CHAPTER I.

But lost to me, for ever lost those joys, Which reason scatters, and which time destroys. No more the midnight fairy-train I view, All in the merry moonlight tippling dew. Even the last lingering fiction of the brain, The churchyard ghost, is now at rest again. _The Library._ The moral bard, from whom we borrow the motto of this chapter, has touched a theme with which most readers have some feelings that vibrate unconsciously. Superstition, when not arrayed in…