in company with a character celebrated for conviviality—­one of the men employed to float rafts of timber down the Dee—­three dozen of porter.  Of this Mr. Paul it was recorded, that on being asked if he considered porter as a wholesome beverage, he replied, “Oh yes, if you don’t take above a dozen.”  Saunders Paul was, as I have said, the innkeeper at Banchory:  his friend and porter companion was drowned in the Dee, and when told that the body had been found down the stream below Crathes, he coolly remarked, “I am surprised at that, for I never kenn’d him pass the inn before without comin’ in for a glass.”

Some relatives of mine travelling in the Highlands were amused by observing in a small road-side public-house a party drinking, whose apparatus for conviviality called forth the dry quaint humour which is so thoroughly Scottish.  Three drovers had met together, and were celebrating their meeting by a liberal consumption of whisky; the inn could only furnish one glass without a bottom, and this the party passed on from one to another.  A queer-looking pawky chield, whenever the glass came to his turn, remarked most gravely, “I think we wadna be the waur o’ some water,” taking care, however, never to add any of the simple element, but quietly drank off his glass.

There was a sort of infatuation in the supposed dignity and manliness attached to powers of deep potation, and the fatal effects of drinking were spoken of in a manner both reckless and unfeeling.  Thus, I have been assured that a well-known old laird of the old school expressed himself with great indignation at the charge brought against hard drinking that it had actually killed people.  “Na, na, I never knew onybody killed wi’ drinking, but I hae kenn’d some that dee’d in the training.”  A positive eclat was attached to the accomplished and well-trained consumer of claret or of whisky toddy, which gave an importance and even merit to the practice of drinking, and which had a most injurious effect.  I am afraid some of the Pleydells of the old school would have looked with the most ineffable contempt on the degeneracy of the present generation in this respect, and that the temperance movement would be little short of insanity in their eyes; and this leads me to a remark.—­In considering this portion of the subject, we should bear in mind a distinction.  The change we now speak of involves more than a mere change of a custom or practice in social life.  It is a change in men’s sentiments and feelings on a certain great question of morals.  Except we enter into this distinction we cannot appreciate the extent of the change which has really taken place in regard to intemperate habits.