There may be a divinity in the grape which excuses
excess, but if so, one would expect it to be there even before
the grape had been trodden on by somebody else. Yet no poet ever
hymned the man who tucked into the dessert, or told him that he
was by way of becoming a jolly good fellow. He is only by way of
becoming a pig.
"It is the true, the blushful Hippocrene." To tell oneself this
is to pardon everything. However unpleasant a drunken man may
seem at first sight, as soon as one realizes that he has merely
been putting away a blushful Hippocrene, one ceases to be angry
with him. If Keats or somebody had said of a piece of underdone
mutton, "It is the true, the blushful Canterbury," indigestion
would carry a more romantic air, and at the third helping one
could claim to be a bit of a devil. "The beaded bubbles winking
at the brim"--this might also have been sung of a tapioca-
pudding, in which case a couple of tapioca- puddings would
certainly qualify the recipient as one of the boys. If only the
poets had praised over-eating rather than over-drinking, how much
pleasanter the streets would be on festival nights!
I suppose that I have already said enough to have written myself
down a Temperance Fanatic, a Thin-Blooded Cocoa-Drinker, and a
number of other things equally contemptible; which is all very
embarrassing to a man who is composing at the moment on port, and
who gets entangled in the skin of cocoa whenever he tries to
approach it.
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