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The inevitable toper, the perambulating musician, the old woman standing in a doorway, the gossips, the children, and the dog not house-broken may stand for the eternal Ostade, while the merry-makings of David Teniers are too much alike. However, this touch of spleen is the outcome of seeing so many bituminous canvases.
The Malek might, however, have had his revenge upon the edifying soldier, had he known as well as I did that he had gone over to the town of Nousreddin expressly to amuse himself with the women of the country, and had doubtless paid as much attention to the bouza as the most sturdy toper in Berber.
New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stoke of fate for this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary fails upon a Sunday, when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper feels called upon to go to church.
This does not look like an habitual toper. His English acquaintances in Italy were, he said in derision, all milksops. On the rare occasion of any of his former friends visiting him, he would urge them to have a carouse with him, but they had grown wiser.
No, sir, claret is the liquor for boys: port for men: but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy! Most toper sentiments! But Ramsay did not stint his guests. And these were constantly of a noble order. Lord Bute, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Bath, Lord Chesterfield, and the Duke of Richmond were often at the painter's table, discussing all sorts of political questions with him.
Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the boy's life. But Hermiston was not all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the bench with a steady hand and a clear head.
MacIan, your health!" Dusk was already dropping, the rustics in the tavern were already lurching and lumbering out of it by twos and threes, crying clamorous good nights to a solitary old toper that remained, before MacIan and Turnbull had reached the really important part of their discussion. MacIan wore an expression of sad bewilderment not uncommon with him.
There came a morning when for the first time I remembered that when in ordinary health I had no desire to breakfast; but there was a sense of such general exhaustion from power wasted over an unusual food mass not needed at the previous evening meal that my morning coffee was craved as the morning dram by the chronic toper.
'By the Mass, he cried at last, 'I have never had so much honest amusement out of my prosperity as hath been caused in me by my downfall. Fill up your glasses! 'We have still some distance to travel this evening, and must not drink more, I observed, for prudence told me that it was dangerous work for two sober country lads to keep pace with an experienced toper. 'So! said he in surprise.
There are thousands who practice errors day after day, and whose pervading thought is, that everything which is agreeable and pleasing cannot be hurtful. The slothful man loves his bed; the toper his drink, because it throws him into an exhilarative and exquisite mood; the gourmand makes his stomach his god; and the sensualist thinks his delights imperishable.
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