So, Parnell alludes to the superior touch of blind musicians :—

Where the epidermis is preternaturally thickened by hard labour, it becomes too complete a barrier to any very accurate or delicate perception of the surfaces of external objects by the nervous papillæ, materially intercepting the fine sense of touch.

HAMLET. The hand of little employment hath

The daintier sense.

Hamlet, v., 1.

Shakespeare has most minutely and completely described sleep, in all its peculiar states and conditions, the disturbed and broken sleep of one with mind distressed-of another with rebellious conscience—of another with an over-filled stomachof another enjoying a light heart, spotless innocence, and perfect health. He has finely extolled it as "the balm of hurt minds," and also as nature's quietest refreshment after the fatigues of the day.

ALONZO. What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyes

Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts: I find
They are inclined to do so.

Refreshing rest, and peaceful nights, are chiefly the portion of him who lies down weary with honest labour, and free from the

* Honey-heavy dew. I suspect these words were transposed by the printer, or an error arising from an interpolation in the manuscript, and that we should read, heavy honey-dew of slumber, i. e., a heavy sweet sleep; or perhaps Shakespeare wrote, honied ev'ning dew of slumber.

+ Figures; shapes created by a disturbed imagination.

2

fumes of indigested luxury, and from the anxieties of corroding

care.

CLAUDIO. As fast locked up in sleep as guiltless labour,

When it lies starkly* in the traveller's bones:

He will not wake.

Measure for Measure, iv., 2.

It is the just doom of indolence and gluttony to be inactive without ease, and drowsy without repose. This fact was noticed in the earliest times. "The sleep of the labouring man," says Solomon, "is sweet, whether he eat little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep."+

So Virgil, speaking of Rhamnes, who was killed in the midnight expedition of Nisus and Euryalus :—

Rhamneten aggreditur, qui forte tapetibus altis
Extructus, toto proflabat pectore somnum.

PROSPERO. Awake, dear heart, awake! thou hast slept well;

Awake!

MIRANDA. The strangeness of your story put

Heaviness in me.

Tempest, i., 2.

"Why," says Dr. Johnson, "should a wonderful story produce sleep? I believe experience will prove that any violent agitation of the mind easily subsides in slumber, especially when, as in Prospero's relation, the last images are pleasing."

In the following fine speech, which will be admired as long as the English language exists, how beautifully has Shakespeare contrasted the sweets of a sound sleep with the horrors of a

* Starkly, i. e., stiffly.

+ Ecclesiastes, v., 12.

restless night! How poetically has he compared the disturbing anxieties of opulence and power with the lulling influence of indigence and labour!

KING HENRY. How many thousands of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O Sleep, O gentle Sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Why rather, Sleep, ly'st thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,

And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfum'd chambers of the great,

Under the canopies of costly state,

And lull'd with sounds of sweetest melody?

O, thou dull god, why ly'st thou with the vile,

In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch,
A watch-case, or a common 'larum bell?*

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge;
And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deaf'ning clamours in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly,† Death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial Sleep! give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude ;‡
And, in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!?
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

King Henry IV., Part II., iii., 1.

* This alludes to the watchman, set in garrison towns upon some eminence, attending upon an alarum-bell, which he was to ring in case of fire, or any approaching danger. He had a case or box to shelter him from the weather; but at his utmost peril, he was not to sleep while he was upon duty. These alarum-bells are mentioned several other times by Shakespeare.

+ Hurly is noise, derived from the French hurler, to howl. Davenant says of sleep:

"It loves the cottage, and from court abstains,

It stills the seaman though the storm be high;

Frees the griev'd captive in his closest chains,

Stops want's loud mouth, and blinds the treach'rous spy."

That is," You who are happy in your humble situations, lay down your heads to rest. The head that wears a crown lies too uneasy to expect such a blessing." Had not Shakespeare thought it necessary to subject himself to the tyranny of rhyme, he would probably have said, "Then, happy low! sleep on."

MACBETH. Methought, I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleive* of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast ;-

Macbeth, ii., 2.

In the following passage, Shakespeare is at once poetical and philosophical. While he amuses us with the vagaries of his preternatural beings, his gay and sportive fairies, he inculcates the philosophical notion, which Aristotle expressed of old that a dream is only the pavraopa, or appearance of things, excited in the mind, and remaining after the objects are removed; in a word, the imaginations or reveries of sleeping men, deducible, in particular from the impressions and ideas lately received, and upon which they were the most recently and earnestly intent.† Lucretius and Petronius had both preceded our immortal bard in a description of the effects of dreams on different kinds of persons; but both the passages to which I allude serve only to show the superiority of Shakespeare's boundless genius.

MERCUTIO. O, then, I see, queen Mab hath been with you.

She is the fairies' 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 wat'ry 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 squirrel, or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers,
And in this state she gallops, night by night,

* Sleive, i. e., unwrought silk.

Spenser speaking of dreams, observes :

"The things that day most minds, at nighte doe most appeare."

Faery Queene, iv., c. v., st. 43.

ROMEO.

Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love:
On courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight:
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees:
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream;
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;*
And sometimes comes she with a tithe pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose as he lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice:
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear; at which he starts and wakes;
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two,
And sleeps again-

Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace;

Thou talk'st of nothing.

MERCUTIO.

True, I talk of dreams;
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air;
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

Romeo and Juliet, i., 4.

The philosophic truth of the above passage is exemplified in the case of those who, in a sleep of only a few hours' duration, dream a series of events seeming to occupy two or three days; and of others, who, in one night, have dreamt that they made a tour over the whole globe, or performed some other impossible feat. Again, for example, when we are awake, the recollecting, in

The expression, smelling out a suit, in the above passage, might appear at first sight to belong more properly to the dream of a lawyer than to that of a courtier, and accordingly, in some editions, the lawyer is substituted for the courtier ; but Warburton has very well explained it, by observing that, in Shakespeare's time, a court solicitation was simply called a suit, and a legal process a suit at law, to distinguish it from the other. “The king,” says the contemporary biographer of Sir William Cecil, "called Sir William, and, after long talk with him, being much delighted with his answers, willed his father to find [that is, smell out] a suit for him. Whereupon he became suitor for the reversion of the Custos Brevium Office in the Common Pleas which the king willingly granted, being the first suit he had in his life."