THESE are dreadful words, especially the former. How frightful an array does it summon up of shattered constitutions, blighted fates, and shipwrecked souls; of misery, want, and crime. When we reflect on the whole dark annals of intemperance, it is not wonderful that any word connected with it should inspire in good men's minds a shrinking horror inimical to patient investigation and just appreciation. As the people who in old fable believed their territory to be desolated by some supernatural dragon, fled hither and thither in ignorant terror, instead of calmly examining the evidence of the animal's devastating powers, and assigning to it a place in natural history, so the well-meaning world is driven frantic by the very name of that instrument which has been perverted to so much evil, and endeavours to drive it out of sight and out of existence with such a loathing horror that no opportunity is given for calm, dispassionate consideration of the real manner in which it accomplishes its mischief, and the true nature of the proper remedy. This, we consider, renders it all the more incumbent on those who feel that they can handle the matter boldly and freely, to do so. We modestly claim to be in that position. We are not abstainers, or teetotallers, as they are called, but belong to the large body whom it has been customary of late to denominate partakers. But, on the other hand, we never beat a wife, or committed murder in a fit of frantic intoxication; so that we feel no call to demand that the system of the world should be changed on our account, because our sins of intemperance have been so great that it requires the penance of all mankind to atone for them.

We must commence by saying that we are not going to give a particle of countenance to the views of those who think that all narcotics and stimulants may be driven, so far as the human race is concerned, out of presumed existence, and that mankind can be set in the mass on a specific regimen as sheep can be depastured

on the most economical and nutritious grass. We must take man with his passions and propensities such as they are. We shall make an imperfect piece of work if we begin in the supposition that he is to be stripped of them. The Deity in his wisdom has given him the faculty to create știmulants, and the propensity to enjoy them. On the grounds of simple reverence to the all-wise Creator, we will not admit that any of His gifts to His creatures are a pure unmitigable curse-a thing pregnant solely with evil and incapable of good-a sort of mistake and miscalculation in the Deity's composition of this world's elements, which it becomes the function of wise teetotallers to remedy. Nay, we believe that it is out of his passions and the means of gratifying them that, through much peril and calamity, man works out the high destiny of civilisation and purity for which his race was created and predestined. The mere animal has ac complished his destiny from the beThe ox ginning, and is satisfied. feels no mortification at the entire subjection of his huge powerful frame to the will of a being physically weaker, who rules by intellectual superiority; he has no desire to soar with the eagle or to roam with the tiger: his master's stall and paddock content him, and he meets death unconscious of its coming. That creature so noble among the animal race -the dog-opens his eyes, shakes himself, and walks forth into the world a complete gentleman after his kind. Nothing that is natural to him degrades him; he follows the bent of his own appetites unchecked by any misgivings, save, perhaps, when some practical hints have taught him that it may not be safe to kill his own mutton. How much of what is brutalising and disgusting man has to clear himself of, ere he can be as inoffensive an inhabitant of the earth as his own mastiff watchdog! With how many aspirations unknown to that animal is he filled, tending to the shaking off still remaining impurities which hinder him

it. The barbarian is often a soberer man than the cultivated gentleman; but it is from necessity, not choice. To possess unlimited supplies, yet to restrain unlimited indulgence, is the result of advanced civilisation. The Red Indian drinks himself dead drunk when he can; so does the negro slave; so, unfortunately, and to the scandal of our social condition, does our jolly tar and railway navvy. The well-bred gentleman, with his tastes and appetites fully developed, and his cellar fully supplied, uses its contents rationally, if not beneficially. This brings us to the grave question-Are we to compel people to be sober in spite of their appetites-or are we to cultivate these appetites until they produce honest grain instead of tares? We like a sober man-who does not? But we are not prepared to admit in all cases the incomparable moral eminence of the class called teetotallers. One section only of them can we admire-those who, in the belief that the cause is a good one, sacrifice their inclinations for the sake of giving us the benefit of an example. For the type of a far more numerous class-for the man who, having been a terrific drunkard, takes the vow to save himself from perdition, we have no respect. He takes the measure of his elevation from the depths of his own previous degradation, instead of the natural level of humanity; and, thus convinced of his own moral majesty, totters along at teetotal processions under the weight of a stupendous banner, to the braying and banging of brass bands. But still, through all the moral majesty of the sight, we see the refuse of the last fit of delirium in the motion of his legs; and the uneasy twinkle of his eye suggests that the old love is not entirely deserted, and may soon again be pressed to his lips. We cannot view him as any better than a man morally diseased, who is administering to himself a violent remedy, fortunately not needed by his moderate brethren.

