University of Virginia Library

THE LETTER.

My dear Editor:—I have been much amused in learning
through the press, as well as from the more sprightly narrative
of your private letter, that such and so very odd claims
and conjectures had been made as to the authorship of
my late hasty letter to you, in proof that the poets and
gentlemen of old Greece and Rome drank as good
champagne as we do. You know very well that the
letter which you published was not originally meant for
the public, and the public have no right at all to inquire
who the author may be; nor, indeed, has the said impertinent
public to inquire into the authorship of any
anonymous article which harms nobody, nor means to do
so. I have not sought concealment in this matter, nor
do I wish notoriety. If any one desires the credit of
the communication, such as it is, he or she is quite welcome
to it until I find leisure to prepare for the press a
collection of my Literary Miscellanies under my own
name. I intend to embody in it an enlarged edition of
this essay on the antiquity of champagne mousseux, with
a regular chain of Greek and Latin authorities defending
and proving all my positions.

To this future collection of my critical and philological
writings I look forward with a just pride as a fit gift

to the few in our country who occupy their leisure, not
with light and trifling literature, but on grave and solid
studies (like the investigation of the Champagne question),
and with the culture of high and recondite learning;
or, as this thought is admirably expressed by Petrarch,
in one of his epistles, announcing to a learned friend the
completion of one of his Latin prose works, in a passage
which I have selected for the motto of my own
Collectanea: “Munus hocce prebeo, non iis qui levibus
et ludicris nugis assueti sunt, sed lis quibus cordi est,
gravis et severus bonarum literarum et doctrinæ reconditæ
cultus.”

You tell me that you have every day personal inquiries
or written communications to the Wine Press, desiring
information as to the meaning of the word Oxyporian,
which I used as characterizing the effects of certain
wines. It seems that the word is in neither of the rival
American dictionaries, nor in any English one in present
use. Of this I was not aware, but if it is not in their
dictionaries, so much the worse for the learned lexicographers.
It ought to have been there; they have
no excuse for omitting it. On the other hand, you and
I deserve all such honor as the literary and scientific
public can bestow, for restoring the word Oxyporian to
the present generation. It is a good word, and one—as
Corporal Bardolph phrases it—“of exceeding good command.”
But I shall not imitate the gallant corporal in
his style of definition and explanation: “Accommodated!

that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or
when a man is—being—whereby—he may be thought to
be accommodated, which is an excellent thing.” That is
not my fashion. This word Oxyporian is of great
antiquity and high descent. It was first used by Hippocrates,
and from his medical use passed to that of the
philosophers, thence into the Latin, and thence to the
old English medical and philosophical writers down to
Sydenham, since whose day it has not been used for near
two centuries. It is from the Greek ΟΕυπριοξ and means
simply that which is of speedy operation and as quick in
passing off—first used as a substantive name of such a
medicine, then as an adjective with a broader sense. I am
sorry that it has gone out of fashion, for no other word
can supply its place, either for scientific or literary use.
The philosophy of the word, especially as applied to
wines, is nowhere better illustrated than by one of the
old lost poets in a fragment preserved by my favorite
Athenæus. The Athenian dramatist, Philyllius thus
describes the Oxyporian character and effects of certain
wines:

That last line cost me more labor than I have often
bestowed upon a whole lecture, and though it is hyper-catelectic
with redundant syllables, expressive enough, I
think of the metre and feeling of the original, it has not
done full justice to the crowded thought, the practical
philosophy of the gay and wise old heathen.

I never read Athenæus without renewed gratitude to
kind Professor Schweighauser, who first opened to me
that treasure-house of the remains of ancient bards,
“with whom (justly says a modern critic) perished so
much beauty as the world will never see again.” How
fortunate it was that the old Greek philosophical diner-out
was as much given to quotation as Montaigne, Jeremy
Taylor or myself. As for the learned French-German
or German-Frenchman, Schweighauser—the recollections
of my brief acquaintance with him rise in my mind
like “a steam of rich distilled perfumes,” fraught with
the memory of retined classical criticism, and the flavor
of the world-renowned culinary product of his own
beloved city of Strasbourg, the páté de foies gras.

