I wonder if Sir Wilfrid Lawson, or any other eminent abstainer, ever picked up a volume of {224} the _Pickwick Papers_ for the purpose of perusal? If so, and it was an illustrated edition, the frontispiece must have made his heart quail; for it represents Pickwick himself standing on a chair addressing a more or less excited audience, all seated at a long table, and each with a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and a large tumbler in front of him. And if the eminent abstainer cared to carry his researches farther, he would discover that ere the Pickwickian deputation had started on their first journey they had taken part in a street fight, eventually quelled by the arrival of a perfect stranger, who celebrates the occasion by calling for glasses round of brandy-and-water, hot and strong! The _Pickwick Paper_ absolutely reek with alcohol, from title-page to name and address of printer. Everybody drinks with everybody else, both in and out of the Fleet Prison. The hospitality of the good people is unbounded, and good and bad alike do it full justice. The very instant the belated travellers have crossed the threshold of Dingley Dell they are fed with cherry brandy. The entire deputation has “Katzenjammer,” on the morning after their arrival at Rochester, and a duel, or an attempted one, is the consequence. In coffee-room, bar-parlour, or smoking-room, an introduction, a story, or a song is an excuse for a bowl of punch. Wherever the Pickwickians go they carry trouble, more or less amusing to the reader, and the trouble is invariably followed by revelry. That two medical students should wash down their oysters with neat brandy—and before {225} breakfast—seems at the first glance an impossibility; but many of those who know for certain the effects of undue indulgence are the most careless in indulging, and Bob Sawyer and his still more rascally friend and fellow-student Ben Allen are reckless types of a reckless profession. The same meal—oysters _cum_ brandy—is partaken of, later on, by Solomon Pell and the coachman; and Dickens probably knew that lawyers and stage-drivers, like sailors, can digest anything. The most drunken man in the book, “the Shepherd,” is an alleged teetotaller; and the abstaining division will assuredly never forgive Dickens for his word-painting of Stiggins, whose “vanity” was pine-apple rum with hot water and plenty of sugar. The Wellers, _père et fils_, were not conservative in their potations; and whether “the inwariable” is Wellerese for brandy hot, or rum hot, I am still uncertain, although many correspondents have sought to enlighten me on the subject; said correspondents being anything but unanimous. One of the most favoured beverages mentioned in the work is “cold punch,” by which I understand milk-punch, a very “more-ish” draught indeed.