Both the passages here alluded to, only
serve to shew the vast superiority of Shakspeare's boundless genius:
their sense is thus admirably expressed by Stepney:
At dead of night imperial reason sleeps,
And fancy with her train, her revels keeps;
Then airy phantoms a mix'd scene display,
Of what we heard, or saw, or wish'd by day;
For memory those images retains
Which passion form'd, and still the strongest reigns.
Huntsmen renew the chase they lately run,
And generals fight again their battles won.
Spectres and fairies haunt the murderer's dreams;
Grants and disgraces are the courtier's themes.
The miser spies a thief, or a new hoard;
The cit's a knight; the sycophant a lord,
Thus fancy's in the wild distraction lost,
With what we most abhor, or covet most.
Honours and state before this phantom fall;
For sleep, like death, its image, equals all.
Chaucer in his tale of the Cock and Fox, has a fine description, thus
versified by Dryden:--
Dreams are but interludes which fancy makes:
When monarch reason sleeps, this mimic wakes;
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A court of coblers and a mob of kings:
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad:
Both are the reasonable soul run mad;
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, or are, or e'er can be.
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