But I must not forget to call your attention to the
very curious parallel between this fragment of an Athenian
dramatic author and Falstaff's eulogy on the virtues
of his favorite sherris-sack. “It hath a twofold operation
in it. It ascends me into the brain, drives me forth all
the foolish, dull and crudy vapors which overrun it,
makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble,
fiery and delectable shapes.” “The second property of

your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood, which
before cold and settled left the liver white and cold, but
the sherris-sack warms it”— Yet why need I quote
any more of what you and half your readers have by
heart. Now there is not the slightest ground for attributing
this resemblance of thought and expression to
imitation. No, (as I remarked in one of my lectures on
the resemblances to be traced between Shakspeare and
the Greek tragedies), the great ancients and this greater
modern coincide in thought because they alike draw their
thoughts from truth and nature and the depths of man's
heart. The comparison of the passage cited from Falstaff
and that of which I have above given my feeble
version, affords ample evidence of this. They agree
marvellously in describing the immediate operation of
the lighter Greek wines, resembling our best Bordeaux
and champagne, and that of Falstaff's more powerful
and grave sherry. In this they are equally true. But the
Greek goes on to insist on the Oxyporian worth of his
favorite wines in gladdening the whole man “with mirth
which after no repentance draws.” Not so the great
English poet. He, with a dietetic and physiological
philosophy as profound and as accurate as was his insight
into the affections and passions of man, passes over in
profound silence this point on which the Greek bard
dwells. This Shakspeare does, not from ignorance, but
to lead the reader to infer from Falstaff's own infirmities,
that such was not the after-operation of Falstaff's “inordinate
deal of sack”—that his drink was not Oxyporian
—that did not pass away “like the baseless fabric of
a vision” (and, to use the words of the great bard in a
sense which he might not immediately have intended, but
which was, nevertheless, present to his vast intellect:)
The fat knight experienced to the end of his days the
slow but sure operation of his profuse and potent beverages,
in results from which the judicious drinker of the
more delicate wines of modern France as well as of
ancient Ionia is and was wholly exempt.

But a truce to ideas of past ages. Let me come down
to our own day, and give you a practical example of the
use and value of this word Oxyporian, and the immense
benefit which we have conferred upon our own countrymen,
in having thus followed the precept of Horace* and

Horat, Epist. L. ii, c. 116.

so happily paraphrased and adapted to modern speech
by Pope:

Such a word was this same Oxyporian. Now mark
its application.

Suppose that by way of aiding and embellishing my
Thanksgiving family festivities, you present me with a
basket or two of sparkling native wine prepared according
to the recently improved method. Thereupon I
send you a brief certificate thus worded:

“I certify that I have tried (number of bottles left
blank) of improved sparkling Catawba on self, family
and friends, and find the same truly Oxyporian.”

These few words speak volumes—a whole encyclopedia
in that one word Exyporian. Even with my humble
name thereto subscribed, what an effect would this produce!
But if in addition you could prevail on our
mutual friend, Dr. Holmes, to concur with a similar
attestation, how that effect would be multiplied a hundred
fold! The professor, upon the exhibition of a
proper quantum of the last edition of our best brands,
would, doubtless, in the Mecbeth spirit of his late anniversary
discourse against chemicals and Galenicals,
certify to this effect:

“O. W. H.”

I shall be much mistaken if such certificates, thus
clear, strong, brief, inspiring public confidence and public
thirst, would not at once compel our native cultivators
to put hundreds of thousands of acres more into grape cultivation,

and oblige the sole agent in New York to hurry
A. T. Stewart higher up Broadway, leaving that marble
palace to be converted into an Oxyporian Hall for the
exclusive sale of Catawba and other Oxyporian liquids,
domestic and foreign.

