arrived-in which I found myself emerging from total unconsciousness into the first feeble and indefinite sense of existence. Slowly-with a tortoise gradationapproached the faint grey dawn of the physical day. A torpid uneasiness. An apathetic endurance of dull pain. No care-no hope—no effort. Then, after long interval, a ringing in the ears; then, after a lapse still longer, a pricking or tingling sensation in the extremities; then a seemingly eternal period of pleasurable quiescence, during which the awakening feelings are struggling into thought; then a brief re-sinking into nonentity; then a sudden recovery. At length the slight quivering of an eyelid, and immediately thereupon an electric shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive effort to think. And now the first endeavour to remember. And now a partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so far regained its dominion that, in some measure, I am cognisant of my state. I feel that I am not awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been subject to catalepsy. And now, at last, as if by the rush of an ocean, my shuddering spirit is overwhelmed by the one grim danger-by the one spectral and ever-prevalent idea.

For some minutes after this fancy possessed me, I remained without motion. And why? I could not summon courage to move. I dared not make the effort which was to satisfy me of my fate; and yet there was something at my heart which whispered me it was sure. Despair-such as no other species of wretchedness ever calls into being—despair alone urged me after long irresolution to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes. I uplifted them. It was dark-all dark. I knew that the fit was over. I knew that the crisis of

my disorder had long passed. I knew that I had now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties—and yet it was dark-all dark—the intense and utter raylessness of the night that endureth for evermore.

I endeavoured to shriek, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt— but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs, which, oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration.

The movement of the jaws in this effort to cry aloud showed me that they were bound up, as is usual with the dead. I felt too that I lay upon some hard substance; and by something similar my sides were also closely compressed. So far I had not ventured to stir any of my limbs-but now I violently threw up my arms, which had been lying at length with the wrists crossed. They struck a solid wooden substance which extended above my person at an elevation of not more than six inches from my face. I could no longer doubt that I reposed within a coffin at last.

And now amid all my infinite miseries came sweetly the cherub hope-for I thought of my precautions. I writhed and made spasmodic exertions to force open the lid; it would not move. I felt my wrists for the bell-rope ; it was not to be found. And now the comforter fled for ever, and a still sterner despair reigned triumphant; for I could not help perceiving the absence of the paddings which I had so carefully prepared; and then too there came suddenly to my nostrils the strong peculiar odour of moist earth. The conclusion was irresistible. I was not within the vault. I had fallen into a trance while absent from home-while among strangers-when or how I could not remember; and it was they who had buried me as a dog-nailed up in

some common coffin-and thrust deep, deep, and for ever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.

As this awful conviction forced itself thus into the innermost chambers of my soul, I once again struggled to cry aloud; and in this second endeavour I succeeded. A long, wild, and continuous shriek, or yell of agony, resounded through the realms of the subterrene night. "Hillo! hillo, there!" said a gruff voice in reply. "What the devil's the matter now? said a second. "Get out o' that!” said a third.

"What do you mean by yowling in that ere kind of style like a cattymount?" said a fourth; and hereupon I was seized and shaken without ceremony for several minutes by a junto of very rough-looking individuals. They did not arouse me from my slumberfor I was wide awake when I screamed-but they restored me to the full possession of my memory.

This adventure occurred near Richmond, in Virginia. Accompanied by a friend I had proceeded upon a gunning expedition some miles down the banks of James River. Night approached, and we were overtaken by a storm. The cabin of a small sloop lying at anchor in the stream, and laden with garden mould, afforded us the only available shelter. We made the best of it, and passed the night on board. I slept in one of the only two berths in the vessel-and the berths of a sloop of sixty or seventy tons need scarcely be described. That which I occupied had no bedding of any kind. Its extreme width was eighteen inches. The distance of its bottom from the deck overhead was precisely the same. I found it a matter of exceeding difficulty to squeeze myself in. Nevertheless, I slept soundly; and the whole of my vision-for it was no dream, and no nightmare-arose naturally from the circumstances of my position-from my ordinary bias of thought, and

VOL. IV.

K

from the difficulty, to which I have alluded, of collecting my senses, and especially of regaining my memory for a long time after awaking from slumber. The men who shook me were the crew of the sloop and some labourers engaged to unload it. From the load itself came the earthy smell. The bandage about the jaws was a silk handkerchief in which I had bound up my head in default of my customary nightcap.

I

The tortures endured, however, were indubitably quite equal for the time to those of actual sepulture. They were fearfully—they were inconceivably hideous; but out of evil proceeded good, for their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone-acquired temper. I went abroad. took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of heaven. I thought upon other subjects than death. I discarded my medical books. "Buchan" I burned. I read no "Night Thoughts "-no fustian about churchyards no bugaboo tales-such as this. In short I became a new man and lived a man's life. From that memorable night I dismissed for ever my charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which perhaps they had been less the consequence than the cause.

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathis to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but, like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us—they must be suffered to slumber or we perish.

FOUR BEASTS IN ONE;

THE HOMO-CAMELOPARD.

Chacun a ses vertus.

Crébillon's Xerxes.

ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES is very generally looked upon as the Gog of the prophet Ezekiel. This honour is, however, more properly attributable to Cambyses, the son of Cyrus. And indeed the character of the Syrian monarch does by no means stand in need of any adventitious embellishment. His accession to the throne, or rather his usurpation of the sovereignty, a hundred and seventy-one years before the coming of Christ; his attempt to plunder the temple of Diana at Ephesus; his implacable hostility to the Jews; his pollution of the Holy of Holies; and his miserable death at Taba, after a tumultuous reign of eleven years, are circumstances of a prominent kind, and therefore more generally noticed by the historians of his time, than the impious, dastardly, cruel, silly, and whimsical achievements which make up the sum total of his private life and reputation.

Let us suppose, gentle reader, that it is now the year of the world three thousand eight hundred and thirty, and let us, for a few minutes, imagine ourselves at that most grotesque habitation of man, the remarkable city of Antioch. To be sure there were, in Syria