strifes,
and histories that go on within the nature of wine until the perfect
spirit is born, and is purified, and escapes, and triumphs over
gorgons, and demons, and becomes immortal, and the giver of
immortality.' "
As
a case in point, prosaic, and matter-of-fact, but none the less
appropriate, Harrison Weir, the well-known depicter of animal life, was
so desperately ill some years ago that the doctor in attendance told
Mrs. Weir her husband could not live through the night. When the doctor
had gone, the artist asked for some port wine. This was given him ; he
drank more than half a tumblerful, and felt all the better for it;
soon after this he drank another like quantity, and fell asleep. On
waking he finished the bottle. When the doctor came next morning he
found the patient, not dead, as he had expected, but sitting up in the
bedroom. Harrison Weir, who lived some years subsequently, always
attributed his recovery to that bottle of port. Though Dr. Samuel
Johnson, who was by no means a total abstainer, declared, " A man may
choose whether he will have abstemiousness, and knowledge; or claret,
and ignorance."
" What a pity it is," says Mr. Bagshot in his recent Comments, (full
of original shrewdness), "that overeating is not followed by the same
visibly scandalous consequences as over-drinking ! There would be more
thin people in the world, and less gluttony ; but scarcely anyone would
be sober at the end of a London dinnerparty " ! " Again," he goes on
to say, " it is ultimately the most disagreeable fact in nature that
living things live on each other. In this respect man is divided from
the brutes by the cook. There may be pleasures unrealized by man in the
sense of smell, but I am
