Professor George Saintsbury wrote:To find ’70 and ’73 always maintaining and improving their place to the very last bottle, when tears would have mingled with the wine but for spoiling it ; to see the ’90’s catching up and beating the (as it seemed to me) always over-rated ’87’s : or to pit against each other two such vintages as ’96 and ’97 from the same shipper—these were intellectual as well as merely sensuous exercises, and pleasing as both.
How little changes—except perhaps that we might contest his use of the word “merely†.
Professor George Saintsbury wrote:The best and most robustly and skilfully prepared wines, such as ’51, ’63, ’70, ’73, ’78, ’78, ’81, ’87, ’90, and most ’96’s with some ’97’s, probably arrive at their best between twenty and thirty.
Still today, ┰¥20 but ┰¤30 is not a bad guide.
Professor George Saintsbury wrote:A Canadian lady once told me that, when she was a girl, she was playing lawn-tennis with other maidens in the gardens of the late Professor
Goldwin Smith ‘over there.’ It was a very hot day, and he came and good-naturedly asked them if they would like something to drink. … after a few minutes, during which the damsels naturally became thirstier than ever, their host reappeared, bearing on a mighty silver salver glasses of—port wine!
It is possible, depending on the age range covered by the term “maiden†, that the man who argued for “the abolition of celibacy as a condition of the tenure of fellowships† might have had a specific motivation for the provision of something as sweet and alcoholic as “port wine†.
Professor George Saintsbury wrote:—then still the milk of donhood, as Greek was its unthreatened mother-tongue—
The Professor likes his em-dashes (“—†), and uses them and hyphens correctly. However, unlike Saintsbury, I am not fond of the American style of punctuation, in which commas and full stops, that properly belong to the outer quoting author, are instead placed within the quotation.