Conscientious in his cultivation of these admirably abnormal appetites; fond of heavy, late suppers; addicted to too much tobacco; with friends forever to the fore to interest, stimulate, and thus unnerve him; and with the unceasing terror that hung over their home and gave it its profound depression, it is small wonder that he found in alcohol just what he needed, and just what he should not have depended upon! He would tipple at times, and now and then he did get drunk, I do not deny; but never twice in the same house, as he truthfully assured a lady! That was a redeeming habit, surely. The fact, put in a word, is that he was affected by incredibly small quantities of stimulants, and as high as they pulled up his spirits, even so correspondingly low did his spirits sink afterward. His agonies of remorse, following a slight excess, were morbid, fantastic, never to be taken as true to the letter. After a trifling tipsy quarrel with Walter Wilson, he sent an apology, and added: “You knew well enough before that a very little liquor will cause a considerable alteration in me.” Mary wrote frequently: “He came home very _smoky and drinky_ last night;” and then he would reproach himself the day after for “wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on.” His spasmodic efforts at reform were born of these extravagant self-accusings, and were equally needless and fruitless. “I am afraid I must leave off drinking. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off gin.” And he did leave it off, with a moral certainty of his abstinence lasting until his feeble stomach clamoured for so much porter in its place that Mary herself had to beg him “to live like himself once more.” His “Farewell to Tobacco” was more successful, and more permanent; it was not only “his sweet enemy,” but really his worst enemy. “Liquor and company and wicked tobacco, o’ nights, have quite dis-pericraniated me, as one may say;” and of these three delights wicked tobacco was to him the most delightful, and withal the most dangerous. And so we must not consider too curiously his famous “Confessions of a Drunkard,” with its terrible, eloquent passage, beginning with this unfair and unfounded introspection: “To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools.” We are glad and proud to take him as we find him--full of frailties, just as we poorer mortals are; it is not for us to sit in judgment on him; we say to the Philistines, in Wordsworth’s benignant words, “Love him or leave him alone.”