y of physic; but recollecting that, when at Winchester, his
schoolfellows had told him that he spoke fluently in his sleep, he tried,
affecting to be asleep, to form a discourse on physic. Finding that he
succeeded, he continued the practice: he then tried divinity, and spoke a
good sermon. Having prepared one for the purpose, he sat up in his bed and
delivered it so loudly that it attracted attention in the next chamber. It
was soon reported that Haddock preached in his sleep; and nothing was
heard but inquiries after the _sleeping preacher_, who soon found it his
interest to keep up the delusion. He was now considered as a man truly
inspired; and he did not in his own mind rate his talents at less worth
than the first vacant bishopric. He was brought to court, where the
greatest personages anxiously sat up through the night by his bedside.
They tried all the maliciousness of Puck to pinch and to stir him: he was
without hearing or feeling; but they never departed without an orderly
text and sermon; at the close of which, groaning and stretching himself,
he pretended to awake, declaring he was unconscious of what had passed.
"The king," says Wilson, no flatterer of James, "privately handled him so
like a chirurgeon, that he found out the sore." The king was present at
one of these sermons, and forbade them; and his reasonings, on this
occasion, brought the sleeping preacher on his knees. The king observed,
that things studied in the day-time may be dreamed of in the night, but
always irregularly, without order; not, as these sermons were, good and
learned: as particularly the one preached before his Majesty in his sleep
--which he first treated physically, then theologically; "and I observed,"
said the king, "that he always preaches best when he has the most crowded
audience." "Were he allowed to proceed, all slander and treason might pass
under colour of being asleep," added the king, who, notwithstanding his
pretended inspiration, awoke the sleeping preacher for ever afterwards.

* * * * *

BASILICON DORON.

That treatise of James I., entitled "Basilicon Doron; or, His Majesty's
Instructions to his dearest Son Henry the Prince," was composed by the
king in Scotland, in the freshness of his studious days; a work, addressed
to a prince by a monarch which, in some respects, could only have come
from the hands of such a workman. The morality and the politics often
retain their curiosity