3.  I question not but every reader’s memory will suggest to him several ambitious young men, who are as vain in this particular as Will Funnell, and can boast of as glorious exploits.

Our modern philosophers observe, that there is a general decay of moisture in the globe of the earth.  This they chiefly ascribe to the growth of vegetables, which incorporate into their own substance many fluid bodies that never return again to their former nature: 

4.  But with submission, they ought to throw into their account, those innumerable rational beings which fetch their nourishment chiefly out of liquids:  especially when we consider that men, compared with their fellow-creatures, drink much more than comes to their share.

5.  But however highly this tribe of people may think of themselves, a drunken man is a greater monster than any that is to be found among all the creatures which God has made; as indeed there is no character which appears more despicable and deformed, in the eyes of all reasonable persons, than that of a drunkard.

6. Bonosus, one of our own countrymen, who was addicted to this vice, having set up for a share in the Roman empire, and being defeated in a great battle, hanged himself.  When he was seen by the army in this melancholy situation, notwithstanding he had behaved himself very bravely, the common jest was, that the thing they saw hanging upon the tree before them, was not a man, but a bottle.

7.  This vice has very fatal effects on the mind, the body and fortune of the person who is devoted to it.

In regard to the mind, it first of all discovers every flaw in it.  The sober man, by the strength of reason, may keep under and subdue every vice or folly to which he is most inclined; but wine makes every latent seed sprout up in the soul, and shew itself:  it gives fury to the passions, and force to those objects which are apt to produce them.

8.  When a young fellow complained to an old philosopher that his wife was not handsome; Put less water into your wine, says the philosopher, and you’ll quickly make her so.  Wine heightens indifference into love, love into jealousy, and jealousy into madness.  It often turns the good natured man into an idiot, and the choleric into an assassin.  It gives bitterness to resentment, it makes vanity insupportable, and displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

9.  Nor does this vice only betray the hidden faults of a man, and shew them in most odious colours, but often occasions faults to which he is not naturally subject.  There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, that drunkenness does not produce, but discover faults.  Common experience teaches the contrary.

10.  Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses qualities into the mind, which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.  The person you converse with, after the third bottle, is not the same man who at first sat down at the table with you.  Upon this maxim is founded one of the prettiest sayings I ever met with, which is inscribed to Publius Syrus, He who jests unto a man that is drunk, injures the absent.