'Who delve 'mid nooks and sinuosities, For literary curiosities.'
'Wine and Walnuts' was a good title for a gossipping book; 'Claret and Olives' is a better. It has a more decided flavour, a more elegant bouquet, a more gem-like colour. The other might refer to any denomination of that multitudinous stuff the English drink under the name of wine; or, if it has individuality at all, it relishes curiously of the coarse and heavy produce of Portugal, so beloved of Dr Johnson, and many other grave doctors, down to the last generation. This breathes all over of the sweet South; it babbles of green fields; it is full of gaiety and frolic, of song and laughter, and the sparkle of wit and crystal. The title, we say, is a good title; and the book has an unmistakable claret flavour--the best English claret, that is to say--which unites the strength of Burgundy with the bouquet of Château Margaux. Mr Reach despises a weak thin wine, and, by an idiosyncratical necessity, he has produced a sparkling, racy book. He traces the falling-off in our literature to a change in wine. 'The Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn,"' quoth he; 'and we had the giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret. Port came into fashion--port sapped our brains--and, instead of Wycherly's _Country Wife_, and Vanbrugh's _Relapse_, we had Mr Morton's _Wild Oats_, and Mr Cherry's _Soldier's Daughter_. It is really much to the credit of Scotland, that she stood stanchly by her old ally, France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little slice of the worst part of Spain--Portugal, or her brandified potations. In the old Scotch houses, a cask of claret stood in the cellar, on the tap. In the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter _tappit hen_, holding some three quarts, "reamed," _Anglicé_, mantled, with claret just drawn from the cask. At length, in an evil hour, Scotland fell--
"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood, Firm was his mutton, and his claret good; 'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried; He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"
This will look like treason to a good many of our readers; but we beg them to reflect, that in preferring claret to port, Mr Reach is, after all, an advocate of temperance; and they may therefore hope, that by degrees his potations will become thinner and thinner, till they at last come down--like Mike Lambourne's intentions--to water, 'nothing save fair water.' Our belief, indeed, is, that the excessive duty placed on French wines is a main cause of intemperance in its modern forms; for the dearth of the article drives people to spirits, and other intoxicating agents. Let the light claret (_vin ordinaire_) of France become a cheap and accessible drink, and we say advisedly that there would soon be a marked improvement in the matter of general sobriety.