It was a long time since I had visited the City, and I accordingly devoted yesterday to it. As I am, in my quality of Teutonic knight, a beerbrewer, I turned my ‘cab’ to Barclay’s brewery, which the vastness of its dimensions renders almost romantic, and which is one of the most curious sights in London.
From twelve to fifteen thousand barrels, that is about twenty thousand quarts[64] of beer, are brewed here daily. Every thing is done by machinery, which is all set in motion by a single steam-engine. The beer is boiled in four vats, each of which holds three hundred barrels. The hops are first put into the vat or cauldron dry, and kept stirring by a machine, that they may not burn. During this process the sweet-wort flows in upon them. There is a curious apparatus for cooling the beer in hot weather;—it is made to pass through a number of pipes like those of an organ, through which a stream of cold water is then let to flow, and so on, alternately. At last the beer flows into a barrel as high as a house, of which there are ninety-nine under gigantic sheds. You can’t conceive the strange effect of seeing a vessel holding six hundred thousand quarts tapped for you to drink a glass of porter, which, ‘par parenthèse,’ is excellent, and cold as ice. These barrels are covered with a little hill of fresh sand, and preserve the beer fresh and good for a twelvemonth. It is drawn off into smaller casks, and sent out to the consumer. The drawing off is effected with great rapidity by means of leathern pipes, as the smaller casks are arranged in readiness under the floor on which the great ones stand.
A hundred and fifty horses, like elephants, one of which can draw a hundred hundred-weight, are daily employed in carrying out the beer.
A single enormous chimney devours the smoke of the whole establishment; and from the roof of the principal building you have a very fine panoramic view of London.
I next proceeded to the West-India docks and warehouses,—an immeasurable work; one of those at the sight of which the most cold-blooded spectator must feel astonishment, and a sort of awe at the greatness and the might of England. What a capital lies here in buildings, wares, and vessels! The admirably excavated basin, which it took me half an hour to walk round, is thirty-six feet deep, and surrounded by sheds and warehouses, some of which are five or six stories high: some of them are built entirely of iron, the foundations only being of stone. This mode of building has however been found to be dangerous, from the contraction and expansion of the metal. In these boundless depositories there was sugar enough to sweeten the whole adjoining basin, and rum enough to make half England drunk. Two thousand artisans and overseers are commonly employed daily, and the value of the goods here collected is estimated at twenty millions sterling; exclusive of the stores, which are kept in great quantities in a storehouse, so that the breaking or spoiling of any of the tools delays the work only a few minutes. The number of well-contrived tools and machines is wonderful. I looked on with great pleasure while blocks of mahogany and other foreign woods, many larger than the largest oak, were lifted up like feathers, and deposited on drays or wagons as carefully as if they had been the most brittle ware. Everything is on a colossal scale. On each side of the basin lie rows of ships, most of them newly painted. There are two basins, one for import and the other for export. I was obliged to leave this interesting place sooner than I wished, as the entrance-gate and all the warehouses are closed at four o’clock. The gatekeeper does not take the slightest trouble to ascertain whether there is any one in the yard, so that it appeared to me one would have to bivouac there for the night if one missed the hour. The man very coolly assured me that if the King were there he would not wait a minute; I made my escape therefore as quickly as I could.
On my way home I passed a booth where a man was calling out that here were the famous German dwarf and his three dwarf children; the living skeleton; and, to conclude, the fattest girl that ever was seen. I paid my shilling, and went in. After waiting a quarter of an hour, till five other spectators arrived, the curtain was drawn up, and the most impertinent ‘charlatanérie’ exhibited that ever I witnessed. The living skeleton was a very ordinary sized man, not much thinner than I. As an excuse for our disappointment, we were assured that when he arrived from France he was a skeleton, but that since he had eaten good English beef-steaks, it had been found impossible to check his tendency to corpulence.
The fattest woman in the world was a perfect pendant to the skeleton. She was not fatter than the Queen of Virginia Water.
Last came the so-called dwarfs—which were neither more nor less than the little children of the ‘Impressario,’ stuck into a sort of bird-cage, their faces shaded, and only their hands and feet left free. With the former the little wretches made a horrible noise with great bells.—Here closed the exhibition:—an English hoax, which no Frenchman could have executed more burlesquely nor with more effrontery.
July 29th.
Since I became Mr. Deville’s pupil I cannot help measuring the skulls of all my acquaintances with my eye, before I open myself to them; and to-day, like the man in Kotzebue’s comedy, I examined an English servant I was hiring, ‘in optima forma.’ Let us hope the result will not be similar,—for the line drawn through the ear gave good promise. And here it struck me that the common proverb (and how much popular truth do such often contain!) is perfectly in accordance with Deville’s principle—“He has it behind the ear, beware of him!” (Er hat es hinter den Ohren, hütet euch vor ihm!)