"If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury, back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites."
The gay and dissipated Thomas Lyttleton, son of Lord George Lyttleton, and
his successor in the peerage, has been the subject of "a
well-authenticated ghost story, which relates that he was warned of his
death three days before it happened, in 1779, while he was in a state of
perfect health, and only thirty-five years of age." This is what says a
biographer. Now let us present the truth of the matter.
He was a dissipated man. He was subject to fits. A gentleman present at
the time of his seeing a vision, says "that he had been attacked several
times by suffocative fits the month before." Here, then, was a _body
diseased_. The same authority says, "It happened that he dreamed, three
days before his death, that he saw a _fluttering bird_; and afterwards,
that he saw (dreamed) a woman in white apparel, who said to him, 'Prepare
to die; you will not exist three days.'
[Illustration: PREPARE TO DIE!]
"His lordship was much alarmed, and called his servant, who slept in an
adjoining closet, who found his master in a state of great agitation, and
in a profuse perspiration."
Fear blanches the cheek; perspiration is rather a symptom of bodily
weakness, and the result of a laborious dream, or even a fit. He had no
fear, for, on the third day, while his lordship was at breakfast with "the
two Misses Amphlett, Lord Fortescue," and the narrator, he said,
lightly,--
"'If I live over to-night, _I shall have jockeyed the ghost_, for this is
the third day.' That day he had another fit. He dined at five, and retired
at eleven, when his servant was about to give him some prescribed rhubarb
and mint-water, but his lordship, seeing him about to stir the mixture
with a toothpick, exclaimed,--
"'You slovenly dog, go and fetch a teaspoon.'
"On the servant's return, he found his master in another fit, and, the
pillow being high, his chin bore on his windpipe, when the servant,
instead of relieving his lordship from his perilous position, ran away for
help; but on his return, found his master dead."
He had strangled. Is it anything strange that a dissipated, weakened man
should die after having a score of suffocative fits? It had been more
surprising if he had survived them. Then, as respecting the dream, it was
the result of a "mind diseased."
There was evidence that his lordship had seduced the Misses Amphlett, and
prevailed upon them to leave their mother; and he is said to have
admitted, before his death, that the woman seen in his dream was the
mother of the unfortunate girls, and that she died of grief, through the
disgrace and desertion of her children, about the time that the guilty
seducer saw her in the vision. How could his dreams but have been
disturbed, with the load of guilt and remorse that he ought to have had
resting upon his conscience? The "fluttering bird" was the first form that
the wretched mother assumed in his vision, as a bird might flutter about
the prison bars that confined her darling offspring. The more natural form
of the mother finally appeared to the guilty seducer, and to dream that he
heard a voice is no unusual occurrence in the life of any person. The
peculiar words amount to nothing. Lyttleton gave them no serious thoughts,
and it was an accident of bodily position that caused his sudden death.
The whole thing seems to be too flimsy for even a respectable "ghost
story."