and cannot be imitated. The favoured vine
grows on calcareous declivities where the chalk
is mixed with flints. Every process of
manufacture is conducted with a thoughtful care, of
which Burgundy ought to be ashamed. Black
grapes are used for the best white sparkling
and foaming Champagnes. The fruit is picked
at sunrise, while the dew is still glistening
on the bunches and pearling on the crimson
and yellowing leaves. The foggier the
vintage weather, the better the fermentation goes.
Black grapes are found to resist the frost and
rains of vintage time, better than the white.
They are picked with minute care and patience,
almost one by one; every rotten or unripe berry,
every berry frost- bitten, bird- pecked, wasp-
eaten, or bruised, is trodden under foot, as
worse than useless. In gathering the fruit, in
emptying the baskets, in carting them to the
press, all rapid motion is avoided, and they are
placed in the cool shade. They are then spread
carefully on the press and crushed rapidly, but
only for an hour. Each pressing has its own
name and forms a specific quality. The precious
juice is removed from the vats, early on the
following day, and poured into sulphured
puncheons. Soon after Christmas, the fermentation
being over, on the first dry frosty day, the
wine is racked; a month after, it is racked again
and fined with isinglass; and before it is bottled
it is again racked and fined. By the month of
March, it is all in bottles, and six weeks
afterwards it becomes brisk. The sediment that
collects in the neck of the horizontal bottles, has
then to be removed by taking out the corks and
adding fresh wine. This entails a great loss;
in fact, an irritable Champagne wine merchant,
would soon lose his senses, his loss is so
perpetual. In July and August, the five hundred
or six hundred thousand bottles that M. Moet
stores in his limestone caverns at Epernay, fly and
shatter by dozens, and the workmen have to go
down with wire masks on, to try and stop the
popular effervescence. The great brittle piles,
six feet high, will sometimes burst and explode,
whole hills of them, in a week: sending the
Champagne in floods over the floors, or cascading their
sounder brethren. Then, the closing the bottles
by clinking them together and rejecting every
one that has too long or too short a neck, or
that has even a suspicious air bubble in its
thin green walls, is also expensive. Costly, too,
and dangerous is the mode of corking, by
sharply striking the cork: the bottle at the
time being placed on a stool covered with sheet
lead.

From beginning to end, the manufacture of
this wine is precarious and complicated, nor
can we wonder that many respectable merchants
at Rheims never sell it under three francs a
bottle, however plentiful the vintage. It may
well reach a high price before it comes on our
tables.

An average Champagne vintage produces,
Mr. Redding informs us, forty million nine
hundred and sixty-eight thousand and thirty-
three and three-quarters gallons, from one
hundred and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred
and seventy acres of vines. The merchants of
Paris and Meaux take nearly all the growth of
the Epernay arondissement. In 1836 France
consumed six hundred and twenty-six thousand
bottles. The export was then reported at—
England and East Indies, four hundred and
sixty-seven thousand bottles; Germany, four
hundred and seventy-nine thousand; America,
four hundred thousand; Russia, two hundred
and eighty thousand; and Sweden and Den-
mark, thirty thousand.

We have already shown that pink Champagne
is a mistake, a mere poetical fancy. We must
now repeat an old warning—the briskest and
frothiest Champagne is never the best. The
brisk wines are always defective in vinous
quality; the small portion of alcohol they have,
passes off in the froth, and the aroma with it.
Humboldt proved this by collecting Champagne
froth under a bell-glass, surrounded with ice.
The alcohol instantly became condensed on the
sides of the vessel.

The reason why Champagne sometimes plays
old Gooseberry with us, is because it contains
so much of young Gooseberry. Bad Champagne
tastes of brown sugar-candy and brandy. For
the French and Americans, the foreign wine
doctors add one-fifth of wine and syrup; for
the fiery Englishman, who will swallow
anything, one-tenth of brandy and syrup.

They also (the treacherous villains), use
capillaire, Madeira, Kirsch, and strawberry syrup.
Nay, the Americans have actually made
Champagne from petroleum. As there is but one
positively good vintage to six ordinary or bad
vintages, it is necessary, the rascals of Rheims
believe, to sugar-candy and brandy the acrid
and weak wine that the sun has frowned upon,
and in the language of the trade " bring it up
to the mark." And here we have one answer
to the question, What is a mock sun?

THE JUBILEE AT BONN.

IN August last, the University of Bonn
celebrated the jubilee of its foundation. It was
the close of the academical year, and all the
living children of the university were called
together to greet each other in honour of
their common mother. From Berlin came the
Crown Prince, and other personages of state
who, like him, had studied at Bonn; from Ems,
the King; and from every corner of Germany,
innumerable representatives of bygone generations
of students. From the more ancient
universities of Germany, came the most
distinguished of the professors, as deputations to
greet their young sister of the Rhine.

The festival was to commence on Saturday,
and continue until the following Wednesday.
On Saturday, Bonn was full of visitors. Bonn
is the very model of a university town. It
is not an offshoot of the university; it has a
being of its own, but subordinated to the wants
of the great seat of learning to which at present