The same experiments might with great propriety,
and, doubtless, with equal success, be repeated upon Dr.
Holmes and myself with the Dido brand of French
champagne when it arrives.

I have just said that I am determined not to enter at
present into verbal controversy on the accuracy of my
translations and citations on the great question of the
champagne of antiquity. I leave all that till my proposed
publication, which I trust will settle the question,
even against the authority of Eustathius and Gladstone
as to the word οἲνοπα, though the one was a Greek archbishop
eight hundred years ago, and the other is the
present Chancellor of the Exchequer of the British Empire,
and has just achieved the triumph of abolishing the
duties on champagne and other wines of France.

But I learn that two other arguments have been advanced
against my doctrine, both from distinguished
quarters, and both founded, not upon the authority of
scholiasts and lexicons, but upon the principles and reasoning
of the higher criticism.

The first of these is advanced by President King, of
your New York Columbia College. His objection to my
argument is briefly this: If either the Greeks or the

Romans had champagne, Horace must have taken his
share, and luxuriated in recounting its merits and glories.
As Horace makes not even a distant allusion to any wine
of this kind, no such can have been in use in his days.
I have a great respect for President King's judgment,
both in respect to champagne and to Horace; and his
argument is logical in form and plausible in reasoning.
Still this must have been an obiter dictum of his (as the
lawyers say), not a formal decision, such as he would
have given on full argument and examination of the
authorities. I think that I can convince the President of
the error of his argument; and considering the magnitude
of the question, and the responsibilities of his position,
I am confident that he has too much candor to persist in
his error after duly weighing my reasoning.

I object entirely to Horace's testimony—to his competence—if
he is offered as an expert in wine; but if he is
regarded as an ordinary witness to facts, then to the
credibility, weight, or value of his negative testimony.
This objection arises from no general disrespect to his
character or talent. I am far from agreeing with an
accomplished professor of your city, whom I might address
in the words of Horace,

as master alike of the tongue of Shakspeare and of that
of Schiller. I cannot agree with him in vilipending
Horace—to use a word of Charles Fox's, which I fancy
has not been used since his days. I was told lately, at a
literary party in Boston, by an eminent fellow-citizen of
yours, that this accomplished New York professor had
pronounced Horace to be “a mediocre old fogy.” So.
do not I.

As a keen-sighted observer and describer of men and
manners, full of shrewd good sense and worldly wisdom,
Horace has no rival; and the unanswerable proof of it
is that his thoughts and maxims, and even language, on
such topics, have been incorporated into the thoughts,
language, and best literature of all modern nations. In
pure poetry, his patriotic pride and ardent love of country
often raise him to the noblest strains of lyric declamation.
Above all, he has an unrivalled power of natural but condensed
expression, compressing whole pages of thought,
or of description of nature, of form or of manner, into
a short phrase or a brilliant word or two. On some
other points I nearly agree with your professor, who is as
polyglot in knowledge as he is in languages. Horace's
love-verses I hold very cheap. In these he is indeed
graceful, courtly, airy, elegant; but he has little passion
and no tenderness. If he ever approaches to any semblance
of either passion or affection, it is when he translates
or imitates the Greek, to which source late German
critics have traced not a few of his minor lyric beauties,
and made it probable that he owed more than can now
be clearly ascertained. The other line, in which I hold

him to be still more clumsy and out of his element, is that
which specially relates to our present purpose. It is that
which he often affects, and affects with little success, the
gaiety of the Bacchanalian songster. In nearly every
one of his convivial odes he is as far as possible from the
light gaiety or the broad jollity of such poets as Burns
or Béranger, and a dozen Scotch and Irish songsters of
far less name but of scareely less merit. In his desperate
attempts at jollity, his constant incentive to festivity—
which seems to mean, with him, nothing but hard drinking—is
the shortness of human life and the black prospect
of death, so that his festive odes may be condensed into
the thought of Captain Macheath, in the Beggar's Opera:

Much as in his “Moriture Delli,” etc., he is inferior
to the gay songsters of later times, he appears still worse
when any of his scenes of conviviality are compared
with those of Shakspeare, of Cervantes, or of Scott,
with the feasts of Falstaff, of Sancho, or of Friar Tuck.

