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BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENTS.

spoken at the bar like Cicero; in the Lords, like Pericles; like Demosthenes in the Commons; and to our democratic constituency like Cleon. We have etherealized a budget like Gladstone; have debated like Bright and Disraeli; and translated Homer in a Derby gallop. We have written epics like "Paradise Lost" or the "Fall of Babylon;" we have waked to ecstasy the living lyre, like Fletcher or like Tennyson; we have produced dramas like Shakspeare or like Boucicault, which we have played like Kemble or like Widdicombe. Lying in bed, mute and inglorious, we have sung like Mario or like Patti; shown an amazed and admiring public a pas unknown to Terpsichore; or danced with eight other scholastic angels on the point of a mediæval needle. We have found out a philosophical method that will supersede the Baconian, as Pegasus would outstrip a Suffolk "punch;" we have at last discovered the latent fallacy that vitiates Edipus's solution of the riddle of the Sphinx; with our mind's eye we have discovered the stars of the future; or wakened ourselves with shouting eureka at the sublime invention of a shirt. Shooting at long range, we have beaten Armstrong and Whitworth with a popgun charged with Holloway's Pills; we have settled the question of homoeopathy to the satisfaction of the College of Physicians, and other experts in the art of medical ignorance; and triumphantly performed all the surgical operations in the various American armies with a philanthropic neutrality unparalleled in anything but a royal speech.

There is in dreams a sort of safety-valve for disappointment. The veteran, maimed and broken in constitution by the fortunes of war, is compensated by a sleeping identification with the happier merchant. The merchant, tossed by the east wind and at loggerheads with the ocean, dreams uneasily of the preferable shock of battle that in one supreme moment brings speedy death or joyful victory. The farmer, going down home in a state of depression from Mark Lane or his provincial corn-market, shares the ideal bliss of his brother,

the attorney; whilst the latter takes refuge from the dry mould and must of Chancery Lane, amongst the dew-spangled tops of the husbandman's turnips. The mind of the pauper becomes a kingdom; the deaf man hears music finer than the sonatas of Beethoven; the blind man sees double; and the lame man leaps as a hart or a meteor, or wings his flight

From star to star,

From world to luminous world, as far

As the universe spreads its flaming wall.

Distance is annihilated; our own planet is a sand-grain ; and the entire universe an hour-glass. The equator becomes the girdle of the pole; icebergs build up their towers in the Red Sea; the diameter of a planetary orbit is a hop-skip-andjump; and the sun is brought near enough to be serviceable as a toaster of cheese. Time is no more. We give our right hand to Adam and our left to Campbell's "Last Man;" a cyclic year is but the interval between two fever-pulses.

The dreamer stands on the verge of a precipice, and does not wink when he sees Death grinning at him from a thousand feet below. He is braver than Hector, fiercer than Achilles, stronger than Thor, more redoubtable than Jack the Giantkiller. He has more transmigrations than Pythagoras, more avataras than Krishna, more impersonations than Bottom or Garrick, more rope-tricks than Calcraft or the brothers Davenport. He is a greater general than Hannibal, Cæsar, or Napoleon; a more accomplished fiddler, and a more colossal incendiary, than Nero; a more skilful slayer of flies than Domitian, of lions than Jules Gérard, of gorillas than Du Chaillu. He is a lover more sad than Dante, more mad than Tasso, more long-winded than Petrarca, more successful than Rochester, Wilkes, or Mirabeau; or, again, more unfortunate than Pope or Gibbon.

But a truce to conjecture. Let us rise to the didactic. There are a few lessons for our guidance which may be beaten musically out of our consideration of dream-phenomena.

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MORAL VALUE OF DREAMS.

Dreams are valuable as throwing light upon our spiritual constitution. They show us that the mind has a certain power of involuntary action, and that it works generally in the direction in which the waking occupation has given the impetus. They prove its power of vivid realization, of exact and subtle projection and impersonation, and the lightning rapidity of its processes. They show that mental action is not dependent on physical organisms; and thus they help to establish an important analogical argument for the immortality of the soul. They indicate that without physical organisms the mind can realize itself as holding a certain indefinable relation to the material world; and thus they offer their contribution to a settlement of the questions of the materiality of the mind, the ideality of matter, and the unity of substance of mind and matter.

Nor are they without their value in morals and religion. If " our prevalent state and disposition of mind, our habits of thought and habits of feeling, determine and shape the complexion of our dreams," it follows that those evil dreams are not innocent which are the result of a burlesque continuation of evil waking desire or speculation. The sordid and miserly cannot hoard even in sleep and be blameless; the cruel cannot be unmerciful without a crime; the impure cannot be unchaste and be spotless. There is a modified sense in which it may be understood that between the waking world and the world of sleep there is a kind of one-sided extradition treaty, under which the criminals of the latter are to be relegated to the tribunals of the former. It might not be altogether indefensible to say that there is nearly as much spontaneity, and therefore nearly as much responsibility attaching to our dreams as to our articles of faith. It follows that they may be made useful for self-correction. If dream-action be morally diseased, there is much reason to suspect that waking action is not morally sound. Our success in our efforts after selfgovernment may be estimated partly by our dream-correctness or divarication.

APPEAL FROM WAKING TO SLEEPING.

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Dreams, again, are of some service, as revealing the natural bent of a man intellectually and aesthetically as well as morally; for in them the natural action of the mind is not repressed by the will to a compulsory profession; and the mind naturally takes the opportunity of exercising itself about that kind of pursuit to which it has an irremovable affinity— for which it has an inherent inclination or adaptation.

Further, to flutter about the ethics of dreams, we would suggest or repeat their value as instruments of introspection or self-examination. Many good and wise men from the time of Zeno have professedly so used them. Every solution of goodness in sleep has been pressed for the work of giving continuity to waking excellence. In morals, or let us say in immorals, the value of the maxim principiis obsta can scarcely be over-rated. What shall we think, then, of the worth of the dream-watchman who is often the first to give the alarm? The value of dreams for this purpose is to be discovered in the fact that in them seedtime and harvest occur together,tendency and consummation. The waking man, if he be not a fool, knows that the breeze which wafts a feather-index of direction would in time, if suffered to continue, impel a vessel round the world. In somnio veritas; in dreams each man's character is disintegrated, so that he may see the elements of which it is composed. It is for him to cure, to confirm, to modify, or to eradicate, in such a way that he may at length attain to symmetrical and blameless combinations.

CHAPTER V.

ONEIROCRITICA; OR MODES OF DREAM-INTERPRETATION, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

We have already had occasion to remark upon the curiosity of mankind to ascertain the future, and to mention some of the methods and instruments of divination to which

they resorted for that purpose. Oneirocriticism, or dreaminterpretation, very early took high rank as an art, and was studied and professed as a science. If we could roll away the mists that enshroud its first origin, it is likely that we should find this to have taken place when man, first losing his rectitude and purity, lost with them the infancy and the perfection of his trust in a Father. If we could bridge the deluge of Noah, we should probably discover that the sins of the antediluvian world were not those alone of violence and bodily impiety. The spiritual defection of the race of the giants was, it is more than conjecturally held, correspondent to the magnitude of their stature. Very soon after the Flood there sprang up heretical speculations in philosophy and theologyas, for instance, in India—so vast and, in principle, so mature, as to make it almost impossible to avoid the belief that they had been transmitted through one or other of the people of the Ark, from the submerged ancestry who had devoted ages to their elaboration.

But this is not the place to prosecute a research into regions about which, though so little is known, so much is shadowed in dim and portentous outline. It must suffice us