Then dreams he of another benefice:
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then he dreams of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscades, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep! and then anon
Drums in his ears, at which he starts and wakes;
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two,
And sleeps again.

Lucretius, in the verses that immediately follow my motto, and Petronius, in his poem on the Vanity of Dreams, had preceded our immortal bard in a description of the effects of dreams on different kinds of persons. Both the passages, to which I allude, only serve to show the vast superiority of Shakspeare's boundless genius: their sense is thus admirably expressed by Stepney:

At dead of night, imperial Reason sleeps,
And Fancy, with her train, her revels keeps.
Then airy phantoms a mixed scene display,
Of what we heard, or saw, or wished by day;
For Memory those images retains

Which passion formed, and still the strongest reigns;
Huntsmen renew the chase they lately run,

And generals fight again their battles won.
Spectres and furies haunt the murderer's dreams;
Grants and disgraces are the courtier's themes,
The miser spies a thief, or a new hoard;
The cit's a knight; the sycophant a lord,
Thus Fancy's in the wild distraction lost,
With what we most abhor, or covet most.
Honours and state before this phantom fall;
For Sleep, like Death, its image, equals all.

Chaucer, in his tale of the Cock and Fox, has a fine description, thus versified by Dryden :

Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes:
When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes;
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A court of coblers, and a mob of kings:
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad:
Both are the reasonable soul run mad;

And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things, long cast behind,
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind.
The nurse's legends are for truths received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play,
The night restores our actions done by day,
As hounds in sleep will open for their prey.
In short, the farce of dreams is of a piece,
Chimeras all; and more absurd or less.

And Shakspeare again:

I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain phantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind.

Nor must Milton be omitted:

In the soul

Are many lesser faculties, that serve
Reason as chief; among these Fancy next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, aëry shapes,
Which Reason joining, or disjoining, frames
All what we affirm, or what deny, or call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private cell, when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence mimic Fancy wakes,
To imitate her; but misjoining shapes,
Wild works produces oft, but most in dreams,
Ill matching words or deeds, long past or late.

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From these poetical descriptions let us proceed to take a view of the principal phenomena in dreaming. But I shall first give Mr. Locke's beautiful account of Modes of Thinking, as it will greatly illustrate the preceding observations:

"When the mind (says he) turns its view inward upon itself, and contemplates its own actions thinking is the first that occurs. In it the mind

observes a great variety of modifications, and thence receives distinct ideas. Thus the perception, which actually accompanies, and is annexed to any impression on the body, made by an external object, being distinct from all other modifications of thinking, furnishes the mind with a distinct idea, which we call sensation; which is, as it were, the actual entrance of an idea into the understanding by the senses. The same idea, when it occurs again without the operation of the like object on the external sensory, is remembrance: if it be sought after by the mind, and with pain and endeavour found, and brought again in view, it is recollection: if it be held there long under consideration, it is contemplation: when ideas float in our minds without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that, which the French call reverie 1; our language has scarce a name for it. When the ideas that offer themselves (for as I have observed in another place, while we are awake, there will always be a train of ideas succeeding one another in our minds) are taken notice of, and, as it were, registered in the memory, it is attention: when the mind, with great earnestness, and of

There is a phenomenon in the mind, which, though it happens to us while we are perfectly awake, yet approaches the nearest to sleep of any I know. It is called the reverie, or, as some term it, the brown study, a sort of middle state between waking and sleeping; in which, though our eyes are open, our senses seem to be entirely shut up, and we are quite insensible of every thing about us, yet we are all the while engaged in a musing indolence of thought, or a supine and lolling kind of roving 'from one fairy scene to another, without any self-command; from which, if any noise or other accident rouse us, we wake as from a real dream, and are often as much at a loss to tell how our thoughts were employed, as if we had waked from the soundest sleep. This is frequently called dreaming, sometimes absence, a thing often observed in lovers and people of a melancholy, or indeed speculative turn. Fordyce's Dial. on Education, vol. ii, p. 255.

choice, fixes its view on any idea, considers it on all sides, and will not be called off by the ordinary solicitation of other ideas, it is what we call intention, or study. Sleep without dreaming is rest from all these: and dreaming itself, is the having of ideas (while the outward senses are stopped, so that they receive not outward objects with their usual quickness) in the mind, not suggested by any external objects, or known occasion, nor under any choice or conduct of the understanding at all; and whether that which we call ecstacy, be not dreaming with the eyes open, I leave to be examined."

Dr. Beattie, in his Dissertations Moral and Critical, has an ingenious essay on this subject, in which he attempts to ascertain, not so much the efficient, as the final causes of this phenomenon, and to obviate those superstitions in regard to it, which have sometimes troubled weak minds. He labours, with great earnestness, to show, that dreams may be of use in the way of physical admonition; that persons, who attend to them with this view, may make important discoveries with regard to their health; that they may be serviceable as the means of moral improvement; that, by attending to them, we may discern our predominant passions, and receive good hints for the regulation of them; that they may have been intended by Providence to serve as an amusement to the mental powers; and that dreaming is not universal, because, probably, all constitutions do not require such an intellectual amusement.-In observations of this kind we may discover the ingenuity of fancy and the sagacity of conjecture; we may find amusement in the arguments, but we look in vain for satisfaction. Nature, certainly, does nothing in vain; but I am far from thinking, that man is able, in every case, to discover her inten

tions. Final causes, perhaps, ought never to be the subject of human speculation, but when they are plain and obvious. To substitute vain conjectures, instead of the designs of Providence, on subjects where those designs are beyond our reach, serves only to furnish matter for the cavils of the sceptical, and the sneers of the licentious.

Among the many striking phenomena in our dreams, it may be observed, that, while they last, the memory seems to lie wholly torpid, and the understanding to be employed only about such objects as are then presented, without comparing the present with the past. When we dream, we often converse with a friend who is either absent or dead, without remembering that the ocean or the grave is between us. We float like a feather upon the wind; for we find ourselves this moment in England, and the next in India, without reflecting that the laws of nature are suspended, or inquiring how the scene could have been so suddenly shifted before us. We are familiar with prodigies; we accommodate ourselves to every event however romantic; and we not only reason, but act upon principles, which are in the highest degree absurd and extravagant. Our dreams, moreover, are so far from being the effect of a voluntary effort, that we neither know of what we shall dream, nor whether we shall dream at all.

But sleep is not the only time in which strange and unconnected objects involve our ideas in confusion. Beside the reveries of the day, of which I have already spoken, we have, in a moral view, our waking dreams, which are not less chimerical, and impossible to be realized, than the imagina❤ tions of the night.

Night visions may befriend

Our waking dreams are fatal. How I dreamt
Of things impossible! (Could sleep do more?)"