To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’
Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was the Golden Syrup tin. The declaration about vipers came from the Natural History (1693) of Sir Thomas Blount, Bt, whose wife bore him five sons and nine daughters before he died, aged 47.
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I stumbled across that in following up something Sir John wrote about the ‘strong’ in the Golden Syrup motto having a subsidiary reference to a ‘wild beast’, from the Greek for which the English word treacle derives.
We all know about the treacle well in Alice, and the real treacle well at Binsey, and the verse in Jeremiah (viii:22) according to Coverdale’s translation: ‘I am hevy and abashed, for there is no more triacle in Galaad’ (which the Authorised Version makes a question, ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’).
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