often have smiled over the
quizzical-looking gentleman who used to figure at the right-hand
corner of HH.'s admirable sketches. But we doubt whether the fashion
is destined to be ever fully restored, or whether the monogram is not
rather doomed to remain a thing of the past--a subject of speculation
for that laborious, though not very practical class,

'Who delve 'mid nooks and sinuosities,
For literary curiosities.'

CLARET AND OLIVES.[1]

'Wine and Walnuts' was a good title for a gossipping book; 'Claret and
Olives' is a better. It has a more decided flavour, a more elegant
bouquet, a more gem-like colour. The other might refer to any
denomination of that multitudinous stuff the English drink under the
name of wine; or, if it has individuality at all, it relishes
curiously of the coarse and heavy produce of Portugal, so beloved of
Dr Johnson, and many other grave doctors, down to the last generation.
This breathes all over of the sweet South; it babbles of green fields;
it is full of gaiety and frolic, of song and laughter, and the sparkle
of wit and crystal. The title, we say, is a good title; and the book
has an unmistakable claret flavour--the best English claret, that is
to say--which unites the strength of Burgundy with the bouquet of
Chateau Margaux. Mr Reach despises a weak thin wine, and, by an
idiosyncratical necessity, he has produced a sparkling, racy book. He
traces the falling-off in our literature to a change in wine. 'The
Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn,"' quoth he;
'and we had the giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers
worked on claret. Port came into fashion--port sapped our brains--and,
instead of Wycherly's _Country Wife_, and Vanbrugh's _Relapse_, we had
Mr Morton's _Wild Oats_, and Mr Cherry's _Soldier's Daughter_. It is
really much to the credit of Scotland, that she stood stanchly by her
old ally, France, and would have nothing to do with that dirty little
slice of the worst part of Spain--Portugal, or her brandified
potations. In the old Scotch houses, a cask of claret stood in the
cellar, on the tap. In the humblest Scotch country tavern, the pewter
_tappit hen_, holding some three quarts, "reamed," _Anglice_, mantled,
with claret just drawn from the cask. At length, in an evil hour,
Scotland fell--

"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood,
Firm was his mutton, and his claret good;
'Let him drink port!' the English statesman c