BACCHANALIA MEMORABILIA. BY NIMROD. DRINKING EXPERIENCES. As the general influence of wine, on what is called society, will be treated of hereafter, I shall, for the present, confine my remarks to my own individual case. The pleasure imparted by wine to me is great, but very shortlived: it appears to mount, as it were, to a crisis; after which it somewhat rapidly declines. In fact, it does not enliven me beyond a certain pitch. It then ceases its charms; doubtless, because my stomach, the centre of all sympathy, feels oppressed by it. I grow dull, my head aches, I am inclined for sleep, and wish for bed. But it does not rob me of self-possession, nor incline me to wrangle or quarrel. On the contrary, it excites my love, not my hatred, and greatly expands my heart. I have granted many a favour, and promised many more, by the inspiration of the jolly god. I have shaken hands with, sworn eternal friendship for, many a man, and made love to many a woman, for whom, vulgarly speaking, I cared not a rush. In short, I have a hundred times made a fool of myself by talking, boasting-not lying, for I have ever held that low vice in abhorrence-and occasionally laid wagers, and matched horses, without a chance of winning. But, as I have already stated, I never was so overcome by wine as not to know where I was, and what I said. In fact, it never had the power to make me forget that I was born a gentleman; and I am happy in the reflection, that I have travelled thus far through life without having been once called upon to make an apology for an insult given, either when drunk or sober; nor to demand but two, and those were the result of excess in wine. One was tendered to me on the first dawn of returning reason; the other, I am sorry to say, at the pistol's mouth. But the events I am alluding to occurred many years back, when, as a well known sporting old earl of the last century said of himself, the devil was very strong in me.* Yet I would not answer for myself under the influence of a large dose of ardent spirits. With the exception of the feat at Cheltenham with the bowl of punch, already described, I never was drunk, from drinking spirits, more than twice, which was with very strong brandy and water. Now he that praises drunkenness is a sot convicted on his own evidence; but were I to drink for what is called drinking sake—that is, to acquire an artificial state of pleasurable excitement-brandy should be the liquor I would fly to to secure it. The divine luxuries of opium" I never yet tasted; but the powers of wine upon me are, comparatively with brandy, truly insignificant. At the period I am alluding to, it not only appeared to afford me a sure panacea for all evils, past, present, and to come, but to open unlimited prospects of future bliss. I felt as if I were possessed of more than human powers, and that there was nothing I willed I could not do. In short, it eventually made me mad; and, on each occasion, I nearly lost my life, together with my senses. On the one, I attempted to go to sea, by moonlight, in a small open boat, without either rudder or sail, and in the current of a strong tide running out of a Welsh bay; on the other, although more than two hundred miles distant from it, I got upon a coach-box to go to London, in my evening dress; and did "go," till I tumbled off it into the road. To the latter excursion I was no doubt indebted to my early propensity to driving coaches; but having at no time of my life had a fancy for the sea, I All the world knows, that the old sporting peer I allude to was a very gay man in his younger days, and that his worldly propensities did not forsake him in his old ones. Being late in life in the society of a certain dignitary of the church, whom he had not met since they were brother collegians at Oxford, he commenced reminding him of some of the frolics in which they had both been engaged at that juvenile period. The bishop-for such he was-wished to forget them; but the earl was determined to refresh his memory. "Too true, I fear," said the bishop; " and all I can say in excuse is, the devil was strong in us in those days." "He was," said the earl; owed my intended aquatic trip to a member of the yacht club, who was my partner in the debauch. Death, says Johnson, is more than usually unwelcome to a rich man; and as my friend is possessed of ten thousand a-year, he was by no means a fit subject to be mangled by Welsh crabs. Had we, however, accomplished our purpose in unmooring the boat, we should never have been heard of in this world any more. The day would have come upon us both "unawares." To return to wine. The effect of wine is generally supposed to invigorate the understanding, and to stimulate the mental powers-of poets, especially. Thus Horace asks Bacchus whither he is about to transport him? But, by the words "tui plenum," I think he must have meant full, not of his wine, but of his divinity, without the aid of which he felt himself unequal to pen a panegyric upon Octavius. Now, were I to say that it is in the power of wine to sink me below mortality in other words, to make a brute of me - I should certainly go beyond my tether; but I can safely assert that, if I were a poet, so far from realising Horace's expectations of it, it would lead