But there is another member of the teetotal class the man who constitutionally dislikes liquid stimulants -who is made sick with a glass of champagne, and discovers an offensive odour in the bouquet of his

friend's best Bordeaux. Shall we not give our meed of admiration to his happy constitution? No. There is a defect in it, which his wife, or his partner in business, or his servant, or some one or other, has known but too well. We cannot say we entirely approve of the speech of a worthy Aberdonian matron, who, when her companions were talking bitterly of the vices of their respective husbands, represented her own as "jist a gueed, discreet, couthy, canny, weel-principled, drucken body, wi' nae ill habits about him ava." But the man who has no taste for stimulants in his constitution may have something worse, and the natural teetotaller generally has it. Some of them we have known men of dire morosity of temper-sullen, impracticable, and relentless. Others of them, again, we have known the victims of continual excitement, as if they were afflicted with a sort of chronic intoxication. Pride, vanity, and such like moral stimulants, provide them with a self-contained ginpalace, furnishing them with the temptations to many a fantastic folly. Supreme among this class was Charles XII. of Sweden, one of the few men the world has seen who, with no cruelty of character or other glaring vice, yet in mere self-indulgence, and the pursuit of a whim or hobby, kept the world in dispeace, desolated whole nations, and sacrificed thousands of valuable lives. It is remarkable, on the other hand - though not, of course, a matter to be made a precedent that his illustrious rival, Peter the Great, he who, perhaps, did more for civilisation than any other single man, was a hard drinker. Rousseau was another type of the natural teetotaller. The mention of his name is quite sufficient to conjure up a sufficient array of compensatory defects of character to make up for the absence of the common appetite. Such anomalies are often seen on a smaller scale. Your excited friend, who is like the very effervescence of champagne, ever fizzing, spurting, and threatening to discharge his cork, getting into unaccountable scrapes every day, and a nuisance to all his friends from his eccentricity and wrongheadedness-he is a teetotaller; whereas

air, for you give them no air to breathe.

MILBORDE-But we are beginners, and all that will come in time.

LAKE. Very possibly; but you begin at the wrong end. You start with the details, and then hope the effect will come of itself. You should begin with the effect, and then work out the details in subordination to it. Who is that looking in at the window with his sharp eyes? Denny the landscape-painter, who, since his fivefoot study was blown away over the rocks, has painted nothing but calm. Come in, Denny, and light your pipe. Denny, we must call you the serene painter, or give you the name of a Spanish watchman, "el sereno," for you are the painter of all scenes fit to give effect to serenades; they are warm, and clear, and very still, and generally rather late in the evening. I fear you love late hours, Tom Denny.

DENNY.-I love quiet hours. I paint calm scenes, because I hold that calm, and not storm, is the high art of landscape-painting. When Divine Perfection rebuked the winds and the waves, and there was a great calm, He exercised the same powers that He did at the dawn of the world-He brought harmony out of chaos, He changed the temporal into the eternal. Look at that full moon which rose over the shoulder of Moël Liabod yesterday night; is there to us any wind or turbulence on her disc? No! We do not know what there may be in fact; there may be volcanic convulsions, tornadoes, earthquakes or moonquakes, wars, pestilence, violence there; but we know nothing about it-all is dwarfed by the distance into calm. And the farther the stars are off, the calmer do they seem-the more regular in their twinkling; for there may be calm in motion as well as in repose. And the most heavenly clouds that we paint are all calm. All is calm to God, not to us; for we cannot see the calm harmony that underlies outward disturbance. But for this reason calm is best for the soul, as, in the contemplation of it, we open the gate of eternity, and look out, whither, we may some day know better. But it gives to earthly scenes a spirituality

that no other condition can give, and in such spirituality resides the highest beauty of art-I may, indeed, say all beauty. There is a harmony in the tempest-torn scenes of Salvator, but a harmony not so easily appreciable by us. His country is rugged, his clouds are ragged; his figures are both, but they have a romantic grandeur; and repose is the result of the fitness of the parts of the whole, and in that repose the soul of the artist feels itself at home in the storm even as in the calm. But I am no Salvator, and I love to paint the calm, as being that kind of beauty most accessible to me.

