The Landscape Gardener. Chelsea, 1835.
The Rev. Jonas Dennis himself died at Polsloe Park on 6 December, 1846, aged seventy-one. His only ecclesiastical preferment in life was the prebend of Carswell, one of the four prebends attached to the church of St. Mary, in the Castle of Exeter, which he held from 1799 to the day of his death, receiving the yearly emolument of £2 13s. 4d.
He was buried at Otterton, and his grave and tombstone, as well as those of his wife, are in the churchyard.
If Providence had chosen him, as the voice from heaven intimated, to reform the Church, it made a most unhappy selection, as his inflated and absurd style of writing and speaking made him an object of ridicule not of respect, and deprived his efforts of success.
I will add some of the stories from the second part of his Hammer of Materialists.
Prebendary Salter, M.A., tutor to the son of the former Bishop Fisher, of Exeter, translated to Salisbury in 1807, declared that one night he saw his father’s apparition standing by the bedside. At the same time his little child began to whimper, and this roused his wife, who also saw the spectre, and both particularly noticed the peculiar plaiting of the shirt. In a short time a special messenger arrived bringing information that the old gentleman was dead.
Sarah, wife of James Smith, of Peckham, Russia merchant, and herself a descendant of General Monk and mother-in-law of John Dennis, the brother of Prebendary Jonas, saw a female friend’s apparition at the foot of her bed. Next day a letter arrived announcing the dying anxiety of the party for an interview with Mrs. Smith, to entreat her kind attention to her surviving orphans. The moment of dissolution coincided with that of the apparition. Mrs. Burrow, aunt of Baron Giffard, informed the author that going up Fore Street, Exeter, one night, she saw, walking at a little distance before her, an intimate acquaintance named Jones, a retired silversmith. Perceiving him to halt at the door of the house where he had been formerly established in business, she hurried her pace to catch him up, when he vanished as she reached the spot. Next morning a messenger arrived to announce his death, which had occurred at the very time of her seeing the spectre.
Mrs. Woodall, of Dartmouth, a widow, blind, was informed by letter from her daughter-in-law in November, 1797, of the death of her cousin, her sister-in-law; Miss Sarah Woodall replied through an amanuensis that she had previously known of the death, by feeling the clay-cold hand of her cousin clasp her own as she lay in bed.
The late Lady Rolle was reported to have been seen after her decease by the gardener at Bicton, at the gate of the Dutch garden.
The gardener of Franklyn, in St. Thomas by Exeter, then in the possession of a family named Jones, said that he saw his father’s ghost whilst he was at work in one of the gardens of the mansion.