After this the scene thickens. The drunkard’s imagination gets disordered with the most grotesque conceptions. Instead of moderating his drink, he pours it down more rapidly than ever: glass follows glass with reckless energy. His head becomes perfectly giddy. The candles burn blue, or green, or yellow; and where there are perhaps only three on the table, he sees a dozen. According to his temperament, he is amorous, or musical, or quarrelsome. Many possess a most extraordinary wit; and a great flow of spirits is a general attendant. In the latter stages, the speech is thick, and the use of the tongue in a great measure lost. His mouth is half open, and idiotic in the expression; while his eyes are glazed, wavering, and watery. He is apt to fancy that he has offended some one of the company, and is ridiculously profuse with his apologies. Frequently he mistakes one person for another, and imagines that some of those before him are individuals who are, in reality, absent or even dead. The muscular powers are, all along, much affected: this indeed happens before any great change takes place in the mind, and goes on progressively increasing. He can no longer walk with steadiness, but totters from side to side. The limbs become powerless, and inadequate to sustain his weight. He is, however, not always sensible of any deficiency in this respect: and while exciting mirth by his eccentric motions, imagines that he walks with the most perfect steadiness. In attempting to run, he conceives that he passes over the ground with astonishing rapidity. To his distorted eyes all men, and even inanimate nature itself, seem to be drunken, while he alone is sober. Houses reel from side to side as if they had lost their balance; trees and steeples nod like tipsy Bacchanals; and the very earth seems to slip from under his feet, and leave him walking and floundering upon the air. The last stage of drunkenness is total insensibility. The man tumbles perhaps beneath the table, and is carried away in a state of stupor to his couch. In this condition he is said to be _dead drunk_.