A STOPPER FOR A BOTTLE-STOPPER.

The hot wrath of Dean Close lately smoked against tobacco; and now we find the fumes of wine have an ill savour in his nostrils. The Dean was terribly whole-hoggish in his intolerance of pigtail; and as an advocate of temperance, he is as terribly intemperate. When he appeared as a tobacco-stopper, he not merely clapped his veto upon smoking in excess, but denounced the “filthy weed” as being the root of every evil; and when now his Very Reverence comes before us as a bottle-stopper, he not merely would impede the over-circulation of the claret-jug or beer-pot, but would stop the make of these and other stimulating beverages, on the ground that drink which cheereth must certainly inebriate.

Whether water-drinkers suffer much from water on the brain, is a point which we throw out for the doctors to determine. But their orations are, in general, very watery and weak, and their flow of words not seldom becomes the merest dribble. The late outpouring of Dean Close to the Members of the Carlisle (so-called) Temperance Society forms clearly no exception to this aquatic rule. Here, for instance, is a sample of the wishy-washy stuff which, no doubt, passed for “true Pierian” with those who sat and drank in the Dean’s dean-unciation:-

“His Christian friends had no idea of the extent and ramifications of the misery occasioned in this country, not by drunkenness, but by drink,- by the thing itself, by that which intoxicated. He did not care what they called it, or what the Bible might call it, but it was the something that made people drunk, whatever that might be, only it was not water.”

“Only it was not water.” Readers will please note the importance of these words. Something makes people drunk: the Dean don’t care what it’s called; only it is not water. How surprisingly Close-reasoning a brain the Dean must have, to arrive at the conclusion that a something makes men drunk, and that this something is not water!

Further on we get another sprinkling of wish-wash, such as no one but a water-spouter could have managed to pump up:-

“Whatever made men drunk – he would not say, reduced them to the level of the beast, for beasts never got drunk,- but whatever reduced them to the state of madmen, robbed them of their power, so that they could not distinguish right from wrong; this was the evil that percolated trough society.”

Here is set a fresh proof of the Dean being a Close thinker. Having informed his hearers that beasts do not get drunk, whatever the unlearned in zoology may say of them, the Dean proceeds to argue that, whatever makes men mad deprives them of their mental power; and hence it is, he reasons, that they are unable to distinguish right from wrong. This is a conclusion that we cannot get away from, and we congratulate the Dean on so convincing a remark.

In what follows this, however, the Dean is not so happy, and, with however great a diffidence, we must own we disagree with him. In the course of our experience, which is not a slight one, we have so much more frequently seen our friends made jolly than made miserable by wine-drinking, that we cannot coincide in defining wine to be.

-”an artificial drink, which God never intended man to take, and which man only drank to his own misery.”

As Dean Close reads the Bible without “caring what it calls” things, one cannot be surprised at finding him misreading it. Perhaps the Dean will at his leisure add a footnote to his text, and quote the sacred passages which prove to him that wine was not “intended” to be drunk. It is the fashion with some preachers to boast of being taken, as it were, behind the scenes, and having further insight into millstones than mere laymen. But to our ears it assuredly smacks of profanity to make profession of acquaintance with heavenly requirements, and of knowing what Divinity “intended” to be done.

His Very Reverence the Bottle Stopper next proceeds to tell us that-

“He had often thought people appeared stupid, and when he came to ask the cause, the answer was Drink.”

Drink? Yes, very possibly; but of what sort, please your Deanship? Do you mean us to infer that only wine-drinkers seem stupid? If so, we must beg tee-totally to differ from you. We don’t believe that water is a good thing for the wits. Mental faculties get low when kept on a l’eau diet. Claret, while it clarifies, invigorates the brain, while water but dilutes, and consequently weakens it. Indeed, if you doubt the fact, your Deanship, of waterbibbers being stupid, one need not seek much further than your Deanship’s speech to prove it.

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