E-text prepared by ellinora, RichardW, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/b21529346
Some characters might not display properly in this UTF-8 text file (e.g., empty squares). If so, the reader should consult the the original page images noted above or the html version: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/57179/57179-h/57179-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/57179/57179-h.zip)
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Original printed page numbers are enclosed by curly brackets like this: { 52}.
Original small capitals are in upper case.
A Memory of many Meals; the whole interspersed with various Recipes, more or less original, and Anecdotes, mainly veracious.
A Treatise on Drinks of All Kinds and of All Periods, Interspersed with Sundry Anecdotes and Reminiscences
I claim no merit for the following pages, other than may attach to industry, application, the gift of copying accurately, and the acquisition of writer’s cramp. The mechanical writing is—to the great joy of the compositors who have dealt with it—every letter mine own; but the best part of the book has been conveyed from other sources. In fact the book is, as the old lady said of the divine tragedy of _Hamlet_, “full of quotations.” The hand is the hand of Gubbins, but the voice is, for the most part, the voice of the great ones of the past, including Pliny and Gervase Markham. The matter, or most of it—I am endeavouring to drive the fact home—is culled from other sources; and if this is the most useful and interesting work ever published it is more my fortune than my fault.
The genial reception of my earlier effort, _Cakes and Ale_—which was condemned only by worshippers of _Ala_, who were not expected to applaud—together with the hope of earning something towards the purchase of a Bath Chair—have induced me to issue this little treatise on liquids, as a companion to my first cloth-bound book. And innate modesty—I stick to “innate,” despite the critics—compels me to add that I think the last is the better work. I will, however, leave a generous and discriminating public to decide that question for itself.