closely to business for days and weeks without touching a drop of liquor, then took to drink for a day or a week, and after their debauch returned to their work with new vigor. Business is one thing and pleasure another, they say—one should be wholly disthict from the other. In Europe all drink and without ceasing, but usually in moderation, and mixed with their work which is light; in California the two were somewhat separated, and the work was harder.
Gulliver assured his horse friends, the Houyhnhnms^ "that wine was not imported among us from foreign countries to supply the want of water or other drinks, but because it was a sort of liquid which made us merry, by putting us out of our senses, diverted all melancholy thoughts, begot wild extravagant imaginations in the brain, raised our hopes and banished our fears, suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use of our limbs, till we fell into a profound sleep, although it must be confessed that we always awoke sick or dispirited, and that the use of this liquor filled us with diseases which made our lives uncomfortable and short " This was at a time when Swift's contemporary, Sir Richard Steel, says of England that "the common amusement of our young gentlemen, especially of such as are at a distance from those of the first breeding, is drinking." And furthermore 'that "it is very common that evils arise from a debauch which are fatal, and always such as are disao-reeable."
There are many like the learned Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt, who can abstain wholly, but who cannot practise abstinence. There are men, who from their very nature, can do nothing in moderation. Men of genius, particularly, being of necessity unevenly balanced in mind, tend to every species of excess. Broad laxity follows severe effort, and free indulgence temporary abstinence. For many years Johnson drank no wine; but toward his latter days he took it up
