One Haddock, who was desirous of becoming a preacher, but had a stuttering and slowness of utterance, which he could not get rid of, took to the study of physic; but recollecting that, when at Winchester, his schoolfellows had told him that he spoke fluently in his sleep, he tried, affecting to be asleep, to form a discourse on physic.  Finding that he succeeded, he continued the practice:  he then tried divinity, and spoke a good sermon.  Having prepared one for the purpose, he sat up in his bed and delivered it so loudly that it attracted attention in the next chamber.  It was soon reported that Haddock preached in his sleep; and nothing was heard but inquiries after the sleeping preacher, who soon found it his interest to keep up the delusion.  He was now considered as a man truly inspired; and he did not in his own mind rate his talents at less worth than the first vacant bishopric.  He was brought to court, where the greatest personages anxiously sat up through the night by his bedside.  They tried all the maliciousness of Puck to pinch and to stir him:  he was without hearing or feeling; but they never departed without an orderly text and sermon; at the close of which, groaning and stretching himself, he pretended to awake, declaring he was unconscious of what had passed.  “The king,” says Wilson, no flatterer of James, “privately handled him so like a chirurgeon, that he found out the sore.”  The king was present at one of these sermons, and forbade them; and his reasonings, on this occasion, brought the sleeping preacher on his knees.  The king observed, that things studied in the day-time may be dreamed of in the night, but always irregularly, without order; not, as these sermons were, good and learned:  as particularly the one preached before his Majesty in his sleep —­which he first treated physically, then theologically; “and I observed,” said the king, “that he always preaches best when he has the most crowded audience.”  “Were he allowed to proceed, all slander and treason might pass under colour of being asleep,” added the king, who, notwithstanding his pretended inspiration, awoke the sleeping preacher for ever afterwards.

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BASILICON DORON.

That treatise of James I., entitled “Basilicon Doron; or, His Majesty’s Instructions to his dearest Son Henry the Prince,” was composed by the king in Scotland, in the freshness of his studious days; a work, addressed to a prince by a monarch which, in some respects, could only have come from the hands of such a workman.  The morality and the politics often retain their curiosity and their value.  Our royal author has drawn his principles of government from the classical volumes of antiquity; for then politicians quoted Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.  His waters had, indeed, flowed over those beds of ore;[A] but the growth and vigour of the work comes from the mind of the king himself:  he writes for the Prince of Scotland, and about the Scottish people.