The jovial, genial drunkard of the Anglo-Saxon times is a rare personage nowadays, and tho there may be men as fond of sack as Falstaff himself, they seem to have lost the intense sociability which was the characteristic of the burly knight. Nearly all the great men of the Napoleonic era were drinkers—Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Wellington himself. Napoleon’s marshals had the soldier’s pet failing, and it is said of stern old Blücher that he slept in his boots and went to bed in a more or less pronounced condition of intoxication for thirty years. Byron boasted of having drank a dozen bottles of wine in a day, and his “Don Juan” was composed under the influence of gin. Thackeray loved the bottle, so did Dickens. The children suffer for the failings of their sires, and many of the nervous symptoms and morbid cravings which perplex physicians in the young men and women of to-day are in reality legacies bequeathed by overbibulous ancestors. (Text.)—Baltimore Herald.
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DRINK, PERIL OF
A number of years ago a certain firm of four men in Boston were rated as “A1.” They were rich, prosperous, young and prompt.
One of them had the curiosity to see how they were rated, and found these facts in Dun’s and was satisfied, but at the end these words were added: “But they all drink.”
He thought it a good joke at the time, but a few years later two of them were dead, another was a drunkard, and the fourth was poor and living partly on charity.
That one little note at the end of their rating was the most important and significant of all the facts collected and embodied in their description. (Text.)
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DROUGHT, RESPONSIBILITY FOR
When the electric trolley-cars were first set running in Seoul, a peculiar result manifested itself in the nation. We quote from The Outlook: