juice, previous to boiling, would contain an excess of saccharine matter.

In

But while these observations and arguments demonstrate that the wines of Palestine were not alcoholic, or were for the most part destitute of the spirits of wine, it is not intended to affirm that they were all destitute of an intoxicating principle. We have already shown that other substances, besides alcohol, possess inebriating and stupifying or maddening properties. In the Sacred Volume we have several allusions to such medicinal or deleterious drugs. In Psalm 1x. 3, we read of "the wine of astonishment or giddiness." Psalm 1xxv. 8, it is said that the wine in the cup of Jehovah was "red and full of mixture." Isaiah, in chapter li. 17, 22, mentions the "cup of trembling or giddiness. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk, speak of the same drugged liquor. In Prov. xxiii. 30, we read of those who go to "seek mixed wine." The wine mentioned, Pro. xxxi. 4-7, was a soporific drink; kings and princes were prohibited from touching it, lest they should "forget the law," while it was to be given to those that were of a heavy heart, that they might "drink and remember their misery no more." The wine mixed with myrrh, gall, or a species of laudanum, offered to our Lord, was intended to produce stupefaction, and therefore he would not drink. Hence we learn that the strong wines of the ancients were mixed or drugged to render them inebriating, and to these mixtures, rather than to alcohol, they owed their intoxicating powers. We learn from Homer, Columella, Pliny, and others, that the ingredients used were very various, and sometimes very potent.

Homer is allowed by all to have been very correct in his description of the countries, manners and customs of the Greeks. He lived nearly one thousand years before Christ; and seeing the customs of those ages were almost permanent, his descriptions extend back to a very remote antiquity. Among other things this poet very frequently mentions the very potent drugs that were mixed with wines. In the Odyss. lib. iv. 220, he tells us that Helen prepared for Telemachus and his companions a beverage which was highly stupefactive and soothing to the mind. To produce these qualities, he says, that she threw into the "wine delirious drugs, which were

Νηπενθές τ' αχολον τε, κακων επιληθον απαντων, grief-assuaging, rage-allaying, and the oblivious antidote for every description of misfortune." He adds, that the person "who drunk the bowl that she had mingled, from morn to eve, would not shed a single tear, although his father and mother utterly perished, or he saw his brother, or his own darling son, slain before his eyes." He

further tells us, that "Helen had acquired the knowledge of these poisonous drugs from Egypt." The following translation of this passage by Pope, though free, is fully borne out by the original:

"Meanwhile, with genial joy, to warm the soul,
Bright Helen mixed a mirth-inspiring bowl,
Tempered with drugs of sovereign power to assuage
The boiling bosom of tumultuous rage,
To clear the clouded front of wrinkled care,
And dry the tearful sluices of despair.
Charmed with that virtuous draught, the exalted
mind

All sense of woe delivers to the wind,
Though on the blazing pile his parents lay,
Or a loved brother groan'd his life away,
Or darling son, oppress'd by ruffian force,
Fell breathless at his feet, a mangled corse;
From morn to eve, impassive and serene,
The man, entranced, would view the deathful

scene.

The drugs so friendly to the joys of life,
Bright Helen learn'd from Thone's imperial wife,
Who sway'd the sceptre where prolific Nile
With various simples clothes the fatten'd soil,
With wholesome herbage mixed, the dreadful bane
Of vegetable venom taints the plain."

Here, then, we learn not only that, as early as the Trojan war, the Greeks mixed their wines with drugs, but that this custom came from Egypt, and therefore that the practice was very ancient. Bishop Lowth, in his Notes on Isaiah i. 22, quotes the verses from Homer which I have just given, and observes, "The Hebrews generally by mixed wine, mean wine made inebriating by the adoption of higher and more powerful ingredients, such as spices, myrrh, mandragora, opiates, and other strong drugs. Such were the exhilarating or rather stupifying ingredients which Helen mixed in the bowl together with the wine for her guests, oppressed with grief, to raise their spirits, the composition of which she had learned in Egypt. Such was the spiced wine and juice of the pomegranates mentioned Cant. viii. 2. Thus the drunkard is described as one who seeks "mixed wine, " and is

66

mighty to mingle strong drink." And hence the Psalmist took the highly poetical and sublime image of the cup of God's wrath, called by Isaiah "the cup of trembling," causing intoxication and stupefac tion, containing, as St. John (Rev. xiv. 10) expresses in Greek the Hebrew idea with the utmost precision, though with a seeming contradiction in the terms, "xsxsgaoμsvo angarov, mixed, unmixed wine," the unmixed juice of the grape rendered stupifying by a mixture of powerful ingredients. "In the

hand of Jehovah," saith the Psalmist, Psalm lxxv. 8. "there is a cup, the wine is turbid, it is full of mixed liquor, he poureth out of it. Verily, the dregs thereof, (the thickest sediment of the strong ingredients mingled with it,) all the ungodly of the earth shall wring them out and drink them."-Lowth on Isaiah, p. 235.

