No. V. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21. Tunc et aves tutas movere per aera pennas; Then birds in airy space may safely move, OVID. DRYDEN. I HAVE before remarked, that it is the peculiar infelicity of those who live by intellectual labour, not to be always able equally to improve their time by application: there are seasons when the power of invention is suspended, and the mind sinks into a state of debility from which it can no more recover itself than a person who sleeps can by a voluntary effort awake. I was sitting in my study a few nights ago in these perplexing circumstances, and after long rumination and many ineffectual attempts to start a hint which I might pursue in my lucubration of this day, I determined to go to bed, hoping that the morning would remove every impediment to study, and restore the vigour of my mind. I was no sooner asleep than I was relieved from my distress by means which, if I had been waking, would have encreased it; and, instead of impressing upon my mind a train of new ideas in a regular succession, would have filled it with astonishment and terror. For in dreams, whether they are produced by a power of imagination to combine images which reason would separate, or whether the mind is passive and receives the impressions from some invisible agent, the memory seems to lie wholly torpid, and the understanding to be employed only about such objects as are then presented, without comparing the present with the past. When we sleep, we often converse with a friend who is either absent or dead, without remembering that the grave or the ocean is between us. We float like a feather upon the wind, or we find ourselves this moment in England, and the next in India, without reflecting that the laws of nature are suspended, or inquiring how the scene could have been so suddenly shifted before us. We are familiar with prodigies, we accommodate ourselves to every event, however romantic and we not only reason, but act upon principles which are in the highest degree absurd and extravagant. In that state, therefore, in which no prodigy could render me unfit to receive instruction, I imagined myself to be still sitting in my study, pensive and dispirited, and that I suddenly heard a small shrill voice pronounce these words, "Take your pen; I will dictate an Adventurer." I turned to see from whom this voice-proceeded, but I could discover nothing: believing, therefore, that my good genius or some favouring muse was present, I immediately prepared to write; and the voice dictated the following narrative.: "I was the eldest son of a country gentleman, who possessed a large estate, and when I was about nineteen years of age, fell with my horse as I was hunting; my neck was dislocated by the fall, and, for want of immediate assistance, I died before I could be carried home but I found myself, the next moment, with inexpressible grief and astonishment, under the shape of a mongrel Fuppy, in the stable of an inn, that was kept by a man who had been butler to my father, and had married the cook. : "I was indeed greatly caressed; but my master, in order as he said to encrease my beauty, as well as my strength, soon disencumbered me of my ears and tail. Besides the pain that I suffered in the operation, I ex perienced the disadvantages of this mutilation in a thousand instances; this, however, was but a small part of the calamity which in this state I was appointed to suffer. "My master had a son about four years old, who was yet a greater favourite than myself; and his passions having been always indulged as soon as they appeared, he was encouraged to gratify hi resentment against any thing, whether animate or inanimate, that had offended him, by beating me; and when he did any mischief, for of other faults little notice was taken, the father, the mother, or the maid, were sure to chastise me in his stead. "This treatment from persons whom I had been accustomed to regard with contempt, and command with insolence, was not long to be borne: early one morning, therefore, I departed. I continued my journey till the afternoon without stopping, though it rained hard. About four o'clock I passed through a village; and perceiving a heap of shavings that were sheltered from the wet by the thatch of a house which some carpenters were repairing, I crept as I thought unnoticed into the corner, and laid myself down upon them: but a man who was plaining a board, observing that I was a strange dog, and of a mongrel breed, resolved to make himself and his companions merry at my expence for this purpose, having made a hole about two inches diameter in a piece of deal, he suddenly catched me up, and putting the remainder of my tail through this diabolical engine, he made it fast by driving in a wedge, with a heavy mallet, which, crushing the bone, put me to inexpressible torment. The moment he set me down, the wretches, who had been spectators of this waggery, burst into immoderate laughter at the awkward motions by which I expressed my misery, and my ridiculous attempt to run away from that which I could not but carry with me. They hooted after me till I was out of their sight: however, fear, pain, and confusion, still urging me forward with involuntary speed, I ran with such force between two pales that were not far enough asunder to admit my clog, that I left it with the remainder of my tail behind me. I then found myself in a farm-yard; and fearing that I should be worried by the mastiff which I saw at a distance, I continued my flight: but some peasants who were at work in a neighbouring barn, perceiving that I ran without being pursued, that my eyes were inflamed, and that my mouth was covered with foam, imagined that I was mad, and knocked out my brains with a flail. "Soon after I had quitted this maimed and persecuted carcass, I found myself under the wings of a Bullfinch, with three others that were just hatched. I now rejoiced in the hope of soaring beyond the reach of human barbarity, and becoming like my mother a denizen of the sky: but my mother, before I was perfectly fledged, was surprised in her nest by a school-boy, who grasped her so hard, to prevent her escape, that she soon after died: he then took the nest with all that it contained, which he deposited in a basket, where I presently lost my three companions in misfortune, by change of food and unskilful management. I survived; and as soon after as I could feed myself, I was taken by my tyrant's mother, when she went to pay her rent, as a present to her landlord's daughter, a young lady who was extremely beautiful, and in the eighteenth year of her age. "My captivity now began to lose its terrors; I no longer dreaded the rude gripe of a boisterous urchin, whose fondness was scarce less dangerous than his resentment; who, in the zeal of his attachment to a new plaything, might neglect me till I perished with hunger; or who might wring off my neck, because he had some other use for the halfpenny which should procure me food: the confinement of a cage became habitual; I was placed near a pleasant window; I was constantly fed by one of the finest hands in the world; and I imagined, that I could suffer no misery under the patronage of smiles and graces. "Such was my situation, when a young lady from London made an afternoon's visit to my mistress: she took an opportunity to caress me among her other favourites, which were a parrot, à monkey, and a lapdog; she chirped, and holding out her finger to me, I hopped upon it; she stroked me, put my head to her cheek, and to shew my sensibility of her favours I began to sing as soon as my song was over, she turned to my mistress, and told her, that the dear little creature might be made absolutely one of the sweetest birds in the world, only by putting out his eyes, and confining it in a less cage. To this horrid proposal my fair keeper agreed, upon being again assured that my song would be very greatly improved; and the next day performed herself the operation, as she had been directed, with the end of a hot knitting-needle. My condition was now more easily to be conceived than expressed: but I did not long suffer the mournful solitude of perpetual darkness; for a cat came one night into the room undiscovered, dragged me through the wires of the cage and devoured me. "I was not displeased to find myself once more at large; delivered from blindness and captivity, and still able to sport upon the breeze in the form of a Cockchafer. But I had scarce entered this new scene of existence, when a gentleman, in whose garden I was, feasting on one of the leaves of a cherry tree, caught Ime, and turning to his son, a boy who had just been put into his first breeches, here, Tommy, says he, is a bird for you. The boy received me with a grin of horrid delight, and, as he had been taught, immedi ately impaled me alive upon a corking-pin, to which a piece of thread was fastened; and I was doomed to make my young master sport, by fluttering about in the agonies of death; and when I was quite exhausted, |