If I compare Horace with these moderns, it is because
the contrast is more striking from our familiarity with
the latter. But the same thing might be shown to
scholars by placing him by the side of Plutus, or of the
remains of Greek comedy. The truth is, that Horace,
with all his love of company, his shrewd observation of
life, his keen perception of the ridiculous, was decidedly
a melancholy man. I do not believe that in his most

convivial hours, he ever rung out that hearty peal of
laughter for which Walter Scott was celebrated; not was
Horace, in those solitay rambles of his about the shops,
markets and by-places of Rome, which he so agreeably
relates, ever seen smiling and chuckling to himself, over
his own thick-coming pleasant fancies, like your Halleck,
when amusing himself in the same fashion in his frequent
visits to Boston or New York.

Yes, Horace was clearly as melancholy a man, when
by himself, as Lord Byron was, and for the same reason,
a stomach performing its functions badly, and stimulated
in the one case by Falernian, in the other by strong gin
and water.

Horace himself, unconsiously, shows us the philosophy
of all this, in the account which he gives here and there
of his own history. He had led a pretty hard, promiscuous
sort of a life in his early days of inglorious and
disastrous military rank. Afterward he got up in the
world, and became the holder of a comfortable office, of
more profit than honor; and then, by the favor of his
friends in power, became a well-to-do country gentleman.
Next we find him suffering the certain penalties of an
early debauched and chronically debilitated stomach.
He had weak eyes, and a deranged digestion, the first
being the natural result of the other malady. He at
times resorted to total abstinence and cold water, and
became a great critic in good water, in which last particular
he showed his usual practical good sense. He was

constantly running about, as he tells us, from the plain
fare of his Sabine farm to Rome, where he shared the
luxurious table of Mecænas. Thence he galloped off to
Baiæ, the Newport of that day; then from one mineral
spring to another; now dosing himself with chalybeate,
now with sulphur water. But all this water regimen is
interspersed with frolic after frolic in old Falernian. His
love of Falernian flashes the whole truth upon us. What
was this famed Falernian wine? It was, unquestionably,
a rich, high-flavored wine, but as unquestionably most
highly brandied, decidedly fortified with an enormous
proportion of alcohol, nearly bringing it up to the proof
of our most approved old cognac. The commentators
and compilers of antiquities do not let us into the secret
of this same famed Falernian. But I speak on the very
best authority. It is that of Pliny the naturalist.

In speaking of the strong Roman wines, he says of the
Falernian varieties, in a customary phrase of his, that
there is no wine of higher authority, “Nec ulli in vino
major auctoritas.” He then adds, that it was inflammable!
and the only wine that was so: “Solo vinorum
flamma accenditur.” “It is the only kind from which
flame can be kindled.” The ancients had no more precise
test than this one, that of burning with a flame, to
ascertain the proportion of alcohol in these liquors. They
had nothing similar to the various beautiful modes of
modern chemistry, to ascertain the alcoholic proportions
of wine as the eboulliscope of the French chemists, the

