as he did in the course of the night. Many such instances are upon record; and Cervantes must have witnessed something of the kind, or he would not have ventured to restore Don Quixote to reason in his final illness, make him abjure knight-errantry, and die a sensible as he had lived a worthy man; for throughout his adventures he displays a loftiness of principle and a rectitude of purpose which give an elevation to his character, and render him estimable when most ridiculous. Sir Henry Halford cautioned the younger members of his profession against these appearances, which have often deluded physicians themselves. The medical attendant of Charleval, a French versifier, called out exultingly to a brother of the faculty who entered the room, Come and see, the fever is going!" After a moment's observation, the other, more experienced, replied, "No-it is the patient.' The amendment is not real unless the pulse has improved: the energies of life are otherwise worn out; and either the inertness of the disease proceeds from a want of power to sustain it, or, if it has fairly retired, the system has been too much depressed to rebound. The temporary revival is rarely complete; but a partial intermission, from its comparative ease, creates a considerable change of sensation. Hence the pause in the disorder has received the name of a lightening before death”- —a removal of the load of pain and stupor by which the patient was previously oppressed. Shakspeare confines the term to the merriment of mind which usually accompanies the relief. Paley has said, and he wrote after many visitations of gout, that the subsidence of pain is a positive pleasure which few enjoyments can exceed. The observation is sometimes strikingly illustrated in surgical operations, when neither the smarting of the wound nor the attendant horrors have the power to disturb the sense of satisfaction which directly ensues. Sir Charles Bell opened the windpipe of a man attacked with spasms of the throat, and who was dying through want of air. The incision closed with the convulsive throbs, and it was necessary to slit out a piece of the cartilage; but when the man, whose face was lately a picture of distress, who streamed with the sweat of suffering, and who toiled and gasped for life, breathed freely through the opening, he fell fast asleep while half a dozen candles threw their glare upon his eyes, and the surgeons, with their hands bathed in his blood, were still at work upon the wound, inserting materials to keep it open. A soldier, struck in the temple at Waterloo with a musket-ball, had his skull sawn through with a trephine by Mr. Cooper, the author of the "Surgical Dictionary," and a bone pulled out which had been driven half an inch into the substance of the brain. Nearly lifeless before, he instently sat up, talked with reason and complacency, and rose and dressed the same day. The transition is little less sudden in the "lightening before death;" and though the debility is usually too great for exuberance of spirits, there is sometimes a gentle gaiety which would have a contagious charm if it were not the signal of a coming gloom, made a hundred fold more dark by the contrast with the short-lived mirth, never in this world-unless by the tearful eye of memory -to be beheld again. The moment which converts a sensitive body to inanimate matter is often indistinguishable; but one would hardly think that any who had deliberately contemplated a corpse-icy, stiff, and motionless, with nothing of humanity except the form-could suppose that life might put on the "borrowed likeness of shrunk death," and men, who were still of the present world, be consigned by mistake to a living tomb. Yet many persons, especially women, are so haunted with the idea, that they will almost fear to sleep lest they should wake with six feet of earth for their covering and a coffin for their bed. Solemn physicians abroad-for in England these terrorists boast no educated discipleshave written books to accredit the belief, and add a deeper horror to the grave. Each successive production of the kind, however, is little more than a resuscitation of its forgotten predecessor, from which it differs about as much as the Almanac of this year from the Almanac of last. In 1834, Julia de Fontenelle, a man of science-if several lines of philosophical titles written after his name are a voucher for the character-published his "Medico-legal Researches on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death," which volume is at present, we believe, the standard one on the subject. The horror of being buried alive was his least motive for rousing up the public to a sense of their danger. Convinced, he said, that unwholesome diet and evil passions, the abuse of drugs and the ignorance of physicians, are but too successful in swelling the number of the undoubted dead, he conceives it his duty in compensation to preserve to society the many who were only dead in appearance. He seems to have persuaded himself that burial-grounds are a species