ST. MARTIN'S EVE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE UNHOLY WISH" A POLITICAL CONVERSAZIONE OF THE YEAR 1848.-METTERNICH, GUIZOT, BABALI AND THE PACHA. BEING THE SECOND TALE OF MY DRAGOMAN. BY EXTRACTS FROM THE COMMONPLACE-BOOK OF A LATELY DECEASED AUTHOR, 363, 422 PALACE TALES: THE WHITE LADY; AND THE STORY OF PALE SOPHIE A VOICE TO THE SAD. BY G. W. THORNBURY AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP. BY SIR NATHANIEL. No. IX.-N. P. WILLIS THE LADY'S WELL. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE UNHOLY WISH" GOSSIP FROM FLORENCE. A LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE EDITOR OF THE TALES OF MY DRAGOMAN. No. III. How MUFTIFIZ ROSE TO GREATNESS. LITERARY LEAFLETS. BY SIR NATHANIEL. No. XIV.-MRS. JAMESON NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. THE BOWL AND THE DUTY. BY CYRUS REDDING. WHERE is our national symposiarchos, our wine-master of the ceremonies? We are still far from thinking we shall not soon require such an official. Our ministers are not men of taste, or they would have given us the opportunity of electing such an officer long ago. They are teasops, and make the land nervous with Hong-Kong decoctions. We thought to have had wine at a more reasonable rate this session; but we languish still under the want of the "universal panacea," or as a great physician styled it, "that to the body which manure is to trees." The ancient Greek chiefs secured their wine, not as Solomon is said to have done his temple, with Bramah's patent lock, but with a trusty sentinel of Milesian origin, who introduced whisky into the court of the Pharaohs, according to Vallancy in his history of Irish civilisation. The Customs keep ours for us. Commend us to Pitt, who, though not a jester nor a wit, did honour to the elixir of life. Let it be poured over his ashes with an "Ave! vale!" What else could have enabled him "to speak off a king's speech ?" as Windham said he could have done-what but his libations with his friend Lord Melville. To this the different state of eloquence in the House of Commons in his time and our own is mainly owing. Wine cherishes eloquence in politics as well as in divinity. In proof of the latter observation, a great clerical authority asserts that "it maketh sermons to abound for edification;" gives "visions of poetic zeal." Lord Aberdeen may be assured that no purple clusters will rise to grace his tomb, unless he thinks of moving a little faster upon this matter. While the Russian bear hungers for the flesh-pots of Constantinople to accompany his rye-meal and water, his sour quass, the Porte may become more cordial in its alliance with France. Sultan Mustapha told Cromwell's ambassador that if he ever changed his religion he should turn Catholic, "ause there was no good wine in any Protestant country." Who can belie., judging from the wisdom of his ancestorthat most convincing species of evidence-that his present Turkish Sublimity will prefer gin and whisky to Burgundy, Champagne, and claret? Why, then, are we denied the use of good wine? The adulteration of our port wine has just been sanctioned by the Treasury. Gerupiga is permitted to be introduced into wine in the docks in certain proportions. Verily we retrograde. Shame to the land of our fathers. Why are we denied cheap wine? The enormous duty of six hundred Sept.-VOL. XCIX. NO. CCCXCIII. B per cent. is a denial-a prohibition to nine-tenths of the people of England, and prevents an access of revenue to the Exchequer. All other nations enjoy wine at a reasonable cost. "The public do not agitate about it." How should it do so, when the mass of the people know no more about wine than the public did of tea in the reign of King John, when wine was three-halfpence per quart? Adam did not trouble himself about his own character in Paradise Lost. We stand in need of something to stimulate us in conversation. What are modern dinings-out compared to the old conversational times of Johnson, Reynolds, and Burke? All dinner-parties now are lifeless things" weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." A tolerable allowance of wine is swallowed with dinner at wealthy tables-wasted; but there is no more conversational wit, none of the seasoning of the past time. We are a dull people now, mere money-grubbers; what has wit, hilarity, good fellowship to do with such? Hence the need of cheap good wine in place of stomach-burning brandy-wine and spirits. We do not want heaviness over the eyebrows, but liveliness to counteract our cares. The Wine was once accessible to all here, as it has been to other nations in all times. We find corn, wine, and oil, terms used to designate fertility in the first ages of the world. From the deluge-from the Egyptian captivity of the Israelites to the reign of the wisest of men, we find mention of it. Sculptures of the expression of the juice of the grape may yet be seen upon the walls of the great temple of Karnac in the Thebaid, emblematic, it is probable, of the wine of Meröe, which has caused disputes in relation to the wine-wisdom of antiquity among learned pundits; some denying the existence of any wine in that climate where it was known twenty centuries before the Christian era. young captive Joseph, interpreting the dream of the chief butler of Pharaoh, represents him as squeezing the juice of the grapes into the goblet of his royal master, the representation still to be seen on the temple of Karnac thus corresponding in a singular manner with the custom described by the sacred historian. These delineations can only be understood as emblematic of wine. The must of the grape taken in that climate, sweet, cloying, and warm, could hardly be intended. To make wine that will keep well, fermentation is necessary, and that this process was known in the early ages, is evident from the account of Noah's inebriety. The institutes of Moses, and the customs of contemporary nations, show that wine was common to them all, and was considered one of Heaven's choicest gifts. Sacred and profane writers laud it alike. Amphora have been recently discovered by Layard in the mounds time has accumulated over the ruined palaces of the luxurious Sardanapalus, after twenty-seven centuries of inhumation. The excavations amidst the indurated lava of Vesuvius afford similar evidence of the abundance and care bestowed upon that which "makes glad the heart of man." Pure wine has a very distinctive character, through its effect on the animal economy; but in this country the unadulterated juice of the grape is met with only at the tables of the fashionable and opulent. The wines introduced early into England were of a less artificial character than in later times. France, Spain, and the