if he was an obstinate, dogged, and overbearing old rascal,-yet was the father of modern English,) wrote the famous English Dictionary, and when Mr. Thrale died, Johnson being one of his executors, the property was sold to the Barclay & Perkins of that day for the sum of £135,000. The present brewery encloses fifteen acres of buildings and vats, and is the largest in the world but one.

The tribes that came from India and settled in Germany, to which Tacitus refers, were the first to introduce beer into Europe. The descendants of these long haired, fair skinned tribes, were long after, (in the sixteenth century,) the first to teach the English brewers the use of hops, for the people of England, of that day, made their beer after the manner of the ancient Egyptians, by the admixture of herbs, broom, and berries of the bay and ivy.

In 1585, there were twenty-six brewers in London and Westminster, who brewed in that year 648,960 barrels of beer, and, six years after, they exported 24,000 barrels of beer to the Low Countries and Dieppe. In 1643, the first excise duty was imposed on beer. In 1722, the brewers stored their beer to keep it mellow, for the first time, and sold it to all housekeepers to be retailed at three-pence a pot-holding over a pint. In 1869, 500,000 barrels of beer, valued at £1,800,000, were exported from London to foreign places, being one-fourth of the total amount that was exported during the same time from other ports in England.

British India took 201,000 barrels, Australia and New Zealand, 148,000 barrels, China, 35,000 barrels, Cape of Good Hope, 15,000, British West Indies, 30,000 barrels, Spain took 209 barrels, Brazil, 15,000 barrels, Russia, 6,000, and France 7,000 barrels.

Barclay and Perkins employ a capital of £2,000,000 annually in their trade, and 300 huge horses, brought from Flanders, at a cost of from £60 to £100 each. These horses consume 9,000 quarter hundreds of oats, beans, or other grain, 900 tons of clover, and 290 tons of straw for litter. The manure hops that are spent, and other refuse, are taken by a Railway Company.

There are five partners in the house; the firm being worth £8,000,000, and the head brewer receives a salary of £2,000 a year.

The water used for brewing purposes is that of the Thames, pumped by a steam engine, on the same ground where Shakespeare's Globe Theatre stood three hundred years ago. One hundred and fifty thousand gallons of beer can be brewed from this water, daily. There are two engines of 100 horse power each, which are nearly a hundred years old. The furnace shaft is 19 feet below the surface and 110 above it. The malt is carried

from barges at the river-side, by porters, and deposited in enor mous bins, each of the height and depth of a three-story house. Rats are fond of malt, but to keep them off a staff of sixty large

cats are constantly employed on the premises, and all these cats are under the supervision of a big-headed or chief cat, with a long moustache and Angola blood.

It is quite a sight to witness the anxious solicitude of this

Chief Cat for the honor of the house of Barclay & Perkins, and for the discipline of his subordinate cats, the chief being a Thomas of the purest breed.

Thirty-six tons of coal per day are used here for brewing purposes, and the malt is stored in a huge room, with light windows, called the Great Brewhouse, built entirely of iron and brick. There is no continuous floor, but looking upwards, whenever the steaming vapor rises, there may be seen, at various heights, stages, platforms, and flights of stairs, all occupied by the Cyclopean piles of brewing vessels.

There are also huge buildings next to the brewhouse, with cooling floors, into which is pumped the "hot Wort," as it is called, or beer. The surface of the floor in one of these buildings is 10,000 feet square, and I saw men with gigantic wooden shoes swimming about in this beer, which looked like a vast lake. The beer is sometimes cooled by passing it through a refrigerator which has contact with a stream of cold spring water. The cold beer is then allowed to ferment in vast rooms or squares, as large as an ordinary block of houses,—which are made to hold 2,000 barrels. It is a strange sight to look at one of these lakes of beer, the yeast rising in masses like coral reefs in a southern sca,-upon the surface of the water, and these rock-like elevations yield, after the force of the yeast is spent, to the slightest wind, giving it the appearance of a vast ocean of beer in a storm. There is one huge vat for porter that will hold 5,000 gallons, which at selling price is worth £12,000. The Great Tun of Heidelberg holds but half of this quantity. One thousand quarter-hundreds of malt are brewed daily by Barclay & Perkins.

The great rival house to that of Barclay & Perkins, is that of Hanbury, Buxton & Co., in Brick-Lane, Spitalfields, covering eight acres; in which 275,000 gallons of water are used daily, obtained from a well 530 feet deep;-600,000 barrels of beer are brewed here annually. There are 150 vats, the largest of which contains 3,000 barrels, or about 100,000 gallons of beer. There are cight brewing coppers, three of which are capable of containing 800 barrels cach. 700 quarters of malt can be

THE GREAT PORTER TUN.

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mashed at one time in six mash tubs;-10,000 tons of coal are used annually, and there are 200 huge horses, each horse consuming 42 pounds of food per day, or about 2,500,000 pounds per annum.

There is a library with 5,000 volumes, a billiard-room, reading-room, and savings-bank, on the premises, with a benefit Club for the workmen, each member paying sixpence a week, and receiving fourteen shillings a week in case of sickness; and on the death of his wife, £8, and in the event of his own death the family receives £18. Two companies of volunteers were raised from the 800 employees of the firm, and the men are allowed one holiday in a fortnight.

The brewery of Mr. Salt, at Burtonon-Trent, has been established for eighty years, and brews

annually 25,000 bar

rels of that peculiarly strong and bitter ale.

In London it is calculated that about 6,500,000 barrels of ale, beer, and porter, are brewed annually, valued at about £20,000,000, and I think I am therefore correct in calling the English a beer-drinking people.

Everybody drinks beer in London. You can see laborers and dockmen sitting on benches outside of public houses, swilling what they call swipes, at two pence a pot. So if you drink at a Club you will see men as eminent as Mr. Bright, or Mr. Disraeli, calling for a "pint of Bass' East India Ale," or "a bottle of Stout." Even in workhouses beer is kept on tap,

and were the paupers to be deprived of their beer, they would, I believe, rise and annihilate their masters. A quart bottle of good beer or porter can be got anywhere in London for sixpence, and of all the beverages that I have ever tasted, I never found anything to equal in fragrance a drink of good London Brown Stout" on a warm summer day. A man may procure as much good beer as he can drink at a draught, for three pence, in London, at any public house or restaurant, and it is the common custom with the Cockneys to have it at every meal, and also between meals.

They have also a fashion in large parties among the working and middle classes, of ordering what is called a "Queen Ann," which is simply three pints of beer in a large, brightly burnished metal pot with a handle, and the man who calls for it having paid, takes a drink, then wipes the edge of the pot with the cuff of his coat-sleeve, to remove the foam from his lips, -then passes it to his wife, sweetheart or his eldest child, who each in turn drink and wipe the edge of the measure; then it is passed to the stranger, and all around the board, each person being careful to wipe the " pewter" in the same fashion. his custom seems rather strange and savage at the first sight to an American, but it is the custom of the country, and therefore cannot be quarreled with.

Benjamin Franklin, as we learn by his diary, was disgusted by the beer-swilling Londoners. When a journeyman printer in London before 1776, he says "I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were drinkers of beer. We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply workmen. My companion at the press drank every day, a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another pint when he had done his work. I thought it a detestable custom, but it was necessary, he supposed, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong himself. He had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every week for the detestable liquor."

This is pretty strong testimony from Franklin, and I find