Points of Friction
volume, "Report of the Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism," published in 1887, will remember that "Belle," who claimed to be the original proprietor of Yorick's skull (long a "property" of the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, but at that time in the library of Dr. Horace Howard Furness), voiced her pretensions, and told her story, in ten carefully rhymed stanzas.
"My form was sold to doctors three,
So you have all that's left of me;
I come to greet you in white mull,
You that prizes my lonely skull."
But these effusions were desultory and amateurish. They were designed as personal communications, and were betrayed into publicity by their recipients. We cannot regard their authors—painstaking but simple-hearted ghosts—as advance guards of the army of occupation which is now storming the citadel of print.
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