There was a practice among the Romans with regard to wine, which should win the respect of all our Inns of Court. All law business was suspended during vintage time. “Sanè,” says Minucius Felix, “et ad vindemiam feriæ judiciorum curam relaxaverunt;” and this was no poor holiday: it was the Long Vacation of the Roman bar, extending, as the Rev. Hubert Ashton Holden remarks, in his admirable edition of the “Octavius,” from August 22nd to October 15th. And here let me remark, parenthetically, how much preferable it would be to make a school-book of the “Octavius” of Minucius Felix, so rich in early Christian information, and so pure in its Latinity, rather than pursue the old course of letting boys read Ovid and similar authors. The Abbé Gaume, in his “Ver Rongeur,” traces all the evils by which society is afflicted, to the study of erotic Latin and Greek authors. The Abbé rushes from one extreme into its opposite, and wishes to confine our sons to the mawkish Latinity of the Lives of the Saints, and the Pastorals (so unlike the Eclogues) of Bishops. The work of Minucius Felix just occupies the safe medium of the two remote points,—erotic Heathenism, and Monkish mendacity, told with much violation of grammar. It is a book that ought to be on the list of works to be studied in every locality devoted to the education of “ingenuous youth.”
It is hardly necessary to write of the effects of wine on the bodily economy. They are too familiarly known. There was an old adage that—
“He who goes to bed, and goes to bed sober,
Falls as the leaves do, and dies in October;
But he who goes to bed, and goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to do, and dies a good fellow.”
This is poor poetry, worse sentiment, and deadly counsel. Half the evils that torture men arise from intemperance; and, next to excess in alcohol, immoderation in wine is the most fatal practice to which humanity can bind itself slave. An Arab says of his horse, that the horse’s belly is the measure of its corn. Men are too apt to allow a similar metage with respect to themselves in the matter of wine. It were safer to remember that we cannot drink too little, and that we soon may be drinking too much. Panard very justly says,—
“Se piquer d’être grand buveur,
Est un abus qui je déplore.
Fuyons ce titre peu flatteur;