That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil is not perfectly clear.  Men get fairly intoxicated with music, with poetry, with religious excitement, oftenest with love.  Ninon de l’Enclos said she was so easily excited that her soup intoxicated her, and convalescents have been made tipsy by a beef-steak.

There are forms and stages of alcoholic exaltation which, in themselves, and without regard to their consequences, might be considered as positive improvements of the persons affected.  When the sluggish intellect is roused, the slow speech quickened, the cold nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, the flagging spirit kindled,—­before the trains of thought become confused or the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed,—­just at the moment when the whole human zoophyte flowers out like a full-blown rose, and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution-box,—­it would be hard to say that a man was, at that very time, worse, or less to be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his meaner wits about him.  The difficulty is, that the alcoholic virtues don’t wash; but until the water takes their colors out, the tints are very much like those of the true celestial stuff.

[Here I was interrupted by a question which I am very unwilling to report, but have confidence enough in those friends who examine these records to commit to their candor.

A person at table asked me whether I “went in for rum as a steady drink?”—­His manner made the question highly offensive, but I restrained myself, and answered thus:-]

Rum I take to be the name which unwashed moralists apply alike to the product distilled from molasses and the noblest juices of the vineyard.  Burgundy “in all its sunset glow” is rum.  Champagne, “the foaming wine of Eastern France,” in rum.  Hock, which our friend, the Poet, speaks of as

“The Rhine’s breastmilk, gushing cold and bright, Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light,”

is rum.  Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to the first miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion!  I address myself to the company.—­I believe in temperance, nay, almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people.  I trust that I practice both.  But let me tell you, there are companies of men of genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.

Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by drinking.  My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined before they became drunkards.  The habit of drinking is often a vice, no doubt,—­sometimes a misfortune,—­as when an almost irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it,—­but oftenest of all a punishment.