On other days, the man of toil is doom'd To eat his joyless bread, lonely; the ground Both seat and board; screen'd from the Winter's cold, He shares the frugal meal with those he loves ; He hopes, yet fears presumption in the hope, THE KNIGHT OF ARTS AND INDUSTRY.*-THOMSON. JAMES THOMSON was born in Roxburghshire, in 1700, and after attending the University of Edinburgh went to London, to try his fortune in Literature. After experiencing great poverty, the publication of his poem "Winter," introduced him to notice, and he had adequate resources thenceforth. His fame rests chiefly on his four poems known as "The Seasons," but he also published Tragedies, a long poem called "Liberty," and a very fine one "The Castle of Indolence," from which the following extract is taken. AMID the greenwood shade this boy was bred, The Knight of Arts and Industry1 by name. * These verses aro in the same form of Stanza as Spenser's "Fairie Queene.” Him did Minerva2 rear and nurture well, In every science and in every art, By which mankind the thoughtless brutes excel, That brace the nerves, or make the limbs alert, Was never knight on ground mote3 be with him compared. Sometimes, with early morn, he mounted gay Yclad in steel, and bright with burnished mail, Or wheeled the chariot in its mid-career, Or, strenuous, wrestled hard with many a tough compeer At other times, he pried through Nature's store, Or else he scanned the globe, those small domains, Its seas, its floods, its mountains, and its plains; Nor would he scorn to stoop from high pursuits Fighting with winds and waves on the vexed ocean pool. To solace then these rougher toils, he tried Or, to such shapes as graced Pygmalion's wife, Or verses framed that well might wake Apollo's lyre.10 Accomplished thus he from the woods issued, To-wit, a barbarous world to civilize. Earth was till then a boundless forest wild: A rugged wight, the worst of brutes, was man : A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE.-CANON FARRAR. 1. OF far deeper, of far more awful significance, is what drinking costs in disease, what it costs in crime, what it costs in misery, what it costs to the glory of England now, and the hopes of English generations for years to come. I should have no time, I have no heart, to tell you all that could be told under this head. I entreat you not to turn impatiently from it, nay—I tell you plainly you have no right to turn impatiently from it. For the drinking of some means, inevitably, as things are, the drunkenness of many; and these who sin, these who suffer, these who die, are our own flesh and blood. I believe that there is scarcely one family in England which has not suffered from this hideous plague, scarce a house in England where there is not one dead. 2. You know what drink costs to the nation in money, what does it cause in disease and accident? Ask the dreary page of statistics, and you will read in so-called accidents, but accidents perfectly preventable, that it costs us broken limbs, and shipwrecked vessels, and burnt houses, and shattered railway trains, and the deaths of children, overlaid by drunken mothers, or beaten savagely by drunken fathers. To tell you what it costs in disease, I should have to take you, not, in fancy, but in hard fact, to what the poet saw as the result of intemperance in meats and drinks: "A lazarhouse it seemed, wherein were laid Of ghastly spasm, and racking torture: qualm 3. This is what those who claim a right to speak with authority tell us it costs in sheer disease; and which of you is so ignorant of English history, of English literature, of English life, as not to know, further, of noblest reputations stained, of glorious intellects ruined, of great souls embittered, of invaluable lives cut short by it? And what does it cost in crime? I will tell you, not as a surmise of my own, but on the recorded testimony, on the emphatic evidence of almost every judge and magistrate and recorder on the English bench. 4. Remember that those arrested for drunkenness do not furnish one-tithe of the drunkards, and then shudder to hear that, in one year alone, 204,820 were arrested for crimes in which drunkenness was entered as a part of the charge, and that last year 5,131 women-only think of that, and of all the hideous degradation, all the unspeakable horror, which it implies-were arrested for drunkenness in Westminster alone. In every province, in every county, in every great city of the United Kingdom, it has been stated from the seat of justice again and again that but for drunkenness there would not be in England one-tenth of the existing crime. It is getting a hideous common-place of judges. 5. Only a few days ago Lord Coleridge said at Durham that but for drink we might shut up nine-tenths of our gaols. Last week there was brought up before Mr. Justice Manisty, a wretched creature in man's semblance, who, as though he were worse than a natural brute beast, made to be taken and destroyed, had brutally kicked to death a feeble and ailing wife, and the judge, in sentencing him to the gallows, said, "You have been found guilty of the crime of wilful murder, your victim being your own wife. You are a sad, sad instance of the consequences of indulging in drink, which has brought you to this fearful condition. It is only owing to God's mercy that this has not brought many more into a similar case. I am afraid that if this vice continue to be indulged in as it now is, many more will stand in a like position. Oh, that we could by administering the law put an end to such things!" 6. He might well say that; but dare you blink such testimony? Do you think that they say these things rashly? And if you will not listen to the reiterated warnings of the judges in their ermine, will you listen to the noble-hearted missionaries, who tell us what drink costs to the glory of England in the execration of her name over whole continents, and the ruin of her efforts among whole populations? Could I summon the Maoris of New Zealand-once |