[Pg 15]The Plinies were undoubtedly two of the ablest and most enlightened men of their time; and the belief in the value of dreams is certainly not extinct among us yet. If we possess Artemidorus's book on the subject for the ancient world, we have also the "Smorfia" of to-day, so dear to the heart of the lotto-playing Neapolitan, which assigns a special number to every conceivable subject that can possibly occur in a dream—not excluding "u murtu che parl'" (the dead man that speaks)—for the guidance of the believing gambler in selecting the numbers he is to play for the week.

Plutarch placed great faith in ghosts and visions. In his Life of Dion[28] he notes the singular fact that both Dion and Brutus were warned of their approaching deaths by a frightful spectre. "It has been maintained," he adds, "that no man in his senses ever saw a ghost: that these are the delusive visions of women and children, or of men whose intellects are impaired by some physical infirmity, and who believe that their diseased imaginations are of divine origin. But if Dion and Brutus, men of strong and philosophic minds, whose understandings were not affected by any constitutional infirmity—if such men could place so much faith in the appearance of spectres as to g