I once knew a physician in good practice,
whose whole family were in the habit of
taking a tea-spoonful of soda mixed in water
and then a glass of port wine after dinner,
but I found that it produced acidity instead
of destroying it. The best specific I know
for acidity fs a glass of cold water; if one
does not succeed, try two.

French dinners should always be diluted
with claret and water; beer does not
harmonise with them. Half a bottle of claret
and one glass of Madeira is a fair dinner
allowance for any man, and will not hurt him.
Claret may be drank, and will be found good
in France, Northern Germany (especially in
the Steuer-Verein), Russia, and America;
elsewhere it is detestable. Beer is good in
England, Bavaria, and indeed throughout
Germany, and in America; everywhere else
it should be avoided. In Hamburg, English
beer may be had cheaper than in England,
owing to the drawback on exportation. In
Spain the only drinkable wine I could ever
get, except at the houses of the Jews, was
the Val-de-peñas, but that is seldom good;
it is hardly necessary to add that port and
sherry are unknown there, and it would be
impossible to drink either in a hot country,
if as plentiful as water.

I found it a good plan to drink weak
brandy-and-water throughout Spain. If an
English traveller also should arrive hungry
at a Spanish inn, he had better confine
himself to eggs, and dress them himself, or they
will be served up with rancid oil and bad
potatoes. It is a curious thing that
beefsteaks are better almost everywhere than
in England. They are best of all in Hamburg.
Let the epicure ask for a biftek étouffé –
a stifled beefsteak – and he will make the
acquaintance of one of those happy marvels
of cookery of which there are not more
than four or five in the world. The worst
ham I ever eat was at Bayonne; but they
make the best chocolate in the world there.
In Southern Germany the best dish a
hungry traveller can ask for is a kalbs-
cotelette (a veal cutlet); in Northern Germany
beefsteaks and potatoes are to be
recommended. Mutton throughout Germany is
detestable. In Hungary the fried chickens
are better than anything else, and for wine
let the thirsty man ask for Erlauer, and
mix it with two parts of water to one of
wine. Italy is famous for macaroni; and a
dish called polenta should be forgotten by no
visitor to Venice, though it wants a good
appetite. In America, pumpkin pie stands first
in the estimation of the wise, and mint julep
and sherry cobbler require no recommendation
here; although how cousin Jonathan
can contrive to swallow so much of them it
is not easy to understand. A mayonnaise
is a good dish in its way, and a capital
manner of serving up cold salmon or the
remains of a fowl. At Frankfort, however,
they give you a mayonnaise of brains; a
dish which it surpasses the capacity of
any human digestion to dispose of
satisfactorily. The Jews, I really believe, can
eat anything in the way of strong food. I
once saw a pretty little lady of this race
devour the best part of a Strasbourg pie
without one atom of bread, yet she seemed
to live upon butterflies, and had a complexion
like an houri.

The capacity of the digestions of Southern
Germany is also very remarkable: they can
dispose of a regular meal six times a day, and
fill up the intervals with raw herrings and
sardines. An Algerine, however, once told me
he eat twenty pounds of grapes daily while
they were in season, for his health. So that
nationality can make little difference. However,
southern nations are less given to excess
than northern ones. The late Mr. Liston was
once called in by a lady in weak health; his
advice to her was to get tipsy every day.
She did so and recovered. The relations of
an old gentleman of eighty used to assert
that he never by any accident went to bed
sober. Yet Panucci, one of the famous long
livers of Italy, never eat anything but salad
and drank nothing whatever. Priests may
be said, as a body, to live more moderately
than soldiers; yet we have more examples of
long life in the army than in the priesthood.
Diet, or rather fixed rules of diet seem to
have little influence on longevity. Persons
who wish for long life had better buy
annuities: there are plenty of people silly enough
to sell them; but no one yet ever eat, drank,
or starved themselves into Iong life.

CHIPS.

THE REASON WHY.

WHEN Sir Walter Scott met with the dirge
of the Bridal Bed in Evans's Collection of
Old Ballads, he pronounced it not genuine;
and thought it no treason to add that, in his
judgment, it was better than if it had been.
The poem was certainly written by William
Julius Mickle.

Scott's authority in ballad-literature is so
great, that we may be permitted to take
shelter under it against a mistake into which
we have lately fallen. Mr. Macaulay turns
out to have been nearer the truth, in declaring
that only two lines survive of the once
famous Trelawney Ballad, than ourselves in
affirming that Mr. Davies Gilbert had
succeeded in rescuing all of it from oblivion. It
appears to be beyond doubt, that the four
lines printed as the burden of the stanzas
which we gave in our number of October 30th,
were a genuine fragment of the old ballad;
and equally so, that the stanzas themselves,
excepting only the lines in which portions of
that burden are repeated, were the work of a
modern hand.

The Reverend R. S. Hawker, vicar of
Morwenstow in Cornwall, the person most