nd, by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising
under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and
valleys of France. They can squeeze bordeaux out of the sloe, and draw
champagne from an apple. Virgil in that remarkable prophecy,

_Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva_,[76]

(_The ripening grape shall hang on every thorn_),

seems to have hinted at this art which can turn a plantation of Northern
hedges into a vineyard. These adepts are known among one another by the
name of "wine-brewers," and I am afraid do great injury, not only to her
Majesty's customs, but to the bodies of many of her good subjects.

Having received sundry complaints against these invisible workmen, I
ordered the proper officer of my court to ferret them out of their
respective caves, and bring them before me, which was yesterday executed
accordingly.

The person who appeared against them was a merchant, who had by him a
great magazine of wines that he had laid in before the war: but these
gentlemen (as he said) had so vitiated the nation's palate, that no man
could believe his to be French, because it did not taste like what they
sold for such. As a man never pleads better than where his own personal
interest is concerned, he exhibited to the court with great eloquence,
that this new corporation of druggists had inflamed the bills of
mortality, and puzzled the College of Physicians with diseases, for
which they neither knew a name nor cure. He accused some of giving all
their customers colics and megrims; and mentioned one who had boasted,
he had a tun of claret by him, that in a fortnight's time should give
the gout to a dozen of the healthiest men in the city, provided that
their constitutions were prepared for it by wealth and idleness. He then
enlarged, with a great show of reason, upon the prejudice which these
mixtures and compositions had done to the brains of the English nation;
as is too visible (said he) from many late pamphlets, speeches and
sermons, as well as from the ordinary conversations of the youth of this
age. He then quoted an ingenious person, who would undertake to know by
a man's writings, the wine he most delighted in; and on that occasion
named a certain satirist, whom he had discovered to be the author of a
lampoon, by a manifest taste of the sloe, which showed itself in it by
much roughness, and little spirit.

In the last place, he ascribed to the unnatural tumults and
ferm