The irony of this was not lost upon contemporaries, accustomed to being awakened by paeans to sound slumber. “For though you lay you downe to sleepe, /” fumed an early seventeenth-century poet, “The Belman wakes your peace to keepe.” In the Danish play Masquerades (ca. 1723), by Ludvig Baron Holberg, the servant Henrich complains, “Every hour of the night they waken people out of their sleep by shouting to them that they hope they are sleeping well.”
