It is going a long way back to ascend from “Pindar” to Tasso, but both poets loved roasted chestnuts,—and there is the affinity. Peter never drank any thing but old rum; a wine glass, (never beyond a wine glass and a half,) served him for a day, after a dinner of the plainest kind. The doctor eschewed wine altogether, at least in his latter days, as generating acidity. Tasso, however, unlike our satirical friend, was a wine-bibber. During the imprisonment which had been the result of his own arrogance, he wrote to the physician of the Duke of Ferrara, complaining of intestinal pains, of sounds of bells in his ears, of painful mental images and varying apparitions of inanimate things appearing to him, and of his inability to study. The doctor advised him to apply a cautery to his leg, abstain from wine, and confine himself to a diet of broth and gruels. The poet defended the sacredness of his appetite, and declined to abstain from generous wine; but he urged the medico to find a remedy for his ills, promising to recompense him for his trouble, by making him immortal in song. At a later period of his life, when he was the guest of his friend Manco, in his gloomy castle of Bisaccio, the illustrious pair were seated together, after dinner, over a dessert of Tasso’s favourite chestnuts and some generous wine; and there he affrighted his friend by maintaining that he was constantly attended by a guardian spirit, who was frequently conversing with him, and in proof of the same, he invited Manco to listen to their dialogue. The host replenished his glass and announced himself ready. Tasso fell into a loud rhapsody of mingled folly and beauty, occasionally pausing to give his spirit an opportunity of speaking; but the remarks of this agathodæmon were inaudible to all but the ears of the poet. The imaginary dialogue went on for an hour; and at the end of it, when Tasso asked Manco what he thought of it, Manco, who was the most matter-of-fact man that ever lived, replied that, for his part, he thought Tasso had drunk too much wine and eaten too many chestnuts. And truly I think so too.
The greatest of authors are given to the strangest of freaks. Thus one of the most popular of the teachers of the people presided at a gay tavern supper the night before the execution of the Mannings. The feast concluded, the party (supplied with brandy and biscuits) proceeded to the disgusting spectacle, where they occupied “reserved seats;” and when all was done, the didactic leader of the revellers and sight-seers, thought he compensated for his want of taste, by pronouncing as “execrable” the taste of those who, like George Selwyn, could find pleasure in an execution. But there are few men so inconsistent as didactic authors. Pope taught, in poetry, the excellence of moderation; but he writes to Congreve in 1715, that he sits up till two o’clock over burgundy and champagne; and he adds, “I am become so much of a rake that I shall be ashamed, in a short time, to be thought to do any sort of business.” But Pope’s table practice, like Swift’s, was not always of the same character. The dean, writing to Pope, in the same year that the latter tells Congreve (a dissolute man at table, by the way) of his sitting over burgundy and champagne till two in the morning, speaks of quite another character of life: “You are to understand that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house. My family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in my stable, a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board wages; and when I do not dine abroad, or make an entertainment,—which last is very rare,—I eat a mutton pie, and drink half a pint of wine.” Pope’s habit of sleeping after dinner did not incline him to obesity; and it was a habit that the dean approved. Swift told Gay that his wine was bad, and that the clergy did not often call at his house; an admission in which Gay detected cause and effect. In the following year to that last named, Swift wrote a letter to Pope, in which I find a paragraph affording a table trait of some interest: “I remember,” he says, “when it grieved your soul to see me pay a penny more than my club, at an inn, when you had maintained me three months at bed and board; for which, if I had dealt with you in the Smithfield way, it would have cost me a hundred pounds, for I live worse here (Dublin) upon more. Did you ever consider that I am, for life, almost twice as rich as you, and pay no rent, and drink French wine twice as cheap as you do port, and have neither coach, chair, nor mother?” Pope illustrates Bolingbroke’s way of living as well as his own some years later. The reveller till two in the morning, of the year 1715, is sobered down to the most temperate of table men, in 1728. “My Lord Bolingbroke’s great temperance and economy are so signal, that the first is fit for my constitution, and the latter would enable you to lay up so much money as to buy a bishopric in England. As to the return of his health and vigour, were you here, you might inquire of his haymakers. But, as to his temperance, I can answer that, for one whole day, we have had nothing for dinner but mutton broth, beans and bacon, and a barn-door fowl;” after all, no bad fare either, for peer or poet! Swift too, at this period, boasts no longer of his “French wines.” His appetite is affected by the appalling fact, that the national debt amounts to the unheard-of sum of seven millions sterling! and thereupon he says: “I dine alone on half a dish of meat, mix water with my wine, walk ten miles a day, and read Baronius.”
