Richard Valpy French

STUART PERIOD.

In entering upon this period it will be necessary to consider, in the first place, what were the drinks chiefly in use. A pamphlet, bearing the date 1612, enumerates a number of the wines then popular:—

Some drinking the neat wine of Orleance, some the Gasgony, some the Bordeaux. There wanted neither sherry sack, nor Charneco, Malyfo, nor amber-coloured Candy, nor liquorish Ipocras, brown beloved Bastard, fat Aligant, nor any quick-spirited liquor.[112]

That Spanish wines of the Sacke species were now especial favourites, is evident from an ordinance of James I.:—

Whereas, in times past, Spanish wines, called sacke, were little or no whit used in our court, and that in late years, though not of ordinary allowance, it was thought convenient that such noblemen and women and others of account, as had diet in the court, upon their necessities by sicknesse or otherwise, might have a bowle or glasse of sacke, and so no great quantity spent; we understanding that within these late years it is used as common to all order, using it rather for wantonnesse and surfeiting than for necessity, to a great and wasteful expense.... Our pleasure is that there be allowed to the serjeant of our seller 12 gallons of sacke a day, and no more.

The fashion of Malmsey had passed away, and the Hungarian red wine (Ofener) had taken its place. It came by Breslau to Hamburg, whence it was shipped to England. Very little Hungarian wine used to be made with a view to exportation. Now many sorts find their way to this country, notably the Carlowitz. The wine-jurors of the 1862 Exhibition reported:—‘Great expectations have been formed of the capability of Hungary as a wine supplying country. The produce is large, amounting to nearly 250,000,000 gallons yearly. Many of the wines are good, but more careful treatment is generally required.’ At one time only imperial Tokay was known in England as the produce of that country.[113]

Hock was also in high repute:

What wine is it? Hock,
By the mass, brave wine.[114]

Besides wine, beer and spirits were both adopted. Spirits used to be called strong waters, and comfortable waters; thus, when Sir George Summers of Lyme, in 1609, was driven before a hurricane, which led to his discovery of the Bermudas, there appeared no hope of saving the ship, so waterlogged was she. In this extremity, those who had ‘comfortable waters’ drank to one another as taking their last leaves.

Ale and beer were both in common use. But a new kind arose in competition. Dr. Butler, physician to James I., and, according to Fuller, the Æsculapius of that age, invented a kind of medicated ale, called Dr. Butler’s Ale, which used to be sold at houses that had the ‘Butler’s Head’ for a sign.[115]

But to pass from the quid to the quatenus, as Bishop Andrewes would say. Were these liquors drunk to excess? We should suspect that such would be the case, knowing the example of the Court, and remembering that not a little of the literature of the time abetted free living, whilst, at the same time, legislative restriction and ecclesiastical monition were rife, and in certain quarters, both clerical and lay, these excesses were vehemently anathematised.

Yes, the legislative, we shall find, was active, far more active than the executive, as appears from the renewal of an important statute in the same reign, just as though it had utterly ceased to be in force. The king showed great desire to enforce several statutes, but the difficulty lay in the fact that he was the first to infringe them. In fact, as Green does not hesitate to aver, the king was known to be an habitual drunkard; ladies of rank copied the royal manners, and rolled intoxicated in open court at the king’s feet.[116] His tutor, Buchanan, was a great drinker; and his nurse is said to have been a drunkard,[117] which latter circumstance gave him a predisposition to drink; the relation of cause and effect in such cases being established. Dr. Mitchell, one of the Lunacy Commissioners, stated in evidence before the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards in 1872: ‘It is quite certain that the children of habitual drunkards are in a larger proportion idiotic than other children, and in a larger proportion themselves habitual drunkards.’[118] The king’s hereditary tendency was not improved by his connection with Denmark. In the carouses with which that Court celebrated the royal nuptials, James increased that proclivity for heavy drinking to which most of his follies may be traced. He dates his letters ‘From the castle of Cronenburg, quhaire, we are drinking and driving our in the auld manner.’ The same influence followed him to his own dominions. A tavern sign, ‘The King of Denmark,’ perpetuates to this day a royal visit which was celebrated with unparalleled orgies. It will be remembered that James I. married a sister of Christian IV., king of Denmark.[119] In 1606 the Danish king, Christian, paid a visit to this country. He and his brother-in-law, James, were invited to a festival at Theobalds, the seat of the Prime Minister Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. The revellings there were disgraced by scenes of intemperance which have acquired historical notoriety. The queen was by necessity absent at the time when the kings were abandoning themselves to unrestrained excess. Mr. Samuelson, in his History of Drink, has fallen into the error of certain writers of the last century who have accused Queen Anne of the derelictions from propriety committed on this occasion by a certain queen, who, having taken too much, reeled against the steps of King Christian’s throne. But, as is pointed out by Strickland, this queen was only the Queen of Sheba, personated by a female servant of the Earl of Salisbury, and not the Queen of Great Britain, as any one may ascertain who reads Sir John Harrington’s letter, the sole document on which is founded the mistaken accusation of intemperance against the queen of James I. The story has been often told in whole or part, but it may be well to produce the original.[120]

Those whom I never could get to taste good liquor now ... wallow in beastly delights. The ladies abandon sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication. After dinner, the representation of Solomon, his temple, and the coming of the Queen of Sheba was made.... The lady who did play the queen’s part did carry most precious gifts to both their majesties, but forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets in his Danish Majesty’s lap, and fell at his feet, though I rather think it was on his face. Much was the hurry and confusion—cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean. His Majesty then got up, and would dance with the Queen of Sheba, but he fell down and humbled himself before her and was carried to his inner chamber. The entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went backward or fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers.

Much more is told, but one sentence is pregnant: ‘The gunpowder fright is out of all our heads, and we are going on hereabouts, as if the devil were contriving every man should blow up himself by wild riot, excess, and devastation of wine and intemperance.’

The queen was not present; indeed, she was not even a guest of the earl at this time, but was confined to her chamber sick and sad at Greenwich Palace. At a banquet on the Thames, however, given soon after by her royal brother, the queen was present. They pledged each other to continued friendship. To each pledge, drum, trumpet, and cannon were responsive. Shakespeare describes a similar scene:

No jocund health that Denmark drinks to-day,
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell.

Such pledges of friendship seem almost typical of the happy event of 1863, to which Jean Ingelow so exquisitely alludes in her ‘Wedding song.’

Come up the broad river, the Thames, my Dane,
My Dane, with the beautiful eyes.
****
And they said, ‘He is young, the lad we love,
The heir of the Isles is young;
How we deem of his mother, and one gone above,
Can neither be said nor sung.
He brings us a pledge—he will do his part
With the best of his race and name;’
And I will, for I look to live, sweetheart,
As may suit with Thy mother’s fame.

But, taking leave of the court, let us proceed to discover the manners of the people, from contemporary authors and dramatists. Much is to be gleaned from the voluminous writings of Thomas Decker, whose pamphlets and plays, the Quarterly Review once said, would furnish a more complete view of the habits and customs of his contemporaries in vulgar and middle life than could easily be collected from all the grave annals of the times. His Seven Deadly Sins of London, published in 1606, is a mighty invective against the iniquity of the day. It has been well remarked in the introduction to Arber’s reprint of the work, how much the mind of the writer was imbued with the style of the old Hebrew prophets, and how sure he was that that style would find a response in the hearts of his readers. For instance, how like the ‘burden of the Word of the Lord’ is his apostrophe to London—‘O London, thou art great in glory, and envied for thy greatness. Thou art the goodliest of thy neighbours, but the proudest, the wealthiest, the most wanton.... Thou sit’st in thy gates heated with wines.’ In his account of the third deadly sin, he speaks of wines, Spanish and French, meeting in the cellar, conspiring together to lay the Englishman under the board. Perhaps his finest effort of prosopopÆia is his impersonation of sloth, whom he represents as giving licences to all the vintners to ‘keepe open house, and to emptye their hogsheades to all commers, who did so, dyeing their grates into a drunkard’s blush (to make them knowe from gates of a prison) lest customers should reele away from them, and hanging out new bushes, that if men at their going out could not see the signe, yet they might not lose themselves in the bush.... And as drunkennesse when it least can stand, does best hold up ale-houses, so sloth is a founder of the alms-houses, ... and is a good benefactor to these last.’ To call attention to this author’s notices of such rules of drunkenness as Vpsy-Freeze, Crambo, Parmizant, &c., would be beside the present object; but the book will amply repay study, and serve as a commentary on Defoe’s Plague of London. Several other of his works bear upon the present theme, e.g. The Batchelor’s Banquet, Lanthorne and Candle Light, and English Villanies prest to Death.

A writer quite as voluminous, and equally with Decker a scourge of iniquity, was George Wyther (persistently called by so many—Hazlitt and Brand among the number—Wythers). In 1613 he brought out his satirical essays, Abuses Stript and Whipt, the truth and beauty of which, to his honour be it said, touched the heart of Charles Lamb, who observes:[121]

The game run down is coarse general vice, or folly as it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is stript and whipt.... To a well-natured mind, there is a charm of moral sensibility running through them. Wither seems everywhere bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base actions. At this day it is hard to discover what parts in the poem Abuses Stript could have occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was vice in high places more suspicious than now?

Reference has already been made to the allusion in this work of Wither to the custom of Hock-tide. He ridicules the notion of such an observance and that of ales subserving the devotion of youth, and indignantly asks,—

What will they do, I say, that think to please
Their mighty God with such fond things as these?
Sure, very ill.

