baptism from the people; he was recognised by his contemporaries. "Ah!" said he, inwardly smitten with joy and sorrow, "if they could but know how much that young muse, which lisped and negligently threw forth those poor lines, has increased in strength since that time, what would they think of my own work, of that composed by me entirely-the glorious labour of my youthful ardour!" The train of the victor was now advancing. As in the days of the tribune Rienzi, old and new Rome seemed to have united in furnishing the strangely pompous costumes and ornaments, and to have dictated the ritual of the ceremonials. The tymbal players of the pope opened the march; then came a cavalcade of young nobles, in velvet mantles and doublets glittering with gold; then another cavalcade, cased in armour, bearing pikes and javelins, wearing war casques ornamented with red and white plumes, like those of the Pharsalian soldiers. : The crowd was tumultuous; beside the rich habiliments of the townsfolk, were to be seen the cowl of the monk, and the mantle covered with cockleshells, pertaining to the pilgrim there, blended in the air, were confounded together, standards of the emperors and the cross of St. Peter; the consular emblems and the banners of the saints came afterwards. Advancing in dignified gravity, there was next a deputation of the principal authorities of the city, the members of the divers congregations, the "cameriere" of the pope, escorting the senator and governing prelate of Rome, protected by a double hedge-row of halberdiers. Upon majestic horses richly caparisoned, proudly shaking their silver bells, were two men, dressed in the tunic and mantle of the emperors, throwing out small medals to the people, and coins, and exclaiming, "Bounty, in the name of the poet !" At this cry, the Mutilated, giving himself up anew to his frenzied avidity for glory, sprang forth in the midst of the silent and attentive crowds, and calling upon himself the eyes of all, placing himself in front of them, by his multiplied gestures, by the expression of his countenance, endeavoured to make them comprehend, that to him alone were due the honours of the capitol. He was taken for a madman or a merryandrew, and, casting at him glances of contempt or of disgust, they turned away from him; and, standing upon tiptoe, with outstretched necks, sent forth their eager looks towards the gorgeous train, in order to behold the crowned author. He at length appeared, seated upon a car of ancient form, drawn by four snowwhite horses. Then the trumpet sounded, and the cannon of the Castle of St. Angelo was loudly heard, the multitude uttered joyous shoutings, and from every window and casement came a shower of ribands and of flowers. The poet, the mighty victor, was Pandolpho Norsini! The Mutilated recognised him at a glance, whilst the car of triumph was already upon the start leading to the capitol: then it was that his impotence turned to sudden fury; in his blind delirium to regain the price of his victory, the place which had been usurped from him, and his meed of praise, he cast himself forward in front of the car, as if to force it to stop; but the frightened horses reared violently, threw him on the earth, trampling him under their feet. A monk caught him up, in this bleeding and wounded state, and the festive train moved onwards as if no such event had occurred. The monk was Antonio Peraldi! The sufferings of the Mutilated were drawing nigh unto a close. Some days afterwards he voluntarily exiled himself from Rome, wandered from place to place, meeting nought but insult and mortification, and feeling unable to attach himself to any spot; for, abhorred by all, he was repelled and persecuted as if mankind had guessed the secret of his genius. Some shepherds of the Apennines saw him pass their dwellings, and, from his sinister countenance, and the strangely disordered state of his garments, they took him for one endowed with witchcraft, who, by sortileges, would shed sterility and disease amongst their flocks; and, surprising him, they put an end to his wretched life. * * ** * Thus closed the life of this wondrous being, whom nature had endowed with all the treasures of intelligence and of imagination—who left on earth neither a NAME, a BOOK, nor even a TOMB! A POET'S FANCY. A POET's fancy is a tricky guide To pilot man o'er life's tempestuous tide; WOMAN. BY MRS. WILLIAM QUARLES. WHEN the weak infant's wailing cry And charms away the sufferer's tear : When the rich wine is ruby bright, And pleasure reigns in banquet hall; If fame he seek, she nerves his heart; In fields of danger and of death, And stifling all her natural fear, When his last hour is drawing nigh, With ceaseless fond anxiety, Alone, she watcheth over him. When life's warm tide hath ceased to flow, Whose is the tear, the sigh of woe? 'Tis woman's sigh, 'tis woman's tear. Brighton, October, 1837. UMBRA. SLEEP, THE WANT OF SLEEP, WITH THEIR CONTINGENCIES. BY MRS. HOFLAND. "Scared by the hideous spirit of unrest."