LAWLESS.-You are no Salvator, Denny, but I think you are in a fair way to be a Claude, without Claude's formality. You paint birch-trees in preference to all other trees, because, being of all most easily moved by the air, when in repose they give the deepest feeling of calm." I saw a picture of yours in the British Institution, called "Childhood's Trophies." There was a picture beside it representing a dead peacock, some gold plate, and other brilliant and conspicuous things, admirably drawn and coloured to the life. But your picture was neither brilliant or conspicuous, although a large one, and the peacock drew the eyes of most of the gazers off your landscape. Yet the eyes of some did not rest on the peacock long, for the colours hurt them, mine amongst the number. I could have looked, however, at your picture for ever. It grew upon one, and shed a magnetism as one looked, like the symmetrical but inconspicuous statues of antiquity. The evening blush was over the scene, but there was no sun in the middle, as in Turner's pictures, with a black tree against it, dazzling and offending, though in its way true to nature. The blush was in the sky, which looked immeasurably deep and calm to the bottom or the top, as the case may be. There were faint traces of pearly clouds, which gave distance to the skyey depths. The blush was over the rocks of Bryn Cefn, lighting up the broken faces of the storm in a hundred different degrees, and showing terrace upon terrace, like an irregular ruin of some mighty temple of enchantment,

with hints of wild-flower gardens among the gaps. The blush was on the stream, while it was still in the foreground, before it came to the stepping-stones, having in that still part the character of

"The stream whose waters scarcely seem to stray,

And yet they glide, like happiness, away." The blush followed it a little way, when it hastened on, as the stream of our lives hurries on when it is near

the middle, to bury itself in the invisible green depths of the middle distance, above which point rose the sisterhood of birches, like graceful statues in perfect repose, and like Canova's or Baily's Graces, bending their heads together, and interlacing each other with their arms. To the right was indicated the road, which wound under a rugged hill, covered with gorse and thyme, and crowned with a clump of Scotch firs. To the left was a grove of Arcadian scenery, platforms of rocks, large and small trees, runnels and pools, broken into forms inviting rest, where you may take your choice of a sofa of sward and moss, an arm-chair of tree-trunks, a severe seat of stone,

οἱ κώλα κάμψον τουδ ̓ ἐπ ἀξέστου πέτρου. or a down-bed at the water-side, broken also into forms inviting curiosity and superstitious speculation, hollow rocks, hollow spring-heads, hollow trees. The only figures introduced are crossing near the steppingstones-a tall boy with a child in his arms, the child carrying long streamers of flags the captured flags which constitute "childhood's trophies." Perfect idleness characterises them, as it does Brown's children, for the small child is doing nothing, and the huge child helping him; and the choice of these figures, let me observe, Denny, shows an instinct of good taste. Maga's "Sketcher" most truly observed, that nothing destroys the beauty of a picture so much as the representation of toil. Labour is the curse, and therefore, although it is the duty of all of us to submit to it cheerfully, we should not represent it in delineations of nature's innocence and nature's repose. The only way in which toil may be beautified is by the idea of heroism as attached

to it, just as there is a beauty in the patient martyrdom of St Sebastian. But the artist, in his proper work, as Schiller well says

"Malt mit lieblichem Betruge Elysium auf seinem Kerkerward" "with sweet deceit paints Elysium upon the wall of his earthly dungeon." Nor can he be blamed who, in the midst of his necessary daily labour, takes a refreshing draught at that fountain of repose, which we all believe to spring perennial in a world even beyond the farthest and the quietest stars. Denny, it is when I see such a picture as that of yours that I especially feel the want of wherewithal to buy it; the duris urgens in rebus egestas, which is the penalty for the slack performance of that improbus labor, or "villain toil," justly so called both by Virgil and "the Sketcher."

DENNY.-It is for the reasons you have given that I do not like a sketch of yours of the Falls of Schaffhausen ; you have put a man on a raft there, working away with all his might and main at an enormous oar in a strong current. The unpleasant sympathy with the man's toil takes the eyes off the waterfall, and the sunset hues on the rocks above it.

LAWLESS.-Your criticism is just, and I give up the sketch to suffer condign punishment, if you will. But with all my views about labour, I must allow that it becomes a plea sure when it is taken up in the right frame of mind, and when it is natural to the disposition of the labourer. Although it is the Curse, it is intended to be a blessing to those who rightly use it. It is the short-sighted vice and injustice of man that makes labour so often cruel. Schiller beautifully worked up this idea in his poem of "Pegasus in the Harness." I would not put a hunter in a cider-mill, nor would I put Burns to gauge spiritcasks. Of all trials to which human nature can be subjected, the severest is that which forces the time of the gifted amongst men to be taken up with works which might be done by any hewer of wood or drawer of water; for they feel that man has no right to make the curse harder than it was intended to be.

The