In this same work occurs an allusion to the then common practice of inserting toast into ale with nutmeg and sugar:—

Will he will drinke, yet but a draught at most,
That must be spiced with a nut-browne tost.

The origin of the word toast is much disputed, as is elsewhere observed, and no better account of it is forthcoming than that the word was taken from the toast which was put into the tankard, and which still floats in the loving cup. Hence the person named was the toast or savour of the wine, that which gives the draught piquancy.

Many other of the drinking customs of the day are criticised, but not all with censure. The ode to Christmas, for instance, contrasts strongly with his later puritanical sentiments. Neither sectarian gloom nor civil struggles had yet enveloped the author when he wrote,—

Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,
And let us all be merry.
Hark how the roofs with laughter sound!
Anon they’ll think the house goes round,
For they the cellars’ depth have found,
And there they will be merry,

which introduces a stanza upon wassailing. A change must have come over his dream before he wrote his second ode on the same subject, which alone would entitle him to the encomiums of Hazlitt or any other critic.[122]

Far more unqualified denunciation of seventeenth century excess is to be found in a volume by Thomas Young (1617), entitled England’s Bane, or the Description of Drunkennesse. He says,—

There are in London drinking schooles: so that drunkennesse is professed with us as a liberall arte and science.... I have seene a company amongst the very woods and forests drinking for a muggle. Sixe determined to trie their strengths who could drinke most glasses for the muggle. The first drinkes a glasse of a pint, the second two, the next three, and so every one multiplieth till the last taketh sixe. Then the first beginneth againe and taketh seven, and in this manner they drinke thrice a peece round, every man taking a glasse more than his fellow, so that he that dranke least, which was the first, drank one and twenty pints, and the sixth man thirty-six.[123]

Scarcely less absurd than these laws of drunkenness, are the laws of health-drinking as described by Barnaby Rich in his work published 1619, the title of which is an excellent preface to the subject-matter, ‘The Irish Hubbub, or the English Hue and Crie; briefly pursuing the base conditions and most notorious offences of this vile, vaine, and wicked age. No less smarting than tickling,’ &c. The following is his description of toasting laws:—

He that beginneth the health hath his prescribed orders; first uncovering his head, hee takes a full cup in his hand, and settling his countenance with a grave aspect, hee craves for audience; silence being once obtained, hee begins to breath out the name peradventure of some honourable personage that is worthy of a better regard than to have his name polluted amongst a company of drunkards; but his healthe is drunke to, and hee that pledgeth must likewise off with his cap, kisse his fingers, and bowing himselfe in signe of a reverent acceptance. When the leader sees his follower thus prepared, he soups up his broath, turnes the bottom of the cup upward, and in ostentation of his dexteritie, gives the cup a phillip, to make it cry twango. And thus the first scene is acted. The cup being newly replenished, to the breadthe of an haire, he that is the pledger must now beginne his part, and thus it goes round throughout the whole company, provided alwaies by a cannon set downe by the founder, there must be three at the least still uncovered, till the health hath had the full passage, which is no sooner ended, but another begins againe, and he drinks a health, &c.

It appears from another author, that this method was accounted a procedure in order, for he adds, ‘It is drunke without order when the course or method of order is not observed, and that the cup passeth on to whomsoever we shall appoint.’ Drink is the burden of the songs of this hilarious writer, who is usually, known by the sobriquet of Drunken Barnaby (or Barnabea) from the titles he himself employed. It is curiously illustrative of the hold that convivial phrases had upon the popular mind that we find a pious divine solemnly quoting the words of a suffering Christian, one Lawrence Saunders, to this effect,—‘My Saviour began to mee in a bitter cup, and shall not I pledge Him?’ [i.e. drink the same cup of sorrow]. The divine just alluded to, Dr. Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, in his sermon (1685) entitled ‘Woe to Drunkards,’ anathematises toasting: ‘Abandon that foolish and vicious custome, as Ambrose and Basil call it, of drinking healths, and making that a sacrifice to God for the health of others, which is rather a sacrifice to the devil, and a bane of their owne.’

But this kind of appeal was by no means confined to the pulpit. Robert Burton, the famous author of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), who cannot be accused of being strait-laced (at any rate, Anthony Wood speaks of his company as very merry, facete, and juvenile), in his pungent chapter on Dyet as a cause of melancholy, exclaims,—

What immoderate drinking in every place! How they flock to the tavern! as if they were born to no other end but to eat and drink, as so many casks to hold wine; yea, worse than a cask, that marrs wine, and itself is not marred by it.... ‘Tis now come to that pass, that he is no gentleman, a very milk-sop, that will not drink, fit for no company.... No disparagement now to stagger in the streets, reel, rave, &c., but much to his renown.... ‘Tis the summum bonum of our tradesmen, their felicity, life, and soul, to be merry together in an ale-house or tavern, as our modern Muscovites do in their mede-inns, and Turks in their coffee-houses. They will labour hard all day long, to be drunk at night, and spend totius anni labores in a tippling feast.... How they love a man that will be drunk, crown him, and honour him for it, hate him that will not pledge him, stab him, kill him: a most intolerable offence, and not to be forgiven.

Again, in his chapter on ‘Mirth and Merry Company,’ he warns,—

But see the mischief; many men, knowing that merry company is the only medicine against melancholy, will therefore neglect their business, and spend all their days among good fellows in a tavern, and know not otherwise how to bestow their time but in drinking; malt-worms, men-fishes, or water-snakes, like so many frogs in a puddle.... Flourishing wits and men of good parts, good fashion, and good worth, basely prostitute themselves to every rogue’s company to take tobacco and drink.... They drown their wits, seeth their brains in ale, consume their fortunes, lose their time, weaken their temperatures, contract filthy diseases, rheumes, dropsies, calentures, tremor, get swoln juglars, pimpled red faces, sore eyes, &c.; heat their livers, alter their complexions, spoil their stomachs, overthrow their bodies (for drink drowns more than the sea and all the rivers that fall into it), mere funges and casks—confound their souls, suppress reason, go from Scylla to Charybdis.

If such were the avowed expressions of Burton, we shall not wonder to find such men as George Herbert and Bishop Hall vehement in denunciation of the same bane.

Because luxury is a very visible sin, the parson is very careful to avoid all the kinds thereof, but especially that of drinking, because it is the most popular vice; into which if he come, he prostitutes himself both to shame, and sin, and by having fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, he disableth himself of authority to reprove them: for sins make all equal whom they find together; and then they are worst, who ought to be best. Neither is it for the servant of Christ to haunt inns, or taverns, or ale-houses, to the dishonour of his person and office.[124]

This passage is quoted to call attention to the words italicised (not by Herbert), ‘because it is the most popular vice;’ an independent confirmation of the excessive drinking in the reign of James I.

Again, in The Parson in Journey, chapter xvii.,—

When he comes to any house, where his kindred or other relations give him any authority over the family, if he be to stay for a time, he considers diligently the state thereof to God-ward, and that in two points: First, what disorders there are either in apparel, or diet, or too open a buttery, &c.

The meaning of the words italicised is mistaken by the occasional annotator to Bohn’s edition, who explains it, ‘A repository or store-room for certain provisions.’ But in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, buttery always meant the place where the beer (or wine) was kept. Evidence is forthcoming from our dramatists of those periods. Thus:—

(1) Maria, in Twelfth Night (act i., scene 3), says to the unfortunate butt Sir Andrew Ague-cheek, ‘I pray you bring your hand to the buttery bar and let it drink.’

(2) Middleton, in A Trick to Catch the Old One (Ed. Dyce, vol. ii.), has a clear proof, in the words, ‘Go, and wash your lungs i’ th’ buttery.’

From Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum may be extracted—

A drunkard’s purse is a bottle.
Choose not a house near an inn.
Take heed of the vinegar of sweet wine.
The wine in the bottle doth not quench thirst.
A morning sun, and a wine-bred child, and a
Latin-bred woman, seldom end well.

Once more, from the Church Porch,—

Drink not the third glasse, which thou canst not tame
When once it is within thee; but before
Mayst rule it, as thou list: and poure the shame,
Which it would poure on thee, upon the floore.
It is most just to throw that on the ground
Which would throw me there, if I keep the round.
He that is drunken may his mother kill
Bigge with his sister: he hath lost the reins,
Is outlaw’d by himselfe; all kinde of ill
Did with his liquor slide into his veins.
The drunkard forfets Man, and doth divest
All worldly right, save what he hath by beast.
Shall I, to please another’s wine-sprung minde,
Lose all mine own? God hath giv’n me a measure
Short of his canne, and bodie.
****
Be not a beast in courtesie, but stay,
Stay at the third cup, or forego the place.
Wine above all things doth God’s stamp efface.

Bishop Hall was unsparing in his lashes of the vices of his time, and amongst these of intemperance. We hear him in verse and prose, in critique and sermon. Thus, in his Satire on the Stage,[125]—

Soon as the sun sends out his piercing beams
Exhale out filthy smoke and stinking streams,
So doth the base and the fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign.

In his Contemplation on Lot he remarks, ‘Drunkenness is the way to all bestial affections and acts. Wine knows no difference either of persons or sins.’ In his sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, on Good Friday, 1609, we find ‘Every of our sins is a thorn, and nail, and spear to Him; while thou pourest down thy drunken carouses, thou givest thy Saviour a portion of gall.’ Why are not the preachers of to-day equally outspoken? One of his apophthegms can scarcely be forgotten:[126] ‘When drinke is in, wit is out; but if wit were not out, drinke would not be in;’ and, lastly,—

Wine is a mocker. When it goes plausibly in, no man can know how it will rage and tyrannise. He that receives that traitor within his gates shall too late complain of surprisal. It insinuates sweetly, but in the end it bites like a serpent and hurts like a cockatrice. Even good Uriah is made drunk. The holiest may be overtaken.

