1903 The Flowing Bowl by Edward Spencer

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THE FLOWING BOWL

Gordon's favourite brew appears to have been hot mulled wine. As for the rest of the rioters, they drank, after the manner of rioters, anything they could get. The first mention of wine in A Tale of^ Two Cities is the fall and breakage, pro hono publico^ of a large cask of inferior claret in the district of St. Antoine—emblematic of the blood to be spilt in Paris later on—which called forth the delight ful, philosophic remark of Defarge, the master of the wine-shop to which the cask had been consigned; " It is not my affair. The people from the market did it. Let them bring another," But the chief imbibers in the book are Sydney Carton and Serjeant Stryver, the pushing and successful advocate for whom the other "devilled." Stryver, we gather from Edmund Yates's Retnini- scences^ was modelled by Dickens, from Mr. Edwin James, Q.C., who at one time "stood high in popular favour," and who " liked talking." There is plenty of subsequent moderate drinking —in Defarge's wine-shop principally—but with the exception of these two advocates, Stryver and Carton—" what the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas might have floated a king's ship"—nobody appears to swallow an undue amount of alcohol, in this the most power ful, and the saddest, of all Dickens's books. I could never wade through Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit is not one of my favourite books. It was ruthlessly mauled by the Saturday Review soon after its appearance, and Thackeray's openly expressed opinion of the work was " Little D. is Deed stupid." I have