Johnson that this vice of drink, if long indulged, will render
knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible. Oh! how many
lost sons of earth, whose lamps of genius blazed only to light their
pathway to the tomb, might have achieved an inheritance of immortal fame
but for this vice, or disease as it may be.
I write this with a hope that it may be a heeded warning to the
intellectual of earth, not less than the illiterate. The educated man is
more liable to suffer from strong stimulants than the man who is not
educated. Never was there a greater or more dangerous fallacy than that so
often urged, that the thinking functions are assisted by the use of
stimulating liquors or drugs. O, say some, Byron owed a great portion of
his inspiration to gin and water, and that was his Hippocrene. Nonsense!
His highest inspiration came from the beauty of the world and from God.
Lord Brougham, it has been declared, made his most brilliant speeches of
old port. Sheridan, it has been told, delivered some of his most sparkling
speeches when "half seas over." Eugene Sue found his genius in a bottle of
claret; Swinburne in absinthe, and so on.
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