me down, not up, the hill. In fact, when under its immediate influence--I do not mean drunk, but " pretty considerably sprung," as the term is I can scarcely indite a common letter. It appears to stultify my ordinary capacities. I must, however, admit that, on the first waking after a plentiful allowance of good wine, some bright thoughts have come across my mind, and, when not lost by an intervening nap, have been found worthy of being noted down, and now and then made serviceable. It would indeed be an act of ingratitude to the jolly god, were I to omit the fact, that I once did rise from my bed, at four o'clock in the morning, after having sacrificed largely the overnight, and wrote the best thing I did write; at least, so said a certain learned sergeant, who now wears a silk gown, and who told me he would have given five hundred pounds to have been the author of it. But it never saw the light. It was a satire; and "Nulla venenato litera mixta joco est," has ever been, and shall ever continue to be, my motto. I wish not to dip ever [June, theses, which applies well here. I was in a retired part of England, when I was once spending a few days with a friend, suddenly called upon to write an article for which the press waited. Pen and ink being provided for me in a snug little boudoir, I was progressing as fast as my subject would allow me. After a very limited time, however, I began to be interrupted by a peep in at the door, accompanied by the question, "Have you done?"-then it was, you not done yet?"—and at length it "Have you not done?"-then, "Have was, "What a d-d slow fellow you are with your pen; I am sure I could have written what you have had to write in half this time." Well, all this but it ended in my making mine host was amusing, though not very edifying; believe he could do what he boasted of, and in my obtaining from him a promise that he would write an article for the forthcoming number of the old Sporting Magazine. The following day, being a hunting But who or what is this said Bacchus as the author of plenty; and Ovid invokes even a look from him as a blessing, and sacrificed to him annually in the month of March. With both Greek and Roman poets, indeed, the crown of ivy was more in favour than the wreath of laurel. Yet how variously are the attributes of this (ideal) personage handed down to us! There is generally something naughty attached to his character; and the description of his orgies are by far the most voluptuous of ancient poetry. Look into one page of his history, and we find him a drunken sot, a bloated imbecile turn over another leaf, and he appears a fine-looking youth, a brave soldier, not a drunkard, and the sole inventor of the chief means of human existence. But the truth is, no real Bacchus has ever existed. He was only, as Horace means to signify, a mask, or figure of some concealed truth,- perhaps the improvement of the earth by tillage, or the culture of the vine plant, which he is fabulously said to have introduced into the world. To return to myself-which, as I have undertaken to treat this subject illustratively, I am now and then compelled to do. I have found wine, taken to excess for only a few days, to depress the mind more than the body; that is to say, when, as a friend of mine expresses himself, "the animus is flown ;" and I once heard this natural effect of over-mental excitement admirably illustrated by a very illiterate road-coachman of the old school. "Was Jem drunk when he upset his coach the other night?" was a question I put to one of this fraternity some years back, when drinking to excess with them was the order of both day and night. "Why, sir," he replied, "he warn't drunk, nor he warn't sober; the liquor was a-dying in him, and he was stupid." Now, this strongly resembles my own case. Had I to write for a prize, and that prize were immortality, I would not depend much upon the assistance of Bacchus. I would rather rely on my own natural powers, gently stimulated by wine when they flagged. In all ages of the world, however, clever men, and poets especially, have been more or less addicted to drinking to excess. The austere Cato, the voluptuous Cæsar, were each given to what Seneca calls the intemperantia bibendi notwithstanding which, ac cording to Seneca, the wisdom of the former received no blemish from this cause. His daughter, indeed, admitted that it softened the rigour of her father's virtues. Titus, the delight of human kind, sat late after his dinner: his brother, Domitian, the tyrant and fly-tormentor, never later than the setting sun. The influence of wine upon poets has long since been proverbial. Poetry, in fact, has been called the wine of the mind; and wine, like love, makes poets. The old Greeks drank and sang; and Anacreon would not have been Anacreon, but for the inspiring juice of the grape, as he himself tells us in his celebrated hymn to the full-blown rose "Crown me, and instant, god of wine, Strains from my lyre shall reach thy shrine." Indeed, the first prize contended for by poets was a cask of wine; and the Bacchic hymn was called "The Hymn of the Cask." Horace, in fact, pronounces a water-drinking poet to be little worth even the springs of Castalia will not avail; but after his bottle of Falernian, he