"Leave me! for, to a soul so out of tune

As mine is now, nothing is harmony:

When once the brain-spring hope is fall'n into
Disorder, no wonder if the lesser wheels,

Desire and joy, stand still; my thoughts, like bees,
When they have lost their king, wander

Confusedly up and down, and settle nowhere."

It has been remarked that Suckling modelled both his style and his dramatic compositions upon Shakespeare. The criticism is not very accurate, for, if this be the case, Suckling has not produced that sincerest kind of flattery, an excellent imitation. Placed beside Shakespeare, indeed, his efforts are as moonlight unto sunlight. He lacks strength, and has only in place of it the humours of a man of society, touched with the poetic temperament. If he had eschewed the more ambitious role of the dramatist, and adhered to his love songs, he might have left behind him a still finer legacy than that which he has bequeathed to posterity.

We have glanced at Suckling's "Aglaura," but his "Brennoralt" is generally regarded as his best dramatic work. The scene of the play is laid in Poland, but the Lithuanians are intended for the Scotch. The play originally appeared with the title of "The Discontented Colonel," and Suckling chose it as the medium for satirising the Scotch rebels. One prominent character in this drama is Iphigene, a young Palatine lady, "who has been brought up as a man, and whose love doings and sayings are more according to circumstance than propriety." Steele greatly admired a passage describing the love of Brennoralt and Francelia, and compared the delineation of the latter with one of Eve in Milton's "Paradise Lost." The lines of Suckling run:

"Her face is like the milky way i' th' sky,

A meeting of gentle lights without name.
Heav'ns shall this fresh ornament

Of the world, this precious love-lines,
Pass with other common things

Amongst the wastes of time? What pity 'twere."

The versification of "Brennoralt" is almost as crude and halting as that of " Aglaura,"-though, as a whole, the former must take precedence for its superior dramatic qualities. Yet the lyrics in "Aglaura" are far superior to those found in the later drama. Suckling's comedy of "The Goblins" need not detain us. "The idea of the play is evidently borrowed from Shakespeare; and the same arguments may be adduced in defence of the machinery adopted in it as have been so powerfully adduced by Dr. Johnson in support of Shakespeare's

employment of witches in Macbeth.'" When it is remembered that so sagacious a man as Sir Matthew Hale believed in witchcraft, we can scarcely wonder that there was a prevalent belief in it in Suckling's time, especially amongst the lower classes. The comedy in which Suckling avails himself of this belief is not noticeable for wit or brilliancy. A very short tragedy, entitled "The Sad One," completes the list of the poet's dramatic works. It is concerned with civil troubles in Sicily. There is a considerable amount of fighting and "running through" with deadly weapons, but the literary vigour of the author is by no means commensurate with the military vigour of the characters.

Suckling is most successful, as we have remarked, in his lyrics; but a word of appreciation and admiration is due as regards his prose writings. All his sprightliness of fancy seems to be called into requisition in many of his letters, which are able, shrewd, and full of worldly wisdom. It is also in these that he shows the extent of his erudition. His discourse entitled "An Account of Religion by Reason," inscribed to the Earl of Dorset, exhibits a good controversial faculty, together with strong powers of reasoning. Suckling is very learned upon his subject, and traces the progress of faith from the earliest times. In one portion of this essay is to be found a simile which, upwards of a century later, was improved upon and expanded by Paley. By way of showing the excellence and the dignity of Suckling's prose, we will extract the following passage, not as expressing belief in its conclusions or otherwise. Suckling is arguing upon the subject of the Trinity :

"The head of a spring is not a head, but in respect of the spring; for if something flowed not from it, it were no original; nor the spring a spring, if it did not flow from something; nor the stream a stream, but in respect of both : now all these three are but one water; and though one is not the other, yet they can hardly be considered one without the other. Now, though I know this is so far from a demonstration, that it is but an imperfect instance-perfect being impossible of infinite by finite things-yet there is a resemblance great enough to let us see the possibility. And, here, the eye of reason needed no more the spectacles of faith than for these things, of which we make sympathy the cause, as in the loadstone; or antipathy, of which every man almost gives instances from his own nature. Nor is it there so great a wonder that we should be ignorant; for this is distant and removed from sense; these near and subject to it; and it were stranger for me to conclude that God did not work ad extra, thus one and distinct within himself, because I cannot conceive how begotten, how proceeding, than if a clown should say the hand of a watch did not move, because he could not give an account of the wheels within. So far is it from being unreasonable because I do not understand it, that it would be unreasonable I should: for why should a created substance comprehend an uncreated? a circumscribed and limited

an uncircumscribed and uniimited? And this I observe in those great lovers and lords of reason, quoted by the fathers, Zoroaster, Trismegistus, Plato, Numenius, Plotinus, Proclus, Aurelius, and Avicen; that when they spoke of this mystery o the Trinity-of which all wrote something, and some almost as plainly as Christians themselves-that they discussed it not as they did other things, but delivered them as oracles, which they had received themselves without dispute."