-MONTGOMERY. PERHAPS there is not a single point on which mankind, in all the diversities of situation, age, climate, government, habit, and health, would more generally agree; than that of acknowledging the benefit derived from sleep. Not only do the uneducated and poor ejaculate, with Sancho, “ a blessing on him who invented sleep, for it covers a man all over like a mantle," but the high-born and the intellectual, the imaginative, studious, heroic, enterprising, and philanthropic, continually court the comfort it bestows, the courage it inspires, and the renewed vitality it imparts, alike to the outward and inner man. To be partially bereft of sleep (although it is a species of temporary death) is felt alike by every temperament a sensible loss of life, which clogs the wheels of thought, weighs down the spirit of adventure, increases the burden of toil, and at once destroys physical and mental energy-the best affections of nature, and the proudest flights of fancy, sink before its influence--no lady must expect the homage of the eye from a lover who has been jolting all night in a carriage, nor will any wise man ask a wit to dinner, whom he knows to have been afflicted with tooth-ache the day previous. Not only have physicians made the troubles of sleeplessness their especial care, in consequence of the sufferings they daily witness amongst the diseased, the afflicted, and the inert; but poets, as being themselves more especial martyrs to the privation, have expatiated in their purest strains on the deficiency they mourned, or eulogised in their brightest lays the refreshment they invoked. I know no passages in our best bards finer than Shakspeare's soliloquy in praise of sleep, notwithstanding the reproach of « Oh! thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile 2” for never was human conception more sweetly embodied than in the opening apostrophe, "Sleep! gentle sleep! Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids And steep my senses in forgetfulness ?” down But indeed the whole speech is so full of may be said to render himself Laureate of Sleep, more especially when we recall In any posture finds; till the grey morn And well does it become, not only the poet, but the studious man of every description, for he is also in general either a nervous, dyspeptic, or bilious patient, to lament the loss of that most blessed faculty, whereby he might every morning enjoy the delight of a resurrection to the existence for which he pines-an existence, relieved from the ennui, the tremors, higher enjoyments, and useful exertions, the sense of insufficiency for all the which never fails to paralyse the efforts of a sleepless man. No native strength of mind, no habit of endurance-neither acquired knowledge, nor genius, though Heaven's own gift,will enable any man, for any length of time, to enjoy life, and use it to God's glory and the benefit of his fellow creatures, who is not able at a certain hour to lay his head on his pillow, and " in the pleasant land of dreaminess" lose that feverish sense of pain or pleasure which ambition, love, or the iron hand of necessity, has imposed upon him. To those who can sleep on the hardest bed, after the most fatiguing toil, and have frequently experienced the greatest difficulty in keeping their wearied eyes open during the last hours of their diurnal duties, it may appear a sad waste of pity, to bestow it on the rich man, or any man who stretches his limbs, precisely at the hour he chooses, upon a good bed, with clean cool sheets, and every other of those "appliances and means" which may act as an incentive to the state which nature demands. A man situated among bawling watchmen, slow dragging carts, rattling cabs, night rows, and morning market people-city clocks and chimes, the screaming of young children, the quarrels of their elders, the terrors awakened by fire engines, the thousand sounds which scare "the drowsy ear of night" in London, however little they may affect himself, can yet conceive them to be disagreeable. But how a man who lives out of town, hears not a sound from the Great Babel, has no debts to pay, no ships to expect, and whose "bed-room is a little paradise," how he should get up with the sensations of one who had been dragged through a horse-pond-his limbs weary, his eyes half closed, his appetite a nonentity, and his very power of speech confined to yawning monosyllables or irritated sentences, is utterly beyond his comprehension, and considered more a fault than a misfortune. Just by way of quickening his sympathies, I beg to lay his head for one hour (only one, mind) on the pillow where one of the sleepless has lain probably for eight, and to suppose it possible that his position conveys a portion of the sensations experienced by the late owner, who we will suppose to be an artist, of course a thinking man, yet not one of those subject to the severer labours of the class let us listen to his low-murmured soliloquy. "To-night I shall surely sleep. I will think of nothing. Heigh-ho! if I could get the mists on the mountains in the back-ground of my picture right, it would be all I could desire—yet how far short of what is possible in art!—but I will not reflect too much now. My head aches; I am determined to sleep. "One, two, three, four-pshaw! there is no getting drowsy-this pillow is-no it is not hard, but soft-I abhor a soft pillow, one gets so warm with it-the mist must be silvery tinted, yet opaque, shrouding the tops of the hills, yet fleecy as the lightest snow, and throwing round an uncertain fairy light-my greens are not right yet-there is no end to the variety in nature, and a painter must find them all, or be for ever nought,' as somebody says. Salvator was better off among the banditti than I am in London, for he had no lodgings to pay for: mine are going on all the time I am here, just as if-well, well, I am chained to the oar. I suppose Turner was poor once. I am very feverish, I will take a turn in my room. No, I shall take cold again, and the cough, and the hectic, and all that will be returning. I must lie still-still! I was not made