Oh, the power of intemperance! and how it encroaches on the best dispositions in the world; how it comes upon us gradually and insensibly; and what dismal effects it works upon our morals, changing the most virtuous, regular, well-instructed, and well-inclined tempers into worse than brutal! That was a good story, whether real or invented, of the devil tempting a young man to murder his father. No, he said; that was unnatural. “Why, then,” says the devil, “go and lie with your mother.” “No,” says he; “that is abominable.” “Well, then,” says the devil, “if you will do nothing else to oblige me, go and get drunk.” “Ay, ay,” says the fellow, “I will do that.” So he went and made himself drunk as a swine, and when he was drunk, he murdered his father and lay with his mother. Never was a woman more virtuous, modest, chaste, sober; she never so much as desired to drink any thing strong; it was with the greatest entreaty that I could prevail with her to drink a glass or two of wine, and rarely, if ever, above one or two at a time; even in company she had no inclination to it. Not an immodest word ever came out of her mouth, nor would she suffer it in any one else in her hearing without resentment and abhorrence. But upon that weakness and illness after her last lying-in, as above, the nurse pressed her, whenever she found herself faint and a sinking of her spirits, to take this cordial and that dram, to keep up her spirits, till it became necessary even to keep her alive, and gradually increased to a habit, so that it was no longer her physic but her food. Her appetite sunk and went quite away, and she ate little or nothing, but came at last to such a dreadful height that, as I have said, she would be drunk in her own dressing-room by eleven o’clock in the morning, and, in short, at last was never sober. In this life of hellish excess, as I have said, she lost all that was before so valuable in her, and a villain, if it be proper to call a man who was really a gentleman by such a name, who was an intimate acquaintance, coming to pretend a visit to her, made her and her maid so drunk together that he lay with them both; with the mistress, the maid being in the room, and with the maid, the mistress being in the room; after which he, it seems, took the like liberty with them both as often as he thought fit, till the wench, being with child, discovered it for herself, and for her mistress too. Let any one judge what was my case now. I, that for six years thought myself the happiest man alive, was now the most miserable, distracted creature. As to my wife, I loved her so well, and was so sensible of the disaster of her drinking being the occasion of it all, that I could not resent it to such a degree as I had done in her predecessor; but I pitied her heartily. However, I put away all her servants, and almost locked her up; that is to say, I set new people over her, who would not suffer any one to come near her without my knowledge.