Page:Through a Glass Lightly (1897, Greg).djvu/35

 have been permitted to drown his five wits in Claret. Surely champagne had been meeter. But this Claret is ever being diluted with abuses, and it scarce surprises that a great man’s name should be evermore associated with a coloured concoction which the unthinking persist in calling Gladstone Claret even unto this day. So is a lordly title dishonoured in the application. Yet that one, of whom it has sometimes been asserted that his promises are writ in water, should find his immortality traced in the nobler fluid affords matter for thought.

But to the name itself there clings a romance no politician nor any touting advertiser can whollydegrade or dispel. His father-grape is himself a true patrician, abiding in fair Châteaux, with ancient honey-sounding