Burton Ale.—Many of our readers may recollect the dispute, about three years since, between the Burton Ale brewers and the Useful Knowledge Society, when the excellence of the ale was proved to be the result of the hard water of which it was manufactured flowing over a limestone rock. A chemist was dispatched to Burton, and the settlement of the matter assumed the importance of a discovery; though in the last century this fact was ingeniously explained by Dr. Darwin, in a letter to Mr. Pilkington, upon the supposition that some of the saccharine matter in the malt combines with the calcareous earth of hard waters, and forms a sort of mineral sugar, which, like true sugar, is convertible into spirits.
Read-y Wit.—A young man, in a large company, descanting very flippantly on a subject, his knowledge of which was evidently very superficial, the Duchess of Devonshire asked his name. "'Tis Scarlet," replied a gentleman who stood by. "That may be," said her Grace, "and yet he is not deep read."
CANTON.
Anti-free Trade.—An odd instance of the restrictive system occurred in the embassy from the emperor Otho to Nicephorus Phocas. The Greeks making a display of their dress, he told them that in Lombardy the common people wore as good clothes as they.—"How," they said, "can you procure them?"—"Through the Venetians and Amalfitan dealers," he replied, "who gain their subsistence by selling them to us." The foolish Greeks were very angry, and declared that any dealer presuming to export their fine clothes should be flogged.
Footnote 1: [(return)] Dartmoor appears the head-quarters of dreariness and desolation, forming a mountain tract of nearly 80,000 acres in extent, strewed with granite boulders and fragments of rocks, and appearing to set cultivation at defiance.—Brande's Outline of Geology.
Footnote 2: [(return)] John Britton and E.W. Brayley: in the Beauties of England and Wales, vol. iv.
Footnote 3: [(return)] A poet of considerable eminence in his day, born at Tavistock, in the year 1590. He was noticed by Selden, Drayton, Brooke, Glanville, and Ben Jonson.
Footnote 4: [(return)] Warner's Walk through the Western Counties.