was written because the poet could do no otherwise-something within him would find a voice, and bubbled forth into song as naturally as the life and love of the nightingale. With the invention of printing, and the cheap and rapid mode of production thereby introduced, a change came over the aspect of things, and ballad-writing, ceasing to be the work of the poet, became a trade, governed by the laws of supply and demand. The change was, of course, gradual, but it has been complete; its consequence is that ballad-writing is, in the present day, a work of the smallest consideration and lowest practical value. The persons who exercise it are, almost without exception, utterly destitute of all the nobler faculties of insight and dramatic power; but, having a certain knack of versification, they contrive to make a living by the production of a vast quantity of trash, which, were they or their publishers wise, would never see the light. A similar reproach attaches to modern plays. They are produced as a matter of trade, and bear all the characteristics which might be expected on that account. The plots are almost invariably taken from the French, and it not unfrequently happens that the dialogue is transplanted in a similar manner. The consequences are, perhaps, felt most severely by the class which perpetrates the crime. A public accustomed to the highly flavoured dishes which suit the French taste cannot appreciate the simpler plots and less violent sensations which characterize the best periods of the English school, and, as a consequence, the dramatist who relies solely upon his invention in the production of his work is likely to be speedily distanced by his less honest, but more worldly-wise, competitor. As for dramatic criticism, that is practically dead. The journal which attacks the productions of the modern stage, speedily finds itself shut out from those houses the pieces produced at which he has condemned, so that journalistic criticism is reduced either to a complaisant praise of everything produced at every theatre, or to a mere notification of the appearance of a new piece, with the cast and a sketch of the plot. Public expression of opinion is gagged in a somewhat similar way. The enthusiastic pitite who should utter too loudly his contempt for the hash presented to him on the stage, would speedily find himself engaged in the contemplation of the theatre from the outside under the guidance of a policeman in the interest of the management. The present state of the literature of the stage and of the music halls, leads to some rather serious reflections as to the state of mind of those who enjoy them, and as to the prevailing tone in society which they reveal. The present genera tion is one greatly given to glorifying itself, to boasting of the material progress which it has made, and to scoffing at the ignorance of its benighted ancestors. But surely we have little reason to be proud of such a state of thought and feeling as that revealed by the songs and plays of which we have spoken. Such things as these are signs of declension rather than progress, and cannot but fill the thoughtful looker-on with the deepest apprehensions for the future of those who take their pleasure in them. He will be inclined to suspect that, with a more extensive range of knowledge, we have become shallower and less reflective; that for the wisdom that comes by thought we have exchanged a crude and superficial knowledge of certain details of fact; that our aspirations, instead of being purified and ennobled by time, have retrograded; and that vice and sensuality have, in spite of our efforts to disguise the fact, to the full as much influence over us as over the most backward of our ancestors. We have, it is true, learned exactly the distance between the sun and the earth, we know how to calculate eclipses, are quite certain that there is nothing supernatural in the lightning, and that the thunder is not the voice of the gods; and now that we have all this knowledge, of what value is it to us? Has it made any one of us wiser or happier, or caused us to occupy ourselves in ways one whit worthier or nobler than those which filled the lives of our forefathers? Are our pleasures purer or more refined? less tainted by sensuality or less scarred by vice? It can hardly be questioned that a truthful answer to these questions must be a decided negative. Noble impulses seem in this whirling town life of ours to be almost dead, or pushed aside at the dictation of a vile theory of expediency. The London music halls-alike by their literature and the company which frequent them-prove only too distinctly where many find their chief pleasure, amongst the triumphs of base and ignoble sentiment, and in the contemplation of the lowest forms of vice and impurity; while the condition of the London theatres affords ample evidence that a vehement sensation is greatly preferred by the majority to the highest forms of poetry or the most refined graces of aeting. Of the nonsense uttered at the music halls it seems almost useless to speak, though it certainly is a most remarkable circumstance that the popularity of a song should apparently be in an inverse ratio to the rationality of the words. Their baseness and impurity in language and tendency are open to the strongest animadversion. As literature they are utterly worthless, as far as the provocation of genuine fun is concerned they are worse than useless. They They produce no honest and wholesome laughter; the most that they can do is to cause a sort of effervescence of the polluted spirits of the auditors through their lips. It were well if all who delight in them, whose corrupted natures find a congenial food in these worthless and impure stories, who enjoy them, listen to them with approbation, and witness the shameless gestures of the performance without protest, could be brought to see into what a depth of degradation they have fallen, that they have learned to call evil good and good evil,' that their conduct is likely, under such circumstances as these, to be a reflection of the amusements in which they take pleasure, that they are likely to be guided by the basest motives, and that they themselves are on their way to become the slaves of the vilest passions. When people do begin to see this-do begin to realize the moral death of which these productions are a sign-then, but not until then, we may look for a reformation in the productions of the stage, and then we may begin to hope that music halls like those now existing, with their concomitant evils, will pass into the limbo of all worthless things, and their literature become a thing of the past. ART. IV.