racters of the gentleman, the wit, and the man of business. He was, in the best sense of the words, "a person of wit and honour about town," The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eye, tongue, sword. He was born in Barbadoes, and after residing some time in England, and serving with great gallantry as an officer in various parts of the world, became Governor-General of the Leeward Islands. He resigned his government in the course of a few years, and died in Barbadoes in the midst of his favourite studies. Among the variety of his accomplishments he did not omit divinity; and he was accounted a master of metaphysics. His public life he had devoted to his country; his private he divided among his books and friends. If the verses before us are not so good as those of the old poets, they are as good in their way, are as sincere and cordial, and smack of the champagne on his table. We like them on many accounts, for we like the panegyrist, and have an old liking for his friend-we like the taste they express in friendship and in beauty; and we like to fancy that our good-humoured ancestors in Barbadoes enjoyed the Governor's society, and relished their wine with these identical triplets.

TO MY FRIEND THE AUTHOR, DESIRING MY OPINION
OF HIS POEM.

Ask me not, friend, what I approve or blame;
Perhaps I know not what I like or damn;

I can be pleased, and I dare own I am.

I read thee over with a lover's eye;
Thou hast no faults, or I no faults can spy;
Thou art all beauty, or all blindness I.

Critics and aged beaux of fancy chaste,
Who ne'er had fire, or else whose fire is past,
Must judge by rules what they want force to taste.

I would a poet, like a mistress, try,

Not by her hair, her hand, her nose, her eye;
But by some nameless power to give me joy.

The nymph has Grafton's, Cecil's, Churchill's charms, If with resistless fires my soul she warms, With balm upon her lips, and raptures in her arms. Literary loves and jealousies were much the same in other ages as the present; but we hear a great deal more of the loves than the reverse; because genius survives, and ignorance does not. The ancient philosophers had a delicate way of honouring their favourites, by inscribing treatises with their names. It is thought a strange thing in Xenophon that he never mentions Plato. The greater part of the miscellaneous poetry of the Greeks is lost; or we should doubtless see numerous evidences of the intercourse of their authors. The Greek poets of Sicily, Theocritus and Moschus, are affectionate in recording the merits of their contemporaries. Varius and Gallus, two eminent Roman poets, scarcely survive but in the panegyrics of their contemporaries. Dante notices his, and his predecessors. Petrarch and Boccaccio publicly honoured, as they privately

loved one another. Tasso, the greatest poet of his time, was also the greatest panegyrist; and so, as might be expected, was Ariosto. The latter has introduced a host of his friends by name, male and female, at the end of his great work, coming down to the shores of poetry to welcome him home after his voyage. There is a pleasant imitation of it by Gay, applied to Pope's conclusion of Homer. Montaigne, who had the most exalted notions of friendship, which he thought should have every thing in common, took as much zeal in the literary reputation of his friends, as in every thing else that concerned them. The wits of the time of Henry the Fourth, of Louis the Fourteenth, and of Louis the Fifteenth,— Malherbe, Racan, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Chaulieu, La Fare, D'Alembert, Voltaire, &c., not excepting Boileau, where he was personally intimate with a brother author-all do honour in this respect to the sociality of their nation. It is the same, we believe, with the German writers; and if the Spanish winced a little under the domination of Lope de Vega, they were chivalrous in giving him perhaps more than his due. Camoëns had the admiration of literary friends as poor as himself, if he had nothing else; but this was something.

LV.-A WORD UPON INDEXES. INDEX-MAKING has been held to be the driest as well as lowest species of writing. We shall not dispute the humbleness of it; but since we have had to make an index ourselves,* we have discovered that the task need not be so very dry. Calling to mind indexes in general, we found them presenting us a variety of pleasant memories and contrasts. We thought of those to the Spectator, which we used to look at so often at school, for the sake of choosing a paper to abridge. We thought of the index to the Pantheon of Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, which we used to look at oftener. We remember how we imagined we should feel some day, if ever our name should appear in the list of Hs; as thus, Home, Howard, Hume, Huniades, poets would have been better, but then the names, though perhaps less unfitting, were not so flattering; as for instance, Halifax, Hammond, Harte, Hughes, We did not like to come after Hughes.

The

goodness in things evil," so there is a soul of humour in things dry, and in things dry by profession. Lawyers know this, as well as index-makers, or they would die of sheer thirst and aridity. But as grapes, ready to burst with wine, issue out of the most stony places, like jolly fellows bringing Burgundy out of a cellar ; so an index, like the Tatler's, often gives us a taste of the quintessence of his humour. For instance,

"Bickerstaff, Mr. account of his ancestors, 141. How his race was improved, 142. Not in partnership with Lillie, 250. Catched writing nonsense, 47.

