with supernatural communication, and start up in solitude. I expect a Dira facies, or smiling angel, beckoning and pointing. (Vol. II., p. 299).

"August 28.-Debt and ruin have touched the honour of my name. Yet I am not unhappy. I never lose the mysterious whisper, 'Go on,' and I feel that, in spite of calamity and present appearances, as I am virtuous and good, I shall, before I die, carry my object.

"Washington Irving says, Columbus imagined the voice of the Deity spoke to him to comfort him in his troubles in Hispaniola. No; he did not imagine it, he did hear it, and it did speak. Irving calls him a visionary. Oh, no! Irving has no such object-he has no such communications."

In April, 1841, he went to Playford Hall to paint the portrait of Thomas Clarkson for his great picture of the AntiSlavery Convention, and this is what he notes in his journal :"Clarkson told me the whole story of his vision. He said he was sleeping when a voice awoke him, and he heard distinctly these words: 'You have not done all your work. There is America.' Clarkson said it was vivid. He sat up in his bed; he listened, and heard no more. Then the whole subject of his last pamphlet came to his mind. Texts without end crowded in, and he got up in the morning and began it, and worked eight hours a day till it was done-till he hoped he had not left the Americans a leg to stand on.

"Now come the causes of this belief. There is no doubt that all men who devote their lives from boyhood to a great cause have the impression of being called or led by the Deity. Does this impression come from the mere physical exercise of the brain in one direction, so that imagination is excited, or does perpetual solitude engender the notion that what is merely imagined is actual? Clarkson says he was sleeping. Might he not have dreamt strongly? He heard a voice, and sat upright, neither awake nor asleep, and still heard the imagined sounds of the dream before his reason returned with his waking. This the physical explanation, and is always more gratifying to world than the supposition that any being is so favoured by as to be called and selected. On the other hand, Clarkso1 evidently been a great instrument for the abolition of a curse. A whole species, who have suffered for centuri by his exertions, and those of others, been advanced in of human beings to liberty and protection. Is such unworthy the interference of the Deity? If not, is it i he would select for such a benevolent purpose a hun his instrument? The men who do these great thing have the impression that they are so impelled.

Columbus believed he heard a voice in the storm, encouraging him to persevere. Socrates believed in his spirit; and if it be allowed to refer to Christ, the Saviour always talked as of an immediate communication. I myself have believed in such impressions all my life. I believe I have been so acted on from seventeen to fifty-five, for the purpose of reforming and refining my great country in art. I believe that my sufferings were meant, first to correct me, and then, by rousing attention, to interest my nation. I know that I am corrected, and a better man; and I know there exists a sympathy for me, and by reflection for my style and object, which, without such causes, could not have operated so soon. At seventeen, I could not write a word intelligibly. Who gave me the power to thunder out in one night, as if by inspiration, my thoughts on the Academic question? Who guided me as to the only sound system of education in an artist, in opposition to all the existing practice of the day in England? Who cheered me when all the world seemed adverse to desert? God, my great, my benevolent, my blessed Creator, by the influence-and the influence only of his Holy, Holy, Holy Spirit!

"Perhaps this is insanity, as well as Clarkson's, Columbus' Milton's, and others. Perhaps we are all 'drunk with new wine." No, no; we are all more alive to the supernatural and spiritual than the rest of our fellow-creatures. Where did I see the prototype of the head of Lazarus? I had never seen a man raised from the dead. Who was my inspirer? God, my blessed Creator.

"How often in prison, in want, in distress, in blindness, have I knelt in agony before Him, my forehead touching the ground, and prayed for His mercy! How often have I risen with Go on'

loud in my brain as to make me start! How often have I, in despair, opened the Scriptures, and seen, as in letters of fire, Fear thou not; I am with thee! And have I ever had occasion but once to find the result did not answer the promises? And that result will yet be accomplished.

Ybelieve Clarkson did hear a voice, like other selected beings before he was born."-Vol. III, p. 171.

March 24, 1844.-Awoke this morning with that sort of audible whisper which Socrates, Columbus, and Tasso heard :— 'Why do you not paint your own six designs for the house on *One of the your own foundation, and exhibit them?

most remarkable days and nights of my life. I slept at the Adelphi last night, high up, and just at break of day I awoke, and felt as if a heavenly choir was leaving my slumbers as day dawned, and had been hanging over and inspiring me as I slept. I had not dreamt but heard the inspiration. When I was awake

I saw the creeping light. If this be delusion, so was Columbus's voice in the roaring of the Atlantic winds: but neither was; and under the blessing of God the result will shew it as to myself, but only under His blessing."-Vol. III, p. 274.

Haydon was as generous to young artists as he was immovably persuaded of his own genius. He zealously interested himself for the young sculptor Lough. On one occasion Lough said to Haydon, as if half afraid of being laughed at,"Mr. Haydon, I fancy myself in the Acropolis sometimes, and hear a roaring noise like the tide." "My dear fellow," said Haydon, "when I was at my great works, I saw with the vividness of reality the faces of Michael Angelo and Raffaele smiling about my room. Nurse these feelings, but tell them not, at least in England."

