English Drinking of Long Ago.

It appears that, once upon a time, the English were a sober people. The chronicler Camden speaks of drunkenness as a rare vice among them in his time, and says that the English were, "of all the northern nations, the most commended for their sobriety." It was from the. Dutch and Germans that they learned the brutal pleasures of heavy drinking. By Shakespeare's time drunkenness had become common: and a writer in the middle of the seventeeth century spoke of England as "the dizzy island," and declared that "we drink as if we were nothing but sponges, or had tunnels in our mouths. We are the grape-suckers of the earth." Early in the eighteenth century the upper classes were greatly addicted to this vice; and we are surprised to find how many famous men yielded to the seductions of the bottle. Addison, the foremost moralist of his time, was not free from it. Oxford, whose private character was in most respects singularly high, is said to have come, not unfrequently, drunk into the very presence of the Queen. Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking; and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened without sleep to his official business. When Walpole was a young man his father was accustomed to pour into his glass a double portion of wine, saying: "Come, Kobert, you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father."

The popular beverage of the poor, early in the eighteenth century, was ale or beer; but gin made its appearance in the time of the first George, and over five million gallons of spirits were distilled every year in England by 1735. Fifteen years later, the London doctors stated that in or near the town there were more than fourteen thousand cases of illness directly caused by the consumption of gin. Fielding declared the next year, that "gin is the principal sustenance of more than one hundred thousand people in the metropolis." At this time vigorous efforts were made by legislation to check the evil: and the restrictions imposed by new laws had manifestly beneficial results. There was a marked decrease of drunkenness and the diseases resulting from it.