6d. a The first half of this book, which discusses the dream in literature and legend, is particularly full and interesting. The author tells a good many stories, but hi triumph is that of the tinker of Swaffham. The tinker dreamed fo three nights that he was told to go on_a journey to Jondon Bridge, where someone would tell him news of great importance. So he-tramped off to London, and waited all day long for three days London Bridge.
At the end of the third day, just as he was about to leave in disgust, a stranger came up to him and asked why he had been standing there so long. The tinker thereupon told the story of his dream. The stranger burst out laughing at him, dalled him a fool, and bade him go back home at once. "I, myself" the stranger cried, "were I disposed to trust such things, might now go a hundred miles into the country on just such an errand as yours; for three nights this week I have dreamed that if T went to a town called Swaffham in Norfolk, and there dug urder an apple tree in a certain garden on the north side of the town I should find a. chest of money; but I have something else to do than to run after such idle fancies!" At this, the tinker hurried back home and dug up, not one, but two chests vu: gold and silver.
We thank Mr. Ratcliff for introducing us to this tinker. But we do not thank him for the chapters on dream analysis that make up the second part of his book. We have heard it al] before, these theories of Freud, Jung, and the rest, and we are getting a little tired of it. As 9 specimen of the nonsense that will perhaps sood overflow into literary criticism, his Freudian explanation of Hamlet's irresolution is typical. Hamlet, we are told, cannot freely will his uncle's death, for the murder of his father, because he had him self in childhood desired his father's death: the wish had been sternly repressed, he 's quite ignorant of its existence, but it ferments stil! in his unconscious, and imposes a fatal check upon his will. Mr. Ratcliff, when he is not a fourth-hand exponent of psycho-analysis is very good com-~ pany indeed.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.