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will charge their employers first-class expenses and travel third, pocketing the difference; persons, again, who have abundant leisure and money, but to whom time is a less object than money.

I may here say that there are many lines on which the choice of class virtually lies only between the first and the third. When the second class is not properly cushioned and padded, as is the case on some lines, I do not see that the second class is at all preferable to the third, except on conventional considerations. My own prejudices are entirely in favour of first-class carriages. I do not believe people who tell me they travel second instead of first, because they prefer the second to the first. The great requisite of railway travelling is to deaden, as far as possible, the innumerable little shocks which the vibration of the carriage occasions to the brain and spinal cord. I believe that medical men are now fully alive to the fact that an infinite amount of mischief is done, in case of heart or brain feebleness or disease, by much railway travelling. The man of business who comes up to town from Brighton, by the time he reaches his office, feels that half a day's work has been taken out of him by the demands which the railway journey has made upon his nervous powers. Now, the object is to reduce this demand as far as possible, and this is only done in the first-class carriage. It might be much better

done than is the case at present. I noticed at the late Paris Exhibition, some carriages where the padding was so extraordinarily dense that the vibration must be reduced to a vanishing fraction. That

is the kind of padding which ought to be supplied to first and second class carriages. When second-class people cannot get any padding at all, they ought to go third. I will add one further piece of advice, which I am sure will be endorsed by the facultykeep the windows closed during swift motion, but open them at every station. On our railways, more persons are killed by draughts than by accidents.

Concerning Beer.

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E all know the burden of that pretty chorus in Faust where the students sing that they care not whether it be wine or beer, so that liquor does not fail; and one of them lays down the rule, that although a man may lose his appetite through love, he must not lose his thirst. I am sometimes divided between my patriotic love of my country's bitter beer and that taste for German beer which I first imbibed at Heidelberg beneath the shadow of the mighty Tun itself. That Tun, where a family might be almost comfortably lodged, has for ages been only a tradition; that is to say, void of beer. But large as it is, I think you might set it floating in the enormous vats of some of our great English brewers. I don't know whether the famous Strasburg beer was ever really French, but the Bavarian beer was always the chief favourite. The native Paris Beer, which hardly ever found its way to a good table, was simply below contempt. It had the essentially Gallic property of an enormous amount of fizz, but was hardly palatable, no thing or

Beer is

substance, a choleraic instead of a choleric tendency, and did not, like genuine good beer, 'wrap you round like a blanket.' I am fertile in hints that will make any person's fortune except my own, and I advise our English brewers to make a peaceable invasion of Paris and take possession of all the cafés. Ind and Coope they know well; you could get a bottle for fifteen sous anywhere; but they do not know other great brewers as they deserve to be known. no longer insular, but has now a cosmopolitan character. The greatest monuments of British dominion in India are the enormous heaps of empty bottles of Bass; and a friend of mine found a lot of pale ale in the Arabian desert itself. The pious Mohammedans acutely argue, first, that beer does not intoxicate, in which I opine they are mistaken; and in the next place, that Mohammed could not have prohibited beer, since he never knew, and would not have prohibited it if he had once drunk it. In this last particular, they are probably correct.

With my true Vaterland taste, I am glad the various conduits of German beer are set flowing in the metropolis. In Oxford Street or in the Strand you can get a glass of Vienna beer, from Dreher or Fanta. But Dreher's or Fanta's beer was never meant to be taken from the prosaic glass; they should be drained by the goblet, as is so lustily shown to us in those scenes at the Opera where beer is introduced. I see that the retailers of German beer have somewhat

reduced their prices; but as an enlightened beer-drinker, I still think that they might give us more liberal measure at a more liberal price.

Without going so far as a poet of somewhat bacchanalian mind who is supposed to have written a 'Hymn to Beer,' I might say that I have for years given an impartial and zealous investigation to the subject. As a volunteer and uncommissioned juryman I sat in severe judgment on the merits of competing candidates at the Paris Exhibition. I believe I can distinguish the rival shades of different Viennese and Bavarian beers. I can even draw comparisons, which are certainly odious, between the different brewers of that most pleasant town of Burton-on-Trent. At Cambridge I have drunk that famous ale which is especially reserved for gala or audit days; and I must candidly avow my belief that, having refreshed at various Oxford butteries, the sister University is not far behind. I have appointed myself Special Commissioner for investigating the beery habits of the working classes in this country. I have gone into rural publics, and have tasted the stuff heavily drugged with cocculus indicus, which makes the British peasant boosy at an early stage, which suits his finances. I have even tasted that London porter, which, with the generic name of beer and at a penny the glass, is the favourite drink of the Londoner, out of its native pewter.' I will even avow that the drink popularly known as

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