[6] Liqueurs often contain narcotic principles; therefore their use is doubly improper. [7] Thackrah on the Effects of the Principal Arts, Trades, and Professions, p. 83. [8] Botanic Garden. [9] Rede’s Memoir of the Right Hon. George Canning. [10] The old gentleman who is represented as speaking, in Bunbury’s admirable caricature of the “Long Story,” furnishes one of the best illustrations I have ever seen of this variety. It is worth consulting, both on account of the story-teller, and the effect his tedious garrulity produces upon the company. [11] Alcohol appears to exist in wines, in a very peculiar state of combination. In the Appendix, I have availed myself of Dr. Paris’s valuable remarks on this subject. [12] There is reason to believe that the Sack of Shakspeare was Sherry.—“_Falstaff_. You rogue! here’s _lime_ in this Sack too. There is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous man. Yet a coward is worse than a cup of Sack with lime in it.”—Lime, it is well known, is added to the grapes in the manufacture of Sherry. This not only gives the wine what is called its dry quality, but probably acts by neutralizing a portion of the malic or tartaric acid. [13] “It is recorded of a Welsh squire, William Lewis, who died in 1793, that he drank _eight gallons_ of ale _per diem_, and weighed forty stones.”—_Wadd’s Comments on Corpulency._ [14] “The law of Mahomet, which prohibits the drinking of wine, is a law fitted to the climate of Arabia; and, indeed, before Mahomet’s time, water was the common drink of the Arabs. The law which forbade the Carthagenians to drink wine, was also a law of the climate.”—_Montesquieu_, Book xiv., Chap. x. [15] The following description, by a modern traveller, of a scene witnessed by him in the East, gives a lively picture of the effects of this drug:—