knows every thing, in what contempt a man was once held, who, under any circumstances, was induced to violate the laws of secrecy; nor of the cutting remark of Quintus Curtius, that, although few men can speak well, it is in every one's power not to speak at all. In the ardour of kindness, however, produced by the bottle, many a secret has been extorted or revealed.

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I now come to speak of, as far as society is concerned, one of the worst evils arising from intemperance in wine -a disposition to quarrel, which it too often creates. Since the battle of the Centaurs with the Lapithæ, however, such has been the case; and it has more than once been my lot to witness a modern Hyleus distributing bottles and glasses amongst the heads of his companions, making a lasting impression upon all those in their course. Horace, indeed, in his ironical pleasantry, makes it what we call " even betting," that, unless the Graces interfere, drinking bumpers and quarrelling were synonimous terms in his day; and, consequently, when he invites Mecenas to his feast, he gives him an assurance that good humour shall be preserved. This, it must be confessed, is a reflection on human nature,—that what must have been intended, by its cheering influence, to have increased the sympathies between man and man, should warm the snake, and give vigour to the poison, and oftentimes to the destruction of unoffending victims. But the fact is, that although wine increases our sympathies, it brings to light antipathies, and sometimes opens wounds that were supposed to be healed.

But does not Bellona accompany Bacchus, as well as Mars? Undoubtedly she does; and a disposition to shed blood, when heated by wine, is one of the unhappy results of indulging in it to excess. This is, in fact, typically implied in heathen mythology. The god of wine is not only said to have been born in a storm, but, by its being feigned that he was horned, it was intended to be conveyed to us, by such monstrosity, that, when men sacrifice too largely to him, they are inclined to fight. I hate the prac tice of duelling, necessary evil as it may be, in the pell-mell of human society. Death by the hand of man always leaves a stain; and one of the

great advantages attending the present comparatively moderate use of wine, is the comparatively infrequent__recourse to the trigger. I could produce a long list of awful events-two very recent ones-having their origin in drunkenness; but am unwilling to enter on so melancholy a subject.

When we read of Alexander the Great killing his best friend and benefactor in his cups, and setting fire to a palace and all the illustrious monuments of the Persian kings, we are almost unwilling to receive the story as fact, because we are at a loss to find a cause. But I have witnessed many instances of temporary insanity produced by drink-ay, by even one night's debauch. From one of these selfcreated maniacs-an intimate friend, too, and an excellent fellow when sober -I had a very narrow escape for my own life. He entered my barrackroom with a drawn sabre, fresh ground -for he had been a few weeks before on actual service, and had received a sabre wound-when I hid myself under the bed-clothes. His amusement was to exhibit his skill in the "cuts five and six," at my head, which was fortunately protected by thick blankets. What he was thinking of, unless it were Bedlam, I am unable to divine; but his reiterated exclamation was,"Mind your eyes, Dr. Munro." I also was once horror-struck at hearing a well-educated, and by no means an immoral, man, cursing his Maker for ten minutes in succession, when mad with wine; because, as he said, he had not ten thousand a-year to spend, and his next neighbour had. Now, although it may be allowable to exclaim with Horace,

Quo mihi fortunas, si non conceditur uti?"

we can have no right to upbraid the Giver of all good things for not making us quite so rich as our neighbours. But I could bring more instances of these temporary demoniacs by the fumes of wine, were I not in fear of outraging decency, as also of shocking the feelings of your numerous readers.

I can, however, give you a harmless anecdote or two illustrative of the maddening effects of wine on easily excited temperaments. I knew a surgeon to a dragoon regiment, who, although correct

In this world, there is nothing indestructible but the heart of man. Other things were made to be unmade again. But this "was given him tempered so," that the iron hand of Time might knock for generations and leave no visible mark. The moral, like the physical world, is a revolving world; and doubtless, if we knew, moves forward with a mathematical necessity as strong, and a regularity as beautiful. Now, every other part of this great circle was intended to share the revolutions of time; but for the heart, God placed it in the centre of his scheme, that so, like the sun, it alone might stand fixed amidst an universe of change. This was to be the radiating focus of every bright achievement; itself immovable, this was to be the grand fulcrum of all motion.

And so it has ever been; for while opinion, law, custom, manner, and what has been called the "spirit" of an age, rising or setting, have passed through every sign of the political zodiac, the human heart, that was the moving principle all along the human heart, with all its passions, good and bad (if any are bad), has been the same heart from the first. It is the native soil of the man, the common mould, wherein all his actions root and grow-differing in their fruits, but in their kingdom and generation identical. A glorious soil it is, and a fruitful, which never failed-did it, ye poets?-to throw up some of its precious wild-flowers of sentiment, even in the bleakest, rudest seasons of the world; and now, in the summer of our civilisation, with a pure stream of Christian philosophy flowing liberally through the garden of life, how bright, how beautiful, are its productions! You, gloomy cynic, that sit at home, and in the embers of your solitary hearth see none but shapes of evil, come forth, and purge your bile! away with that sneering mouth, reform that under-lip, open wider those supercilious eyes, and let the blessed sun of humanity, that is now warming the world, inform you how gross a cloud enveloped your understanding, that could not see the fair works that are abundant in the light.

