.578 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 



The Nursery Book. Darton and Son. 



This is a beaut-ifully got up little work. It is exactly suited to the tastes 

 of children ; for its numerous drawings will please their eye, while its letter- 

 press informs their minds. It is well conceived and well executed. 



Charges against Custom and Public Opinion. By the Rev. H. Jef* 

 FREYs, A.M., Senior Chaplain, Bombay. Smith, Elder, and Co. 



No adequate notion of the nature of this little work can be formed from the 

 title page. The object of the author is to induce the respectable portion of 

 society to abstain from the use of ardent spirits, in order that others may not 

 abuse them. He maintains that the crime of drunkenness now prevails to 

 such an extent as to render it the duty of all who wish well to the human 

 race to do every thing in their power to put it down ; and he conceives that if 

 those who are actuated by right principles, and move in respectable society, 

 were to cease using spirituous liquors, it would contribute very much to dis- 

 countenance the drinking of them altogether. No man can question the 

 excellence of the rev. gentleman's motives ; but, constituted as society is at 

 present, we doubt the practicability of his suggestions. The work displays 

 talent, but the diction is quaint and stiff, and there are a good many repeti- 

 tions of the same sentiments. 



Speaking of the evil and misery produced by drinking, the author says : — 



" It is, perhaps, not too much to say that the spirit-cask alone has caused 

 more human crime, and made more human tears to flow than any other cause 

 of crime and misery that ever cursed the earth ; or, perhaps, than all other 

 causes of human misery put together. We know where it is said, ' As a man 

 soivs, so shall he reap ;' and that a man's sin often becomes his punishment. 

 The object of this horrid custom may be stated in general to be this : — ' To 

 raise the tone of the animal spirits, by unnatural means, and to produce a 

 forced laughter and a fictitious joy ; and the end of it is that there is no 

 cause on earth so prolific of tears, and misery, and sorrow. 



"There is not, perhaps, in all the millions of England, a single individual 

 who has not either been made miserable in his own family, or known of some 

 other family within the compass of his observation whose peace has been 

 marred and blighted, by this widely extended evil. If we consider what has 

 been again and again said of it, but which ought to be again and again re- 

 peated, till the public, like the Unjust Judge, by our importunity, is made to 

 hear, ' That ardent spirit is the cause of three-fourths of the poverty, disease, 

 crime, and misery of England ; that it fills our alms-houses with poor, our 

 asylums with maniacs, our grave-yards with premature mortality ; that it 

 furnishes the victims for the scaffold, and peoples hell with its inhabitants, — 

 that region of never-ending despair and woe. If, to this mass of misery, we 

 add the grief, and shame, and tears of relations and friends, — and if we still 

 further add all that are in any way corrupted by their example, or injured by 

 their crimes, — if we add all these woes together, and then reflect that it is 

 no exaggeration, but a sober truth, that the spirit-cask is the author of them 

 all, we must admit, that the price that is paid for it is the price of blood, — 

 that he who lives by the sale of it lives upon the tears of his fellow-creatures, 

 upon the wreck and ruin of their happiness, both temporal and eternal, — and 

 that he who buys it, or encourages the sale of it, or lends to it his respecta- 

 bility, is (however little he may intend it) an assistant and abettor of the very 

 : worst demon that ever cursed the earth. Therefore, charity requires us to 

 ;. suppose that all who have any thing to do with it are perfectly insane and 

 " mad on this subject, and unable to put two rational propositions together on 



