It was written just before he committed suicide. “I leave to the world a wasted character and ruinous example; I leave to my parents as great a sorrow as in their weakness they could possibly bear; I leave to my brothers and sisters as much shame and dishonor as I could have brought them; I leave to my wife a broken heart and a life full of shame; I leave to my children poverty, ignorance, a bad character and the memory of their father lying in a drunkard’s grave and having gone to a drunkard’s hell.” This is typical. Decent men are becoming sick at heart with this thing. We are now in the midst of a war that promises to become world-wide, relentless until our Christian obligation to the world is fully met. Since religion, business, science, education and the State have taken the field against drink there is certain promise of victory.—Methodist Recorder.
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Drunkenness, Disastrous—See [Debauch, Fatal].
Drunkenness, Safeguard Against—See [Safeguard for Drunkards].
DRUNKENNESS, THE TRAGEDY OF
A recent orator gives this incident:
I think the subject has been kept back very much by the merriment people make over those slain by strong drink. I used to be very merry over these things, having a keen sense of the ludicrous. There was something very grotesque in the gait of a drunkard. It is not so now; for I saw in one of the streets of Philadelphia a sight that changed the whole subject to me. There was a young man being led home. He was very much intoxicated—he was raving with intoxication. Two young men were leading him along. The boys hooted in the street, men laughed, women sneered; but I happened to be very near the door where he went in—it was the door of his father’s house. I saw him go up-stairs. I heard him shouting, hooting and blaspheming. He had lost his hat, and the merriment increased with the mob until he came up to the door, and as the door was opened his mother came out. When I heard her cry, that took all the comedy away from the scene. Since that time, when I see a man walking through the street, reeling, the comedy is all gone, and it is a tragedy of tears and groans and heartbreaks. Never make any fun around me about the grotesqueness of a drunkard. Alas for his home!
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DUAL CHARACTER
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) who was certainly not the greatest writer of his age, perhaps not even a great writer at all, but who was nevertheless the dictator of English letters, still looms across the centuries of a magnificent literature as its most striking and original figure. Here, moreover, is a huge, fat, awkward man, of vulgar manners and appearance, who monopolizes conversation, abuses everybody, clubs down opposition—“Madam” (speaking to his cultivated hostess at table), “talk no more nonsense”; “Sir” (turning to a distinguished guest), “I perceive you are a vile Whig.” While talking he makes curious animal sounds, “sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes clucking like a hen”; and when he has concluded a violent dispute and laid his opponents low by dogmatism or ridicule, he leans back to “blow out his breath like a whale” and gulp down numberless cups of hot tea. Yet this curious dictator of an elegant age was a veritable lion, much sought after by society; and around him in his own poor house gathered the foremost artists, scholars, actors, and literary men of London—all honoring the man, loving him, and listening to his dogmatism as the Greeks listened to the voice of their oracle.—William J. Long, “English Literature.”