version that people took heretofore in making one another
drunk, appeared more heinous to St. Augustine than an assassination, for
he maintained, that those who made any one drunk, did him greater injury
than if they had given him a stab with a dagger.

"A Greek[4] physician once wrote a letter to Alexander, in which he
begged him to remember, that every time that he drank wine, he drank the
pure blood of the earth, and that he must not abuse it.

"[5]Some poets say, that it was the blood of the gods wounded in their
battle with the giants.

"[6]The Severians in St. Epiphanius, hold, that it was engendered by a
serpent, and it is for that reason that the vine is so strong. And the
Encratites, in the same author, imagine to themselves that it was the
gall of the devil.

"Noah[7] in an hour of drunkenness," says St. Jerom, "let his body be
seen naked, which he had kept covered for six hundred years."

[Footnote 1: Sphinx Theol. p. 682.]

[[Footnote 1a: Ovid, _Ars Amatoria_ 237.]]

[Footnote 2: Diver, cur. t. i. p. 141.]

[Footnote 3: Rep. des Lett. Janv. 1687. Art. I.]

[Footnote 4: Androcydes.]

[Footnote 5: Entret. de Voiture, et de Costar, Lett. 29.]

[Footnote 6: Lib. i. Heres. 47.]

[Footnote 7: Ep. ad Ocean.]

CHAP. XXVI.

A RIDICULOUS AVERSION THAT SOME HAVE TO WINE.

An aversion to wine is a thing not very common; and there are but a very
few but will say with Catullus:--

"At vos quo lubet, hinc abite lymphae
Vini pernicies."[a]

Pernicious water, bane to wine, be gone.

One should certainly be very much in the wrong to put in the number of
those who had an aversion to wine the duke of Clarence. His brother,
Edward the Fourth, prejudiced with the predictions of Merlin, as if they
foretold, that one day that duke should usurp the crown from his
children, resolved to put him to death, he only gave him the liberty to
choose what death he would die of. The duke being willing to die a merry
death, chose to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey. Not unlike him on whom
this epigram was made.

"[1]In cyatho vini pleno cum musca periret;
Sic, ait Oeneus, sponte perire velim."

In a full glass of wine expir'd a fly;
So, said Oeneus, would I freely die.

But let us come in earnest to those who have really had an antipathy to
wine. Herbelot[2], in his Bibliotheque Orientale, says, that there are
some Mussulmans so superstitious, that they wil