“An inner cellar!” exclaimed the doctor.

“Sacred from the butler.  It is interdicted to Stoneman.  Shall I offer myself as guide to you?  My cellars are worth a visit.”

“Cellars are not catacombs.  They are, if rightly constructed, rightly considered, cloisters, where the bottle meditates on joys to bestow, not on dust misused!  Have you anything great?”

“A wine aged ninety.”

“Is it associated with your pedigree that you pronounce the age with such assurance?”

“My grandfather inherited it.”

“Your grandfather, Sir Willoughby, had meritorious offspring, not to speak of generous progenitors.  What would have happened had it fallen into the female line!  I shall be glad to accompany you.  Port?  Hermitage?”

“Port.”

“Ah!  We are in England!”

“There will just be time,” said Sir Willoughby, inducing Dr. Middleton to step out.

A chirrup was in the reverend doctor’s tone:  “Hocks, too, have compassed age.  I have tasted senior Hocks.  Their flavours are as a brook of many voices; they have depth also.  Senatorial Port! we say.  We cannot say that of any other wine.  Port is deep-sea deep.  It is in its flavour deep; mark the difference.  It is like a classic tragedy, organic in conception.  An ancient Hermitage has the light of the antique; the merit that it can grow to an extreme old age; a merit.  Neither of Hermitage nor of Hock can you say that it is the blood of those long years, retaining the strength of youth with the wisdom of age.  To Port for that!  Port is our noblest legacy!  Observe, I do not compare the wines; I distinguish the qualities.  Let them live together for our enrichment; they are not rivals like the Idaean Three.  Were they rivals, a fourth would challenge them.  Burgundy has great genius.  It does wonders within its period; it does all except to keep up in the race; it is short-lived.  An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port.  I cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode.  Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter, Burgundy the pindaric dithyramb.  What do you say?”

“The comparison is excellent, sir.”

“The distinction, you would remark.  Pindar astounds.  But his elder brings us the more sustaining cup.  One is a fountain of prodigious ascent.  One is the unsounded purple sea of marching billows.”

“A very fine distinction.”

“I conceive you to be now commending the similes.  They pertain to the time of the first critics of those poets.  Touch the Greeks, and you can nothing new; all has been said:  ’Graiis . . . praeter, laudem nullius avaris.’  Genius dedicated to Fame is immortal.  We, sir, dedicate genius to the cloacaline floods.  We do not address the unforgetting gods, but the popular stomach.”

Sir Willoughby was patient.  He was about as accordantly coupled with Dr. Middleton in discourse as a drum duetting with a bass-viol; and when he struck in he received correction from the paedagogue-instrument.  If he thumped affirmative or negative, he was wrong.  However, he knew scholars to be an unmannered species; and the doctor’s learnedness would be a subject to dilate on.