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advised his people not to drink it. In a letter addressed to a friend he enlarges with great unction upon the evils of tea drinking. He argues that people who are uninjured by the use of tea should give up drinking it for the sake of those who are; that our ancestors lived very well without it, and therefore we can do without it also; that it is unwholesome and expensive, and "has too much hold on the hearts of them that use it;" that it is a duty to abstain for the sake of some poor man or of some miserable woman who drinks it and "says she does no evil," who "will not believe the poison will hurt her, because it does not sensibly at least hurt you." "Oh, throw it away," he adds, with evangelical earnestness; "let her have one plea less for destroying her body, if not her soul, before the time." Wesley's arguments, such as they are, are quickly changed into exhortations, and he writes of adding fault to fault, of joining in wasteful selfindulgence, and of grieving the Spirit of God, as if the use of the cup that "cheers but not inebriates," were a sin against heaven and against nature.

Like other good men, John Wesley invents a sin, as if there were not sins enough in the world of the devil's making, and then denounces all those who venture to commit it. One narrow-minded man

discovers that it is a sin to dance; another objects to music; a third, like Mr. Müller, finds the beauties of nature injurious to his spiritual life; a fourth is of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Scott are unwholesome food for Christians; a fifth, that a country walk on Sunday is an infraction of the fourth commandment; a sixth denounces tobacco as "a gorging fiend:" and thus our narrow and rugged path through this troublesome world is made narrower and more rugged, and the dread of imaginary sins presses like a frightful nightmare on the hearts of the timid and feeble-minded.

Wesley not only undertook to dispense medicines, but wrote a small volume entitled Primitive Physic,' which contains some amusing advice and several preposterous prescriptions. Students are recommended frequently to shave and to wash their feet; a person suffering from ague may apply a large slit onion to the stomach, or take at certain times "six middling pills of cobwebs," a remedy that "seldom fails." The asthmatic patient is advised "to live for a fortnight on boiled carrots only," a remedy as unpleasant as the disease. The cure for a cold in the head is to "pare very thin the yellow rind of an orange, roll it up inside out, and thrust a roll into each nostril." To prevent cramp, "tie your garter

smooth and tight under your knee at going to bed," or "lay a roll of brimstone under your pillow." To reduce corpulence Wesley recommends, in opposition to Banting, “a total vegetable diet;" to relieve a particular kind of colic he gives the curious advice of Sydenham, "hold a live puppy constantly on the belly." Raging madness may be cured by " setting the patient with his head under a great waterfall as long as his strength will bear," a rather difficult feat, we imagine, for the patient's keeper. Berkeley's famous recipe of tar-water is largely recommended by Wesley. This is one of the remedies for pleurisy, for which a decoction of nettles is also suggested, or "half a drachm of soot." The unfortunate man who is afflicted with scurvy must live on turnips for a month, or take tar-water for three months; but in this case, as in others, Wesley sometimes hits upon the antidote employed in modern times, for he recommends lemon juice and sugar as "a precious remedy and well tried." Tartar emetic he considers one of the best medicines known. "I have given it," he writes, "to many thousand patients with the utmost safety and with the greatest advantage;" but his chief remedy is electricity, which he regards as the specific for a vast number of disorders.

We laugh at some of Wesley's old-fashioned pre

scriptions, and are amazed at the presumption of the man who without a medical education undertook to cure men's bodies as well as their souls; but it is fair to add that his little volume of Primitive Physic,' despite a thousand absurdities, contains some homely counsel as to the care of the health, and some "old wives'" prescriptions, formed of simple herbs, the virtue of which is still, we believe, accredited in many rural districts.

The mixture of practical sagacity and of credulity which marks Wesley's character as a religious reformer, is evident also in his self-imposed office of physician. After reading the Journal,' and the remarkable little volume called 'Primitive Physic,' we are reminded forcibly of Wesley's own words : "There is no folly too great even for a man of sense, if he resolve to follow his own imagination."

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

THE profession of literature has rarely had a more honourable representative than the Poet Laureate, Southey. As the Laureate, he wrote poems which are unworthy of him, as a politician he made many egregious blunders, and his partisanship exposed him whilst living to considerable obloquy. We know now, however, what his contemporaries could not know, that the faults of Southey are comparatively venial, and that his virtues deserve the highest admiration. The record of his life has been inconsiderately laid bare to the public; but, while it exposes much that was rash and presumptuous, and some weaknesses that ought never to have been known beyond the family circle, it shows too, beyond all controversy, the noble nature of the poet, his high courage, his unswerving rectitude, his almost unexampled benevolence, his strong affections, his generous and ungrudging appreciation of contemporary genius. No mean

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