Odd things have been said of Gin. Burke, in one of his spirituel flights, exclaimed, "Let the thunders of the pulpit descend upon drunkenness, I for one stand up for gin." This is a sort of paraphrase on Pope's couplet:
"This calls the church to deprecate our sin,
And hurls the thunder of our laws on gin."
[What an Epicure Eats in his Life-Time.]
In a life of sixty-five years' duration, with a moderate daily allowance of mutton, for instance, an epicure will have consumed a flock of 350 sheep; and altogether for dinner alone, adding to his mutton a reasonable allowance of potatoes and other vegetables, with a pint of wine daily for thirty years of this period, above thirty tons of solids and liquids must have passed through his stomach. Soyer, in his practical work, The Modern Housewife, says:—
Take seventy years of the life of an epicure, beyond which age of that class of bon vivants arrive, and even above eighty, still in the full enjoyment of degustation, &c. (for example, Talleyrand, Cambacères, Lord Sefton, &c.); if the first of the said epicures, when entering on the tenth spring of his extraordinary career, had been placed on an eminence—say the top of Primrose Hill—and had had exhibited before his infantine eyes the enormous quantity of food his then insignificant person would destroy before he attained his seventy-first year—first, he would believe it must be a delusion: then, secondly, he would inquire where the money could come from to purchase so much luxurious extravagance?
Imagine on the top of the above-mentioned hill, a rushlight of a boy just entering his tenth year, surrounded with the recherché provision and delicacies claimed by his rank and wealth, taking merely the consumption of his daily meals. By close calculating, he would be surrounded and gazed at by the following number of quadrupeds, birds, fishes, &c.:—By no less than 30 oxen, 200 sheep, 100 calves, 200 lambs, 50 pigs; in poultry, 1,200 fowls, 300 turkeys, 150 geese, 400 ducklings, 263 pigeons, 1,400 partridges, pheasants, and grouse; 600 woodcocks and snipes; 600 wild ducks, widgeon, and teal; 450 plovers, ruffes, and reeves; 800 quails, ortolans, and dotterels, and a few guillemots, and other foreign birds; also, 500 hares and rabbits, 40 deer, 120 guinea fowl, 10 peacocks, and 360 wild fowl. In the way of fish, 120 turbot, 140 salmon, 120 cod, 260 trout, 400 mackerel, 300 whitings, 800 soles and slips, and 400 flounders; 400 red mullet, 200 eels, 150 haddocks, 400 herrings, 5,000 smelts, and some 100,000 of those delicious silvery whitebait, besides a few hundred species of fresh-water fishes. In shell-fish, 20 turtles, 30,000 oysters, 1,500 lobsters or crabs, 300,000 prawns, shrimps, sardines, and anchovies. In the way of fruit, about 500lb. of grapes, 360lb. of pine-apples, 600 peaches, 1,400 apricots, 240 melons, and some 100,000 plums, greengages, apples, pears, and some millions of cherries, strawberries, raspberries, currants, mulberries, and an abundance of other small fruit, viz. walnuts, chestnuts, dry figs, and plums. In vegetables of all kinds, 5,475lb. weight; about 2,434-3/4lb. of butter, 684lb. of cheese, 21,000 eggs, 100 ditto of plovers. Of bread, 4½ tons, half-a-ton of salt and pepper, near 2-1/8 tons of sugar; and if he had happened to be a bibacious boy, he could have formed a fortification or moat round the said hill with the liquids he would have to partake of to facilitate the digestion of the above-named provisions, which would amount to no less than 11,673¾ gallons which may be taken as below:—49 hogsheads of wine, 1,368¾ gallons of beer, 584 gallons of spirits, 342 ditto of liqueur, 2,394 ditto of coffee, cocoa, tea, &c., 304 gallons of milk, 2,736 gallons of water—all of which would actually protect him and his anticipated property from any young thief or fellow-schoolboy. This calculation has for its basis the medium scale of the regular meals of the day, which, in sixty years, amounts to no less than 33¾ tons weight of meat, farinaceous food, and vegetables, &c.; out of which the above are in detail the probable delicacies that would be selected by an epicure through life.
[Epitaph on Dr. William Maginn.]
Dr. Maginn, it is to be regretted, died at an early age, of consumption. The following epitaph, written for him by his friend, John G. Lockhart, conveys a tolerably correct idea of his habits:—