His alms were money put to interest
In the other world,-donations to keep open
A running charity-account with Heaven:-
Retaining fees against the last assizes,

When, for the trusted talents, strict account
Shall be required from all, and the old arch-lawyer
Plead his own cause as plaintiff.

S. I must needs
Believe you, sir these are your witnesses,
These mourners here, who from their carriages
Gape at the gaping crowd. A good March wind
Were to be prayed for now, to lend their eyes
Some decent rheum. The very hireling mute
Bears not a face blanker of all emotion
Than the old servant of the family!

How can this man have lived, that thus his death
Costs not the soiling one white handkerchief!

T. Who should lament for him, sir, in whose heart Love had no place, nor natural charity?

The parlour spaniel, when she heard his step,
Rose slowly from the hearth, and stole aside
With creeping pace; she never raised her eyes
To woo kind words from him, nor laid her head
Upraised upon his knee, with fondling whine.
How could it be but thus! Arithmetic
Was the sole science he was ever taught.
The multiplication-table was his creed,
His pater-noster, and his decalogue.

When yet he was a boy, and should have breathed
The open air and sunshine of the fields,

To give

his blood its natural spring and play,

He in a close and dusky counting-house,

Smoke-dried, and seared, and shrivelled up his heart. So from the way in which he was trained up

His feet departed not; he toiled and moiled,

Poor muck-worm! through his three-score years and ten,
And when the earth shall now be shovelled on him,
If that which served him for a soul were still

Within its husk, 'twould still be dirt to dirt.

S. Yet your next newspapers will blazon him For industry and honourable wealth

A bright example.

T. Even half a million

Gets him no other praise. But come this way

Some twelve-months hence, and you will find his virtues
Trimly set forth in lapidary lines,

Faith, with her torch beside, and little Cupids
Dropping upon his urn their marble tears.

Southey.

THE CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD.

DEHORTATIONS from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, (the man who is to be cured), unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is acknowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man to raise the glass to his head against his will. 'Tis as easy as not to steal, nor to tell lies.

Oh pause, thou sturdy moralist! thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is happily untouched! and first learn how much of compassion, how much of human allowance thou mayest virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation!

Begin a reformation, and custom 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 change, violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? What if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? Is the weakness which sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul?

I have known one in such a state, that when he has

tried to abstain but for one evening,-though the poisonous potion had long ceased to bring back its first enchantments, though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it,-in the violence of the struggle, and the necessity he has felt of getting rid of the present sensation at any rate,-I have known him to scream out, to 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 believe that there are constitutions, robust heads, and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do no worse injury to, than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very pellucid. On them this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade them that 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 convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for term of life.

Twelve years ago I had completed my six-andtwentieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions 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 I fell in with some companions of a different order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a nights, disputants, drunken; yet seemed to have something noble in them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes for it, after midnight, jovially. Of

the quality called fancy, I certainly possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their applause, I set up for a professional joker! I, who of all men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experience at all times in finding words to express my meaning, a natural nervous impediment in my speech!

Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish upon your tongue, disposing you to that conversation, 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 from certain destruction. If you cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake 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 trickling down your cheeks.

To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty; to be applauded for witty when you know you have been dull; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty, which no premeditation can give; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt; to be set on to provoke mirth, which procures the procurer hatred; to give pleasure, and to be paid with squinting malice; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine, which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle auditors; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging applause,— are the wages of buffoonery.

Time, which has a sure hand in dissolving all connexions which have no better fastening than this liquid cement, more kind to me than my own taste or penetration, at length opened my eyes to the supposed qualities 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 infidelity towards them of which I may have been guilty.

My next more immediate companions were, and are, persons of such intrinsic worth, that though accidentally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know, if the thing were to do over again, whether I should have the courage to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the benefit. I came to them reeking with the steams of my late overheated notions of companionship, and the slightest fuel, which they unconsciously afforded, was sufficient to feed my old fires into a perpetuity.

They were no drinkers. But one, from professionable habits, another from a custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to retake a backsliding penitent. The transition from gulping down draughts of liquid fire, to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating the enemy.

It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, through stronger wine and water, through small punch, to those juggling compositions, which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, until they come to next to none, and so to none at 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 it, the slavery which I have vowed to it. How, when I have resolved to quit it, a feeling of ingratitude has started up; how it has put on 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 chimney corner of some inn, in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete Angler, breaks his fast upon a morning pipe in that delicate room piscatoribus sacrum), has in a moment broken down the resistance of