with bad consequences to Mr R- -d; whose health and spirits were afterwards impaired, by the attention which he thought himself obliged to pay to the visions of the night.” This result is a melancholy proof of the effect sometimes produced by ignorance of natural laws. Had Mr R- -d been acquainted with the nature of the brain, and of the manner in which it is affected in sleep, the circumstance above related would have given him no annoyance. He would have traced the whole chain of events to their true source; but being ignorant of this, he became the victim of superstition, and his life was rendered miserable.

FUNDACIÓN SIMARRO

BIQUATTER

MADRID

CHAPTER V.

NIGHT.MARE.

NIGHT-MARE may be defined a painful dream, accompanied with difficult respiratory action, and a torpor in the powers of volition. The reflecting organs are generally more or less awake; and, in this respect, night-mare differs from simple dreaming, where they are mostly quiescent.

This affection, the EPHIALTES of the Greeks, and INCUBUS of the Romans, is one of the most distressing to which human nature is subject. Imagination cannot conceive the horrors it frequently gives rise to, or language describe them in adequate terms. They are a thousand times more frightful than the Visions conjured up by necromancy or diablerie;

and far transcend every thing in history or romance, from the fable of the writhing and asp-encircled Laocoon to Dante's appalling picture of Ugolino and his famished offspring, or the hidden tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. The whole mind, during the paroxysm, is wrought up to a pitch of unutterable despair: a spell is laid upon the faculties, which freezes them into inaction; and the wretched victim feels as if pent alive in his coffin, or overpowered by resistless and immitigable pres

sure.

The modifications which night-mare assumes are infinite; but one passion is almost never absent that of utter and incomprehensible dread. Sometimes the sufferer is buried beneath overwhelming rocks, which crush him. on all sides, but still leave him with a miserable consciousness of his situation. Sometimes he is involved in the coils of a horrid, slimy monster, whose eyes have the phosphorescent glare of the sepulchre, and whose breath is poisonous as the marsh of Lerna. Every thing horrible, disgusting, or terrific in the physical or moral world, is brought before

him in fearful array; he is hissed at by serpents, tortured by demons, stunned by the hollow voices and cold touch of apparitions. A mighty stone is laid upon his breast, and erushes him to the ground in helpless agony: mad bulls and tigers pursue his palsied footsteps: the unearthly shrieks and gibberish of hags, witches, and fiends float around him. In whatever situation he may be placed, he feels superlatively wretched; he is Ixion working for ages at his wheel: he is Sisyphus rolling his eternal stone: he is stretched upon the iron bed of Procrustes: he is prostrated by inevitable destiny beneath the approaching wheels of the car of Juggernaut. At one ment, he may have the consciousness of a malignant demon being at his side: then, to shun the sight of so appalling an object, he will close his eyes, but still the fearful being makes its presence known; for its icy breath is felt diffusing itself over his visage, and he knows that he is face to face with a fiend. Then, if he look up, he beholds horrid eyes glaring upon him, and an aspect of hell grinning at him with even more than hellish

mo

malice. Or, he may have the idea of a monstrous hag squatted upon his breast-mute, motionless, and malignant; an incarnation of the Evil Spirit—whose intolerable weight crushes the breath out of his body, and whose fixed, deadly incessant stare petrifies him with horror and makes his very existence insufferable.

In every instance, there is a sense of oppression and helplessness; and the extent to which these are carried, varies according to the violence of the paroxysm, The individual never feels himself a free agent; on the contrary, he is spell-bound by some enchantment, and remains an unresisting victim for malice to work its will upon. He can neither breathe, nor walk, nor run with his wonted facility. If pursued by any imminent danger, he can hardly drag one limb after another; if engaged in combat, his blows are utterly ineffective; if involved in the fangs of any animal, or in the grasp of an enemy, extrication is impossible. He struggles, he pants, he toils, but it is all in vain: his muscles are rebels to the will, and refuse to obey its calls. In no case is there a