Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/11



a New Year we begin a New Volume.

A New Year is always, in expectancy, "annus mirabilis;" and a New Volume belongs pretty much to the same category.

Without pretending to the oracular skill of Zadkiel, that most learned of "Genethliacs," we may safely predict the quality of the Ninety-seventh Volume of the New Monthly; for the writers whose contributions have filled the pages of the Magazine for the last few years, have still the same ready pens for its service.

A volume of the New Monthly may be likened unto a good dinner with three courses and a dessert, seeing that four removes are necessary to complete the literary as well as the substantial banquet. Like a practised maître d'hôtel, we also present our bill of fare, but with even more consideration for the tastes and appetites of our guests, since we offer them the contents of only one course at a time, with sufficient interval to get hungry again before the dishes are replaced.

He who would confidently say what the year 1853 is to do for us, must make some bold guesses. The prophecy of Lear's Fool is no bad precedent Let us take a few samples from his prediction.

Shakspeare had some suspicion of this being the case in 1605; what are we to say, two centuries and a half later?

Between the "half-and-half" of Puseyism, the "heavy, steady Stingo" of the Establishment, and the "sharp, sour cider" of Dissent, we are more ballottés with "words" than edified by "matter." If "His Eminence" (as the Times' advertisement says) puts in his oar, we may be rowed over to an opposite shore, but the boatman's song will be very nearly to the same tune.

They did this, if not in the reign of King Lear (though most likely it was a practice in his day) certainly in that of the Virgin Queen; but it is only charitable to suppose that the brewers of Elizabeth's day, knowing that the ladies then drank beer for breakfast, diluted it as much as possible in order to save their reputations.

Our quarrel with the brewers of Queen Victoria's domination is, not so much that they "mar their malt with water," though they are adepts at any cunning infusion—(we will say nothing about Strychnine and Baron Justus Liebig, or Humuline, the newest name for Extract of Hops)—as that they don*t enough know how to cut down a legitimate allowance of beer. Quart bottles were quart bottles, we will suppose, "when every rood of ground maintained its man,"—or, at all events, "black jacks" held no stinted measure; but, at the present time, "Bottledom"—has reached such a pitch of refinement, that if you get anything in a bottle of