Homer personifies a dualism of “Sleep and Death, two twins of wingèd race, of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace;” and he makes the friends of Sarpedon “his sacred corse bequeath to the soft arms of silent Sleep and Death.” He pictures Aphrodite speeding to Lemnos o’er the rolling deep, to “seek the cave of Death’s half-brother, Sleep.” The dying Gorgias, we are told, being in a slumber, and asked how he did, answered, “Pretty well; only Sleep is commending me to the charge of his brother.” Samuel Daniel apostrophizes “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, brother to Death, in silent darkness born;” and so too, Beaumont and Fletcher apostrophize him in almost the selfsame words. So again their contemporary, John Webster, “O thou soft natural Death, that art joint twin to sweetest slumber!” Cowley’s ode _in memoriam_ of William Harvey, begins with sombre commemoration of a dismal and a fearful night, “when sleep, death’s image, left his troubled breast, by something liker death possest.” And the last verse of Denham’s “Song to Morpheus” identifies the twins,—practically makes a hendiadys of them, as grammarians might call it: “Sleep, that is thy best repast, Yet of death it bears a taste, And both are the same thing at last.” Warton’s Latin epigram on sleep, as _certissima mortis imago_, has been Englished by Wolcot with a beauty and felicity pronounced by critics to be worthy of the original: “Come, gentle sleep! attend thy votary’s prayer; And, though death’s image to my couch repair, How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie, And, without dying, O how sweet to die!”