Next morn a publican, whose tap, Had help’d to drain the vat so dry, Not having heard of the mishap, Came to demand a fresh supply, Protesting loudly that the last All previous specimens surpass’d, Possessing a much richer gusto Than formerly it ever us’d to, And begging, as a special favour, Some more of the exact same flavour.
“Zounds!” cried the brewer, “that’s a task More difficult to grant than ask; Most gladly would I give the smack Of the last beer to the ensuing, But where am I to find a Black And boil him down at every brewing?”
Professor Wilson, writing on brewing,[68] thus relates his conversion to the porter-drinker’s creed.
[68] Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. xxi.
“From ale we naturally get to porter—porter—drink ‘fit for the gods,’ being, in fact, likely to be, now and then, too potent for mere mortals. With porter we are less imbued than with ale (not but that for some years we have imported our annual butt of Barclay); and this we hold to be one of the great misfortunes of our life. We were early nurtured in love and affection for ‘good ale’ by our great aunt, with whom we were a young and frequent visitant. Excellent old Aunt Patty! She was a Yorkshire woman, and cousin (three times removed) to Mr. Wilberforce (the father). She too hated rum as the devil’s own brewage, but then she loved sound ale in the same ratio. Thus it happened, as we derived our faith in malt liquor from her, that we {371} penetrated not the mysteries of porter until our elder days. Our heresy was first effectually shaken by Charles Lamb, who, in his admirable way, proved to us that, in a hot forenoon, a draught of Meux or Barclay is beyond all cordial restoratives, and after a broiling peregrination (the stages were all full) from Coleridge’s lodgings at Highgate to town, gave us a specimen of the inspiring powers of porter in a perspiration, which we shall remember until the day of our death.” Lamb was known by all his friends to have an amiable weakness for porter, and the poet, in An Ode to Grog, thus commemorates the fact:—
The spruce Mr. Lamb (’pon my word it’s no flam) With Whitbread’s Entire makes his Pegasus jog; I’ll grant he’s a poet, but then he don’t show wit, In thinking that Porter is better than grog.
Burns was fond of porter, as of all other extracts of malt. He addressed the following lines to his friend Mr. Syme, along with a present of a dozen of bottled porter:—
O, had the malt thy strength of mind, Or hops the flavour of thy wit, ’Twere drink for first of human kind, A gift that e’en for Syme were fit.
We have given what we believe to be a correct historical account of the origin of porter. Peter Pindar, in the Lamentations of the Porter Vat, a poem in which he celebrates the bursting of a mighty porter vat at Meux’s Brewery, gives a somewhat less prosaic account:—