It sounds curious to read that France and Spain were censured by that universal provider of knowledge, Pliny, for their drunkenness with beer and ale, “wines not being in that age so frequent.” What was the world like before the invention of port wine, I wonder? For in Pliny’s time Italy exceeded all parts of the world for her luscious and curious vintages, being responsible for 195 different sorts of wines.
Their Names and Kinds innumerable are,
Nor for their Catalogue we need not care;
Which who would know as soon may count the Sands
The Western Winds raise on the Libyan Strands.
At a much later date, in the seventeenth century, Italy still held her own in the matter of the juice of the grape; and then, as now, their Chianti and Lachrymae Christi were justly celebrated. Strange to say at the same period the Germans, we read, “are much given to drunkenness, as one of their own countrymen writes of them; they drink so immodestly and immoderately at their Banquets that they cannot pour their beer {25} in fast enough with the ordinary Quaffing Cups, but drink in large Tankards whole draughts, none to be left under severe penalties; admiring him that will drink most, and hating him that will not pledge them.”
I once, in my salad days, assisted in the attempt to make a German “foxed.” There were some half a dozen of us, nice boys all, and we entertained this Teuton right royally. At the banquet table the champagne was decanted, and it was so arranged that our guest should imbibe at least twice as much as anybody else. Then we took him around the great city. At four the next morning the German sat facing me in the smoking-room of a little social club. Everybody else had gone home, more or less limp, or had come to anchor in some police-station. And I did not feel very well myself. And as the clock chimed four, and the grey dawn stole in through the venetians in streaks, that German uprose in all his majesty—he was six feet five inches and broad in proportion—smote me hard on the back, and enquired, in cheerful tones: “Now then! Vhere can ve go to haf some fun?” We never “took on” any more of the children of the Fatherland.
The Russians, Swedes, Danes, and other Northerners—also during the seventeenth century—we read, “exceed all the rest, having made the drinking of Brandy, Aqua Vitae, Hydromel, Beer, Mum, Meth, and other liquors in great quantities, so familiar to them that they usually drink our countrymen to death.”
“The Mahometans,” the same writer tells us, {26} “which possess a great part of the world, on a superstitious account forbear the drinking of much wine; because that a young and beautiful woman being accosted by two angels, that had intoxicated themselves with it”—an intoxicated angel surely takes the cake?—“taking the advantage of their ebriety, made her escape, and was for her beauty and wit prefer’d in Heaven, and the angels severely punished for their folly; for which reason they are commanded not to drink wine. Yet many of them, doubting of the divinity of that relation, do transgress that command, and liberally drink of the blood of the grape, which the Christians prepare out of their own vineyards; palliating their crime, in that they did not plant the tree, nor make the wine.” For the philosophy of the Mahomedan is like the ways of the Heathen Chinee, “peculiar.”
“The Chineses,” we are further told, “are the least addicted to ebriety, delighting themselves in Coffee, Tea, and such like drinks, free from those stupifying qualities; yet are they not without their carouses; and those of the intoxicating drinks prepared of Rice, Coco’s, Sugar, Dates, etc., equalling in strength and spirit any liquors in the world.”