SUMMER NIGHTS.

If the best of all ways of lengthening our days be to take a few hours from the night, many of us are involuntarily prolonging existence at the present hour.  Macbeth did not murder sleep more effectually than the hot weather does.  At best, in the sultry nights, most people sleep what is called “a dog’s sleep,” and by no means the sleep of a lucky dog.  As the old English writers say, taking a distinction which our language appears to have lost, we “rather slumber than sleep,” waking often, and full of the foolishest of dreams.  This condition of things probably affects politics and society more than the thoughtless suppose.  If literature produced in the warm, airless fog of July be dull, who can marvel thereat?

“Of all gods,” says Pausanias, “Sleep is dearest to the Muses;” and when the child of the Muses does not get his regular nine hours’ rest (which he fails to do in warm weather), then his verse and prose are certain to bear traces of his languor.  It is true that all children of the Muses do not require about double the allowance of the saints.  Five hours was all St. Jerome took, and probably Byron did not sleep much more during the season when he wrote “Childe Harold.”  The moderns who agree with the Locrians in erecting altars to Sleep, can only reply that probably “Childe Harold” would have been a better poem if Byron had kept more regular hours when he was composing it.  So far they will, perhaps, have Mr. Swinburne with them, though that author also has Sung before Sunrise, when he would (if the wisdom of the ancients be correct) have been better employed in plucking the flower of sleep.

Leaving literature, and looking at society, it is certain that the human temper is more lively, and more unkind things are said, in a sultry than in a temperate season.  In the restless night-watches people have time to brood over small wrongs, and wax indignant over tiny slights and unoffered invitations.  Perhaps politics, too, are apt to be more rancorous in a “heated term.”  Man is very much what his liver makes him.

Hot weather vexes the unrested soul in nothing more than this, that (like a revolution in Paris) it tempts the people to “go down into the streets.”  The streets are cooler, at least, than stuffy gas-lit rooms; and if the public would only roam them in a contemplative spirit, with eyes turned up to the peaceful constellations, the public might fall down an area now and then, but would not much disturb the neighbourhood.  But the ’Arry that walketh by night thinks of nothing less than admiring, with Kant, the starry heavens and the moral nature of man.  He seeks his peers, and together in great bands they loiter or run, stopping to chaff each other, and to jeer at the passer-by.  Their satire is monotonous in character, chiefly consisting of the words for using which the famous Mr. Budd beat the baker. {152}