Persia, Chaldæa, Judæa, Asia Minor, Greece,
Italy, Spain, and France.

Of Japan, in illustration of his theory, Dr.
Arthaud says that, although civilisation is
evident in its beautiful manufactures of silk, porcelain,
and lacquer-ware, it is almost stationary.
The vine grows there, but it is only cultivated
for its fruit, tea and saki, a kind of beer made
with rice, being the only drink; but Dr.
Arthaud thinks that wine may have been made in
Japan by an earlier race of inhabitants than the
present, and that civilisation stopped short
where we find it, when the Japanese neglected
the bequest of their predecessors.

That which is a doubt with respect to Japan
is a certainty when we turn to China, wine
having been made in great quantities, and
preserved in vases buried in the sand, long before
the Christian era; and the Chinese poets sang
its praises in verse worthy of Anacreon, Horace,
or Béranger. The provinces offered the wine
of honour to their governors, and even to their
supreme ruler, the latest instance of this
presentation occurring in A.D. 1373, when the city
of Taï-yuen paid its tribute to the Emperor Taittsou.
A school of economists, however, arose,
who, in view of an increased population,
persuaded the emperors of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries to destroy the vines and
plant corn in their stead; nor were these
decrees revoked till 1787, when the vine was
again introduced into some of the more temperate
latitudes of China. It is to the destruction
alluded to that Dr. Arthaud ascribes the
declension in the national character which
rendered the Chinese an easy prey to the invading
Tartars.

On his way towards Persia, Dr. Arthaud
incidentally adduces Cashmere as a vine-growing
country, observing that its produce very much
resembles Malmsey Madeira, and pointing to
their shawls, to attest their civilisation. Persia,
in respect of wine, is the Eastern rival of
France, the provinces of Erivan, Azerbijan,
Irak, and Farsistan producing vintages that
rival the best growths of Europe; amongst
them the wine of Shiraz, which, although a
trifle below the latitude fixed by Dr. Arthaud,
is of world-famed celebrity, and worthy of the
verse of Hafiz. The best vineyards of Persia
are situated in the mountainous districts that
stretch from the Persian Gulf to the
Caspian Sea. Sixty-five kinds of grape are grown
there, its cultivation being abandoned to the
Ghebers, the Armenians, and the Jews; for,
though the Mohammedan part of the population
drink wine without scruple, they assert that the
infringement of the law of Islam consists in
making the wine, not in drinking it—a convenient
conclusion, which satisfies their
consciences, and enables them to gratify their
inclinations. Pure wine, however, is not for the
topers of Ispahan and Teheran, the Jewish and
Armenian dealers ministering to that fondness
for narcotics which tend so greatly to enervate
the East, by mixing myrrh, incense, and the juice
of the Indian hemp with the finest growths.

Egypt barely touches the vinous zone, the
greater part of its territory belonging to regions
condemned in ancient times to hieratic immobility
It was below the thirteenth degree that
Thebes, Meroë, and Memphis adored Typhon,
the god of night, and where the stupidity of the
people caused them to fall prostrate before
onions and crocodiles. Yet Egypt preserved
one spark of life—but it was above the
thirteenth degree—the wine of Antilla, grown near
Alexandria, being the choicest seen at the
banquets of Antony and Cleopatra. The civilisation
of Egypt Dr. Arthaud despises: their
architecture was heavy, and as to the Sphinx,
what is it, he exclaims, but the perfect type
of immobility, with its languishing attitude and
its profound somnolence?

On the Attic shore, however, civilisation at
once raised its throne, and the vineyards of
Greece were coexistent and equally famous with
her poets, her artists, her orators, her physicians,
her statesmen! In such estimation was wine
held amongst the Greeks, not only for its flavour
but its vivifying properties, that Asclepiades, the
highest medical authority of Greece, said of the
drink which Homer had called "divine," that
"wine, by its activity, was a power equal to that
of the gods!" But the conquests of Alexander
in the East were fatal to the moral superiority
of the Greeks. The narcotics of the lands
beyond the Himalaya, from the banks of the
Indus to the far off isle of Taprobana, reacted
upon the Peloponnesus. Bacchus gave up a
part of his empire to incense, myrrh, nard, and
opium, and with the introduction of these drugs,
art, science, and literature declined, and the
civilisation of Greece passed with the vine into
Italy. On that volcanic soil, the Greek wine
gained in "tannin" (its tonic principle) and
strength what it lost in sweetness, delicacy, and
perfume. After the conquests of Sylla and
Cæsar, which opened new countries to Roman
activity, commercial relations with Greece and
the islands of the Archipelago were multiplied.
The astringent wine of Latium, on the tables of
the patricians, gave way to the Falernian of
Campania, the light Omphacite of Lesbos, the
Phanean of Chios, and the Saprian of Arvisia,
whose perfume, Pliny tells us, embalmed the
banquet halls. Tasus, Corcyra, Candia, Rhodes,
and Scaros, furnished vast quantities of delicious
wines, and under their influence the gloomy,
political genius of the Romans was softened,
and they became accessible to poetry and the arts.
"Captive Greece," says Horace, "took captive
her fierce conqueror, and introduced her arts
into rude Latium." Athenian elegance
penetrated into the language of Rome, into her
manners and her decorations, and with the
intellectual progress went hand in hand the cultivation
of the vine. Wine, indeed, was always
held in the highest esteem in Italy, and Horace
has summed up its good qualities in these
remarkable lines: "What does not plenty of
wine incite to? It discloses secrets; compels
the ratification of our hopes; urges on the
coward to fight; removes care from troubled