Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/171

 I BEN JONSON 155 I like a man to tak' his glass, Toast a friend or bonnie lass ; He that winna is an ass — Deil send him ane to gallop on ! I like a man that's frank an' kind, Meets me when I have a mind, Sings his sang an' drinks me blind, Like the Laird o' Lamington." He would just have suited our poet, who "of all styles loved most to be named Honest, and hath of that one hundreth letters so naming him." Did Drummond, think you, have many so naming him ? In our days the question of stimulants is commonly discussed with so much canting intemperance on the one side (that called, in irony, the Temperance) and so much timid hypocrisy on the other, that we rarely hear or read a straightforward sensible word on it. About the best I have ever seen, in a short space, is that of Dr. Garth Wilkinson, in his magistral but little known work, "The Human Body and its Connexion with Man," chap, iii., " Assimilation and its Organs;" much of the argument being as good for the sedative tobacco as for the stimulant wine. The wise liberal rule in this matter is precisely the contrary of that in politics : it is men not measures, instead of measures not men. The pertinent question is not, How much does So-and-So drink? but. How does he live and work on his drink, and into what society does it lead him ? It is scarcely needful to state that Jonson emerges triumphant from such a test As Gifford says on this point : " The immensity of his literary acquisitions, and the number and extent of his productions, refute the slander, no less