resorted to for the purpose of enabling the guests to protract their debauches. Accounts of these are to be found not only in the pages of the satirists, but in the sober philosophical writings of Pliny and other historians. Pliny says,1 that on no object was so much ingenuity expended as upon the manufacture of wine, and that so common was its use, it was given even to beasts of burden. He speaks of it as a liquid which deprives man of his reason and "drives him to frenzy and the commission of a thousand crimes." One of his statements seems almost incredible, but it is made by other writers as well, and that is, that men actually drank hemlock (to which, as already stated, wine was considered an antidote), before commencing a carouse, "that they may have the fear of death before them, to make them take their wine." "The more prudent," he says, "have themselves parboiled in hot baths, from whence they are carried away half dead," and emetics were commonly resorted to after a large quantity of wine had been swallowed, so that the drinking might be renewed. Premiums upon the exercise of the drinking capacity were offered to such as liked to make exhibitions of themselves at banquets, and the result of these and similar practices is said to have been the rupture of all ties of decency and modest bearing on the part of the guests of both sexes.

"Then it is," says Pliny, "that the secrets of the mind are revealed: one man is heard to disclose the provisions of his will; another lets fall some expression of fatal import, and so fails to keep to himself words which will be sure to come home to him with a cut throat and how many a man has met his death in this 1 Book iv. cap. 28.

PLINY ON DRUNKENNESS.

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fashion! Indeed, it has become a common proverb that in wine there is truth.'" He goes on to describe the appearance of the drunkard, which agrees with the picture of him that was drawn by the satirists, and which may be viewed at the present day: the blotched and purple skin, the crimson nose, the bleared and watery eyes! Delirium tremens, or, as the historian. calls it, "sleep agitated by furies," was also common, and was accompanied by loss of memory; "and this," he adds, "this is what they call seizing the moments of life! Whereas, in reality, whilst other men lose the day that has gone before, the drinker has already lost the day that is to come!" He censures the fashionable physicians of his day who prescribed alcoholic drinks to their patients for the purpose of pleasing them, and so securing their custom; and he does not hesitate to expose the habits of those who were great topers as well as eminent citizens. Alcibiades comes in for severe reproof; so, too, an eminent Roman, Novellius Torquatus, of Mediolanum, a man who held all the honours of the state from the prefecture to the proconsulate, of whom he says that he could drink off three congii at a single draught,1 from which he obtained the name of Tricongius. This he is said to have done before the eyes of Tiberius, and to the extreme surprise of the Emperor, who was himself a renowned toper. Another hero, we are told, kept up a drinking bout at the residence of the same Emperor for two days. and two nights; and these little dissipations do not seem to have interfered in the least with the exercise of the civil or military duties of those who indulged in them.

More than two gallons at a draught! It seems an incredible feat.

But drunkenness and debauchery were not confined to the higher classes in the days of Roman decadence. In describing the baths of Caracalla, Gibbon says, on good authority, that there issued from those stately palaces crowds of dirty and ragged plebeians, without shoes and without a mantle, who loitered away whole days in the street or Forum to hear news and to hold disputes; who dissipated in extravagant gaming the miserable pittance of their wives and children, and spent the hours of the night in obscene taverns and brothels in the indulgence of gross and vulgar sensuality.1

Such, then, was the condition of society in the latter days of Rome, with her proud and debauched patricians and her ragged and dependent plebeians, shortly before the conquering barbarians of the North swept down like an avalanche and completed her overthrow; and thus do we find the curse of drunkenness associated with her downfall. May the story of her vices and the lesson of her fate not have been learned in vain by succeeding nations, and above all by the people of our own land; for they teach us that the upper ranks of society cannot yield themselves to over-indulgence without the commission of a twofold wrong without injuring themselves by their vicious practices, as well as their poorer fellow-citizens by their evil example. Neither does the inconvenience cease with the discontinuance of the evil habit; the excesses of the poor react upon the rich, and it is as idle to attempt to reform the lower orders by criminal legislation and police restrictions alone, as it is unwise to content ourselves with

1 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iii. p. 215. Edinburgh: Strachan, 1782.

THE LESSON OF ROME'S DECADENCE.

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denouncing their vices, and leaving them to work out their own reformation. In order to secure continued prosperity to a nation, all classes, high and low, rich and poor, must be alike free, contented, and virtuous. We cannot expect to progress satisfactorily as a nation amongst our neighbours whilst we have even a residuum of drunkards in our midst; for as long as there are amongst us such as those who issued from the baths of Caracalla (but who in our day neither enter nor issue from any baths at all), as easy would it be for rich bon vivant whose head is but little affected by the irregularities of his appetite but whose nether members the gout has made her own, to expect to compete successfully in a race with a band of young, and healthy, and vigorous athletes. This is the first grave lesson to be learned from a consideration of the history of drink.

CHAPTER VIII.

GERMANY: ANCIENT, MEDIÆVAL, AND MODERN.

LONG before the northern barbarians had descended into the plains of Italy as conquerors, and whilst they were still the tributaries of Rome, they had earned the reputation of being brave, but indolent and intemperate. Pliny, who has already enlightened us concerning the habits of his own countrymen, tells us that the chief drink of the Germans was beer, or, as he calls it, "corn steeped in water," which, he says, was capable of being kept until it had attained a great age. They, however, soon learned the superiority of the wines of Italy and Gaul, and those are said to have been not the least of the inducements which tempted them to make incursions into their neighbours' territories. Tacitus describes the Germans as a primitive, savage, and warlike race, much addicted to intemperance in drink, but chaste and virtuous in their relations with women, whom they treated with great respect. He says that they slept late into the day, and on rising they proceeded to bathe, after which they partook of a meal, each sitting on a distinct seat and at a separate table. They then went armed to business, and not less. frequently to convivial parties, in which it was no

1

1 Bohn's Tacitus, vol. ii. p. 312 et seq.