“When you begin to turn in bed, its time to turn out,” says the old Duke; and we believe his practice has been in accordance with his precept. Literary men--among whom, as Bulwer says, a certain indolence seems almost constitutional--are not so clear upon this point: they are divided between Night and Morning, though the best authorities seem in favor of the latter. Early rising is the best _elixir vitæ_: it is the only lengthener of life that man has ever devised. By its aid the great Buffon was able to spend half a century--an ordinary lifetime--at his desk; and yet had time to be the most modish of all the philosophers who then graced the gay metropolis of France. Sleep is a treasure and a pleasure; and, as you love it, guard 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 splendor of day. It is a strange result of civilization! It is not merely occasioned by that thirst for varied amusement which characterizes 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 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 splendors, and seducing glitter, we should convert that pagan devil ere half his work was done.