In the ninth book of the Odyssey we have a passage equally conclusive respecting

2. It

These facts are very important, because, 1. The wine was sweet as honey, it was divine or resembling nectar, and therefore could not have fermented, otherwise the sugar would have been destroyed. was boiled, otherwise it would not have been so exceeding sweet, and at the same time have retained its great sweetness for so long a time, and been capable of "keeping for ever," in the various temperatures to which it was exposed. 3. When drank it was diluted with twenty times its amount of water: this was necessary on account of its great sweetness, its consequent thickness, and the high degree to which it was drugged; and, 4. It was exceedingly aromatic, affording incontestable evidence of the spices, &c. with which it was mixed. He intimates that diluted with so large a quantity of water, still its odour was most temptingly delicious. He says that this wine was both "black and red; probably it was of a very deep and beautiful purple. In the 10th book of the Odyssey, the same poet tells us, that Circe mixed Pranmian wine with pernicious drugs, by which means those who drank it became swine." In the Iliad, the wine that Hector's mother advised him to drink, but which the hero refused, was sweet as honey, and yet produced "lethargy and forgetfulness," a plain proof that it was not fermented, but drugged. Every chemist knows that the reasoning here employed is in exact accordance with the facts of modern science. There can be no doubt that the wines drunk by Noah and Lot were drugged, as we shall hereafter show.

The following receipt for drugging sapa and defrutum, from the 20th chapter of the 12th Book of Columella, "De Re Rustica," will give the reader an idea of the ancient custom of manufacturing wine. After having given directions to boil ninety amphoras of must, or about 720 gallons, down to the third part, or to thirty amphoras, he says, "Tum demum medicamina adjicito, quæ sunt aut liquida, aut resinosa, id est picis liquida nemeturcæ, cum eam diligenter ante aqua marina decocta perlueris, decem sextarios, item resina terebinthæ sesquilibram. Hæc cum adjicies, plumbeum peragitabis, ne adurantur, cum deinde ad tertias subsederit coctura, subtrahe ignem, et plumbeum subinde agitabis, ut defrutum, et medicamina coeant, deinde cum videbitur mediocritur calere defrutum, reliqua aromata contusa et

bulo ligneo agitari, quod decoxeris, dum defrigescet. Quod sinon ita, ut præcipimus, permiscueris subsident aromata et adurentur. Ad prædictum autem modum musti adjici debent ii odores, nardi folium, iris Illyrica, nardum Gallicum, crocum, palma, cyperum, schoenum, quorum singulorum selibræ satisfacient. Item, myrhæ quincunx, calami pondo libram, casia selibram, amomi pondo quadrans, croci quincunx, cripe pampanacæ libram. Hæc, ut dixi, arida contusa, et cribrata debent adjici, et his commisceri rasis, quod est genus crude picis, eaque quanto est vetustior tanto melior habetur, nam longo tempore durior facta, cum est contusa in pulvere redigitur, et his medicaminibus admiscetur." The reader may be told that the quotation just given is by no means a solitary example of the ancient mode of adding various herbs and drugs to wine. If he will consult Varro, Cato, Palladius, Pliny, and others, he will find that nothing was more common than the addition of different medicaments to the juice of the grape. Mr. Buckingham, in his articles on " ancient wines," in the Athenæum, says, that the Romans added to their wines, "pitch, rosin, assafoetida, sea water, tar, bitumen, myrrh, aloes, cassia, gums, pepper, spikenard, poppies, wormwood, milk, chalk, cypress, bitter almonds." These ingredients he appears to have quoted from Athenæus, Plutarch, &c.

Pliny, in the 16th chapter of Book XIV. says, "That there were wines made from millet, dates, and the lotus-tree; from figs, beans, pears, all sorts of apples, poinegranates, cornels, medlars, sorb-apples, mulberries, pine-apples, the leaves, berries, and twigs of myrtles; from rue, asparagus, savory, organy, sutherwood, parsley seed, wild mint, turnips, pennyroyal, wild time, horehound, squills, flowers and leaves of roses, Gallic and wild nard. Spiced and aromatic wines, made from a composition of spices, from myrrh, Celtic nard and bitumen. Calamus, bulrush, Syriac nard, balsam, Jerusalem or lady's rose, cassia, cinnamon, palm, gum-benjamin, pepper and honey, pomwater, elecampane, citron, walwort, wormwood, hyssop, hellebore, scammony, wild sage, gentian, wild fig, dittany, wild carrot, heal-all, garden flag, flea-bane, thyme, mandrake, ithacomel, pitch, cedar, cypress, laurel, pine, juniper, turpentine, mastic, olivella, ground pine, and ground oak," were all added, in different proportions, to the juice of the grape, for the purpose of rendering it medicinal, stupifying, or aromatic. Numerous as are the ingredients just mentioned, I believe that they might be doubled from the writings of Pliny alone. Now we know that the Romans borrowed most of their arts from the Greeks, and the Greeks from Asia Minor, Tyre, Palestine, and Egypt, so that

