required two days to consult his familiar; at the end of which time he informed his employers, that at twelve o'clock at midnight, they would find the fowls" under the muckle thornbush i' the stackyard." One of the servants was to be at the thorn-bush, exactly ten minutes before the hour appointed, but neither sooner nor latter. He accordingly went as Samuel had directed. As the clock struck twelve the bush began to shake, and in a moment, the fowls, falling from branch to branch, came tumbling down upon poor David's head, who, thinking himself embraced by the Devil, had scarcely strength remain ing to run and publish the miracle to the inmates of the house, who were little less surprised at the relation than David was at the adventure, for he swore the devil was in the bush, and that not such a thing as a fowl was to be seen; he felt his prodigious wings flap in his face, and saw his long horns, and his cloven feet; what he saw, in short, amounted to a complete description of Old Nick! Though the fowls were found next day, scattered under the bush, David could scarcely convince himself of his mistake. This trick of Samuel's, however, proved fatal to his long established fame. The cord by which the fowls had been suspended over a branch of the thorn-tree, and which reached to an adjoining stack of corn, from which, by frequent tugs, he made them and the bush to shake as before described, was broken at the wrong place, and a considerable part of it found attached to the thorn, so that his master soon suspected the stratagem; but without revealing to his more credulous servants, who never once doubted of the whole affair's being a miracle, what his opinion of the matter was, he resolved to have the like experiment tried again. The result was, that poor Samuel was found at his post behind the stack, tugging at the cord with perfect composure and gravity. When he saw that he was likely to be discovered, he poured forth a long string of frightful imprecations, declaring that he was the devil in Samuel's shape, and conjured those who surrounded him not to touch him, otherwise he would in a moment consume them, with a "flauchter o' brunstane." The mas

ter being less "bogle-rad" than his servants, (who, believing in all that Samuel said, promptly refused to meddle with him,) seized the wizard, and chastised him off hand with a sound thrashing, and a refreshing bath in the ducks' mire. It was not, however, till a day or two after, that his pretended witchcraft was discovered to be, what it had all along been, ingenious knavery. Some circumstances had transpired which excited suspicions that all his divinations were accomplished by similar tricks; and, accordingly, searching his house, nearly all the goods and chattels which had been lost in the neighbourhood for the preceding ten years, save such as had been discovered to the owners for certain rewards, were found safely deposited in Samuel's secret coffers. Thus he and his agents first stole the goods, and then, for a sum of money, restored them by supernatural means, to those from whom they had pilfered them.

It is curious to remark the changes that are made upon a simple story, such as this, almost every time it is related, for the devout faith which is reposed, by the rustic narrator, in its authenticity, generally leads him a step farther than even his information warrants him to go, and in this manner, the story passing from one mouth to another usually in the course of no great number of relations, assumes quite a different character from that in which it was first told, every narrator embellishing it with whatever his own ideas, tinged with so much superstitious prejudice suggest, and carefully withholding every thing which may tend to excite doubts as to the reality of supernatural agency having been employed. It is in this manner that the greater number of those extravagant stories about wizards and witches, which had their origin in former ages, have arisen from no less simple circumstances than those of the last related story, though they have been magnified, by oral tradition, into the frightful shapes in which they are now presented to us.

Thus, having given you as much about the ancient and modern witches of Tiviotdale as I conceive will partially illustrate the relative superstitions, I shall bid adieu to the subject, reserving to my next communication

MR EDITOR, THERE is a certain country gentle man spoken of in the Spectator, if my recollection serve me justly, who raises money by inveterate slumbers, and who givesout in a steady advertisement that he "intends to sleep next at the Cock and Bottle;" inviting all curious people, at so much per head, to come and see him in his trance. I am so far like this worthy somnulent, that I now advise your readers I purpose aleeping this month in the columns of your Magazine, and request a gerer ous public at 2s. per head to read my dreams. I confess that since I encountered Boswell in a vision, I have taken but profitless naps, and have rarely manufactured an interest ing sentence, or wandered into a page of speculation. In vain have I tried to drug myself into a literary slumber, or to go to sleep with music in my ears for the sake of poetical visions. Laudanum would not turn a periodopiates could not catch a single metaphor,-the dying falls of music fell dead on my benumbed and senseless senses, and there seemed no sleep in

ine.

