Rhine wines would keep for ever. Let the man who wishes to know what wine _can be_, by all means go daily for a few weeks to the Rathskeller in Bremen. Let him pay due homage to the worthies of old time there by tasting them, one glass of each per diem; but let him not fail to wash them down speedily with a bottle of twenty-year old Niersteiner or Rüdesheimer. If you ask, thirsty reader, why these things are to be found at their best in Bremen, we can only say that North Germany is a right conservative country; and because the Burgomasters of Bremen thought it their duty in the seventeenth century to lay down cask upon cask of the best vintages, their successors think it is their duty likewise; which is a very practical and righteous feeling. Bacchus, however, and the two mighty casks which guard his right hand and his left (like those trusty comrades who stand up in the halls of the Colleges of our Universities on each side of the drinker, when the loving cup is passed round, to prevent his being stabbed in the back), are now empty. The right hand cask was broken open and drained by the French soldiers in 1806, after the defeat of Prussia at Auerstädt; a loss which one can well imagine that the Town Council of Bremen bore less philosophically than many another act of power of those merciless freebooters. Bacchus himself, who dates from 1624, has been empty for 100 years. But what has become of the Rose herself? There are many old casks in the cellar called after her, but none that I could identify with the heroine of the story. She is still painted on the ceiling--a sufficiently ugly specimen (of the variety known as 'La France,' she appears to be)--very fat and round, with very dirty green foliage, and round her the following inscription:-- 'Cur Rosa Flos Veneris Bacchi depingitur antro, Causa quod absque mero frigiat ipsa Venus.' Other bad hexameters follow in other parts of the vault known as the Rose cellar; as for instance: 'Haec Rosa Luminibus Veneres Nectarque Palato Objicit, exhalans pocula grata cadis: Vina vetusta tenet, grandævi munera Bacchi; Sint procul hinc juvenes; vos decet iste senes.' They are in fact the sort of verses that the traditional Eton boy, who wrote verses for the whole of his Dame's house, could turn out at the rate of a couplet a minute, adding a few false quantities and concords by desire of the accomplice for whom they were written, 'because if you don't, you know, my tutor will never believe they're my own composition.' Finally, over the entrance door, on the other side of which is a medallion of Hauff, erected in 1876, comes the following:-- 'Was Magen, Leib und Herz, Saft, Kraft, und Geist kann geben, Betrübte trösten mag, halbtodte kann beleben, Theilt diese Rose mit, sie hat von hundert Jahren Den Preis ein edles Oel mit Sorgfalt zu bewahren.' More could be quoted, but this breathes the spirit of the eighteenth century quite sufficiently for our purpose.