Chap. XXV Burlesque, Ridiculous, and Out-of-the-Way Thoughts, Against Drunkenness
It is reported that Gerson should say, That there was no difference between a man’s killing himself at one stroke, or to procure death by several, in getting drunk.
Somebody has burlesqued this verse of Ovid1:—
Vina parant animos, faciuntque coloribus aptos.1a
And thus changed it,
Vina parant asinos, faciuntque furoribus aptos.
Cyneas2 alluding to those high trees to which they used to fasten the vines, said one day, discoursing on wine, that it was not without reason that his mother was hanged upon so high a gibbet.
“3The diversion that people took heretofore in making one another drunk, appeared more heinous to St. Augustine than an assassination, for he maintained, that those who made any one drunk, did him greater injury than if they had given him a stab with a dagger.
“A Greek4 physician once wrote a letter to Alexander, in which he begged him to remember, that every time that he drank wine, he drank the pure blood of the earth, and that he must not abuse it.
“5Some poets say, that it was the blood of the gods wounded in their battle with the giants.
“6The Severians in St. Epiphanius, hold, that it was engendered by a serpent, and it is for that reason that the vine is so strong. And the Encratites, in the same author, imagine to themselves that it was the gall of the devil.
“Noah7 in an hour of drunkenness,” says St. Jerom, “let his body be seen naked, which he had kept covered for six hundred years.”
1a. Ovid, Ars Amatoria 237.
1. Sphinx Theol. p. 682.
2. Diver, cur. t. i. p. 141.
3. Rep. des Lett. Janv. 1687. Art. I.
4. Androcydes.
5. Entret. de Voiture, et de Costar, Lett. 29.
6. Lib. i. Heres. 47.
7. Ep. ad Ocean.