Perhaps the oldest house in the Cognac district is Hennessy’s, but it would be invidious to say that their brandy was superior either to Martell’s, Otard and Dupuy’s, the Société Vignicole, Courvoisier, or many other firms. That must be left to individual taste. But from these firms we can rely on having pure unadulterated brandies, the pure product of the vine, without any admixture of grain or beet spirit. At one time, adulteration was rife among the farmers, but in 1857 and 1858 several of them were prosecuted, and they are now credited with having abjured their evil ways. J. A. [Illustration] [Illustration] GIN. Massinger’s _Duke of Milan_—Pope’s _Epilogue to Satires_—The _Dunciad_—William III.—Lord Hervey—Sir R. Walpole—The Fall of Madame Geneva—Hogarth’s Gin Lane—Schiedam Adulteration—Gin Sling—Captain Dudley Bradstreet—Tom and Jerry Hawthorn. Gin is an alcoholic drink distilled from malt or from unmalted barley or other grain, and afterwards rectified and flavoured. The word is French, _genièvre_, juniper, corrupted into _Geneva_, and subsequently into its present form. It is to the berries of the juniper that the best Hollands owes its flavour. Perhaps one of the earliest allusions to gin is in Massinger’s _Duke of Milan_ (1623), Act I., scene i., when Graccho, a creature of Mariana, says to the courtier Julio, of a chance drunkard, “Bid him sleep; ’Tis a sign he has ta’en his liquor, and if you meet An officer preaching of sobriety, Unless he read it in Geneva print, Lay him by the heels.” In this extract the word is played upon, Geneva suggesting both the habit of spirit-drinking and Calvinistic doctrine. When Pope wrote, the corrupted word “Gin” had become common. In the _Epilogue to the Satires_, I. 130. “Vice thus abused, demands a nation’s care; This calls the Church to deprecate our sin, And hurls the thunder of our laws on gin.” Pope has added a note to this passage, to the effect that gin had almost destroyed the lowest rank of the people before it was restrained by Parliament in 1736. Another early allusion to Geneva is to be found in _Carmina Quadragesimalia_, Oxford, 1723, vol. i., p. 7, in a copy of verses contributed by Salusbury Cade, elected from Westminster to Ch. Ch. in 1714. The thesis of which Salusbury Cade maintained the affirmative, is whether life consists in heat, or in the original _An vita consistat in calore?_