of human slaughter-house, and, if he had read the English Martyrology, would have seen something more than a lying legend in the story of St. Frithstane, who, saying one evening masses for the dead in the open air, as he pronounced the words requiescant in pace, heard a chorus of voices from the surrounding graves respond loudly Amen. M. Fontenelle's hopes of recruiting the population from churchyards are grounded on a hundred cases of apparent deaths gleaned from the entire history of the world —a rather slender counterpoise to the victims of passion, gluttony, drugs, and physicians, even if the instances were all well founded and all to the purpose. "He cheats by pence, is cheated by the pound." But of his examples those which are true are inapplicable, and those which are applicable are unsubstantiated. The marvellous is most credible when left to the imagination; the attempt to verify it dissipates the illusion. Supernatural appearances seemed to be probable when the argument rested on the general belief; nothing more unlikely when the specific facts. were collected and weighed. A volume of ghost stories is the best refutation of ghosts. That persons, by every outward sign long dead, have revived, is also among the opinions that have found adherents in all countries, and many are the superstitions to which it has given rise. Roger North, in his Life of the Lord Keeper, mentions that the Turks, if a noise is heard in a tomb, dig up the corpse, and, as one method of making matters sure, chop it into pieces. He adds, that some English merchants, riding at Constantinople in company with a Janizary, passed an aged and shriveled Jew, who was sitting on a sepulchre. The Janizary never doubted that of this sepulchre the Jew himself was the rightful tenant, and ordered him back to his grave, after rating him soundly for stinking the world a second time. Nations sunk lower in barbarism give credence to fables still more absurd, though they do not exceed in extravagance what we might expect from the exaggerations of ignorance and terror, if the cries and struggles of buried men had been heard disturbing the stillness of the tomb; but the moment an effort is made to substantiate the belief by authentic examples, the edifice is overthrown by the very endeavor to prop it up. Timidity itself would take courage on reading the terrific register of the credulous Fontenelle. An examination of his proof, while it indicates the precautions that are prudent to be taken, will reassure those who are accustomed to shrink from the semblance of death, with its frightful accompaniments, far more than they dread the reality; for it will show that, unless by culpable recklessness and haste, there is no possibility that a single individual should be entombed before his time. The first page shows how much his criticism has been outstripped by his zeal, for he counts among the victims of error the Emperor Zenon, who is said to have been interred when he was drunk, by the order of his wife, ambitious of his crown. M. Fontenelle himself relates, that for two nights he continually cried from his capacious sepulchre, "Have mercy on me! Take me out!" and surely his petition would not have been in vain, if they had buried him in good faith through an unhappy mistake. Horrors never come singly it is added, that in his hunger he ate up his shoes and the flesh of his arms. A case among the accidents, that of an Archbishop Gèron-when or where he lived is not told-has a close resemblance to the end of poor Zenon: He waked in the boat, and to Charon he said That he would be rowed back, for he was not yet dead. But the persons who heard him shouting from the sepulchre refused to believe him, and he was left to his fate. There was an Abbé who had better luck. He revived on the way to the grave; and his attendants having thought fit to bury his cat with him, which sat like a night-mare upon his chest, the Abbé employed his returning strength to drive off the incubus. The animal mewed with the pain, and more regard being paid to the remonstrances of a cat than to those of an Archbishop, the procession was stopped and the coffin unscrewed. Out jumped the cat, and immediately after the dead man followed, and took to his heels. The bearers are said to have been "frozen with fear;" and the cat and the Abbé must have partaken of the chill. Some who came off with life, have yet had reason to rue the misconception. A gentleman of Rouen, returning from a tour just as his wife was being borne to the tomb, he ordered back the coffin, and had a surgeon to make five-and-twenty incisions on the corpse-a strange method of cherishing the remnant of existence, if he suspected any. Nevertheless, at the twentysixth incision, which went deeper than the rest, she mildly inquired "What mischief they were doing her?" and she survived to bear her husband six-and-twenty children 66 a pledge for every gash. An English soldier showed more vigor and less endurance than this meekest of women. He was carried to the dissecting-room of