“Come, Christopher, and leave all meaner things,
To low ambition and the pride of kings;
Let us, since life can little else supply;
Than just to swallow poison and to die;
Expatiate free o’er all this dreadful field,
Try what the brewer, what the baker yield;
Explore the druggists’ shop, the butchers’ stall;
Expose their roguery, and—damn them all!”
Pope.
Melancholy as the details are, there is something almost ludicrous, we think, in the very extent to which the deceptions are carried. So inextricably are we all immersed in this mighty labyrinth of fraud, that even the venders of poison themselves are forced, by a sort of retributive justice, to swallow it in their turn.—Thus the apothecary, who sells the poisonous ingredients to the brewer, chuckles over his roguery, and swallows his own drugs in his daily copious exhibitions of Brown stout. The brewer in his turn, is poisoned by the baker, the wine-merchant, and the grocer. And, whenever the baker’s stomach fails him, he meets his coup de grace in the adulterated drugs of his friend the apothecary, whose health he has been gradually contributing to undermine, by feeding him every morning on chalk and alum, in the shape of hot rolls.