give as much as the whole yearly profits of his farm for a machine that he could never find enough work for.'

6

Humph!' said the German.

'You should go southwards; there, though the labourers are thriftless and slothful, the land ill-tilled, and the country poor, you will find at any rate estates large enough for expensive machines to do sufficient work to pay for the outlay upon them.'

'I shall go there and try,' said the German.

The German gentleman remained silent, and I hoped he was impressed; but he presently said,

'I admit that you have told me something that I did not know before; nevertheless I cannot but think that there is a solution for the intellectual, social, and moral obstruction which you describe, more in accordance with immutable general principles and the doctrines of the great Smith than you perhaps imagine.'

Here our conversation ceased, with the unspoken reflection on my part that very intelligent persons are sometimes singularly opposed to the reception of new opinions; and when once they have taken in a full cargo of information and ideas, are very loth to do any further traffic in these commodities.

I am reminded of a similar limitation in the sagacity of the most sagacious of all animals after man-the elephant.

It is related of one of these thoughtful creatures that, his keeper failing to feed him sufficiently during the day, it was his habit every night to draw the heavy wooden post to which he was fastened by means of a stout chain, by main force out of the ground, and to make his way to a neighbouring rice-field, and

there, after carefully fixing his post in a convenient part of the field-so great was the force of habit and association with him-he would proceed to feed upon all the rice within reach of his tether. In the morning he again drew his post up, and returning to his stable, refixed it in its accustomed place.

I could not but reflect that my German acquaintance possessed not a little of this rather narrow elephantine wisdom; and he is, I fear, not singular. Many and many an intelligent traveller have I met, in, as it were, foreign-rice fields, carrying his post with him, planting it firmly in the ground from time to time, and tethering himself thereto, to the very lamentable limitation of his outlook upon the world around him.

CHAPTER VI

PORT WINE.

IF the secret history of many of the utterances on the subject of wine that have been made within the last thirty years could be made known to the world, the world would be singularly astonished at learning from whose hands it has been accepting the doctrine which it holds with a very firm faith indeed. A man writes a learned book, or a popular book, or a long review in an influential periodical, or a smart one in a newspaper; or he takes a scientific and seemingly impartial interest in the digestion of wine consumers and writes an essay, or he fires off a dozen controversial pamphlets in succession; and in each one of these cases the good, easy public believes

1 I published some years ago in a leading periodical, under the transparent pseudonym of Matthew Freke Turner, a paper entitled Wine and Wine Merchants. This paper I have now rewritten, with copious additions, into the present chapter. When it appeared, many worthy gentlemen, whose interests seemed to them to run counter to the facts and conclusions I put forth, were made very angry with me, and used strong language in print. Much as the original article has been altered to suit its present place as a chapter in a book on Portugal, I have been careful to take away from it nothing which could have the good effect of continuing to irritate and offend the aforesaid interested persons, being convinced that one of the most righteous and pleasing functions of literature is to tell the plain truth, and shame those who have any interest in suppressing it.

that the author has no object in view but its instruction.

There are cases, no doubt, in which the writer has no other object before him; and there is, I am sure, no case in which he does not believe himself to be an impartial instructor of mankind; nevertheless as human nature is at present constituted, it would be reassuring to be quite certain how the writers are circumstanced. It would, perhaps, be too much to expect that the author of pamphlet, article, essay, review, or book should begin by saying, 'I am a dealer in the ware I am about to describe,' or 'I am the brother, uncle, or intimate friend of some one who is, and I am interested in the good repute of certain wares that I am about to praise, and in the ill repute of certain other wares that, as the reader shall presently observe, I shall run down;' but I cannot recollect a single instance in which such a preface has been written.

Now, I am not for a moment going to imply that a gentleman who lives by selling one kind of wine, say the fine vintages of our Australian colonies, is anything but quite conscientious when he asserts in a printed book that Château Margaux is poor stuff, and Lafitte very much overrated. I only say that he is not a fit person to write a book to instruct the public. It is, no doubt, a very illiberal ordinance that a judge should not sit on the bench in his native county, but it recommends itself to the common sense of human nature. As one of a simple-minded public, I protest against our having to accept our opinions about wine from gentlemen whom a customary rule would exclude from the wine committees of their London Clubs.

After saying so much, it is well that the present writer should observe that he is not himself pecuniarily interested, directly or indirectly, even in the remotest way, in wine.

The universal interest that is now taken in wine, and consequently the mass of literature dealing with the subject, dates from little more than about twenty or thirty years ago. When port and sherry were the daily drink of English gentlemen, claret and champagne not very common ones, and the German wines hardly known, there was very little to make a book about. The secrets of the trade were also better kept; it was in fewer hands; the duties were enormous, and the lighter wines which are now favoured by taxation were then so overburthened as only to reach a very few rich men. There were few rivalries among wine merchants, seeing that wines of each variety were the staple of every merchant's trade, and therefore if a man sold claret he did not care to say a bad word for his neighbour who sold port, as it is to be feared he does now when wine-firms have multiplied and, as always happens with an increasing trade, businesses have been subdivided. It was then the golden age of wine-dealing, when an innocent and unsuspecting public drank over-brandied port, and 'plastered' sherry, and loaded claret, and paid their wine bills, and held their tongues.

Yet, even in those days of happy ignorance and guileless customers, some stir had been made, a panic created, and a dead set made against one of the truest, best, and safest (I shall explain this word presently) of imported wines. A fashionable doctor discovered that madeira contained acid in pernicious proportions.