As to the Muses, we know well that Sleep has been their favourite theme for ages. With the exception of Catullus (whose verses have been greatly over-rated, and who is always talking of people lying awake at night), all the ancients have mentioned and praised this innocent pastime. Everyone who has done Greats will remember the beautiful passage in Lucretius,[29] but perhaps that in Sidonius Apollinaris, the highly polished Bishop of Gaul, is less well known.[30] To turn to our own literature, the sonnet beginning “To die, to sleep,” etc.,[31] must be noted, and above all, the glorious lines in which Wordsworth reaches his noblest level, beginning-- “It is a pleasant thing to go to sleep!” lines which, for my part, I can never read without catching some of their magical drowsy influence.[32] All great men have slept. George III. frequently slept,[33] and that great and good man Wycliffe was in the habit of reading his Scriptural translations and his own sermons nightly to produce the desired effect.[34] The Duke of Wellington (whom my father used to call “The Iron Duke”) slept on a little bedstead no larger than a common man’s. As for the various positions in which one may sleep, I treat of them in my little book of Latin Prose for Schools, which is coming out next year.[35] VI. Lambkin’s Advice to Freshmen Mr. Lambkin possessed among other great and gracious qualities the habit of writing to his nephew, Thomas Ezekiel Lambkin,[36] who entered the college as an undergraduate when his uncle was some four years a Fellow. Of many such communications he valued especially this which I print below, on account of the curious and pathetic circumstances which surrounded it. Some months after Thomas had been given his two groups and had left the University, Mr. Lambkin was looking over some books in a second-hand book shop--not with the intention of purchasing so much as to improve the mind. It was a favourite habit of his, and as he was deeply engaged in a powerful romance written under the pseudonym of “Marie Corelli”[37] there dropped from its pages the letter which he had sent so many years before. It lay in its original envelope unopened, and on turning to the flyleaf he saw the name of his nephew written. It had once been his! The boy had so treasured the little missive as to place it in his favourite book! Lambkin was so justly touched by the incident as to purchase the volume, asking that the price might be entered to his account, which was not then of any long standing. The letter he docketed “to be published after my death.” And I obey the wishes of my revered friend: “MY DEAR THOMAS, “Here you are at last in Oxford, and at Burford, ‘a Burford Man.’ How proud your mother must be and even your father, whom I well remember saying that ‘if he were not an accountant, he would rather be a Fellow of Burford than anything else on earth.’ But it was not to be.