
“…the vinegar of the law, then the wine of the gospel…”
Heaven Taken By Storm
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal
“…the vinegar of the law, then the wine of the gospel…”
Heaven Taken By Storm
Source: Rigante series, Stormrider, Ch. 7
Context: No need for confusion, my dear Mulgrave [... ] Beautiful wine and sour vinegar come from exactly the same source. Curiously if one leaves a bottle of wine open for long enough it will become vinegar. Happily in this house wine never survives long enough to go bad.
“4781. The sweetest Wine makes the sharpest Vinegar.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“Then Hamilcar … was drowned in 228 B. C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants.”
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal
“3454. More Flies are taken with a Drop of Honey than a Tun of Vinegar.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“A fellow that makes no figure in company, and has a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar-cruet.”
Tour to the Hebrides, Sept. 30, 1773
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Within one cup pour vinegar and oil,
And look! unblent, unreconciled, they war.”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, lines 322–323 (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)
October 5, 1773
Recounted as a common saying of physicians at the time.
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)