mirth and jollity; but St. Just is an old haggard philosopher, whose ruthful appearance would deter the soft and luxurious from having anything to do with him; but he is full of riches within.' His new acquisition he found in anything but a satisfactory condition. His parishioners there were much given to drinking, especially on the sabbath day, a great part of which they spent at the alehouses of the church town.' They also,' he adds, 'began to absent themselves from their church on holidays;' in consequence of which, and other irregularities, he proceeded thither, and read the sentence of excommunication over a certain Mr. Pokenhorne. But, in spite of these unruly spirits, the average congregation in the forenoon on Sundays was 1000, and in the afternoon 500,' a fact which, taken with the others, is strangely out of accordance with the generally received opinion, that the Establishment in West Cornwall a century ago was at a very low ebb. Over the spiritual welfare of his own immediate flock at Ludgvan, Dr. Borlase* kept a still more watchful eye. The belief in the power of evil spirits, working through the medium of 'white witches' or wizards, was at that time as constant in the West, as it was universal among all classes. The following is a curious letter on this subject, addressed to a certain Mr. Bettesworth at St. Ives:

'Sir, I hope the rumours of your pretending to conjuration are not true; and I have so much charity as to believe that you have not been meddling in the dangerous mysteries of a lower world; but rather, like a true Christian, defy and refuse all intercourse with the devil; but since there are such rumours, and you are said to take upon you to discover lost or stolen goods, I hope you will think that, to retrieve and vindicate your character, it will be necessary for you to use abundant caution that you give no encouragement to silly women to come to you on such foolish and wicked errants; and particularly I am obliged to desire that no such encouragement may be given to those persons who are the flock, and must be the care of your most humble servant-WILLIAM BORLASE.'

It is curious to note that the affairs of the Church of England were affording her ministers at this time quite as much perplexity as they seem to do now-a-days; and that the special subject of anxiety exactly one hundred years ago was precisely the same as at present. Might not the following extract from a letter dated 1772, have appeared in a certain church newspaper in 1872? The rage against the Church,' says Borlase, 'is I fear increasing; and I shall not wonder to see a bill next year brought in to cut off the Athanasian Creed; and the year after

* He had been presented with the honorary D.C.L. at Oxford in 1766.

to strip the Liturgy of the Trinity; and the third to sweep away the whole service,' a sentence from which it would appear that the Athanasian Creed was in those days at least considered by most moderate churchmen as the touch-stone and the key-note of the Christian faith, and that to remove it from the Prayer Book would be paramount to striking a death-blow to the Church itself.

The next extract, which will be our last, relates to the extravagance of the lower classes in Cornwall in 1771. Like the last, it affords some interesting points for comparison with the present day :

'We hear,' it begins, 'every day of murmurs of the common people; of want of employ; of short wages; of dear provisions: there may be some reason for this; our taxes are heavy upon the necessaries of life; but the chief cause is the extravagance of the vulgar in the unnecessaries of life. In one tin-work near me, where most of the tinners of my parish have been employed for years, there were lately computed to have been at one time three score snuff-boxes [the italics are ours]; there may be in my parish about 50 girls above 15 years old, and I dare say 49 of them have scarlet-cloaks; there is scarce a family in the parish, I mean of common labourers, but have tea, once if not twice a day, and in the parish alms-house there are several families, but not one without their tea-kettle, and brandy when they can purchase it: Your journey-men at London, and elsewhere, have their clubbs, and newspapers, and sometimes worse amusements, if worse can be than some of them in short, all labourers live above their condition.'

As old age crept on, Borlase devoted himself to painting, and to sewing together and binding those letters from which we have gathered these few extracts. His habits of industry never deserted him to the last. Every morning he rose at five, and every evening retired to rest at nine, continuing these regular healthy hours until a few days before his death, which occurred at Ludgvan on the 31st of August, 1772. The leading feature of his character was contentment, as far removed from stoic indifference on the one hand, as it was from listless indolence on the other, a temperament, indeed, which carried him pleasurably through all the duties of life, and calmly through its cares. From an age like our own, when intellectual life has so often to be maintained amidst the jostling elements of progress which knows no rest, it is pleasant to look back to that quiet spot by the Cornish sea, where, far removed as he was from the busy hum of men, the subject of our memoir was still happily engaged in working out for himself, line by line and page by page, that mighty book of nature in which his philosophy taught him to recognise the First Cause, and his religion the Creator of the whole

ART.

ART. IV.-1. Report from the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards, together with the Proceedings of the Committee and Minutes of Evidence. 1872.

2. Report by the Committee on Intemperance for the Lower House of Convocation of the Province of Canterbury. 1869.

3. Self-imposed Taxation. By Samuel Smiles. Year Book of General Information. 1870.

4. Wine: its Use and Taxation. By Sir Emerson Tennent. 1855.

5. The Temperance Year Book for 1875.

6. The Licensing Laws of Sweden; and some Account of the great Reduction of Drunkenness in Gothenburg. By David Carnegie, Esq., of Stronvar, Lochearnhead. 1873.

7. Suggestions for a Permissive Clause. By James Garth Mar

shall.

1872.

8. The Necessity of some legalised Arrangements for the Treatment of Dipsomania, or the Drinking Insanity. By Alexander Peddie, M.D. 1858.

