The Sun.
London, England, 1842-06-08 00:00:00

THE SUN,-LONDON, W-.EDNESDA EyENING, JUNE 8, 1 842.

TEE' LAST OF THE BRANDY

DRINIs.ERS.

Well : there is no mistake about the matter, and I
really believe that I am the last of the long race of
brandy-drinkers. There were plenty of us when I
began, and of all these not one is now left. Temper-
ance took off the greater part ; and bad spirits thinned
those who remained : there were some who died
young, and yet not regretting life ; whilst others
were old men when the call came, and yet went
grudgingly, as though they had not had trouble
enough. lam the only one left, and this bottle that
I hold in my hand contains the last drop of distilled
spirits that the world now contains. When I have
consumed it, as I shortly shall, and with it yielded my
last breath, there will be no more brandy in the world
and no more brandy-drinkers !
Well : I have lived seventy years, and I have seen
strange changes. It is now 1890, and I was born in
1820. I recollect Father Mathew, and I can re-
member when it was considered no sin for a man to
warm his heart with the generous juice of the grape,
or to give fresh energy to his drooping faculties by
the aid of a little plesant inspiring drink. The
world was not a bad world then, although it was
always the fashion to abuse it. There were kind-
hearted good souls in it, and there was a warmth
and friendship which would offer a strong con-
trast to the chilly coldness of these modern
times. Men drank good stout ale then, and were
not afraid of it. They kept it as a friend in their
cellars, and watched over it jealously, yet not in a
niggardly spirit. If they had friends they shared it
liberally with them, and never dreamt of having
committed a crime. They made songs, and they
drank to them ; they kept their high days and holi-
days, and instead of setting themselves apart from the
poor, they' made the labourers come and be happy,
with them. They had sheep-shearing and harvest-
home, and a hundred other pleasant festivities, where
the ale-keg was broached, and the heart of man was
made happy. They may call those times bad, but I
never saw better.
Temperance has changed all this, and I am old
enough to recollect when the attack was first made.
They who commenced it were kind-hearted men,
and there was much need of their services. Great
miseries (brought about by political causes) were
weighing upon the people, who had grown too
poor to brew their own malt and hops, as they used
to do, and so had been driven to drink villanous
compounds called gin and whisky, and were fast sacri-
ficing their bodies and souls together. This scene fright-
ened a great many goo,d people, who, without troubling
themselves about the causes, looked only to the effect,
and declared a deadly war against alcohol, as they now
called this new enemy. For a season they battled man-
fully and with proper zeal againt Mister Alcohol, who
was certainly doing an immense deal of mischief, and
whom at length they pretty well managed to put down.
Moderation at first was the cry, and I, who was then a
young man, became a member of a Temperance So-
ciety; but by and by they wanted me to take a vow
to abstain from all spirituous drinks whatever, even
small-beer, and then I took my leave of them, and
joined the Old Paddington Brandy Club (limited to
two glasses per diem), of which I am, as I said, the
only surviving member, holding the last bequeathed
drop of the generous liquor whose extinction has
been so fatally pronounced.
The race, then, of brandy-drinkers is at an end,
and not a drop of alcoholic drink of strength suffi-
cient to intoxicate a spider is to be found upon earth.
with the exception of the small wasting quantity i
hold in my hand. The whole world is a world of
water-drinkers, and man contends with the horse and
the sheep for a taste of that crystal stream whose in-
sipidity he professes to admire. The result might
have been expected. As the mind is influenced by
the body, and this latter is acted upon by whatever is
received into it, it has followed as a necessary conse-
quence that man has become as insipid as his drink,
and his life as monotonous as the dull never-varying
stream from whence his potations are drawn. A
cold, selfish, artificial set of beings have taken the
place of the old inhabitants—men who rarely smile,
who love not music, who banish the dance, and
whose grand test of virtue is thrust into the
narrow limits that they prescribe for Temperance.
Instead of the good old English songs about " Sir
Barley-corn," 'there is nothing heard but wishy-washy
compositions made over tea-tables' by a parcel of gos-
sipping old men and women, who have not the souls
to put together two staves decently. All our poets
too have been tumbled off the shelves, because they
were not Temperance men. Shakspeare went first,
for they could not abide' the idea of patronizing a
man who is constantly exclaiming in favour of wine ;
and one by one all the dramatists followed; old
Deckar, Martson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger,
Rowe, down even to poor Sheridan Knowles and
Lytton Bulvver. The ancients also were not spared.
Anacreon among the Greeks, and Horace with the
Romans, were voted abominations, and latterly the
comic writers have been going out of fashion. This
being the case, of course the novelists could not
stand. One by one they have been proscribed, and
now it is considered as great an abomination to
have a work of Sir Walter Scott in one's library, as
it would have been in my time to be seen reading
Tom Paine's " Age of Reason," or " Voltaire's " Die-
' tionaire Philosophique."
But, besides this effect upon the genius and grow-
ing talent of the country, another, still more to be
deplored has been produced on the minds and disposi-
tions of men. There is much less generosity and
warmth of heart than there used to be, for as men
have made Temperance the grand saving virtue they
seem to have lost sight of a host of other kind feelings
which it used to be the fashion to cultivate. The
sympathies have been moulded into a set of stiff
automata, which only move in a certain set direction,
and have no natural spring of their own. There is no
longer any spontaneous charity ; and as to scandal
and malevolence, it seems to me that they never were
so rife in the world. Selfishness is now the leading
feature of the age, and the world has become so cold
and chilly that I really long to finish my glass and
be out of it.

What vexes me also, is to see the old Saxon Nor-
man stock deteriorating physically, for since men and
women have given over drinking ale, they certainly
have not such large families, nor yet such fine chil-
dren. Why this is I cannot say, but I speak of it
as a fact. John Bull was always noted for being a
strong-backed, broad-chested, long-armed, straight-
legged, full-calved, bull-headed, handsome-looking
fellow, and he could always lick every other nation
in the world when he had his belly well lined with
good beef and beer; but John never liked fighting
without his pint of ale per diem, or a good glass of
rum, and I set it down to his not having these that
we have been recently whopped by those miserable
beggars the —'s and
But I must now conclude this paper, for I feel that
I am growing weaker, and the last drop of brandy is
nearly gone. I suppose the Temperance people will
make a great bobbery over my grave, for I know
they have been looking after me for a long time. I
care very little for them however. My liver is sound,
in spite of all they may say, and 1 weigh sixteen
stone, which is more by many pounds than the best
of the water-drinkers can come up to. What. I re-
gret is, that there should be so little social feeling
left in the world, and so very few even empty beer-
harrels. Brandy there is none—for here goes the
last drop !—Montreal Morning Courier.