Of the decapitation of Charles I. his reprobation is expressively strong, and his enthusiasm at the Restoration (1660) was as extraordinary as his grief for the decollation of Charles was extravagant, and his view of the state of England under the Commonwealth desponding. In his Resolve Of Peace,' he says: Consider the havock a few years made among us. The waste of wealth, the wreck of worth; the sad fate lighting on the great and good; the virtuous left to scorn the loyal used, as once the Roman parricides, with desperate and malicious persons left to rule and vex them; wealth prostituted to the beggarly and the base; palaces plundered and pulled down; temples profaned; antiquities razed; religion rivuled into petty issues running thick corruption. Then let men consider, after a little revolution, how little have the authors gained. Those who would take peace from others themselves have missed it, in their hollow graves; the earth they tore, hath fled them from her bosom and her bowels, with nought in the least considerable to the expense of blood and treasure. Then also, let men see, how the sacred wheel of Providence hath resurrectioned all our joys. How the Church recovers her late besmeared beauties; how the tide of trade returns; how brightened swords have now a peaceful glitter; how glory, wealth, and honour with loyalty, is returned; how shouts of joy have drowned the cannon's roar; that till men come to heaven such joy can never again be expected to be seen.' The foregoing extracts will have suggested the reason why, though during the twenty years after their first publication, the Resolves' passed through seven editions, the succeeding sixteen years elapsed without a call for another. He was in the opposite party. The edition of 1661 was followed by one in 1670, and another in 1677; and it is generally supposed that he died in the following year, 1678. Neither the time, place, nor manner of his death are, however, accurately known. We cannot point to his grave and say—in the words of the last line of his self-written epitaphExuvias hic reliquit Felltham.” Did he die calmly, without fear or grudging? Did he feel that 'nihil est in morte quod metuamus, si nihil timendum vita commisit? Did he realize his early thought, The good man I must reckon with the wise; as one that equally can die or live?' Let us hope so, and shed the fond regrets of friendship on his unknown grave. Two editions of his works were published after his death, viz., in 1696 and 1709. Thereafter nearly a century elapsed before any new edition was given to the press. During the interval, he almost ceased from the remembrance of living men. William Oldys, 1687-1761, the Norroy King-at-arms, an indefatigable and accurate bibliographer, and an industrious recorder of the gossip of his day, made some inquiries about him at a relative of Felltham'sone William Loughton, the schoolmaster in Kensington-but could get no information about him. There is a notice of his works in Sir Egerton Brydges' Censura Literaria' (1808), in the first number of which Oldys' notes about him are quoted." There is also a paper upon the Resolves' in The Retrospective Review,' vol. x. It is, however, still true, as Oldys said a century and a half ago, that Of this Felltham there has been little written.' We have endeavoured by sedulous search into every (to us) available source where information was likely to be found to recover or discover any memorials of him. Our cyclopædias and biographical works are almost if not always silent regarding him. We hope that the foregoing attempt to lighten up this hitherto obscure biography may interest and gratify the reader, and lead him to admire the judicious thinker and the pious writer-as an honest, conscientious man, who, though suffering, endured in silence and without unkindly feeling in return the evils of his age and time-and to relish the following illustrations of his reflective, ingenious, sprightly, and perspicuous style of thought, which combines in a great degree the point and polish of modern composition with the warmth and geniality of the olden time; and includes touches of eloquence and refinement of expression and character which it would do us all good to imitate : 'CHARITY.-The world which is chained together by intermingled love, would shatter and fall to pieces if charity should chance to die. . . . God may respect the mind and will, but man is nothing better for my meaning. Let my mind be charitable that God may accept me. Let my actions express it that man may be benefited. LEARNING AND WISDOM.-The practique part of wisdom is the best. Wisdom is no inheritance; no, not to the greatest clerks. He that is built up of the press and pen shall be sure to make himself ridiculous. Company and conversation are the best instructors for a noble behaviour, and this is not found in a melancholic study alone. our armour. PRAYER.