To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

craving hourly sympathy. I must have He knows that his syllables are weighedbooks, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, and how far a consciousness of this particular jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim- watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a wnams, which their simpler taste can do tendency to produce indirect answers, and a without. I should starve at their primitive diverting of the question by honest means, banquet. My appetites are too high for might be illustrated, and the practice justithe salads which (according to Evelyn) fied, by a more sacred example than is proper Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too to be adduced upon this occasion. The excited admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchThe indirect answers which Quakers are fulness—if it did not seem rather an humble often found to return to a question put to and secular scion of that old stock of relithem may be explained, I think, without the gious constancy, which never bent or falvulgar assumption, that they are more given tered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to evasion and equivocating than other to the winds of persecution, to the violence i people. They naturally look to their words of judge or accuser, under trials and racking more carefully, and are more cautious of examinations. "You will never be the committing themselves. They have a pecu- wiser, if I sit here answering your questions liar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth-the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth- oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the invidious exemption.

till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "There after as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances.—I was travelling in stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest non-conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money and formally tendered it-so much for tea—I, in humble imitation, tendering mine-for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess,

not very indistinctly or ambiguously pro- not a syllable was dropped on the subject. nounced, became after a time inaudible-and They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length now my conscience, which the whimsical the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring scene had for a while suspended, beginning of his next neighbour, "Hast thee heard how to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope indigos go at the India House?" and the that some justification would be offered by question operated as a soporific on my moral these serious persons for the seeming injus- feeling as far as Exeter. tice of their conduct. To my great surprise

WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS.

this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised.

I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder, or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them-as if they should subpoena Satan!-Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers.-What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces—or who had made it a condition of his prey that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait-we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country.

We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd-could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony?—That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire-that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed-that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest-or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring -were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld--has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood à priori to us, who have no measure to guess From my childhood I was extremely inat his policy, or standard to estimate what quisitive about witches and witch-stories. rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied market. Nor, when the wicked are ex- me with good store. But I shall mention pressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be the accident which directed my curiosity wondered at so much, that he should come originally into this channel. In my father's sometimes in that body, and assert his meta-book-closet, the History of the Bible by phor. That the intercourse was opened at Stackhouse occupied a distinguished station. all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake-but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of

The pictures with which it abounds—one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity

A A

too much haste, I unhappily made a breach
in its ingenious fabric-driving my incon-
siderate fingers right through the two larger
quadrupeds-the elephant and the camel-
that stare (as well they might) out of the
two last windows next the steerage in that
unique piece of naval architecture. Stack-
house was henceforth locked up, and became
an interdicted treasure. With the book, the
objections and solutions gradually cleared out
of my head, and have seldom returned since
in any force to trouble me.-.
-But there was
one impression which I had imbibed from
Stackhouse which no lock or bar could shut
out, and which was destined to try my
childish nerves rather more seriously.-That
detestable picture!

of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had Turning over the picture of the ark with been upon the spot-attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes -and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern in- I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. fidelity, drawn up with an almost compli- The night-time, solitude, and the dark, were mentary excess of candour. The solution my hell. The sufferings I endured in this was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The nature would justify the expression. I never bane and antidote were both before you. To laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemned the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, my life-so far as memory serves in things for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. so long ago-without an assurance, which But-like as was rather feared than realised realised its own prophecy, of seeing some from that slain monster in Spenser-from frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then the womb of those crushed errors young acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of the Witch raising up Samuel-(0 that of so tender a Saint George as myself to van-old man covered with a mantle !)—I owe— quish. The habit of expecting objections to not my midnight terrors, the hell of my inevery passage set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but-the next thing to that -I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling!I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of illfortune which about this time befel me.

fancy-but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow-a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm-the hoping for a familiar voice-when they wake screaming-and find none to soothe them—what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called,-would, I am satisfied, in a

medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams-if dreams they were for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other

Headless bear, black man, or ape

Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual-that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth-that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy

are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our antemundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., extinguished taper, will come and look at me; who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition-who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story-finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thick-coming fancies; " and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire -stories of Celano and the Harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition-but they were there before. They are transcripts, types-the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all ?—or

-Names, whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not?

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from
such objects, considered in their capacity of
being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?
-O, least of all! These terrors are of older
standing. They date beyond body-or, with-
out the body, they would have been the same.
All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in
Dante-tearing, mangling, choking, stifling,
scorching demons-are they one half so
fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple
idea of a spirit unembodied following him

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turn'd round, walks on
And turns no more his head;

but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildingscities abroad, which I have never seen and hardly have hoped to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon-their. churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight-a map-like distinctness of trace-and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells-my highest Alps,-but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,

to solace his night solitudes-when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune-when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night

• Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

season, raise пр the ghost of a fish-wife. To
set my failures in somewhat a mortifying
light-it was after reading the noble Dream
or this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon
these marine spectra; and the poor plastic
power, such as it is, within me set to work,
to humour my folly in a sort of dream that
very night. Methought I was upon the ocean
billows at some sea nuptials, riding and
mounted high, with the customary train
sounding their couchs before me, (I myself,
you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily
we went careering over the main, till just
where Ino Leucothea should have greeted
me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace,
the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a
sea-roughness to a sea calm, and thence to a
river motion, and that river (as happens in
the familiarisation of dreams) was no other inauspicious inland landing.

than the gentle Thames, which landed me in
the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone,
safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of
Lambeth palace.

The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humourist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be,-"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that

VALENTINE'S DAY.

HAIL to thy returning festival, old Bishop every street and turning. The weary and Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric, all forspent twopenny postman sinks bethou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen! neath a load of delicate embarrassments, not Immortal Go-between; who and what his own. It is scarcely credible to what an manner of person art thou? Art thou but extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on a name, typifying the restless principle which in this loving town, to the great enrichment impels poor humans to seek perfection in of porters, and detriment of knockers and union? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, bell-wires. In these little visual interpretawith thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, tions, no emblem is so common as the heart, and decent lawn sleeves? Mysterious per--that little three-cornered exponent of all sonage! like unto thee, assuredly, there is our hopes and fears, the bestuck and no other mitred father in the calendar; not bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the into more allegories and affectations than an consigner of undipt infants to eternal tor- opera-hat. What authority we have in hisments, Austin, whom all mothers hate; nor tory or mythology for placing the headhe who hated all mothers, Origen; nor quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor anatomical seat rather than in any other, is Whitgift. Thou comest attended with not very clear; but we have got it, and it thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, will serve as well as any other. Else we and the air is might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, "Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow ?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of

Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.

In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at