But it is time to pass from precept to law.

In 1603 the power of licensing inns and ale-houses was granted by letters patent to certain persons, in which it was enacted that no victualler could sell less than one full quart of the best ale for one penny, and two quarts of the smaller sort for the same. The preamble of the statute of 1604 is most valuable for the information it affords as to what the ancient Parliaments considered to be the legitimate use of a tavern.

Whereas the ancient, true, and principal use of wine, ale-houses, and victualling-houses was for the receipt, relief, and lodging of wayfaring people travelling from place to place, and for the supply of the wants of such people as are not able by greater quantities to make their provision of victuals; and not meant for entertainment and harbouring of lewd and idle people to spend and consume their money and time in lewd and drunken manner: it is enacted that only travellers, and travellers’ friends, and labourers for one hour at dinner-time or lodgers can receive entertainment under penalty.

The statute of 4th James imposes punishment for drunkenness:—

Whereas the loathsome and odious sin of drunkenness is of late grown into common use, being the root and foundation of many other enormous sins, as bloodshed, stabbing, murder, swearing, fornication, adultery, and such like, to the great dishonour of God and of our nation, the overthrow of many good arts and manual trades, the disabling of divers workmen, and the general impoverishing of many good subjects, abusively wasting the good creatures of God.

Therefore a fine of five shillings was imposed for intoxication, or confinement in the stocks for six hours, and for the first offence of remaining drinking in a person’s own neighbourhood, a fine of three shillings and fourpence, or the stocks, the penalty being increased for further offence. The fine, it must be remembered, was worth several times the same amount imposed now for intoxication, and the high road to it, tippling, is now passed over. The time prescribed in the stocks was fixed at six hours, because by that time the statute presumed the offender would have regained his senses, and not be liable to do mischief to his neighbours.[127]

Little success can as yet have attended legislation, for in 1609, the statute, admitting that ‘notwithstanding all former laws and provisions already made, the inordinate and extreme vice of excessive drinking and drunkenness doth more and more abound,’ enacts that offenders convicted against the two last Acts shall be deprived of their licence. Again has this statute to be renewed in 1623, as though the executive had slept. Among the grievances that the Parliament of 1621 examined was one that patents had been granted to Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Michel, for licensing inns and ale-houses; that great sums of money had been exacted under pretext of these licences; and that such innkeepers as presumed to continue their business without satisfying the rapacity of the patentees, had been severely punished by fine, imprisonment, and vexatious prosecutions. The patentees were denounced as criminals. They fled for refuge. Sentence was passed upon them, which, in the case of Mompesson, was commuted. Many useful hints might be learnt from purely local legislation from time to time. Indeed, a most useful code might be formed from a digest of borough enactments. Let one illustration suffice. We find a local law at Lyme, about this time, to the effect that no retailer of beer was to sell to any craftsman or servant of the town, unless he was in company with a stranger. In 1612 it was there ordered that no one should tipple any one day above one hour in any house. It merely remains to be noticed that in Cott. MSS. Titus B. III. Codex chartaceus, in folio, Constans fol. 281, may be found—

1. A letter of James I. to the magistrates of Southampton; with orders for the regulation of ale-houses and victualling-houses, Westm., March 3, 1607.

2. An order of the Queen’s Council for an exact account of all the inns, ale-houses, and taverns in the kingdom, towards levying a tax upon them for the repairs of Dover harbour. Richmd, July 20, 1577.

3. An order for the regulation of ale-houses, 1608.

4. An order of Privy Council for a return concerning the ale-houses in different countries, Feb. 19, 1608.

5. Three letters of the Privy Council, and a paper of directions concerning ale-houses. Greenwich, June 30, 1608.[128]

The reign of Charles I. very nearly covers the second quarter of the seventeenth century. If we had to select a single author as our guide to the social habits of the time, we should probably at once fix upon Thomas Heywood, the busiest of dramatic writers, ‘a sort of prose Shakespeare,’ as Charles Lamb makes bold to say. Of his numerous works, one is a direct exposure of the then drinking customs.[129] The immense variety of drinking-cups, as well as the intrinsic value of many of them, speaks volumes. He describes them as ‘some of elme, some of box, some of maple, some of holly, &c., mazers, broad-mouth’d dishes, moggins, whiskins, piggins, cruizes, ale-bowles, wassell-bowles, court-dishes, tankards, kannes, from a bottle to a pint, from a pint to a gill. Other bottles we have of leather, but they are most used amongst the shepheards and harvest-people of the countrey; small jacks wee have in many ale-houses, of the citie and suburbs, tip’t with silver, besides the great black jacks and bombards at the court, which when the Frenchmen first saw, they reported at their returne into their countrey, that the Englishmen used to drinke out of their bootes: we have besides, cups made of horns of beasts, of cocker-nuts, of goords, of the eggs of estriches, others made of the shells of divers fishes brought from the Indies and other places, and shining like mother of pearl. Come to plate, every taverne can afford you flat bowls, prounet cups, beare bowles, beakers; and private householders in the citie, when they make a feast to entertain their friends, can furnish their cupboards with flagons, tankards, beere-cups, wine-bowls, some white, some percell gilt, some gilt all over, some with covers, some without, of sundry shapes and qualities.’

In the same books occurs the following curious satire:—‘There is now profest an eighth liberal art or science, called Ars Bibendi, i.e. the Art of Drinking. The students or professors thereof call a greene garland, or painted hoope hang’d out, a colledge, a sign where there is lodging, man’s-meate, and horse-meate, an inne of court, an hall or an hostle, where nothing is sold but ale and tobacco, a grammar schoole; a red or a blue lattice, that they terme a free schoole for all comers.... The bookes which they studdy, and whose leaves they so often turne over are for the most part three of the old translation and three of the new. Those of the old translation—1, The Tankard; 2, The Black Jacke; 3, The Quart-Pot, Rib’d, or Thorondell. Those of the new be these: 1, The Jugge; 2, The Beaker; 3, The Double or Single Can, or Black Pot.’ The same author gives a list of slang phrases then in use, signifying the being intoxicated. ‘He is foxt, hee is flawed, he is flustered, hee is suttle, cupshot, he hath seene the French king, he hath swallowed an havie or a taverne-token, hee hath whipt the cat, he hath been at the scriveners, and learn’d to make indentures, hee hath bit his grannam, or is bit by a barne-weesell,’ &c. In another of his productions, Shipwreck by Drink, he describes a drunken scene which took place in a house that he was passing in which a feast was being held:—

In the height of their carousing, all their brains
Warmed with the heat of wine.

And a marvellous piece of description it is. The guests imagine themselves to be rocked in a vessel during storm, climb bedposts as though they were masts, turn out the furniture as if casting ship-lading overboard; another bestrides his fellow to escape, Arion-like, on the dolphin’s back. The staff of the constable who enters is considered to be Neptune’s trident, and so forth.

But enough of this author. The habits of his time had evidently impressed him, and he constantly revives his impression. But it was no self-formed phantom. Abundance of corroboration is forthcoming. A political economist of the same date (1627) remarks, ‘This most monstrous vice is thus defined:—“Drunkenness is the privation of orderly motion and understanding.” ... But I need not stand much about the definition of drunkenness, for, with grief I speak it, the taverns, ale-houses, and the very streets are so full of drunkards in all parts of this kingdom, that by the sight of them it is better known what this detestable and odious vice is than by any definition whatsoever.’[130]

Regarding it then as established, that the intemperance of the times of Elizabeth and James I. was still perpetuated, it is natural to inquire to what it is to be attributed.

(1) The attractiveness of the drinks themselves, a constant factor in all periods.

Of wines, Canary and sack were in most demand, though these were constantly terms indifferently used; thus,—

Some sack, boy.
Good sherry-sack, sir?
I meant Canary, sir; what, hast no brains?[131]

The following is the explanation of the confusion in terms:—

Your best sacks are of Xeres in Spain; your smaller, of Gallicia and Portugall; your strong sacks are of the islands of the Canaries and of Malligo, and your Muskadine and Malmseys are of many parts, of Italy, Greece, and some special islands;[132]

and renders intelligible the following:—

Two kinsmen near allied to sherry sack,
Sweet Malligo and delicate Canary.[133]

It is extolled in Beaumont and Fletcher:—

Give me a cup of sack
An ocean of sweet sack.

Canary was in great esteem. John Howell praises it as ‘accounted the richest, the most firm, the best bodied, and lastingest wine: while French wine pickles meat in the stomach, this is the wine that digests, and doth not only breed good bloud, but it nutrifieth also, being a glutinous substantial liquor. Of this wine, if of any other, may be verified that merry induction, that good wine makes good blood, good blood causeth good humours, good humours causeth good thoughts, good thoughts bring forth good works, good works carry a man to heaven; ergo good wine carrieth a man to heaven. If this be true, surely more English go to heaven this way than any other, for I think there is more Canary brought to England than to all the world besides.’[134]

But probably no kind of drink came amiss.

