In this and similar cases the mind of the dreamer is placed passively in the very situation which we endeavour, but often in vain, to assume in our attempts at active recollection. All those associated circumstances are called up which may escape our ordinary memory. It is highly probable that the Captain's observant eye had transiently noticed the spots alluded to as probable lurking-places of the fugitive Covenanters. In the subsequent hurry of action they were forgotten, but were afterwards re-produced in his dream.

But my hearers may, perhaps, be weaiy of my attempt to disenchant dreams of their mysterious interest. They may be inclined to ask how I deal with those cases in which an event was vividly and minutely pre-figured to a person hundreds of miles from the spot where it was really occurring, or at a considerable period before it came to pass; such, for instance, as the following, narrated in an old work, "The Itinerary of Mr. Fiennes Morrison."

"Whilst I lived at Prague, and one night had sit up very late drinking at a feast, early in the morning, the sunbeams glancing on my face as I lay in my bed, I dreamed that a shadow passing by told me that my father was dead, at which, awaking all in a sweat, and affected with this dream, I rose, and wrote the day and hour, and all circumstances thereof in a paper-book, which book, with many other things, I put into a barrel, and sent it from Prague to Strode, thence to be conveyed into England. And now being at Nuremberg, a merchant of a noble family well acquainted with me and my friends arrived there, who told me my father died some two months ago. I list not to write any lies; but that which I write is as true as strange. When I returned into England some four years after, I would not open the barrel I sent from Prague, nor look into the paper-book in which I had written this dream, till I had called my sisters and some friends to be witnesses, when myself and they were astonished to see my written dream answer the very day of my father's death."

"I may lawfully swear that which my kinsman hath heard witnessed by my brother Henry whilst he lived, that in my youth at Cambridge I had the like dream of my mother's death, when, my brother Henry living with me, early in the morning I dreamed that my mother passed by with a sad countenance, and told me that she could not come to my commencement, I being within five months to proceed Master of Arts, and she having promised at that time to come to Cambridge; and when I related this dream to my brother, both of us awaking together in a sweat, he protested to me that he had dreamed the very same; and when we had not the least knowledge of our mother's sickness, neither, in our youthful affections, were any whit affected with the strangeness of this dream; yet the next carrier brought us word of our mother's death."

Supposing these narratives to be true, and regarding them for the moment as instances of a kind of revelation, we look for a final cause, but we discern none, unless it be the possibility of some influence on the spiritual condition of the individuals.

A similar difficulty presents itself, when we read of the warnings made through ghosts and dreams of the death of the celebrated or notorious Duke of Buckingham. In fact, as Captain Grose says, "in cases of murder, a ghost, instead of going to the next justice of the peace and laying its information, or to the nearest relation of the person murdered, appears to some poor labourer who knows none of the parties, draws the curtain of some decrepit nurse or almswoman, or hovers about the place where the body is deposited."

Before any such cases are received as true occurrences, it behoves us to apply most rigorously all the tests of evidence; and I hope I shall not be deemed unduly suspicious, if I say that in very few instances can we be satisfied that the relater of the dream, even when wishing to be strictly accurate, has not been deceived by his own mind. When one striking object has been presented to the mind in sleep, it is so easy to imagine others that might have harmonized with it, that the latter may afterwards seem to be remembered as part and parcel of the dream, and may enter into the narrative. Even the subsequent event, the anti-type of the dream, may have attendant circumstances which were not prefigured, but which are unconsciously appropriated by the mind of the dreamer in accordance with that singular propensity, now and then experienced, to imagine that what has really happened to us for the first time, is only the repetition of what has occurred at some previous period. Bertram says in Guy Mannering, "How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new, - nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place." Tou remember, too, Coleridge's expression of the same idea in one of his sonnets: -

"Oft o'er my brain does that strange fancy roll, Which makes the present, while the flash does last, Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past, Mixed with such feelings as perplex the soul Self-questioned in her sleep; and some have said We lived, ere jet this robe of flesh we wore."*

I trust it will not be thought that I have depreciated dreams, by endeavouring to divest them of some of the false interest which has been attached to them. It is right that we should endeavour to view all phenomena in their true aspects; not through the tinted media of human prejudices and misconceptions. We have warrant in Holy Writ for extreme caution, to say the least, in lending a too ready ear to the divinations of dreams; and let us hear what has been said by that orthodox divine, Jeremy Taylor, a name no less cherished by the lovers of English literature than dear to the venerators of the English Church. He is speaking of superstitious fear. "To this may be reduced the observation of dreams, and fears commenced from the fancies of the night; for the superstitious man does not rest even when he sleeps, neither is he safe because dreams usually are false, bat he is afflicted for fear they should tell true. Living and waking men have one world in common; they use the same air and fire, and discourse by the same principles of logic and reason. But men that are asleep, have every one a world to himself, and strange perceptions, and the superstitious hath none at all. His reason sleeps, and his fears are waking, and all his rest, and his very securities, to the fearful man turn into affrights, and insecure expectation of evils that never shall happen. Dreams follow the temper of the body, and commonly proceed from trouble or disease, business or care; an active head and a restless mind: from fear or hope, from wine or passion, from fulness or emptiness, from fantastic remembrances, or from some demon, good or bad; they are without rule and without reason. They are as contingent as if a man should study to make a prophecy; and by saying ten thousand things, may hit upon one true, which was therefore not foreknown, although it was fore-spoken, and they have no certainty because they have no natural causality, - no proportion to those effects which many times they are said to fore-signify."*