Hops and turkeys, carps and beer, or, as some rigid Anglican has improved it-- Hops, reformation, bays, and beer Came to England all in one year-- to wit, the year 1525--is a little wrong in its date, and that beer was known earlier. After the date named, we know that it soon made its way into the highest circles. As proof of this we have the one shoe which Queen Bess carelessly left behind after that lunch, of which beer formed an item, with which she was regaled on her progress through Sussex, under the spreading oak still shown in that pretty village of Northiam-- O fair Norjem! thou dost far exceed Beckley, Peasmarsh, Udimore, and Brede-- which shoe may still be seen, by favour, in the private archæological collection at Brickwall House, in company with Accepted Frewen's toasting-fork. Saxon descent may have had much to do with the development of our own peculiar cerevisial taste--taste, that is, for beer with some body and a good strong flavour of malt. There can be no doubt that, compared with the produce of other countries, our beer is still the best--if only one's liver will stand it--the most tasty, the most nourishing--"meat, drink and cloth," as Sir John Linger puts it--beer which will occasionally "make a cat speak and a wise man dumb." The Saxons always had a liking for beer with something in it--not merely "strong water," as Sir Richard l'Estrange calls the small stuff. The ancient Teutons, we know, were all of them furious drinkers. Accordingly, not a few of the modern generation hold, with Luther's Elector of Saxony, that a custom of such very venerable antiquity ought not to be lightly abandoned. Tacitus writes that the Germans think it no shame to spend a whole day and night a-drinking. The Greek Emperor Nicephoras Phorcas told the ambassador of Emperor Otho that his master's soldiers had no other proficiency but in getting drunk. Rudolph of Hapsburgh grew vociferous over the discovery of good beer. "Walk in, walk in!" he shouted, standing at a tavern door in Erfurt, wholly oblivious of his imperial dignity; "there is excellent beer to be had inside." And "good King Wenceslas" of our Christmas carol--described as "good" nowhere else--was an habitual toper, and was "done" accordingly by the French at Rheims, where he thought more of the wine than of the treaty which he was negotiating. Henri Quatre would on no account marry a German wife. "Je croirais," he said, "toujours avoir un pot de vin auprès de moi." A modern writer, Charles Monselet, says that in Strassburg--in this respect a typically German town--"tout se ressent de la domination de la bière." Beer lends its colour to the faces of the inhabitants, to their hair, to their clothes; to the soil and the houses; and the very women seem nothing but "walking _chopes_." But the Saxons in particular--not the modern ones, but those of the North, some of whom found their way into England--always loved good stout nutritious drink, such as that to which