The Russ drinks quass; Dutch, Lubeck beer,
And that is strong and mighty;
The Briton, he metheglin quaffs,
The Irish aqua vitÆ;
The French affects the Orleans grape,
The Spaniard tastes his sherry;
The English none of these can ‘scape,
But he with all makes merry.[135]

(2) The prevailing habit of toasting may be set down as a second cause, and a powerful factor it must have been in national corruption, if the case is not overstated by William Prynne,[136] who wrote his startling book to prove ‘the Drinking and Pledging of Healthes to be Sinfull and utterly Unlawful unto Christians.’ In his Epistle Dedicatorie to King Charles I. he urges that his Majesty’s health is an occasion, apologie, pretence, and justification of excesse.

Alas! how many thousand persons have been drawne on to drunkennesse, drinking their wit out of their heads, their health out of their bodies, and God out of their soules, whiles they have beene too busy and officious in carrying healthes unto your sacred Majestie.

Following upon this is an appeal ‘To the Christian Reader,’ in which he offers six reasons ‘why men are so much infatuated with the odious sinne of drunkennesse. (a) The inbred corruption and practice of humane nature. (b) The power of the Prince of the ayre, who hath lately gotten such high predominance in the souls of vitious men, that they doe not only glory in their drunkennesse, proclaiming it unto the world, but set themselves against the God of Heaven, violating the very lawes of nature and the very rules of reason. (c) The third reason is, the popular titles given to abettors of intemperance, e.g., good fellow, sociable, joviall boon companion, good natured, &c.; whilst mottoes of ignominy are applied to the temperate, e.g., Puritanisme, discourtesie, coynesse, singularitie, stoicisme, &c. (d) The fourth reason is the negligence and coldnesse of justices, magistrates, &c., in the faithful execution of those pious statutes enacted by the State against this sinne. “If justices were as diligent to suppresse drunkennesse and ale-houses as they are industrious to patronise them, the wings of drunkenness would soon be clipt, whereas now they spread and grow, because the sword of execution clipse them not.” (e) The fifth cause why this gangrene doth so dilate is the ill example of gentlemen, great men, magistrates, and ministers, who either approve excesse, or tolerate it in their misgoverned families, “which are oftentimes made the very theatres of Bacchus, and the seminaries, sinkes, and puddles of ryot and intemperance, under pretence of hospitality.” (f) The sixth cause assigned is, “Those common ceremonies, wiles, and stratagems which the deuill and his drunken rowt have invented, of purpose to alure, force, and draw men on to excesse of wine.” ... There is no such common bayte to entice men to intemperance as this idle, heathenish, and hellish ceremonie of beginning, seconding, and pledging healthes.’

Prynne then proceeds in the book proper to give fifteen arguments against health-drinking, drawn out in syllogistic form. Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the array of quotations from ‘the Fathers’ against occasions of intemperance; SS. Augustine, Basil, and Ambrose being most frequently quoted. He vindicates Luther from a charge laid against him by the Papists, which cannot be omitted. They put it about ‘that Luther once made a great feast at his house, to which he invited the chiefest Professours of the Universitie, and among the rest one Islebius. Dinner being ended, and all of them somewhat merry, Luther, after the Germane custome, commanded a great glasse divided with three kindes of circles to be brought unto him; and out of it he drunke an health in order to all his guesse. When all of them had drunke, the health came at last to Islebius. Luther then, in the presence of all the rest, takes this glasse, being filled up, into his hand, and, shewing it to Islebius, saith: “Islebius, I drinke this glasse full of wine unto thee, which containes the tenne commandements to the first circle; the Apostles’ Creed to the second, the Lord’s Prayer to the third, and the Catechisme to the bottom.” When he had spoken, he drinkes off the whole glasse at a draught; which being replenished with wine, he delivers it to Islebius, that he might pledge him all at a breath, who takes the glasse and drunke it off onely to the first circle, which did containe the Decalogue—it being impossible for him to drink any deeper—and then sets downe the glasse on the table, which hee could not behold againe without horrour: then said Luther, “I knew full well before, that Islebius could drinke the Decalogue, but not the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Catechisme.”’

He further cites some canons from ancient Councils; the most important being Canon xv. of the Council of Lateran, 1215:—‘Let all clergymen diligently abstain from surfeitings and drunkenness. For which let them moderate wine from themselves, and themselves from wine. Neither let any one be urged to drink, since drunkenness doth banish wit and provoke lust. For which purpose we decree that that abuse shall be utterly abolished, whereby, in divers quarters, drinkers bind one another to drink healths or equal cups, and he is most applauded who quaffs off most carouzes. If any shall offend henceforth in this, let him be suspended from his benefice and office.’ Again, in the Provincial Council of Colin, 1536, is the order—‘All parish priests or ministers are chiefly prohibited, not only surfeiting, riot, drunkenness, and luxurious feasts, but likewise the drinking of healths, which they are commanded to banish from their houses by a General Council.’

Thus much for the habit of toasting; but—

(3) We may assign as the third reason for the prevalent excess—Convivial Literature. The name that first suggests itself is that of Herrick. It is not only in poems avowedly of this description, such as ‘The Wassail’ and ‘The Wassail Bowl’ but it is a vein running through the entire seam of his songs. With him, at Christmas-time,—

My good dame, she
Bids ye all be free,
And drink to your heart’s desiring.

In his New Year’s Gift, he bids Sir Simeon Steward—

Remember us in cups full crowned,
And let our city health go round.

Is he singing of Twelfth Night? No sooner is the question of king and queen settled than their health must be drunk:—

And let not a man be seen here,
Who unurged will not drink,
To the base from the brink,
A health to the king and queen here.
Next crown the bowl full
With gentle lamb’s wool;
Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,
With store of ale too;
And thus ye must do
To make the wassail a swinger.

Of course, ‘True Hospitality’ would be impossible without the favourite ingredient:—

But as thy meat, so thy immortal wine
Makes the smirk face of each to shine,
And spring fresh rosebuds, while the salt, the wit,
Flows from the wine, and graces it.

The pretty superstition that wassailing the trees will make them bear, is included among the Christmas Eve ceremonies in his Hesperides:—

Wassaile the trees, that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or lesse fruits they will bring,
As you do give them wassailing.

The day of this ceremony varies in different localities. In Devonshire the eve of the Epiphany is chosen; there the farmer and his men proceed to the orchard with a huge jug of cider, and forming a circle round a well-bearing tree, drink the toast,—

Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! caps full!
Bushel, bushel, sacks full,
And my pockets full too; huzza![137]

Total sustenance (not abstinence) was part of his religion. In his exquisite little poem entitled ‘A Thanksgiving for his House’—only to be approached (of its kind) by Bishop Wordsworth’s hymn, ‘Who givest all’—he thanks God, amongst other mercies, for the wassail bowl:—

Lord, I confess too, when I dine,
The pulse is Thine,
And all those other bits that be
There placed by Thee.
The worts, the purslain, and the mess
Of water-cress,
Which of Thy kindness Thou hast sent:
And my content
Makes those, and my beloved beet,
To be more sweet.
‘Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth
With guiltless mirth;
And giv’st me wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.

With Herrick must be coupled in this connection the name of Cowley, of whom Dr. Johnson said, that ‘if he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the familiar and the festive.’[138] He was perfectly at home with Anacreontics. That on ‘Drinking’ will be remembered:—

Nothing in nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high.
Fill all the glasses there, for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, men of morals, tell me why?

As will also ‘The Epicure’—the ‘bibamus, moriendum est’ of Seneca:—

Fill the bowl with spicy wine,
Around our temples roses twine,
And let us cheerfully awhile
Like the wine and roses smile.
****
To-day is ours; what do we fear?
To-day is ours, we have it here.
Let’s banish business, banish sorrow;
To the gods belong to-morrow.

Cowley’s death was accelerated by intemperance if we can rely upon the authority of Pope. The event occurred while Dean Sprat was his guest. They had visited in company a neighbour of Cowley’s, who too amply refreshed them. ‘They did not set out for their walk home till it was too late, and had drunk so deep that they lay out in the fields all night. This gave Cowley the fever that carried him off.’

To the same convivial school belongs Sir Richard Fanshawe, to whom the distress of the monarch provided occasion for a toast:—

Come, pass about the bowl to me;
A health to our distressed king!
Though we’re in hold, let cups go free,
Birds in a cage do freely sing.[139]

And Alexander Brome, whose Mad Lover exemplifies the tyranny of excessive drinking:—

I have been in love and in debt and in drink
This many and many a year;
And those three are plagues enough, one would think,
For one poor mortal to bear.
‘Twas drink made me fall into love,
And love made me run into debt;
And though I have struggled and struggled and strove,
I cannot get out of them yet.
There’s nothing but money can cure me
And rid me of all my pain.
‘Twill pay all my debts
And remove all my lets,
And my mistress that cannot endure me
Will love me, and love me again;
Then I’ll fall to loving and drinking amain.