The feverish life of Suckling never fulfilled its true issues. Expatriated and disgraced, his sun went down in a foreign land, ere almost it had reached its meridian. He possessed, however, a true and exquisite genius, as his lyrical outpourings abundantly testify. The vicious habits he contracted in early life almost paralysed his talents, except on rare and special occasions, when the brilliancy of his genius forced its way through the clouds of sorrow and humiliation. He remains to us chiefly a name, though there is indicated the outline of a master of lyric verse but little below the first rank. He never carried his genius to such perfection as did Herrick, but he has individual stanzas and poems which are equal to anything that Herrick, Wither, or Waller ever achieved. To the allurements of a court at first brilliant and trifling, then sensual and devilish, we owe in great measure the failure of Suckling's life, and the extinction of his fine genius. But, when all deductions have been made, there still remain substantial reasons for classing the poet honourably amongst the distinguished men of his age.

GEORGE BARNETT SMITH.

ON ETHER-DRINKING AND EXTRAALCOHOLIC INTOXICATION.

HOSE who like to find excuses for indulgence in the use of alcoholic drinks are apt to argue that the taste for intoxicants is a part of natural man. Some go further and declare that the said part, more clearly than anything else, distinguishes man from the beast. The beast has no taste for strong drink; the beast never gets drunk of its own will and pleasure; the beast knows nothing of the enjoyment of the wine cup, of wine that maketh glad the heart of man therefore, the poor beast is a little lower than man, as man is a little lower than the angels.

It is a pity to break this delusion, but it must be broken. Beasts are not so much lower in intelligence than man that they cannot enjoy wine. Man is not so much above the beast that he alone can enjoy it.

With both man and beast the taste for and enjoyment of alcoholic drink are mere matters of education. You can educate either of them to take strong drink, and the world, if it liked the amusement, could train up menageries of drunken beasts that would rival the gin palaces of Liverpool, Manchester, or London itself.

There is a disease common amongst the hard drinkers of the human family which has gained the common name of "gin-drinker's liver," and which the learned members of the Faculty of Medicine call "cirrhosis of the liver." The disease consists of an indurated condition of the liver which impedes, and as a rule fatally impedes, the function of that vital organ, with dropsy as a further condition, and death in due time, which is not often a long time. Amongst my pathological specimens I have the cirrhosed liver of a cat. cat was taught by some young children to drink alcohol. The cat would amuse a company at dessert by taking her share of old port, and by becoming first excited and then very stupid, unsteady, and sleepy. In a few months this feline drunkard became dropsical and soon died. Her liver presented one of the most typical examples of cirrhosis.

When I was conducting my researches on the influence of alcohol on animal temperature, I fed pigeons on peas that had been soaked in a solution of alcohol. At first, as is the case with the human subject, objection was taken by the birds to the foreign substance in their food, and in a few instances the wiser birds objected to it altogether. But others, so far from objecting, soon acquired a taste for the foreign substance and became decided alcoholics. They quickly were made sleepy, drowsy, and in short diseased animals, but for that they did not care. The alcoholic constitution once pronounced in them, they were fond of the luxury that led to it. If they could have talked to their abstaining fellows, what arguments they might have used! Happily for the world that feeds on pigeons, they could neither talk nor argue alcoholically.

A horse will learn to drink beer. One day, when I was riding in a hired carriage near to Canterbury, the horse stopped short at a wayside public-house. I asked the driver what that was for. “The horse," said he, "always stops here for his beer; he wouldn't go by on no account; you couldn't whip him by, sir, till he has had his beer. His former master taught him to drink beer and invariably treated him to it at this house, and here he'll stop til he gets it." It was the fact. A large tankard of beer was brought out for that horse, and he disposed of the fluid with as much relish as his master, and then went his way. "It's a shame," added the driver, "but young fellows from London who like a joke, and who also like beer themselves, will sometimes give him a lot and make him very drunk. Then he is awkward to drive, and bad for two or three days afterwards, and we have to give him more beer to keep him up, which costs a lot."

In some parts of the country it is the custom still to feed fattening calves with what are called "gin balls." A portion of barley flour is made into a paste, and to the paste a measure of gin is added. The gin paste is then made up into rolls and the calves are fed with the rolls much in the same way as the traveller Bruce recorded that the Abyssinian lords were daily fed by their faithful wives. After this refreshing meal the calves are for a short time frisky and wild in the darkened and warm cells in which they are placed to fatten. But before long they go down on their knees, get exceedingly drowsy, and do not move again, nor care for anything, until the next meal comes round. "They soon take very kindly to gin balls," a feeder of calves told me. "They soon like them better than anything else, and the gin keeps them so quiet, that they are fattened up in half the time, in the dark. If we didn't give them gin, they would