Exemplar of Temperance, yea, to the sot,
    In use of good wine, but abusing it not! 
    We dare not pretend to do better than He;
    But follow the Master, as servants made free
    To touch, taste, and handle, to use, not abuse,
    All good to receive, but all ill to refuse! 
    It is thus the true Christian with temperance lives,
    Giving God thanks for the wine that He gives.”

I once heard Mr. Gough, the temperance lecturer:  it was at the Brooklyn Concert Hall in 1877.  A handsome and eloquent man, his life is well known, and that his domestic experiences have made him the good apostle he is.  I remember how well he turned off the argument against himself as to the miracle of the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee:  “Yes, certainly, drink as much wine made of water as you can.”  It was a witty quip, but is no reply to that miracle of hospitality. Apropos,—­I do not know whether or not the following anecdote can be fathered on Mr. Gough, but it is too good to be lost, especially as it bears upon the fate of a poor old friend of mine in past days who was fatally a victim to total abstinence.  The story goes that a teetotal lecturer, in order to give his audience ocular proof of the poisonous character of alcohol, first magnifies the horrible denizens of stagnant water by his microscope, and then triumphantly kills them all by a drop or two of brandy!  As if this did not prove the wholesomeness of eau de vie in such cases.  If, for example, my poor friend above, the eminent Dr. Hodgkin of Bedford Square, had followed his companion’s example, the still more eminent Moses Montefiore, by mixing water far too full of life with the brandy that killed them for him, he would not have died miserably in Palestine, eaten of worms as Herod was!  Another such instance I may here mention.  When I visited the cemetery of Savannah, Florida, in company with an American cousin, I noticed it graven on the marble slab of a relation of ours, a Confederate officer, to the effect that “he died faithful to his temperance principles, refusing to the last the alcohol wherewith the doctor wanted to have saved his life!” Such obstinate teetotalism, I said at the time, is criminally suicidal.  Whereat my lady cousin was horrified, for she regarded her brother as a martyr.

I cannot help quoting here part of a letter just received from an excellent young clergyman, who had been reading my “Temperance,” quite, to the point.  After some compliments he says, “I need scarcely say I entirely agree with the scope and arguments of this vigorous poem.  Nothing is more clear, and increasingly so, to my own perception than the terrible tendency of modern human nature to run into extremes” (quoting some lines).  “Your reference to ‘thrift’ is especially true.  I have often smiled at the pious fervour with which the heads of large families with small incomes have embraced teetotalism!  I have long thought that the motto ‘in vino veritas’ contains