me, ever whispering unto me, that I am from my friend; but my friendly dreams in night requite me, and make me think I am within his arms.  I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness.  And surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this World, and that the conceits of this life are as near dreams to those of the next, as the Phantasms of the night, to the conceits of the day.  There is an equal delusion in both, and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other; we are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul.  It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason, and our waking conceptions do not match the Fancies of our sleeps.  At my Nativity, my Ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpius; I was born in the Planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that Leaden Planet in me.  I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof:  were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams; and this time also would I chuse for my devotions:  but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls, a confused and broken tale of that that hath passed.

[Sidenote:  Religio Medici]

He is rich, who hath enough to be charitable; and it is hard to be so poor that a noble mind may not find a way to this piece of goodness. He that giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord; there is more Rhetorick in that one sentence, than in a Library of Sermons; and indeed if those Sentences were understood by the Reader, with the same Emphasis as they are delivered by the Author, we needed not those Volumes of instructions, but might be honest by an Epitome.  Upon this motive only I cannot behold a Beggar without relieving his Necessities with my Purse, or his Soul with my Prayers; those scenical and accidental differences between us, cannot make me forget that common and untoucht part of us both; there is under these Cantoes and miserable outsides, these mutilate and semi-bodies, a soul of the same alloy with our own, whose Genealogy is God as well as ours, and in as fair a way to Salvation as our selves.

“PLEASE TO RING THE BELLE” [Sidenote:  Hood]

  I’ll tell you a story that’s not in Tom Moore:—­
  Young Love likes to knock at a pretty girl’s door: 
  So he call’d upon Lucy—­’twas just ten o’clock—­
  Like a spruce single man, with a smart double knock.

  Now, a handmaid, whatever her fingers be at,
  Will run like a puss when she hears a rat-tat: 
  So Lucy ran up—­and in two seconds more
  Had questioned the stranger and answered the door.