things have been demonstrated by learned
doctors and professors of ability ; why may
we not, then, assume that Barclay and Perkins
were names possessed in an astonishingly
prolific degree by London citizens, who, proud
of belonging to so respectable a family, were
in the habit of blazoning the declaration of
their lineage in blue and gold on an oblong
board, and affixing the same on the front of
their houses ? " The Emperor of China has
upwards of five thousand cousins, who are
distinguished from the tag-rag and bobtail of
the Celestial Empire by wearing yellow girdles.
" Why," these sages will ask, " may not the
parent Barclay Perkins have been a giant,
blessed with hundreds of arrows in his quiver,
whose thousand descendants were proud to
be clad like him in a livery of blue and gold ? "

Then the sages will squabble, and wrangle,
and call each other bad names, and write
abusive diatribes against each other by
magnetic telegraph; just as other sages were
wont to squabble and wrangle about the
Rosetta Stone, the Source of the Niger, and
Salt's discoveries in Abyssinia; or, as they
do now, about the North-West Passage, the
causes of the cholera, and the possibility of
aërial locomotion. As it has been, so it is,
and will be, I presume; and if we can't agree
now-a-days, so shall we, or rather our
descendants, disagree in times to come, and
concerning matters far less recondite or abstruse
than Barclay Perkins.

I know what Barclay and Perkins mean, I
hope; — what Combe and Delafield — what
Truman, Hanbury,and Buxton — what Calvert
and Co. — what Reid and Co. — what Broadwood,
Mundell and Huggins. You know too,
gentle, moderate, and bibulous reader. They
all mean BEER. Beer, the brown, the foaming,
the wholesome, and refreshing, when
taken in moderation; the stupefying, and
to-station-house-leading, when imbibed to excess.
That oblong board, all blue and gold, I have
spoken of as visible from my parlour window,
has no mystery for me. Plainly, unmistakeably,
it says Beer; a good tap; fourpence a
pot in the pewter; threepence per ditto if
sent for in your own jug.

And if you admit (and you will admit,
or you are no true Englishman) that beer be
good — and, being good, that we should be
thankful for it — can you tell me any valid
reason why I should not write on the subject
of Beer? Seeing how many thousands of
reputable persons there are throughout the
country who live by the sale of beer, and how
many millions drink it, — seeing that beer is
literally in everybody's mouth, it strikes me
that we should not ignore beer taken in its
relation towards the belles lettres. Tarry with
me, then, while I discourse on Beer — on the
sellers and the buyers thereof — and of their
habitations. I will essay to navigate my little
bark down a river of beer, touching, perchance,
at some little spirit-creek, or gently meandering
through the " back-waters " of neat wines.

When the Spanish student — immortalised
by Le Sage — was inducted into the mysteries
of the private life of Madrid, he availed
himself of a temporary aërial machine, in
a person of diabolical extraction, called
Asmodeus — who further assisted him in his
bird's-eye inspection, by taking the roofs off
the houses. When the nobility and gentry
frequenting the fashionable circles of the
Arabian Nights, were desirous of travelling
with extraordinary rapidity, they were sure
to be accommodated with magical carpets, or
swift-flying eagles, or winged horses. Then
they could be rendered invisible, or provided
with telescopes, enabling them to see through
every obstacle, from stone walls to steel
castles; but things are changed, and times
are altered now. One can't go from London
to Liverpool without buying a railway-ticket,
and being importuned to show it half-a-dozen
times in the course of the journey. If you
want to study character in the Stock Exchange,
you can get no more invisible suit to do it in
than a suit of invisible green, and run,
moreover, the risk of hearing a howl of " 201!"
and feeling two hundred pair of hands, and
two hundred pair of feet to match, bonnetting,
buffetting, hustling, and kicking you from the
high place of Mammon.

So, then, in the study of Beer and Beerhouses,
I have had no adventitious aid from accommodating
demons, obliging genii, invisible caps,
carpets, or cloaks. " Experientia " — you know
the rest. I have graduated in Beer; I have
mastered its mysteries; and I will now assume,
for your benefit, a magic power, which I
devoutly wish I had possessed during my Beery
researches. Come with me, then, in the spirit,
to Bankside; and, after a cursory stroll round
the fountain-head of beer, let us seat ourselves
(still in the spirit) at the tail of one of these
big drays, drawn by big horses, and, fearing
no cries of "whip behind!" from jealous boys
(for, being spiritual, we are, of course,
invisible), perambulate the metropolis, rapt in
the contemplation of Beer. Surrounded with
Barclay and Perkins's beer-barrels, our steeds
conducted by Barclay and Perkins's
red-night-capped draymen, we will go in this, our
magic chariot, from public-house to public-house:
"The latent tracks, the giddy heights
explore; " " shoot folly as it flies, and catch
the manners living as they rise; " attempt
a mild classification of the peculiar social
characteristics of the different metropolitan
"publics;" give, in short, a view and a
description, however lame and incomplete it
may be, of " London on Tap."

I do not purpose, in this present paper, at
least, to enter minutely into the consideration
of the aspect of a London Brewery, or of the
manufacture of the great English beverage;
so, then, our stay will be but short in this
huge brick beer emporium. I make remark,
en passant, that an odour prevails in and
about the establishment, resembling an
amalgamation of several washing-days, a few