Lockhart's store of Jamaica rum which enabled the Shepherd, as he confesses, to overcome his rustic timidity; while Sym—the "Timothy Tickler" of Blackwood's—and he were wont to fiddle and fuddle the long night through, to prove which of the twain had the softest heart and the strongest head.
These are poor Hogg's own ingenuous confessions, and are, moreover, in strict accordance with a certain fixed principle and theory of life held by him. This was sorely disturbed when, visiting Keswick, and having sent an invitation to Greta Hall, asking Southey to come to his inn, and "drink one half-mutchkin with him;" the poet indeed came and stayed an hour and a half, but showed no disposition to imbibe. "I was," says Hogg, "a grieved as well as an astonished man when I found that he refused all participation in my beverage of rum-punch. For a poet to refuse his glass was to me a phenomenon; and I confess I doubted in my own mind, and doubt to this day, if perfect sobriety and transcendant poetical genius can exist together. In Scotland I am sure they cannot. With regard to the English, I shall leave them to settle that among themselves, as they have little that is worth drinking."
Well, this is a position I am not prepared to dispute. Plutarch tells us that the Muses themselves were given to fuddling; and Horace says that their breath of a morning indicated addiction to stronger waters than those of Helicon. The latter bard, indeed, goes so far as to assert that no teetotaller can possibly write pleasing or lasting verse:—
"Nulla placere diu, nec vivere carmina possunt,
Quæ scribuntur aquæ potoribus,"[1]
thus paraphrased by a witty modern:—
"If with water you fill up your glasses,
You'll never write anything wise;
For wine is the horse of Parnassus,
Which hurries a bard to the skies."[2]
In like vein John Phillips says:—
"the Muses still require
Humid regalement, nor will aught avail
Imploring Phœbus with unmoistened lips."[3]
Even Milton is on this side of the question, and in his Epistle to Carlo Deodati, asks:—
"Quid quereris refugam vino dapibusque poësin?
- Carmen amat Bacchum, carmina Bacchus amat."
It is true that on the other side we have Wordsworth somewhere declaring himself
"A simple water-drinking bard,"—
and Huetius, the learned bishop of Avranches, forsaking the vine so dear to his countrymen, imputes special poetic gifts to the not inebriating cup which our own Cowper has immortalized:—
"—Theæ quisquis crebro se proluit haustu,
Tradidit huic artes dexter Apollo suas,
Et caput implicuit lauro, curruque levatum
Sacra coronatis ad juga vexit equis."[4]
