Countess d'Anois, and many others of the samė class. It may be thought strange that the mind should with pleasure acquiesce in the open violation of the most known and obvious truths; and that relations which contradict all experience, and exhibit a series of events that are not only impossible but ridiculous, should be read by almost every taste and capacity with equal eagerness and delight. But it is not, perhaps, the mere violation of truth or of probability that offends, but such a violation only as perpetually recurs. The mind is satisfied if every event appears to have an adequate cause; and when the agency of Genii and Fairies is once admitted, no event which is deemed possible to such agents is rejected as incredible or absurd; the action of the story proceeds with regularity, the persons act upon rational principles, and such events take place as may naturally be expected from the interposition of superior intelligence and power: so that though there is not a natural, there is at least a kind of moral probability preserved, and our first concession is abundantly rewarded by the new scenes to which we are admitted, and the unbounded prospect that is thrown open before us. But though we attend with delight to the achievements of a hero who is transported in a moment over half the globe upon a griffon, and see with admiration a palace or a city vanish upon his breaking a seal or extinguishing a lamp; yet if at his first interview with a mistress, for whose sake he had fought so many battles and passed so many regions, he should salute her with a box on the ear; or if immediately after he had vanquished a giant or a dragon, he should leap into a well or tie himself up to a tree, we should be disappointed and disgusted, the story would be condemned as improbable, unnatural, and absurd, our innate love of truth would be ap plauded, and we should expatiate on the folly of an attempt to please reasonable beings by a detail of events which can never be believed, and the intervention of agents which could never have existed. Dramatic poetry, especially tragedy, seems to unite all that pleases in each of these species of writing, with a stronger resemblance of truth, and a closer imitation of nature: the characters are such as excite attention and solicitude; the action is important, its progress is intricate yet natural, and the catastrophe is sudden and striking; and as we are present to every transaction, the images are more strongly impressed, and the passions more forcibly moved. From a dramatic poem to those short pieces which may be contained in such a periodical paper as the Adventurer is a bold transition. And yet such pieces, although formed upon a single incident, if that incident be sufficiently uncommon to gratify curiosity, and sufficiently interesting to engage the passions, may afford an entertainment, which, if it is not lasting, is yet of the highest kind. Of such, therefore, this paper will frequently consist: but it should be remembered that it is much more difficult and laborious to invent a story, however simple and however short, than to recollect topics of instruction, or to remark the scenes of life as they are shifted before us. No. 5. TUESDAY, NOV. 21, 1752. Tunc et aves tutas movere per aëra pennas; Then birds in airy space might safely move, Ovid. For all was peaceful, and that peace sincere. 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 increased 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 the imagination to combine images which reason would separate, or whether the mind is passive and receives 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 "Take pronounce these words, 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 puppy 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 mas ter, in order as he said to increase my beauty as well as my strength, soon disencumbered me of my ears and my tail. Besides the pain that I suffered in the operation, I experienced 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. 66 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 his 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 planing a board, observing that I was a strange dog and of a mongrel breed, resolved to make himself and his companions merry at my expense: for this purpose, having made a hole about two inches diameter in a piece of deal, he suddenly eatched 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 mallett, which crushing the bone put me to inexpressible torment. The moment he set me down, the wretches who had been spectators of this waggery, |