To return to wine. The effect of wine is generally supposed to invigorate the understanding, and to stimulate the mental powers--of poets, especially. Thus Horace asks Bacchus whither he is about to transport him? But by the words "_tui plenum_," I think he must have meant full, not of his wine, but of his divinity, without the aid of which he felt himself unequal to pen a panegyric upon Octavius. Now, were I to say that it is in the power of wine to sink me below mortality--in other words, to make a brute of me--I should certainly go beyond my tether; but I can safely assert that, if I were a poet, so far from realizing Horace's expectations of it, it would lead me _down_, not up, the hill. In fact, when under its immediate influence--I do not mean drunk, but "pretty considerably sprung," as the term is--I can scarcely indite a common letter. It appears to stultify my ordinary capacities. I must, however, admit that, on the first waking after a plentiful allowance of good wine, some bright thoughts have come across my mind, and, when not lost by an intervening nap, have been found worthy of being noted down, and now and then made serviceable. It would indeed be an act of ingratitude to the jolly god, were I to omit the fact, that I once did rise from my bed, at four o'clock in the morning, after having sacrificed largely the overnight, and wrote the best thing I ever did write; at least, so said a certain learned sergeant, who now wears a silk gown, and who told me he would have given five hundred pounds to have been the author of it. But it never saw the light. It was a satire; and "_Nulla venenato litera mixta joco est_," has ever been, and shall ever continue to be, my motto. I wish not to dip my pen in gall. I have found wine, taken to excess for only a few days, to depress the mind more than the body; that is to say, when, as a friend of mine expresses himself, "the _animus_ is flown;" and I once heard this natural effect of over-mental excitement admirably illustrated by a very illiterate coachman of the old school. "Was Jem drunk when he upset his coach the other night?" was a question I put to one of this fraternity some years back, when drinking to excess with them was the order of both day and night. "Why, sir," he replied, "he warn't drunk, nor he warn't sober; _the liquor was a-dying in him, and he was stupid_." Now, this strongly resembles my own case. Had I to write for a prize, and that prize were immortality, I would not depend much upon the assistance of Bacchus. I would rather rely on my own natural powers, gently stimulated by wine when they flagged.