-There is no doubt that prayer is needful daily, ever profitable, and at all times commendable. If it be for ourselves alone, it is necessary; and when it is for others, it is charitable. At night it is our covering, in the morning it is Though prayer should be the key of the day, and the lock of the night, yet I hold it of the two, more needful in the morning than when in the evening we commit ourselves to repose. The ship is safer in the bay or harbour, than when tossed and beaten in the boiling ocean. Retiredness is more safe than business. We are withdrawn, when the veil of night and rest enwraps us in their dark and silent cabinet. But with the sun we disclose ourselves and are discovered to our prying enemies; we go abroad to meet what at home does not look after us.... When the mind in the morning opens to God, as the eye to the sun's clear light, by the radiance of the divine beams we become enlightened inwardly all the day. The breathing and effusions of a devout soul turn prayer into a chain, which links us fast to God, but intermission breaks it, and when we are so loose we are easily overthrown; and doubtless it is far less difficult to preserve a friend, once made, than to recover one that is lost. . . . Why should God take thy dry bones when the devil hath sucked the marrow out? THE DRUNKARD.-As to the drunkard, he hath laesa memoria while he is in his cups, and if he drinks on he hath none. While Bacchus is his chief god, Apollo never keeps him company. Friends and foes, familiars and strangers, are then alike to him; and he forgetfully speaks of that, in his cups, which, if he were sober, the rack could not wrest from him. First, he speaks he knows not what; nor can he after remember what it was he spoke. He speaks that which he should forget; and forgets that which he did speak. Drunkenness is the death of rational man, which only time and abstinence can resuscitate. Absentem laedit, qui cum ebrio litigat. He who quarrels with one that is drunk is like the fool who fights with him who is absent. He is not fit to keep another's secrets who knows not how to closet up his own thoughts. DRUNKENNESS.-There is but one thing which distinguishes beast from man, reason; and this drunkenness robs him of. The cup is the betrayer of the mind. ... Drunkenness besots a nation and brutifies even the bravest spirits. The The Macedonian Philip would not make war against the Persians when he heard they were such drinkers; for, he said, they would ruin themselves. . . . What a monster man is in his inebriations! A swimming eye, a face both roast and sod, a rambling tongue, clammed to the roof and gums; a drumming ear; a fevered body; a boiling stomach; a mouth rendered nauseous with offensive fumes, till it sickens the brain with giddiness; a palsied hand, and legs tottering and reeling under their moistened burthen. .. Let me rather be disliked for not being a beast, than be good-fellowed with a sot for being one. Some laugh at me for being sober; and I laugh at them for being drunk. Let their pleasures crown them, and their mirth abound; the next day they will feel the inconvenience of it. "Bibite et pergraecamini, O Cimmerii! Ebrietatem stupor, dolor, imbecillitas, morbus, et mors ipsa comitantur." Drink on and revel, O Cimmerians! your drunkenness is accompanied by stupefaction of the mind, lowness of spirits, by weakness, by disease, and even by death itself.' Extracts might be indefinitely multiplied, each surpassing the other in some quality, in acute insight into the heart, in faithful expostulation, in richness, depth, and pregnancy of meaning; in force and pathos; in power of thought and elegance of expression: but let these suffice to show that in Owen Felltham's Resolves' there are unfolded to the reader the pages of a clear, methodical, expansive, many-thoughted, acute, and faithful Christian man's soul, and therefore that it interests us much to know and read and feel the truths which he enunciates. An honest man's voice can seldom be too often heard. Felltham's Resolves' abound in just and judicious thoughts; they are the reflections of a serious and intelligent, widely observant man; they are suffused with a sort of contemplative melancholy that looks upon the causes of the multiplied miseries of human life with a saddened rather than a censorious eye. They are full of a kindly charity, which endeavours to calm and soothe, to console and encordial man's estate; and they are imbued with a Christian earnestness which anxiously exerts itself to dissolve and dispel the perplexities and uncertainties of man regarding his origin, condition, duty, sufferings, and destiny. Devout aspirations, penitential and grateful reflections, sincere confessions, variety of sentiment, a learned yet unpedantic scholarship, a style always perspicuous, often striking, not unfrequently quaint, give this book a charm and worth which recommend it to the notice of those who like to possess themselves of ingenious, sagacious, manly, and felicitously-expressed thought. Aiming not at the discussion of large and vast speculations, or deep and unplummeted inquisitions into morals and religion, but intending to be a wise companion, a Christian adviser, a judicious prompter, a conscientious friend, an engaging inspirer of moral life and feeling, Felltham has eminently succeeded. Among the thinkers of his time, he almost alone has held the field against the oblivion in which the gliding years enwrap the labours of men. He has not, indeed, sought to 'reason high' upon the mysterious mysteries' of life, providence, fate, &c., but he has been contented to think about and advise regarding the attainment The Praise of Drunkenness. 