Whether the theologians have a dis

tinction between the heart and the soul I know not; but as I presume there are not two "divine particles," but only one, and as the heart is assuredly divine, so, I conceive, the one must include the other, or be merely another name for it. With respect to the intellect of man, it is a dry, hard piece, in the composition; by its small show of power only serving the more signally to mark his subordinate condition, like the speciousness of a footman's livery. It is so poor a piece of stuff, when considered in relation to the wisdom of God, that we cannot suppose it to be even the veriest shred from the hem of that robe, but rather a different pattern altogether -a coarser, lower kind of intelligence, of a distinct species - a menial bit, to suit our estate. But the heart, on the contrary, is an authentic spark from heaven; it is a portion of God himself; and the man who feels that fervid thing glowing and dilating within his breast in his hours of selfcommunion, and silently urging him on to generous sentiments, need never trouble the laborious intellect for reasons to prove the immortality of the soul.

Among the earliest offsprings of the heart are Music and Poetry, which seem to have been born for one another. Accordingly, they were united soon; and Music merging her name, the two have formed one flesh, under the designation of Lyric Poetry. Lyric Poetry, originally, had (as the name imports) the accompaniment of the lyre, and was entirely devoted to the service of religion. But this, which was at first the entire character of the lyric kind, sunk afterwards into a species, which we call the Hymn, and which the grammarians generally distinguish by the name of Paan (from the usual acclamation of In Iaia, which was peculiar to it), while various other divisions began to appear; such as the ode amatory, or melos; scolium, or convivial ode; epinicium, or laudatory ode, in celebration of those who conquered at the games ("Quamobrem omnia Pindarica quæ extant epinicia sunt," says Julius Scaliger-all the odes of Pindar that remain are of this class); sotadicum, or invective; and

others. Through these various deviations from the original character, Music, like an attached wife, faithful even in transgression, still attended. To speak more plainly, however, the abuse of both was so early matter of complaint, that almost all the old writers, who touch on the subject at all, cry out against it as a grievous public evil, threatening the moral character of the people, and endangering liberty itself. If these denunciations were confined to that false school of philosophy to which all the Roman declaimers belong, I should regard them with contempt, and hug myself (as I do whenever I read Cicero) in the reflection, that it was not my misfortune to live in an age when the natural gaiety of good feeling, and the graces of refinement that attend on superior intelligence, were regarded as so many derelictions from a certain stiff standard of moral propriety which these incorrigible clowns (for so they remained to the last) had moulded to themselves for worship, like some clumsy claygod, out of the very thickness of their understanding. But when I find the elegant and spiritual Greeks, with Plato himself at their head, preferring this complaint, and regretting the ravages which the "enharmonic genus was making amongst the susceptible hearts of their countrymen, I am at no loss to conceive that they talk of something really exceeding the natural modesty of music. The animadversions of Aristotle touching this point, in that admirable book in which he treats of the musical art, are of great weight, and the facts which you collect from them the picture of a state of manners the very counterpart of our own — drawing-room view he presents you with the follies and impertinences of private life offer the most curious matter for reflection. For his strictures on the fopperies of a fictitious taste in music, they possess the greater force from the unequivocal proofs he gives elsewhere of a real felt enthu

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siasm for this divine art. The charge brought against music, or a particular species of it, by these writers, was, that it unnerved and debauched the mind. This was probably true of that species which, if it be possible to collect any definite notion of it in the unfortunate obscurity which surrounds the subject, seems to have been some exceedingly ornate, chromatic kind; but not obnoxious on that account so much, I suspect, as on account of the ostentation and conceit with which it may have been usually found in connexion as, with us, Italian music is an innocent thing, though the manners of our foreign artistes, as they are affectedly called, are sometimes not a little displeasing to an honest mind. This, however, may have been so far true; but when I hear the same objection urged, generally, against music, by those who take upon themselves to play the Cato in our times, I always have a suspicion that the corruption they dread lies nearer their own souls than the souls of those they are so solicitous about: as they who run about crying "Plague !" are generally the first to fall sick. If I remember, Aristotle allows the "enharmonic genus' for old people, and people afflicted with pains. But the fact is, that if the mind be fashioned aright, young or old, sick or hale, matters not-no "genus" can do any harm; to the soul in health all is innocent: "not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.' I would willingly grant as much as this, viz. that the only title that any work of art ought to have to our favour, is its power of contributing to the common advantage. But, then, because the mind receives its nourishment, like the body, not from simples only, but from every kind of mixed diet, possessing in its healthy state the same faculty of secretion-the faculty of separating the nutritious from the rancid particles of its food - so there are