a French hospital, where a student, to practice anatomy, cut his jugular vein. Furious with rage and pain, he leaped upon the student and flung him to the ground, where he fainted with alarm. The soldier must have been a disciple of the laughter-loving Roderick Random, who counterfeited death on his recovery from a fever, and snapped at the fingers of the surgeon as he was closing his eyes. But the more valorous son of Mars had nearly carried the jest too far, when he suffered his jugular vein to be opened before he played out the play." Zadig, in Voltaire's story, pretends to be dead, to test the affection of his wife; and his friend, who is in the plot, applies immediately for the vacant post, and feigns a pain in his side, which nothing can cure except the application of a dead man's nose. But when the widow, deeming that a living lover is worth more than a departed husband, advances to the coffin with an open razor to take possession of the specific, Zadig is wise enough to cover his nose with one hand while he thrusts the instrument aside with the other. A man of war, who had the good fortune to recover in a dissecting-room without the aid of the knife, seeing himself surrounded, on opening his eyes, by mutilated bodies, exclaimed, "I perceive that the action has been hot!" And if M. Fontenelle had opened his eyes he might easily have perceived that the anecdote was a jest. Indeed, such is his credulity, that the story of a surgeon addicted to cards, whose death had been tested by bawling in his ears, rising up when a friend whispered in the language of piquet, "a quint, fourteen and the point," has been mistaken by him for an extraordinary case of resuscitation, instead of a commonplace joke on the passion for play. The jest-book has always contributed abundant materials to the compilers of horrors. Several anecdotes turn on that inexhaustible theme for merriment-the sorrows of matrimony. In passing through the street a bier was struck against the corner of a house, and the corpse reanimated by the shock. Some years afterward, when the woman died in good earnest, her husband called to the bearers, "Pray, gentlemen, be careful in turning the corners.' Thus there is not even a step from the mirthful to the terrible. The stories, unaltered, do double duty. Two Parisian merchants, bound together in close friendship, had one a son and the VOL. XIX. NO. I. | other a daughter, who were friends and something more. The daughter, compelled by her parents to sacrifice her lover for a wealthy suitor, fell into what M. Fontenelle calls an "hysterical syncope," and was buried. Fortune frowns upon lovers that she may enhance the value of her smiles. A strange instinct induced her adorer to disinter the body, and he had the double pleasure of delivering the fair one from a horrible death and a hateful husband. Holding that the interment had broken the marriage-tie, they fled to England, but at the end of ten years ventured back to Paris, where the lady was met by the original husband, who, noways surprised that she should have revisited the earth, nor staggered by her denials, laid a formal claim to her in a court of justice. The lover boldly sustained that he who rescued her from death had more right to her than the claimant who interred her alive; but the doctrine being new to a court of law, the prudent pair anticipated the decision by returning to England, where they finally terminated their adventures. The plot and morality of the story are thoroughly characteristic of M. Fontenelle's nation, and the simplicity which believes it is not less so of himself. The countrymen of Shakspeare will recognize a French version of Romeo and Juliet. All ladies are not blest with resurrectionist lovers, but covetousness will sometimes do the work of chivalry. A domestic visited his mistress in her tomb, enticed by a diamond ring, which resisting his efforts to draw it off, he proceeded to amputate the finger. Thereupon the mistress revives, and the domestic drops down dead with alarm : "Thus," says M. Fontenelle, "death had his prey; it was only the victim which was changed." He gives further on a similar story, in which the lady with the ring was supposed to have died in childbirth, and some grave-diggers were the thieves. In the hurry of their flight they left a lantern which served to light the lady to her door. Who's there?" inquired the girl who answered her knock. "Your mistress,' was the reply. The servant needed to hear no more; she rushed into the room where her master was sitting, and informed him that the spirit of his wife was at the door. He rebuked the girl for her folly, and assured her that her mistress was in Abraham's bosom, but on looking out of the window the well-known voice exclaimed, "For pity's sake, open the door. Do you forget that I have just been confined, and that cold in my condition will be fatal ?” This was not the doubt which troubled his 3 more an honor to his profession by his skill than to his kind by his virtues. The faculty of his day demonstrated, on