Sleep is a treasure and a pleasure; and, as you love it, guide it warily. Over-indulgence is ever suicidal, and destroys the pleasure it means to gratify. The natural times for our lying down and rising up are plain enough. Nature teaches us, and unsophisticated mankind followed her. Singing birds and opening flowers hail the sunrise, and the hush of groves and the closed eyelids of the parterre mark his setting. But “man hath sought out many inventions.” We prolong our days into the depths of night, and our nights into the splendour of day. It is a strange result of civilisation! It is not merely occasioned by that thirst for varied amusement which characterises an advanced stage of society—it is not that theatres, balls, dancing, masquerades, require an artificial light, for all these are or have been equally enjoyed elsewhere beneath the eye of day. What _is_ the cause, we really are not philosopher enough to say; but the prevalence of the habit must have given no little pungency to honest Benjamin Franklin’s joke, when, one summer, he announced to the Parisians as a great discovery—that the sun rose each morning at four o’clock; and that, whereas, they burnt no end of candles by sitting up at night, they might rise in the morning and have light for nothing. Franklin’s “discovery,” we dare say, produced a laugh at the time, and things went on as before. Indeed so universal is this artificial division of day and night, and so interwoven with it are the social habits, that we shudder at the very idea of returning to the natural order of things. A 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 gaspipes, 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.