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Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortuheir sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is aowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force oblige a man to raise his glass to his head against his will. Tis as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies.Alas! The hand to pilfer, and the too bear false witness, have no stitutional tendency. These are as indifferent to them. At the first instance of the reformed will, they be brought off without a murmur. The itg finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar with the same natural delight give forth useful truths with which it has been aced to scatter their pernicious traries. But when a man has itted sot-----
Oh pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched, ahy ge riseth at the name which I have written, first learn what the thing is; how much of passion, how much of human allowahou mayest virtuously mih thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a ma not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle.
Begin a reformation, and will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through fire? what if the whole system must undergo a ge violent as that which we ceive of the mutation of form in some is? what if a process parable to flaying alive be to be gohrough? is the weakhat sinks under such struggles to be founded with the pertinacity which gs to other vices, which have induo stitutional y, no e of the whole victim, body and soul?
I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one evening,-- though the poisonous potion had long ceased t back its first entments, though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it,-- in the violence of the struggle, and the y he has felt of getting rid of the preseion at any rate, I have known him to scream out, or cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him.
Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I have no ;puling apology to make to mankind. I see then all in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am atable for the woe that I have brought upon it.
I believe that there are stitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scary excesses hurt; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wiaken in ever so plentiful a measure, do no worse injury than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them his discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, wh his strength with them, and ing off foiled from the test, would fain persuade them hat such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak, the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the vivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life.
Twelve years ago I had pleted my six-and-tweh year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty mu solitude. My panions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the faculties which God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me unused.
About that time<dfn></dfn> I fell in with some panions of a different order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunke seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or asses for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I certainly possessed a larger share then my panions. Enced by their applause, I set up for a professed joker! i who of all men am least fitted for su occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experie all times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment in my speech!
Reader, if yifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tig relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort of versation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly yreatest destru. If you ot crush the power of fancy, or that within you whiistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, -- but not as I do now, with tears trig down your cheeks.
To be an object of passion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stated at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you ot be witty, to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty whio premeditation give; to be spurred on to efforts whid in pt; to be set on t provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred; to give pleasure and be paid with squinting malice; to swallhts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors; te miserable morrows fhts of madness; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it ba little insiderable drops ing applause,-- are the wages of buffoonery ah.
Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all es which have no solider fastening than this liquid t, more kind to me than my own taste or peion, at length opened my eyes to the supposed quality of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced, and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample retribution for any supposed iy that I may have been guilty of towards them.
My more immediate panions were and are persons of sutrinsid felt worth, that though actally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know that if the thio do ain, I should have the ce to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the be. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of panionship; and the slightest fuel which they unsciously afforded, was suffit to feed my old fires into a propensity.
They were no drinkers, but one, from professional habits, and another, from a derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backslidient. The transition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to ute. He beats us at barter; and whehink to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, tis odds but that he puts the trick upon us of two for ohat (paratively) white devil of tobaccht with him in the end seven worse than himself.
It were impertio carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wihrough stronger wine and water, through small punch, to those juggling positions which, uhe name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under less and less water tinually, until they e o none, and so to all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of my Tartarus.
I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believing me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudging service which I have paid, the slavery which I have vowed to it. Here, when I have resolved to quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has started up; how it has put upon personal claims, and made the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casually in a book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the ey-er of some inn in "Joseph Andrews" or Piscator in the "plete Angler" breaks his fast upon a m pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. Hoe was ever in my midnight path before me, till the vision forced me to realise it,-- how then its asding vapours curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand deliinisterings versant about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it turo a ive relief, theo a restlessness and dissatisfa, theo a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands fessed in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself lio it beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone-----
Persons not aced to examihe motives of their as, to re up the tless nails that rivet the s of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have fessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which, in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, s down many a poor fellow, of ninal indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot?
I have seen a print after Cio, in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound to the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repug the same instant of time is applying a so his side. In his face is feeble delight, the recolle of past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bohe springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering stantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preg a-all this represented in one point of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own dition.
Of that there is no hope that it should ever ge. The waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening ses of life or the entering upon some newly-discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to uand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going dorecipice with open eyes and a passive will,-- to see his destru and have no power to stop it, ao feel it all the way emanating from himself; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him, a not to be able tet a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins:-- could he see my fevered eye, feverish with last nights drinking, and feverishly looking for this nights repetition of the folly; could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered,-- it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantliation; to make him clasp his teeth
and not undo em
To suffer WET DAMNATION to run thro em.
Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be the fihing you would have us to uand, if the forts of a cool braio be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders, in your instahat you do not return to those habits from which you would ihers o swerve? if the blessing be worth preserving, is it not worth rec?
Rec!-- Oh if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, when a draught from the clear spring could slake as which summer suns and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit! In my dreams I sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innoly makes me sid faint.
But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinend the excess which kills you? For your sake, reader, and that you may tain to my experience, with pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, hat I find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less firmed-for some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential), iage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which is suffit to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his own trial. He will e to know it, whenever he shall arrive in that state in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through intoxication: for it is a fearful truth that the intellectual faculties, by repeated acts of intemperance, may be driven from their orderly sphere of a, their clear daylight ministries, until they shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint maions of their departing energies, upourning periods of the fatal mado which the owe their devastation. The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil is so far his good.*
[Footnote] * When poor M-------- painted his last picture, with a pencil irembling hand, and a glass of brandy and water iher, his fingers owed the parative steadiness with which they were eo gh their task, in an imperfect mao a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and his kin so terribly.
Behold me, then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility and decay. Hear me t my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the midnight cup.
Twelve years ago, I ossessed of a healthy frame of mind <samp></samp>and body. I was rong, but I think my stitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as it ossible to be. I scarew what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches.
At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the m, summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece of a song to wele the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretg out the hours of recumbeo their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked.
Life itself, my waking life, has much of the fusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day time I stumble upobbr>.9９lib.</abbr>n dark mountains.
Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my nature, yet as something of y to be gohrough, and therefore best uaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of discements, and am ready to give up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing ceit of incapacity The slightest ission given me by a friend, or any small duty which I have to perform for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, &c., haunts me as a labour impossible to be got through. So much the springs of a are broken.
The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind. I dare not promise that a friends honour, or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the expense of moral a are deadened within me.
My favourite occupations in times past now cease to eain. I do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstray dition e long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at e of thought, which is now difficult to me.
The noble passages whierly delighted me in history or poetic fi, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great and admirable.
I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general feeling of deterioration.
These are some of the instances, ing which I say with truth, that it was not always so with me.
Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? or is this disclosure suffit?
I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to sult by these fessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I end them to the readers attention, if he finds his own case any way touched. I have told him what I am e to. Let him stop in time.
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