which suits their taste, than when they dabble in variety. Every one knows that he can eat more, and does eat more, of cold meat than of hot. Cold beef is therefore the true poison. But we have answered the question as far as relates to unnecessary, or superfluous, eating, already. We do not think that this is a source of much evil at any time; and still less when it is occasional or casual. Unquestionably, the stomach may be deranged by excess of variety as by excess of any kind; and we do not deny the power of temptation, arising from the excellence of the food or the cookery, in causing a man to eat more than is necessary. Nor will we deny that, in a gouty disposition, and particularly when gout is actually impending, excess may produce the fit. But, in this case, it acts but as any other debilitating cause would do; like fatigue, or anxiety, or Cheltenham. If a glass of champagne or claret produces an attack of this disorder, it is from the existence of idiosyncracy, and because the fit is only waiting to be excited. The excess is the match; but the train was laid, and would have been fired by some cause. But we will dismiss a branch of the subject which we can scarcely be persuaded to treat very seriously; believing that it is in vain to argue rationally with those who are governed by words and habits, by sentiment and cant. We might easily have written much more, and much more gravely, but we are at present as little inclined to weary ourselves as our readers. We must therefore inquire what the faculty says about drinking, since this is also a subject of standing hostility, even independently of eating. Drinking has been condemned by Solomon, it was condemned by Mahomet, it has been condemned and re-condemned by every man who could hold a pen to repeat what others had written before him. And it is a bad thing, because it deprives a man of his senses and burns his nose. And therefore wine is poison. This corollary indeed was reserved for the present age. It is not only a fashion to preach down wine, but a merit not to drink it. Not to "drink wine" is a claim to modern distinction and modern virtue. Greater men than we reviewers have pronounced that a good glass of "Sherris sack" comforted the heart and aided digestion. The world must have gone widely astray in this matter for the last six thousand years; but we should go astray also, were we to say all that might be said in defence of wine. We will therefore ask the doctors to inform us what are the evils, what are the diseases, produced by the common use of wine, or of any strong drink. We could much more easily inform them how many they kill by their fashionable Sangrado practice of bleeding and water. We certainly do believe that it is a very bad practice to drink drams in the morning; and we are not quite sure that it is a very good one to swallow a glass of chamomile whiskey before breakfast, like the men of the mountains in Scotland. Yet perhaps even this last doubt may be doubted, The Hollander knows that he shall die and be buried if he even quits his house without a previous glass of schnaps. Assuredly we do not recommend a man to drink a "bucket full" of gin a-day, like the commissionaire at the Bricklayer's Arms, nor three bottles of Eau de Cologne a-day, like Lady nor brandy, arquebusade, and Eau de Cologne altogether, like poor Sheridan. But we really cannot see the infinite horror of spirits, as the phrase is, unless a man is determined to turn drunkard, and add daily to his daily dose; in which case he does not fall under our cognizance. But the finest refinement of all this is, that the man who drinks only a bottle of bad port wine a-day, or perhaps two, fancies himself a virtuous and cleanly drinker, while he condemns the poorer wretch who must regale on brandy and water; quite forgetting, good easy man, that his grog is composed of brandy and bad wine, while the profligate brandy drinker is drinking but brandy and water, and does not drink half as much, even of the former. But all this has nothing to do with the reasonable and moderate use of wine, which was given to us to regale man's heart, and which we hold, in spite of Mahomet, to be a most virtuous invention. But we must always be discontented; and he who does not quarrel with wine at large, still has his private spites against claret or champagne, or madeira, or malt liquor, or punch, or something or other. It is instructive to listen to the reasons why. "I declare," says the man who has eaten of twenty dishes and drank of ten wines, "that that glass of champagne has given me my gout," -or what not. "I never drink malt liquor," says another philosopher, "as it always disagrees with me." The three bottles of wine are accounted as nothing, of course, in this reckoning. Wine, eider, malt liquor, punch, all is wholesome in moderation, and nothing is wholesome without it, always excepting idiosyncracies and previous disorders. But abstinence is not