and,
Her wages earning!
Laymen we spurn from our alliance,
Like brutes to art deaf, dumb to science.

Two gods alone
We serve and mate with;
One law we own,
Nor hold debate with:
Who lives the goodly student fashion
Must love and win love back with passion!

Among drinking-songs of the best period in this literature may be
reckoned two disputations between water and wine. In the one, Thetis
defends herself against Lyaeus, and the poet assists in vision at
their contest. The scene is appropriately laid in the third sphere,
the pleasant heaven of Venus. The other, which on the whole appears to
me preferable, and which I have therefore chosen for translation,
begins and ends with the sound axiom that water and wine ought never
to be mixed. It is manifest that the poet reserves the honour of the
day for wine, though his arguments are fair to both sides. The final
point, which breaks the case of water down and determines her utter
confusion, is curious, since it shows that people in the Middle Ages
were fully alive to the perils of sewage-contaminated wells.

THE CONTEST OF WINE AND WATER.

No. 51.

Laying truth bare, stripped of fable,
Briefly as I may be able,
With good reasons manifold,
I will tell why man should never
Copulate, but rather sever,
Things that strife and hatred hold.

When one cup in fell confusion
Wine with water blends, the fusion,
Call it by what name you will,
Is no blessing, nor deserveth
Any praise, but rather serveth
For the emblem of all ill.

Wine perceives the water present,
And with pain exclaims, "What peasant
Dared to mingle thee with me?
Rise, go forth, get out, and leave me!
In the same place, here to grieve me,
Thou hast no just claim to be.

"Vile and shameless in thy going,
Into cracks thou still art flowing,
That in foul holes thou mayst lie;
O'er the earth thou ought'st to wander,
On the earth thy liquor squander,
And at length in anguish die.

"How canst thou adorn a table?
No one sings or tells a fable
In thy presence dull and drear;
But the guest who erst was jolly,
Laughing, joking, bent on folly,
Silent sits when thou art near.

"Should one drink of thee to fulness,
Sound before, he takes an illness;
All his bowels thou dost