EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF LORD BROUGHAM.

Grey River Argus, Volume XI, Issue 942, 3 August 1871, Page 2

EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF LORD BROUGHAM.

One of the most remarkable stories recently told appears in Lord Brougham's autobiography, which has just been issued by Messrs Blackwood :— " A most remarkable thing happened to me— so remarkable that I must tell the story from the beginning. After I left the High School I went with G ,my most intimate friend, to attend the classes in the University. There was no divinity class, but we frequently in our walks discussed and speculated upon many grave subjects— among others, on the immortality of the soul and a future state. This question, and the possibility, I will not say of ghosts walking, but of the dead appearing to the living, were subjects of much speculation ; and we actually committed the folly; of drawing up an agreement, written with our blood, to the effect that whichever of us died first should appear to the other, and thus solve any doubts we had entertained of the 'life after death.' After we had finished at the college, G went to India, having got an appointment there in the Civil Service. He seldom wrote to me, and after a lapse of a few years I had almostforgotten him ; moreover, hisfamily having little connection with Edinburgh, I seldom saw or heard anything of them, or of him through them, so that all the schoolboy intimacy had died out, and I had nearly forgotten his existence. I had taken, as I have said, a warm bath ; and while lying in it, and enjoying the comfort of the heat after the late freezing I had undergone, I turned my head round, looking towards the chair on which I had deposited my clothes, as I was about to get out of the bath. On the chair Bat G > looking calmly at me. How I got out of the bath I know not, but on recovering my senses, I found myself Bprawlmg on the floor. The apparition or whatever it was that had taken the likeness of G , had disappeared. This vision produced such a shock that I had no inclination to talk about it, or to speak about it even to Stuart, but the impression it made upon me was too vmd to be easily forgotten, and so. strongly was I affected by it that I have here written down the whole history with the date, 39th December, and all the particulars, as they are now fresh before me. go doubt I had fallen asleep, and that the appearance presented so distinctly to ; my eyes was a dream I cannot fora moment donbt; yet for years I had had ? no communication with G s nor haa ' there been anything to recall him to mv recollection. Nothing had taken place during our Swedish travels either connected with G -, or with India, or with anything relating to him or to any member of his family. I recollected quickly our old discussion, and the bargain we had made. I could not discharge from my mind the impression that G— . must have died, and that his appearance to me was to be received by me as a proof of a future state." This was on the 19th December, 1799. In October, 1862, Lord Brougham added, as postscript—*' 1 have iust been copying out from my journal £ the account of this strange dream. Cer* tissinm martis imago I And now to finish the story, begun about sixty years since Soon after my return to Edinburgh there arrived a letter from India announcing G- — s death, arid stating that he had died on the 19th December!"