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insensibly to interest herself in the all-accomplished Lord Curryfin; while the sister-beauties of the forest tower, placed by anticipation in the anomalous sphere that Mrs. Crawshaw of Cwyfartha has imagined for her lady domestics, sink with yielding coyness after a lively courtship into the stalwart arms of their sworn adorers. Gryll Grange' is by many degrees the most fascinating of the five novels in its style.

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The three articles on Shelley, published originally in 'Fraser's Magazine,' so far as they go, are most valuable contributions to the life of the poet, for Peacock had lived in close intimacy with him for years, and had done something towards correcting the morbid weaknesses that injured his health and embittered his life. We need only notice briefly what is most original in them, without pretending to enter into details on points that are still matters of controversy. But Mr. Peacock seems to make it plain beyond reasonable doubt that Shelley's imagination actually played him false so far as honestly to deceive himself. Repeatedly he narrated most circumstantially events that can hardly have occurred. He used to tell how in an outburst of righteous indignation he had driven a knife through a schoolfellow's hand at Eton: yet it is only from himself we hear of an incident that must have made no slight sensation had it happened. He elaborately invented the account of a night attack on a lonely house that he occupied in Wales at least his story was flatly contradicted by an examination of the earth and grass under his windows. On another occasion he mentioned to Peacock all the details of a visit he had received-proposed to convince his doubting friend by taking him to see the gentleman who was supposed to have paid it: then suddenly stopped short on the road, tacitly admitting that the whole tale had been a fable. We have a ludicrous example of his habit of seeking confirmation in common life of some wildly fanciful theory that for the time amounted to monomania with him. At a time when he saw the Zodiac in everything,' he and Peacock passed a public-house with the sign of the Horse-shoes.

'They were four on the sign and he immediately determined that their number had been handed down from remote antiquity as representative of the compartments of the Zodiac. He stepped into the public-house and said to the landlord," Your sign is the Horse-shoes?" "Yes, sir." "This sign has always four horse-shoes?' "Why, mostly, sir." "Not always? "I think I have seen three." "I cannot divide the Zodiac into three. But it is mostly four. Do you know why it is mostly four?" Why, sir, I suppose because a horse has four legs." He bounced out in great indignation, and as soon as I joined him, he said to me, "Did you ever see such a fool? "'

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As to the separation from his first wife, Mr. Peacock holds that the fault was Shelley's. He simply saw another woman who pleased him better, because he discovered an affinity between their minds. There was no estrangement, no shadow of a thought of separation, till Shelley became acquainted, not long after his marriage, with the lady who was subsequently his 'second wife.' Characteristically, he then spoke of his unfortunate wife as a noble animal,' never doubting that she would acquiesce in the separation he had set his heart upon. She did not acquiesce: he left her, and she subsequently drowned herself. That he suffered painful fits of remorse, Mr. Peacock, who lived with him so familiarly, only discovered by accident. They were walking together in Bisham Woods, when Shelley impetuously acknowledged as much on being roused from a gloomy reverie. Had he lived more like his somewhat Epicurean friend, and made a better use of his excellent natural appetite, he might have been a very different man both physically and mentally. Once, when he was in the doctor's hands to little purpose, Peacock volunteered to prescribe for him. He asked, "What would be your prescription?" I said, "Three mutton chops, well peppered." He said, "Do you "really think so?" I said, "I am sure of it." He took the 'prescription: the success was obvious and immediate.' But, unfortunately, Shelley did not persist in this regimen that answered so satisfactorily, and he not only went on dreaming unhealthy dreams, but later in life, he saw visions. Shortly before his death, he woke up in the night, to see a figure, draped in a mantle, standing by his bedside and beckoning to him: and only a month before the fatal shipwreck off Spezia, a naked child appeared to him rising from the surf, as he walked with a friend on the terrace of his marine villa. With a mind so diseased acting on a body so enfeebled, it seems probable that the end could not have been long deferred in any case.

We have done our best to give an idea of the miscellaneous contents of these three volumes, by the light reflected on them from some knowledge of their author. But from their very nature, any notice of the kind must necessarily do them most imperfect justice, even had our limits permitted of our indulging far more freely in quotation. They are not to be skimmed with any satisfaction. They are books to be dipped into as the humour takes you, although you are scarcely likely to lay them down quickly when you happen to turn to them in conge

nial mood.

ART. VI.-1. Alcohol, its Action and its Uses: Cantor Lectures of the Society of Arts. By BENJAMIN W. RICHARDSON, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.C.P. 'Journal of the Society of Arts,' Vol. XXIII. London: 1875.

2. A Treatise on the Origin, Nature, and Varieties of Wine. By J. L. W. THUDICHUM, M.D., and AUGUST DUPRÉ, Ph. D. London: 1872.

3. Stimulants and Narcotics, and their Mutual Relations. By FRANCIS E. ANSTIE, M.D., M.R.C.P. London:

1864.