(4) A fourth cause of the intemperance of the time was the profusion of taverns. Decker writes that ‘a whole street is in some places but a continuous ale-house, not a shop to be seen between red lattice and red lattice.’[140]

The Lord-keeper Coventry thus speaks of them:—‘I account ale-houses and tippling-houses the greatest pests in the kingdom. I give it you in charge to take a course that none be permitted unless they be licensed; and for the licensed ale-houses, let them be but few and in fit places; if they be in private corners and ill places, they become the den of thieves—they are the public stages of drunkenness and disorder. Let care be taken in the choice of ale-house keepers, that it be not appointed to be the livelihood of a large family. In many places they swarm by default of the justices of the peace.’[141] It may be remarked that by this time inns had become representative; that is, for the most part each inn attracted a particular species of customer. This did not escape the notice of that keen observer Heywood:—

The gentry to the King’s Head,
The nobles to the Crown,
The knights unto the Golden Fleece,
And to the Plough the clown;
The Churchman to the Mitre,
The shepherd to the Star,
The gardener hies him to the Rose,
To the Drum the man of war;
To the Feathers, ladies, you; the Globe
The seamen do not scorn;
The usurer to the Devil, and
The Townsman to the Horn;
The Huntsman to the White Hart,
To the Ship the merchants go,
But you that do the Muses love
The sign called River Po;
The bankrupt to the World’s End,
The fool to the Fortune hie,
Unto the Mouth the oyster-wife,
The fiddler to the Pie;
The drunkard to the Vine,
The beggar to the Bush, then meet
And with Sir Humphrey dine.

Bishop Earle, whose Microcosmography is accounted a faithful delineation of characters as they existed in the seventeenth century, has bequeathed the following account of a tavern of his date:—‘A tavern is a degree, or (if you will) a pair of stairs above an ale-house, where men are drunk with more credit and apology. If the vintner’s nose be at the door, it is a sign sufficient, but the absence of this is supplied by the ivy-bush. It is a broacher of more news than hogsheads, and more jests than news, which are sucked up here by some spongy brain, and from thence squeezed into a comedy. Men come here to make merry, but indeed make a noise, and this music above is answered with a clinking below. The drawers are the civillest people in it, men of good bringing up, and howsoever we esteem them, none can boast more justly of their high calling. ‘Tis the best theatre of natures, where they are truly acted, not played, and the business as in the rest of the world, up and down; to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber. A melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads, as brittle as glasses, and often broken. Men come hither to quarrel, and come here to be made friends. It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or the maker away of a rainy day. It is the torrid zone that scorches the face, and tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up. Much harm would be done if the charitable vintner had not water ready for the flames. A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and it is like those countries far in the north, where it is as clear at midnight as at midday. After a long sitting it becomes like a street in a dashing shower, where the spouts are flushing above, and the conduits running below. To give you the total reckoning of it, it is the busy man’s recreation, the idle man’s business, the melancholy man’s sanctuary, the stranger’s welcome, the inns-of-court man’s entertainment, the scholar’s kindness, and the citizen’s courtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of comedy their book, whence we leave them.’

(5) A fifth cause was the perpetuation of Wakes. Complaints were made in all directions of their evil tendency. The author of the Life of John Bruen (1641) laments that ‘Popery and Profannes, two sisters in evil, had consented and conspired in this parish, as in many other places, together to advance their idols against the arke of God, and to celebrate their solemne feastes of their Popish saints by their wakes and vigils, ... in all riot and excesse of eating and drinking.’

The outcry, it is evident, arose rather from the Puritan than the Temperance party, and became so irrepressible that at the Exeter assizes (1627), Chief Baron Walter and Baron Denham made an order for suppression of all wakes. Judge Richardson made a like order for the county of Somerset, 1631. But on Laud’s demurrer the King commanded this order to be reversed; which the judge declining to do, a report was required by the bishop of the diocese how the feast days, church-ales, wakes, and revels were observed within his jurisdiction. On receipt of these instructions the bishop advised with seventy-two of the most able of his clergy, who certified that on these feast days the service of God was more solemnly performed than on any other days, that the people desired their continuance, as did also the ministers, for that they preserved the memorial of the dedication of their several churches, civilised the people, composed differences, tended to the increase of love and unity, and to the relief of the poor. On the delivery of this certificate Judge Richardson was cited, and peremptorily commanded to reverse his former order. After this, King Charles I. gave new force to his father’s declaration:—

We do ratify and publish this our blessed father’s decree, the rather because of late, in some counties of our kingdom, we find that under pretence of taking away abuses there hath been a general forbidding, not only of ordinary meetings, but of the feasts of the dedications of the churches, commonly called Wakes. Now his Majesty’s express will and pleasure is that these feasts, with others, shall be observed; and that his justices of the peace shall look to it, both that all disorders there may be prevented or punished, and that all neighbourhood and freedom, with manlike and lawful exercises, be used.

It should here be stated that malice even has not dared to impeach the private morals of Charles I. Chaste and temperate are epithets constantly applied to him. The most convincing testimony to the latter virtue is the statement of A. Wood, that the vintners illuminated at his death, made bonfires, and drank lusty carouses. He had evidently not favoured their trade; but the justice of his cause and the injustice of his treatment were engraven on many a publican’s sign, to which the ‘Mourning Crown and Mitre’ bore witness. The Mourning Bush was the sign set up by John Taylor, the ‘Water-Poet,’ over his tavern in Long Acre, to express his grief at the beheading of the King. But he was compelled to away with it; when, in its place, he put up the Poet’s Head, his own portrait, with this inscription:—

There is many a head hangs for a sign,
Then, gentle reader, why not mine?

The following is the testimony of Clarendon:—

As he (the king) excelled in all other virtues, so in temperance he was so strict, that he abhorred all debauchery to that degree, that at a great festival solemnity, where he once was, being told by one who withdrew from thence, what vast draughts of wine they drank, and that there was one earl who had drunk most of the rest down, and was not himself moved or altered, the king said that he deserved to be hanged; and that earl coming shortly after into the room where his Majesty was, in some gaiety, to show how unhurt he was from that battle, the king sent one to bid him withdraw from his Majesty’s presence; nor did he in some days after appear before him.

The following lines occur on the signboard of the inn near Hardwicke House, close to Caversham, where Charles I. was kept a prisoner:—

Stop! traveller, stop! In yonder peaceful glade
His favourite game the Royal Martyr played:
Here, stripped of honours—children—freedom—rank,—
Drank from the bowl, and bowled for what he drank;
Sought in a cheerful glass his cares to drown,
And changed his guinea, ere he lost his crown.

But, along with so many incentives to excess, were there no counteractive agencies at work? The reply is that there were. Precept and law were neither silent nor inoperative. It was not for nothing that men like Jeremy Taylor and Usher, Milton and Crashaw, lived and wrote.

Of the first-named writer (chaplain to the king) two quotations must suffice.

Jeremy Taylor on Temperance.—Temperance hath an effect on the understanding, and makes the reason sober, and the will orderly, and the affections regular, and does things beside and beyond their natural and proper efficacy: for all the parts of our duty are watered with the showers of blessing, and bring forth fruit according to the influence of heaven, and beyond the capacities of nature.[142]

Jeremy Taylor on our Shortening our own Days.—In all the process of our health we are running to our grave: we open our own sluices by viciousness and unworthy actions; we pour in drink and let out life; we increase diseases and know not how to bear them; we strangle ourselves with our own intemperance; we suffer the fevers and the inflammations of lust, and we quench our souls with drunkenness: we bury our understandings in loads of meat and surfeits, and then we lie down on our beds, and roar with pain and disquietness of our souls.[143]

Archbishop Usher, treating of the seventh commandment, asks,—

How is this commandment broken in the abuse of meat and drink? Either in regard of the quality or quantity thereof. How in regard of the quantity? By excess, and intemperance in diet: when we ... give ourselves to surfeiting and drunkenness. What be the contrary duties here commanded? 1. Temperance, in using a sober and moderate diet, according to our ability.... 2. Convenient abstinence (1 Cor. ix. 27).[144]

Of Milton, Johnson says that—

His domestic habits, so far as they are known, were those of a severe student. He drank little strong drink of any kind, and fed without excess in quantity, and in his earlier years without delicacy of choice.

But we should certainly infer, pace the good Doctor, that in his earlier years at least he was fond of wine, from his sonnet to Mr. Lawrence, which seems redolent of Horace in his Bacchanalian moods. The sonnet is intensely classical:—

To Mr. Lawrence.

Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sow’d nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

Also in L’Allegro we are rather disposed to think our poet shows that he was not altogether superior ‘to the spicy nut-brown ale.’ On the other hand, his—also Horatian—sonnet to Cyriac Skinner seems to suggest a somewhat similar idea to Cowper’s ‘cups that cheer but not inebriate,’ though they may refer to moderate drinking:—

To Cyriac Skinner.

Cyriac, whose grandsire, on the royal bench
Of British Themis, with no mean applause
Pronounced and in his volumes taught our laws,
Which others at their bar so often wrench;
To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench
In mirth that after no repenting draws.

On the other hand, he could be no friend to excess who in Paradise Lost, book i., thus speaks of Belial:—

In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

And again:—

Intemperance on the earth shall bring
Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew
Before thee shall appear!

What an advocate of prohibition was he who could write,—

What more foul common sin among us than drunkenness? Who can be ignorant that if the importation of wine were forbid, it would both clean rid the possibility of committing that odious vice, and men might afterwards live happily and healthfully without the use of intoxicating liquors!

Richard Crashaw, of whom it was writ,—

Poet and saint! to thee alone are given
The two most sacred names of earth and heaven,

reckons amongst his many efforts of genius, Temperance, or the Cheap Physician, where, after ridiculing the doctors’ mystic compositions, he asks,—

And what at last shall gain by these?
Only a costlier disease.
That which makes us have no need
Of physic, that’s physic indeed.

It may be remembered that this poet was the author of the epigram whose last line runs,—

Lympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.
The modest water saw its God, and blushed.

This epigram was composed by Crashaw when Dryden was an infant, so should not be attributed to the latter.

