from his human functions, passed rapidly into a further development, no longer gay or playful, but terrific, the most terrific that besieges dreams, viz—­the horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures.  This horror has always been secretly felt by man; it was felt even under pagan forms of religion, which offered a very feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human capacities of sublimity or of horror.  We read it in the fearful composition of the sphinx.  The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion.  The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye, unintentional on the part of the unhappy agent, with the intentional venom of some other malignant natures.  But these horrid complexities of evil agency are but objectively horrid; they inflict the horror suitable to their compound nature; but there is no insinuation that they feel that horror.  Heraldry is so full of these fantastic creatures, that, in some zoologies, we find a separate chapter or a supplement dedicated to what is denominated heraldic zoology.  And why not?  For these hideous creatures, however visionary[8], have a real traditionary ground in medieval belief—­sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity, blundering, credulity, and intense superstition.  But the dream-horror which I speak of is far more frightful.  The dreamer finds housed within himself—­occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain—­holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart—­some horrid alien nature.  What if it were his own nature repeated,—­still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that—­even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness—­might be a curse too mighty to be sustained.  But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it?  How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself?  These, however, are horrors from the kingdoms of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and gloomily retire from exposition.  Yet it was necessary to mention them, because the first introduction to such appearances (whether causal, or merely casual) lay in the heraldic monsters, (which monsters were themselves introduced though playfully,) by the transfigured coachman of the Bath mail.

GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY.