not passed away, and he never seems so thoroughly at ease with himself
and others as when he is enjoying some light and temperate
amusement.'

Thus there was nothing in Home to dominate, or even to excite personal
curiosity. He and his more intimate friends, not marchionesses but
middle-class people, corresponded in a style of rather distasteful
effusiveness. He was a pleasant young man in a house, not a Don Juan.
I have never heard a whisper about light loves--unless Mr. Hamilton
Aïdé, to be quoted later, reports such a whisper--not a word against
his private character, except that he allowed a terribly vulgar rich
woman to adopt him, and give him a very large sum of money, later
withdrawn. We shall see that she probably had mixed motives both for
giving and for withdrawing the gift, but it was asserted, though on
evidence far from sound, that 'the spirits' had rapped out a command
to give Home some thirty thousand pounds. Spirits ought not to do
these things, and, certainly, it would have been wiser in Home to
refuse the widow's gold even if they did. Beyond this one affair, and
an alleged case of imposture at a _séance_, Home's private character
raised no scandals that have survived into our knowledge. It is a very
strange thing, as we shall see, that the origin of Home's miracles in
broad daylight or artificial light, could never be traced to fraud,
or, indeed, to any known cause; while the one case in which imposture
is alleged on first-hand evidence occurred under conditions of light
so bad as to make detection as difficult as belief in such
circumstances, ought to have been impossible. It is not easy to feel
sure that we have certainly detected a fraud in a dim light; but it is
absurd to believe in a miracle, when the conditions of light are such
as to make detection difficult.