"Dead men, who are to be so accounted, 247." Sometimes he has a stroke of pathos, as touching in its brevity as the account it refers to; as,

"Love-letters between Mr. Bickerstaff and Maria, 184-186. Found in a grave, 289." Sometimes he is simply moral and graceful; as, "Tenderness and humanity inspired by the Muses, 258. No true greatness of mind without it, ibid."

At another he says perhaps more than he intended; as,

Laura, her perfections and excellent character, 19. Despised by her husband, ibid.”

The index to Cotton's Montaigne, probably written by the translator himself, is often pithy and amusing. Thus in Volume 2d,

"Anger is pleased with, and flatters itself, 618. "Beasts inclined to avarice, 225.

"Children abandoned to the care and government of their fathers, 613.

"Drunkenness, to a high and dead degree, 16. "Joy, profound, has more severity than gaiety in it.

"Monsters, are not so to God, 612.
"Voluptuousness of the Cynics, 418."

Sometimes we meet with graver quaintnesses and curious relations, as in the index to Sandys's Ovid:

so every thing which has a Latin word for it, was alike important to the creator of the Orbis Pictus: for so the book is called.

He sees with equal eye, as construing all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.

The Tormenting of malefactors, Supplicia Malefactorum, is no more in his eyes than the making of honey, or Mellificium. Shipwreck, being Naufragium, he holds in no graver light than a feast, which is Convivium; and the feast is no merrier than the shipwreck. He has wood-cuts, with numerals against the figures; to which the letter-press refers. In one of these, his "Deformed and Monstrous People," cut as jaunty a figure as his Adam and Eve, and seem to pique themselves on their titles of Deformes et Monstrosi. In another the soul of man is described by a bodily outline, standing against a sheet. He is never moved but by some point of faith. Thus," Godliness," he says, "treads reason under foot, that barking dog, No. 6."Oblatrantem Canem, 6. The translation, observe, is worthy of the original. Again :—

4.

shall enter into life eternal, into the place of Bliss, and the new Jerusalem, 5. But the wicked

Ubi pii (justi) et Electi, 4. introibunt in vitam eternam. in locum Beatitudinis. et novam Hierosolymam, 5. Impii vero

and the damned. 6. with the Devils, 7 shall be thrust into Hell. (No. 8.)

ever.

et damnati, 6. cum Cacodæmonibus, 7.

in Gehennam,8. detrudentur,

THE materialists and psychologists are at issue upon the subject of dreams. The latter hold them to be one among the many proofs of the existence of a soul: the former endeavour to account for them upon principles altogether corporeal. We must own, that the effects of their respective arguments, as is usual with us on these occasions, is not so much to satisfy us with either, as to dissatisfy us with both. The psychologist, with all his struggles, never appears to be able to get rid of his body; and the materialist leaves something extremely deficient in the vivacity of his proofs, by his ignorance of that primum mobile, which is the soul of everything. In the mean time, while they go on with their laudable inquiries (for which we have a very sincere respect), it is our business to go on recommending a taste for results as well as causes, and turning everything to account in this beautiful star of ours, the earth. There is no reason why the acutest investigator of mysteries should not enjoy his

[PART 11.]

existence, and have his earthly dreams made as pleasant as possible; and for our parts, we see nothing at present, either in body or soul, but a medium for a world of perceptions, the very unpleasantest of whose dreams are but warnings to us how we depart from the health | and natural piety of the pleasant ones.

What seems incontrovertible in the case of dreams is, that they are most apt to take place when the body is most affected. They seem to turn most upon us when the suspension of the will has been reduced to its most helpless state by indulgence. The door of the fancy is left without its keeper, and forth issue, pellmell, the whole rout of ideas or images, which had been stored within the brain, and kept to their respective duties. They are like a school let loose, or the winds in Virgil, or Lord Anson's drunken sailors at Panama, who dressed themselves up in all sorts of ridiculous apparel.

We were about to say, that being writers, we are of necessity dreamers; for thinking disposes the bodily faculties to be more than usually affected by the causes that generally produce dreaming. But extremes appear to meet on this, as on other occasions, at least as far as the meditative power is concerned; for there is an excellent reasoner now living, who telling another that he was not fond of the wilder parts of the Arabian Nights, was answered with great felicity, "Then you never dream." It turned out that he really dreamt little. Here the link is impaired that connects a tendency to indigestion with thinking on the one hand, and dreaming on the other. If we are to believe Herodotus, the Atlantes, an African people, never dreamt; which Montaigne is willing to attribute to their never having eaten anything that died of itself. It is to be presumed that he looked upon their temperance as a matter of course. The same philosopher, who was a deep thinker and of a delicate constitution, informs us that he himself dreamt but sparingly; but then when he did, his dreams were fantastic though cheerful. This is the very triumph of the animal spirits, to unite the strangeness of sick dreams with the cheerfulness of healthy ones. To these exceptions against the usual theories we may add, that dreams are by no means modified of necessity by what the mind has been occupied with in the course of the day, or even of months; for during our two years' confinement in prison, we did not dream more than twice of our chief subjects of reflection, the prison itself not excepted.* The two dreams were both connected with the latter, and both the same. We fancied that we had slipped out of jail, and gone to the theatre, where we were horrified by seeing the faces of the whole audience unexpectedly turned upon us.