principles deri pox ought to yield to a hot regimen, and, though patients died, physicians thought death under a philosophical treatment better than a capricious and perverse recovery in defiance of rules. Sydenham, who reformed the whole system of medicine by substituting experience for speculation, and who, besides indicating the right road, was himself perhaps the nicest observer of the habits of disease that ever lived, had early discovered that the antidote was to be found at the other end of the thermometer. The science which saved the lives of the public was the torment of his own. He was assailed by the profession to the close of his days for being wiser than his generation, and among the facts by which he mildly and modestly defended his practice, he relates with evident satisfaction how a young man at Bristol was stewed by his physician into a seeming death, and afterward recovered by mere exposure to cold. The moment he appeared to expire, his attend mind, nor was it the first observation we should have expected a wife to address to her husband, when, newly released from her grave by an almost miraculous deliverance, she sud-ved from abstract reasoning, that the smalldenly appeared before him in the dead of night, wearing the habiliments of the tomb. But as the husband was satisfied, it is not for us to be critical. Numerous places are declared to have been the scene of the incident of the ring, which M. Fontenelle considers to be cumulative testimony to its truth. We should have thought, on the contrary, that his faith would have been diminished as the stories increased. Marvels rarely go in flocks. In the present instance few need to be told that M. Fontenelle has been drawing upon the standard literature of the nursery-that the ring-story is one of those with which children from time immemorial have been terrified and amused. "The nurse's legends are for truth received," and to the inventions which entertained their infancy many are indebted for their after-apprehensions lest the fate at which they shuddered in another should prove prophetic of their own. M. Fontenelle has himself thought that it would help out his subject to insert the poem of a M. Les-ants laid him out, leaving nothing upon his guillon, in which he relates from imagination the burial and resurrection of a lady, who was set free, at the crisis of her despair, by the accident of a sexton cleaving her coffin with his spade. What calls forth M. Fontenille's special admiration is, that the author has "wedded reason to rhyme," and it is impossible to deny that there is as much reason in M. Lesguillon's verse as in M. Fontenelle's prose. As a set-off to the miserable mortals who lost their lives through a seeming death, this very appearance is affirmed to have been the means of averting the reality. Tallemant has a story of a Baroness de Panat, who was choked by a fish-bone, and duly buried for dead. Her servants, to get her jewels, disinterred her by night, and the lady's maid, who bore her a grudge, struck her in revenge several blows upon the neck. The malignity of the maid was the preservation of the mistress. Out flew the bone, set free by the blows, and up rose the Baroness, to the discomfiture of her domestics. The retributive justice was complete, and the only objection to the narrative is, that like the fish-bone, it sticks in the throat. In this particular, the stories mostly agree; a single anecdote comes recommended by intrinsic probability, and is no less distinguished from hearsay romances by the external authority; for it is told by the famous Sydenham, a man who was not body except a sheet thrown lightly over it. No sooner had he escaped from the domain of art to the dominion of nature than he began to revive, and lived to vindicate Sydenham, to shame his opponents, and to prove that there are occasions in which the remedy against death is to seem to be dead. The ancient who originated the celebrated saying, "The physician that heals is death," never anticipated such a verification of his maxim. The three examples, however, which the resurrectionists consider their stronghold, yet remain to be told, and it must be confessed that many have lent them the weight of their authority who reject the mass of old wives' fables, though with the imposing addition of being sanctioned by a philosopher and printed in a book. There was a French captain in the reign of Charles IX. who used to sign himself "François de Civile thrice dead, thrice buried, and by the grace of God thrice restored." The testimony seems striking ; as he himself related his history to Misson the traveler, either Civile was a liar, say our authors, or the story is true. But without taking much from the romance of his adventures, the details are fatal to the value of the precedent. His first burial, to begin with, occurred before he was born. His mother died when she was advanced in pregnancy, during her husband's absence, and nobody, before committing her body to the ground, thought of saving the child. His