his 'arf and 'arf, and further admonishes the
cheery barmaid to "draw it mild." Brewers, it would seem, like their
horses and draymen, are of a substantial race; many of the leading brewers
of the middle nineteenth-century times, indeed, of our own day, are those
who brewed in the reigns of the Georges.

By those who know, genuine London ale (presumably the "Genuine Stunning
ale" of the "little public house in Westminster," mentioned in
"Copperfield") alone is supposed to rival the ideal "berry-brown" and
"nut-brown" ale of the old songs, or at least what passed for it in those
days.

The increase of brewers has kept pace with London's increase in other
respects. Twenty-six brewhouses in the age of Elizabeth became fifty-five
in the middle of the eighteenth century, and one hundred and forty-eight
in 1841; and in quantity from 284,145 barrels in 1782 to 2,119,447 in
1836. To-day, in the absence of any statistics to hand, the sum total must
be something beyond the grasp of any but the statistician.

Without attempting to discuss the merits or demerits of temperance in
general, or beer in particular, it can be safely said that the brewer's
dray is a prominent and picturesque feature of London streets, without
which certain names, with which even the stranger soon becomes familiar,
would be meaningless; though they are, as it were, on everybody's tongue
and on many a sign-board in nearly every thoroughfare. As a historian, who
would have made an unexceptionable literary critic, has said: Beer
overflows in almost every volume of Fielding and Smollett. Goldsmith was
not averse to the "_parson's black champagne_;" Hogarth immortalized its
domestic use, and Gilray its political history; and the "pot of porter"
and "mug of bitter" will go down in the annals of the literature, art, and
history of London, and indeed all Britain, along with the more
aristocratic port and champagne.

LONDON TOPOGRAPHY

From Park Land to Wapping, by day and by night,
I've many a year been a roamer,
And find that no Lawyer can London indite,
Each street, every Lane's a misnomer.
I find Broad Street, St. Giles, a poor narrow nook,
Battle Bridge is unconscious of slaughter,
Duke's Place can not muster the ghost of a Duke,
And Brook Street is wanting in water.

JAMES SMITH, _Comic Miscellanies_.

It is not easy to delimit the territorial confines of a great and growing
city like London. The most that the most