your company, that altogether there is something of social goodness in it."
Though wine may make us better pleased with ourselves, it does not always make others better pleased with us. Such is not always the effect, I say, but sometimes it is. Many become more agreeable in society as they forget themselves, so that they do not go too far and forget others. Although drink furnishes one with neither wit nor learning, it often breaks down the barriers and liberates such abilities as before were confined. It ammates what before was dormant. It thaws congealed ideas, and unlocks the tongue. The effect of this may be pleasing or otherwise.
After all it is a skulking for brilliant effect which manliness despises. Better a mind so cultivated and manners so assured that a man can be as much himself while in his senses, as when beside himself
When alone, as well as when in company, laboring under a humiliating^ sense of awkwardness or inferiority, many drink to get rid of themselves. They would send their thoughts far away from themselves, from the proximate objects and events that annoy them to more pleasing scenes and subjects. Thus wine gives pleasure by taking from us pain. And in every pleasure we have the right to indulge unless it brings evil upon ourselves or others. Then the right is no longer ours. A good which is counterbalanced by an evil is not good but evil, as it tends to evil, and is but the pleasurable beginning of an evil which has a painful ending^.
There is little difference between drunkenness and insanity, and you may as well look for fixed resolve and determinate principle in an idiot as in the habitual drunkard. Having passed certain stages, he is absolutely powerless to reform; and when jeers and insults are heaped upon one of these unfortunates, one hardly knows which to pity most, the sot or the inhuman rabble; when one sees the so-called respectable