See a remarkable coincidence in the Essay on Dreams, in Mr. Hazlitt's Plain Speaker.

D

It is certain enough, however, that dreams in general proceed from indigestion; and it appears nearly as much so, that they are more or less strange according to the waking fancy of the dreamer.

All dreams, as in old Galen I have read,
Are from repletion and complexion bred,
From rising fumes of indigested food,
And noxious humours that infect the blood.
-When choler overflows, then dreams are bred
Of flames, and all the family of red.
-Choler adust congeals the blood with fear,
Then black bulls toss us, and black devils tear.

In sanguine airy dreams aloft we bound,

With rheums oppress'd, we sink, in rivers drown'd.' DRYDEN'S Cock and the Fox, from CHAUCER.

Again, in another passage, which is worth quoting instead of the original, and affords a good terse specimen of the author's versification:

Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes;
When Monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes;
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A mob of cobblers and a court of kings:*
Light fumes are inerry, 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.

It is probable that a trivial degree of indigestion will give rise to very fantastic dreams in a fanciful mind; while, on the other hand, a good orthodox repletion is necessary towards a fanciful creation in a dull one. It shall make an epicure, of any vivacity, act as many parts in his sleep as a tragedian, "for that night only." The inspirations of veal, in particular, are accounted extremely Delphic; Italian pickles partake of the same spirit of Dante; and a butter-boat shall contain as many ghosts as Charon's.

There is a passage in Lucian, which would have made a good subject for those who painted the temptations of the saints. It is a description of the City of Dreams, very lively and crowded. We quote after Natalis Comes, not having the True History by us. The city, we are told, stands in an immense plain, surrounded by a thick forest of tall poppy-trees, and enormous mandragoras. The plain is also full of all sorts of somniculous plants, and the trees are haunted with multitudes of owls and bats, but no other bird. The city is washed by the river Lethe, called by others the Nightbringer, whose course is inaudible, and like the

Perhaps a misprint for

A court of cobblers and a mob of kings.

flowing of oil. (Spenser's follower, Browne, has been here:

Where consort none other fowl,
Save the bat and sullen owl;
Where flows Lethe without coil,
Softly, like a stream of oil.

Inner Temple Mask.)

There are two gates to the city: one of horn, in which almost everything that can happen in sleep is represented, as in a transparency; the other of ivory, in which the dreams are but dimly shadowed. The principal temple is that of Night; and there are others, dedicated to Truth and Falsehood, who have oracles. The population consists of Dreams, who are of an infinite variety of shape. Some are small and slender; others distorted, humped, and monstrous; others proper and tall, with blooming good-tempered faces. Others, again, have terrible countenances, are winged, and seem eternally threatening the city with some calamity; while others walk about in the pomp and garniture of kings. If any mortal comes into the place, there is a multitude of domestic Dreams, who meet him with offers of service ; and they are followed by some of the others that bring him good or bad news, generally false; for the inhabitants of that city are, for the most part, a lying and crafty generation, speaking one thing and thinking another. This is having a new advantage over us. Only think of the mental reservation of a Dream!

If Lucian had divided his city into ranks and denominations, he might possibly have classed them under the heads of Dreams Lofty, Dreams Ludicrous, Dreams Pathetic, Dreams Horrible, Dreams Bodily Painful or Pleasant, Dreams of Common Life, Dreams of New Aspects of Humanity; Dreams Mixed, Fantastic, and utterly Confused. He speaks of winged ones, which is judicious, for they are very common; but unless Natalis Comes, who is not a very bright person, misrepresents him, he makes them of the melancholy class, which, in general, they are not.

In airy sanguine dreams aloft we bound. Nothing is more common, or usually more pleasant, than to dream of flying. It is one of the best specimens of the race; for besides being agreeable, it is made up of the dreams of ordinary life and those of surprising combination. Thus the dreamer sometimes thinks he is flying in unknown regions, sometimes skimming only a few inches above the ground, and wondering he never did it before. He will even dream that he is dreaming about it; and yet is so fully convinced of its feasibility, and so astonished at his never having hit upon so delightful a truism, that he is resolved to practise it the moment he wakes. "One has only," says he, "to give a little spring with one's foot, so, and-oh! it's the easiest and