“God gave sleep to the bad,” said Sadi, “in order that the good might be undisturbed.” Yet to good and bad sleep is alike necessary. During the hours of wakefulness the active brain exerts its powers without cessation or rest, and during sleep the expenditure of power is balanced again by repose. The physical energies are exhausted by labour, as by wakefulness are those of the mind; and if sleep comes not to reinvigorate the mental powers, the overtaxed brain gives way, and lapses into melancholy and madness. Men deprived of rest, as a sentence of death, have gone from the world raving maniacs; and violent emotions of the mind, without repose, have so acted upon the body, that, as in the case of Marie Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, and others, their hair has grown white in a single night— “As men’s have grown from sudden fears.”[2] Mind and body alike suffer from the want of sleep, the spirit is broken, and the fire of the ardent imagination quenched. Who can wonder that when disease or pain has racked and tortured the frame, and prevented a subsidence into a state so natural and necessary to man, he should have resorted to the aid of drugs and potions, whereby to lull his pains, and dispel the care which has banished repose, and woo back again— “the certain knot of peace, The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe; The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.” Leigh Hunt has well said, “It is a delicious moment that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render this remaining in one posture delightful; the labour of the day is gone—a gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you—the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the mind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye—it is closed—the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.” It is this universal sense of the blessing of sleep which takes hold of the mind with such a religious feeling, that the appearance of a sleeping form, whether of childhood or age, checks our step, and causes us to breathe softly lest we disturb their repose. We can scarce forbear whispering, while standing before the well-known picture of the “Last Sleep of Argyle,” lest by louder or more distinct articulation, we should rob the poor old man of a moment of that absence of sorrow which sleep has brought to him for the last time. Shakespeare has made the murder of Duncan to seem the more revolting in that it was committed while he slept. Macbeth himself must have felt this while exclaiming—