Drinking, it would seem, is not altogether confined to the
lower classes. Ina recent trial in London for conspiracy to defraud Mr. Le Hunt Doyle, it came out that Mr. Doyle and three other gen- tlemen, one of them a bankrupt baronet, since dead, were in the habit of drinking together from morning to night. Mr. Doyle himself admitted that he drank champagne-cup before he was up, and all day ; and had a carafe of brandy placed in his room every night, which he usually emptied ; while the amounts of liquor consumed at lunch and dinner were so enormous that we do not give them, preferring to believe that the bottles were changed a great deal oftener than necessary. Mt. Doyle, a gentleman with large estates in three counties in Ireland, did not seem to think his drinking anything extraordinary, and told the jury that at the moment he spoke he was "quite sober and very thirsty." We fear even the sharp lesson he has had—he had very nearly been constituted an unlimited partner in a wine business under a deed obtained from him when he was drunk—will be insufficient to cure that kind of " thirst " which prevails, the doctors' say, among idle men of means much more frequently than it is just now the fathion to admit.
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