As far down, indeed, as Henry VIII.'s time you might get Gascony and Guienne wine for eightpence a gallon, and the comfortable word "claret" was well known early in the seventeenth century. One of its admirers, however, about that time gave odd reasons for liking it, to wit--"Claret is a noble wine, for it is the same complexion that noblemen's coats be of." This gentleman must have been a strenuous admirer of the aristocracy. The old Gascon growth was, however, in all probability, what we should now call coarse, rough wine. The district which is blessed by the growth of Chateau Margaux and Chateau Lafitte, was a stony desert. An old French local book gives an account of the "savage and solitary country of Medoc;" and the wines of the Bordelais, there is every reason to believe, were grown in the strong, loamy soil bordering the river. By the time 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 Rochel wyn;" and we had the giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret. Port came into fashion--port sapped our brains--and, instead of Wycherly's _Country Wife_, and Vanbrugh's _Relapse_, we had Mr. Morton's _Wild Oats_, and Mr. Cherry's _Soldier's Daughter_. It is really much to the credit of Scotland, that she stood staunchly by her old ally, France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little slice of the worst part of Spain--Portugal, or her brandified potations. In the old Scotch houses a cask of claret stood in the hall, nobly on the tap. In the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter _tappit hen_, holding some three quarts--think of that, Master Slender,--"reamed," _Anglice_ mantled, with claret just drawn from the cask, and you quaffed it, snapping your fingers at custom-houses. At length, in an evil hour Scotland fell: "Bold and erect the Caledonian stood, Firm was his mutton, and his claret good; 'Let him drink port!' the English statesman cried. He drank the poison, and his spirit died!" But enough of this painful subject. As Quin used to say, "Anybody drink port? No! I thought so: Waiter, take away the black strap, and throw it out."