halymetric method used by Fuchs and Zieri, and the
ingenious aerometer of Tabaric, all which give such
elegant precision to the alcoholic tables, digested and
enlarged by our exact Dutch friend, Professor Mulder.
But Pliny's statement is enough to prove that the strength
of Falernian did not arise from “combined alcohol”
formed in the natural process of fermentation of the
grape juice, but from added “uncombined alcohol” (as
the chemists term it) produced by distillation. On this
very question, I cannot refrain from quoting the opinion
of Dr. Watson, of New York, in his most agreeable,
learned and instructive work on “The Medical Profession
in Ancient Times,” a volume which, if it had been published
in London, would have been reprinted in the
United States, and had a circulation of thousands. Dr.
Watson says thus: “I copy from the volume on my table
which I have just read with much gratification to myself,
and the highest respect for the author's science and
scholarship.” After quoting Pliny, he says, “modern
wines with only their natural supply of alcohols are not
of strength equal to this. It is therefore reasonable to
infer that the art of distillation must have been known
to the vintners of antiquity. If so, it must have been
confined to some fraternity and practised by them as one
of their secret mysteries, for the purpose of fortifying
their wines, and thus kept secret until alcohol was discovered
anew by the alchemists of the middle ages.”
Such was Falernian, differing only from our Cognac
brandy from having a full vinous body with a luscious
fruity flavor.

This exposition of the true character of Falernian at
once explains and is confirmed by the fact that Horace
often in his exhortations to the hardest drinking, speaks
of some rules of mixing water with the Falernian, which
no Greek or Roman author mentions as usual as to other
wines, excepting only certain Greek wines of a similar
potency.

All the above stated considerations prove to my satisfaction
(and I trust also to that of President King) that
Horace, with all his matchless merits, was exactly in the
state of certain of our mutual acquaintances, some of
whom, men of the prairie or of the plantation, alternate
between “total abstinence” and unquenchable thirst for
Bourbon and Monongahela; others, again, habitués of
city clubs and hotels, vibrate between soda or congress
water, and old Otard, or Geneva, more or less diluted
with water; generally less than more, and every day becoming
more and more less.

Now to the inference from this statement of facts:
Would you, Mr. President, or you, Mr. Editor, take the
opinion or the evidence of any such, of our acquaintance,
though we should receive it with all respect on any other
point, political, commercial, or financial—upon any
question touching champagne. You would not? Neither
do I accept Horace's testimony on the same subject.

I learn that I have to meet another argument, levelled

at my Homeric interpretation, of the word commonly
rendered “dark,” which I hold to mean “champagne-faced,”
or covered with foam like champagne. This is
from another dignitary of learning, not of your city,
whose high scholarship is everywhere admitted. He is
armed with the authority and clothed with the dignity of
Jupiter, yet I cannot say with the Italian chief,
No, even against Jupiter, I reply,
and I am thrice armed in the cause of truth and of
Homer.

As in respect to Horace, so in this Homeric question,
I defer for the present all mere verbal and lexicographical
disquisition. My future readers will have quite
enough of it in my forthcoming volumes. But I willingly
meet the great argument of my very learned and eminent
critic, as it claims to rest upon broad, historical and
critical grounds.

He boldly maintains that Homer could not have known
personally anything of champagne—even supposing that
there was anything resembling it in his day—that
throughout his two epies he never intimates in himself or
in his heroes any taste or connoisseurship in wine, though
he describes the drinking of a good deal of it, to which
he gives various indiseriminating epithets, as “pleasant,”

“sweet,” “divine,” “dark,” or “red.” Above all, it is
asserted that he betrays the grossest ignorance on its use
in making his venerable Nestor (who should have known
better) mix grated cheese with his old Pramnian wine.

Before entering on the wider field of discussion, I must
briefly refute this last wholly unsound objection. It is
easily and quickly done. Any reader who will carefully
read the whole of the eleventh book of the Iliad, either
in the original or in any tolerably faithful translation—
even in Pope's brilliant but commonly loose paraphrase—
will see at once that this preparation of old wine, thickened
with grated goat's milk cheese, and flour, which
Nestor took with his wounded friend after their escape
from battle, was clearly a medical prescription prepared
under the professional direction of Machaon, who was
surgeon-general of the Greek allied army, as well as
commanding colonel of his own and his brother's contingent.
Machaon had a flesh wound; Nestor, a very old
man, was prostrated by fatigue and fright.

