Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/323

Rh learning were a sort of conjuring. These are the men, who pretend to understand a book by scouring through the index; as if a traveller should go about to describe a palace, when he had seen nothing but the privy; or like certain fortune-tellers in northern America, who have a way of reading a man's destiny, by peeping into his breech. For, at the time of instituting these mysteries, there was not one vine in all Ægypt, the natives drinking nothing but ale; which liquor seems to have been far more ancient than wine, and has the honour of owing its invention and progress, not only to the Ægyptian Osiris , but to the Grecian Bacchus; who, in their famous expedition, carried the receipt of it along with them, and gave it to the nations they visited, or subdued. Besides, Bacchus himself was very seldom, or never drunk: for, it is recorded of him, that he was the first inventor of the mitre ; which he wore continually on his head, (as the whole company of bacchanals did) to prevent vapours and the head-ach after hard drinking. And for this reason, say some, the scarlet whore, when she makes the kings of the earth drunk with her cup of abomination, is always sober herself, though, she never balks the glass in her turn, being, it seems, kept upon her legs, by the virtue of her triple mitre. Now, these feasts were instituted, in imitation of the famous expedition Osiris made through the world, and of the company that attended him, whereof the bacchanalian ceremonies were so many types and symbols. From which account it is manifest, that the fanatick rites of these bacchanals, cannot