there is reason to believe that none of these modes of manufacturing or drugging wine were inventions of the age in which Pliny, or Cato, or other writers on this subject, lived. These practices had probably been handed down from father to son, from the days of the deluge. Indeed the Greek and Roman writers on these subjects often refer to the ancient or foreign authorities whence they derived their knowledge and information. Mago, the Carthaginian, is a great favourite with them all.

From what has been said, the reader may be prepared for the conclusion, that the wines of the ancients were very different from ours, and that the taste and appetite of the tipplers of antiquity were far from being similar to the drinking mania of the moderns; and these opinions, which he may have formed, will be fully borne out by the testimony of ancient writers.

The wines of the Greeks and Romans not only differed from ours, but also from each other. Pliny, Lib. xiv, cap. 22, says, that human ingenuity had produced "one hundred and ninety-five different kinds of wine, and that if the species of these genera were estimated, they would amount to almost double that number." Virgil, after having enumerated various descriptions of wine, cuts short the subject by saying,

"Sed neque quam multæ species, nec nomina quæ

sint

Est numerus; neque enim numero comprehendere refert,

Quem qui scire velit, Lybici velit æquoris idem
Discere quam multæ zephyro turbentur arena;
Aut ubi navigiis violentior incidit Eurus
Nosse, quot Ionii veniaut ad littora fluctus."
Geor., lib. II.

Here we are told that it was impossible to number the various species of wine then in use, and that to attempt it would be as hopeless a task as to endeavour to tell the sands of the Lybian coast, which the west wind agitates, or the waves of the Ionian sea, which are rolled to the shore: and after making every allowance for the licence to exaggerate which we grant the poet, we must still conclude that the various kinds of wines of his day were described and computed with difficulty. The temperature of the country in which the grape was ripened; the nature of the vine which was planted; the soil in which it grew, whether marshy, sandy or dry; the aspect of the heaven towards which it looked; its position, whether on a hill, in a vale, or among other trees; the supports to which it was trained, whether a pole, a tree, a wall, or a rock; the mode also of manufacturing the wine, and which must have varied in different farms and countries; the drugs, "medicaments" or condiments with which it was mixed; and the vessels and place in which it was kept ;must all have given an incalculable variety to the taste, character and potency of the

liquor. The reader of Cato, Columella, Pliny, and others, will find that the modes of manufacturing and preserving wine were exceedingly varied; and should he wish to have such wines as were drunk in the time of our Lord, he has only to adopt the receipts which are still left in plentiful abundance in their writings. And we certainly think that it is the bounden duty of those who tell us that the Scriptures recommend wine, to produce some of the wines of Scripture. If St. Paul commends wine, it behoves us to inquire which of all the hundreds of varieties that then existed, was the drink of The which the holy apostle approved. wines of that day and of the present, have nothing in common with each other except the name: and to say that because the apostle recommended to a sick friend one of the medicinal wines of that period, therefore he intended to intimate that all persons, whether healthy or sickly, should drink all the trash which human caprice, cupidity, or passion might denominate "wine," or "strong drink," is not only to reason without argument or thought, but also to intimate that the great apostle of the Gentiles recommended the most deadly drinks. To say that he recommended all the wines of that age, is to charge him with approving of liquors deeply impregnated with hellebore, opium, assafoetida, and other nauseous and poisonous drugs; and if he did not, and as a follower of Christ could not, bestow his praise or approbation upon all; then what did he commend? We have here not only to do with the medical advice, but also with the medicine. The advice to take a "litte medicine" is not enough, but we want the prescription also; or else, when the draughts are so numerous and at the same time so various in their qualities, our ignorance may put its hand upon the wrong phial, and swallow hemlock and death as our panacea.

