T. T. Greg

“ We have taken the vine leaves from out of our hair and our second-rate life refuses to be comforted. The soda-water spits its little puny, restless, damnable bubbles against the cold white glass of a degenerate child of Bacchus, a glass which once had glowed and gleamed with alternate ruby and amber gold. Of what avails all our learning now? What boots it that we have learned to love, if death, in the guise of an insurance company’s doctor, has robbed us of our beloved? ”

“ My obiter dictum that the old Madeira had sunk into his dotage and had become tart and peevish degraded him instanter into the second-class, so that he became the drink of those who were yet young and uninitiate. And now Death, on the pale horse Insurance, has bid me stand and deliver, and offers me life only on the degrading terms of abject teetotalism. All is over; no longer do I descend—oh! facilis et amabilis descensus—into the cellar and watch with silent joy the removal, for my own immediate delectation, of the “storied urn” ”

“ For it seems that that better part of me, that which I most loved and valued, has evanished from my life, so that I am now become a new thing. A degenerate regeneration has taken place, and a novissiinus homunculus reigns in the stead of the old Noah. ”