the body as the principal agent in the production of dreams, as they certainly may originate independent of its influence in the sole recollection and energies of the mind, which in its ordinary speculation revives the days of childhood, recalls the friends and events of distant periods by sudden and unexpected starts unconnected with present sensations, places them in circumstances in which we never have beheld them, and in which they never have existed, blends and diversifies particulars fantastically with novel combinations, and metamorphoses persons into a thousand forms, who with Protean versatility appear to practise the frauds of every shape.

"Dreams are but interludes which fancy makes,
When monarch Reason sleeps then 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 things in dreams we see
That never were, nor are, nor ere can be.
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play,
The night restores our actions done by day,
As hounds in sleep will open for their prey.

}

Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind
Rush forward to the brain and come to mind,
The nurses legends are for truths receiv'd,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.
In short the farce of dreams is of a piece,
Chimeras all, and more absurd or less *."

If Mr. Hobbes speak of dreams universally, the author does not agree with him, that different dreams are to be attributed to different distempers, though he feel no inclination to refute the position, that lying cold may produce dreams of fear, as it would unquestionably produce the symptom of fear, shivering, and chattering teeth. We must allow for poetical representation when we read that

"All dreams

Are from repletion and complection bred
From rising fumes of undigested food,
And noxious humours that infest the blood.

When choler overflows, then dreams are bred
Of flames, and all the families of red;

* Dryden from Chaucer's Tale of the Cock and Fox.

Red dragons and red beasts in sleep we view,
For humours are distinguished by their hue.
From hence we dream of war and warlike things,
And wasps and hornets with their double stings.
Choler adust congeals our 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;
The dominating humour makes the dream."

The whole is, that our sleeping as our waking thoughts may be changed from their own course by attention excited by the sensation of the body, and those who would enjoy quiet and pleasing dreams, should attend to the preservation of the sobriety and temperance of the body. The ancients were very particular in their diet when they were desirous of obtaining such, and particularly regarded beans, and the head of a polypus, as calculated to produce perturbed slumbers; and upon the same consideration the crude and undigestible peacock mentioned by Juvenal as the cause of

Dryden from Chaucer's Cock and Fox,

sudden and intestate death must have been avoided, as all who do not wish like the lazy glutton of Persius to

Indulge their sloth, and batten with their sleep t,"

should avoid excess in turtle and venison, and may do well to observe the rule of Levinus Lemnius, who recommends to sleep with the mouth shut, which contributes to promote regular digestion, excluding the too rapid ingress of the external air, and cherishing the proper warmth of the stomach; a precaution, it is said, generally serviceable to weak stomachs, as we see that a cough or the hickup is often stopped by it when we are awake.

Dr. Hartley with more scope of allowance than Hobbes, considers dreams as reveries deducible from three causes-natural impres

Sat. i. L. 143. Plutarch. πως δει. Vol. i. p. 56. Edit. Wyttenbach.

+ Hic Satur. &c. Sat. v. L. 56. Dryden's Transl.

sions-redundancy of watery humours-and great heat. Whatever effect these may have in storing or colouring the mind in sleep, they cannot be considered as the primary cause of the operations which are displayed in dreams, and which are here considered as the effects of the exertion of the mental powers: even dreams which are occasioned by the ephialtes, or night mare, and which assume a gloomy or terrific character from the clouds raised up from flatulency, repletion, or stagnation of the blood, or crudity of the stomach, are in fact but reflections of the mind affected in sympathy to the sufferings of the body*.

The night mare is well described in the following lines of Dryden's translation of Virgil.

"And as when heavy sleep has closed the sight, The sickly fancy labours in the night;

* Young persons are particularly subject to this disorder, they should be awakened when they appear to be affected by it, and on changing their position it will cease.