Every thing around him seemed Elysium, and he was on the point of indulging the most boundless freedoms, when on a sudden their beauty, which was but a vizard, fell off, and discovered forms the most hideous and forbidding imaginable.  Lust, revenge, folly, murder, meagre poverty, and despair, now appeared in the most odious shapes, and the place instantly became a most dire scene of misery and confusion.  How often did Cremes wish himself far distant from such a diabolical company, and now dreaded the fatal consequence which threatened him.  His blood ran chill at his heart, and joy and rapture were perverted to amazement and horror!—­When Esculapius perceived it had made a sufficient impression on his guest, he thus addressed him:  “Know, Cremes, it is Esculapius who has thus entertained you, and what you have beheld is a true image of the deceitfulness and misery inseparable from luxury and intemperance.  Would you be happy, be temperate:  temperance is the parent of health, virtue, wisdom, plenty, and every thing that can make you happy in this or the world to come.  It is indeed the true luxury of life, for without it life cannot be enjoyed.”  This said, he disappeared, and left Cremes (instead of an elegant apartment) in an open plain, full of ideas quite different from those he had brought with him.

On his return home, from the most luxurious, he became one of the most temperate men, by which wise method he soon regained health.  Frugality produced riches, and from an infirm and crazy constitution, and almost ruined estate, by virtue of this infallible elixir, he became one of the happiest men breathing, and lived to a healthy old age, revered as an oracle for his wisdom throughout all Greece.

If temperance be necessary with regard to food, it is still more so with respect to strong liquors; these diffusible stimuli, by quickly exhausting the excitability, soon blast the vigour, and sap the foundation of the strongest constitution.  Their immediate effects you know are stimulant; they raise the animal spirits, produce a cheerful state of mind, and if taken in greater quantity, cause intoxication, or that temporary derangement of the thinking powers which arises from too great a degree of excitement:  but let us see what happens the next day; the animal spirits are exhausted, and the person thus situated, finds himself languid and enervated to a great degree; for it seems a law of the human body, that the spirits are never artificially raised, without being afterwards proportionably depressed; and to shew clearly that in this state the excitability is exhausted, the ordinary powers which in general support life, will not have their due effect; and a person thus situated finds most relief the next day, from taking some of the same stimulus which occasioned the exhaustion; because the common exciting powers can scarcely act upon his exhausted excitability.