly inform us, you are lamentably subject, as well as to bad headaches, proceeding from bile and indigestion,) you may withdraw to the holy contemplation of your own divine perfections, and there

perk up with timid mouth" "and lamping eyes," (so you have it) upon what to you is dearer and more glorious than all created things besides, till you become absorbed in your own identity,-motionless, mighty, and magnificent, in the pure calm of Cockneyism.

Does your Majesty remember, how, during the paroxysms of your passion, you kept fearfully crying out for Z.? Nothing would pacify you but the appearance of that gentleman. A message was accordingly sent to him, and, being a good-natured man, he was about to visit the patient, when, all at once, you "stayed your hand, and changed your measure," and threatened the very person whom, in the same breath, you had invited to visit you, with

all the terrors of the law, if he should venture to set foot within the Cockney King's dominions. Not wishing to be brought into any unnecessary trouble by a lunatic, I contented my self with quoting the following rhymes, which you may find in Cambden: "Were I in my castle of Bungay, Beside the river of Waveney,

I would ne care for the King of Cockney." In spite and in pity of your wild yells of "Coward! Coward!" I am, at this present moment, writing incog. And I purpose doing so, till it suit may my own convenience to affront, "in angry parle," the offended majesty of Lisson Grove. But, meanwhile, let me open your eyes, if possible, to the foolishness of this expression-" Coward."

You, Leigh Hunt, allow your rage and conscious guilt (for you know that Rimini is an incestuous poem) to drive you into the stupidest inconsistency of speech. You tell us that you are answerable for every thing in your inflammatory and unprincipled newspaper, and that therefore every man who writes against you, ought to give his name to the public. There is no logic in this it is a non-sequitur. You may unblushingly expose yourself and your name to the scorn and disgust of the wise and the good-you may endeavour to sap the foundations of civil society and of social life-you may, as you have often done in prose, eulogise prostitutes and kept-mistresses, and sneer at that dull thing a wife-you may, as you have done in something that is not prose, hold up to the love, and pity, and admiration, and worship of virgins, the incestuous and adulterous wretch, who took to her polluted embraces her husband's brother, for no other cause than because he was a handsome man, and " more lightsomely dropt in his lordly back" you may, as you have done, abet murder and assassination, by blaming the general principle, and yet applauding or extenuating each particular instance of it and to all these enormities you may affix, with an imperial flourish, the sign-manual of LEIGH HUNT. But is that any reason why Z., or any other man, should voluntarily offer himself to the filthy abuse of a crew of Jacobins and incendiaries? How can courage or cowardice be in any way shewn, by

in

concealing or avowing one's self to be the castigator of your wicked and pernicious tale of incest? To fear Leigh Hunt, is beyond the power of human timidity. But while I despise you and your noisy impotence, I choose freedom from the molestation of your abuse. You are the coward. You bawled upon a man, who, you clearly saw, held you derision, to offer himself to the combat. You are like some puny drunk. ard at a village-wake, "shewing fight" to a sober man; and, in the midst of all his vapouring, well aware, first, that the muscular object of his slavering curses would be satisfied with merely holding up his fist; and, secondly, that his own gang would prevent him from fighting, and were his challenge accepted, cry out for a constable.

"Then see what thou'lt do: Woul't weep? WOUL'T FIGHT? woul't fast? woul't tear thyself? Woul't drink up easil? eat a crocodile ? I'LL DO'T."

In the midst of your fury, you would fain be jocular. You tell me that I think the " green leaves black," and am ignorant of "all noble theories." Truly if I were to form my opinion of "leaves" from your system of "Foliage," I should have singular notions both of their shape and colour. A tree in the hands of Leigh Hunt is a very odd affair. No such tree as he is in the habit of describing grows in the British isles; nor is any description of it to be found in Evelyn's Silva. I am sorry it is not in my power to admire what I never saw. But how is this my insensibility to the colour of leaves, or rather the diseased state of my optical nerves, connected with that hatred and disgust which I, in common with every body else, entertain for indecent and immoral compositions in verse, more particularly the "Story of Rimini ?” And can it indeed be, that no one can admire, or even see, the beauties of nature, without also admiring that most artificial of all objects, Mr Leigh

Hunt?

