“In a quiet little room in Exeter Hall a veteran lecturer is holding forth all day upon a subject which moves his heart very strongly. His text, on which he has preached before in many places, is still ‘The Bottle.’ He divides his sermon into many hundreds of heads, and preaches with the most prodigious emphasis and grotesque variety. He is for no half measures. He will have no compromise with the odious god Bacchus; the wicked idol is smashed like Bel and Dagon. He will empty into the gutter all Master Bacchus’s pipes, his barrels, quarter-casks, demijohns, gallons, quarts, pints, gills, down to your very smallest liqueur glasses of spirits or wine. He will show you how the church, the bar, the army, the universities, the genteel world, the country gentleman in his polite circle, the humble artisan in his, the rustic ploughman in the fields, the misguided washerwoman over her suds and tubs--how all ranks and conditions of men are deteriorated and corrupted by the use of that abominable strong liquor: he will have patience with it no longer. For upwards of half a century, he says, he has employed pencil and pen against the vice of drunkenness, and in the vain attempt to shut up drinking shops and to establish _moderate drinking as a universal rule_; but for seventeen years he has discovered that teetotalism, or the total abstaining from all intoxicating liquors, was the only real remedy for the entire abolition of intemperance. His thoughts working in this direction, one day this subject of ‘the Worship of Bacchus’ flashed across his mind, and hence the origin of a work of art measuring 13 ft. 4 in. by 7 ft. 8 in., which has occupied the author no less than a year and a half. “This sermon has the advantage over others, that you can take a chapter at a time, as it were, and return and resume the good homilist’s discourse at your leisure. What is your calling in life? In some part of this vast tableau you will find it is _de te fabula_. In this compartment the soldiers are drinking and fighting; in the next the parsons are drinking ‘Healths to the young Christian.’ Here are the publicans, filthily intoxicated with their own horrible liquors; yonder is a masquerade supper, ‘where drunken masquerade fiends drag down columbines to drunkenness and ruin.’ Near them are ‘the public singers chanting forth the praises of the “God of Wine.”’ ‘Is it not marvellous to think,’ says Mr. Cruikshank in a little pamphlet, containing a speech by him which is quite as original as the picture on which it comments,--‘Is it not marvellous what highly talented poetry and what harmonious musical compositions have been produced, from time to time, in praise of this imaginative, slippery, deceitful, dangerous myth?’