General News.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3759, 14 January 1881, Page 2

General News.

In the Alliance News, a " Teetotal Footman" contrasts the past with the present of upperclassdom, infinitely to the advantage of the latter. He has vivid recollections of dinners at which a score of gentlemen drank as many as twenty.two bottles of wine, four gallons of ale, and three bottles of spirits. " You see nothing of that sort now," remarks the " Teetotal Footman; " but we are not exactly sure that is is so. There is a good deal of drinking done in these latter days, and it is not the workingman alone consumes intoxi-^ cants. Then, in not a very remote pasv^ " Jeames " relates, "The 'ladies never though of sitting down to dinner without drinking one, two, or three glasses of sherry, port, champagne, or hock." "We had thought that in a not very remote past it had been much worse with the ladies than this ; and certain it is, that in the fashionable world of the present day few ladies would consider sipping even a couple of glasses of sherry drinking to excess. There are certainly more teetotallers now than there were five-and-twenty years ago, but it is greatly to be questioned whether there is not also fully as many heavy drinkers as there were then, and a far greater array of habitual tipplers.

Work.—Mr Carlyle, in reply to a request for advice as to a course of reading, said—"lt is not by books alone, nor by books chiefly, that a man becomes in all parts a man. Study to do faithfully whatsoever thing in your actual situation, there and now, you find expressly or tacitly laid to your charge; that is your post—stand to it like a true soldier, A. man perfects himself by work much more than by reading. They are a growing kind of men that can wisely combine two things— wisely, valiantly cau do what ia laid to their hand in their present sphere, and prepare themselves withal fordoing other, while things if such lie before them,"