PRAISES OF THE WINE OF MONTEPULCIANO.

Oh! how widely wandereth he

Who, in the search of verity,

Keeps aloof from glorious wine!

Lo! the knowledge it bringeth to me.

For Barbarossa, this wine so bright,

With its rich red look and its strawberry light,

So invites me

And so delights me,

I should infallibly quench my inside with it,

Had not Hippocrates

And old Andromachus

Strictly forbidden it

And loudly chidden it,

So many stomachs have sickened and died with it.

Yet discordant as it is,

Two good biggins will not come amiss;

46Because I know, while I’m drinking them down,

What is the finish and what is the crown.

A cup of good Corsican

Does it at once;

Or a cup of old Spanish

Is next for the nonce:

Quackish resources are things for a dunce.

Cups of chocolate,

Ay, or tea,

Are not medicines

Made for me.

I would sooner take to poison,

Than a single cup set eyes on

Of that bitter and guilty stuff ye

Talk of by the name of coffee.

Let the Arabs and the Turks

Count it ’mongst their cruel works:

Foe of mankind black and turbid,

Let the throats of slaves absorb it.

Down in Tartarus,

Down in Erebus,

’Twas the detestable Fifty invented it;

The Furies then took it,

To grind and to cook it,

And to Proserpine all these presented it.

If the Mussulman in Asia

Doats on a beverage so unseemly,

I differ with the man extremely.

· · · · ·

There’s a squalid thing called beer:—

The man whose lips that thing comes near

Swiftly dies, or falling foolish,

Grows, at forty, old and owlish.

She that in the ground would hide her,

Let her take to English cider:

47He who’d have his death come quicker,

Any other Northern liquor.

Those Norwegians and those Laps

Have extraordinary taps:

Those Laps especially have strange fancies:

To see them drink,

I verily think

Would make me lose my senses.

But a truce to such vile subjects

With their impious, shocking objects,

Let me purify my mouth

In an holy cup o’ the south:

In a golden pitcher let me

Head and ears for comfort get me,

And drink of the vine of the wine benign

That sparkles warm in Sansovine;

48Or of that vermillion charmer

And heart-warmer,

Which brought up in Tregonzano

And on stony Giggiano,^[6]

Blooms so bright and lifts the head so

Of the toasters of Arezzo.

Francesco Redi (1626–1696).