The drunkard is a lean and sunken-eyed being, the current of whose life is reduced to a poor half-pint, and one-half of that is settled in his nose. He drinks for the sake of the stimulus, and seems scarcely to live when the excitation is at an end. You see him then with blood-shot eyes, and mean and trailing pace, crawling along the earth, or standing still with his limbs hanging about him like those of a pasteboard Merry Andrew when the child has ceased to pull its string. All his sober moments are employed in efforts to appease the anger of those friends whom he has offended in his maudlin fits. He takes indignities with patience-not the patience of a Christian, but that of a coward; a coward who murders his friend in his heart, while he crouches to him in appearance. Every feeling, every care, every project are forgotten in this single and beastly propensity; every duty is sacrificed; every obligation is slighted; every affection surrendered to its gratification.

The sot is a sensualist of another order, different in appearance and different in character. He is a huge, bloated creature, with a lead-coloured complexion and stupid sleepy eyes, into which no human excitement can infuse a spark of fire or intelligence. His drink is ale, or some heavy malt liquor, which will gradually stupefy and beget a dull oblivion, without at any time. wholly depriving him of consciousness. The drunkard acts as if his brains were converted into fire; the sot

would lead you to believe that his cranium contained a huge lump of mud. He smokes his pipe, and gulps down his coarse draught for the sake of the sedative, not like the drunkard, in pursuit of stimulus. But both are nothing better than the brute.

Yet why should I libel the poor brute by such a comparison? It is a shame to call a man a beast, when he puts on a character which no well-regulated animals in the whole Linnæan system would assume. Poor sinless things! I wrong you vilely, when I class you with the glutton and the drunkard. Who ever saw a horse with a paunch like some human creatures, or a hog with a carbuncled proboscis? What dog, unless a dog tutored by man, would surfeit himself on made-dishes, like an epicure, and turn up his nose at plain beef or mutton? Who talks of intemperance in a pig-stye? What, if the poor hog does love a roll in the mire, and eats his peas at the rate of a quart to the mouthful, still it is a sober beast, and fulfils its part in the system of the universal harmony. It would blush, if a hog could blush, to neglect its little squeaking family for the best trough of peas, or the vilest slough that ever tempted him. It is egregious flattery to call a drunkard or a glutton a beast.

The glutton, whose passion regards the quantity of his diet, is a hideous creature. To please himself, he would have his stomach as capacious as a post-bag. He envies his horse when he enters the stable and sees him

M

tugging at a rack full of hay. He emulates the quadruped, and goes on dilating, like the frog in Æsop, till he is ready to explode from plethora. An apoplectic stroke, in general, concludes his feast, and sends him straight from the table to his tomb.

The epicure is a daintier sinner. He prides himself on a degree of imaginative delicacy in eating, which only proves him to be the more thorough sensualist. The glutton is only devoted in body to the passion, his mind is suffered to stagnate or run wild as it pleases. But the epicure brings both into play. He makes his intellect subservient to the uses of the passion, and debases the lofty faculties of his eternal nature to the service of a mean and selfish appetite. Who would not suppose that the following passage from a fragment of Plato's comedies had been written for the benefit of those philosophers?

"What is your science

But kitchen science? Wisely to descant
Upon the choice bits of a savoury carp,
And prove by logic that his summum bonum

Lies in his head; there you can lecture well;

And whilst your grey beards wag, the gaping guest
Sits wondering with a foolish face of praise.”

Nature, having denied reason to the brutes, wisely ordained that the means of their subsistence should be thinly scattered over the earth, and that they should

* Cumberland's Essays.

seldom find food in masses sufficiently abundant to produce a surfeit. A horse who enters on a pasture field with the hungriest inclinations, can do little more in the course of a day than graze a tolerable meal. The same provision was not resorted to in the instance of man; for his reason rendered the precaution unnecessary. But he has contrived to escape the restraint of that severe admonisher in this as well as in other cases.

I close this unpleasing subject, over which I have hurried with perhaps a too manifest dislike. Forgive the coarseness of the terms which have escaped me. The pencil must be dipped in no delicate colours that is intended to sketch such portraits with any fidelity.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Selfish Crotarie.

Ar that period in Irish history, when the Scandinavian conquerors, long masters of the island, were deprived of their sovereignty by the natives, there lived in the court of the Ard-righ, in Meath, a young hobbeler named Ollam. He was remarkable for his courage in war, and his accomplishments in peace, but more than all for his strict and steady piety. The practice of self-denial, so necessary to the preservation of virtue, and the formation of true greatness, was familiar to him from his childhood. His obedience was as implicit as his patriotism was devoted-and it was to him a severe trial of this virtue that he was sent by his king into a remote part of the country, on the very eve of that singular insurrection which ended in the destruction of the Norwegian Thorgils, and his tyrannical countrymen.

On the day of his return to Meath the young hobbeler and his daltin, or attendant, were seen, the one riding, the other running on foot, along the banks of the River Callain, in the direction of Armagh. The morning was rich in all the soft and youthful luxury of a promising spring; and the horseman, or hobbeler, as those of his

2