The
egg lies under many disadvantages. If you leave the egg-cup on the
table, you have to steady it with the one hand, and carry the floating
nutriment a distance of about two feet with the other, and always in a
confoundedly small spoon, and sometimes with rather unsteady fingers. To
avoid this, you take the egg-cup in your hand, and every spoonful have
to lay it down again, in order to help yourself to bread; so, upon the
whole, we disapprove of eggs, unless, indeed, you take them in our old
mode at Oxford; that is two eggs mashed up with every cup of tea, and
purified with a glass of hot rum.
But the glass of wine--can anything be more easy? One would think
not--but if you take notice next time you empty a gallon with a friend,
you will see that, sixteen to one, he makes the most convulsive efforts
to do with ease what a person would naturally suppose was the easiest
thing in the world. Do you see, in the first place, how hard he grasps
the decanter, leaving the misty marks of five hot fingers on the
glittering crystal, which ought to be pure as Cornelia's fame? Then
remark at what an acute angle he holds his right elbow as if he were
meditating an assault on his neighbour's ribs; then see how he claps the
bottle down again as if his object were to shake the pure ichor, and
make it muddy as his own brains.
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