It hath, on the other hand, been affirmed by an ingenious clerk, that apple-eating is a masculine passion, and that no woman hath a dominating natural relish for this hearty fruit; which, proven, would seem to indicate (as a burnt child dreads the fire, according to the proverb) that Eve's mindful daughters shun by instinct the immemorial enemy. If, indeed, it needs must be demonstrated by some unborn logician, that our primal happiness was forfeited by nought else, beyond the serpent's wiles, than a Gilliflower or a Greening, hanging on the representative tree, and criterion of obedience,--then there exist myriads of her descendants with the ancestral weakness, who shall look on our abused common mother with new and tender consideration, such as her disastrous connection with a plum, or a currant, or a quince, could never have evoked.
The apple is the only fruit which deserveth the name of genial. A peach is but a Capuan dish; the lime approacheth with cold infrequency; the amiable pear hath too little character; the grape is chiefly suggestive, anticipatory of its hereafter, as the larva of the gorgeous butterfly. But Apple standeth on her own merits. Tart, jelly, fritters, dumpling, enter not into the imagination of her possessor. Nay, nor even cider, that fretful disempurpled wine,--wine, as it were, with the bar sinister. Apple hath not the flippant gayety of the cherry; her glad humor is somewhat dashed with cynicism: she warmeth the heart, and trippeth up the tongue, and is, in the accepted phrase of artists, "a good fellow;" foe to unrighteous melancholy, as Laurentius writ, and frankly compassionate. She should have had Horace for her court-poet. One can conceive of poor, manly Fielding loving her at the modest ratio of three dozen a day; and of little Mr. Pope brushing her aside with fastidious petulance.
The friends of Apple, your sworn familiars, who offend not her sun-mottled exterior with barbaric divisions of the knife, may be known by their ready wit and their bright glances. Hath not the wholesome autumn light, which filtered into the fruit they affect, permeated their moral temperament? They must needs be sound, consolatory, humane, and fit to wrestle with every wind that blows. "Man is that he eats," we read among the bewilderments of German speculation. But of her chaste and subtle cup, rimmed with gold or crimson, as Nature willed, the elect drink invigoration.