Intemperance on the earth shall bring
Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew
Before thee shall appear!
What an advocate of prohibition was he who could write,—
What more foul common sin among us than drunkenness? Who can be ignorant that if the importation of wine were forbid, it would both clean rid the possibility of committing that odious vice, and men might afterwards live happily and healthfully without the use of intoxicating liquors!
Richard Crashaw, of whom it was writ,—
Poet and saint! to thee alone are given
The two most sacred names of earth and heaven,
reckons amongst his many efforts of genius, Temperance, or the Cheap Physician, where, after ridiculing the doctors’ mystic compositions, he asks,—
And what at last shall gain by these?
Only a costlier disease.
That which makes us have no need
Of physic, that’s physic indeed.
It may be remembered that this poet was the author of the epigram whose last line runs,—
Lympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.
The modest water saw its God, and blushed.