58 ON THE EPFECTB OP CERTAIN MENTAL 



neck, and hugged her to suffocation. Then followed the struggle 

 for life, the sense of utter inability to escape, and the toil and hor- 

 ror of unearthly warfare. 



The modifications which night-raare assumes are infinite ; but one 

 passion is never absent — that of utter, incomprehensible dread. 

 *' Sometimes the sufferer is buried beneath overwhelming rocks, 

 which crush him on all sides, but still leave him with a miserable 

 consciousness of his situation : sometimes he is involved in the coils 

 of a horrid, slimy monster, whose eyes have the phosphorescent glare 

 of the sepulchre, and whose breath is poisonous as the marsh of 

 Serna. Every thing horrible, disgusting, or terrific in the physical 

 or moral world, is brought before him in fearful array ; he is hissed 

 at by serpents, tortured by demons, stunned by the hollow voices 

 and chilled by the cold touch of apparitions ; a mighty stone is laid 

 upon his breast, and crushes him to the ground in helpless agony ; 

 bulls and tigers pursue his palsied footsteps ; the unearthly shrieks 

 of hags, witches, and fiends float around him. In whatever situation 

 he may be placed, he feels superlatively wretched ; he i Ixion, 

 working for ages at his wheel ; he is Sysiphus, rolling his eternal 

 stone ; he is stretched upon the iron bed of Procrustes ; he is pros- 

 trated, by inevitable destiny, beneath the approaching wheels of the 

 car of Jagernaut. At one moment he may have the consciousness 

 of a malignant demon being at his side ; then, to shun the sight of 

 so alarming an object, he will close his eyes — ^but still the fearful 

 being makes its presence known, for its icy breath is felt diffusing 

 itself over his visage, and he knows that he is face to face with a 

 fiend ; if he look up, he beholds horrid eyes glaring on him, and an 

 aspect of despair grinning at him with more than hellish malice; or, 

 what is most common, he may have the idea of a monstrous hag 

 squatted upon his breast, mute, motionless, and malignant — an in- 

 carnation of the Evil Spirit, whose intolerable weight crushes the 

 breath out of his body, and whose fixed, deadly, and incessant stare 

 petrifies him with horror, and makes his very existence insuffer- 

 able.*'* 



In the earlier ages of the history of philosophy, when the greater 

 part of the occurrences which the systems then in vogue could not 

 explain were attributed to the agency of demons, fauns, and satyrs ; 

 when the Platonic philosophy was the order of the day, the incu- 

 bus, or night-mare, attracted much attention, and called forth the 

 ingenuity of all the theorists of the age. But as that kind of sci- 



* Macnish, op, cit.f eh. % p. i2b, 128. 



