admire and cherish. Sever the connection, and, like a bad swimmer without his life-belt, a few struggles will suffice to finish it.

Strip wickedness of its accessories, and you'll not have to call it a snare. When it ceases to be "picturesque," it ceases to be perilous.

SHALL BAGMEN DRINK WINE?

IT is clear that we must have fallen upon a very dull season of the year, or the 'Times' would not have devoted so large a portion of its space to the controversy now agitating the Bagmen, as to whether they should drink wine at their dinner or not.

As it appears, however, to be a National Question, I incline to interest myself in it; and having duly weighed all that has been said on either side, I pronounce for the no-wine party. They declare that they have no desire to take wine, and they ask to be excused paying for it. The others opine that the greatest-happiness principle may occasionally press hard on individual interest, while on the whole it works for good; and that as wine is a great cementer of friendships, and tends in a high degree to draw closer the ties of brotherhood, it is a useful adjunct to such gatherings as theirs; and they less openly

suggest that wine, in England at least, has a certain smack of gentility about it, not without its advantage to the social station of Commercial Travellers, and eminently conducive to that high estimation in which these Gentlemen of the Road are deservedly held.

There is a great deal to be said for "the winers." It is one of those broad cases which soar above common sense, and rise to the higher region of sympathies, interests, and popular impressions. I can well imagine an ingenious man making a strong case for the Bacchanals.

Between the man who drinks wine and him who drinks beer at dinner, what an ocean of social difference may be said to roll! Wine is a brevet of gentility; it is the stamp of station, sharp, defined, and indelible. He who sits at table with his decanter beside him, knows that there, at least, his flank is defended. Wine, besides, as to Beer, is as the rapier to the single-stick; the whole use of the arm is at once more elegant, more graceful, and refined. The taper wine-glass offers to the hand the momentary resting-place before raising gracefully to the lips, and admits of many a little coquetry of winebibbing order, such as looking through, and the like. But how is the most gifted of men to dally with his quart? What amount of manipulation will throw elegance over his pewter?

C. T. knows this well. This man of patterns and fast trotters and box-coats is a devoted cultivator of the graces. Let the barmaids say what they think of his captivations. Who like him to weld the language of commerce to the purposes of Cupid, and convey through "raw goods" the declaration of a ripe passion? It was not, however, very easy to advance all these in the controversy, however they might have been made, as I feel they must, the subject of friendly and earnest remonstrance in private -“Wine Travellers" addressing "No-wine" with a natural eagerness to avoid the publicity of a newspaper discussion, and saying how indecorous and inexpedient it was to let the world have even a transient peep into that sanctuary of the road, the Commercial Room.

I am old enough to remember a controversy very like this in a distinguished cavalry regiment, and where one rebellious member of the mess insisted on his right not only to drink hock, but to have what was strangely called the "black bottle" on the table at his side--a breach of the dinner unities so gross, so outrageous, and so unheard-of, that it shook the discipline of the corps to the centre, and led to most serious quarrels.

Has C. T.-I ask for information—taken the ground of the anti-black-bottles in this question?

Is his fear that of a man who dreads to think of a time when pewter shall jostle cut-glass, and the vulgar quart in all its ungainly coarseness stand side by side with crystal? Does his prescient imagination display before him the degenerate manners and coarse habits that will thus flow in? Does he see in his mind's eye a future C. T. wiping the froth from his lips with, mayhap, his hand? Does he speculate on the decline of those airy graces that men display with the glass, and which are denied to the pint-pot? If so, I say, many of my sympathies are with him. I can foresee all these things, and my heart saddens to think of a commercial room less like a cavalry mess, and some future C. T.s that one would not mistake for the Fusilier Guards.

The wine system of the commercial travellers was not, then, a mere conviviality-it was something far more elevated and refined. It was the result of a process of reasoning on the lives, ways, and habits of Englishmen, their prejudices and their impressions. The men who drink wine are a category like the men who drive gigs. They are a sort of small Brahmins— Bagmen Brahmins, who would lose caste by beer. In the ante-Gladstone age Wine symbolised station: it was dear. Now, whatever is dear in England means not alone the luxury of the rich, but of birth, education, refinement, and condition. To reduce the ques-·