PREFACE. CAKES and ALE are of many-sorted flour, and many-sorted barley. Then there are the spices, the condiments, the milk, and honey and eggs, that give character and individuality to the great family of CAKES; and then there is the born faculty of the cakemaker for do not certain babies come into the world with a hand for a light crust ?—the faculty bestowed by housewife Nature on her favourite little ones; bounteously touched with a delicacy of palm and finger, denied to so many of her clay-fisted progeny. With the same flour, and the same milk and eggs and spices, how different may be the grand result of combination, the CAKE !— From one hand, how light and melting—from another, dead dough! Even as to two men lie open the same stores of mother English; the very self-same words in self-same quantities: yet what very different CAKES-that is, BOOKS-the two men will compound therefrom. And as with CAKES, so with ALE. Let there be the same barley, the same hops, the same water impregnated with the same properties, and-two brewers! What is this? Melted topaz, liquid amber, with here and there just a filament of hop; no, not hop; but the feather of the wing of a fairy flail-killed |