And yet such calamities as that which “old George” has drawn happen every day; beginning not in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance, but in little yieldings to temptation, in apparently trivial and accidental excesses. What constitutes intemperance? According to Dr. Alfred Carpenter, any consumption of alcohol sufficient to furnish the blood with one part of alcohol in five hundred of blood, is dangerous to health, and therefore is an act of intemperance. A more moderate indulgence, he says, is not yet proved to be deleterious. The late Dr. Anstie put temperance in a different way. An average man or woman cannot, according to him, take more than a couple of glasses of sherry daily without injury. Dr. Carpenter has denounced the habitual use of stimulants, even in a very diluted form, to enable the drinker to do more work than he could get through without them, as unquestionably injurious--and therefore an act of intemperance. There is not a middle-aged man of education who has not come across the wrecks of lives where the ruin was a gradual giving way to-the temptation of stimulants. The police courts unfold daily stories of clerks and others, holding positions of honour and of trust, who have first staggered out of the straight path under the influence of drink. Cruikshank’s beginning of his drama is only too true to life; and I think he would have made a mistake, that he would have weakened the tremendous force of his moral, if he had put the excuse of sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance into his opening scene. As his story, stands, it teaches humble and happy households, in a rough text which all who run may read, to have a care whenever the bottle appears on the scene; and to lose no opportunity of impressing, upon the children the danger, of putting; the enemy near, their mouths, who may steal away, not their brains only, but their heart and soul.