READING IN BED.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR, - I read your article on this subject (Spectator, Decem- ber 5th) with much interest, and I am quite prepared from my own experience to endorse your conclusion. For years I have lain for many hours comfortably in bed, wide-awake, not torturing myself with worrying anxieties, but simply not sleeping,— roaming incoherently over all sorts of things. At one time I used to try the experiment of counting a thousand backwards till I could rattle it off with perfect ease, and at the end feel more wakeful than ever. Then I took to sitting up reading till the small hours of the morning—this, I am afraid, involved an extra cigar or two—and I found myself just as wakeful in bed as if I had retired two or three hours earlier. Latterly, say for the last four or five years, I have taken to what some of your correspondents regard as the baneful habit of reading in bed. My reading has been of a somewhat miscellaneous character. I read iuch books as Scott's novels, Dickens, Thackeray, or perhaps Boswell's "Johnson." Sometimes I get off by heart a variety of favourite old hymns or the Psalms of David. My reading, however, at such times is not so much for edification as to find sleep. I now, as a rule, retire at 10 o'clock. I have a small table at my bedside, and on it two of Barrett's delightful little reading-lamps, so placed as to throw a bright light on the page, leaving my eyes in the shade. I rest my head on two pillows, and thus comfortably fixed, without fatigue to hands or elbows or shoulders, I read on till I find myself nodding,—a slight puff' at once ex-
tinguishes my lamps. Generally I drop off for an hour or so; then I wake up, and finding sleep has for the tune departed, I again light my lamps, and read till once mo,i,e I begin to nod. By this time it is about 3 o'clock, and then I am a happy man if I can sleep uninter- ruptedly on till 7, when I am quite ready and willing to get up. I am always satisfied if somehow or other I get about four hours' sleep during the night. During the day I take as much outdoor exercise as I can get; my living is very moderate, and simple both as regards eating and drinking ; and my general health is very good. Thus my own experience has driven me to the conclusion that old age (if verging on eighty may be called old) does not require or need so much sleep as seems to be necessary to a younger generation. I have not found that my eyesight or my general health has been in the least affected by this " baneful habit" of reading in bed, and it has certainly enabled me to pass many an hour far more pleasantly than in building fantastic castles in the air.—I am, Sir, &c., E. M.
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