With respect to my ignorance" of all noble theories," there again breaks forth the vanity of the Cockney King, You think that "all noble theories" are contained in your own writings for of those alone did I speak. And I presume, that the "ideal beauty of "all those noble theories" is to be found

in the "Story of Rimini." Noble as those theories are, let me hope that they may never be carried into practice. Let me hope that wives may continue to love their husbands, and to remain faithful to their bed, though they may chance to see finer men at church and market, that a holier power guards the sanctity of the marriage-couch, than whim, fancy, caprice, passion, and shameless desire,-that execration and hatred shall for ever pursue the memory of the unprincipled adultress,-that instead of flowers being sprinkled, and annual hymns chaunted over the mingled dust of incestuous paramours, weeds may grow there, and toads undisturbed engender; and that all low-minded and paltry men, who, in folly, or in wickedness, shall seek, like Leigh Hunt, to versify více into virtue, may meet with some just infliction, as severe as that which makes him at this moment to wince, wail, and tremble, and in his heart to feel all the agonies of remorse, without the softening of repentance, at having dedicated to a licentious muse the prison-hours that were doomed to be the punishment of his sedition.

But it seems that Leigh Hunt now denies having had any thing to do with these pot-valiant denunciations of vengeance against Z. You sat still and silent,

"As the female dove,

Or ere her golden couplets are disclosed," You are still "he of the rose and the violet,"

"A fool of sweetness, crispness, ease, Compound of lovely smallnesses." But your brother, who appears to be the drudge at the printing-office in town, while your Majesty resides at Hampstead, was, you say, the oracle on that occasion. Really the King of the Cockneys must himself be sensible of the imprudence of Prince John. That unhappy prince must needs have two separate readings of his creed. He calls upon Z. to come forward with his name, and declares him to be a coward for withholding it, though all that Z. did was to expose the wickedness of an immoral poem. By and by the Examiner publishes, with high praise and commendation, a letter to Mr Canning, which, whatever may be its character as a literary composition, is, beyond doubt, the most malignant and fiendish curse ever uttered by one hu

man being against another, and concludes with a threat of assassination, either idiotically unmeaning, or savagely wicked. Prince John is in high glee at the sarcasms of this lurking assassin; he delights to think that Mr Canning allowed himself to be disturbed by them; a single unguarded expression of an animated orator, during the warmth of discussion, is judged by him worthy of death and a conjuration of murderers; for the sake of one word, an accomplished gentleman, rhetorician, scholar, and poet, ought, according to this moralist, to be outlawed from human society, and denied the common attributes of a human being; and, at the fancied idea of his humiliation, a shout is raised by the royal brothers, that shakes the whole kingdom of Cockney, from Lisson Grove to No 18, Catherine Street, Strand.

Your Majesty seems to be sensible of the extraordinary style of your royal edicts, and you seek to preserve your own consistency by the sacrifice of Prince John. How hard the hearts of kings! There, alas, generosity is not to be found. You, forsooth, think, that the author of the letter to Mr Canning ought to come forward; though you also think, that he may have good reason for not doing so; and with these clashing opinions of your own, you give your royal brother a sort of awkward lecture on his absurd and contending principles. But still you admire the author of the letterhint that he is your friend-and the friend of man-talk of enduring " petrefaction" before you disclose his name

breathe not a syllable of displeasure with his ferocity and avowed determination, under supposeable circumstances, to commit murder-and delight in the universal odium against Mr Canning, which, according to you, his atrocious epistle has excited.

Prince John can have no hopes of the succession, for you have often told the world, that your throne is surrounded by a numerous progeny, but you ought to drill him into the appearance of consistency with himself and his elder brother; so that he may not drive you into the necessity of again speaking of the "poor creature whom you last week dismissed;" as if Z. could be said to be dismissed from a mind which his image for ever haunts like an avenging shadow, and from