_Club._ Egad, master, I think ‘tis a very good jest. _Mock._ What? _Club._ Why, drinking, you’ll find, master, that this same gentleman in the _straw doublet_, the same will o’ the wisp, is a wit at the bottom. Here, here, master, how it _puns and quibbles in the glass_! _Mock._ By the universe, now I have it; the wit lies in the jingling. Hear how the glasses rhyme to one another.[186] Evident allusion is here to the effervescence of champagne. In his _Constant Couple_, we have:-- Malice ne’er spoke in generous Champaign. But champagne, we have said, suffered like other French wines from the War of Succession and the Methuen treaty. By this treaty we were bound to receive Portuguese wines in exchange for our woollen goods, and to deduct from the duty on importation one-third of the rate levied on French wines. The new demand led to an extension of Portuguese vineyards. The demand continued to increase; the supply was forthcoming, but too often with an article grossly mixed and adulterated. Counterfeits poured into this country, especially from Guernsey, and home manufactures of spurious wine abounded. Mr. Cyrus Redding, an acknowledged authority, in his treatise on French wines, inveighs against what he considers the short-sighted policy of our ministers in this reign. He says:-- We have only done now what wiser heads offered us nearly 150 years ago. M. de Torcy, in vain, proposed an open trade, the advantages of which (now obvious enough to every man of common sense) were scouted by the Government here, and the proposition opposed, not only by the Parliament, but by that suffrage satirically denominated, if not profanely, the _vox populi, vox Dei_. It was almost an axiom in the last century, in relation to trade, that the success or ruin of our commerce continually inclined for or against us, as the trade of France with England was shut or open. Well and justly did the late Lord Liverpool remark that the trade of England had flourished in spite of our legislation. When France proposed, in 1713-14, that a tariff should be made in England similar to that of France and England in 1664, Lord Bolingbroke treated the proposal with disdain. This tariff was simply that the duties and prohibitions in both countries should be reciprocal. The duty to be paid on both sides was five per cent. After so much of two centuries has elapsed since, we can hardly do otherwise than admit that our ideas of the true principles of trade continued to be erroneous too long, that the offer of de Torcy was a just offer, and that any can still be found obtuse enough to deny this fact shows that there must be exceptions even to the common run of vulgar intellect.