Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Pauls,
A famous preacher in the halcyon days
Of Queen Elizabeth of endless praise,
was at the beginning of Queen Mary's cruel reign, Master of Westminster School. Izaak Walton would have pronounced him a very honest man from his picture at Brazen Nose College, (to which he was a great Benefactor,) inasmuch as he is there represented “with his lines, hooks and other tackling, lying in a round on one hand, and his angles of several sorts on the other.” But says Fuller, whilst Nowell was catching of Fishes, Bonner was catching of Nowell, and understanding who he was, designed him to the shambles, whither he had certainly been sent, had not Mr. Francis Bowyer then a London merchant, conveyed him upon the seas. Nowell was fishing upon the Banks of the Thames when he received the first intimation of his danger, which was so pressing that he dared not go back to his own house to make any preparation for his flight. Like an honest angler he had taken with him provision for the day; and when in the first year of England's deliverance he returned to his own country and his own haunts, he remembered that on the day of his flight he had left a bottle of beer in a safe place on the bank; there he looked for it, and “found it no bottle but a gun, such the sound at the opening thereof; and this, says Fuller, is believed, (casualty is mother of more inventions than industry,) the original of Bottled Ale in England.”
Whatever my Master may think of me, whether he may class me with Grey Bennet's weak and frothy, or Dean Nowell's wholesome and strong, be the quality of the liquor what it may, he certainly mistook the capacity of the vessel, even if he allowed it to be a Magnum Bonum or Scotch Pint. Greatly was he mistaken when he supposed that a large portion of my intellectual resources was expended, and of my common-place Book also.—The former come from a living spring,—and the latter is like the urn under a River God's arm. I might hint also at that Tun which the Pfalzgraf Johannes Kasimir built at Heidelberg in the year 1591,
Dessgleichen zu derselben zeit
War keines in der Christenheit:
but alas! it is now a more melancholy object than the Palace to which it appertained,—for the ruins of that Palace are so beautiful, that the first emotion with which you behold them is that of unmingled pleasure:—and the tun is empty! My Master, however, who imagines that my vat runs low and is likely to be drawn dry, may look at one of the London Brewers great casks.
END OF VOL. IV.
W. Nicol, 51, Pall Mall.