103 attainment of the highest happiness and the holiest pleasure, and has endeavoured to lighten up life by glimpses of the radiance of eternity. May we with Thomas Randolph say, but also, unlike him, do what we say ''Mongst thy Resolves put my resolves in too, ART. II.-Ebrietatis Encomium; or, the Praise of Drunkenness ; wherein is authentically and most evidently proved the necessity of frequently getting Drunk; and that the practice is most Ancient, Primitive, and Catholic. By Boniface Oinophilus, De Monte Fiascone, A. B. C. London: Printed for C. Chapple. 1812. TEMPERANCE readers will be ready to start when their eyes behold the title of the work before them. They often wish, with the patriarch Job in the land of Uz, that their adversary had written a book.' There is certainly a full supply of teetotal literature, but very little has been published on the other side. On the present occasion we are able to fulfil the desire of the coldwater army, and to afford them a specimen of a treatise in the praise of drunkenness, which we lately disentombed from the library of a learned and able LL.D., M.D., and fellow of many scientific societies. We thought it a pity that so formidable a treatise should be hidden. We trust there was no violence done to the literary reputation of the library where we excavated this celebrated masterpiece of anti-teetotal art. We pledged our word that the niche would be filled again by the slab when once we had made an examination of its formation, and had prepared a suitable memoir of the wonderful composition for the enlightenment of the temperance world. In the year 1812, a literary phenomenon appeared in the form of a treatise with the above very euphonious title. It was an era in modern prose. In ancient times grave and learned writers had expressed in imperishable books their opinions of the usefulness of getting drunk occasionally. Poets in all ages have consecrated to wine and other drinks many of their famous verses. But it was reserved for the author of this work to produce a treatise in prose in praise of drunkenness. He was well aware of the perilous attempt he made in authorship. The bare title of the book,' said he in his preface, 'is enough to have it universally cried down, and to give the world an ill opinion of its author; for people will not be backward to say, that he who writes the Praise of Drunkenness must be be a drunkard by profession; and who, by discoursing on such a subject, did nothing but what was in his own trade, and resolved not to come out of his own sphere, not unlike Baldwin, a shoemaker's son (and a shoemaker), in the days of yore, who published a treatise on the shoes of the ancients, having a firm resolution strictly to observe this precept, Ne sutor ultra crepidam. To this I answer, I am very well contented that the world should believe me as much a drunkard, as Erasmus, who wrote the Praise of Folly, was a fool, and weigh me in the same balance.' The work contains thirty-two chapters and a postscript. We cannot, in the limited space assigned to us, enter into and discuss the many topics thus introduced to our notice by the author, who was evidently a man of great learning, extensive acquaintance with classical and ecclesiastical literature both of ancient and modern times, at least up to his own age, and besides, possessed of ready wit and great powers of satire. Few subjects have been treated with greater lore and made so readable withal. The author was capable of making his encyclopædiac knowledge full of interest to the unlearned. He is no Doctor Dryasdust. He is fitted to be good company to any reader who should light upon his singular production. The following are the titles of the chapters:-1. That one must be merry. 2. That wine drives away sorrow, and excites mirth. 3. That it is good for one's health to get drunk sometimes. 4. That old people ought to get drunk sometimes. 5. That wine creates wit. 6. That wine makes one eloquent. 7. That wine acquires friends, and reconciles enemies. 8. That the custom of getting drunk is most ancient. 9. That the primitive Christians got drunk. 10. Of churchmen. 11. Of popes, saints, and bishops, that used to get drunk. 12. A catalogue of some illustrious topers. 13. Of philosophers that used to get drunk. 14. Of poets that used to get drunk. 15. Of freemasons, and other learned men, that used to get drunk. 16. Of nations that used to get drunk. 17. Of the drunkenness of the Germans. 18. Of nations that get drunk with certain liquors. 19. Other considerations in favour of drunkenness. 20. An answer to the objection, That drunkenness causes infinite evils. 21. An answer to the objection, That the mirth which wine inspires is chimerical. 22. An answer to the objection, That one loses one's reason in getting drunk. 23. An answer to the objection, That one cannot trust a man that gets drunk. 24. An answer to the objection, That drunkenness makes one incapable of performing the duties of civil life. 25. Burlesque, ridiculous, and out-of-the-way thoughts against drunkenness. 26. A ridiculous aversion that some have to wine. 27. Rigourous laws against wine and drunkenness. 28. Rules to be observed in getting drunk. (1.) Not too often. (2.) In good company. 29. (3.) With good wine. 30. (4.) At convenient times. 31. (5.) To force no one to drink. 32. (6.) Not to push drunkenness too far. Concluding with a postscript in the shape |