You told me the other day that you believed the inducement to what I called intellectual living to be merely the love of pleasure--pleasure of a higher kind, no doubt, than that which we derive from wine, yet fairly comparable to it. You went on to say that you could not, from the moral point of view, discern any appreciable difference between intoxicating oneself by means of literature or art and getting tipsy on port wine or brandy; that the reading of poetry, most especially was clearly self-intoxication--a service of Venus and Bacchus, in which the suggestions of artfully-ordered words were used as substitutes for the harem and the wine-flask. Completing the expression of this idea, you said that the excitement produced by oratory was exactly of the same nature as the excitement produced by gin, so that Mr. Bright and M. Gambetta--nay, even a gentleman so respectable as the late Lord Derby--belonged strictly to the same profession as the publicans, being dealers in stimulants, and no more. The habitual student was, in your view, nothing better than the helpless victim of unresisted appetite, to whom intellectual intoxication, having been at first a pleasure, had finally become a necessity. You added that any rational person who found himself sinking into such a deplorable condition as this, would have recourse to some severe discipline as a preservative--a discipline requiring close attention to common things, and rigorously excluding every variety of thought which could possibly be considered intellectual.