boldly asserts, in his ode to Bacchus, in which he wishes to soap Cæsar, that no daring was then too great for his muse. Both Homer and Horace must have liked wine, and experienced on occasions its good effects, or they would not have been the authors of such glowing panegyrics upon it. It is true the latter is moral in the midst of his gaiety, uniting the wisdom of the philosopher with the playfulness of the poet; still, and notwithstanding he preaches up moderation in desires, as the chief source of human happiness, he must have been secretly attached to the Epicurean school, in our acceptation of that term. We may, I think, glean this from various passages of his several works, and especially from the compliment he pays Tibullus on the knowledge he displays of the savoir vivre (“artemque fruendi”) at his own house and table. Again, although in his ode to Apollo he wishes us to believe he did not like it, the one to his Cask is an incentive to drinking. In another to Telephus, he himself gets "as drunk as a lord;" and had a pretty good housing match on his escape from the tree, as well as at his party on Cæsar's birth-day. Then how does he promise to welcome Marenas when ha him? To take a hundred bumpers with him for friendship sake! Neither is this all. Notwithstanding his telling his friend and patron that his wine was not such as he ought to drink, it is evident he did not "think small beer of it" himself. He notes its age, seals the casks with his own hands, and taps a fresh one on any very memorable occasion. In short, but for a bodily infirmity to which he was subject, there is little doubt but he would have been one of the jolly dogs of his own day. At all events, as has been elegantly said of him, "he tuned his harp to pleasure, and to the easy temper of his own soul." How happens it, it may be asked, that not a single Grecian has ascended Parnassus for so many ages back, and that the vocal hills of Arcadia no longer resound to the Doric reed? There are, we know, several reasons given for this, such as a despotic government, alteration in the language, &c. &c.; but the most powerful cause of the literary degeneracy of this once justly celebrated people is, doubtless, in the substitution of the enervating luxuries of coffee, tobacco, and opium, for the invigorating powers of good wine. It was not so in Anacreon's days. Let us now turn to the eminently gifted men of our own times—at least, of my time; although, perhaps, it would be better first to look still further back. Sir Richard Steele spent half his time in a tavern. In fact, he may be said to have measured time by the bottle; as on being sent for by his wife, he returned for answer that "he would be with her in half a bottle." The like may be said of that great genius, Savage; and Addison was as dull as an alderman till he was three parts drunk. Neither would he stop at that point. It is on record of him that he once drank till he vomited in the company of Voltaire; which called forth the cutting remark, that the only good thing that came out of his mouth, in his (Voltaire's) presence, was the wine that had gone into it. It is also recorded of Pitt, but I cannot vouch for the truth of it, that two bottles of port wine per diem was his usual allowance, and that it was to potens Bacchus he was indebted for the almost superhuman labour he went through during also in his way, went the pace with him over the mahogany; and the joke about the Speaker in his chair, after they had dined together, cannot be forgotten. Pitt could see no Speaker; but his friend, like Horace with the candle, saw two. Sheridan, latterly, without wine, was a driveller. He sacrificed to it talents such as no man I ever heard or read of possessed, for no subject appeared to be beyond his reach. I knew him when I was a boy, and thought him then something more than human. The learned Porson would get drunk in a pothouse-so would Robert Burns, the poet; and Byron drank brandy and water by bucketsful. Fox was a thirsty soul, and drank far too much wine for either a politician or a play-man; yet, like Nestor over the bowl, he was always great. But a contemporary of his, likewise a great play-man and a clever fellow, outheroded Herod. He estimated his losses in hogsheads of claret; and it was humorously said of John Taylor -for such was his name-that, after a certain hour of the night, "he could not be removed without a permit, as he had more than a dozen of claret on board." Two of the finest actors that ever graced the British stage could scarcely be kept sober enough to perform their parts: but enough of this. Wine taken in excess is the bane of talent. Like fire upon incense, it may cause rich fumes to escape; but the dregs and refuse, when the sacrifice is ended, are little worth. By a long continuance, indeed, in any vicious indulgence, the mind, like the body, is reduced to a state of atrophy; and knowledge, like food, passes through it without adding to its strength. repeated vinous intoxication soonest unfits a man for either mental or bodily exertion. Equally with the effect of violent love, so powerfully set forth by the poet Lucretius, it creates an indolence and listlessness which damps all noble pursuits, as well as a neglect of all useful affairs But |