ushed with conquest, rides off in the Hansom, or it may
be in her private brougham, to her luxurious rooms; while her sister,
shivering in the cold night, begs us for two-pence with which to purchase
a bed of straw. Poor forlorn one! in another year thou wilt lie down in
another bed, only to wake up when the last trump shall sound!

DR JOHNSON'S TAVERN.

Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, and the _Times_ are all eloquent in the
praise of alcohol. It lifts us above this dull earth, it fires our
genius, it gives to us the large utterances of the gods. Barry Cornwall
tells us--

"Bad are the times
And bad the rhymes
That scorn old wine."

Leigh Hunt translates "Bacchus in Tuscany," and sanctions such lines as
the following--

"I would sooner take to poison
Than a single cup set eyes on
Of that bitter and guilty stuff ye
Talk of by the name of coffee;"

and the _Times_ everywhere inculcates the idea that, without wine, poetry
and eloquence and wit were dumb and dead. Was Sidney Smith witty, was
Shelley a poet, or was he who in old times drew away the Hebrew multitude
from the crowded streets of Jerusalem out into the desert, whose food was
locusts and wild honey, whose raiment was a leathern girdle--was he not
eloquent, as he warned the terror-stricken mob that hung upon his lips of
the wrath to come? Facts are not in favour of the wine-drinkers. Of
Waller Dr Johnson writes, "In a time when fancy and gaiety were the most
powerful recommendations to regard, it is not likely that Waller was
forgotten. He passed his time in the company that was highest both in
rank and wit, from which even his obstinate sobriety did not exclude him.
Though he drank water, he was enabled by his fertility of mind to
heighten the mirth of Bacchanalian assemblies; and Mr Saville said that
'no man in England should keep him company without drinking, but Ned
Waller.'" "In Parliament," says Burnet, "he was the delight of the
House, and, though old, said the liveliest things of any of them." The
truth is, men have often reserved the outpourings of their mind for the
social glass, and have fallen into the natural mistake of believing that
it was the glass, and not the opportunity and the action of mind upon
mind, that elicited a certain amount of joyous fun. I must quote an
anecdote from Sir Walter Scott's Life to illustrate my meaning. He tells
us one of his school-fellows was always at the top of the c