Before the days of ‘Mr. Sludge the Medium,’ fashionable folk had a sentimental leaning towards polite correspondence from vanished friends, who had gone to a better, or, at least, another world, Proof of this is afforded in a delightfully languishing volume, published in 1824, the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, entitled Friendship in Death, in Letters from the Dead to the Living, with a frontispiece illustrated by two radiating tombstones. The volume is dedicated to Dr. Young, and the lady writes with great humility:

The retiring Mrs. Rowe will give some entertainment of a non-serious kind to the frivolous but harmless. Letter II, for example, from a Gentleman who died at Constantinople, to his friend in England, giving him an account of his death, is ingeniously diverting. Altamont tells his crony, Beville, how he passed away, and awoke in a genteel world, where his ladylove welcomed him with all the grace of a woman of fashion :