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exhaled in consequence of immoderate feeding, the brain is so stuffed by it, that monsters and strange chimera are formed, of which the most inordinate eaters and drinkers furnish us with sufficient instances. Some dreams, they assert, are governed partly by the temperature of the body, and partly by the humour which mostly abounds in it; to which may be added the apprehensions which have preceded the day before; and which are often remarked in dogs, and other animals, which bark and make a noise in their sleep. Dreams, they observe, proceed from the humours and temperature of the body; we see the choleric dreams of fire, combats, yellow colours, etc. the phlegmatic of water baths, of sailing on the sea; the melancholics of thick fumes, deserts, fantasies, hideous faces, etc. they that have the hinder part of their brain clogged, with viscous humours, called by physicians Ephialtes incubus, dream that they are suffocated. And those who have the orifice of their stomach loaded with malignant humours, are affrighted with strange visions, by reason of those venemous vapours that mount to the brain and distemper it.

POETICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF THE IMAGINATION IN DREAMS.

Were we to enter more profoundly into the mysterious phenomena of dreams, our present lucubrations might become too abstruse; and, after all, no philosophical nor satisfactory account can be given of them. Such of our readers therefore, as

may wish for a more minute inquiry into the opinions above stated, we beg leave to refer to the respective authors whom we have already quoted. The reader, who is fond to find amusement even in a serious subject, from the scenes of nocturnal imagination, will be glad, perhaps for a moment, to be transported into the regions of poetic fancy. And here we find that the fancy is not more sportive in dreams, than are the poets in their descriptions of her nocturnal vagaries. On the effects of the imagination in dreams, the following effusion, put into the mouth of the volatile Mercurio, is an admirable illustration :—

O, then I see, Queen Mab has been with you.
She is the fancy's midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an Alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies,
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep :
Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs ;
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces of the smallest spider's web;
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams;
Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film ;
Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm,
Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is an empty hazel nut,
Made by the joiner squirril, old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers :
And in this state she gallops night by night,
Thro' lovers' brains, and then they dream of love,
On courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies strait;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who strait dream on fees;

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O'er ladies lips, who strait on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plague,
Because their breath with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a lawyer's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit:
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig tail,
Tickling the parson as he lies asleep;
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 pray'r or two,
And sleeps again.

Lucretius, 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 here alluded to, only serve to shew 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 mix'd scene display,
Of what we heard, or saw, or wish'd by day;
For memory those images retains

Which passion form'd, and still the strongest reigns.
Huntsmen renew the chase they lately run,

And generals fight again their battles won.

Spectres and fairies 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, or are, or 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 truth 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
In chimeras all; and more absurd or less.

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 inconsistant than the wind.

Nor must Milton be omitted

In the soul

Are many lesser faculties, that serve

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Reason as chief; among these Fancy next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, airy shapes,
Which reason joining, or disjoining, frames,
And all that 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 tale.

PRINCIPAL PHENOMENA IN DREAMING.

From these practical descriptions let us proceed to take a view of the principal phenomena in dreaming. And first, Mr. Locke's beautiful modes of which will greatly illustrate the preceding observations.

When the mind," says Locke, "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 from 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,

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