O, then I see, Queen Mab has been with you. She is the fancy's midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the fore-finger of an Alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies, Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film; Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm, Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid. Her chariot is an empty hazel nut, Made by the joiner squirril, old grub, Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers: And in this state she gallops night by night, Thro' lovers' brains, and then they dream of love; On courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies strait; O'er lawyers' fingers, who strait dream on fees; O'er ladies lips, who strait on kisses dream, Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plague, Because their breath with sweetmeats tainted are. Sometimes she gallops o'er a lawyer's nose, And then dreams he of smelling out a suit, And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig tail, Tickling the parson as he lies asleep; Then dreams he of another benefice; Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck And then he dreams of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscades, Spanish blades, Of healths fire fathom deep; and then anon Drums in his ears, at which he starts and wakes, And being thus frighted, swears a pray'r or two, And sleeps again. Lucretius, and Petronius in his poem on the vanity of dreams, had preceded our immortal bard in a description of the effects of dreams on different kinds of persons. Both the passages here alluded to, only serve to shew the vast superiority of Shakspeare's boundless genius: their sense is thus admirably expressed by Stepney: At dead of night imperial reason sleeps, And fancy with her train, her revels keeps; Then airy phantoms a mix'd scene display, Of what we heard, or saw, or wish'd by day; For memory those images retains Which passion form'd, and still the strongest reigns. Huntsmen renew the chase they lately run, And generals fight again their battles won. Spectres and fairies haunt the murderer's dreams; Grants and disgraces are the courtier's themes. The miser spies a thief, or a new hoard; The cit's a knight; the sycophant a lord, Thus fancy's in the wild distraction lost, With what we most abhor, or covet most. Honours and state before this phantom fall; For sleep, like death, its image, equals all. Chaucer in his tale of the Cock and Fox, has a fine description, thus versified by Dryden:--