Drinking and Reading

Giovanni Matteo Toscano
‘Petrus Alcionius XCVIII’

Quam vorax dapis heluo fuisti,
Quam meri bromii siticulosus,
Heluo Petre tam vorax librorum
Eras, Castaliae et sititor vndae:
Ut nunquam fueris satur bibendo,
Et nunquam fueris satur legendo:
Sic te Cynthius hinc et inde Bacchus
Suis annumerant, parumque certum est
Cui gratus fueris magis sacerdos.

Yes, you were a voracious glutton for a fine spread,
With quite a thirst, yes, for the riotous god’s own pure wine,
But, Peter, no less voracious a glutton were you
For books, and a thirster after Castalian water:
Just as you were never sated with imbibing,
You were also never sated with reading:
Thus Apollo on the one hand, and Bacchus on the other,
Count you amongst their own, and it is hardly clear
To which of the two you were the more gratifying priest.

Giovanni Matteo Toscano, Peplus italiae (Paris: ex officina Federic Morel, 1578), pp. 59-60. Cited and translated in George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2003), p. 167.

A Special Delight

He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish, there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early morning drinking in Greece.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p. 42.

Books and Beer on Credit

But the end of my first year [at Oxford] saw me heavily in debt: so many barrels of beer, so many books, shelf upon shelf of them, which had nothing to do with work. At Blackwell’s bookshop credit seemed to a newcomer endless (though they liked a little bit sometimes on account), but drinks were ordered through the college buttery and appeared on battels, as college bills were called (there was no credit given there) [...]

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: Slightly Foxed, 2010; 1971), p. 128.

Morning Optimism

Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy (London: Black Spring Press, 1991; 1972-1976), p. 109:

‘Goodness,’ I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.’

All I Want Out of Wines

"Mr. Barnes," answered the count, "all I want out of wines is to enjoy them."

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Signet Classics, 2022; 1926), p. 59.

What Students Drink

From Ælfric’s Colloquy. My translation.

Teacher: & hwæt drincst þu?
Student: Ealu, gif ic hæbbe, oþþe wæter gif ic næbbe ealu.

Teacher: And what do you drink?
Student: Beer, if I have it or water when I don't have beer.

No Exception

There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night the next morning will show the other side to his nature.

David Garnett, Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, n.d.; 1922 & 1924), p. 37.

The Intoxicated Undergraduate

It is an undeniable fact that undergraduates occasionally get drunk. Moreover, as I have before observed, when they get drunk they do it with a will. But, as in other classes of society, intoxication is rapidly becoming rarer and less respectable. I can remember orgies, which would not now be tolerated, which rose to the pitch of hurling tumblers at each other's heads: one noisy gentleman was temporarily squelched by a friend, who used a large bowl-full of milk-punch in the guise of a helmet, pressing it well down over his head and shoulders ; and they (I will not say we) finished by hunting the soberest man of the party with wild shrieks over the college grounds with the expressed intention of putting him safely to bed. He obstinately declined the proffered assistance.

[...]

The intoxicated undergraduate is generally beset by this shadowy idea, that he either has insulted, or immediately ought to insult, the college authorities. It was beautifully illustrated by a pupil of his whom my friend Brown discovered clinging desperately to a tree and trying to drive a corkscrew into the bark. "What on earth are you about?" he inquired. "I'm screwing up that old fool, Brown, into his room," was the touching reply.

Leslie Stephen, Sketches from Cambridge by A Don (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 1865), p. 77; p. 79.

Academic Lubrications

    The complex social and intellectual machinery of Oxford University at this time was lubricated by vast quantities of alcohol. Magdalen was perhaps one of the most bibulous of Oxford’s colleges, with its resident fellows being particularly prone to overindulgence. During 1924 and 1925, the Senior Common Room paid off a debt by selling twenty-four thousand bottles of port, raising the sum of £4,000. Fellows who wagered against each other would calculate their winnings in terms of cases of claret or port, rather than cash. The Senior Common Room butler was once observed carrying a silver tray laden with brandy and cigars through the college cloisters at eleven o’clock one morning. On being asked what he was doing, the butler replied that he was bringing one of the fellows his breakfast. Lewis kept a barrel of beer in his rooms to entertain colleagues and students, but otherwise seems to have avoided the alcoholic excesses of the prewar years.

Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Colorado Springs, CO: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013), pp. 115-16.

A Drinking Proverb

Humanum est potare
 
to drink is to be human.

Rodney M. Thomson (ed.), Tractatus garsiae or the translation of the relics of ss. gold and silver (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), p. 44 [479]. T.P.Q: May 1099.