Such was the table and daily life of an author who began to despair of his country! In 1732, however, the dean was again full of hope,—we see it in the condition of his wine matters: “My stint in company,” he writes to Gay, “is a pint at noon, and half as much at night; but I often dine at home, like a hermit, and then I drink little or none at all.” Was it that he despaired again, when alone; or that he only drank copiously at others’ cost? Of his own cellar arrangements, though, he thus speaks: “My one hundred pounds will buy me six hogsheads of wine, which will support me a year, provisæ frugis in annum copia. Horace desired no more; for I will construe frugis to be wine. How a man who drank little or none at home, and seldom saw company to help him to consume the remainder, could contrive to get through six hogsheads in a year, is a problem that will be solved when the philosophers of Laputa have settled their theories.” Literature is a pleasant thing when its professors have not to write in order to live. Such was the case in the last century, with poor De Limiers, who was permitted to write in periodicals, on the stipulation that he “never told anybody.” It is said of him that he would have been an exceedingly clever person, if he had not always been hungry, but that famine spoiled his powers. This was the bookseller’s fault, not his. The same might nearly be said of poor Gerald Griffin; but he kept his ability warm even amid cold hunger, and had the courage to write his noble tragedy “Gisippus” on scraps of paper picked up by him in wretched coffee-shops, where he used to take a late breakfast, and cajole himself into the idea that it was dinner.
When Cervantes, with two friends, were travelling from Esquivias, famous for its illustrious wines, towards Toledo, he was overtaken by a “polite student,” who added himself and his mule to the company of “the crippled sound one” and his friends, and who gave honest Miguel much fair advice touching the malady which was then swiftly killing him. “This malady is the dropsy,” said the student with the neck bands that would not keep in their place,—“the dropsy, which all the water in the world would not cure, even if it were not salt; you must drink by rule, sir, and eat more, and this will cure you better than any medicine.” “Many have told me so,” was the reply of the immortal Miguel, “but I should find it as impossible to leave off drinking, as if I had been born for no other purpose. My life is well-nigh ended, and by the beatings of my pulse, I think next Sunday, at latest, will see the close of my career.” The great Spaniard was not very incorrect in his prognostic. I introduce this illustrative incident for a double reason; first, it is “germane to the matter” in hand, and secondly, it reminds me of a fact with the notice of which I will conclude this section of my imperfect narrative: I allude to
THE LIQUOR-LOVING LAUREATES.
It is incontrovertible that, with the exception of two or three, all our laureates have loved a more pleasant distillation than that from bay-leaves. In the early days, the “versificatores regis,” were rewarded, as all the minstrels in Teutonic ballads are, with a little money and a full bowl. The nightingales in kings’ cages piped all the better for their cake being soaked in wine. From the time of the first patented laureate, Ben Jonson, the rule has borne much the same character, and permanent thirstiness seems generally to have been seated under the laurel. Thus, Ben himself was given to joviality, jolly company, deep drinking, and late hours. His affection for a particular sort of wine acquired for him the nick-name of the Canary-bird; and indeed succeeding laureates who, down to Pye, enjoyed the tierce of Canary, partly owe it to Ben.
