In Virgil’s time, his contemporaries—and very probably the old man himself—drank deep; but instead of fighting, and breaking things, and jumping on their wives, and getting locked up, they brought their own heathen religion into their debaucheries. In more civilized circles, at this end of the most civilized century, the reveller {6} goes out “to see a man,” and subsequently “shouts for the crowd”; but in Virgil’s time a man who had a drink was said to be “pouring forth libations to the gods,” “making sacrifices”—more especially to Bacchus, the wine deity, whom nothing under the slaughter of a he-goat was supposed to propitiate. And the “Billy” was chosen for the sacrifice, because the tender shoots of the vine formed his favourite food, in a land in which there was neither brown paper, nor wall-plaster, nor salmon-tins, to nibble. And these sacrifices to the rosy god were “occasions” (as they say in the City) indeed! I have often wondered what the ancients did to cure a headache; and whether a man said to be “possessed of a devil” was in reality suffering from Alcohol, “the Devil in solution,” in the shape of _delirium tremens_ in one of its many and objectionable forms. In the time of Pliny, drunkenness and debauchery appear to have been the principal studies of the nations about whom he had information. A man was actually _rewarded_ for getting drunk—tell it not in Vine Street, W.! The greatest drinker got the most prizes; and Pliny informs us that whilst the Parthians contended for the distinction of having the hardest heads and the longest swallows, they were simply “not in it” with the Milanese, who had a real champion in one Novellius Torquatus. This man, according to history, could have given a market-porter of the present day, a brewer’s drayman, or a stockbroker, any amount of start over the Alcohol course, and “lost” him. This Novellius won the championship from all {7} pretenders, and “had gone through all honourable degrees of dignity in Rome, wherein the greatest repute he obtained was for drinking in the presence of Tiberius three gallons of wine at one draught, and before he drew his breath again; neither did he rest there, but he so far had acquired the art of drinking, that although he continued at it, yet was never known to falter in his tongue; and were it ne’er so late in the evening he followed this exercise, yet would be ready again for it in the morning. Those large draughts also he drank at one breath, without leaving in the cup so much as would dash against the pavement.” Ah! We have nobody up to this form to talk about nowadays; and if men have improved in morality they must have deteriorated in capacity, or the occupation of gaolers and warders would be gone. And the poor old poet “Spring Onions,” with even a tenth part of the powers of endurance and swallow of Novellius Torquatus, might have escaped even one solitary conviction.