wild and tempestuous, the wind howled across the moors, and every succeeding gust spoke of unrelieved solitude. The guilty couple felt the silent awe of the moment, and, as they stole along with their lifeless burden hanging on their arms, listened with renewed affright to each passing moan of the breeze. They had now reached the extremity of the garden, and cast the corpse into the burialplace. It sunk with a heavy sound into the grave; the face was turned upwards, and a sudden flash of lightning revealed the features of their daughter, for whose sake the murder had been committed.

They were roused from their trance of agony by the sound of approaching footsteps, and by the dim light of their lantern beheld a form clad in white approaching the grave. The conscience of the murderers instantly took the alarm, and suggested to their disordered imagination, that it was the ghost of their slaughtered child. Struck to the soul with the sight, her past guilt rushing full on her mind, the feelings of the mother were unequal to the struggle, and she dropped senseless on the body of her daughter. The father returned in a state of phrenzy to his cottage, was impeached on the evidence of the young woman who had encountered them at the grave, and, together with his

wife, was shortly afterwards executed for the murder. Before he died, he confessed the share he had taken in the rebellion; but solemnly persisted in affirming that he was driven to despair by the unexampled indigence of his family.

ON THE

Religious and Moral Propriety

OF

BEING DRUNK.

"Man being reasonable, must get drunk,
The best of life is but intoxication."

DON JUAN.

THE duty of getting drunk, from its relative connexion with the best interests of society, is a subject which merits the gravest consideration. Like the cider cellar, it is replete with bibulous interest, and comes thronging on our imagination with the most edifying reminiscences. But say the elect, "of a verity, intoxication is sinful:" away with the blasphemous idea. It is a custom of the most venerable correctness, and was held in such esteem among the ancients, that deity himself was supposed

to preside over the bottle. Striking proof of the wisdom of the institution! Thrones, kingdoms, religions, have bloomed and passed away-but the temples of the jolly Son of Semele still flourish in every street of our blessed metropolis.

The old writers must have had "stout notions on the drinking score," for they relate, that when Jupiter wished to reward Hebe, the goddess of youth and beauty, he could think of no higher compliment than dubbing her Cup-bearer to Olympus. The greatest authors, both in ancient and modern times, have in like manner been the subtlest advocates of drinking. "We are told," says the historian of New York, "that the aboriginal Germans had an admirable mode of treating any question of importance; they first deliberated upon it when drunk, and afterwards reconsidered it when sober. The shrewder mobs of America, who dislike having two minds upon a subject, both determine and act upon it drunk; by which means a world of cold and tedious speculation is dispensed with."

The correctness of perpetual intoxication may be considered in a two-fold light; in a religious as well as in a moral sense. “Wine maketh glad the heart of man," is the biblical apophthegm from which an inference favourable to inebriety is drawn.

This passage a modern divine has illustrated with his usual ability. "Wine," says he, "that is, one bottle, exhilarateth the heart of man, two bottles augment his merriment-and so on, till he reaches the summit of terrestrial felicity; from whence it is obvious that intoxication is consonant to religious enjoyment. Q. E. D."-For the edification of the unenlightened, this assertion may be further resolved into a rule-of-three sum. If one bottle (given its quality and vintage) makes a man glad, what ratio of pleasure will four bottles procure him? The solution, with the aid of a dozen of old Port and Cocker's Arithmetic, is obvious to the meanest capacity.

In a moral sense, drunkenness is equally correct; for it is well known that, in these days of sobriety and wickedness, the revenue is injured by an atheistical affectation of temperance. Water, "hear it, ye Gods," supplies the place of wine. They will dispense with turtle-soup next, I suppose; and then, as Alderman Fatsides told me, with tears in his eyes, the constitutional liberty of England is ruined. If then we are desirous of supporting the character of moral citizens, (for the cause of our country, is assuredly the cause of morality) let us get drunk with all due expedition, and restore the equilibrium of the revenue. Thus only can we