Such of our readers therefore, as may wish for a more minute inquiry
into the opinions above stated, we beg leave to refer to the respective
authors whom we have already quoted. The reader, who is fond to find
amusement even in a serious subject, from the scenes of nocturnal
imagination, will be glad, perhaps for a moment, to be transported into
the regions of poetic fancy. And here we find that the fancy is not more
sportive in dreams, than are the poets in their descriptions of her
nocturnal vagaries. On the effects of the imagination in dreams, the
following effusion, put into the mouth of the volatile Mercurio, is an
admirable illustration:--
O, then I see, Queen Mab has been with you.
She is the fancy's midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an Alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies,
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep:
Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces of the smallest spider's web;
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams;
Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film;
Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm,
Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid.
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