e intense
mental activity engendered in the mad race for fame or wealth, where the
nervous and mental force of man is measured against steam and
lightning,--these are usually credited with having developed what is
considered a modern and even an almost distinctively American disease.

As the maxim, "There is nothing new under the sun," is of general
application, it may be of interest to investigate if an exception occurs
in the case of sleeplessness; if it be true that among our ancestors,
before the days of working steam and electricity, the glorious sleep of
youth was prolonged through all one's three or four score years.

Medical books and literature throw no light upon this subject three
hundred years ago. We must therefore turn to Shakespeare--human
nature's universal solvent--for light on this as we would on any other
question of his time. Was he troubled with insomnia, then, is the first
problem to be solved.

Dr. Holmes, our genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a
philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory
that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or
otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that
when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure his
own, or at least one of which he feels its tendencies and possibilities
belong to himself. Emerson, too, says of Shakespeare, that all his
poetry was first experience.

When we seek to analyze what we mean by the term Shakespeare, to
endeavor to define wherein he was distinct from all others and easily
pre-eminent, to know why to us he ever grows wiser as we grow wise, we
find that his especial characteristic was an unequalled power of
observation and an ability accurately to chronicle his impressions. He
was the only man ever born who lived and wrote absolutely without bias
or prejudice. Emerson says of him that "he reported all things with
impartiality; that he tells the great greatly, the small
subordinately,--he is strong as Nature is strong, who lifts the land
into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats
a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other." Says
he, further: "Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality
will presently appear: he has certain opinions which he disposes other
things to bring into prominence; he crams this part and starves the
other part, consulting not the fitness of the t