y rated by
the fastidious among the more favoured orders of society.

We ought to consider that the opportunities and amusements of the lower
orders of society are few. They do not frequent coffee-houses; theatres
and places of public exhibition are ordinarily too expensive for them;
and they cannot engage in rounds of visiting, thus cultivating a private
and familiar intercourse with the few whose conversation might be most
congenial to them. We certainly bear hard upon persons in this rank of
society, if we expect that they should take all the severer labour, and
have no periods of unbending and amusement.

But in reality what occurs in the public-house we are too much in the
habit of calumniating. If we would visit this scene, we should find it
pretty extensively a theatre of eager and earnest discussion. It is here
that the ardent and "unwashed artificer," and the sturdy husbandman,
compare notes and measure wits with each other. It is their arena of
intellectual combat, the ludus literarius of their unrefined university.
It is here they learn to think. Their minds are awakened from the sleep
of ignorance; and their attention is turned into a thousand channels of
improvement. They study the art of speaking, of question, allegation
and rejoinder. They fix their thought steadily on the statement that is
made, acknowledge its force, or detect its insufficiency. They examine
the most interesting topics, and form opinions the result of that
examination. They learn maxims of life, and become politicians. They
canvas the civil and criminal laws of their country, and learn the value
of political liberty. They talk over measures of state, judge of the
intentions, sagacity and sincerity of public men, and are likely in time
to become in no contemptible degree capable of estimating what modes of
conducting national affairs, whether for the preservation of the rights
of all, or for the vindication and assertion of justice between man and
man, may be expected to be crowned with the greatest success: in a word,
they thus become, in the best sense of the word, citizens.

As to excess in drinking, the same thing may be expected to occur here,
as has been remarked of late years in better company in England. In
proportion as the understanding is cultivated, men are found to be less
the victims of drinking and the grosser provocatives of sense. The king
of Persia of old made it his boast that he could drink large quantities
of liquo