Besides, Bon Gaultier definitely shews That the real beverage for feasting gods on Is a soft compound, grateful to the nose And also to the palate, known as ‘Hodgson.’ I know a man—a tailor’s son—who rose To be a peer: and this I would lay odds on, (Though in his Memoirs it may not appear,) That that man owed his rise to copious Beer. O Beer! O Hodgson, Guinness, Allsop, Bass! Names that should be on every infant’s tongue! Shall days and months and years and centuries pass, And still your merits be unrecked, unsung? Oh! I have gazed into my foaming glass, And wished that lyre could yet again be strung Which once rang prophet-like through Greece, and taught her Misguided sons that “the best drink was water.” How would he now recant that wild opinion, And sing—as would that I could sing—of you! I was not born (alas!) the “Muses’ minion,” I’m not poetical, not even blue: And he (we know) but strives with waxen pinion, Whoe’er he is that entertains the view Of emulating Pindar, and will be Sponsor at last to some now nameless sea. Oh! when the green slopes of Arcadia burned With all the lustre of the dying day, And on Cithæron’s brow the reaper turned, (Humming, of course, in his delightful way, How Lycidas was dead, and how concerned The Nymphs were when they saw his lifeless clay; And how rock told to rock the dreadful story That poor young Lycidas was gone to glory:) What would that lone and labouring soul have given, At that soft moment, for a pewter pot! How had the mists that dimmed his eye been riven, And Lycidas and sorrow all forgot! If his own grandmother had died unshriven, In two short seconds he’d have recked it not; Such power hath Beer. The heart which Grief hath canker’d Hath one unfailing remedy—the Tankard. Coffee is good, and so no doubt is cocoa; Tea did for Johnson and the Chinamen: When ‘Dulce et desipere in loco’ Was written, real Falernian winged the pen. When a rapt audience has encored ‘Fra Poco’ Or ‘Casta Diva,’ I have heard that then The Prima Donna, smiling herself out, Recruits her flagging powers with bottled stout. But what is coffee, but a noxious berry, Born to keep used-up Londoners awake? What is Falernian, what is Port or Sherry, But vile concoctions to make dull heads ache? Nay stout itself—(though good with oysters, very)— Is not a thing your reading man should take. He that would shine, and petrify his tutor, Should drink draught Allsop in its “native pewter.”