blamed himself for “buying days of misery by nights of madness;” but the sweet soul was enchained, and no struggles availed to work a blessed transformation.  Read his “Confessions of a Drunkard.”  It is the most awful chapter in English literature, for it is written out of the agony of a pure and well-meaning mind, and its tortured phrases seem to cry out from the page that holds their misery.  We are placed face to face with a dread aspect of life, and the remorseless artist paints his own pitiable case as though he longed to save his fellow-creatures even at the expense of his own self-abasement.  All these afflicted creatures sought the wrong remedy for the exhaustion and the nameless craving that beset them when they were spent with toil.  The periodic drinker takes his dive into the sensual mud-bath just at the times when eager exertion has brought on lassitude of body and mind.  He begins by timidly drinking a little of the deleterious stuff, and he finds that his mental images grow bright and pleasant.  A moment comes to him when he would not change places with the princes of the earth, and he endeavours to make that moment last long.  He fails, and only succeeds in dropping into drunkenness.  On the morning after his first day he feels depressed; but his biliary processes are undisturbed, and he is able to begin again without any sense of nausea.  His quantity is increased until he gradually reaches the point when glasses of spirits are poured down with feverish rapidity.  His appetite is sometimes voracious, sometimes capricious, sometimes absent altogether.  His stomach becomes ulcerated, and he can obtain release from the grinding uneasiness only by feeding the inflamed organ with more and more alcohol.  The liver ceases to act healthily, the blood becomes charged with bile, and one morning the wretch awakes feeling that life is not worth having.  He has slept like a log; but all night through his outraged brain has avenged itself by calling up crowds of hideous dreams.  The blood-vessels of the eye are charged with bilious particles, and these intruding specks give rise to fearful, exaggerated images of things that never yet were seen on sea or land.  Grim faces leer at the dreamer and make mock of him; frightful animals pass in procession before him; and hosts of incoherent words are jabbered in his ear by unholy voices.  He wakes, limp, exhausted, trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide and—­more drink.  If he drinks at this stage, he is lost; and then is the time to fix upon him and draw him by main force from the slough.

Now some practitioners say, “Let him drop it gradually;” and they proceed to stir every molecule of alcohol in the system into vile activity by adding small doses of wine or spirit to the deadly accumulation.  The man’s brain is impoverished, and the mistaken doctors proceed to impoverish it more, so that a patient who should be cured in forty-eight hours is kept in dragging misery for a month or more.  The proper