night into restless misery. "In St. James's day,* as now, it would appear that there were idle men and idle women, who went about from house to house, dropping slander as they went; and yet you could not take up that slander and detect the falsehood there. You could not evaporate the truth in the slow process of the crucible, and then show the residuum of falsehood glittering and visible. You could not fasten upon any word or sentence, and say that it was calumny; for in order to constitute slander, it is not necessary that the word spoken should be false-half truths are often more calumnious than whole falsehoods." It is not even necessary, as Mr. Robertson reminds us, that a word should be distinctly uttered; a dropped lip, an arched eyebrow, a shrugged shoulder, a significant look, nay, even an emphatic silence, may do the work; and when the light and trifling thing which has done the mischief has fluttered off, the venom is left, to work and rankle, to inflame hearts, to fever human existence, and to poison human society at the fountain-springs of life. Very emphatically was it said, he adds, by one whose whole being had smarted under such afflictions, "Adder's poison is under their lips." The Lady Blast of the Spectator has such a particular malignity in her whisper, that it blights like an easterly wind, and withers every reputation that it breathes upon. The Miss Brabazon of A Strange Story, by anonymous letter-writing conveys to innocent ears and sensitive hearts, "in biting words which female malice can make so sharp," poison that, in the case in question, destroys mind though not life: "The heart that took in the venom cast its poison on the brain, and the mind fled before the presence of a thought so deadly to all the ideas

*It is not without interest to observe in those remote times, and under a social system so widely different from the modern,-observes a dissertator of another kind,-the same small causes at work to ruffle and to ruin which operate so commonly at this day; the same inventive jealousy, the same cunning slander, the same crafty and fabricated retailings of petty gossip. Hence the writer pauses to describe the "mechanism of those trivial and household springs of mischief, which we see every day at work in our chambers and at our hearths. It is in these, the lesser intrigues of life, that we mostly find ourselves at home with the past.”

STUFFED WITH SPITE TO THE THROAT. 301

which its innocence had heretofore conceived." The Miss Limejuice of a clerical essayist is made the text for a homily on there being something to be said for even the most unamiable and worst of the race; for he takes the case of this sour, backbiting, malicious, wrong-headed, lying old woman, who gives her life to saying disagreeable things and making mischief between friends; and he pleads on her behalf the unknown degree of physical irritability of nerve and weakness of constitution which the poor creature may have inherited, or the singular twist of mind which she may have got from nature and from bad and unkind treatment in youth. Not only of bitter judgments of men, but of a disposition to sow strife, and in short of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, is the remark made, that possibly they come out of a bad heart, but certainly out of a miserable one. The Miss Cynthia Badham of Dr. Holmes's Guardian Angel, is perhaps a compromise of the two; six of the one, and half-a-dozen of the other. The Lady Penelope Penfeather of St. Ronan's Well is, to some extent, painted, if not tarred, with the same brush. The Miss Gussy Marks of Archie Lovell is bitterly spiteful; her carefullyworded equivocations being deliberate, cold-blooded murders; murders with malice aforethought: she belongs to the class who whispers about versions, more or less blackened, of other people's vilifications; who supply all missing links in other people's evidence; and yet, "such an agreeable companion! such unfailing spirits!" is the good word strangers have to say of her, until, at least, they cease to be strangers. Spenser's embodiment has no such superficial or transitory grace to qualify her utter loathsomeness: from the first she is

"A foule and loathly creature sure in sight,
And in conditions to be loath'd no lesse:
For she was stuff'd with rancour and despight
Up to the throat, that oft with bitternesse
It forth would breake and gush in great excesse,
Pouring out streames of poyson and of gall
Gainst all that truth or virtue doe professe;

Whom she with leasings lewdly did miscall

And wickedly backbite; her name did Sclaunder call."

W

LIKE THEM THAT DREAM.

PSALM CXXVI. I; ACTS xii. 9.

