[Illustration: 'Now, George, my boy, there's a glass of Champagne for you. Don't get such stuff at school, eh?'
'H'm! Awfully sweet. Very good sort for ladies. But I've arrived at a time of life when I confess I like my wine dry.'
(From a drawing by John Leech in 'Punch.')]
To the dinners of Bloomsbury and Belgravia, as well as the suppers of Bohemia, Champagne imparts a charm peculiarly its own by placing all there present _en rapport_. The modern mind may well look back with shuddering horror to that dreary period when Champagne, if given at all, was doled out at dinner-parties 'like drops of blood.' No wonder the ladies used to fly from the table and the gentlemen to slide underneath it. And, speaking of the ladies, is not Champagne their wine _par excellence_? How would the fragile products of modern civilisation be able to outdo the most robust of their ancestresses--whose highest saltatory feats were the execution of the slow and stately minuet, the formal quadrille with its frequent rests, or at most the romping country dance--by whirling almost uninterruptedly in the mazes of the giddy waltz from nine in the evening until five in the morning, without the sustaining power the sparkling fluid affords them? Has it not on their tongues an influence equal to that which it exercises on their swiftly-flying feet, inspiring pretty prattle, sparkling repartee, enchanting smiles, and silvery laughter? Old Bertin du Rocheret was quite right when he invited his fair friends to continue drinking
'De ce nectar délicieux, Qui pétille dans vos beaux yeux Mieux qu'il ne brille dans mon verre.'
Since these lines were penned, many thousands of bright eyes have so borrowed an additional lustre.
It would certainly be going too far to suggest that flirtation and Champagne must have been introduced simultaneously, yet the former can only have attained perfection since the advent of the latter. Only consider what a failure a picnic or a garden-or water-party, or any other kind of entertainment to which that much-abused term _fête champêtre_ is applied, and where flirtation would be, without Champagne! As a matrimonial agent, Champagne's achievements outdo those of the cleverest of man[oe]uvring mammas. It was solely those two extra glasses at supper which emboldened young Impey Cue of the Foreign Office to summon up sufficient courage to propose in the conservatory to Miss Yellowboy, the great heiress; and Impey Cue now lords it at Yellowboy Park as though to the manor born. Nor must the part it plays on the eventful day when the fatal knot is firmly tied be overlooked. It has been cynically remarked that it is a painful spectacle even for the most hardened to witness the consigning of a victim to the doom matrimonial; and that it becomes all the more painful when, under the futile pretext of festivity, bewildered fathers, harassed mothers, sorrowing sisters, envious cousins, bored connections, and pitying friends, arrayed in their best attire, meet at an abnormally early hour round the miscalled social board. Still, fancy what a wedding breakfast would be without the accompaniment of Champagne!