Shakspeare and Wines. 263 That oft quoted, but usually misinterpreted allusion of Hamlet, in the phrase "to the manner born," opens a vista in the history of customs, as seductive as they are oppressive and ruinous. Horatio is from the South; from Italy, whose effeminacy, as opposed to conviviality, was noted in the days alike of Horace, and a thousand years before him, in the days of the Trojan Eneas, and as it now is marked. Hamlet, on the other hand, is of the old German race; among whom marriage infidelity, as Tacitus pictures, was almost unknown, while intoxication, the most beastly, prevailed. Down to the times of Shakspeare and of his Danish hero, the habits of the two regions, as in the Italy and the Germany of to-day, showed the same characteristic contrast. When Horatio is roused by the midnight noise of drunken revelers, coming from the palace of the newly-installed king, and is told by Hamlet of the "swaggering upstart" draining his "draughts of Rhenish wine," and when, with wonder, this novel scene of brutal drunkenness prompts from Horatio the inquiry, "Is it custom?" Hamlet's reply shows, not his own, but the poet's recognition of the law of wines. Says Hamlet in response: "Ay, marry, is't: But to my mind, though I am native here, And to the manner born, it is a custom More honored in the breach than the observance ; Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. From our achievements, though performed at height, If that German habit of drinking, from the days of Tacitus to Shakspeare, made other nations call them drunkards and swinish, and one "to the manner born" had to confess that it took from their "achievements the pith and marrow of their attribute "--an attribute so worthy, in many an age, and worthiest now— it should not surprise the scholarly Germans, that the same ineradicable impression as to the unnatural in many of their modern æsthetic and literary achievements, still lives in the breasts of other nations. High art in ideal poetry, as in sculpture and painting, pictures ever the true law of wines. Here the line of distinction between men who have united genius and constant virtue, and their opposites, is specially instructive. The former always teach the lesson of abstinence. Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, are constant in their utterances like these: "Bacchus that first from out the purple grape Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine." If thou hast no name to be called by, "In the flowers that wreath the sparkling bowl, "They fancy that they feel Divinity within them breeding wings." 265 The fact that Milton, like Shakspeare, notes that one class of the tempted fall a prey to one, and another to the other of the two "youthful lusts," prepares the thoughtful student to estimate rightly the utterances of inconstant genius. In his "Samson Agonistes," Milton draws out at length, in the colloquy between the fallen hero and his parents, his confession, that though temptation to licentiousness has led him into sin, and brought its penalty, he could repress "desire of wine," "Which many a famous warrior overturns." Coming then to the apparent contradiction found in men like Horace and Byron, we find that same poet of the sensual and voluptuous, in company with the abstemious and even dys peptic Virgil at the banquet table of Mecænas and Augustus. We find more: that his seductive pictures of pleasure in the wine-cup, are not the serious, deep and real convictions of the man when he is himself. They have but half read Byron, who only revel in his "Don Juan"; when intoxicated the poet is not himself. Byron's sublime genius, the poem that will outlive his age, is "Childe Harold." There he is himself, and not another, and a deluded man. There, his reason and his conscience—the man, speaks; not the beastly "law in the members," which always, as in Paul, "wars against the mind.” Let any young man who thinks Byron was great, or Burns, or Moore, because they drank intoxicating wine, turn and witness the hours in the lives of these very men, when, like the youth, in Jesus' parable, it could be said "he came to himself." Read all such men wrote, or none ! "Drink deep" at the fount of their thought, or "touch not the Pierian spring!" No men ever taught the law of wines as have men like these. Their "mourning at the last," is like that of the French popular leader, Mirabeau; who, but for the weakening of his physical and mental power by his early drinking habit, might have ruled France by his intellect, in place of Napoleon with his sword. Modern Artists and Wines. 267 MODERN ARTISTS AND WINES. The true idea of art, as applied to science, brings within its field that class of men of high endeavor, who, in every department, seek to make the discoveries of men of science minister to human utility, or to cultivate the love of beauty. Higher artists, like poets, lead men of science, as well as follow them. Even the men of superior mechanical genius, inventors in the useful arts, have been noted for quick observation of the law of intoxicating drinks, and for their resoluteness in fixing their own laws of fashion as to their use. Especially exposed to temptation by the proffer of the luxuries which success invites, it would be strange if some did not fall. No class of men, however, more quickly recognize the law of their own easily excited constitution; no men are more humiliated when self-conviction yields to the insidious suggestion of meretricious fashion; and no men, in the main, are more intelligently abstinent from all intoxicants, even from light wines. The men of higher art, in its various departments, are next in their witness as to the law of wines. The aspirants for fame as athletes, who school themselves to attain superior strength and elasticity of muscle, have always |