persevering, steadfast kind of courage in which he put his pride. Wine or brandy, then, came to be the indulgence of peace and triumph, not of war; wassail followed on victory, sobriety was necessary till the victory was won. But still it has always been on the sterner, fiercer, more energetic races that alcohol, and especially the stronger forms of alcohol, retained their hold. It is to the passive, quiet, reflective temperaments—national or individual, peculiar to classes or to crafts—that tea or coffee, opium or haschisch, substances that calm rather than excite the nerves, have always proved strongly and often dangerously attractive. Now it may be urged with plausibility, and perhaps with truth, that civilization and intellectual culture, the exchange of out-door for in-door life, the influences that have rendered intelligence and dexterity of more practical value than corporeal strength, tend in some sense and in some measure to Orientalize the most advanced European races. We are not, perhaps, less daring or less enterprising than our fathers; but there is a large and ever increasing class to which strenuous physical exertion is neither habitual nor agreeable. We are unquestionably becoming sedentary; we work much more with our brains, much less with our muscles, than heretofore. With this change has come a decided change of feeling and tastes. We shrink from the fierce excitement, the violent moral stimulants that delighted ruder and less sensitive races and generations. The gladiatorial shows of Rome, the savage sports and public punishments of the Middle Ages, would be simply revolting to the great majority of almost every European nation of to-day; not primarily because as thoughtful Christians we deem them wicked, but because, instinctively, as sensitive men and women in whom imagination and sympathy are strong, we shudder at them as brutal. Prize-fights, bear-baiting, bull-fights have become too rough, too coarse, but above all too exciting; the hideous tragedies of old have ceased to suit the taste at least of our cultivated classes. In one word, our nerves are far too sensitive to crave for strong and violent excitement, moral or physical; it is painful rather than pleasurable. The sobriety of the educated classes is due much less to moral than to social causes. It is not that strong wines and spirits are so much more injurious to us than to our grandsires, nor that we have learned in fifty years to think intoxication sinful; rather we have come to despise it, and to dislike its means, because we have ceased to feel or understand the craving for such violent stimulation, because not merely the reaction but the excitement itself gives more pain than pleasure.