Disciples and their Master.
In my younger days they used to bring up the famous old wines, the
White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse, the Essex Junior, and the rest, in
their old cobwebbed, dusty bottles. The resurrection of one of these old
sepulchred dignitaries had something of solemnity about it; it was like
the disinterment of a king; the bringing to light of the Royal Martyr
King Charles I., for instance, that Sir Henry Halford gave such an
interesting account of. And the bottle seemed to inspire a personal
respect; it was wrapped in a napkin and borne tenderly and reverently
round to the guests, and sometimes a dead silence went before the first
gush of its amber flood, and

"The boldest held his breath
For a time."

But nowadays the precious juice of a long-dead vintage is transferred
carefully into a cut-glass decanter, and stands side by side with the
sherry from a corner grocery, which looks just as bright and apparently
thinks just as well of itself. The old historic Madeiras, which have
warmed the periods of our famous rhetoricians of the past and burned
in the impassioned eloquence of our earlier political demigods, have
nothing to mark them externally but a bit of thread, it may be, round
the neck of the decanter, or a slip of ribbon, pink on one of them and
blue on another.

Go to a London club,--perhaps I might find something nearer home that
would serve my turn,--but go to a London club, and there you will see
the celebrities all looking alike modern, all decanted off from
their historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the
every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is
Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain
gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the
leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the
kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not
decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks, you will think it
sacrilege to brush a cobweb from your cork by and by. O little
fool, that has published a little book full of little poems or other
sputtering tokens of an uneasy condition, how I love you for the one
soft nerve of special sensibility that runs through your exiguous
organism, and the one phosphorescent particle in your unilluminated
intelligence! But if you don't leave your spun-sugar confectionery
business once in a while, and come ou