o drink wine, and men of strength to mingle
strong drink_. Regardless of these denunciations, and trusting to the
strength of their own heads, and the practised discipline of their own
stomachs, their _noble_ ambition was to make drunk as many of their
guests as possible, especially any luckless freshman who chanced to be
of the party. Those who, whether from religious principle or from
manliness of character, did not choose to submit to be made drunk, were
obliged either to encounter these _kind_ endeavours with sturdy
resistance,--resistance which sometimes occasioned a total cessation of
intercourse and acquaintance,--or to evade them by stratagem. Glass
after glass was dexterously emptied upon the carpet under the table, or
the purple stream sought concealment under heaps of walnut-shells and
orange-peel. In short, at a tolerably large wine-party there was wasted,
or _worse than wasted_, a quantity of Port wine sufficient to check the
ravages of a typhus fever in an entire village.

These days of _Celtic barbarism_ are, I hope, utterly passed away. As in
general society very little wine is consumed, (_excepting at dinner_,)
so Oxford has caught the spirit of the times, and the bacchanalian
revels to which I have alluded are, I believe, much less common than
they were formerly, if not entirely exploded. I am afraid, however, that
even now more wine is drunk in some colleges, than is consistent either
with Christian temperance, or with habits of study, or with the
preservation of health.

I need not point out to _you_, my dear nephew, the evils which, in a
religious point of view, result from drinking to excess. You, I well
know, would shudder at the idea of wilfully depriving yourself of
reason, and of sinking yourself to the situation of a beast or of a
maniac. A man, who has thrown away his reason, has little right to hope
for the continuance of the assisting and preventing grace of God. And
destitute of the controlling guidance, both of reason and of Divine
Grace, what is there left to prevent his ungoverned passions from
carrying him into the most perilous excesses? There are deadly vices, to
which young men are, at all times, but too powerfully solicited by their
natural appetites; and when those appetites are stimulated by drinking,
and all salutary control shaken off, the danger is great indeed. You
perhaps may remember an Eastern apologue to the following effect, (I
know not where to find it): The Devil havi