Page:Through a Glass Lightly (1897, Greg).djvu/39

 wine needs no bush, and the pages of his catalogues are strewn with false and perjured epithets. So great are his eulogies of what he is pleased to call his “light Clarets” that for the real thing, if he have it, language falls too short for adoration. To begin with superlatives at the lowest rung of the ladder is to make sure of vertigo and a plunge into anti-climax from the top: so his “grand wines” remain in splendid isolation, whence their three figures alone convey a sense of excellence. Yet even here a man may be undone, and the Claret of his dreams remains an airy phantasm: for though he may find in a day, if his purse be long enough, a Port that is irreproachable, it demands a more arduous pilgrimage ere he come on an incomparable Claret.