With guiltless mirth.
And giv’st me wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.”
The lines sound like an echo of Saint Chrysostom’s wise warning, spoken twelve hundred years before: “Wine is for mirth, and not for madness.”
Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, all are set with traps for the unwary, and all are alike unconscious of offence. Here is Dr. Johnson, whose name alone is a tonic for the morally debilitated, saying things about claret, port, and brandy which bring a blush to the cheek of temperance. Here is Scott, that “great good man” and true lover of his kind, telling a story about a keg of whisky and a Liddesdale farmer which one hardly dares to allude to, and certainly dares not repeat. Here is Charles Lamb, that “frail good man,” drinking more than is good for him; and here is Henry Crabb Robinson, a blameless, disillusioned, prudent sort of person, expressing actual regret when Lamb ceases to drink. “His change of habit, though it on the whole improves his health, yet, when he is low-spirited, leaves him without a remedy or relief.”
John Evelyn and Mr. Pepys witnessed the blessed Restoration, when England went mad with joy, and the fountains of London ran wine.
“A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking”
time it was, until the gilt began to wear off the gingerbread. But Evelyn, though he feasted as became a loyal gentleman, and admitted that canary carried to the West Indies and back for the good of its health was “incomparably fine,” yet followed Saint Chrysostom’s counsel. He drank, and compelled his household to drink, with sobriety. There is real annoyance expressed in the diary when he visits a hospitable neighbour, and his coachman is so well entertained in the servants’ hall that he falls drunk from the box, and cannot pick himself up again.
Poor Mr. Pepys was ill fitted by a churlish fate for the simple pleasures that he craved. To him, as to many another Englishman, wine was precious only because it promoted lively conversation. His “debauches” (it pleased him to use that ominous word) were very modest ones, for he was at all times prudent in his expenditures. But claret gave him a headache, and Burgundy gave him the stone, and late suppers, even of bread and butter and botargo, gave him indigestion. Therefore he was always renouncing the alleviations of life, only to be lured back by his incorrigible love of companionship. There is a serio-comic quality in his story of the two bottles of wine he sent for to give zest to his cousin Angler’s supper at the Rose Tavern, and which were speedily emptied by his cousin Angler’s friends: “And I had not the wit to let them know at table that it was I who paid for them, and so I lost my thanks.”