Some noble lines of the poet James Nicholson are well worthy of record:—

Our homes are invaded with dark desolation,
There’s danger wherever the wine-cup doth flow;
Then pledge your fair hands to resist the temptation,
Nor stain your red lips with those waters of woe.
Lift up your bright glances, put on all your beauty—
Your holy affections—your God-given dower;
Such weapons are mighty—awake to your duty,
The trophies you gather will add to your power.

And, once more,—

I’ll pledge thee not in wassail bowl,
With rosy madness filled;
But let us quaff the nobler wine,
By Nature’s hand distilled.
Where to the skies the mountains rise
In grandeur to the view,
Where sparkling rills leap down the hills,
Our Scotia’s mountain dew.

Thomas Weaver, 1649, writes,—

The harms and mischiefs which th’abuse
Of wine doth every day produce,
Make good the doctrine of the Turks,
That in each grape a devil lurks.

Divines like Hugh Peters declaimed from the pulpit against intemperance. Archbishop Harsnet, founder of Chigwell School, left the regulation respecting the head master, that he be ‘no tippler, no haunter of ale-houses, no puffer of tobacco.’

In addition to abundance of precept, some legislative action is noticeable.

In 1627 (3 Charles I.) a fine of twenty shillings, or whipping, is imposed for keeping an ale-house without licence.

---

In 1687 the vintners were called upon to submit to a tax of a penny a quart upon all the wine they retailed. As they repudiated the demand, a decree was passed in the Star Chamber forbidding them to sell or dress victuals in their houses. Two years after, they were questioned for the breach of this decree, and to avoid punishment they consented to lend the king six thousand pounds, subsequently entering into a composition to pay half the duty which was at first demanded of them.

An Act of 1688 prohibits the retailing of wine in bottles—an Act which must have fostered adulteration. Light wines will not keep long in the cask, and if not bottled at the proper time become useless. The dealer, to avert loss, adopts preventive measures. The door is at once open to fraud and adulteration. Complaints of the latter became now common.

Wines had risen greatly in price. An order in Council of 1633 directs that Canary, Muskadells, and Alligant should be sold in gross at 17l. a pipe, and at 12d. the quart by retail; Sacks and Malaga at 10d. the quart; the best Gascoigne and French wines at 6d. the quart.

In 1643 was established the excise, which was introduced, on the model of the Dutch prototype, by the Parliament after its rupture with the Crown. Originally established in 1643, its progress was gradual, being at first laid upon those persons and commodities where it was supposed that the shoe would least pinch—viz. the makers and venders of ale, beer, cider, and perry. The Royalists at Oxford followed the example set them at Westminster, and imposed a similar duty; both sides protesting that it should be continued no longer than to the end of the war, and then be abolished. But the Parliament soon after extended its application to many other commodities, and in course of time these champions of liberty declared the impost of excise to be the most easy and indifferent levy that could be laid upon the people, and so continued it during their usurpation. It was afterwards made hereditary to the Crown. Mr. Pymme is considered to have been the father of this impost.

---

Doubtless there was great occasion for the committee of 1641, which inquired into the general state of the clergy. That there was intemperance in many quarters cannot be denied; but something must be put down to the spirit of the time. Drink was an accessory of everything, and self-restraint was not a constant factor; there could be only one result. The tree was bad, the fruit was bad. That the following extract is now regarded as a curiosity, is itself a proof of very altered manners. The items are taken from the Darlington parochial registers:—

1639. For Mr. Thompson that preached the forenoon and afternoon, for a quart of sack, 14d. 1650. For six quarts of sack to the minister that preached when we had not a minister, 9s. 1666. For one quart of sack bestowed on Mr. Gillet, when he preached, 2s. 4d. 1691. For a pint of brandy, when Mr. George Bell preached here, 1s. 4d.; when the Dean of Durham preached here, spent in a treat with him, 3s. 6d. For a stranger that preached, a dozen of ale, 12d.

We here pause for a moment to listen to some very thoughtful remarks of Howell, contained in a long epistle to Lord Cliffe, upon the subject of comparative drinkdom. He writes:—

It is without controversy that in the nonage of the world, men and beasts had but one buttery, which was the fountain and river, nor do we read of any vines or wines till two hundred years after the flood; but now I do not know or hear of any nation that hath water only for their drink, except the Japanese, and they drink it hot too; but we may say that whatever beverage soever we make, either by brewing, by distillation, decoction, percolation, or pressing, it is but water at first; nay, wine itself is but water sublimed, being nothing else but that moisture and sap which is caused either by rain or other kind of irrigations about the roots of the vine, and drawn up to the branches and berries by the virtual attractive heat of the sun, the bowels of the earth serving as an alembic to that end, which made the Italian vineyard-man (after a long drought, and an extreme hot summer which had parched up all his grapes) to complain, ‘For want of water I am forced to drink water; if I had water I would drink wine:’ it may also be applied to the miller, when he has no water to drive his mills. The vine doth so abhor cold, that it cannot grow beyond the 49th degree to any purpose; therefore God and nature hath furnished the north-west nations with other inventions of beverage. In this island the old drink was ale, noble ale, than which, as I heard a great foreign doctor affirm, there is no liquor that more increaseth the radical moisture, and preserves the natural heat, which are the two pillars that support the life of man. But since beer hath hopped in amongst us, ale is thought to be much adulterated, and nothing so good as Sir John Oldcastle and Smugg the smith was used to drink. Besides ale and beer, the natural drink of part of this isle may be said to be metheglin, braggot, and mead, which differ in strength according to the three degrees of comparison. The first of the three, which is strong in the superlative if taken immoderately, doth stupefy more than any other liquor, and keeps a humming in the brain, which made one say, that he loved not metheglin because he was used to speak too much of the house he came from, meaning the hive. Cider and perry are also the natural drinks of parts of this isle.

The condition of things underwent no material change during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, notwithstanding the special pleading of political partisanship. The state of morals in England and its capital is accurately described in a letter to a French nobleman during the Protectorate:—

There is within this city [London] and in all the towns of England which I have passed through, so prodigious a number of houses where they sell a certain drink called ale, that I think a good half of the inhabitants may be denominated ale-house keepers. These are a meaner sort of cabarets. But what is more deplorable, there the gentlemen sit and spend much of their time, drinking of a muddy kind of beverage, and tobacco, which has universally besotted the nation, and at which I hear they have consumed many noble estates. As for other taverns London is composed of them, where they drink Spanish wines, and other sophisticated liquors, to that fury and intemperance, as has often amazed me to consider it. But thus some mean fellow, the drawer, arrives to an estate, some of them having built fair houses, and purchased those gentlemen out of their possessions, who have ruined themselves by that base and dishonourable vice of ebriety. And that nothing may be wanting to the height of luxury and impiety of this abomination, they have translated the organs out of their churches to set them up in taverns; chanting their dithyrambics and bestial bacchanalias to the tune of those instruments which were wont to assist them in the celebration of God’s praises, and regulate the voices of the worst singers in the world, which are the English in their churches at present.... A great error undoubtedly in those who sit at the helm, to permit this scandal; to suffer so many of these taverns and occasions of intemperance, such leeches and vipers, to gratify so sordid and base a sort of people with the spoils of honest and well-natured men. Your lordship will not believe me, that the ladies of greatest quality suffer themselves to be treated in one of these taverns, where a courtezan in other cities would scarcely vouchsafe to be entertained. But you will be more astonished when I shall assure you that they drink their crowned cups roundly, strain healths through their smocks, dance after the fiddle, &c. Drinking is the afternoon’s diversion; whether for want of a better, to employ the time, or affection to the drink, I know not. But I have found some persons of quality whom one could not safely visit after dinner, without resolving to undergo this drink-ordeal. It is esteemed a piece of wit to make a man drunk, for which some swilling insipid client or congiary is a frequent and constant adjutant.

And later on, in order to contrast the two countries, the writer adds:—

I don’t remember, my lord, ever to have known (or very rarely) a health drank in France, no, not the King’s; and if we say, À votre santÉ, Monsieur, it neither expects pledge or ceremony. ‘Tis here so the custom to drink to every one at the table, that by the time a gentleman has done his duty to the whole company, he is ready to fall asleep, whereas with us, we salute the whole table with a single glass only.[145]

Other writers of the time notice the participation of the women in the general drinking. M. Jorevin, another French author, writes of a Worcester hotel:—

According to the custom of the country, the landladies sup with the strangers and passengers, and if they have daughters they are also of the company, to entertain the guests at table with pleasant conceits, where they drink as much as the men; but what is to me the most disgusting in all this is, that when one drinks the health of any person in company, the custom of the country does not permit you to drink more than half the cup, which is filled up and presented to him or her whose health you have drunk.[146]

John Evelyn tells of the execrable habit of making servants drunk. He remarks, under date July 19, 1654:—

Went back to Cadenham, and on the 19th to Sir Ed. Baynton’s at Spie Park, a place capable of being made a noble seate; but the humorous old knight has built a long single house of 2 low stories on the precipice of an incomparable prospect, and looking on a bowling greene in the park. The house is like a long barne, and has not a window on the prospect side. After dinner they went to bowles, and in the meanetime our coachmen were made so exceedingly drunk, that in returning home we escap’d greate dangers. This it seems was by order of the knight, that all gentlemen’s servants be so treated; but the custome is a barbarous one, and much unbecoming a knight, still lesse a Christian.

The same sort of thing happened to Evelyn again, March 18, 1669:—

I went with Lord Howard of Norfolk to visit Sir William Ducie at Charlton, where we din’d; the servants made our coachmen so drunk that they both fell off their boxes on the heath, where we were fain to leave them, and were driven to London by two servants of my Lord’s. This barbarous custom of making the masters welcome by intoxicating the servants had now the second time happen’d to my coachmen.