Levant, were formerly all laid under contribution by British merchants. It appears that as far back as the reign of Richard III., the wine called Chalybonion, or Chalibon, grown near Damascus, was imported to England from Tyre in Venetian ships; each cask of wine accompanied with ten yews for making bows. This wine was the Helbon of the prophet Ezekiel, sold at the fairs in Tyre. There is no denying that wines were once made in the southern counties of England in considerable quantities, previous to and subsequent to the Norman conquest, and even down to the fifteenth century. Bede alludes to them in plain terms, and they are alluded to in the laws of Alfred. Edgar is stated to have made a present of a vineyard and vinedressers; and there are rude but unmistakable representations of vineyards and vine-dressers in the British Museum of the Saxon date. In Westminster, "Holeborne," and other parts of Middlesex, and in nine counties south of Cambridgeshire, north of which last county vines would not give fruit fit for wine, there are traces of vineyards. Gloucestershire was noted for the excellence of its vinous productions. "Vineyards" occur thirty-six times in Doomsday Book, and the tithes of Lincombe vineyards, near Bath, have been long upon record. We are not among those who discredit this evidence on account of the present character of the climate of these islands. Wine is now made on the Rhine north of 51 deg. of latitude. There has been a change of temperature; cold east winds now prevail to the midsummer-day of the olden time. M. Arago, of the French Institute, says that in the sixteenth century the muscadine grape, which requires the warm sun of the south, ripened well at Macon, in the department of the Seine and Loirea circumstance now thought impossible. The vineyards of Etampes and Beauvais once grew good wine; all they make now is meagre and miserable. Our fathers were men of good taste; they introduced fifty-six French, and no less than thirty kinds of Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Island wines, and in large quantities too. Elizabeth's court and symposiacs, where the cup went round in the debate, made men merry and wise together. Once there came into England, Gascony, Osey, Clarry, Romania, Bastardo, Malvasia, Lepe, Vernage, Malmsey, Cyprus, Candian, and many other wines, whose names are quite a catalogue. Sometimes they were perfumed, at others aromatic herbs and spices were infused into them, when they were called "piment," or made" hippocras" of, as the writers of those times inform us. The quantity of wine consumed formerly in England was very large. The Archbishop of York, in the reign of Edward II., dispensed a hundred tuns of two hundred and fifty gallons each on his enthronement. His predecessor in the see consumed eighty tuns of claret annually in his household-an expenditure that would stagger a very wealthy man of the nineteenth century. Whether wine or ale, the Church always patronised them. Our total-abstinence supporters must read this portion of the history of vinology with due respect. Our old divines found they marvellously improved their spiritual functions by wine. From Walter de Mapes to Sidney Smith, its virtues have found a much more unanimous support than points of doctrine. Who could doubt the orthodoxy of such pillars of the Church as showed by experience the value of wine, or of ale by the less presuming clergy, contented with the home-made beverage, but sensible of the inspiration from both: Then take up this tankard of rough massy plate, And makes the poor curate as proud as the primate. There was a cordiality about those old square-toes looked for now in vain. The Methuen treaty of 1703, admitting port wine at one-third of the duty of most other kinds, drove away variety, and forced a taste for wine of a secondary class increasingly adulterated down to the wise abrogation of the differential duties. We have a hatred for all tyrants which no language we know has words sufficiently vituperative to delineate, but of all tyrants, from Nero to the King of Ashantee, we detest most our Henry VIII., the relentless butcherer of female loveliness, the heartless apostate in faith, who favoured the Reformation he had first opposed, because it occurred to him that he could plunder the existing hospitals, charities, and religious establishments of their wealth, and put it into his own purse, under the plea of supporting what the march of intellect would soon have done without his violence. If one gleam of sunshine breaks through the gloom of that monarch's character in our view, it was his bringing into notice a good wine-rather a selfish virtue to be sure, but we fully believe the only one he possessed. He procured a vineyard at Ay for himself, or in conjunction with Francis I. of France. Henry was not alone in his taste, if he led the fashion: Charles V. of Spain, and the Pope, whom Henry set at defiance, were all unanimous upon this cardinal point of doctrine, that Champagne was an unrivalled wine, and they too kept vineyards. Posterity has confirmed the sentence, with the understanding that the wine be always used in the present tense." Thus did "honey come out of the mouth of the lion"-no, that is a noble beast-out of the mouth of the ravenous wolf. This wine the differential duties excluded from all but persons of wealth, until those duties were equalised. For this alone, Paul Methuen deserved to be drowned in his own Portugal black strap! Who can state the amount of human enjoyment he thus abstracted? When our army was in France at the conclusion of the last war, Champagne was drunk before dinner, with dinner, and after dinner. It was so highly estimated, as we witnessed ourselves, that in a large city only one bottle, by accident, was obtainable-the English officers, they told us, had drank all the rest. We even suspect, from what we heard, that some of them were ready, when they could take no more, to cry out with the young sailor in the same plight, "Pour it over me.' 66 A flourishing epoch in our commerce in wine with France took place under Charles II., soon after the restoration. The trade was wisely encouraged by the court, which saw its manifold advantages. Merchandise of all sorts, as well as wines, came in extensively, particularly from France. But the landed interest of that time became jealous of the mercantile, and too obtuse to perceive how much trade contributes to enhance the value of estates, by the most legitimate of all means. Accordingly, the adverse spirit, so well pointed out in its effects upon trade by the late Sir Henry Parnell, was then omnipotent. Anxious for itself, in the first place, it sounded the tocsin of ruin to the agriculturists. It was the custom then, |