9. Uncontrollable Drunkenness considered as a form of Mental Disorder. By Forbes Winslow, M.D. 1866.

THEA

HE old proverb says, 'To make a Devil you must take an Angel. If, therefore, the relative superiority of the English race be estimated by the depths to which it can fall, the national pride may possibly find some compensation for a state of things not otherwise flattering to its self-respect, creditable to its common sense, or promising for its continued prosperity. A full exchequer, and a drunken population, are concomitants which will hardly be found to answer in the end; and while we encourage one chief source of our revenue, the golden eggs may prove to have cost us more than they are worth. In the power of drinking his pocket empty, his health away, and his mind imbecile, the British subject now carries off the palm before his foreign brethren, and there is reason to believe that he has long been foremost in that race. Our climate and our cooking have furnished the excuse, and our convivialities the tradition, for deep and strong potations. Our countryman is also the freest entertainer in the world, whether on the largest or the lowest scale; whether from the contents of the rich man's own cellar, or in the form of one more pot of beer' pressed by one silly and thriftless labourer on another. Shakspeare's touches of character as regards his own countrymen have in no respect survived with more truth than in those where he alludes to their pre-eminence in the consumption of strong beverages. The

Song and the Clink,' it is true, have not shared in the immortality of' The canakin.' There is little of good-fellowship or of hilarity in the revels of our present sots; still, the ancient boast is as well-deserved as ever, that in potency of potting, your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander are nothing to the English.' But if as well deserved, no longer, it must be added, is it so well excused, as in the days when substitutes for the circling glass were not so easily obtained; when coffee was a rare luxury, and tea and teetotalism equally unknown.

The history of Drink, to call it at once by that much-importing monosyllable—which has come to designate those forms only of beverages which possess the prerogative of making drunk-is full of curious facts and lessons. Its statistics furnish a continuous side-stream of history, in which the habits of our English race at different times are reflected with unerring fidelity. All fermented and spirituous, and therefore intoxicating, liquors have been pronounced by writers on Political Economy to come under the category of luxuries, as opposed to necessaries. The common sense and experience of educated minds bear also witness that only a comparatively small number- the feeble and the sick-actually require stimulating drinks; that the majority of our countrymen and women are not the worse, and may be the better, for their moderate use; while some go further, and aver that most people would be better still-that is, healthier and longer-lived-if they never took any at all. Under these circumstances the true character of stimulants, as superfluities, is sufficiently affirmed; and as such, have they been dealt with as fit objects for taxation. That taxation has a twofold purpose, namely, to provide a legitimate source of public income, and a necessary control for the sake of public morals. As a principle, therefore, to be kept in view, we repeat that all fermented beverages, whether for rich or poor, are luxuries; and the happy mean at which legislation is bound to aim is that precise adjustment of the impost, and that careful limit of the temptation, where the profit to the revenue by the drink shall stop short of the demoralisation of the drinker. Beyond this no legislation is accountable. Every man in this country possesses personally a restraining limit over his right of self-indulgence, more precise than any law can make it, namely, the extent of his means. If a man of probity and sense be so circumstanced that he cannot afford strong beverages at his table, he requires no interference of the State to interdict them; and, on the other hand, if a man be so unprincipled as to indulge, and even inordinately, in that which he cannot pay for, no legislation can prevent his defrauding his family of necessaries,

saries, his creditors of their money, and his employers of his work; and especially if an immense organisation of private charity and legal relief give him the power to do so with comparative impunity. Where Right and Wrong are, as in the matter of Drink,' things not of absolute definition, but of degree, each individual has virtually the control over his own pocket and his own corkscrew. It is only when lawgivers deliberately tempt infirm human nature to excesses, that they become responsible for the results.

The 'Drink' of our country is divided into two main streams —that which is supplied by the higher and middle classes, and that which is kept flowing, at ever-increasing depth, by the wage-earning portion of the nation. As regards the stream of Wine, the beverage of the upper classes, it has been curiously affected by outward causes,-by fluctuations of duties, by the wars that interfered with its importation, by the policy which favoured some wine-growing countries at the expense of others, by the smuggling on an enormous scale which defrauded the revenue that the thermometer of its consumption is difficult to read. Under a 3s. duty per gallon on Peninsular wines, and a 4s. 6d. on French, from 1787 to 1794, the revenue from wine declined from its previous amount-averaging something under a million pounds. From 1794 to 1810, during which period the duties were gradually nearly trebled, the revenue rose in the same increasing ratio, till, in 1810, it realised 2 millions, the largest sum derived from wine the Exchequer of this country has ever known. But the demand for a luxury which thus bore the pressure of a duty of 8s. 3d. per gallon on Peninsular wines, and of 12s. 5d. on French vintages, and rose to its highest point under that pressure, resisted a further burden. With the small increase to 9s. 14d. on the Peninsular produce, and 13s. 8d. on French, the demand slackened, and the revenue fell off. The luxury had become too dear. Under these circumstances it can only be regarded as a prohibitory and vindictive act, rather than a legislative experiment, which raised the tax on French wines in 1813-the year after Moscow-to 19s. 8d.; a larger sum than three times the amount of very fair French wine now costs; though how the revenue dwindled under that imposition no one can now tell. For the records of that year-and the high duty lasted no longer-are destroyed. From 1810 to 1825, a period of rapidly-increasing wealth and population, with duties returned respectively to 9s. 1d. and 13s. 8d., the demand continued its relative decline by remaining stationary, the revenue averaging just above two millions.