[The italics are not Evelyn’s.]

A writer, by name Joseph Rigbie, slashingly exposes intemperance and its incentives, the tavern and toasting:—

The tap-house fits them for a jaile,
The jaile to the gibbet sends them without faile;
For those that through a lattice sang of late
You oft find crying through an iron grate.

And again:—

Yea every cup is fast to others wedged.
They always double drink, they must be pledged.
He that begins, how many so’er they be,
Looks that each one do drink as much as he.

And further on, to the same effect:—

Oh! how they’ll wind men in, do what they can,
By drinking healths, first unto such a man,
Then unto such a woman! Then they’ll send
An health to each man’s mistresse or his friend;
Then to their kindreds or their parents deare,
They needs must have the other jug of beere;
Then to their captains and commanders stout,
Who for to pledge they think none shall stand out;
Last to the king and queen they’ll have a cruse.
Whom for to pledge they think none dare refuse.[147]

‘We seem,’ wrote Reeve in his Plea for Nineveh, quoted in Malcolm’s Manners and Customs of London, i. p. 286, ‘to be steeped in liquors, or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but sponges ... or had tunnels in our mouths.... We are the grape-suckers of the earth.’

That the ignorant and thoughtless should have been swept into this vortex of dissipation is not surprising, but one marvels that a man of power, and in some sort a philosopher, should have stooped to translate an utterly frivolous and worthless poem of St. Amant, of which a mere quotation is sickening:—

Wine, my boy; we’ll sing and laugh,
All night revel, rant, and quaff;
Till the morn stealing behind us,
At the table sleepless find us.
When our bones (alas!) shall have
A cold lodging in the grave;
When swift death shall overtake us,
We shall sleep and none can wake us.
Drink we then the juice o’ the vine,
Make our breasts LyÆus’ shrine;
Bacchus, our debauch beholding,
By thy image I am moulding,
Whilst my brains I do replenish
With this draught of unmixed Rhenish;
By thy full-branched ivy twine;
By this sparkling glass of wine;
By thy thyrsus so renowned,
By the healths with which th’art crowned;
****
To thy frolic order call us,
Knights of the deep bowl install us;
And to shew thyself divine,
Never let it want for wine.

It would be thoroughly to the liking of such a patient that Dr. Tobias Whitaker (1638) should publish his Blood of the Grape, ‘proving the possibility of maintaining Life from Infancy to Old Age without Sickness, by the Use of Wine.’

In point of sobriety the Cavaliers have often been unfavourably contrasted with the Roundheads. The evidence for this, apart from mere recrimination (which in this case is a two-edged sword), has yet to be produced. The manners of the two factions were doubtless diverse. ‘Your friends, the Cavaliers,’ said a Roundhead to a Royalist, ‘are very dissolute and debauched.’ ‘True,’ replied the Royalist, ‘they have the infirmities of men; but your friends the Roundheads have the vices of devils—tyranny, rebellion, and spiritual pride.’ We would fain hope that they were sober all round, and that Cromwell’s description of his troops was unassailable. The mother of Cromwell set up the brewery at Huntingdon which is still flourishing. It was this slight connection with ‘the trade’ which gained for Cromwell the agnomen of ‘the brewer.’

The story is told, ‘a tradition’ (Hume), that one day sitting at table, the Protector had a bottle of wine brought him, of a kind which he valued so highly that he must needs open the bottle himself; but, in attempting it, the corkscrew dropt from his hand. Immediately his courtiers and generals flung themselves on the floor to recover it. Cromwell burst out laughing. ‘Should any fool,’ said he, ‘put in his head at the door, he would fancy, from your posture, that you were seeking the Lord, and you are only seeking a corkscrew.’ One sees here that Cromwell is addressing his ‘men of religion.’ There was much of it real or unreal; and a curious monument of the fashion then prevalent of giving sacred names to everything and everybody is furnished by the tavern sign of the ‘Goat and Compasses,’ which reveals the naked truth that ‘Praise God Barebones’ preferred drinking his tankard of ale at the tavern whose sign was ‘God encompasseth us’ to any other ale-house. On the other hand it should be noted that, according to the late Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, ‘the stories of his wild living while in town ... rest exclusively on Carrion Heath.... Of evidence that he ever lived a wild life about town, or elsewhere, there exists no particle.’

The funeral of the Protector is thus described by Evelyn:—

It was the joyfullest funerall I ever saw, for there were none that cried but dogs, while the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streetes as they went.

Club life was becoming more and more unfavourable to sobriety. The ‘Everlasting Club,’ instituted during the Civil War, was especially bibulous and riotous. So much so, that a good-for-nothing devotee of the bottle was satirically dubbed a member of that club. A writer cited by Timbs notes that ‘since their first institution they have smoked fifty tons of tobacco, drank thirty thousand butts of ale, one thousand hogsheads of red port, two hundred barrels of brandy, and one kilderkine of small beer.’ They sat night and day, one party relieving another. The fire was never allowed to go out, being perpetuated by an old woman in the nature of a Vestal. The delight of the members was in ‘old catches which they sang at all hours, to encourage one another to moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking.’

But Eastern products were soon to create a revolution in the national diet. Sir Anthony Shirley, one of the celebrated trio of brothers, travellers, when he arrived at Aleppo in 1598, first tasted a drink that he described as being made of a seed which will ‘soon intoxicate the brain,’ and which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome: this was coffee. In 1650 was opened at Oxford the first coffee-house by Jacobs, a Jew, at the Angel, in the parish of St. Peter in the East; and there it was, by some who delighted in novelty, drunk. Hence the antiquary Oldys is incorrect in stating that the use of coffee in England was first known in 1657.

Mr. Edwards, a Turkey merchant, brought from Smyrna to London one Pasqua Rosee, a Ragusan youth, who prepared this drink for him every morning. But the novelty thereof drawing too much company to him, he allowed his said servant, with another of his son-in-law, to sell it publicly, and they set up the first coffee-house in London in St. Michael’s Alley in Cornhill.[148]

Of course it was a panacea for all ills. An original handbill of Rosee’s, headed, ‘The Vertue of the Coffee Drink,’ thus sounds its praises:—

The quality of this drink is cold and dry; and though it be a drier, yet it neither heats nor inflames more than hot posset. It so encloseth the orifice of the stomach, and fortifies the heat within, that it is very good to help digestion; and therefore of great use to be taken about three or four o’clock afternoon, as well as in the morning. It much quickens the spirits, and makes the heart lightsome; it is good against sore eyes, and the better if you hold your head over it and take in the steam that way. It suppresseth fumes exceedingly, and therefore is good against the headache, and will very much stop any defluxion of rheums that distil from the head upon the stomach, and so prevent and help consumptions and the cough of the lungs. It is excellent to prevent and cure the dropsy, gout, and scurvy.... It is better than any other drying drink for people in years, or children that have any running humours upon them, as the king’s evil, &c. It is a most excellent remedy against the spleen, hypochondriac winds, and the like. It will prevent drowsiness.... It is observed that in Turkey, where this is generally drunk, that they are not troubled with the stone, gout, dropsy, or scurvy, and that their skins are exceeding clear and white. It is neither laxative nor restringent.

And indeed its virtues must have been generally conceded, for it became fashionable in the reign of Charles II., and is thus alluded to by Pope, who attributes to it an additional virtue:—

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.[149]

The authors of the History of Signboards state that the ‘Rainbow,’ in Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane, is the oldest coffee-house in London:—

I find it recorded that one James Farr, a barber, who kept the coffee-house, which is now the Rainbow, by the Inner Temple gate (one of the first in England), was, in the year 1657, presented by the inquest of St. Dunstan’s in the West, for making and selling a sort of liquor called Coffee, as a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighbourhood, &c., and who would have thought London would ever have had near three thousand such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality and physicians.

The presentation here alluded to is still preserved among the records of St. Sepulchre’s church. It says:—

We present James Farr, barber, for making and selling a drink called coffee, whereby, in making the same, he annoyeth his neighboors by evill smells, and for keeping of fire the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chamber has been set on fire, to the great danger and affreightment of his neighboors.[150]

Roger North, attorney-general to James II., says:—

The use of coffee-houses seems newly improved by a new invention called chocolate houses, for the benefit of rooks and cullies of all the quality; where gaming is added to all the rest, ... as if the devil had erected a new university, and those were the colleges of its professors, as well as his school of discipline.[151]

Chocolate was advertised as a new drink in 1657:—

In Bishopsgate Street in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink called chocolate to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade, at reasonable rates.

The reputation of chocolate upon its introduction was fluctuating. This appears in the letters of Madame de SÉvignÉ, who at one time recommends it to her daughter with all fervour, whilst at other times she decries it as the root of all evil.

But however much the introduction into our country of such drinks was destined to discover a rival to intoxicants, the fact remains that the public taste had by the habit of long ages become vitiated, and England had earned for herself the distinction of the ‘land of drunkards.’

True it is that the Protector strove to repress intemperance by fines and punishments. The rigid restrictions of the republican rule were manifested in the strict surveillance maintained over the people, with the view of securing temperance. Convictions for drunkenness were of daily occurrence; and it was often the practice to remove all doubts of the sufficiency of testimony by producing the delinquent in court under the influence of drink. Many are the instances in which it is recorded by the convicting justice that some offender was ‘drunk in my view.’ They were in the habit, moreover, of making nice distinctions as to the grades of intoxication.

