The jovial, genial drunkard of the Anglo-Saxon times is a
rare personage nowadays, and tho there may be men as fond
of sack as Falstaff himself, they seem to have lost the
intense sociability which was the characteristic of the burly
knight. Nearly all the great men of the Napoleonic era were
drinkers--Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Wellington himself. Napoleon’s
marshals had the soldier’s pet failing, and it is said of stern
old Blücher that he slept in his boots and went to bed in a
more or less pronounced condition of intoxication for thirty
years. Byron boasted of having drank a dozen bottles of wine in
a day, and his “Don Juan” was composed under the influence of
gin. Thackeray loved the bottle, so did Dickens. The children
suffer for the failings of their sires, and many of the nervous
symptoms and morbid cravings which perplex physicians in the
young men and women of to-day are in reality legacies bequeathed
by overbibulous ancestors. (Text.)--Baltimore _Herald_.
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