too carelessly and too lightly lent to the employment of a medicine, the application of whose extraordinary powers ought to be reserved for occasions of proportionate emergency.

PROSPERITY OFTEN A SOURCE OF INEBRIETY.

But

THE meaning of the word stimulus is in general confined to fermented liquors, or to drugs such as that which we have noticed in the preceding section. it may in a more comprehensive and philosophical sense, be made to include not only what acts immediately upon the stomach, but likewise a vast variety of moral causes which operate more directly the passions or imagination. A man may be intoxicated by good news as well as by brandy. In this way prosperity not

upon

unfrequently proves as unwholesome as intemperance. Many have thus fallen the victims of what has been considered their good fortune. A sudden accession of opulence or honor will often obscure the faculties as much as the fumes of drunkenness. A sudden gush of happiness has been known to occasion immediate death, and in other instances has given rise to what is incalculably worse, paroxysms which have terminated in incurable insanity. In the celebrated South Sea speculation, it was remarked that few lost their reason in consequence of the loss of their property, but that many were stimulated to madness by the too abrupt accumulation of enormous wealth. other lotteries, as well as in the general lottery of life, dreadful effects have perhaps more frequently arisen from the prizes than the blanks. It has often happened that an adventurer, in addition

In

to the original price of his ticket, has paid for his chance-gotten wealth by a forfeiture of his reason. The same turn of the wheel which has raised him into affluence, has sunk him also into idiocy, or by no advantageous change, has transformed the mendicant into the maniac.

Adversity, that "tamer of the human breast" acts on the other hand, as a salutary sedative upon the irritability of our frame, and may thus not only secure the subjugation of our passions and protect the sanity of our intellect, but also in some instances may tend to protract life, almost in proportion as it deducts rom the vivacity of its enjoyment.

ap

THE author was once acquainted with a person who, not from actual poverty, but from an hypochondriacal fear of its proach, denied himself not merely the enjoyments, but the wholesome comforts and almost the meagre necessaries of existence. He insulated himself from convivial and all social intercourse, that he might avoid the expenses attending and refused what was almost

them;

essential to immediate sustenance, lest he might ultimately want the means of procuring it. He died in fact of an extreme debility and emaciation of mind and body, from neither of them having been regularly provided with a sufficient quantity of its appropriate aliment. Temperance is moderation. In the proper sense therefore of the word, we may be intemperately abstemious as well as intemperately luxurious and self-indulgent. That degree of privation which is unnatural or unreasonable, proves no less destructive than superfluous and superabundant gratification. It is possible indeed by simple and almost innoxious means, to relieve ourselves from the burden of excess; but it is not possible long to bear with impunity, or even without a fatal result, the inconveniences of a scanty and deficient supply. I recollect a case in dispensary practice,