I wish I could write a chapter upon sleep.
A fitter occasion could never have presented itself, than what this moment offers, when all the curtains of the family are drawn—the candles put out—and no creature’s eyes are open but a single one, for the other has been shut these twenty years, of my mother’s nurse.
It is a fine subject!
And yet, as fine as it is, I would undertake to write a dozen chapters upon buttonholes, both quicker and with more fame, than a single chapter upon this.
Buttonholes! there is something lively in the very idea of ’em⸺and trust me, when I get amongst ’em⸺You gentry with great beards⸺look as grave as you will⸻I’ll make merry work with my buttonholes—I shall have ’em all to myself—’tis a maiden subject—I shall run foul of no man’s wisdom or fine sayings in it.
But for sleep⸺I know I shall make nothing of it before I begin—I am no dab at your fine sayings in the first place—and in the next, I cannot for my soul set a grave face upon a bad matter, and tell the world—’tis the refuge of the unfortunate—the enfranchisement of the prisoner—the downy lap of the hopeless, the weary, and the brokenhearted; nor could I set out with a lye in my mouth, by affirming, that of all the soft and delicious functions of our nature, by which the great Author of it, in his bounty, has been pleased to recompense the sufferings wherewith his justice and his good pleasure has wearied us⸺that this is the chiefest (I know pleasures worth ten of it); or what a happiness it is to man, when the anxieties and passions of the day are