Eminent People's Beverages.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 206, 4 June 1887, Page 7

Eminent People's Beverages.

Perhaps qne might theorise about character* from favourite drinks as much as from " palmistry," or handwriting. Let us see Napoleon had the heart, if ever a man had of a despot. He drank strong black coffee, the Sultan's drink, and Chambertin, the rich wine of princes. Cromwell and George of Clarence were both ambitious, with very opposite endings. Both loved Malmsey, which tradition asserts drowned the latter in the Jewel Tower. Richelieu, the cold, crafty, calculating cardinal, loved the thin red wjne of M.edoc. , The magnificent and high-spirited monarchs, Henry VIII, and Francis of France, loved what Falstaff holds to be so inspiriting, viz., " a good sherris sack. " Edmund Keans erratic magnificent genius and mad career were nourished on brandy, which was, indeed life to the. unhappy tragedian. Doran tells us that after his return, utterly broken, in 1827, only constant glasses of "brown brandy, vory hot and st ong>" enabled him to- get through his scenes. 1 Acldison's polished equable essays were written on moderate potations of excellent claret. , Charles Lamb, most perennially charming' of essayists, was a- thorough Londoner in heart ; and his favourite drink was genuine London porter. , , , 1 .pjtt and Eldpn, who represented' ,the old order of things, both loved port, of which the Chancellor could drink three bottles. ' Peter the Great was a genius and equally a barbarian, with a fiery temper and unbridled will. We are not surprised (speaking- as theorists with just as much probability as your palmistry and chirography professors), to find that his favourite beverage Was brandy With pepper ! King John was an unbridled and fiercely cruel tyrant. And if, as Mr G. R. Sims says in one 1 of his graphic stories, a man's disordered liver can make' him' a fiend, what wonder? For' King .John loved draughts of new ale,^ a surfeit of which With peacnea is supposed to 1 lWe led ! to his death. ', . , , 'Dr. Johnson was a- strange mixture of Toryism of the ancient eighteenth-contrary school — broad amd many-lined knowledge'

and goodness of heart and life— and great? nervousness. He loved in moderationr' ' punch and port wine, and by his' own description was '• a hardened and' shamelessr ' tea-drinker, whose kettle had seldom tuinfc to cool." One cannot theorise about Porson, thefamous Greek scholar, who, it is said, could " cap " from memory any line quoted from the three Greek tragedians, iEsphylus fc Sophocles, or Euripides, for he drank anything. Indeed, it is said, in a lady's absence with the keys, he vowed, much to hep husband's annoyance, that she had a private bottle of spirits, and rummaging- ' about, found one, still more to his friend's; ■ ' annoyance, of which he drank the con- ■ tents. He left, and on that lady's return. (her husband having mentioned this in a vexed manner) she said, " Good Heavens t It was the bottle of spirit for the lamp !" Sir Astley Cooper, the great surgeon (who in 3815 received during the various months of the year i' 21,000 in fees), and who, slaving at his profession twelve hours daily, said he could digest anything but " sawdust,'* drank two tumblers of water at dinner and two glasses - never exceeding them — of porfe wine afterward. Talleyrand's cold and dissimulating; nature was summed tip in his advice to his subordinates. " Above all, no zeal !'" His favourite potation was claret in moder1 ate glasses. Henri Quatre,France's favourite monarch* whose chivalrous memory even the fierce Republican mobs of 1792 at first respected, loved the Avino of Surennes, and, never as & rule, drank anything else. Byron was fond of two very different potations, which, perhaps, one might fancifully say were typical of his two styles of poetry — one was hock and soda water, them a very new beverago in England ; the other was gin and water.