The word used is χὺχεων, meaning a compound potion,
and Pope with far more precision than is usual with him,
renders it “the draught prescribed.” I cannot help
thinking that this happy version was suggested to the
poet by his scholarly medical friend Dr. Arbuthnot, to
whom he and Swift often expressed their warm acknowledgments
for services, medical, literary and social:

Dr. Holmes may very probably sneer at the prescribed
mixture, and I will not pretend to defend it, for that is
not in my line. But Machaon was a physician of great
eminence in his day, and seems to have anticipated the
doctrines of Brown or of Broussais, and to have been
inclined to a bold practice in stimulants. As a surgeon,
he stood at the very head of his profession. Besides,
this was his prescription for himself, as well as for his
friend, and when the physician thus shares with his patient
the risk or the benefit of his potion, even Dr.
Holmes, heretic in medical faith as he is, will allow that-the
patient may venture boldly to swallow whatever may
be ordered. I trust that Dr. Watson will discuss this
whole question in the next edition of his Medical Pro
fession in Ancient Times. In the meanwhile, enough
has been said to exonerate both Homer and the Pylian
sage from the charge of heathenish ignorance in regard
to wine.

Indeed as to Nestor, even if the poet's frequent testimonials
in the Iliad to his wisdom and vast knowledge
earned by old experience, are not enough to exempt him
from any suspicion of gross ignorance in respect to good
wine, he himself has given ample proof of his taste and
judgment in such matters in the Odyssey. When the
son of Ulysses, in that epic, visits Nestor at his home in
Pylos, he finds the aged chief presiding at a grand sacrifice
and banquet. Before Nestor knows who his guest is
he greets him kindly, and besides ordering for him and

his friend a choice portion of the feast, gives them a
goblet bumper of Malmsey Madeira.

Here I must pause and explain, to prevent the barking
of small critics. Homer calls the wine μελίεϑηϛ—“honey-sweet”—which
proves it to have been a luscious, sweet,
fruity wine; and all who are at all learned in the history
of grape enlture know that the Malmsey of Madeira is
the product of a vine in Madeira, originally imported
from the district of Malvasia, in the Peloponesus, which
lay within Nestor's own territory. From Malvasia came
the Spanish and Portuguese name of the wine, Malvasio;
thence the old French Malvoisie, and thence Malmsey.
Pardon this apparent pedantry; the digression is forced
upon me. Nestor gives his unknown guests, with all the
rest of the crowd, plenty of new, pleasant and sweet
Malmsey of his own growth; but afterward, when he
knew that the son of his old friend was his guest, he
gives him a more select entertainment with his family:

In that compound of my own manufacture, “Butler-dame,”
I have aimed at clearly defining the office confided
to confidential old ladies in well-regulated house-holds
in Greece, like Nestor's. Homer in his original
Greek expresses the office, here and in seven or eight
other places by the female substantive Ταμίη. The English

and French translators all omit or slur it over, as it
it was not genteel to have a female butler. The German
translators, on the contrary, honestly use the resources
of their noble language, as copious and flexible as the
Greek, in its compounds, but give a rather broader sense,
by die haus-hof meisterin. But I was not aware till
after I had made my translation that the best Dutch
translator, the illustrious Vondel, the Dryden of Holland,
had formed a word of his own precisely parallel to my
own, though more sonorous and musical, “de schenckster
vrouw. But I must restrain myself on these tempting
verbal digressions (as I have done in my classical quotations),
lest I should incur the Shakspearean sarcasm, he
“has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the
scraps.” Let us return to Nestor.

Nestor never dreamed of giving his guests wine-whey,
such as he had taken, according to prescription, nor does
he offer them any grated cheese to mix with their new
Malmsey, or their eleven years' old Pylian Particular.