moderation; and fashions and fancies are not truth. His Majesty (God bless him) fancies that Madeira is acid, and therefore, as happened to the left shoulders in the court of Alexander the Great, every man now drinks sherry. We suspect that no one can discover any other reason for drinking a bad wine in preference to a good one; to the very best of the strong wines. The acid in Madeira is an atom of cream of tartar; and a man may take ten times as much of this poisonous acid out of the apothecaries' bottle every day of his life, with impunity or advantage. This is the very acid itself which causes wine to be wine, and not cider or brandy; and, thus far, the man who drinks sherry, is one stage nearer to the horrific brandy drinker. As to punch, we are inclined to maintain that it is a most admirable invention, and a most salutary drink-though it be vulgar. It is by means of its acid, and its sugar, and its water, that it becomes the rival of wine in salubrity. There is not one among those who drink to drunkenness, who knows how it is that he becomes sober. It is our duty to inform them, and, as we very much suspect, the medical profession also. This is a piece of chemistry; and it might prove for the benefit of their patients, as well as of the Medical science, if physicians were really acquainted with that chemistry which they are kindly reputed to know: and apothecaries also. We will therefore tell them, that the alcohol which produces the intoxication, is digested by the stomach into an acid, or is converted into vinegar. This is the chemical solution of the difficulty; and hence the addition of a fermentable acid, like that of lemons, determines and accelerates this process, in which the sugar aids. Hence the readier change, and the less permanent effects, of wines than of spirits. Moreover, it is the property of acids to correct the effects of narcotics. Lemon juice is the remedy, even against opium; and thus too it constitutes the virtue of punch. However, if we are to drink any thing, let it be French wine. If we must choose from other lands and other drinks, we would rather drink brandy, and still rather Dutch gin, than black port or fiery and bitter sherry. There is no deception here; a man knows and sees what it is that he is drinking. But we are at last going to drink French wines, thanks for ever and ever to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There are two ends in drinking, and thirst to quench is one. The Englishman, reversely, drinks his black wine as he eats a salt herring, to make himself dry. "Drunk at night and dry in the morning; hey, Barnaby, take good warning." Did the devil possess Sir Paul Methuen when he made that lauded treaty, the like of which exists not in Rymer? Certainly at least his infernal Majesty's progeny have walked into the herd of swine, which has ever since been praising the political economy, and drinking the villanous port of this miraculous diplomatist. How else should they have been silly enough to go on approving and drinking down to the present days of universal illumination; paying in purse, stomach, and senses, for the honour of clothing Portuguese backs with British wool, all for the honour of Sir Paul Methuen and political economy. Thus have Port and Bull become entwined, identified, as effectually as Bull and Beefsteak; and thus has it become a moot point whether a valiant Englishman is most touchy on his port or his porter. A generation must yet pass before Cockayne and its dependencies will be reformed on this point, before they shall discover that they may get drinking and intoxication both for the same trouble and expense; and that it is pleasanter to become drunk in regular gradation, pleasing the palate at the same time, and saving small beer, than to poison themselves with bitter blackness, to lose their senses in an hour, not recover them in twenty-four, and to gain, with stupidity, thirst, head-ache, and Epsom salts. The Exchequer, all praise be to it, says that we may now drink French wines. That is, as far as we can pay for them. We must, yet, not drink too much, lest the French should rejoice and become rich. The tailor in a country town quarrels with the butcher who has called him snip, and determines to live on cucumbers to punish him. That is highly meritorious, and very laudable. The butcher, in return, refuses to wear a coat, and clothes himself in a bull's hide; and thus the village prospers, and thus the Gaul determines to cut his meat with his fingers, and thus Sheffield thrives and commerce flourishes. We have regiments, battalions, armies of doganiére, commissioners, Treasury, Exchequer, Excise, tidewaiter and landwaiter, riding officer and gauger, and all the combined intellect cannot invent a duty ad valorem. This is wondrous strange. But it will arrive on some lucky day, and it will then be wondered why it did not arrive before, and our babes will doubt of the wisdom of their ancestors, and the