ried;
He drank the poison, and his spirit died!"

This will look like treason to a good many of our readers; but we beg
them to reflect, that in preferring claret to port, Mr Reach is, after
all, an advocate of temperance; and they may therefore hope, that by
degrees his potations will become thinner and thinner, till they at
last come down--like Mike Lambourne's intentions--to water, 'nothing
save fair water.' Our belief, indeed, is, that the excessive duty
placed on French wines is a main cause of intemperance in its modern
forms; for the dearth of the article drives people to spirits, and
other intoxicating agents. Let the light claret (_vin ordinaire_) of
France become a cheap and accessible drink, and we say advisedly that
there would soon be a marked improvement in the matter of general
sobriety.

As our author proceeds towards the claret district--for the book is in
the form of a tour--he chats away very agreeably about everything he
sees on the road. We shall not meddle, however, with this part of the
volume, otherwise than to notice a peculiarity we have ourselves been
frequently struck with--the countryness of small towns in France.
There is no aristocracy to be met with there, no higher classes to set
the fashion, no professional functionaries to look up to. 'You hardly
see an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon
the spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left
entirely to themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull
streets from generation to generation, and, though clustered together
in a quasi town--perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of
liberty, and billiard-tables by the half-dozen--the population is as
essentially rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except
on rent-day, by either landlord or agent.'

After reaching Bordeaux, the tourist proceeded to the village of
Margaux, in the true claret country--a general idea of which he gives
by describing it as a debatable ground, stretching between the sterile
Landes and the fat, black loam of the banks of the Garonne. The soil
is sand, gravel, and shingle, scorched by the sun, and would be
incapable of yielding as much nourishment to a patch of oats as is
found on 'the bare hillside of some cold, bleak, Highland croft.' On
this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest
wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as
much of the picturesque a