18 189 THE BREWERY. 8 you pass up the Thames through London, two immense masses of buildings strike your vision, each towering far above the surrounding masonry. The first is St. Paul's Cathedral, on your right; and the second is Barclay and Co.'s brewery, on your left. Both are sublime in their way how much opposition there may be between them I do not discuss at present. Which is the largest I am not able to decide, not having gone over the brewery as I always intended to do. Let no other American procrastinate, but seize the earliest opportunity to see Barclay and Co.'s brewhouse, if he sees nothing else in London. He will there get a better idea of the power that governs England, than in either St. Paul's or St. Stephen's, or St. Lucre's in Threadneedle-street. There are perhaps twelve great breweries in London, of which I saw the fourth in size, not quite half as large as Barclay's, I believe. It was Whitbread and Co.'s. It is the same which belonged to the Thrales, when George the Third dined, and reckoned that the barrels of beer, placed end to end, would reach to Windsor; and when, according to Boswell, Dr. Sam Johnson, playing the auctioneer, with pen and inkhorn by his side, spoke of its coppers and vats as "potentiality of amassing wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." Our first introduction, after visiting the counting-room of the very gentlemanly overseer of the concern, was to an old steam-engine, set up by Watt himself, and still as useful as ever in stirring up and pumping the broth that is to drown that glorious essence in man which invented steamengines among other things. I could have wished the sublime old servant better business. Then we were shown mills for grinding the malt; mashtubs, where the water first meets it-whether pure water, or that in which dead cats have already been brewed, I did not ascertain, nor is it a point of any consequence-great coppers, where the stuff is cooked. Elephants in droves might swim in these. They were once heated by fires underneath, but now by high steam, generated by a series of seven boilers, and at an expense of 4,000 tons of coal per annum. We were shown all manner of fermenting vats, and great tubs. One great fermenting room reminded me strongly of a church. The vast galleries were filled with vats, in which the liquid was reeking and foaming up its filthy yeast in the first stage of fermentation. The body of the house was occupied by a regular congregation of tubs, each twice as big as a common hogshead, arranged along a sort of aisles, which were boarded up half-way to catch the spruce. This great multitude of tubs seemed to me like underling devils piously worshipping the great one, who was doubtless the presiding divinity of the place, and doing it in a very emblematical way, for each, with a broad lip stuck out, was spewing over into the aisle. When this process arrives at a certain stage, the liquid is drawn off into the room below, where it is bunged up for service. In another place we were shown much larger vats, in which the process was commencing. Our whole party of twenty or more stood together on the head of one of them, and one after another looked down through a glass skylight into the tormented liquor below. We saw the cooperage, where barrels and butts are made of solid oak staves two inches thick. We saw the vast storehouses of malt and hops. They use halfa-million bushels of malt in a year, and how many hops I have forgotten. Of the latter they keep a large supply on hand, so as not to be unfavourably affected with fluctuations of the price. In these lofty storehouses, the hop bales, larger than cotton bales, were piled in masses fifteen or twenty feet high. The greatest wonder came next, the building in which the beer is stored; to say nothing of its subterranean regions, in which there are interminable ranges of butts, barrels, and kegs, ready to be hauled off to supply customers, and an invisible cistern of beer, holding 4,000 barrels, sunk in the ground. Above ground were in one room eight iron-hooped top and bottom puncheons or tubs, standing on end, into each of which might have been let down a pretty good-sized four-storey house, so as to be headed in with two chimneys standing. They held, however, only two thousand barrels a-piece, making about 16,000 barrels, or 130,000 dollars' worth of beer in this one room. You notice, ever and anon, in the streets of London a gigantic horse, with great shaggy fetlocks, not much encumbered with harness, drawing a narrow and low vehicle, like a sled, mounted on little wheels or rollers, and loaded with two or three kegs. It is a chance if a lubberly biped is not on his back. It is a brewer's man and horse supplying his customers. We saw one of the stables where these monstrous horses are at home. Each has his name painted on japanned tin, like a lawyer's sign, and stuck up over his manger. The names of all the horses bought the same year begin with the same letter of the alphabet, that the proprietors may know how long they have had any horse in their service. These horses cost about 300 dollars apiece, are in fine case, and drink no beer. Our guide made a point of telling us that these horses were kept and well fed when unable to work. If he could have said as much of the people whose money went to buy hay for them, and palaces and splendour for their owners, it would have been still more to the credit of the latter. Such is a hasty look through the fourth brewery in London, one which is ancient, conservative, and behind the age, in its means of stupefying the people. What must that vast pile be which looks down upon the Thames, where three million dollars' worth of beer are turned out every year, or about 400,000 barrels! Is St. Paul's or any other church likely to draw mankind heavenward as fast and as far as that establishment of Barclay and Co. will pull them in the opposite direction ?-American Paper. THE OUTCAST CHILDREN'S CRY. BY MARY HOWITT. EAUTIFUL the children's faces, Spite of all that mars and sears; Eloquent the children's faces Poverty's lean look, which saith- Give us light amidst our darkness; You can make us what you will! We are willing-we are ready; We would learn if you would teach: Souls that any heights can reach ! Raise us by your Christian knowledge; Let us stamp the age as ours! We shall be whate'er ye make us: Train us! try us! Days slide onward- All my inmost soul was stirr'd, Said "The children's prayer is heard!" Shakspere's Portraits Phrenologically considered. -The July number of "Pitman's Popular Lecturer and Reader" (price 2d.) will contain an original and valuable Paper (illustrated) on this interesting subject, by E. T. CRAIG. London: FRED. PITMAN, 20, Paternoster Row, E.C. |