and the slimy creatures of the deep came forth, with their large rayless eyes, howling and staring. I was left alone by the side of the hungry advancing ocean. I was washed down and overwhelmed,-stifled, destroyed. Then came changes upon me of shape and of spirit. I was a beast hunted and driven to death. I have been trod down with the worms. I have been a bird maimed and torn to pieces by hounds and eagles :-or I have been a murderer and a tyrant, without feeling, or happiness, or remorse: pleasure and pain fled me, like the waters from the lip of Tantalus; and the cold marble apathy which followed, like a palsy of the soul, was worse and more frightful than all."

The dream is in equally fine poetic feeling, and the impression made upon a sensitive mind, by reflections on the unhappy end of a great and estimable man, is pathetically touching, and shows the force of imagination in its strongest colours-" But," (says the ingenious writer) "I repeat, it is in vain that I try to paint and make visible these horrors to you. They existed only in my imagination:— My imagination! Why, that is as real as the sun, as light, or sound, or substance: it is an integral part of our nature, like a taste or a touch. And yet men will tell you in common speech that all this was 'nothing,' but merely fancy.' What then is death? Is that a fancy? or is it A sleep and a forgetting?"

or what? That ditch which is to grave us all,'-that chasm between the past' and the to come,' which all

dread to overstep, because no one knows its breadth or its soundings,-what is it?-Oh! that we could exorcise(still I dare to say this)—that we could exorcise the dead, and call up whomsoever we chose, pale poet or grave-eyed philosopher, to answer us! But they are lying cold, with the riddle perhaps still unsolved; or, if known to them, their joints cannot yet relax and bear them hither again to startle either our admiration or despair. The companions of Plato are gone, and the men of yesterday

'That in

The morning promised many years; but Death

Hath in few hours made them as stiff, as all

The winds and winter had thrown cold upon them,
And whisper'd them to marble.""

The Visionary is a being of another world, whose mind is at times filled with the most delightful prospects that a lively imagination can invent: one moment he is all hilarity, and wit, and sparkling brilliancy; or he is sunken into the lowest depths of despondency-dull, spiritless, woe begone, chimerical, and terrified. There is no medium in his composition; he is on the very pinnacle of happiness, all life, and gaiety, and good-humour; or he is lost in a labyrinth of gloomy thoughtfulness,-morose, sullen, and discontented

"Great wits to madmen nearly are allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide."

THE RANTIPOLES, OR ALTIDUDES.

"Their conduct, like a sick man's dreams,
Is form'd of vanity and whims."

The Rantipoles are not so frequent as many other species of the hyp; but they are equally common to the feminine as well as to the masculine gender. The Hon. Mrs. Whimzy is at times dreadfully afflicted with this species of the disease. The symptoms are-cloudy looks, swelled cheeks, red eyes, with an occasional hysteric affection, a fainting fit, or a flood of tears for no visible reason in the world; or sometimes it will burst into a storm of words and actions the most preposterous, till it destroys itself by its own violence. The face of the ocean is not more variable than her temper, nor half so boisterous. You will find her in ten thousand minds in a day's time, and all in extremes. If she is in mirthful mood, it will be on the high rant, a sort of laughing madness, overpowering and turbulent, but with some little wit and a great deal of vivacity. If, on the contrary, she is in one of her rantipole humours, the tempest rages against all who may come in her way; servants, friends, husband, house, and all will be borne down by her furious transports. Nothing in nature can be conceived more extravagant than a display of this species of the distemper, and

rakish

yet there is nothing more common. All your young
fellows, and old ones too, who commit ten thousand
eccentricities, because it is their humour, are more or less
affected with this distemper. The world abounds with
examples, not only of mad wild fellows whose lives are
nothing but rant and rattle, as if they were born in a hur-
ricane, but of men of more advanced years, chiefly of
figure and fortune, whose lives are distinguished by the
high freak, till the heat of the blood boils over, when they
sink into the most humorsome hyppish creatures in the
world.

"Stretch'd on his back a mighty lubbard lay
Heaving his sides"-

A son of Spleen, in hypochondriac fit,
Struggling with fumes of indigested food,
Who feels, or fancies, by repletion bred,
All the diseases that the spitals know.