The philosophy of artificial and compulsory drinking usage in Great Britain and Ireland: containing the characteristic, and exclusively national, convivial laws of British society; with the peculiar compulsory festal customs of ninety-eight trades and occupations in the three kingdoms ... / By John Dunlop.

  • Dunlop, John, 1789-1868.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The philosophy of artificial and compulsory drinking usage in Great Britain and Ireland: containing the characteristic, and exclusively national, convivial laws of British society; with the peculiar compulsory festal customs of ninety-eight trades and occupations in the three kingdoms ... / By John Dunlop. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    favourable metamorphosis. This state of felicity continued for a twelvemonth; but, unluckily, the usage of drinking at bargains was not departed from; he seemed to find it very expedient for his affairs to repeat this custom, but he fulfilled it in porter, not in spirits. By-and-bye he is known to have reasoned thus with himself,—“ I am now independent of whisky ; this I have demonstrated to my own satisfaction, and to that of all my friends and acquaintance. The drinking of porter, while others take spirits, will not do ; I am singular, and am laughed at; besides, it brings old failings to every body’s remembrance. I will now order whisky as before, but shall taste only, and do no more.” He withdrew from the Temperance So- ciety—began to take whisky at bargains once more -—continued sober for some months—increased his doses—and finally fell again into the gulph of in- temperance. Now, but for this usage, this man, humanly speaking, never would have relapsed, unless he had further become ensnared to a taste for porter or strong ale. The multiplicity of the rites and ceremonies of drinking at fairs, markets, and sacraments, can scarcely have passed unobserved even by inatten- tive spectators, although it is unaccountable how little known to one class are the mysteries of in- ebriation of another. The stopping of farmers on horseback or in carts, with their friends or families, at a variety of public-houses, as they pass home- wards, occasions a sad deterioration of morals in that class of the inhabitants. We have been