BACCHUS AND BEER.
T is an undeniable fact, that the English are the greatest beer-drinking people in the world. The assertion may be disputed in favor of the Germans (and their beverage, lager bier,) but who can compare the thin resinous beer of Munich and Vienna with the heavy bodied, soporific, and sinewy London pale ale, Edinburgh ale, or Guiness Brown Stout, that has ever drank the latter malt liquors.
To believe in his native beer is a necessary part of the Englishman's religion, and it is with the proverbial Briton a trite saying, when an exile at Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Madrid, Constantinople, St. Petersburg, or Calcutta,
"You cawnt get a glass of hale in this blessed country—you knaw. You hawvent got the 'ops you knaw, and ye cawnt make it ye knaw."
English literature and English poetry are full of beer and redolent of malt and hops, from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to the present day. Tom Jones, Roderick Random, the Spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian, Fielding, Hume, Smollett, Pope, Addison, Dryden, Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson, never let slip a chance to prove the virtues and efficacy of beer, and 'Alf and 'Alf.
It was in a room in Barclay & Perkins' brewery in Southwark, then owned by Mr. Thrale, that Samuel Johnson, (who, if he was an obstinate, dogged, and overbearing old rascal,—yet was the father of modern English,) wrote the famous English Dictionary, and when Mr. Thrale died, Johnson being one of his executors, the property was sold to the Barclay & Perkins of that day for the sum of £135,000. The present brewery encloses fifteen acres of buildings and vats, and is the largest in the world but one.
The tribes that came from India and settled in Germany, to which Tacitus refers, were the first to introduce beer into Europe. The descendants of these long haired, fair skinned tribes, were long after, (in the sixteenth century,) the first to teach the English brewers the use of hops, for the people of England, of that day, made their beer after the manner of the ancient Egyptians, by the admixture of herbs, broom, and berries of the bay and ivy.