raspberry brandy. Many excellent descriptions
of claret have never found favour in England,
and are comparatively unknown to us.

An eminent French surgeon who visited
England a short time ago, has publicly expressed
in print his horror and abhorrence of our
custom of drinking sweet champagne with
mutton, and reserving fine costly Bourdeaux, at
ten shillings a bottle, to sip over almonds and
raisins, preserved fruits, grapes, and apples. Of
course, the Bourdeaux then tastes sour and
poor.

A recent distinguished and sensible writer
on vinology has penned a pretty rhapsody on
the contrast between the feminine claret and
the masculine Burgundy. To our mind claret
is the agreeable companion, Burgundy the sound
friend. One pleasant author, that most delightful
of all characters, a well-read medical man,
says that Bourdeaux is a model of purity and
freshness, and resembles young, fresh, laughing
innocent girlhood. We may admire the
rosebud and the snowdrop, but there is a place
in our affections for something fuller, warmer,
sounder, and more voluptuous. As is Jeremy
Taylor to Bunyan, Aphrodite to a Woodnymph,
the Olympic Jove to the ever youthful Apollo,
so is Burgundy to Claret.

During the reign of Louis the Fourteenth
a great controversy raged in the Sorbonne
among the black-capped doctors of the black
and scarlet gowns, the bloodletters and coffin
makers of the days of Molière, their relentless
enemy. A wild young student fresh from his
Aristotle and reckless from his Hippocrates,
had rashly asserted in his inaugural thesis,
influenced by some strange local prejudice or
temporary derangement, that the generous red
wines of Burgundy were preferable to the
creamy vintage of Champagne, which this
young man with much learning declared was
irritating to the nerves, and productive of
many dangerous disorders. The faculty of
medicine at Rheims, fired by this slander, took
up the defence of Champagne, and expatiated
on its liquid purity, its excellent brightness, its
divine flavour, its paradisiacal perfume, its
durability, and all its other rare qualities.
This challenge soon roused another champion.
A professor at the college of Beaune at once
braced on his shield, pressed down his helmet,
couched his lance, and spurred his charger to
the fray.

The Beaune man was very angry. His blood,
half pure Burgundy, was tingling in his veins
from the scalp of his bald head to the toes of
his learned feet. He poured forth prose and
verse, and pelted his antagonists without mercy
– in fact, the celebrated Dr. Charles Coffin, the
sagacious rector of the University of Beauvais,
took the matter so much in snuff that he actually
worked himself up to write a classical ode on
the spirit, sparkle, life, and delicacy of his
wine; and thus the doctor with the dismal
name sipped and sang Latin verses, which may
be translated, with gross incorrectness, by the
parish bellman, somehow thus:

      Bubbles of joy are springing
          Up to my smiling mouth;
      The gods have sent this nectar
          To quench my ceaseless drought:
      I can't spare a drop or bubble
          To pour on the votive shrine.
      Yet I thank the gods twice over
          For sending me down this wine.

The citizens of Rheims were not ungrateful,
and they rewarded the poet. Grénan wrote also an
ode in praise of Burgundy, but this ode was flat
and insipid, and poor Grénan got never a single
stiver by it. The discussion raged hot for years,
and many pipes of Champagne and Burgundy
were drunk over it. It ended in 1778, when,
in a thesis defended before the Faculty of Medicine
of Paris, a verdict was pronounced in favour
of Champagne.

Erasmus, worn with vigil and study,
attributed his restoration to health, to having drunk
liberally of Burgundy – a pleasant medicine,
truly. In an epistle to Le Grand d'Aussy he
says, with the warmheartedness of one who has
well drunk: "Ought not he who first taught us
the art to make this Burgundian wine – should
he not rather be considered as one who has
given us life, than the mere hander to us of a
liquor?"

Dr. Druitt says that an eminent English
wine-merchant was once dining with a wine
congress at Macon. Our Englishman, with
the national wish to make all things pleasant
strongly upon him, propounded to the
assembly in congress on the new vintages his
three stale prejudices against Burgundy.

    First. That Burgundy would not keep.
    Second. That it would not travel.
    Third. That it caused gout.

The answers were conclusive and irrefutable.
They first brought him veritable Burgundy, a
hundred years old, attenuated by time, but still
sound at the core. They then brought him
sound honest Burgundy, that had travelled
round the world. Lastly, they bade him
inquire of all the two hundred Burgundy growers
and Burgundy drinkers round the table which
of them had ever had the gout.

Lucky Englishmen of the nineteeth century!
you can renounce the old Port black dose and
the Sherry brandy of bygone centuries, and you
can get a nice, clean, light, pleasant-flavoured
Chablis at eighteen shillings, a full, round
Pouilly at twenty-four shillings, and a most
cheering and honest Beaujolais at four-and-twenty.

Let us draw up the bottles with the sloping
shoulders, the beauties of Burgundy, the pearls
of the wine merchant's seraglio – the choicest
jewels of the London Docks. First comes
that fine wine Beaune, which grows on either
side of the high road running from Dijon to
Chalon-sur-Saône, which runs through the
immortalised towns of Beaune and Nuits.
The dust from the wheels of the cumbrous
diligences rests on those grapes like a white
bloom, but they are none the worse for
that. The famed Clos Vougeot is grown in an