Then, as to Homer's personal opportunities of becoming
practically familiar with the good wines of his times,
is it possible that my erndite critic imagines Homer to
have led a straggling beggar-like life, like an Italian
organ-grinder? The great bard has himself described
his own status and habitual life in the picture he gives of
the blind bard Domodoius, and the respect with which
he is received, and the luxury he shares in at the sumptuous
court of the good king Alconous. Like him, Homer

himself passed from the table of one king, prince,
potentate or laird to that of another, faring sumptuously
every day, and thus becoming as familiar with the qualities
of the several Chian, Lesbian, Thrasian, Pramnain and
Pylian vintages, as our acquaintance Thackeray did with
the old Madeiras of Boston, Salem, Richmond and
Charleston, or the choice Bourdeaux and Rbine wines of
recherche tables in New York. I might quote an hundred
scattered lines in the Iliad to prove this. But why dwell
upon minor points of evidence? “The greatest is behind.”
While Homer ascribes this good taste and
knowledge of good wine to his wisest old man, has he
not distinguished that hero, who is second only in rank
to Achilles, by his taste and judgment in the same line?
Do not the plot and the interest of the second great epic
depend mainly upon this characteristic of its hero, and
the just pride he feels in his good cellar?

Alas! I ask these questions as if the answer was
familiar to all who read Homer even in the translations
of Pope or Cowper. Alas! alas! I do not know that a
single critic, or annotator, has explained—any Greek instructor
or professor here or even in Germany has made
his students familiar with this great feature of Homer's
domestic epic, the Odyssey, and of its hero Ulysses.

Nevertheless, the filial piety of Virgil's Eneas—the
deep melancholy love of Tasso's Tancredi—the “noble
mind,” “the courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eye, tongue,
sword,” of the accomplished Hamlet are none of them

so essential a part of these several characters and of their
eventful stories, as are to the character and story of
Ulysses, his taste and skill in wine, his judgment and its
management and use, and the deep interest which he
manifests in his own fine and carefully selected stock.

In the very beginning of the Odyssey, before Ulysses
himself appears on the scene, the poet, to make his reader
acquainted with his hero's character, introduces him into
the wine-room of the long-absent chief. It is quite
worthy of remark that he is the only king or chief mentioned
in either great epic, except Nestor, who had a
regular, well-ordered wine-room, or cellar. These few
chiefs, I must remind my readers, are repeatedly designated
by the great poet, as the wisest of all the Greeks,
so adjudged by the common voice—Nestor, from his varied
experience and the collected wisdom he had gathered
during the few generations of men among whom he had
lived. Ulysses, from his own native sagacity. No other
Greeks compared with them either in general wisdom,
or in judgment in the choice or care of their wines.

Another proof of the true nature of this “wine,” as
Homer delicately calls it, is to be seen in the care with
which the good priest kept it out of the way of all his
servants, reserving it for the private drinking of himself
and wife, of course in all moderation.

By the way, this priest of Apollo seems to have been
a sort of prince-bishop, keeping a large establishment of
men and women servants. Yet he, too, like Newton and
Ulysses, put his choice liquors and stores under the care
of a butleress, or, as I have preferred to render it in a
more Homeric phrase, and in the spirit of the Greek
compound, a Butler-dame.

Achilles, for instance, was a model of gentlemanly
hospitality, carved beautifully, and gave his guests the
best wine that force or money could get; but he had no
stock of it, and did not know how to manage it, if he had
it. Not so the “much-contriving” Ulysses.