father's return prevented his going altogether out of the world before he had come into it-and here was concluded the first act of the death, burial, and restoration of François de Civile. His next death was at the siege of Rouen in 1562, where he fell senseless, struck by a ball, and some workmen who were digging a trench immediately threw a little mould upon his body, which was burial the second. The servant of Civile tried to find out his remains, with the intention to bestow on them a formal interment. Returning from a fruitless search, he caught sight of a stretched-out arm, which he knew to be his master's by a diamond ring that glittered on the hand, and the body, as he drew it forth, was visibly breathing. For some days life and death waged an equal contest, and when life was winning, a party of the enemy, the town having been taken, discovered him in bed, and threw him from the window. He fell on a dung-heap, where they left him to perish, which he considered was death and burial the third. Civile's case would never have been quoted on its own merits; the prominence given it is entirely due to the imposing description which a passion for notoriety made him write after his name, and which still continues to arrest the imagination. He survived to have a fourth funeral, and we hope when he was finally laid in the earth that he did not verify a proverb, much in vogue in his day, that a sailor often wrecked gets drowned at last. More of our readers may recollect the story of the Spanish grandee who was opened by the great anatomist Vesalius, and his heart found beating notwithstanding the havoc that had been made by the knife. The family of the nobleman, so runs the tale, complained to the Inquisition, and the Inquisition decided that in a physician with the skill of Vesalius such an error implied a crime. Philip II. employed his authority to procure a pardon, and with difficulty obtained that the sentence of death should be commuted into a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Hallam, whose epithets have almost a judicial authority, calls the accusation absurd, and absurd it may be proved on physiological grounds. But the whole story is an idle rumor written by somebody from Spain to Hubert Languet, after the death of Vesalius, to account for a journey which puzzled the public. Clusius, who was in Madrid at the time that Vesalius set out, and had his information from Tisenau, the President of the Council of the Low Countries, the land of the anatomist's birth | and affections, has related the origin of the pilgrimage in a note on the history of De Thou, whose narrative, so far as it goes, agrees with his own. Hating the manners of the Spaniards, pining for his native country, and refused by Philip permission to return thither, Vesalius sickened with vexation, and vowed on his recovery to travel to Jerusalem, less from any superstition of his own, than to obtain his release by an appeal to the superstition of the king. A newsmonger, ignorant of the motives of an action, appeases the cravings of curiosity by invention; that the Inquisition should be at the bottom of the business, was in the reign of Philip II, a too probable guess, and a pretext for its interference was devised out of the professional pursuits of the pilgrim. The original report soon acquired strength in its progress. The offence of Vesalius was shortly avouched to be neither accidental nor solitary, and by the time the story reached Burton, the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," it assumed the form of a general assertion, that Vesalius was wont to cut men up alive." The fabled end of the Spanish grandee is also asserted of the Abbé Prevost,-the third vaunted example of simulated death. He had a stroke of apoplexy on a journey, and the mayor of the village ordered an immediate examination of the body. The anguish of the incision restored the Abbé to a momentary consciousness, and he expired with a cry. No authority is given for the story, and, judging from the character of the other assertions, it would be natural to infer that there was none to give. But if it be, indeed, a genuine fact among the fables, it proves nothing except the criminal haste of the village mayor, and the criminal heedlessness of the village practitioner,-vices which, in connection with death, are for the most part opposed to the feelings, the prudence, and, therefore, to the usage of mankind. No perfect security can be devised against willful carelessness any more than against willful murder; but because a friendless traveler fell a victim to the rashness of an ignorant surgeon, there is no occasion to fright the world from their propriety, and endeavor to persuade them that, with the best intentions, the living are liable to be confounded with the dead, to be packed sleeping in a coffin, and stifled waking in a grave. In the midst of exaggeration and invention, there was one undoubted circumstance which formerly excited the worst apprehensions,-the fact that bodies were often found |