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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, No. 17, PRINCE'S STREET, EDINBURGH;

AND T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, STRAND, LONDON;

To whom Communications (post paid) may be addressed.

SOLD ALSO BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.

JAMES BALLANTYNE & CO. PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.

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HONOURED MR NORTH, You need not shrug your shoulders at the commencement of this epistle. I know well enough how great a bore, as your modern young gentlemen elegantly term it, it is, in general, to tell one's dreams. "Babbling dreams," Shakspeare calls them; and, to be sure, for the most part, they have all the disadvantage of fiction, joined to the triteness of common-place reality. But this that I am going to give you is, as far as I can see, as agreeable as any realities I have to send you at present from Gowks-Hall, excepting, peradventure, the smoked flitch which accompanies this, and which Dinah says, she hopes is quite equal to that you liked so well when you did us the honour to stop a day or two last backend. However, I must not wander from my subject, considering that I am now only relating a dream, and not dreaming one. Well, I had got comfortably settled the other night, in the old stuffed arm-chair by the fire, after having, at last, sent off to bed your friend Roger, who had been deafening us all the evening with practising "Tantivy," "Up in the morning early," and "the Lass of Livingstone," upon the old French hunting-horn that hangs in the hall; and sister Dinah had left me to enjoy my pipe, ewe-milk cheese, and jug of mulled October, (old John has made a capital brewage of it this year, Mr North, you'll be glad to hear), together with a volume of Anderson's Poets, when, somehow or other, I dropped asleep. VOL. VIII.

Then followed the oddest vision that ever I knew or heard of, all as regular as clock-work, as one may say.

Methought I found myself, all at once, in a long room, with a gallery, like a concert-room, and that, in the gallery, was an audience, as for a concert. I thought, however, that I was in the body of the room, and not in the gallery, and there came in to me a whole company of people, with musical instruments in their hands, whom I knew at once, I cannot tell how, to be poets. To be sure, some of them had an out-of-the-world look enoughbut there's no accounting for these things in dreams. There they all stood at their music-stands, as natural as the life, just as fiddlers do; and, as I remembered, they first all played together the sweetest and wildest harmony I ever heard: indeed, it seemed quite supernatural, and put me into a sort of amaze, and made me gasp for breath, with a feeling such as one recollects to have had, when a boy, in a swing whilst on the return. After that they chimed in, one by one, to play solos, I think, the musicians call them; and some, whose turns were far off, I thought, stood about and came near me, and appeared very affable and familiar. The oddest thing was, that I always knew perfectly who played, though how I came by the knowledge I cannot tell.

The first that played was a pale noble-looking man, whom I knew at first sight to be L-d B-n, and he gave us a solo on the serpent, such as

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