an art by which certain persons can modify their voice, as to make it appear to the audience to proceed from any distance, and in any direction. Some faint traces of this art are to be found in the writings of the ancients; and it is the opinion of M. de la Chapelle, who in the year 1772 published an ingenious work on the subject, that the responses of many of the oracles were delivered by persons thus qualified to serve the purposes of priestcraft and delusion. As the ancient ventriloquists, when exercising their art, seemed generally to speak from their own bellies, the name by which they were denominated was abundantly significant; but it is with no great propriety that modern performers are called ventriloquists, and their art ventriloquism, since they appear more frequently to speak from the pockets of their neighbours, or from the roof or distant corners of the room, than from their own mouths or their own bellies.

From Bocage, a learned critic of the 16th century, we have the following account of the feats of a capital ventriloquist and cheat, who was valet de chambre to Francis the First. The fellow, whose name was Louis Brabant, had fallen desperately in love with a young, handsome, and rich heiress; but was rejected by the parents as an unsuitable match for their daughter, on account of the lowness of his circumstances. The young lady's father dying, he made a visit to the widow, who was totally ignorant of his singular talent. Suddenly, on his first appearance, in open day, in her own house, and in the presence of several persons who were with her, she heard herself accosted, in a voice perfectly resembling that of her dead husband, and which seemed to proceed from above, exclaiming, "Give my daughter in marriage to Louis Brabant: He is a man of great fortune, and of an excellent character. I now endure the insupportable torments of purgatory, for having refused her to him. If you obey this admonition, I shall soon be delivered from this place of torment. You will at the same time provide a worthy husband for your daughter, and procure everlasting repose to the soul of your poor husband."

The widow could not for a moment resist this dread summons, which had not the most distant appearance of proceeding from Louis Brabant; whose countenance exhibited no visible change, and whose lips were close and motionless during the delivery of it. Accordingly, she consented immediately to receive him for her son in law. Louis's finances, however, were in a very low situation; and the formalities attending the marriage contract rendered it necessary for him to exhibit some show of riches, and not to give the ghost the lie direct. He accordingly went to work upon a fresh subject, one Corbeau, an old and rich banker at Lyons, who had accumulated immense wealth by usury and extortion, and was known to be haunted by remorse of conscience on account of the manner in which he had acquired it.

Having contracted an intimate acquaintance with this man, he, one day while they were sitting together in the usher's little back parlour, artfully turned the conversation on religious subjects, on demons and spectres, the pains of purgatory, and the torments of hell. During an interval of silence between them, a voice was heard, which to the astonished banker seemed to be that of his deceased father, com- complaining, as in the former case, of his dreadful situation in purgatory, and calling upon him to deliver him instantly from thence, by putting into the hands of Louis Brabant, then with him, a large sum for the redemption of Christians then in slavery with the Turks; threatening him at the same time with eternal damnation if he did not take this method to expiate likewise his own sins. The reader will naturally suppose that Louis Brabant affected a due degree of astonishment on the occasion; and further promoted the deception, by acknowledging his having devoted himself to the prosecution of the charitable design imputed to him by the ghost. An old usher is naturally suspicious. Accordingly the wary banker made a second appointment with the ghost's delegate for the next day; and, to render any design of imposing upon him utterly abortive, took him into the open fields, where not a house, or a tree, or even a bush, or a pit, were in sight, capable of screening any supposed confederate. This extraordinary caution excited the ventriloquist to exert all the powers of his art. Wherever the banker conducted him, at every step his ears were saluted on all sides with the complaints and groans not only of his father, but of all his deceased relations, imploring him for the love of God, and in the name of every saint in the calendar, to have mercy on his own soul and theirs, by effectually seconding with his purse the intentions of his worthy companion. Cornu could no longer resist the voice of heaven, and accordingly carried his guest home with him, and paid him down 10,000 crowns; with which the honest ventriloquist returned to Paris, and married his mistress.—The catastrophe was fatal. The secret was afterwards blown, and reached the usher's ears, who was so much affected by the loss of his money, and the mortifying railleries of his neighbours, that he took to his bed and died.

This trick of Louis Brabant is even exceeded by an innocent piece of waggery played off not 40 years ago by another French ventriloquist on a whole community. We have the story from M. de la Chapelle, who informs us, that M. St Gill the ventriloquist and his intimate friend, returning home from a place whither his business had carried him, sought for shelter from an approaching thunder storm in a neighbouring convent. Finding the whole community in mourning, he inquired the cause, and was told that one of their body had died lately, who was the ornament and delight of the whole society. To pass away the time, he walked into the church, attended by some of the religious, who showed him the tomb of their deceased brother, and spoke feelingly of the scanty honours they had bestowed on his memory. Suddenly a voice was heard, apparently proceeding from the roof of the quire, lamenting the situation of the departed in purgatory, and reproaching the brotherhood with their lukewarmness and want of zeal on his account. The friars, as soon as their astonishment gave them power to speak, consulted together, and agreed to acquaint the rest of the community with this singular event, so interesting to the whole society. M. St Gill, who wished to carry on the joke still farther, dissuaded them from taking this step; telling them that they would be treated by their absent brethren as a set of fools and visionaries. He recommended to them, however, the immediately calling of the whole community into the church, where the ghost of their departed brother might probably reiterate his complaints. Accordingly all the friars, novices, lay-brothers, and even the domestics of the convent, were immediately summoned and collected together. In a short time the voice from the roof renewed its lamentation and reproaches, and the whole convent fell on their faces, and vowed a solemn reparation. As a first step, they chanted a De profundis in a full choir; during the intervals of which the ghost occasionally expressed the comfort he received from their pious exercises and ejaculations on his behalf. When all was over, the prior entered into a serious conversation with M. St Gill; and on the strength of what had just passed, facetiously inveighed against the absurd incredulity of our modern sceptics and pretended philosophers on the article of ghosts or apparitions. M. St Gill thought it now high time to disabuse the good fathers. This purpose, however, he found it extremely difficult to effect, till he had prevailed upon them to return with him into the church, and there be witnesses of the manner in which he had conducted this ludicrous deception.

