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Through a Glass Lightly: Confession of a Reluctant Water Drinker (The London Library)
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About Through A Glass Lightly: Confession Of A Reluctant
Product Description The love of drinking was well-developed in the nineteenth-century Englishman. With chapters on port, claret, sherry, champagne, Burgundy, Madeira, wine cellars, glasses and butlers, Through a Glass Lightly is a love letter to wine and everything that came with it. But the passionate tale has a sorry ending: in the final two chapters, the author develops gout and has to become a teetotaller in order to be able to take out life insurance. The books in "Found on the Shelves" have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over seventeen miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it. From essays on dieting in the 1860s to instructions for gentlewomen on trout-fishing, from advice on the ill health caused by the "modern" craze of bicycling to travelogues from Norway, they are as readable and relevant today as they were more than a century ago. Review "Thomas Tylston Greg pays homage to a drink many of us love in Through a Glass Lightly: Confession of a Reluctant Water Drinker. Don’t let the title fool you; it is wine he celebrates, not H20. The author looks at the beloved beverage from the nostalgic perspective of someone who has had to give it up. As such, it’ll make you appreciate wine all the more." — Bustle "A perfect stocking filler for any of your friends who have an interest in wine…" — Standpoint "You should buy this book for the one-liners alone." — The Times (UK) "Written in the kind of clubbable style which will be familiar to anyone the reviews and essays of WE Henley or Max Beerbohm." - Spectator "An inspired idea...an innovative series." - Spectator (of the London Library series) "A heavenly little series." - Observer's Best Holiday Reads 2016 About the Author Thomas Tylston Greg was a member of a wealthy mill-owning Manchester family. He worked as a solicitor and married Mary Hope when he was 37 and she was 45. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PORT "Claret for boys” (methinks I hear the Great Doctor with superb finality), “Port for Men, and Brandy for Heroes.” Probably he was right—he so often was right. But a change has come: at this present he would scarce endorse his judgment. Not with unquenchable thirst, and head and nerves immovable, do we drain off those brandies and waters on which our Benbows suffered and were strong. Men have been since Agamemnon, and men will be. The heroic is still attainable; but it has changed its environment, and to seek it in the petit verre, sipped as a digestive after the banquet’s close, were a vain and idle thing. But Johnson speaks truth in the main; for to hack our retracing way through the impenetrable thicket of the years into that sweet and flowering meadowland of adolescence, where the wine was but an attribute of dessert, and it was among the dried cherries and the Elva plums that you looked for its essentials; to transport our big hulking bodies into that ineffable backward, when power was potentiality at best, and ignorance at worst was bliss; to do this, I say, is merely impossible. If Claret be for Boys, and I neither admit it nor deny, then is that cellar closed. But to be Men is for all of us; so for Men is Port. I had said it is the sole and only drink; though many excellent—comparatively excellent—folk there be that give the palm to ginger beer. And yet, on mature reflection, the earlier thought, quick-leaping and unpremeditated, was best. Yes; Port is the only drink. Drink, mind you: not nectar, as some would have you believe! Nectar is but a vague and shilly-shallying poetasterism, which can by no stretch of language be applied to the nobler stuff. For the gods, and Primitive Man in their image, drank only whe
