_Curious Extracts.--Dean Nowell--Bottled Beer._--I was somewhat hasty in
assuming (see Vol. vii., p. 135.) that bottled beer was an unknown
department in early times, as the following extract will show. It is from
Fuller's _Worthies of England_, under "LANCASHIRE," the subject of the
notice being no less a person than the grave divine Alexander Nowell, dean
of St. Paul's, author of the Catechism, whose fondness for angling is also
commemorated by Izaak Walton. Fuller, having noticed the narrow escape
which Nowell had from arrest by some of Bishop Bonner's emissaries in Queen
Mary's reign, having had a hint to fly whilst fishing in the Thames,
"whilst Nowell was catching of fishes, Bonner was catching of Nowell,"
proceeds to say,--
"Without offence it may be remembered that, leaving a bottle of ale,
when fishing, in the grass, he found it some days after no bottle, but
a gun, such the sound at the opening thereof: and this is believed
(casualty is the mother of more inventions than industry[1]) the
original of bottled ale in England."--Nuttall's edit., vol. ii. p. 205.