plenty of exercise in the open air, are the grand conducives to sound sleep; and accordingly, every man whose repose is indifferent, should endeavour to make them his own as soon as possible."

All this is most abominably bad writing. The author seriously prescribes an easy mind and good

digestion," not only to promote sound sleep (which, no doubt, they do), but recommends every one to make these blessings his own!

An easy mind is the result of previous moral rectitude, over which a man cannot afterwards have any control; and a "good digestion" depends quite as much on the native structure as on the management of the stomach: a man can no more make either for himself then he can cause himself to be young when he is seventy! Moreover, the Doctor employs the word indifferent just as an old nurse would: "my poor Missus is but indifferent this morning."

Page 207. "The cause of this constitutional disposition to doze upon every occasion, seems to be a certain want of activity in the brain; the result of which is, that the individual is singularly void of fire, energy, and passion. He is of a phlegmatic temperament, generally a great eater, and very destitute of imagination." This is all very poor! Pope, who had the distemper of drowsiness, was not void of fire, energy, passion, or powers of imagination. Doctor Johnson says that the bard "one day dropped asleep at the dinner-table of Frederick, Prince of Wales, while His Royal Highness was talking of poetry."

Page 208. "Boerhaave speaks of an eccentric physician, who took it into his head that sleep was the natural state of man; and accordingly slept eighteen hours out of the twenty-four;-till he died of apoplexy-a disease which is always apt to be produced by excess of sleep." This whole passage is one of incredible absurdity, at least on the part of the renowned Boerhaave. As a man of common sense he might have known that a person suffers sleep, and cannot command that condition of body; he cannot even counteract the propensity to sleep. And as a medical man he should have remembered that a disposition to sleep unseasonably, is disease; and is not the cause, but the consequence, of organic derangement, and of a liability to apoplexy.

In his clever chapter on the sleep of plants, Doctor M. speaks of plants with pinnated leaves, and ternate leaves. He should have explained these hard words: that the first means feathered, or notched at the edges; the latter, leaves in three divisions.

There is much that is strange and inexplicable in the sleep of animals, of probably every class; certainly of man. When accompanied by dreaming, as in the human race it perpetually is, one might be tempted to say that it is invariably a state of mental insanity. We see in utter darkness, objects, which, if the images beheld were not forgeries of the fancy, would be invisible. We are perfectly satisfied with the existence and fitness of absolute impossibilities, the most trivial incompleteness in which formations

would shock us in our waking and sane moments. We brave imagined dangers, which we should shudder but to read of when awake; and in dreams all reasonable caution seems to forsake us.

Nothing can be more naturally nor more forcibly conceived than the character of Lady Macbeth in her horrific sleep-walking scene. She not only revels in the sight and repulsive odour of the blood she has shed, but betrays aloud the hideous secret of her crime. They who are old enough to recollect the representation of this scene by Mrs. Siddons, in her meridian, will probably recall it above all the noble scenes of all she ever played. It had in it throughout, what stage and tragic representations very rarely have, the fearfulness of reality. Notwithstanding, however, her being unapproached in Lady Macbeth, I cannot help remembering her peculiar action when going to seize the taper, and that I thought at the time, and, since reading Doctor Macnish's Essay, I am still more decided in my opinion, that the great actress committed a fault as a somnambulist. She continued to glare with unearthly eyes on the house, or on vacancy, while she, as it were, felt for the lighted lamp. The sleep-walker, I apprehend, experiences no incertitude as to the exact place of the object supposed to be seen.

Somnambulism is anything rather than dreaming: in that state everything is real; in a dream nothing. But in both cases, the person influenced is insane. If otherwise, the sleep-walker would avoid doing the

very acts which he does in sleep; nor would the dreamer reconcile himself to the most astonishing incompatibilities. An extravagant instance of the vagaries of the brain in dreams may be mentioned.

A sleeping person imagined that he lay dead on a couch within a closet; that it was requisite that he should walk past the place in which he was then lying a corpse; and that he did this with slow and stealthy steps, in order not to awake his deceased self!

ADDISON'S TRAVELS.*

Page 164. Some of the writer's remarks on the passage in the Æneid, book ix. line 715, (not 710, as quoted by Addison,) having undergone much opposition on account of the translation given of the epithet alta, I applied to two most distinguished scholarsthe late highly learned Doctor Thomas Falconer, and another gentleman now living and well known in Bath-for their opinions, and had my own confirmed by the answers they gave; viz. that

"Tum sonitu Prochyta alta tremit,"

must be interpreted,

lowest depths;" or

not," says Addison,

66

see why Virgil, in this noble comparison, has given the epithet alta to Prochyta; for it is not only no high island in itself, but is much lower than Ischia, &c." He appears to have for

* London, Tonson, &c. 1753.

gotten that alta means low down and deep, as well as lofty: "Manet alta mente repostum," &c. for instance. As to General Ludlow's inscription over the door of his retreat at Vevay,

"OMNE SOLUM FORTI PATRIA QUIA PATRIS,"

(see page 264 of the Travels); it has never, I imagine, been satisfactorily explained. Doctor Parr, to whom, at my request, it was submitted by his correspondent, Doctor Falconer, confessed that he could make nothing of it. Doctor Falconer conjectured that the expression, quia patris, the only difficulty, might refer to a term of endearment applied by Germans to their native country, which they tenderly call Faderland; so Ludlow might mean that any soil would become, as it were, father-land to the exiled brave.

Addison says of the inscription in question, " the first part is a piece of a verse in Ovid, as the last is a cant of his (Ludlow's) own."

This is either disingenuous or absurd in Addison. If he understood the passage, (which he did not,) he should have translated it: if not, he had no right to stigmatize the two words as "cant" of Ludlow's. I have sometimes thought the meaning to be, every land is the brave man's country, because every soil belongs equally to GOD, our common father. The original board on which the inscription appears, was brought away from Switzerland; and it is said, is now preserved by a descendant of General Ludlow's, at his seat in Wiltshire.