Such is a list of the detestable articles palmed on the public, by the avaricious and unprincipled dealers and cozeners in the factitious wines and spirits on constant and extensive sale throughout every quarter of the metropolis. The credulity and infatuation of the public in the consumption of the deadly draughts are truly astonishing, and are a verification of the sarcasm that were the vision of death to appear to the tippler in each glass of liquor that he puts to his lips, yet he would still persevere in habits which are inevitably destructive of health and comfort, and eventually productive of disease and death. “Oh blindness to the future!—” Surely old Jeremy Taylor’s observation respecting Apicius is equally applicable to the inveterate consumer of wines and spirits—“It would have been of no use,” says that orthodox old divine, “to talk to Apicius of the secrets of the other world, and of immortality; that the saints and angels eat not! The fat glutton would have stared awhile and fallen a-sleep. But if you had discoursed well and knowingly of a lamprey, a large mullet, or a boar, animal propter convivium, and had sent him a cook from Asia to make new sauces, he would have attended carefully, and taken in your discourses greedily.” The same feeling I expect will be displayed towards this book by the inveterate dram-drinker: he or she will curse the author, as a busy-body, for his intermeddling with, and abusing their “_dear_ comfort.” People are apt to conclude that a practice sanctioned by time and numbers must be right; but there cannot be a conclusion more fallacious. The grossest possible absurdities have been sanctioned for the same reasons. No doubt some will defend their practice of dram-drinking and immoderate potations of wines, and of malt and spirituous liquors by the unsound plea that they find no ill effect from their self immolation from drinking the deadly draughts; but reasoners so deluded should recollect that, though there are persons who are insensible to the immediate effects from strong liquors, either spirituous or malt, yet to those who seldom or ever use them, they act as quick poisons; not waiting their tedious operation in the form of fever, gout, stone and gravel, dropsy, bile, rheumatism, head-ache, scurvy, cancer, asthma, consumption, palsy, brain fever, apoplexy, mania, and a long list of other frightful and loathsome diseases. In truth, as the author of “_The Oracle of Health and Long Life_” forcibly observes, “they paralyze the nervous system and the heart’s action; and the tremulous hand, the palsied limbs, the bloated and inflamed countenance, and the faltering tongue, super-induced by their immoderate use, indicate that premature death lays claim to his deluded and self-destroying victim!”