I have, however, Mr Editor, at length had a sleep, with a valuable kernel of a dream in it; and as I know how much you prize the marvels of my pillow, I have carefully written down the "full, true, and particular account," and sent it you on the instant, so that, like its Newgate namesake, it may be printed, purchased, and read, almost before it has been conceived or uttered. It is curious on a black Monday to find about the obscure streets of the west end of the town, that a moody moral has been wrenched out of a malefactor's mouth, and his untimely end and mournful confessions recorded long before he has had his irons knocked

off. The freedom of the press is proverbial, and wood-cuts of suspended mortality are ready, to any number, at the shortest notice. There dangles a set of indistinct bodies on broken ropes, in all the rude grandeur of bad engraving, bad ink, and bad paper. But I am straying from my subject; or, to speak in fitting language, walking in my sleep.

Perhaps it may not be amiss to tell you, Mr Editor, the cause of the poetical turn my dreaming mind has taken, as it certainly involves in it a few interesting particulars of certain public men, which may amuse many of your readers.

I am in the habit of seeking the society of literary people, and of noting their peculiarities of thought, manner, and person, with all the strength of observation I can command. I love to see one of the modern poets, celebrated in the Reviews and Ladies' schools for tender verses, fairly imprisoned in a circle of learned female critics, and beset by the sounds of many tongues, and exposed to the ogles of poetical old eyes, which roll before him as disrelishingly as peas grey with age, and dimmed with the

lateness of the season." While Mrs

asks him with a whisper whether he has read Don Juan, and whe ther, with all its wickedness, it is not

a lovely poem;"-he, in a worse condition than the ladye Eve, has a second gentle toad pouring its flattery and its slimy criticism in at his other ear:-being the while in a mental sleep between each, and lost in indistinct dreams of poetry, old gentlewomen, and tea.

I have been tolerably fortunate in encountering most of our popular authors, at seasons like to this; not that I have ever seen them together in a body, like a complete set of Mrs Barbauld's novelists, or Chalmers's English poets; but I have at one time met the worthy banker, whe versified the pleasures of memory, at one house, and sat down with Childe Harold to a vegetable dinner at another. I have heard, and thrilled while I hear the round and rolling periods come from the mouth of the celebrated metaphysician and poet of the age, as from an ocean cavern,grand-deep-eternal; or as from the sea itself. "He, of the pet lamb," has been before my eyes, more than

once with his solemn visage and more solemn discourse; not only in a room, but in Mr Haydon's " great picture," though in the latter he differs from that which he is in the former,-being there bowed down with humility. He finds sermons in every thing Nevertheless, he is a great personage," and would be greater, if he did not think himself the greatest. The writer of John Woodvil I have known well, and commend me to him for the vigour of his judgment, the nicety of his taste, and the fine severity of his wit. He cuts with his tongue the tumours of men's minds. His discourse amongst that of other men "sticks fiery off indeed." He is a bright little man, the stiletto of conversation.

I remember sitting in the same box with Mr Moore at Covent Garden Theatre, on an evening when John Kemble played Zanga in Dr Young's Tragic Sermon upon Revenge. It was just before the publication of Lallah Rookh, when all London was on tiptoe to catch the first flutter of those Arabian leaves, and when the west end of the town stood peeping with an anxious eye (as Justice Metaphor would say) in at the dusty windows and dim warehouse of Messrs Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, to watch the progress towards publication of the Tales of the East. I remember the evening well, for I had rude curiosity enough to listen to the remarks he made to his ladyfriends, and to note his " ways of pleasantness." He will remember Zanga: I saw one who reminded me more of the East; and I remember little of Zanga. His eyes sparkle in his head like two good things, and his heart seems dancing to the music of its own feelings.

I have seen Mr Campbell at the Royal Society's House, lecturing in mid-day, on poetry, to powdered heads, clouded canes, extensive bonnets, and flowered pelisses. His intelligent countenance, and slight Scottish accent, gave an interest to his readings from the poets, which I cannot describe; but the time of day was as unfit for poetry in a room, as King John has declared it to be for the deeper accomplishment of murder. Enthusiasm cannot stand a glaring sun through a skylight,-nor are its nerves assured by the gentle crea

tions of applause, rising lightly from French gloves and green benches. Poetical enthusiasm must hide itself in woods and solitudes by day. It abhors Albemarle Street. The only passage of Mr Campbell's Lecture that seemed to stir the hearts of his audience, in good truth, was his description of his first sight of the Apollo Belvidere in the Louvre at Paris. It told upon the fashionables before him, because they had all seen, in the common course of their life, the statue as he described it, and they now flattered themselves with believing that they had contemplated it with the same poetical idolatry and dreaming wonder of which he spake. The allusion was to a figure in France, where they themselves had often cut one, and that was enough. It was of Apollo, and they believed him to be a god and a gentleman. There was a flutter amongst the ribbons and silks, as though an unexpected gust of poetry had passed through them; and the old gentlemen tapped the floor with livelier canes, and nodded approval with heads of thrice brights ened powder.

