into? Do you put it
there to guard the solitary half-crown from the rapacity of your friend;
or do you put it across your breast in case of an unexpected winder from
your apparently peaceable acquaintance on the opposite side?

Is it not quite absurd that a man can't even take a glass of wine
without an appearance of infinite difficulty and pain? Eating an egg at
breakfast, we allow, is a difficult operation, but surely a glass of
wine after dinner should be as easy as it is undoubtedly agreeable. The
egg lies under many disadvantages. If you leave the egg-cup on the
table, you have to steady it with the one hand, and carry the floating
nutriment a distance of about two feet with the other, and always in a
confoundedly small spoon, and sometimes with rather unsteady fingers. To
avoid this, you take the egg-cup in your hand, and every spoonful have
to lay it down again, in order to help yourself to bread; so, upon the
whole, we disapprove of eggs, unless, indeed, you take them in our old
mode at Oxford; that is two eggs mashed up with every cup of tea, and
purified with a glass of hot rum.

But the glass of wine--can anything be more easy? One would think
not--but if you take notice next time you empty a gallon with a friend,
you will see that, sixteen to one, he makes the most convulsive efforts
to do with ease what a person would naturally suppose was the easiest
thing in the world. Do you see, in the first place, how hard he grasps
the decanter, leaving the misty marks of five hot fingers on the
glittering crystal, which ought to be pure as Cornelia's fame? Then
remark at what an acute angle he holds his right elbow as if he were
meditating an assault on his neighbour's ribs; then see how he claps the
bottle down again as if his object were to shake the pure ichor, and
make it muddy as his own brains. Mark how the animal seizes his
glass,--by heavens he will break it into a thousand fragments! See how
he bows his lubberly head to meet half way the glorious cargo; how he
slobbers the beverage over his unmeaning gullet, and chucks down the
glass so as almost to break its stem after he has emptied it of its
contents as if they had been jalap or castor-oil! Call you that taking a
glass of wine? Sir, it is putting wine into your gullet as you would put
small beer into a barrel,--but it is not--oh, no! it is not taking, so
as to enjoy, a glass of red, rich port, or glowing, warm, tinted,
beautiful caveza!

A newly marrie