Page:Address of J. Wilson Gibbes at the Home-Coming Banquet of Citadel Alumni (1924).djvu/5



One of the points of the Epicurean philosophy was that a good meal afforded protection from fate. According to Sydney Smith:

Serenely full, the epicure would say: Fate cannot harm me; I have dined today.

What a dinner this to remove one's doubts and fears! Now I don't have to ask some good apothecary to give me an ounce of civet to sweeten my imagination, for, as Oliver Wendell Holmes told the doctors, the theory of the banquet is that it crowns the temples with roses and warms the heart with wine, so that the lips may speak more freely and the ears listen more lovingly, and our better natures, brought into communion for a gladsome hour or two, may absorb and carry away the fragrance of friendship, mingled with the odor of the blossoms that breathe sweet through the festal circle.

True, we have no small beer, no nut-brown ale, no lowly Port or imperial Tokay, and I see "no cordial julep here that flames and dances in his crystal bounds," as the Eighteenth Amendment is said to have suppressed such cheering and classical accompaniments of good fellowship; but we claim every license to make this home-coming hour "o'erflow with joy and pleasure drown the brim." To borrow from King Henry the Fifth:

This day is called the feast of The Citadel: He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam'd, And rouse him at the name of Citadel.