generation that quits the nipple will take to the graceful bouteille, fit envelope of its graceful contents, and the black sturdy Bull bottle will be forgotten, with its black Stygian liquid, and wit and health will wonder at themselves, and Chancellors of the Exchequer shall drink three or six bottles a-day, as well as Lord Chancellors, and shall not die at forty-six with red noses and Promethean livers. It used to be supposed, that the object; the purpose, the existence, the soul of commerce, was interchange; the giving of iron and cotton, which cannot be eaten and drunk, for corn and wine that can; by those who have more razors for shaving than they want, and more muslins than their wives can wear, to those who have more corn and wine than they can swallow, while they go unshaven, and their wives are clothed in linsey wolsey. In short, it was once thought that commerce was commerce, and nothing else. There could not have been a greater fallacy, as Customs and Exeises have shown. But fashions revolve, and perhaps a day is coming when commerce will really be the thing which it pretends. If the French had eaten ten hundred Marechals d'Ancre, committed a dozen of St. Barthelemy's, and twenty revolutions, they have atoned for it all by inventing claret and champagne. It is claret which is the real "Ami de l'Homme;" nectar which Jove never knew. If a man wishes to be happy all the evening, and sober in the morning, let him drink claret. If he wishes to be merry for an hour, and sober in the next, let him drink champagne. We shall perhaps be accused of preaching in our cups, and yet this is worth another paragraph. The people drink, and the people become drunk; each, high and low, in their several ways, and each according to their fancies, purses, habits, or philosophies. But the drunkenness of the one is not the drunkenness of the other; nor, whether for drunkenness or for drinking, are gin and claret, porter and champagne, equivalents. There is a mighty dif ference between the drinking of a count and a cobbler, of a Chancellor of the Exchequer and a tinker. There is a mighty difference in the results. Unquestionably there may sometimes be slight differences in their educations, as well as, now and then, in their capacities and turns of thinking; but in investigating this calculus by a true method of differences, the more important elements are the drinks drunken. If the whiskey of a Highland savage evaporates in dirk and claymore, it is as much because of the whiskey as of the brute tenement, which is thus fired by this ferocious liquid; and hence also the 66 tug of war," when Pat meets Pat at the fair of Bally O'Shaugnessy. It is, indeed, a serious truth, and let the Exchequer perpend it, that ferocity is the produce of drunkenness with spirits; and that, while occasional violence is the result of accidental intoxication from them, habituál and confirmed brutality is the consequence of their continued use. And were it here proper, we could give medical and physiological reasons why it should be so. Let the Admiralty perpend it also. But Th' Excise is fatten'd with the rich result If ferocity is the produce of gin and whiskey, so is heavy stupidity the child of porter and ale. The moral effects, the metaphysical produce of these and of other drinks, is not immaterial. And it is not immaterial on what a man becomes intoxicated, or of what he drinks, habitually, and short of intoxication. Horace would not have praised the facundæ calices and their effects, had his Hippocrene been Meux's brewery or Booth's distillery. Is there a poet who would preface his sonnet with porter, unless indeed he wrote Cockney for Campbell's Magazine? What drink gave birth to Theodric, let the poet himself tell. Every man knows, if indeed he has any seeds of wit at all, how they germinate under claret, how they expand, like bamboos at the first sprinkling of the monsoon, before champagne. If we would open a man's heart and empty his pocket at a charity feast, we must give him good wine: generous wine, it has been well called: and we are confident that, for every bottle of claret we should obtain three times its value. He is a dull beggar, an unphilosophical swindler upon man's heart, who inundates his stomach with the black strap of the Crown and Anchor, and then hopes to reap. As he sowed, so shall he reapsulkiness and stinginess: let him sow claret and reap guineas; let him sow champagne and reap five-pound notes. But we begin to suspect that our readers will suspect us of having a bottle of this divine liquid at our elbow. Alas! would it were so; our bottle is out, and our essay cannot hold longer. We shall therefore conclude our rejoinder to Mr. Forsyth and the Snatchaways, by recommending to all anxious gentlemen to "live pleasant," to eat their meat and drink their wine "like gentlemen," and not to plague themselves about their stomachs and their healths, and gluttony and abstinence. As surely as a man |