HEN the Lord turned the captivity of Sion, the returned captives were like them that dream. Could it be true? Were they dreaming or awake? So with St. Peter, when roused from prison-sleep by the angel, and the chains fell off from his hands, and he girt himself in haste, and bound on his sandals, just as he was bidden, all in a sort of dazed stupor of bewilderment. And the angel saith unto him, "Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me." And he went out, and followed him; and wist not that it was true which was done by the angel, but thought he saw a vision. Not until they were past the first and the second ward, and through the iron gate leading to the city, that opened to them of itself, and thence had come to the end of one street, when and where the angel left him—not until then did Peter come to himself, and feel assured that it was no dream, but a most real deliverance. From sleep, and no doubt from dreaming, he had been abruptly roused by his miraculous deliverer, who indeed had to smite the sleeper, so fast was he asleep. The poet of the Christian Year speculates on what may have been the captive's dreams that night: haply the "gracious chiding look" of his Master; or wafted back in vision to his native lake, to converse with Jesus, as in that solemn evening walk which was the last of all; or perhaps of the vultus instantis tyranni,—

"His dream is changed-the Tyrant's voice

Calls to that last of glorious deeds

But as he rises to rejoice,

Not Herod but an Angel leads.

"He dreams he sees a lamp flash bright,

Glancing around his prison room—

But 'tis a gleam of heavenly light
That fills up all the ample gloom.

DREAMING THAT WE DREAM.

"Then all himself, all joy and calm,

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Though for awhile his hand forego,
Just as it touch'd, the martyr's palm,
He turns him to his task below."

He was come to himself: ὁ Πέτρος γενόμενος ἐν ἑαυτῷ, and no longer ἐδόκει ὅραμα βλέπειν. Till then, from the moment of drowsy awaking to that of the angel departing from him, the captive Apostle, whose captivity was thus turned, was consciously like them that dream.

Curious enough in psychology is the fact of our sometimes even dreaming that we dream. Mariana in the South, sleeping at noon, seemed knee-deep in mountain-grass, and heard the runlets babbling down her native glen; but,

"Dreaming, she knew it was a dream."

Coleridge discusses the manner in which we so confound the half-waking, half-sleeping, reasoning power, that we actually do pass a positive judgment on the reality of what we see and hear, though often accompanied by doubt and self-questioning, which, as he had himself experienced, will at times become strong enough, even before we awake, to convince us that it is what it is namely (as he spells it), the "night-mair." Edgar Allan Poe somewhere remarks, that when one dreams, and, in the dream, suspects that he dreams, the suspicion never fails to confirm itself, and the sleeper is almost immediately aroused. So Novalis, "We are near waking when we dream that we dream." Bernard Barton has a little poem called A Dream, of which the second stanza runs thus :

66

But all seem'd real-ay, as much

As now the page I trace

Is palpable to sight and touch;

Then how could doubt have place?
Yet was I not from doubt exempt,
But ask'd myself if still I dreamt.
I felt I did."

Dante, in the thirtieth canto of the Inferno, has a simile, "as a man that dreams of harm befallen him, dreaming wishes it a

dream." A popular French writer says, there is hardly any one but has said to himself, amid the oppressions of a suffocating nightmare, and by the help of that light which still burns in the brain when every human light is extinguished, "It is nothing but a dream, after all." But then, in the words of an equally popular English one, what is more terrible than the agony of a dream? even though in the sleeper's breast there lurk a vague consciousness that he is only the fool of a vision.” Rayner, in Joanna Baillie's tragedy of that name, lost in a conflict of emotions, gives voice to their perplexity; around him, he says,

66

"All seems like the dark mingled mimicry

Of feverish sleep; in which the half-doubting mind,
Wilder'd, and weary, with a deep-drawn breath,
Says to itself, 'Shall I not wake?'"

Montaigne puts into a parenthesis in one of his most discursive essays the confidence au lecteur, "I am apt to dream that I dream." Pascal has the simile in one of his Pensées, 66 comme on rêve souvent qu'on rêve, en entassant songes sur songes." Dr. Abercrombie treats as 66 a very peculiar state," what he nevertheless supposes to have "occurred to most people,”the co-existence of a distressing dream with an impression that it probably is only a dream. And he refers to some of the "very singular facts on record," of the reasoning powers being applied to dreams for the purpose of dissipating them; to Dr. Beattie, for instance, who, in a dream, once found himself standing in a very critical position on the parapet of a bridge, when, recollecting that he never was given to pranks of this kind, he began to fancy it might be a dream, and determined to throw himself headlong, in the belief that this would restore his senses; which restoration happily ensued. So with that more masculine metaphysician of the same Scotch school, Dr. Reid, who thus cured himself of a tendency to frightful dreams, with which from early years he had been tormented : he strove to fix strongly on his mind the impression that all such dangers in dreams are imaginary, and determined, in Beattie's style, to fling himself headlong in every case of precipice, so