Of all our venerable British of the two Isles professing a suckling attachment to an ancient port-wine, lawyer, doctor, squire, rosy admiral, city merchant, the classic scholar is he whose blood is most nuptial to the webbed bottle.  The reason must be, that he is full of the old poets.  He has their spirit to sing with, and the best that Time has done on earth to feed it.  He may also perceive a resemblance in the wine to the studious mind, which is the obverse of our mortality, and throws off acids and crusty particles in the piling of the years, until it is fulgent by clarity.  Port hymns to his conservatism.  It is magical:  at one sip he is off swimming in the purple flood of the ever-youthful antique.

By comparison, then, the enjoyment of others is brutish; they have not the soul for it; but he is worthy of the wine, as are poets of Beauty.  In truth, these should be severally apportioned to them, scholar and poet, as his own good thing.  Let it be so.

Meanwhile Dr. Middleton sipped.

After the departure of the ladies, Sir Willoughby had practised a studied curtness upon Vernon and Horace.

“You drink claret,” he remarked to them, passing it round.  “Port, I think, Doctor Middleton?  The wine before you may serve for a preface.  We shall have your wine in five minutes.”

The claret jug empty, Sir Willoughby offered to send for more.  De Craye was languid over the question.  Vernon rose from the table.

“We have a bottle of Doctor Middleton’s port coming in,” Willoughby said to him.

“Mine, you call it?” cried the doctor.

“It’s a royal wine, that won’t suffer sharing,” said Vernon.

“We’ll be with you, if you go into the billiard-room, Vernon.”

“I shall hurry my drinking of good wine for no man,” said the Rev. Doctor.

“Horace?”

“I’m beneath it, ephemeral, Willoughby.  I am going to the ladies.”

Vernon and De Craye retired upon the arrival of the wine; and Dr. Middleton sipped.  He sipped and looked at the owner of it.

“Some thirty dozen?” he said.

“Fifty.”

The doctor nodded humbly.

“I shall remember, sir,” his host addressed him, “whenever I have the honour of entertaining you, I am cellarer of that wine.”

The Rev. Doctor set down his glass.  “You have, sir, in some sense, an enviable post.  It is a responsible one, if that be a blessing.  On you it devolves to retard the day of the last dozen.”

“Your opinion of the wine is favourable, sir?”

“I will say this:—­shallow souls run to rhapsody:—­I will say, that I am consoled for not having lived ninety years back, or at any period but the present, by this one glass of your ancestral wine.”

“I am careful of it,” Sir Willoughby said, modestly; “still its natural destination is to those who can appreciate it.  You do, sir.”

“Still my good friend, still!  It is a charge; it is a possession, but part in trusteeship.  Though we cannot declare it an entailed estate, our consciences are in some sort pledged that it shall be a succession not too considerably diminished.”