A ventriloquist, who performed feats somewhat similar to these, made his appearance in Edinburgh, and many of the other towns of Scotland, a few months before the writing of this article. He imitated successfully the voice of a squeaking child, and made it appear to proceed from whatever place he chose; from the pockets of the company, from a wooden doll, with which he held many spirited conversations; from beneath a hat or a wine-glass, and out of any person's foot or hand. When the voice seemed to come from beneath a glass or hat, it was dull and on a low key, as sounds confined always are; and what evinced his dexterity was, that when the glass was raised from the table during the time of his speaking, the words or syllables uttered afterwards were on a higher key, in consequence, one would have thought, of the air being readmitted to the speaker. This part of the experiment failed, however, when the management of the glass was at a distance committed to any of the company; but as the room was not well illuminated, we are inclined to attribute this failure to the ventriloquist's not being able to perceive at what precise instant of time the glass was removed from the table. The same artist imitated the tones of a scolding old woman, disturbed at unseasonable hours by a person demanding admission into her house; but this exhibition did not to us appear matterily. The tones of the old woman and the child were not accurately discriminated: the child was a young scold, and the scold spoke like an angry child. We have heard that, when in Edinburgh, the same practitioner astonished a number of persons in the Fishmarket, by making a fish appear to speak, and give the lie to its vendor, who affirmed that it was fresh, and caught in the morning; and whether this fact was really performed or not, we cannot doubt, from what we saw and heard him do, but that he was fully equal to its performance.

Our ventriloquist was an illiterate man; and though sufficiently communicative, could not make intelligible to us the manner in which he produced these acoustic deceptions. Indeed if he had, we should hardly have described the practical rules of the art to the public; for though it is proper to make the existence of such an art universally known, it will readily occur to every reflecting mind, that the attainment of it should not be rendered easy to those who, like Louis Brabant, might make it subservient to the purposes of knavery and deception. The speculative principles on which it is founded, must be obvious to every man who has studied the philosophy of the human mind, and has ever witnessed the feats of mimicry.

It has been shown elsewhere (see Metaphysics, p. 47, 48), that previous to experience, we could not refer found to any external cause; that it does not therefore give immediate indication of the place or distance of the honourable body; and that it is only by the association of place with found that the latter becomes an indication of the former. This being admitted, nothing seems requisite to fit a man for becoming an expert ventriloquist but a delicate ear, flexibility of the organs of speech, and long practice of those rules. rules which repeated trials would enable him to discover. A delicate ear perceives every difference which change of place produces in the same sound; and if a person possessed of such an ear have sufficient command over his organs of speech, to produce by them a sound in all respects similar to another proceeding from any distant object, it is evident that to the audience the sound which he utters must appear to proceed from that object. If this be the true theory of ventriloquism, it does not seem to be possible for the most expert ventriloquist to speak in his usual tones of conversation, and at the same time make the voice appear to come from a distance; for these tones must be supposed familiar to his audience, and to be in their minds associated with the ideas of his figure, place, and distance. Hence the ventriloquist whom we saw appeared to speak from various places only in the tones of the squeaking child, while Louis Brabant and M. St Gille, in their great feats, imitated the voices of ghosts, to which no man could be familiar, and where terror would greatly contribute to the deception. There can, however, be no doubt, but that it is, by a peculiar modification of the organs of speech, a sound of any kind can be produced, which in faintness, tone, body, and in short every other sensible quality, perfectly resembles a sound delivered from the root of an opposite house; the ear will naturally, without examination, refer it to that situation and distance, the sound which the person hears being only a sign, which he has from his infancy been constantly accustomed, by experience, to associate with the idea of a person speaking from a house-top. It is evident too, that when there is no particular ground of suspicion, any small disparity between the two sounds will not be perceptible. But if our theory be just, that experience or habit which misleads a person who has seldom heard the ventriloquist, and is a stranger to his powers, at length sets another person right who is acquainted with them, and has been a frequent witness of their effects. This was actually the case of M. de la Chapelle, with whom the illusion at length ceased, in consequence of repeated visits to M. St Gille: so that while others, ignorant of his talent, and possessed only of their old or habitual experience with regard to articulate sounds, considered his voice as coming from the top of a tree, or from a deep cellar under ground; our author, well acquainted with the powers of the ventriloquist, and having acquired a new kind of experience, at once referred it directly to the mouth of the speaker.