yet find time to draw out this stop, and shut that, while leg and feet are flinging out right and left at the pedals,—the whole man looking as if he were about to explode into space under some tremendous internal forces,—I am ready to ask whether it can be that Mind is present at every act, and decrees a distinct volition for it; and, if so, whether she ought not to be able to give a more distinct account of the matter? Yet as to the rapidity, surely I have answered that; and as to the want of consciousness, why, if poor Mind has been thus worried and flustered, is it any wonder that she does not distinctly trace her own acts? Well, we must leave it there; but almost anything seems to me more reasonable than that in those cases of rapid combinations of our habitual acts, which imply novelty at each step, and which seem to involve the highest mental activity, Mind is asleep, and only the body awake!

But it is plaguy strange that Mind can give no more intelligible account of the matter, it being her own affair entirely.

Instead of an attentive reconsideration of our old metaphysical problem, based on the curious experiences I sent you, you have favoured me with a lecture on my late hours; and assure me that if I went to bed earlier, and rose earlier, I should not have any such experiences. On my word, it is sharp practice to make such an exceedingly irrelevant use of my arguments against myself!

I quite agree with you, my dear friend, in all you can say in

praise of early rising; probo meliora; and have done so in this matter any time these twenty years. I believe firmly there is scarcely one habit which youth can form so important as that of early rising, so conducive to health of body, to a vigorous old age, to regularity and method, to success in life, in short, one might go on to the " nineteenth head" of discourse on this subject; so I will spare you, and say Amen!

He who begins late in the morning, and bustles about in a vain effort to overtake the clock, is in the condition of the good man who said he had lost a quarter of an hour, and was afterwards running after it all day and could not catch it.

"Fine sentiments!" you will say. Oh! if you are for fine sentiment, I can give it far finer, and in the purest Johnsonese, as Mr. Macaulay would say; as thus: "The hours which are wasted in superfluous slumber must be deducted from the sum total of mortal existence; nor is it paradoxical to affirm that the man of eighty who should compute the time which he has thus subtracted from his life, ought not to imagine himself to have passed beyond the limits of threescore years and ten."

"Then I am ten years younger than I thought myself," I am afraid an incorrigible old sinner in this kind would be apt to say. -But it is easy to preach: the great moralist I have just ventured to mimic for a moment was preaching on this very topic all his days, and never reformed himself.

Nevertheless, all you say is true enough; and yet —and yet oh the slavery of habit! I have been lecturing myself for twenty years, and must say I have ever found myself a most attentive auditor, and still it is in vain. However, I believe I should not be so quiet under self-reproach if I did not believe that I had sufficient excuses. 66 There," you will say, "that will do ; I have no hope of you." Nay, strike; but hear me. (Conscience be quiet, I say ; what a clamour you are making ! - I can't hear myself speak for you; ahem !-) I protest that my example, at least for many years past, has afforded not the shadow of an excuse for any one's following it. I cannot say I have wasted my time in sleep; I have not for these twenty years had sleep

enough; I rarely get so many as six hours' sleep in the four-andtwenty.

hours, or rather very

Ay, you will perhaps Stop a minute. I have

Next; I generally go to bed at very late early — 1, 2, 3, A. M., as the case may be. say, that is a reason why you sleep so ill. tried both early and late hours; and, in either case, have often been visited with a sleeplessness so intense, that I have been obliged to get up, and read during the rest of the night. Many a cold winter's night have I risen and lighted a fire, rather than remain turning from side to side in vivid wakefulness without something to divert thought. To let the mill go round without grist this is desperate work, let me tell you, for the mental machinery! But, as a physiologist, you know that well enough. Under such circumstances, do not blame me if I take sleep when I can get it. Lastly, I cannot say that when I have indulged in —what is certainly very luxurious an hour or two of matin meditation in bed, it has been time wasted, or often spent in unprofitable thought. On the contrary, I am conscious, in common with many much greater men, that my mind has never wrought so freely as then, nor presented to me so many thoughts I should wish to retain. Unhappily, they often will not come again, when I have once risen.