for still life; what could the critic in Blackwood's mean by praising those partridges? These sheets cling to one's limbs, heating and teasing like the garment of Patroclus. I am dreadfully feverish. I have turned fifty times in the last half hour; I wonder people will say going to bed will get one to sleep, it makes me wide awake." In truth, as with the artist, so with many other persons, he had given himself a task above his powers, for who can describe (however frequently they may have felt them) the multitudinous thoughts that arise in the mind of an imaginative, reflective, and studious man when he lays his head on his pillow, and ought, after a long day of struggle and thinking, to be able to banish them? The most familiar, and the most distant things; the most harassing, and the most inviting, combine to banish sleep from his pillow, and to produce that fever on the nerves, that irritation of the spirits, which forbids repose. Thousands are never so wide awake, as when they ought to be fast asleep; their faculties seem expanded, their ideas enriched, their powers strengthened, up to a certain period; when languor which is not stupor, dulness distinct from sleepiness, succeeds, and we are sensible of the loss of that vitality we should have replenished, and of an accumulation of little miseries which grow into great inflictions. Fair reader, such meditations as these, which are free from all guilty recollections, and unmixed with bodily pains in the strict meaning of the word, will as effectually murder sleep-" the gentle sleep," as Macbeth calls it-as he, the conscious regicide did; and they are felt and pursued night after night by tens of thousands of the young, the virtuous, the struggling, the most endowed spirits amongst us. How have our mighty movements in mechanics, in literature, in politics, in the arts which adorn life, in the ethics which ennoble it, robbed the best and the wisest, and even the young and ardent, of that precious cordial which restores the waste of life and recruits its jaded powers, in a manner for which no substitute can ever be found, leaving them, like Othello, beyond the help of" poppy or mandragora?" Montgomery, himself a victim, terms this disturber of existence "the hideous spirit of unrest;" and truly it does affect one like a malignant intelligence, capable of mixing thorns with every roseleaf; giving the cool place the heat you shrink from, the warm place that cold you shudder to encounter'; making the bed-clothes too heavy or too light for your comfort; presenting images it is desirable to forget; recalling losses it is agony to remember; and rendering even that train of thought it is your duty to pursue, injurious in its mal-apropos in trusion. Some weeks ago I saw, in the advertising columns of The Lady's Magazine, announcement made of an hypnologist, or discoverer of a new system for procuring sound and refreshing sleep. The word was new, but the disorder it offers to cure but too well known; and I could not fail to meditate upon this, as an offer to assist poor human nature in a point where it was the weakest, and where the subjects were of the most interesting character. Moreover, although the poet I have already quoted says of sleep "She, like the world, her ready visit pays Where Fortune smiles; the wretched she forsakes; Swift on her downy pinions flies from woe, To light on lids unsullied with a tear"— 3 L-VOL. XI.-DECEMBER. I was perfectly aware that the great body of the sleepless are not those thus bereaved, or afflicted; for the very act of weeping, in many instances, by a merciful disposition of Nature, produces sleep. We all know that convicts commonly sleep the night before their execution; it is on record that both the decapitated kings of France and England did; yet we know their affections as husbands and fathers were peculiarly vivid, and that many circumstances might press upon their spirits most acutely the melancholy fate assigned them. No! sleeplessness is the result rather of anxiety than sorrow; of a morbid imagination, and faculties so wound up by the thoughts and occupations of the day, that, like a watch, they must run out their time. Thoughts, pulses, nerves, memories, are all set a going, and will have their day of action, unless some medium can be found amongst themselves by which they may be soothed or stupified into tranquillity, thereby suffering nature and night to resume their empire. Believing this possible in all sane subjects, devoid of the more irritating causes, such as rheumatism, gout, &c., I embraced with pleasure an opportunity of being introduced to Mr. Gardner, the hypnologist, who was evidently sufficiently an invalid to account for his having studied the subject from personal necessity; and whose conversation showed so much suavity, good sense, and close observation, as to inspire considerable confidence in his powers. As every person who suffers from this cause has endeavoured, by some little trickery, some frequently-repeated charm, to cheat himself into temporary oblivion, and for the most part found those endeavours futile; so do they become incredulous as to the recipes of others for the same purpose: but there is a certain indescribable something in this gentleman, which wins attention and induces reliance; and I am fully persuaded there are few who converse with him, who will not "seriously incline to what he shall unfold*." If hypnology can be reduced to sys We do most cordially join in this just compliment, although we are wholly unacquainted with the system of the hypnologist.-ED. |