Before Ulysses enters upon the scene, his son, Telemachus
is described as preparing for a secret voyage in
search of his long-absent father, and this affords Homer
an opportunity to paint in anticipation, though indirectly,
the most striking peculiarities of his hero. His
cellar, or wine-room (for it appears to have been above
ground, though on the ground-floor), is superintended,
like that of Nestor, by an aged female butler. I am not
quite satisfied with any translator, and I render the lines
thus:

The good young man, who had been well brought up
by his mother, according to his father's precepts and
example, thus gave order touching the providing for his
ship:

I translate as literally as metre will permit, in honest,
“English verse, without rhyme” (as Milton phrases it),
in the hope of preserving these minutely graphic touches
of the great poet, who always narrates to the eye, and
in turn displays “la terribil via,” the grand and terrible
manner of Michael Angelo, or the grace, dignity and
expression of Raphael, and then rivals the most painstaking
Dutch or Flemish painter in his careful details of
the butchery, the barn-yard, the market, the kitchen or
the wine cellar.

I flatter myself that in spite of the obvious difficulty
of such passages, I have, in the above and my other
scraps of Homeric versions, succeeded in expressing some
exquisite details which Pope's rhymes have polished into
vague smoothness, and Cowper's more faithful, but too
uniformly Miltonic, blank verse has failed to render.

After this preliminary sketch of the “many planning”
Ulysses, we find him everywhere taking his wine like a
gentleman, never in any excess, but always with good
taste, whether at the table of the magnificent king of

Pharacia or at the humble fireside of the keeper of his
own hogs. He avoids the snares of Circe by refusing to
drink her brewed and drugged liquor. When he explored
the land of the Cyclops, he took with him a goatskin
of high proof brandy, given him by the priest of
Apollo, which he used only in case of accidents. I say
“BRANDY:” for though Homer calls it wine, that must
have been from delicacy toward the reverend gentleman,
for the poet expressly says that the worthy priest and his
wife were wont:

But Ulysses took none of this brandy himself, nor gave
it to his men, but when he got into a scrape with the
giant Cyclops, he dosed the huge cannibal with it quite
raw, which soon made him tipsy (or, as the original expresses
it with philosophical accuracy “came around his
brain,”) then puts him to sleep, when Ulysses puts out
his great single eye, and escapes.

When he reaches home incog., he learns with indignation
the suit of the petty chiefs of Ithaca to his supposed
widow, their wasteful depredations upon his goods and
chattels, especially his cattle and hogs, and their insults
to his only son; but he does not explode in full wrath till
he hears of the wasteful abuse of his wines—the οἴνον

διαΦυσσόμϵνον (as he says with the precision of a carefulwine
merchant), his good wine “drawn off.” This he denounces
as the “unkindest cut of all.” He successively
recounts his wrongs from the suitors of his wife:

Od. XVI.

I have not time nor space to note his other expressions
of wrath on the same topic.

It is, therefore, with admirable fitness that the poet
makes Ulysses defer the hour of his final vengeance till
he sees his palace filled with revelry, and the wine cup
crowned with his own best vintages, lifted high and passed
around by the insolent invaders of his home and his
honor. Then it is, when the londest and boldest of these
revellers lifts to his head a huge two-handled goblet of
choice Ithaca Reserve, that he who had long watched
these scenes in suppressed wrath, and in the guise and
garb of a beggar, now “throws off his patience and
his rags together,” rises from the mendicant into the
monarch, and from his mighty bow showers around winged
arrowy vengeance upon the wretches who had essayed to
win the affections of his wife, who had plundered his
possessions, who had wronged and insulted his darling
only son, and who had swilled, without appreciating it,

pipe after pipe of his much prized wine, all of it carefully
selected, in splendid condition, and most of it more than
twenty years old.

And this is the Homer who had no taste, judgment,
feeling, or knowledge in wine!

But I have said more than enough on these topics.
Those who wish to know still more on them must be content
to wait until the publication of my “Lectures on
Homeric Literature,” unless, indeed, I should find time
to comply with the urgent solicitations of your great publishers—the
Appletons—and supply the article Ulysses
for the American Cyclopædia. I have done with all
journalistic controversy. I have floored my adversaries,
and may now say like Virgil's veteran pugilist:

or, as I have rendered the line in my yet unpublished
translation of Virgil: