in which thousands of my fellow-men were at that hour probably plunged. Some suspended over precipices, others sinking by earthquakes, many swept away by floods, scorched by fires, married to shrews. Awful visions! I have murmured to myself, see the results of gravy and of black bile. "Good eating deserves good drinking." This is the adopted saying of those who mean to make beasts of themselves by excess in both. It is my experience, that no quantity of drink, per se, ever produced the night-mare. Yet I have, notwithstanding, found the most horrid notions engendered, by all spirituous compounds, from champagne to small beer. A strict guard must be kept on this by dreamers. Be cautious of French wines. I remember spending a whole night, with a hook in my middle, as a bait for fish, owing to no other earthly cause than a bottle of sour claret. Brandy begets strife and bloodshed in sleep; and beer, heaviness and palsy. I have three times, neither more nor less, had my whole set of teeth entirely out, numbered in the palm of my hand, by drinking new Port. I trust these hints, to a class of men like the readers of the Inspector, will be more than enough. These are the great causes of unpleasant dreaming, the things to be considered in primis; but other operating causes, though of minor importance, are not to be overlooked. All noises and distracting sounds are the parents of horrors. They not only awake and disturb, but are grafted upon, and united with, the dream, with singular combinations of discord and misery. I long tried every inn of court and set of chambers in London for quiet. Thank heaven! I have at last found it. I sleep in the back attic. No children in the house. My landlady, who knows my humor, and consults it, suffers no knocking at the doors or ringing of bells, no milk to be cried but in a whisper. In short, it is the very place of all others for a dreamer. There is, however, an awful visitation which I know not how either to remedy or endure. The serenading, sonneteering, soul-annoying cats! No longer ago than last night the music of en exquisite choir, was changed at a divine cadence to the howlings of lost spirits. I have sometimes breathed slaughter, but of what avail is it? The arsenic of ten mines would want efficacy, among the throngs of our feline population. Great conquerors have been known to look upon the ocean, and reflect with melancholy humility upon their own littleness, when compared with the power of that mighty and ungovernable element. I sometimes look upon my landlady's sleek and well-behaved cat, as she meekly steals along, looking askance at me, and a sense of my utter weakness, my mortality, seems to be forced upon me with peculiar power and emphasis. Of all the negative qualities in the science of dreaming, these are the most important and consequential. But they are but negatives. Man wants something more than merely to be free from misery. To lie in bed, with no more sensibility than your pillow, no more mental energy than your bed post, is the lowest aim of science, the meanest object of an immortal mind. A ruffian, whom some amusingly call a philosopher, one Dr. Franklin, an American, I am told, published an essay, addressed to a lady, on the art of procuring pleasant dreams. And what do you think his art is? Why, that being wakeful and disturbed, you should first of all kick on high the bed clothes to cool yourself; and in the event of this failing, to quiet you, you should step out of bed, no matter if the thermometer be at Zero, and imitating Don Quixote in the mountain, pace your room in your night shirt! Night dress, I should have said, remembering that the abominable design is communicated to a lady. Any man, having a wife and children looking to him for succour, and who would try this experiment on himself, must be a scoundrel, an unregenerate villain, who deserves to be made to sleep in his bed at night, by twelve hours exercise at the tread wheel during the day. What social right can any man possess, to run such a risk of making his wife a widow, and bringing his children to the parish? But very lately, during the last dog days, indeed, a man of sanguine temperament, bitten by fleas to an intolerable degree, got out of bed in the extremity of passion and despair, and regardless of the protestations of his wife, hanged himself in his garters! This conduct was mild and contemplative, compared with that of him, who should try Franklin's method of suicide, with the thermometer under 70. I once tried it with a philosophical view, and who shall describe the cramp, the rheumatism, the torturous tooth-ache? Suffice it, that if I were to be hanged to-morrow at eight precisely, I would not accept a reprieve, on condition of renewing the experiment. A rope is the preferable. mode of death of the two. And as to a lady cutting these demoniacal capers! Any female who-but I have done with it. 66 I propose to communicate a few important hints to the real amateurs of dreaming, all of which I can recommend as tried things, and unlike the quackery just alluded to, unattended with danger, or risk of life. Let your room be a medium size. I hate your Westminsterhall kind of bed rooms. How are you to live through a winter, sleeping in one? A closet is worse. In one of the first kind which I had, I dreamed of nothing but being out hunting bears with Captain Parry, in nankeens without drawers; and in one of the latter, I was regularly twice a week, a rat in an air pump. Twelve feet by sixteen is the size. The thing of first consequence, after the room, is the bed. And here arises a pretty clamor. Sleep on no feather bed," says a physician without patients to kill; "they absorb and