“But it needs Heaven-sent
moments for this skill.”
“If any Gentlemen, and others,
will be pleased to send me any relations about
Spirits, Witches, and Apparitions, In any part of the
Kingdom; or any Information about the Second Sight,
Charms, Spells, Magic, and the like, They shall
oblige the Author, and have them publisht to their
satisfaction.
“Direct your Relations to
Alexander Ogstouns, Shop Stationer, at the
foot of the Plain-stones, at Edinburgh,
on the North-side of the
Street.”
Is this not a pleasing opportunity for Gentlemen,
and Others, whose Aunts have beheld wraiths, doubles,
and fetches? It answers very closely to the
requests of the Society for Psychical Research, who
publish, as some one disparagingly says, “the
dreams of the middle classes.” Thanks to
Freedom, Progress, and the decline of Superstition,
it is now quite safe to see apparitions, and even
to publish the narrative of their appearance.
But when Mr. George Sinclair, sometime Professor of
Philosophy in Glasgow, issued the invitation which
I have copied, at the end of his “Satan’s
Invisible World Discovered,” {12} the vocation
of a seer was not so secure from harm. He, or
she, might just as probably be burned as not, on the
charge of sorcery, in the year of grace, 1685.
However, Professor Sinclair managed to rake together
an odd enough set of legends, “proving clearly
that there are Devils,” a desirable matter to
have certainty about. “Satan’s Invisible
World Discovered” is a very rare little book;
I think Scott says in a MS. note that he had great
difficulty in procuring it, when he was at work on
his “infernal demonology.” As a
copy fell in my way, or rather as I fell in its way,
a helpless victim to its charms and its blue morocco
binding, I take this chance of telling again the old
tales of 1685.
Mr. Sinclair began with a long dedicatory Epistle
about nothing at all, to the Lord Winton of the period.
The Earl dug coal-mines, and constructed “a
moliminous rampier for a harbour.” A “moliminous
rampier” is a choice phrase, and may be envied
by novelists who aim at distinction of style.
“Your defending the salt pans against the imperious
waves of the raging sea from the NE. is singular,”
adds the Professor, addressing “the greatest
coal and salt-master in Scotland, who is a nobleman,
and the greatest nobleman who is a Coal and Salt Merchant.”
Perhaps it is already plain to the modern mind that
Mr. George Sinclair, though a Professor of Philosophy,
was not a very sagacious character.
