“It happened that my maid left on the table in my bedchamber, one of her story books (as she calls them) which I took up, and found full of strange impertinences, fitted to her taste and condition; of poor servants that came to be ladies, and serving-men of low degree, who married kings’ daughters.  Among other things, I met this sage observation, ‘That a lion would never hurt a true virgin.’  With this medley of nonsense in my fancy I went to bed, and dreamed that a friend waked me in the morning, and proposed for pastime to spend a few hours in seeing the parish lions, which he had not done since he came to town; and because they showed but once a week, he would not miss the opportunity.  I said I would humour him; though, to speak the truth, I was not fond of those cruel spectacles; and if it were not so ancient a custom, founded, as I had heard, upon the wisest maxims, I should be apt to censure the inhumanity of those who introduced it.”  All this will be a riddle to the waking reader, till I discover the scene my imagination had formed upon the maxim, “That a lion would never hurt a true virgin.”  “I dreamed, that by a law of immemorial time, a he-lion was kept in every parish at the common charge, and in a place provided, adjoining to the churchyard:  that, before any one of the fair sex was married, if she affirmed herself to be a virgin, she must on her wedding day, and in her wedding clothes, perform the ceremony of going alone into the den, and stay an hour with the lion let loose, and kept fasting four-and-twenty hours on purpose.  At a proper height, above the den, were convenient galleries for the relations and friends of the young couple, and open to all spectators.  No maiden was forced to offer herself to the lion; but if she refused, it was a disgrace to marry her, and every one might have liberty of calling her a whore.  And methought it was as usual a diversion to see the parish lions, as with us to go to a play or an opera.  And it was reckoned convenient to be near the church, either for marrying the virgin if she escaped the trial, or for burying the bones when the lion had devoured the rest, as he constantly did.”

To go on therefore with the dream:  “We called first (as I remember) to see St. Dunstan’s lion, but we were told they did not shew to-day:  From thence we went to that of Covent-Garden, which, to my great surprise, we found as lean as a skeleton, when I expected quite the contrary; but the keeper said it was no wonder at all, because the poor beast had not got an ounce of woman’s flesh since he came into the parish.  This amazed me more than the other, and I was forming to myself a mighty veneration for the ladies in that quarter of the town, when the keeper went on, and said, He wondered the parish would be at the charge of maintaining a lion for nothing.  Friend, (said I) do you call it nothing, to justify the virtue of so many ladies, or has your lion lost his distinguishing faculty?  Can there