These sleep-talkings are sometimes the mere lispings of an idiot; although Astrophel, perchance, may contend that the following, written down from the lips of a servant-maid, is a proof of special inspiration, converting a rustic girl into an improvisatrice. “You may go home and wash your hose, And wipe the dew-drops from your nose, And mock no maiden here. For you tread down grass, and need not; Wear your shoes, and speed not, And clout leather’s very dear; But I need not care, for my sweetheart Is a cobbler.” I have heard this trash cited as a proof of facility of composition in slumber. You do not believe it such; like other specimens, it was a ruse of a wanton girl to excite admiration. In the magnetic somnambulism of Elizabeth Okey, that cunning little wench, who was the _prima buffa_ of the magnetic farces enacted at the North London Hospital, would often skip about and sing snatches of equal elegance: “I went into a tailor’s shop To buy a suit of clothes; But where the money came from, G—— Almighty knows.” These are indeed the very burlesque of somniloquence. And yet Okey _was_ an invalid, and presumed on the credulity of those who ministered to her. True somniloquence is often preceded by a cataleptic state; and in girls like this, the senses are often so dull, that the firing of a pistol close to the ear does not rouse them, until the poetic fit is over. CAST. Were sleep-talking more common, it would indeed be a very dangerous propensity. If the confessor were to prate in his sleep of the peccadilloes of the fair penitents that kneel at his confessional; if the minister on his couch were to divulge his state secrets or his fine political schemes; where would be the tranquillity of domestic or national society? Yet the lips of the love-sick maiden have not seldom whispered in sleep her bosom’s secret; and sometimes the unconscious tongue has awfully betrayed even the blood-stain on the hand. Thus did the ill-mated Parisina of Byron: “Fever’d in her sleep she seems, And red her cheek with troubled dreams; And mutters she, in her unrest, A name she dare not breathe by day.” The fate of Eugene Aram, I believe, may be imputed to such an unfortunate propensity; and in Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” was confessed her participation in the murder of Duncan and the grooms. Somewhat like this, too, was the half-sleeping exclamation of Jarvis Matcham, after he had committed the murder of the drummer boy. Starting from his bed, when roused by the waiter, his first words were: “My God! I did not kill him.”