occasionally on parole. But I think that not at all unlikely. May not
metempsychosis be a scourge of two worlds? If the soul of my grandam
might fitly inhabit a bird, might not a Fairy ruefully inhabit the
person of my grandam? If Fairy Godmothers, perchance, were Fairy
Grandmothers! I have some evidence to place before the reader which
may induce him to consider this hypothesis. Who can doubt, at least,
that Shelley's was not a case where the not-human was a prisoner in
the human? Who can doubt that of Blake's? And what was the result,
forensically? Shelley was treated as a scoundrel and Blake as a
madman. Shelley, it was said, broke the moral law, and Blake
transcended common sense; but the first, I reply, was in the guidance
of a being to whom the laws of this world and the accidents of it
meant nothing at all; and to the second a wisdom stood revealed which
to human eyes was foolishness. Windows! In either case there was a
martyrdom, and human exasperation appeased by much broken glass. Let
us not, however, condemn the wreckers of windows. Who is to judge even
them? Who is to say even of their harsh and cruel reprisals that they
were not excusable? May not they too have been ridden by some wild
spirit within them, which goaded them to their beastly work? But if
the acceptance of the doctrine of multiple personality is going to
involve me in the reconsideration of criminal jurisprudence, I must
close this essay.

I will close it with the sentence of another philosopher who has
considered deeply of these questions. "It is to be observed," he says,
"that the laws of human conduct are precisely made for the conduct of
this world of Men, in which we live, breed, and pay rent. They do not
affect the Kingdom of the Dogs, nor that of the Fishes; by a parity of
reasoning they need not be supposed to obtain in the Kingdom of
Heaven, in which the schoolmen discovered the citizens dwelling in