fierce gnawing of remorse at the heart of the lady should be made manifest; and, as her firm self-contained nature imposes upon her a reticence in her waking moments in strong con trast to the soliloquising loquacity of her demonstrative hus band, the great dramatist has skilfully availed himself of the sleep-talking state in which she uncovers the corroding ulcers of her conscience. Whether the deep melancholy of remorse tends to exhibit itself in somnambulism, is a fact which
may on scientific grounds be doubted. Shakespeare makes the Doctor himself express the doubt: “This disease is beyond my practice; yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds.” The pheno mena of sleep-walking are painted with great truthfulness. In this slumbrous agitation, “the benefit of sleep” cannot be received, as the Doctor thinks. It neither exerts its soothing effects on the mind, nor is it “chief nourisher in life's feast”
to the body.—Light is left by her continually. Was this to avert the presence of those “sightless substances” once so impiously invoked 7–She “seems washing her hands,” and “continues in this a quarter of an hour.” What a comment on her former boast, “A little water clears us of this deed.”
—The panorama of her crime passes before her, searing the eye-balls of the fancy; a fancy usually so cold and impassive, but now in agonising erethism. A wise and virtuous man can “thank God for his happy dreams,” in which “the slum ber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul;” dreams of which he says “it is the ligation of sense, but the
liberty of reason, and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleep.” “There is surely a nearer appre hension of anything that delights us in our dreams than in our waked senses.” “Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams; and this time also would Ichuse for my devotions.” (Religio Medici.) But the converse ? Who can tell the torture of bad
