The Plinies were undoubtedly two of the ablest and most enlightened men of their time; and the belief in the value of dreams is certainly not extinct among us yet. If we possess Artemidorus's book on the subject for the ancient world, we have also the "Smorfia" of to-day, so dear to the heart of the lotto-playing Neapolitan, which assigns a special number to every conceivable subject that can possibly occur in a dream--not excluding "u murtu che parl'" (the dead man that speaks)--for the guidance of the believing gambler in selecting the numbers he is to play for the week. Plutarch placed great faith in ghosts and visions. In his Life of Dion[28] he notes the singular fact that both Dion and Brutus were warned of their approaching deaths by a frightful spectre. "It has been maintained," he adds, "that no man in his senses ever saw a ghost: that these are the delusive visions of women and children, or of men whose intellects are impaired by some physical infirmity, and who believe that their diseased imaginations are of divine origin. But if Dion and Brutus, men of strong and philosophic minds, whose understandings were not affected by any constitutional infirmity--if such men could place so much faith in the appearance of spectres as to give an account of them to their friends, I see no reason why we should depart from the opinion of the ancients that men had their evil genii, who disturbed them with fears and distressed their virtues ..." In the opening of the _Philopseudus_, Lucian asks what it is that makes men so fond of a lie, and comments on their delight in romancing themselves, which is only equalled by the earnest attention with which they receive other people's efforts in the same direction. Tychiades goes on to describe his visit to Eucrates, a distinguished philosopher, who was ill in bed. With him were a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a doctor, who began to tell stories so absurd and abounding in such monstrous superstition that he ended by leaving them in disgust. None of us have, of course, ever been present at similar gatherings, where, after starting with the inevitable Glamis mystery, everybody in the room has set to work to outdo his neighbour in marvellous yarns, drawing on his imagination for additional material, and, like Eucrates, being ready to stake the lives of his children on his veracity.