the Clare

rl of Derby halted his detachments, he always had a pipe set on broach for the good of the company; and it is to be pre

of Gascoyne, Of the Ruel

that the magic spots had been discovered, blessed with the mystic properties which produce the Queen of Wine we had been saddled with-our tastes perverted, and our stomachs destroyed-by the woful Methuen treaty-heavy may it sit on the souls of Queen Anne, and all her wigged and powdered ministers-if, indeed, men who preferred port wine to claret can be conceived to have had any souls at all, worth speaking about-and thenceforth John Bull burnt the coat of his stomach, muddled the working of his brain, made himself bilious, dyspeptic, headachy, and nationally stupid, by imbibing a mixture of strong, coarse, wines, with a taste but no flavour, and bedevilled with every alcoholic and chemical adulteration, which could make its natural qualities worse than they were. See how our literature fell off. The Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Ro

ect the Cale

mutton, and h

ort!' the Englis

oison, and his

to say, "Anybody drink port? No! I thought so: Wa

us they give you nectar; at the little town of Tain, where the Rhone sweeps gloriously round the great Hermitage rock, they give you something better than nectar for less. But the ordinary Bordeaux wine is very ordinary indeed; not quite so red-inky, perhaps, as the Vin de Surenne, which, Brillat Savarin says, requires three men to swallow a glassfu

e you will have a bedroom clean and bright as a Dutch parlour; a grand old four-poster of the ancient regime, something between a bed and a cathedral; a profusion of linen deliciously white and sweet smelling; and la Mere will toss you up a nice little potage, and a cotelette done to a turn, and an omelette which is perfection; and she will ask you, in the matter of wine, whether you prefer ordinaire or vieux? and when you reply, Vie

he other hand, the low banks of the Garonne are generally of a fat, loamy, and black soil, called, locally, Palus. Well, between the Palus and the Landes, there is a longish strip of country from two to five miles broad, a low ridge or backbone, which may be said to be the neutral and blending point of the sterile Landes and the fat and fertile Palus. And truth to tell, the earth seems as if the influence of the latter had much to do to bear up against the former. A Norfolk farmer would turn with a contemptuous laugh from the poor-looking stony soil. "Why," says he, "it's all sand, and gravel, and shingle, and scorched with the sun.

ulations, broken here and there by intervening jungles of coppice-wood, by strips of black firs, or by the stately avenues and ornamental woods of a first-class chateau. Gazing from the bottoms of the shallow valleys, you seem standing amid a perfect sea of vines, which form a monotonous horizon of unvaried green. Attaining the height beyond, distant village spires ris

llis work, none of the embowering, or the clustering, which the poets are so fond of

me to the most shabby, stunted, weazened, scrubby, dwarfish, expanse of snobbish bushes, ignominiously bound neck and crop to the espaliers like a man on the rack-these utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing, as they do, the gravelly soil to show in bald patches of grey shingle through the straggling branches-these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and the most inimitably flavoured wines. Such are the vines which grow Chateau Margaux at half a sovereign the bottle. The grapes themselves are equally unpromising. If you saw a bunch in Covent Garden you would turn from them with the notion that the fruiterer was trying to do his customer, with over-ripe black currants. Lance's soul would take no joy in them, and no sculptor in his senses would place such meagre bunches in the hands and over the open mouths of his Nymphs, his Bacchantes, or his Fauns. Take heed, then, by the lesson, and beware of judging of the nature of either men or grapes by their looks. Meantime, let us continue our survey of the country. No fences or ditches you see-the ground is too precious to be lost in such vanities-only, you observe from time to time a rudely carved stake stuck in the ground, and indicating the limits of properties. Along either side of the road the vines ex

at a distance of about fifteen miles further to the north, in the vineyards of Lafitte, Latour, and between these latter, in the sunny slopes of St. Jullien. And the strangest thing of all is, that the quality-the magic-of the ground changes, without, in all cases, a corresponding change in the surface strata. If a fanciful and wilful fairy had flown over Medoc, flinging down here a blessing and there a curse upon the shifting shingle, the effect could not have been more oddly various. You can almost jump from a spot unknown to fame to another clustered with the most precious vintage of Europe. Half-a-dozen furrows often make all the difference between vines producing a beverage which will be

only more thought of because they have more capital to get it bragged about. Near Chateau Lafitte, on a burning afternoon, I took refuge beneath the emblematic bush; for t

ligent and mildly-expressive faces and fine black eyes, were discussing together a sober bottle. One of the

at our misfortunes; I

is companion, "left

ursed English bullets took me in the knee, and spoil

gaging the Mars. But we had our revenge. The Pluton shot the Mars' captain's head off!"-a fact which I afterwards verified. Capt

e a rap at the English again-I would-the English-nom

ken so few words, that the fact that a son of perfide Albion w

he Waterloo man, "Yo

is comrade, nudged him; a hint, I suppose, in common phrase, to d

hen, eh? I say I would like t

ar more pacific man of the sea. "I think-mon voisin

. Sacré nom de tous les diab

listened to with great impatience by the maimed lancer, and great

his friend) from what you tell us. Come-that's another

be convinced-"Sacré bleu

y now and then shook hands with me magnanimously, as to show that his wrath was national-not individual; and when I proposed a bottle of rather better wine than the

ink of that?" s

ood every day in E

rce lancer. "You might, if you chos

it! My son-in-law grew it. My son-in-law sells it; I know all about it. You shall have that bottle for ten sous, and the Lafitte people and the Larose people would charge you ten francs for it; and it is as good for ten sous as theirs for ten francs. I tell you it grew side by side with their vines; but they have capital-they have power. They crack off their wines, and we-the poor people!-we, who trim

g back the topic to a more soothing subject, and said that what he would like, would be to see lots of English ships coming up the Gironde with the good cottons and woollens and hardwares we made in England, and taking back in exchange their cheap and wholesome wines-not only the great vintages (crus) for th

ne. He couldn't see it at all. He would like to have another brush. He wasn't half done for yet. I

sailor, "there i

with as perfect French sentiment

, he proposed a stirrup-cup-a coup de l'étrier-to the washing down of all unkindness; but, in the very act of swallowing it, he didn't exactly stop, but made a motion a

r own hands. Next they greatly improved both the soil and the breed of plants. They studied and experimentalized until they found the most proper manures and the most promising cultures. They grafted and crossed the vine plants till they got the most admirably bearing bushes, and then, generation after generation, devoting all their attention to the quality of the wine, without regard to the quantity-scrupulously taking care that not a grape which is unripe or over-ripe finds its way to the tub-that the whole process shall be scrupulo

y sunny situation and a hot soil, may have been ready to begin a fortnight before; another, in a converse locality, may not be ready to commence for a fortnight afterwards. N'importe-the French have a great notion of uniform symmetry and symmetrical uniformity, and so the whole district starts together-the mayor issuing, par autorité, a highly-official-looking document, which is duly posted by yellow-breeched gens-d'armes, and, before the appearance of which, not a vine-grower can gather, for wine purposes, a single grape. Now, what must be the common sense of a country which permits, for one instant, the continuance of this wretched little tyrannical humbug? Only think of a trumpery little mayor and a couple of beadles proclaiming to the farmers of England that now they might begin to cut their wheat! The may

VINT