imbibe the perspi"rable vapors, which are again re-absorbed and re-conducted through "the pores, to the annihilation of health." "Horrid contrivance !" loudly echoes a brother quack, "heating and distorting the limbs, legi"timate ancestor of weakness; disordering all the bodily functions, "and obstructing the secretions. In a word, your feather beds are "the great patrons of the sexton and undertaker." Cease your clatter a moment, and let me be heard. It is a lie altogether. Tell me, Gallipots, where you find any better forms, any better health, or more uniform vivacity, than among those who use them? Do not let them be too large, excess is no doubt pernicious. Sleep on about forty pounds of good white goose, and you will not repent it. Get to fifty of down, and your bed, instead of a comfort, is a trial, a torture, a vapor bath, a hell upon earth. But having got your bed, the misery is, not one chambermaid in ten thousand knows how to make it. There is an innate, inbred principle of sin among them all; they all covet to lay the heels so infernally high. This is an ancient error. See an old state bed in a palace, which is made by tradition, and the heels are two feet higher than the bolster, by any spirit-level in the kingdom. I know, if I were the coroner of a county, and called to consider one of your sudden deaths, I would, first of all, ask about suppers, cross-examine the cook; but I would especially sift to the bottom what was the level of the bed. Thousands have died in supposed apoplexies, from no other cause than this noxious vanity, this chambermaid's display of art and elegance. Let the bed gradually incline from the pillow to the feet, about one inch fall in a foot, and if you cannot get it well done, alter it yourself-nothing on earth repays your time and anxiety better interest. There is one thing you may get done, the sheet well tucked in at bottom. My landlady had once a chambermaid, whose whole glory was a display of sheet on the outside; it amounted to a complete passion, and a rascally vice it was. No sooner had I got to sleep, and perhaps in the first act of a good dream, than the second turn brought up the linen from the bottom, which gradually twisted to the figure and consistence of a man-of-war's cable. What hope for peace that night? As to dreaming, when sleep overcame my rage and exasperation, what was it but to be awakened to sorrow, by the terrors of being let down Freshwater cliff, bird's nesting, by a rope tied round my middle -or to be broiled on St. Lawrence's gridiron? I soon taught her better. Women, after all, have some reason. But where is the use of having a philosophically constructed bed, if you do not study a scientific and accurate method of lying in it?-you may as well put a Troughton's equatorial sector into the hands of an Esquimaux. The truth is, not one person in ten knows the philosophy of lying in bed, any more than the quadrature of the circle. One fellow puts his hands and arms in fantastical shapes over his head, imitating the picture of a shepherd reclining, in a frontispiece to an old edition of Phillips's Pastorals. Another sprawls on his back like a frying flounder, ille stertit supinus. A third, the reverse of the last, realizes the description Sallust gives us of the beasts that perish, quæ natura prona, atque ventri obedientia finxit! By all these methods, embarrassing the circulation, and holding in bondage the lungs and viscera. How then is it? Begin on your right side, a little inclining backward, so that you do not press on your arm, and impede the circulation of the subclavian arteries-your legs ad libitum, but tolerably straightened. If you turn, da capo, the position on the other side. How beautiful is the simplicity of an accurate and well-digested philosophy! Talking of legs, I cannot forbear a case in point. A friend of mine, a clergyman, and a great polemical reader, one night got into bed at ten, and, laying his legs uneasily, had a soul-harrowing, dreamy visitation. His limbs were presently converted into theological disputants! One represented a wily Arminian, the other a hot disciple of Calvin. All hope of rest was banished. They kept up an incessant controversy until six in the morning; he supplying, in his sleep, the arguments and texts from his own mind and information. Horrid vision! Look to your legs. Observing these points, and not outraging your conscience and spirits by thinking about, much less discussing, Catholic Emancipation, and the Corn Laws, you may spend six hours each night, at least, either in agreeable discourse with ancient and modern worthies, in the Elysian fields; or, in rapturous musings amidst grander scenery than any that is really furnished by nature or art. I remain, Mr. Editor, your well-wisher, SOMNIOSUS. TO THE SPIRIT OF THE DEPARTING YEAR. Thy goal is almost won, Thy task is almost done, A few short hours and thou shalt be Mingled with past eternity. O that I could awhile delay thee, That prayers or tears would stay thee; Is clos'd in night, I yet might leave of mine Some worthier, nobler sign, Of talents, fairly us'd, Of moments not abus'd, To be upon the record shown, 'Tis thine to place before the Eternal Throne. Spirit, what legacy, What token of thy course, 'Tis in my heart, and in my brain, Of humankind the form and doom, The interchange of joy and care, I should have found within my soul, I have been false to heav'n, I have been false to those who lov'd me, It is too late to win the prize, Are gone,---and more than all, the wealth Life lies before me now-a void, Yet, spirit of the parting year, Methinks I hear thee say— "What, though the prospects once so dear, 31st December, 1826. ICHABOD. |