'The pillow being
high, his chin bore hard on his neck. Instead of relieving him, the
man ran for help: on his return found him dead.'
This undated and unsigned document, by a person who professes to
have been present, is not, perhaps, very accurate in dates. The
phrase 'dreamt' is to be taken as the common-sense way of stating
that Lord Lyttelton had a vision of some sort. His lordship, who
spoke of 'jockeying the GHOST,' may have believed that he was awake
at the time, not dreaming; but no person of self-respect, in these
unpsychical days, could admit more than a dream. Perhaps this
remark also applies to Walpole's 'he dreamed.' The species of the
bird is left in the vague.
Moving further from the event, to 1828, we find a book styled 'Past
Feelings Renovated,' a reply to Dr. Hibbert's 'Philosophy of
Apparitions.' The anonymous author is 'struck with the total
inadequacy of Dr. Hibbert's theory.' Among his stories he quotes
Wraxall's 'Memoirs.' In 1783, Wraxall dined at Pitt Place, and
visited 'the bedroom where the casement window at which Lord
Lyttelton asserted the DOVE appeared to flutter* was pointed out to
me.
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