rid of his unwelcome visitor. The visionary was then informed of
the real transactions of the night, with so many particulars as to
satisfy him he had been the dupe of his imagination; he acquiesced in
his commander's reasoning, and the dream, as often happens in these
cases, returned no more after its imposture had been detected. In this
case, we find the excited imagination acting upon the half-waking
senses, which were intelligent enough for the purpose of making him
sensible where he was, but not sufficiently so to judge truly of the
objects before him.

But it is not only private life alone, or that tenor of thought which
has been depressed into melancholy by gloomy anticipations respecting
the future, which disposes the mind to mid-day fantasies, or to nightly
apparitions--a state of eager anxiety, or excited exertion, is equally
favourable to the indulgence of such supernatural communications. The
anticipation of a dubious battle, with all the doubt and uncertainty of
its event, and the conviction that it must involve his own fate and that
of his country, was powerful enough to conjure up to the anxious eye of
Brutus the spectre of his murdered friend Caesar, respecting whose death
he perhaps thought himself less justified than at the Ides of March,
since, instead of having achieved the freedom of Rome, the event had
only been the renewal of civil wars, and the issue might appear most
likely to conclude in the total subjection of liberty. It is not
miraculous that the masculine spirit of Marcus Brutus, surrounded by
darkness and solitude, distracted probably by recollection of the
kindness and favour of the great individual whom he had put to death to
avenge the wrongs of his country, though by the slaughter of his own
friend, should at length place before his eyes in person the appearance
which termed itself his evil genius, and promised again to meet him at
Philippi. Brutus' own intentions, and his knowledge of the military art,
had probably long since assured him that the decision of the civil war
must take place at or near that place; and, allowing that his own
imagination supplied that part of his dialogue with the spectre, there
is nothing else which might not be fashioned in a vivid dream or a
waking reverie, approaching, in absorbing and engrossing character, the
usual matter of which dreams consist. That Brutus, well acquainted with
the opinions of the Platonists, should be disposed to receive without
d