Pass where we may, through city or through town, Village or hamlet of this merry land, Though lean and beggar’d, every twentieth pace Conducts the unguarded nose to such a whiff Of stale debauch, forth issuing from the styes That Law has licensed, as makes Temperance reel. There sit, involved and lost in curling clouds Of Indian fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, The lackey, and the groom: the craftsman there Takes a Lethean leave of all his toil; Smith, cobbler, joiner, he that plies the shears, And he that kneads the dough; all aloud alike, All learned, and all drunk! the fiddle screams Plaintive and piteous, as it wept and wail’d Its wasted tones and harmony unheard. * * * * * ‘Tis here they learn The road that leads from competence and peace To indigence and rapine; till at last Society, grown weary of the load, Shakes her encumber’d lap, and casts them out. But censure profits little: vain the attempt To advertise in verse a public pest That, like the filth with which the peasant feeds His hungry acres, stinks and is of use. The excise is fatten’d with the rich result Of all this riot: and ten thousand casks For ever dribbling out their base contents, Touch’d by the Midas finger of the State, Bleed gold for ministers to sport away. Drink and be mad then; ‘tis your country bids! Gloriously drunk obey the important call! Her cause demands the assistance of your throats Ye all can swallow, and she asks no more. Towards the end of the progress of error is the sage advice:-- With caution taste the sweet Circæan cup; He that sips often at last drinks it up. Habits are soon assumed, but when we strive To strip them off ‘tis being flayed alive. Call’d to the temple of impure delight He that abstains, and he alone, does right. Finally, an admirable moral is contained in the lines:-- Pleasure admitted in undue degree Enslaves the will, nor leaves the judgment free. ‘Tis not alone the grape’s enticing juice Unnerves the moral powers, and mars their use; Ambition, avarice, and the lust of fame, And woman, lovely woman, does the same. Wordsworth was a most abstemious man. He and his wife drank water, and ate the simplest fare. When Scott stayed with him at Rydal Mount, he had to hie him to the nearest public-house not unfrequently. Myers has observed, in his monograph on the poet in _English Men of Letters_:--