Wine, of course, ought to be taken in moderation, if it is taken at all; and it is well to mix it always with water, and not to drink it during the heat of the day, when the blood is already warm enough, but to wait until the cool of the evening. {95} Even water, however, must be drunk sparingly, "so that the food may not be drowned, but ground down in order to digestion." What a disgusting picture the holy philosopher draws of those "miserable wretches whose life is nothing but revel, debauchery, bath, excess, idleness, drink!" "You may see some of them, half-drunk, staggering, with crowns round their necks like wine-jars, vomiting drink on one another in the name of good-fellowship; and others, full of the effects of their debauch, dirty, pale in the face, and still, above yesterday's bout, pouring another bout to last till next morning." Moreover, he entirely disapproves of importing wines. If one must drink, the product of one's native vines ought to suffice. "There are the fragrant Thasian wine, and the pleasant-breathing Lesbian, and a sweet Cretan wine, and sweet Syracusan wine, and Medusian and Egyptian wine, and the insular Naxian, the highly perfumed and flavored, another wine of the land of Italy. These are many names, but for the temperate drinker one wine suffices." St. Clement concerns himself not only with what people ought to eat and drink, but with how they ought to eat and drink it. The chief thing necessary at table is temperance; the next is good manners. We remember to have had the pleasure and profit of reading once a modern hand-book of etiquette which abounded in the most amazing instructions for gentlemen and ladies at their meals. When you go to a dinner party, it said, do not pick your teeth much at table. Do not breathe hard over your beef. Don't snort while you are eating. Don't make a disgusting noise with your lips while taking in soup. And don't do twenty other horrible things which no gentleman or lady would any more have thought of doing than of standing up on their chairs or jumping upon the table. But St. Clement's directions for polite behavior show that worse things than these were in vogue in those beastly old days. He pours out words of indignation and contempt upon those 'gluttonous feasters who raise themselves from the couches on which the ancients used to recline at their banquets, stretch out their necks, and all but pitch their faces into the dishes "that they may catch the wandering steam by breathing in it." They grab every minute at the sauce; they besmear their hands with condiments; they cram themselves ravenously--in such a hurry that both jaws are stuffed out at once, the veins about the face are raised, and the perspiration runs all over as they pant and are tightened with their insatiable greed. Suppose St. Clement had dined on board an American steamboat!