Robespierre could not carry through so
stupendous a revolution. Nothing less than
an avatar of Siva the Destroyer—Siva with
his hundred arms, turning off as many
gas-pipes, and replenishing his necklace of human
skulls by decapitating the leading conservatives
—could have any chance of success; and,
ten to one, with our gassy splendours, and
seducing glitter, we should convert that pagan
devil ere half his work was done.

But of all the inventions which perverse
ingenuity has sought out, the most
incongruous, the most heretical against both nature
and art, is Reading in Bed. Turning rest into
labour, learning into ridicule. A man had
better be up. He is spoiling two most excellent
things by attempting to join them. Study and
sleep—how incongruous! It is an idle coupling
of opposites, and shocks a sensible man as much
as if he were to meet in the woods the
apparition of a winged elephant. Only fancy an
elderly or middle-aged man (for youth is
generally orthodox on this point,) sitting up
in bed, spectacles on his nose, a Kilmarnock
on his head, and his flannel jacket round his
shivering shoulders,—doing what? Reading?
It may be so—but he winks so often, possibly
from the glare of the candle, and the glasses
now and then slip so far down on his nose, and
his hand now and then holds the volume so
unsteadily, that if he himself didn't assure us
to the contrary, we should suppose him half
asleep. We are sure it must be a great
relief to him when the neglected book at last
tumbles out of bed, to such a distance that
he cannot recover it.

Nevertheless, we have heard this
extra-ordinary custom excused on the no less
extra-ordinary ground of its being a soporific.
For those who require such things, Marryat
gives a much simpler recipe—namely, to
mentally repeat any scraps of poetry you can
recollect; if your own, so much the better.
The monks of old, in a similar emergency,
used to repeat the seven Penitential Psalms.
Either of these plans, we doubt not, will be
found equally efficacious, if one is able to use
them—if anxiety of mind does not divert him
from his task, or the lassitude of illness
disable him for attempting it. Sleep, alas! is at
times tickle and coy; and, like most sublunary
friends, forsakes us when most wanted. Reading
in that repertory of many curious things,
the "Book of the Farm," we one day met
with the statement that " a pillow of hops
will ensure sleep to a patient in a delirious
fever when every other expedient fails." We
made a note of it. Heaven forbid that the
recipe should ever be needed for us or ours!
but the words struck a chord of sympathy in
our heart with such poor sufferers, and we
saddened with the dread of that awful visitation.
The fever of delirium! when incoherent
words wander on the lips of genius; when
the sufferer stares strangely and vacantly on
his ministering friends, or starts with freezing
horror from the arms of familiar love! Ah!
what a dread tenant has the dormitory then.
No food taken for the body, no sleep for the
brain! a human being surging with diabolic
strength against his keepers—a human frame
gifted with superhuman vigour only the more
rapidly to destroy itself! Less fearful to the
eye, but more harrowing to the soul, is the
dormitory whose walls enclose the sleepless
victim of Remorse. No poppies or
mandragora for him! His malady ends only
with the fever of life. Ends? Grief,
anxiety, " the thousand several ills that flesh
is heir to," pass away before, the lapse of
time or the soothings of love, and sleep once
more folds its dove-like wings above the
couch.

"If there be a regal solitude," says Charles
Lamb, " it is a bed. How the patient lords it
there; what caprices he acts without control!
How king-like he sways his pillow,—tumbling
and tossing, and shifting and lowering, and
thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the
ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing
temples. He changes sides oftener than a
politician. Now he lies full-length, then half-
length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet
quite across the bed; and none accuses him of
tergiversation. Within the four curtains he
is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a
man's self to himself! He is his own exclusive
object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated on
him as his only duty. 'Tis the two Tables of
the Law to him. He has nothing to think of
but how to get well. What passes out of doors
or within them, so he hear not the jarring
of them, affects him not."

In this climate a sight of the sun is prized;
but we love to see it most from bed.
A dormitory fronting the east, therefore, so
that the early sunbeams may rouse us to the
dewy beauties of morning, we love. Let there
also be festooned roses without the window,
that on opening it the perfume may pervade
the realms of bed. Our night-bower should
be simple—neat as a fairy's cell, and ever
perfumed with the sweet air of heaven. It
is not a place for showy things, or costly. As
fire is the presiding genius in other rooms, so
let water, symbol of purity, be in the ascendant
here; water, fresh and unturbid as the
thoughts that here make their home—water,
to wash away the dust and sweat of a weary
world. Let no fracas disturb the quiet of the
dormitory. We go there for repose. Our
tasks and our cares are left outside, only to be
put on again with our hat and shoes in the
morning. It is an asylum from the bustle of
life—it is the inner shrine of our household
gods—and should be respected accordingly.
We never entered during the ordinary process
of bed-making pillows tossed here, blankets
and sheets pitched hither and thither in
wildest confusion, chairs and pitchers in the
middle of the floor, feathers and dust everywhere
—without a jarring sense that sacrilege
was going on, and that the genius loci had