If it be said this is a dangerous apology, I answer that it is no apology at all; it is a simple fact, of which I am not ashamed. Honi soit. Each man must judge for himself. To me, I say, such late hours are needful, and, waking or sleeping, are not hours of sloth. So that you see, like Daniel O'Rourke, I am a man more to be pitied than blamed among you. I acknowledge that I often find things going so wrong, such miserable dislocation of the engagements of the day (owing to breakfast always being a "movable feast" between eight and ten), that I cannot quite appease conscience; but then, when the jade has once got the habit of complaining, she will often go on maundering and mutting in the most unreasonable manner.

I have no doubt you enjoyed your view of the sunrise in your recent journey. And so you would have me suppose that you

have often seen it, and are pleased to suppose that I never have! As to you-if you had often seen it, you would never have broken out into these raptures; it is the rarity of the spectacle, my friend, that has made you so eloquent. From your transports, I am induced to question whether you ever saw it before in your life. As to me, let me tell you I have seen it several times. Yes, several; once on the top of a coach, in the olden times when I was travelling all night, -once on board a steamer in the same predicament, -once when I slept on Snowdon on purpose, and once again on the Righi. Pray don't suppose that no one ever saw the rising sun except yourself. But it is too glorious a spectacle to be seen often; familiarity would breed contempt; the thing would become too cheap. Let us, my fine fellow, economise, and be chary of, such delights!

I had a dear friend, who ingeniously proved that though very late in the morning for many years, he was always an early riser. He said that, in his youth, he had risen for years much too early

four and half-past four, A. M.; when I knew him, nine and half-past nine was his hour; but he contended that, striking "a mean" between his excesses and defects, he still reckoned that he rose about seven regularly. I am not quite sure, if I were to take "the mean" of my own doings in this way, that I could not prove myself a regular early riser too.

I remember once hearing an aged relative expostulate with a youth, his nephew, on his lying in bed; he pleaded the difficulty of getting up. "Difficulty!" the other said; "there is no difficulty in it. I have risen at five for these forty years, and I could not lie in bed after that." "My dear uncle," said the young scapegrace, "and I cannot get up. If you want to measure my difficulty in getting up, you ought to lie in bed till nine. It is really no credit in you to be an early riser!"

However, in spite of all the badinage in this letter, be assured that none can be convinced more deeply than I of the excellence of your advice in general, and of its futility to me in particular. Now is not that just what all your patients tell you?

LETTER XXXVII.

To the Same.

Nov. 1845.

My dear Mason,

For "auld lang syne's" sake, I am again going to discourse to you of one of our old metaphysical problems; though I am afraid that, as before, you will prove yourself unworthy of our College aspirations, refuse to deal with any such knotty questions, and treat me with a musty lecture on the duty of going to bed early, and, what is harder, rising early. However, I heard the other day as pretty an argument as you could desire to hear, on a summer's day, on that old question,-"Does the mind always: think, even in sleep?"

"Between whom?" you will say. Well, between myself and me; and, strange as it may seem, never were two people of more opposite opinions. "And how did it end?" In that charming haze, my friend, in which nearly all disputes that concern that elaborately self-ignorant thing, the Mind of man, are so apt to end. I assure you, as I listened, I seemed to doubt of, and to acquiesce in, each ingenious argument; in short, felt tossed to and fro, like a shuttlecock between two battledores—only that I unluckily was both shuttlecock and the battledores. What a mystery of mysteries that same mind is! That it should ask itself—and, for the life of it, cannot tell itself—whether it is always conscious or not! That it should be equally ignorant of a thousand other things about its own self! How humiliating, that that which maps the heavens, tracks the planets, calculates. eclipses, covers the earth with the monuments of its science and art, should thus grope, and stumble, and blunder, when it crosses its own dark threshold; nay, dispute everlastingly with itself and others, what it is, and where and how it exists! Surely we ought to be modest people. To think of one's mind asserting against other minds, and often against itself in different moods, —sometimes with ludicrous dubiety, as often with more ludicrous