I

I fear, Mr Editor, I am rather straying from my subject, but it is almost impossible to speak of the

great men of the age, without be coming garrulous and fond over the recollections that attend them. They rise on the memory with attendant lights-I revel in the recollections of many authors. In short, there are few of the modern writers whom I have not seen, at some time or others And it is my constant custommas much so as the senior Mr Hamlet's habit of taking an afternoon's nap un der the golden pippin and black cherry trees in his orchard at Den mark, to write in a ruled common-l place-book (of a reasonable size, neatly bound, ordered after the method of the great Mr Locke, to be had of two worthy booksellers, yclept Taylor and Hessey, 93, Fleet Street, price only. 12s.) my observations of the day, particularly of the literary gentlemen whom it is in my good fortune to encounter,-not omitting the cut of their clothes, or the colours of their conversation. I am thus enabled to refresh myself on a wet afternoon, or a chilly Sunday morning, with pay ing a visit to Mr Rogers, indulging in the amiable and benevolent res

imaginations. If his. early hopes, from their very ardour, have been broken and frustrated, still the memory of those hopes sheds a melancholy thoughtfulness over his mind, and over his countenance, which awakens in others a fellow pensiveness. He is the first prose writer of the age, and yet of manners simple and modest as a child. The world, by repeated blows, has stricken him into patience. He has learned to endure, in a hard school. His keen, yet serious face, encircled by its raven hair, has all the intellect and quiet power of one of Titian's portraits. His prose is lionhearted, and lion-sinewed. His style of writing, however, it must be confessed, is very superior to his style of shaking hands. The first is all eager ness, intensity, and vigour; the last is cold, tame, and indecisive. He appears to abandon a bunch of melancholy fingers to your threatened squeeze, with some hope of their not coming to a shake. His hand strikes you as doubly chill, from its taking no interest in the ardour and nerve of your own. It swoons away. It appears to have something on its mind, or to be of an absent disposition. If Isaac Walton had received such a hand in the way of salutation at twilight after a day's hard fishing, he would have thought some wag had greeted him with four gudgeons and a Miller's Thumb. I wish he would palpably confirm his grasp" in future, that my own paw may not be disconcerted or lured into the same lifeless habits. But what has this to do with his strong and impressive writ ings? Nothing. Only I find it recorded in my observant book, and therefore I cannot choose but remember it. He is a good hearted man, as well as a fine minded one,-good hearted still, in spite of rude usage, and the despoiled poetry of his youthful hopes. May he yet see a happy sunset after all the boisterous gustiness of his morning! *

It is a curious fact, that the Indicator (a very clever little periodical work) has written a paper on the "shakings of the hand," and even remarked upon the very individual of whom I have spoken, This is a curious coincidence. 1 did not see it till long after my own observations were written; and I only notice it now, for the sake of declaring, at the same time, that I am innocent of all literary theft.

Having thus stated to you the wonders of my matchless common-placebook, I come to the dream of which I spoke to you at the opening of this paper. I stated that I would account for the poetical colours which illuminated it, which I shall proceed at once to do, previous to giving a detail of the dream itself.

I was detained at home the other evening by the harassing showers which at this season of the year fall, as if purposely, at all pleasurable or leisure hours; and being alone in the front of a grate, which, in Spring's despite, clutched its little bars full of bright and burning coals, I took out my book of literary treasures, drew the sofa in front of the fire, married the two bolsters together under my head, and plunged heart and soul into the innermost recesses of the volume's leafed chambers, I read, and read, and read, and my eyes became more and more enamoured of their food. I laughed, and revelled, and loved with Moore, and heard his voice again and again. I attended Mr Campbell's lecture, listened to his readings from Homer, and caught with attentive ear his minute criticisms on the Hebrew writers. Hours chased each other with unnoticed rapidity, and still I turned untired to a new page, and read on. The shades of evening now darkened through my window panes, and threw an indistinctness over my book. Still I read on, teazing with earnest eyes the passages from the page, till they were so lost in shade as to baffle all further reading. But even yet my mind's appetite had grown so by what it fed on, that it supplied imaginary food to the eyes, and I therefore still appeared to read on. From this state, (and I know not how long I remained in it,) you will acknowledge that the transition to sleeping and dreaming was natural enough. I know not how I passed to sleep, but my eyes closed in the twilight, and as the evening deepened, I became involved in a romantic and wondrous vision. It was but the poetry of my waking thoughts; it was imagination snatching the flowers from the hand of memory, and weaving them into a strange and fantastic garland.

I can scarcely describe to you the sweetness of the blooming plants which grew around me in my dream,