Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434, page 39 by Various Authors
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of their humour. Few of those who were wont to enjoy Richard Doyle's inimitable sketches in Punch, whose guiding-spirit he used to be, can forget the funny little figure, surmounted by his well-known initials; and the lovers of political caricature must often have smiled over the quizzical-looking gentleman who used to figure at the right-hand corner of HH.'s admirable sketches. But we doubt whether the fashion is destined to be ever fully restored, or whether the monogram is not rather doomed to remain a thing of the past--a subject of speculation for that laborious, though not very practical class,
'Who delve 'mid nooks and sinuosities, For literary curiosities.'
CLARET AND OLIVES.[1]
'Wine and Walnuts' was a good title for a gossipping book; 'Claret and Olives' is a better. It has a more decided flavour, a more elegant bouquet, a more gem-like colour. The other might refer to any denomination of that multitudinous stuff the English drink under the name of wine; or, if it has individuality at all, it relishes curiously of the coarse and heavy produce of Portugal, so beloved of Dr Johnson, and many other grave doctors, down to the last generation. This breathes all over of the sweet South; it babbles of green fields; it is full of gaiety and frolic, of song and laughter, and the sparkle of wit and crystal. The title, we say, is a good title; and the book has an unmistakable claret flavour--the best English claret, that is to say--which unites the strength of Burgundy with the bouquet of Château Margaux. Mr Reach despises a weak thin wine, and, by an idiosyncratical necessity, he has produced a sparkling, racy book. He traces the falling-off in our literature to a change in wine. 'The Elizabethans quaffed sack, or "Gascoyne, or Rochel wyn,"' quoth he; 'and we had the giants of those days. The Charles II. comedy writers worked on claret. Port came into fashion--port sapped our brains--and, instead of Wycherly's Country Wife, and Vanbrugh's Relapse, we had