“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep; Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast,⸺’ _Lady M._ What do you mean? _Macb._ Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep; and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!’” How sleeps Lady Macbeth after that night? Ask her physician and waiting-woman, and watch with them the sleep-walking scene. “To bed, to bed, to bed.” But what avails _that_ to the somnambulist, ever in semblance washing her hands, and complaining of the smell of blood upon them still, and that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten them? Now and then one meets with a sceptic as to lost sleep being the inevitable sequent upon crime; and no doubt there are exceptions. Mr. G. Wingrove Cooke, in his letters from Chinese waters, thus describes the captive Mandarin, Yeh, whose fellow-passenger to Calcutta he was: “He goes to bed at eight o’clock, and while we are reading or writing or playing chess, he sleeps the sleep of infancy—an unbroken slumber, apparently undisturbed by visions of widowed women and wailing orphans. This man-killer, after slaying his hundred thousand human beings, enjoys sweeter sleep than an innocent London alderman after a turtle dinner.” Perhaps that is not saying much,—considering what a turtle dinner comprehends and superinduces. But the next sentence says a good deal; it is to be hoped, a great deal too much: “So false are traditions; so false are the remorseful scenes of Greek and English tragedies.” One would be sorry, for the dignity of human nature, to believe that all is fiction the poets tell us of cases in which _non avium citharæque cantus_, or any other aids and appliances, _somnum reducent_. “Wherefore to me,” asks Clytemnestra,— ... “is solacing sleep denied? And honourable rest, the right of all? So that no medicine of the slumbrous shell, Brimmed with divinest draughts of melody, Nor silence under dreamful canopies, Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch, May lull this fever for a little while.” Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more.” Her spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to that sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in one of Landor’s fragments,— “It wakes me many mornings, many nights, And fields of poppies could not quiet it.”