Charles I. added the wine to an increase of pay asked for by the bard; and the spontaneous generosity of one king became a rule for those that followed. The next laureate, Davenant, a vintner’s son, was far more dissolute in his drinking, for which he did not compensate by being more excellent in his poetry. The third of the patented laureates, Dryden, if he loved convivial nights, loved to spend them as Jonson did, in “noble society.” Speaking of the Roman poets of the Augustan age, he says:—“They imitated the best way of living, which was, to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure; that which one of the ancients called ‘eruditam voluptatem.’ We have, like them, our genial nights, where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow.” The genial nights, however, were not always so delightfully Elysian and æsthetic. When Rochester suspected Dryden of being the author of the “Essay on Satire,” which was really written by Lord Mulgrave, and which was offensive to Rochester, the latter took a very unpoetical revenge. As Dryden was returning from his erudite voluptes at Wills’, and was passing through Rose-street, Covent Garden, to his house in Gerrard-street, he was waylaid and severely beaten, by ruffians who were believed to be in the pay of Rochester. The conversation of that night certainly must have disturbed the business of the morrow!
And next we come to hasty Shadwell, who may be summarily dismissed with the remark that he was addicted to sensual indulgence, and to any company that promised good wine, and plenty of it. Poor Nahum Tate, too, is described as “a free and fuddling companion;” but the miserable man had gone through more fiery trials than genial nights. Of Rowe, the contrary may be said. He was the great diner-out of his day; always vivacious, dashing, gay, good-humoured, and habitually generous, whether drunk or sober. He was but a poor poet, but he was succeeded by one who wrote worse and drank more—Eusden, of whom Gray writes to Mason that he “was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turned out a drunken parson.” Cibber loved the bottle quite as intensely as Eusden did, and he was a gambler to boot; but there were some good points about Colley, although Pope has so bemauled him. Posterity has used Cibber as his eccentric daughter did when he went to her fish-stall to remonstrate with her against bringing disgrace upon his family by her adoption of such a course: the affectionate Charlotte caught up a stinking sole, and smacked her sire’s face with it; but Colley wiped his cheek, went home, and got drunk to prove that he was a gentleman. With heavy Whitehead we first fall in with indisputable respectability. He sipped his port, a pensioner at Lord Jersey’s table, and wrote classical tragedies, for which I heartily forgive him, because they are deservedly forgotten. His successor, slovenly Warton, exulted over his college wine with the gobble of a turkey-cock; and then came Pye, with his pleasant conviviality and his warlike strains, which “roared like a sucking dove,” and put to sleep the militia, which it was hoped they would have aroused. Pye was of the time of “Pindar, Pye, and Parvus Pybus;” and it was during his tenure of office that the tierce of Canary was discontinued, and the 27l. substituted. With Southey, a dignity was given to the laureateship, which it had, perhaps, never before enjoyed; and the poetic mantle fell on worthy shoulders, when it covered those of the gentle Wordsworth. Not that Wordsworth never was drunk. The bard of Rydal Mount was once in his life “full of the god;” but he was drunk with strong enthusiasm too, and the occasion excused, if it did not sanctify the deed. The story is well told by De Quincey, and it runs thus:—
“For the first time in his life, Wordsworth became inebriated at Cambridge. It is but fair to add, that the first time was also the last time. But perhaps the strangest part of the story is the occasion of this drunkenness, which was the celebration of the first visit to the very rooms at Christ College once occupied by Milton,—intoxication by way of homage to the most temperate of men, and this homage offered by one who has turned out himself to the full as temperate! Every man, in the mean time, who is not a churl, must grant a privilege and charter of large enthusiasm to such an occasion; and an older man than Wordsworth, at that era not fully nineteen, and a man even without a poet’s blood in his veins, might have leave to forget his sobriety in such circumstances. Beside which, after all, I have heard from Wordsworth’s own lips that he was not too far gone to attend chapel decorously during the very acme of his elevation!”
De Quincey has told how pleasant, and cheerful, and conversational was the tea-time at Wordsworth’s table; and there, no doubt, the poet was far more, so to speak, in his element than when in the neighbourhood of wine, whose aid was not needed by him to elevate his conversation. But Wordsworth, gentle as he was, had nothing in him of the squire of dames, whom he generally treated with as much indifference as the present laureate, Tennison, was once said to feel for those very poetical little mortals,—children. And here I end the record of a few table traits of the patented laureates, adding no more of the fourteenth and last, that is, the present vice-Apollo to the Queen, than that he has said of his own tastes and locality to enjoy them in, in Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue, made at the Cock,—