y nights of madness;" but the sweet
soul was enchained, and no struggles availed to work a blessed
transformation. Read his "Confessions of a Drunkard." It is the most
awful chapter in English literature, for it is written out of the agony
of a pure and well-meaning mind, and its tortured phrases seem to cry
out from the page that holds their misery. We are placed face to face
with a dread aspect of life, and the remorseless artist paints his own
pitiable case as though he longed to save his fellow-creatures even at
the expense of his own self-abasement. All these afflicted creatures
sought the wrong remedy for the exhaustion and the nameless craving that
beset them when they were spent with toil. The periodic drinker takes
his dive into the sensual mud-bath just at the times when eager exertion
has brought on lassitude of body and mind. He begins by timidly drinking
a little of the deleterious stuff, and he finds that his mental images
grow bright and pleasant. A moment comes to him when he would not change
places with the princes of the earth, and he endeavours to make that
moment last long. He fails, and only succeeds in dropping into
drunkenness. On the morning after his first day he feels depressed; but
his biliary processes are undisturbed, and he is able to begin again
without any sense of nausea. His quantity is increased until he
gradually reaches the point when glasses of spirits are poured down with
feverish rapidity. His appetite is sometimes voracious, sometimes
capricious, sometimes absent altogether. His stomach becomes ulcerated,
and he can obtain release from the grinding uneasiness only by feeding
the inflamed organ with more and more alcohol. The liver ceases to act
healthily, the blood becomes charged with bile, and one morning the
wretch awakes feeling that life is not worth having. He has slept like a
log; but all night through his outraged brain has avenged itself by
calling up crowds of hideous dreams. The blood-vessels of the eye are
charged with bilious particles, and these intruding specks give rise to
fearful, exaggerated images of things that never yet were seen on sea or
land. Grim faces leer at the dreamer and make mock of him; frightful
animals pass in procession before him; and hosts of incoherent words are
jabbered in his ear by unholy voices. He wakes, limp, exhausted,
trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide
and--more drink. If he drinks at this stage, he