-STIMULANTS AND NARCOTICS. 1. Stimulants and Narcotics, their Mutual Relations; with Special Researches on the Action of Alcohol, &c., on the Vital Organism. By Francis E. Anstie, M.D. London: Macmillan and Co. 1864. 2. Lectures: Chiefly Clinical. By Thomas King Chambers, M.D., Honorary Physican to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales; Physician to St. Mary's Hospital. London: Churchill and Sons. 1864. THE HE medical profession, like every other that has been petted and privileged, is essentially conservative. It clings to the old, and obstinately opposes the new. Hence, within its own circle, and among its own disciples and members, an undying warfare has been carried on, between Authority on the one hand, and Truth on the other. The young and ardent disciples of Physic, inevitably affected by the philosophy of their time, are ever questioning the decrepid opinion' of the past, and demanding that it shall justify its existence by the evidence of facts and reason. Protests against medical medical dogmatism, like protests against all other dogmatism, have necessarily arisen, constituting the steps of progress in medical science, so far as it is science at all. As the two bulky volumes before us mark the history, or rather the approaching termination of such a struggle, especially in respect of one very important and practical point connected with Sociology and Temperance, we will, prior to any detailed discussion of the problem, briefly indicate the opinions that have in succession been held and propagated by the medical schools as to the relations of alcohol to the human organism, and each of which in turn has had to vanish before the light of science and the demonstrations of daily life. First was the period of darkness and of absolute faith in strong drink, and this within the limits of the time when George the Third was king. It was a condition of total national blindness, wherein neither doctors nor patients ever dreamed that alcohol was not a daily necessity, as innocent as water and as valuable as bread! But at the close of the great war men began to think once more, and inquiry and science started forth on a new mission destined to change the entire aspect of the social and physical world. Doubts were engendered, causes were sought into, and truth emerged. Beddoes was succeeded by Carrick and Cheyne and Sir Astley Cooper, who declared that 'spirits and poisons are synonymous terms.' Combe and Hope and Billing, and other men of that high class, followed in the track; and, as the distilled form of alcohol became discredited as a beverage amongst the intelligent portion of the profession, examination of the facts rapidly spread amongst the outside and deeply interested public. But superstition, especially when sustained by appetite, is like a limpet, and holds on to its barren anchorage with a singular tenacity of life. Hence, secondly, no sooner had the doctrines of Liebig been promulgated than they were at once misinterpreted and misapplied. If alcohol could not nourish it could at least warm; for it had been discovered that it was an element of combustion! After a long reign, during which doctors and litterateurs wrote much that was absurd about carbon,' it was at last discovered that alcohol was eliminated from the body in great part as alcohol, and that there was no proof that any portion was decomposed or burnt up. A third theory shot up on the continent, the author being Professor Moleschott, who alleged that if alcohol was not food itself it made food last longer; and, therefore, that the bottle was a savings' box! On the same principle, the pipe and the opium pill must be regarded as provender; and so, for awhile, it was contended, by some few " few consistent enthusiasts, that tobacco, opium, arsenic, and alcohol were 'diet'-'extra diet.' By and by, however, this theory was found to mean only this-that the more you kill the molecular life, by narcotizing it, the less life there is; therefore, the less waste; therefore, the less need for food to supply the waste. So, in spite of the names of Johnston, and Lankester, and Lewes, the thing died under the weight of its own ridiculousness, and the wisest of its patrons (Dr. Chambers) read its burial service. Dr. Anstie now steps in with another saving theory. If alcohol cannot nourish, in any ordinary sense,-if it cannot warm, under the ordinary conditions of the body,-if it is not food, in any ordinary usage of the phrase, then it must be made food in some new and extraordinary sense of the word! In this, at least, our author has accomplished no questionable success; for we have here a costly book of 500 pages, laboriously devoted to prove that alcohol, in certain doses, is a stimulant and a tonic, not a poison; which redefines all the meanings usually attached to the words; which shows that food is medicine and medicine food; that stimulants are tonics, and tonics are stimulants, and food is both; and, therefore, that alcohol is food! Gravely, we assure the incredulous reader that this is the gist and substance of the book, stripped of the elaborate periphrases which cover and conceal the lengthened absurdity. Let us not be unjust to the book, however, for though this verdict is true with respect to leading purpose and final proposition, we concede that the volume exhibits the results of much reading, as well as a praiseworthy attempt at reasoning, and occasionally reproduces some excellent ideas, particularly when the author is working with the conceptions of Dr. Chambers and other writers possessed of more insight than himself. In the very introduction' Dr. Anstie, as it appears to us, misstates the doctrine he designs to refute. Who has ever said that all the results of the use of alcohol, in all doses, are the same essentially'? Nay, what can be meant here by this word essentially'? We fear that much of his book, as well as much that has been written by writers less learned than Dr. Anstie, is a mere confusion and chaos of words. The cardinal fault is the absence of definition, arising from the absence of clear conceptions on fundamental relations. Affirming, for the sake of argument, that alcohol has a fixed disturbing relation to living tissue and to blood corpuscle; that every appreciable dose, brought into contact with the smallest point of muscle, nerve, or cell, is followed by an unnatural contraction, or a destructive dissolution,-what force have the earliest |