happy, be temperate: temperance is the parent of
health, virtue, wisdom, plenty, and every thing that can make you
happy in this or the world to come. It is indeed the true luxury of
life, for without it life cannot be enjoyed." This said, he
disappeared, and left Cremes (instead of an elegant apartment) in an
open plain, full of ideas quite different from those he had brought
with him.

On his return home, from the most luxurious, he became one of the
most temperate men, by which wise method he soon regained health.
Frugality produced riches, and from an infirm and crazy
constitution, and almost ruined estate, by virtue of this infallible
elixir, he became one of the happiest men breathing, and lived to
a healthy old age, revered as an oracle for his wisdom throughout
all Greece.

If temperance be necessary with regard to food, it is still more so
with respect to strong liquors; these diffusible stimuli, by quickly
exhausting the excitability, soon blast the vigour, and sap the
foundation of the strongest constitution. Their immediate effects
you know are stimulant; they raise the animal spirits, produce a
cheerful state of mind, and if taken in greater quantity, cause
intoxication, or that temporary derangement of the thinking powers
which arises from too great a degree of excitement: but let us see
what happens the next day; the animal spirits are exhausted, and the
person thus situated, finds himself languid and enervated to a great
degree; for it seems a law of the human body, that the spirits are
never artificially raised, without being afterwards proportionably
depressed; and to shew clearly that in this state the excitability
is exhausted, the ordinary powers which in general support life,
will not have their due effect; and a person thus situated finds
most relief the next day, from taking some of the same stimulus
which occasioned the exhaustion; because the common exciting powers
can scarcely act upon his exhausted excitability.

But though the excitability be in this way exhausted, it will in the
course of a day or two be again accumulated, and it may, perhaps, be
suspected that this exhaustion can do no harm to the constitution;
but this is a premature conclusion, and quite contrary to fact and
experience, as well as to reason; for, just in the same manner that
a pendulum, made to vibrate in the arc of a circle, will never
return exactly to the same height, but fall a little short of it
every time; so,