The generality of persons allow themselves to be misled by the word "wine," taking it for granted that that term has always had the same signification, and always referred to the same description of intoxicating liquor. But nothing can be more fallacious than this sort of reasoning. We have seen from the wines mentioned by Pliny and Virgil, that the drinks which bore that designation were as different to each other as it is possible for two beverages to be, and yet all were called "wines:" and it is only for the reader to consult Horace, Cato, Columella, Plutarch, Athæneus, or the Word of God, to perceive the delusion which those labour under who imagine that the word "wine" always means a drink resembling modern port, sherry or champagne. Some of the ancient wines were sweet and were bitter; some were fermented, and some were not; some were thick as sirup, and some were more liquid; some

some

To the same purpose are the words of Polybius: in a fragment of his 6th Book he states, "Among the Romans, women were forbidden to drink wine; they drank a wine which is called passon (latine passum), and this was made from dried grapes or raisins. As a drink it very much resembled Aegosthenian and Cretan (yasuxos) sweet wine, and which is used for the purpose of allaying thirst." In this quotation we have several proofs that there was a beverage in common use, made from the fruit of the grape, but which was not inebriating. For 1. Roman females were allowed to drink it, and yet they were not allowed to drink intoxicating liquors. 2. It was a sweet wine, and therefore the sugar had not been converted into alcohol. 3. It was drunk to quench thirst; but fermented and stupifying wines, then, as well as now, created rather than repelled thirst. 4. It resembled the wine of Crete, which is known to have been a sweet wine. This passage also shows that in those days intoxicating drinks were not used as a beverage for allaying thirst. The Greeks and Romans in those ages had more philosophy than to drink liquid fire, for the purpose of freeing themselves from thirst; they might occasionally drink stupifying draughts, but they did this for their own caprice or pleasure, not to satisfy the wants of nature.

The "Passum vinum," to which Polybius here alludes, was made from the passa uva, the dried grape or raisins. Both Pliny and Columella have left receipts for making it. I have unfermented wine in my possession which is now sixteen months old, which I have made according to the receipt of Colu mella, a receipt written about the time that our Lord lived in Judea.

It may be thought that, if these wines were sweet and sirupy, they were very unfit to quench thirst; but it must be remembered that in those days it was very discreditable to drink undiluted wine, or even to take half wine and half water. Homer speaks of the Maronean wine, as diluted with twenty parts water. Pliny says that in his time, when men were greater tipplers, it was mixed with eight parts," one part wine, and five parts water, was the more common and favourite mixture."* In these drinks, the wine could merely have given a little of its taste to the water. How much such wines must have differred from modern port or sherry! they were inspissated by boiling, and, when diluted in water, formed a pleasant beverage. Still the taste of the people of that age must have differed greatly from that of our own day; for what modern wine-bibber

*See notes on Boyd's small edition of Potter's Greek Antiquaries; also "Ancient Wines" in the Athenæum.

would think of diluting even the strongest port with five parts water?

The fact stated by Polybius, that Roman women were prohibited from inebriating wine, is fully borne out by the testimony of Pliny; the latter writer says, that "in the days of Romulus a Roman slew his wife with a club for drinking wine, and was absolved from the charge of murder;" and afterwards that "a Roman matron, for opening the drawers in which the keys of the wine-store were, was starved to death by her own family." These punishments were severe, but the prudent Romans seemed to foresee the scourge that winebibbing mothers or females would become to their country; and, rather than let their females degrade themselves and their offspring by drinking, doomed them to death, deeming the latter the lighter of two evils. We have already seen the curse that drunken women can inflict upon the country; and were we faithfully to enumerate all the fatal consequences of what is called a moderate use of wine and strong drink, it could be demonstrated that, intoxication hath slain its thousands, the moderation of British females hath slain its ten thousands.

It may seem strange to our vitiated taste that any people should ever have existed that preferred wines destitute of spirit or strength; and yet we find that this was the case, both in Greece and Rome, and with the generality of persons in other ancient

nations.

All writers seem to agree that the Greek wines were lusciously sweet: Mr. Buckingham says that "the wine of Cyprus is, at this day, sweet, and as thick as oil, and in consequence of this will keep very well in the shade." The Chian wine was highly esteemed, but was a sweet wine; for Horace speaks of mixing it with Falernian, to sweeten the bitterness of the latter. Lesbian was also very sweet, and said to have been destitute of any intoxicating power.

"Hic innocentis pocula Lesbii

Duces sub umbra; nec Semelius
Cum Marte confundet Thyoneus
Prælia."

In another ode, Horace tells his friend Macænas that he might drink "a hundred glasses" of this "innocent Lesbian" without any danger to his head or senses. In the Delphin edition of Horace we are told that "Lesbian wine could injure no one; that, as it would neither affect the head nor inflame the passions, there was no fear that those who drank it would become quarrelsome." It is added, that "there is no wine sweeter to drink than Lesbian; that it was like nectar, and more resembled ambrosia than wine; that it was