A FEW months since a memorandum appeared in the public

journals, signed by 266 distinguished physicians and surgeons engaged in hospital practice in Great Britain, in which an earnest appeal was made to the medical profession at large to be careful, when using alcohol as a remedial agent, so to employ it as not to give ground that can afterwards be construed into a sanction for its excessive, or even for its habitual, dietetic use. In this memorandum there appeared an altogether unqualified expression of the opinion that the value of alcohol as an article of diet is immensely exaggerated, and that medical practitioners are bound, in the face of the grievous evil that results from its indiscriminate and injudicious use, to inculcate very strenuously habits of the utmost moderation. Shortly afterwards a letter was printed, also in the public journals, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, by Sir Henry Thompson, the well-known surgeon of University College Hospital, in which he states his own assured conviction that there is no greater cause of moral and physical evil in this country than the habitual use of alcoholic beverages, even when restricted to an amount which falls far short of the quantity required to produce drunkenness, and that is conventionally held to be quite within the limits of strict moderation. Sir Henry further adds that such habitual use injures the body, and diminishes the mental power, to an extent that few people are aware of; and that it is, in reality, the determining cause of a very large proportion of the most dangerous and painful maladies that come under the care of the surgeon, and also of much of the deterioration of the qualities of the race that capacitate men for endurance in the competition which must exist in the nature of things, and in which the prize of superiority falls to the best and the strongest.

In the face of this public, and deliberately preferred, indict

VOL. CXLII. NO. CCLXXXIX.

L

ment it becomes a matter of some importance, as well as interest, to inquire a little further into the ground upon which so grave an allegation rests; and it is all the more easy to do this, because in recent years numerous well qualified observers have been powerfully attracted by this branch of physiological investigation, and have been devoting to it the closest and the most unwearying attention. The culprit who is arraigned at the bar of public opinion by this indictment of the physiologists, was not known in his naked and undisguised deformity until he was extracted as a flame-spirit from the alembics of the Arabian alchemists of the eleventh century during their persistent search for the elixir of life, and for the philosopher's stone. He had nevertheless existed, and was a mighty power in the world, for long centuries before that. Alcohol is not created by the artificial manipulation of the grape now used in the manufacture of wine, but grows in it during the natural process of ripening, and of subsequent decay. All the earliest wines were simply the expressed juice of the ripened grape left to its own inherent tendencies. The ferment which generated the wine was as much an integral part of the ripened fruit as its sweetness and its fragrance. It was measured out and apportioned by nature itself to each berry, and deposited in it in the exact quantity which was required in the further work of transforming the sugar of the matured fruit into spirit. Wine, in the sense of a fermented intoxicating beverage, was well known alike to the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The Roman wines are well known from the frequent allusions made to them by the Latin poets; and even the dialogues of Plato record the vinous excesses of Athenian philosophers but spirit extracted from the juice of the grape, or from other vegetable substances, by distillation, does not appear to have been known at all to antiquity.

It was at one time conceived that there was only one kind of wine-producing grape, the species known to botanists as the Vitis Vinifera. This, however, is by no means the true state of the case. Each wine-producing district of the world seems to have its own particular series of indigenous vines, which have improved under the natural circumstances of soil and climate, and under the ordinary process of selection, into the perfected vines of the same district at the present day. Drs. Thudichum and Dupré remark that the grape of each district is so changed when it is transplanted to other localities that its distinctive character is entirely lost, and very commonly its wine-producing power is effectually destroyed, although the climate of its new home differs in no material degree from that

of the place from which it has been removed. The Catawba wine of the Arkansas Valley, in North America, is the production, not of any species of European vine, but of the indigenous American Fox-grape, or Vitis Labrusca. In this district, Mr. Longworth, the principal grower of the Catawba, planted numerous varieties of vine brought from France and from Madeira, but notwithstanding the care and skill which his large experience and intimate knowledge of the vine enabled him to give them, they all failed. The indigenous Catawba grape, on the other hand, is entirely successful, and the manufacture of wine from it is yearly extending. Drs. Thudichum and Dupré furnish a description of twenty-nine distinct species of wild vine which are indigenous in the valley of the Rhine.

By very much the larger part of the juice of the fully ripened grape is nature's own arch solvent, pure water; but this water contains mingled with it a certain proportion of other principles that have been elaborated in the grape during the life of the plant, and are held dissolved in the water to communicate to it its sweetness and other delicious qualities. Of these principles the chief part is sugar mingled with a relatively small percentage of tartaric acid, and with a yet more minute trace of various other more or less organised and complex substances that are mixed cunningly together by the vegetable alchemy, to give the various charming attributes of colour, flavour, and fragrance to the fruit. In the most essential products of this vital elaboration the acid is preponderant during the early stage of the formation of the berry; but with the advance of maturation the sugar accumulates more and more, and the acid falls back into obscurity, for the most part on account of being overborne and masked by the increase of the saccharine ingredient, but in some instances also, it appears, from the actual conversion of the tartaric acid. into sugar.

The sugar produced in the ripening of the grape is mainly of a peculiar kind spoken of as glucose,' or 'grape-sugar,' which is characterised by its proneness to undergo the chemical change that constitutes fermentation. It is chemically distinguished from the sugar of the cane by being a trifle more rich in hydrogen and oxygen, and, therefore, somewhat less highly carbonised. Grape-sugar is capable of presenting itself in two distinct forms mainly distinguished by the odd peculiarity that one has the power of diverting the plane of a ray of polarised light passing through it towards the right, and the other of diverting the same ray towards the left.

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