Such was Benjamin Robert Haydon's firm and life-long conviction; an avowed Spiritualist when Spiritualism was unheard of in England. So early as 1816, he clearly saw into the spirit and reasoning of sceptics on such subjects. Speaking of the character of Voltaire's mind, he said, "If Christ were an impostor, Voltaire would be the hero. If Christ was, as I believe him, divine, Voltaire would not have been ashamed to appear as an incredule." Haydon thus struck the weak spot of scepticism, which is inevitably sure to embrace the false and reject the true. And with respect to Haydon himself the sceptic will say, if his ideas on these subjects were based on a reality, how came it that with all his prayers, his faith and his imagined revelations, his own personal career was a failure, a misery, and finally a terror? No man was in the habit of more zealous and impassioned prayer, and his petitions, so far as they regarded high art, were fully realized. He lived to see his principles publicly acknowledged and adopted. As regarded himself, that very impetuosity and pertinacity of temperament which enabled him to carry his public purpose, destroyed his own personal interests. Like all men who have fought against the false tastes and ideas of their times, he became the martyr of his mission. As he himself says, " Homer begged; Tasso begged in a different way; Galileo was racked; De Witt assassinated; and all for wishing to improve their species." Columbus received chains and dungeons in return for the discovery of a world; Milton died poor and blind; De Caus was shut up as a madman for the assertion of the wonderful power of steam; and Thomas Gray, in our own day, for the zealous advocacy of a national system of railways, was treated with contempt and left to die in indigence. The rewards of martyrs are not in this world; the truth of their convictions has not its testimony in their fortunes, but whilst the ungrateful world reaps the fruits of their labours and teachings,

they reap the reward of their faithful warfare for the right in the world of right.

With all Haydon's faults-and they were conspicuously of temperament-nothing could shake his convictions of the truth, or bend him to their concealment from self-interest. At the same time he was sensible of the defects of his character, and exclaims in his journal,-"Alas! I was imperfectly brought up!" That is a pathetic confession which may cover a multitude of sins, and must deepen the sympathy of every one who sees, amid his clouds and drifting shadows, the sun of his real genius. The head of his Lazarus is one of those things which attest the reality of his spiritual inspiration. He believed it was communicated to him, and the impression of every one who ever looked upon it was of a correspondent character. Sir Walter Scott was wonderfully struck on first seeing it, and stood as if gazing on something supernatural. "Lazarus," Haydon says, "affected everybody: high and low, ignorant and learned." The sensation was universal. The workman employed in hanging it, exclaimed that it made him tremble. The constable that came to arrest Haydon for debt, on seeing Lazarus in his studio, became so agitated that he cried out, "My God, sir! I won't take you. Give me your word to meet me at twelve o'clock at the attorney's, and I will take it." And this was done. Mr. Tom Taylor, Haydon's biographer, says, "Long before I knew anything of Haydon or his life, I have often paused before the awful face of Lazarus in that picture, wondering how such a work came to be in such a place:" the Pantheon in Oxford Street. And he adds, "I am much mistaken if this picture does not bear an impress of power which will hardly be found in the work of any other English historical painter."-Vol. II. p. 4. W. H.

PASSING EVENTS.-THE SPREAD OF
SPIRITUALISM.

By BENJAMIN COLEMAN.

ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS.

ALTHOUGH the name of Andrew Jackson Davis, the celebrated seer, must be familiar to all who are acquainted with the history of Modern Spiritualism, I believe there are comparatively few on this side the Atlantic who have read the remarkable book dictated by him "whilst in the clairvoyant or spiritual state."

Nature's Divine Revelations (Part i.) establishes beyond controversy that a supramundane intelligence was at work in its production. Davis was a shoemaker's apprentice at the time, with but a village school education, and not 20 years of age, and this volume of several hundred pages contains, according to Professor Lewis, one of the witnesses, "A profound and elaborate discussion of the Philosophy of the Universe." Whence came these scientific utterances, many of which were then heard for the first time and have been since confirmed?

Not certainly from the natural brain of an uneducated boy; Davis himself believes that they were dictated to him by spirits; and who shall dispute it when in the man through whose lips this profound philosophy was fluently poured forth, there was an entire absence of every condition required for its production.

This case does not admit of such explanations as many objectors put forward to account for ordinary spiritual phenomena; and I shall be curious to know what Messrs. Jackson, Atkinson, and Bray, have to say to it to make it fit their respective theories.

My object however is not to discuss the merits of this question, but to introduce an incident which appears to me of some interest relating to one of the scientific statements made in Nature's Divine Revelations. My friend Mr. Tietkens, who is a recent convert to Spiritualism, has been as he says, profoundly impressed with the wonderful character of Davis's book, but he was suddenly arrested by a statement which appeared to him untenable, and which, unexplained, tended to lessen the value in his estimation of other statements in the book upon scientific points not so well understood by him.

In Nature's Divine Revelations, Part ii., clause xli., it is asserted that

"The theories that have been presented to the world concerning the phenomenon of tides, have generally been very incorrect. It has been supposed by a conspicuous astronomer, that tides were produced by the law of attraction-by the action of the moon upon the earth. This cannot be true, for attraction is not an established principle, especially beyond the atmosphere of any body or substance. To shew plainly the impossibility of this being the cause of tides, I will present some of the chief considerations which have an important bearing upon the subject. "If the moon has any attractive influence upon the earth

These gentlemen have recently written some clever Papers published in Human Nature upon the subject but from opposite points of view. Mr. Jackson attributes the cause of the phenomena to some " mesmeric action." Mr. Bray to the "correlation of forces," and I believe Mr. Atkinson denies the existence of spirits altogether, but does not explain how the phenomena are produced.