Addison, however, could treat with a happy ridicule all those everyday dreams with which most persons are so familiar and gives several cases from imaginary correspondents, some dissatisfied with the non-fulfilment of their nocturnal visions, and others annoyed at being disturbed in the midst of their delightful reveries. “I have received,” says Addison, “numerous complaints from several delicious dreamers, desiring me to invent some method of silencing those noisy slaves, whose occupations lead them to take their early rounds about the city in the morning, doing a deal of mischief and working strange confusion in the affairs of its inhabitants. Several monarchs have done me the honor to acquaint me, how often they have been shook from their respective thrones by the rattling of a coach or by the rumbling of a wheelbarrow; and many private gentlemen, I find, have been bawled out of vast estates by fellows not worth three-pence. A fair lady was just upon the point of being married to a young, rich, handsome, ingenious nobleman, when an impertinent tinker, passing by, forbade the banns; and a hopeful youth, who had been newly advanced to great honor and preferment, was forced by a neighboring cobbler to resign all for an old song. It has been represented to me that those inconsiderate rascals do nothing but go about dissolving of marriages, and spoiling of fortunes, impoverishing rich, and ruining great people, interrupting beauties in the midst of their conquests and generals in the course of their victories; a boisterous peripatetic hardly goes through a street without waking half a dozen kings and princes to open their shops, or clean shoes, frequently transforming sceptres into paring-shovels and proclamations into bills. I have by me a letter from a young statesman, who in five or six hours came to be Emperor of Europe, after which he made war upon the Great Turk, routed him horse and foot, and was crowned lord of the universe in Constantinople; the conclusion of all his successes is that, on the twelfth instant, about seven in the morning, his Imperial Majesty was deposed by a chimney sweeper. On the other hand, I have epistolary testimonies of gratitude from many miserable people, who owe to this clamorous tribe frequent deliverance from great misfortunes. A small coalman, by waking one of these distressed gentlemen, saved him from ten years’ imprisonment; an honest watchman, bidding a loud good-morrow to another, freed him from the notice of many potent enemies and brought all their designs against him to nothing. A certain valetudinarian confesses he has often been cured of a sore throat by the hoarseness of a carman and relieved from a fit of the gout by the sound of old shoes.