Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/188

Rh 80,000 florins." This vineyard was formerly attached to the Abbey of St. John; and a genial time, no doubt, the merry monks had of it. Would they not have regarded the modern tabooing of wine as the ne plus ultra of heresy? But, poor fellows! their abbey and their wine were long ago secularized, and have fallen into the hands of military and political spoilers. Napoleon made an imperial gift of these vineyards to Marshal Kellerman, and in 1816 they again changed hands, being presented to Metternich by the Emperor of Austria. I have drank wine bearing the name of Johannisberg in New-York, but I have been told by a person who had tasted it at Metternich's table, that it is only to be found unadulterated there. Murray informs us that they permit the grape to pass the point of seeming perfection before they gather it, believing that the wine gains in body by this, and that so precious are the grapes that those which have fallen are picked up by a fork made for the purpose.

met a countryman to-day who has been travelling through France and Italy with his sister, "without any language," he says, "but that spoken on the rock of Plymouth," which, true to his English blood, he pronounces, with infinite satisfaction, to be the best, and all-sufficient. He is a fair specimen of that class of Anglo-American travellers who find quite enough particulars, in which every country is inferior to their own, to fill up the field of their