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Alcohol no safe Condiment.

"Alcohol, a doubtful condiment, in small occasional doses; ordinarily unsuitable, generally unnecessary, and always unmanageable and unsafe."

"What! is a glass of brandy not essential after salmon?" No, sir. If you have eaten salmon to such an extent as to require brandy, it is a sign that you have eaten too much salmon; and if, in consequence, a remedy is necessary, you have selected the wrong one. Dip your hand again into the bag of the materia medica, and if an emetic should turn up, you will find that infinitely more appropriate.

To one article, often used as a condiment, I confess that alcohol has in my mind some resemblance-horse radish. Many a man eats this with his beef, and thinks he is the better for it; certainly he seems to suffer not at all. But ever and anon there flashes out a sad calamity of some hapless eater poisoned, through aconite having been taken in mistake. And so there is many a man who takes his dram with salmon and with cheese, day by day, scarcely seeming to suffer thereby; whilst others, by like practice, commit a mistake, and come to fatal poisoning. But there is this sad difference: in the one case, the poisoning is rare and exceptional; in the other, the fatal cases are counted by thousands and tens of thousands.

"What!" say the alcoholists, "will you stop us from shaving, because a man now and then cuts his

Alcohol's Feeding Qualities.

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throat?" No. But if it so happen that one out of every four or five men who imitate your example is led thereby to cut his throat-some maimed and mutilated for life, some absolute suicides-then surely common humanity should persuade you to throw away the razor in disgust, and identify yourself with the beard-cultivation movement.

Let us take one other view of the "Food" question, before leaving it.

A tree is known by its fruits. Food is estimated by its results. A man or animal, subsisting on convenient food, will prosper on it, more or less. How fares it with the man that lives on alcohol? There are some -alas! far too many-who, with much truth, may be said almost to do so. Like Falstaff, they have but a morsel of bread to their much sack. Nay, they pride themselves on being "small eaters;" honestly adding, however, that they "take a good deal of drink ;" and then perhaps setting up a plea for this latter questionable virtue being in their case somewhat of a necessity. Some such there are, who live thus by choice; others are driven to it, in a sense, by reason of insufficient food-"their poverty, and not their will, consenting' to this sad substitute. The case of the latter is pitiable, and not without excuse; but, in all, the result is the same.

It is as follows, as has been in part stated already,

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A Man like his Meat.

when considering the signs of general poisoning (page 36). Be he beer-drinker, wine-drinker, or dramdrinker, who lives thus snipe-like by suction, the evidence of the feeding power of his diet stands thus. Besides the diseases of the various organs, already spoken of, manifesting themselves by their ordinary signs, the stomach early gives way, disrelishing food, save in the smallest bulk, and poorly digesting the little it receives, more especially if the victim be advanced in years. The skin is discoloured and diseased, and hangs loose and flabby on the parts beneath. These are soft and doughy; and there is an excess of water in the cellular or connective tissue, giving a dropsical appearance. Where there should be muscular firmness and rotundity, there is thinness and misery of limb: where fineness and sharpness of outline, there is heavy and mis-shapen softness. The eye is glassy and unspeculative; the tongue is foul, and not so glib as was its wont; the breath is fetid, and noisome eructations with filthiness of spit are ever and anon emerging. The hands are hot and tremulous; the limbs, too, shake, and feebly totter as they go. The clothes hang loose upon the skeleton, as this daily becomes more and more apparent; the cheekbones stare, the cheeks themselves fall in; and the merest child may tell that the whole man, mental and corporeal, is starving. "Come away!" said a late Lord

The Fat not "Prime."

87

of Session, to a lean, tall, sallow, withered Writer to the Signet, who entered the Parliament House eating a dry split haddock, or speldron, "Come away, Mr

! I am glad to see you looking so like your meat." This was a mere joke on the part of the learned lord. But in the case of the man we speak of, such a phrase would be full of sad truth. He does indeed look like his "meat"-unsubstantial, unstable, unwholesome; his life "even as a vapour vanishing away."

Or if he be young, and mainly live (?) on malt, there may be an apparent nutrition and growth. Alcohol fattens blood, as we have seen, invariably; and fat blood tends to make fat tissues-not only by depositing fat between existing structures, but by causing it even to usurp the place of these, and so constituting the formidable "fatty degenerations." Well may the man grow fat then, after a fashion! If he have any digestion at all, he can scarcely fail to do so. But the fat is not that which in an ox a flesher would call "prime." It is soft, thin, and ill-coloured. Ill placed it is, too; collecting where no fat should be; putting the outer man all out of drawing, and squeezing some of the internal organs most inconveniently; his voice is changed, his breath is short and wheezing, and his heart is labouring. Rapidly this fat, both out and in, has accumulated, like snow by the wayside; and as

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Fatty Degeneration.

rapidly it may thaw and drip away, leaving as a residue the most gaunt and grisly form of humanity.

There are fat and lean kine, then, produced on this pasturage; but they are all "ill-favoured." Sometimes there is, as it were, a crossing of the breed, and the two conditions are somewhat mixed up-in every case, however, expressing the unnatural and diseased, and usually betokening a rapid onset of premature old age, as has been well expressed by the great dramatist, "a marvellous observer of men and manners." "Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth that are written down old, with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you bloated with antiquity? and will you yet call yourself young? Fie, fie, fie, Sir John.”

In many a case, the fatness is unseen, but all the more dangerous. As already stated, alcohol, habitually and freely consumed, prevents, or at least opposes elimination of waste material from the system; fat is one of the forms in which the waste is prepared for

* As a general rule, malt liquors tend to fatten-vide brewers; spirits tend to emaciate-vide the wan and wasted waifs of our large towns.