The ‘drunkard’s cloak’ was an instrument of punishment then in use, which might with advantage be revived. It was a cask with a hole at the top, through which the drunkard’s head protruded, and one on each side for either hand. The legs were free for the offender to perambulate with the instrument of disgrace about him.[152]

Some strong language was uttered from the pulpit against drunkenness. Dr. Robert Harris, President of Trinity College, Oxford, in the dedication to the Drunkard’s Cup, a sermon, speaks of the ars bibendi as having become a great profession:—

There are lawes and ceremonies to be observed both by the firsts and seconds. There is a drinking by the foot, by the yard, &c., a drinking by the douzens, by the scores, &c., for the wager, for the victory, man against man, house against house, town against town. There are also terms of art, fetched from hell, for the better distinguishing of the practitioners; one is coloured, another is foxt, a third is gone to the dogs, &c.

In the sermon he speaks of ‘the strange saucinesse of base vermine, in tossing the name of his most excellent Majesty in their foaming mouthes, and in daring to make that a shooing-horne to draw on drink by drinking healths to him.’[153]

Dr. Grindrod draws attention in his Bacchus to a prominent appeal of about the same date entitled, The Blemish of Government, the Shame of Religion, the Disgrace of Mankind: ‘or, a charge drawn up against Drunkards, and presented to his highness the Lord Protector, in the name of all the sober party in the three nations,’ by R. Younge. The book is not procurable; but assuming the quotation to be correct the statistic is astounding:—

It is sad to consider how many will hear this charge for one that will apply it to himself, for confident I am that fifteen of twenty, this city over [London] are drunkards, yea, seducing drunkards, in the dialect of Scripture, and by the law of God which extends to the heart and the affections.... Perhaps by the law of the land, a man is not taken for drunk except his eyes stare, his tongue stutter, his legs stagger; but by God’s law, he is one that goes often to the drink, or that tarries long at it (Prov. xxiii. 30, 31). He that will be drawn to drink when he hath neither need of it nor mind to it, to the spending of money, wasting of precious time, discredit of the Gospel, the stumbling-block of weak ones, and hardening associates ... is a drunkard.

Presuming that Younge’s statement is at all within the mark, it will account for the effort put forth at the London sessions in 1654, wherein it was ordered that ‘no new licences shall be granted for two years.’

---

Great was the magnificence of the pageant upon the restoration of King Charles II. The conduits flowed with a ‘variety of delicious wines.’ At the Stocks was a fountain, of the Tuscan order, ‘venting wine.’ The event was commemorated at Charing Cross by the sign of the Pageant Tavern, which represented the triumphal arch there and then erected, and which remained some time after. Various were the forms that exuberance assumed. At the rejoicings at Edinburgh for the Restoration, at the Lord Provost’s return he was at every bonfire complimented with the breaking of glasses—one of the concomitant formalities of toasting.

Beyond the natural outburst of rejoicing at so great an occasion, there is abundant corroboration of the remark of Fosbroke, that ‘drinking healths was uncommonly prevalent, and productive of much intemperance, immediately after and on account of the Restoration.’ Royalty will be always prominently recognised at our public rejoicings, as a matter of course, and of right. May the health of the Sovereign and Royal Family always be proposed! Always, when the concomitant of drinking it has become obsolete.[154] What a volume could be written on the customs which have gathered about the toasting of our monarchs alone! One of these comes at once to mind in connection with the Second Charles. Pepys, in his Diary (1662-3), describes his own dining at ‘Chirurgeons’ Hall.’ He tells that:—

Among other observables we drunk the King’s health out of a gilt cup given by King Henry VIII. to this Company, with bells hanging at it, which every man is to ring by shaking after he hath drunk up the whole cup.

Another curious circumstance will be mentioned presently in connection with the toasting his successor, James.

But it is time again to review the material of all this rejoicing. At this period of the seventeenth century the importation of French wines into England was two-fifths of her consumption.[155] Mr. Cyrus Redding states that in 1675, there came to England 7,495 tuns of French wine to 20 of those of Portugal; and in 1676 no less than 9,645 French, to 83 Portuguese; soon after which date French wines were prohibited for seven years.[156]

Navarre wine, which the same author mentions among other wines of the Basses PyrÉnÉes as of good quality, was coming into fashion. Pepys mentions his dining at Whitehall with the Duke of York, who did ‘mightily commend some new sort of wine lately found out, called Navarr wine, which I tasted, and is, I think, good wine.’ Bacharach was becoming a favourite Rhenish wine. Redding tells that German writers pretend that this Bacharach derived its name from the deity of wine, a stone still existing in the river, which they call Bacchus’ altar.

The famous author of Hudibras introduces us to the names of some of these wines which had recently come into vogue:—

Those win the day that win the race;
And that which would not pass in fights,
Has done the feats with easy flights,
Recover’d many a desp’rate campaign
With Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champaign;
Restor’d the fainting high and mighty
With brandy, wine, and aqua vitÆ;
And made ‘em stoutly overcome
With Bacchrach, Hockamore, and Mum.

What a satirist was Butler, of drink, drinkers, everybody!

Of drink:—

Drink has overwhelmed and drowned,
Far greater numbers on dry ground,
Of wretched mankind, one by one,
Than e’er the flood before had done.

Of drinkers—e.g. ‘on a Club of Sots’:—

The jolly members of a toping club,
Like pipestaves, are but hooped into a tub,
And in a close confederacy link
For nothing else but only to hold drink.

Of everybody (to whom he was politically opposed)—appealing to the Muse:—

Thou that with ale, or viler liquors,
Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vickers,
And force them, though it was in spite
Of Nature, and their stars, to write.[157]

Other light wines are sung of in John Oldham’s Works (1684):—

Let wealthy merchants when they dine,
Run o’er their witty names of wine:
Their chests of Florence and their Mont Alchine,
Their Mants, Champaigns, Chablees, Frontiniacks tell;
Their aums of Hock, of Backrag, and Mosell.

No wonder that the doctors complained that their efforts would be fruitless to patch up constitutions so utterly weather-beaten by heat and wet, as we find from Sir Charles Sedley’s The Doctor and his Patients, where it is told of the family Æsculapius:—

One day he called ‘em all together,
And, one by one, he asked ‘em whether
It were not better by good diet
To keep the blood and humours quiet,
With toast and ale to cool their brains
Than nightly fire ‘em with Champains.

And whilst these wines were injurious to their bodies they failed to give any real or permanent relief to their minds, as even the licentious tragedian of the period, Etheridge, admitted:—

At the plays we are constantly making our court,
And when they are ended we follow the sport
To the Mall and the Park,
Where we love till ‘tis dark;
Then Sparkling Champagne
Puts an end to their reign;
It quickly recovers
Poor languishing lovers;
Makes us frolic and gay, and drowns all our sorrow;
But alas! we relapse again on the morrow.[158]

We obtain an incidental estimate of the market price of French wine from the Tatler, No. 147, where we read:—

Upon my coming home last night, I found a very handsome present of French wine left for me, as a taste—of 216 hogsheads which are to be put to sale at 20l. a hogshead, at Garraway’s coffee-house, in Exchange Alley.

These wines were sold by the candle—i.e. the property was put up by the auctioneer, an inch of candle was lighted, and the last bidder when the light went out was the purchaser.

English vineyards were still here and there attempted. Thus Evelyn (Diary, 1655) ‘went to see Col. Blount’s subterranean warren, and drank of the wine of his vineyard, which was good for little.’

The consumption of French Brandy was very great, and discontent was excited from the notion that the country was suffering from the lack of encouragement to home distillation; permission was accordingly granted to a company to distil brandy from wine and malt.

Besides wine and brandy, ale was drunk in various forms.

Chamberlayne states that in 1667 no less than 1,522,781 barrels of beer were brewed in the city of London, each of them containing from 32 to 36 gallons, and that the amount yearly brewed in London had since risen to nearly 2,000,000 barrels; and that the excise for London was farmed out for 120,000l. a year.[159]

Jorevin de Rochefort, whose travels were published at Paris in 1672, says:—‘The English beer is the best in Europe’ (Antiquarian Repertory, vol. iv. p. 607). At Cambridge he had a visit from the clergyman, ‘during which,’ says he, ‘it was necessary to drink two or three pots of beer during our parley; for no kind of business is transacted in England without the intervention of pots of beer.’

At this time people frequently ate no supper but took buttered ale, composed of sugar, cinnamon, butter, and beer brewed without hops. It was put into a cup, set before the fire to heat, and drunk hot.

Cider was again coming into fashion. Butler (Hudibras) tells of Sidrophel that he knew—

... in what sign best sider’s made.

The manufacture being of sufficient moment for reference to astrology.

A new liquor now introduced from Brunswick was a sort of strong beer called Mum, or, sometimes, Brunswick Mum. The word has been derived from mummeln, to mumble, or from the onomatopoeic mum, denoting silence, and from Christian Mummer by whom it was first brewed. It was brewed chiefly from malt made from wheat instead of barley. Pope writes of it:—

The clamorous crowd is hush’d with mugs of mum,
Till all, tuned equal, send a general hum.

This foreign drink was rivalled by Dorset beer.[160]

Lastly, we hear still of Metheglin. Pepys (1666) describes his dining with the king’s servants from meat that came from his Majesty’s table, ‘with most brave drink, cooled in ice; and I, drinking no wine, had metheglin, for the king’s own drinking, which did please me mightilye.’ It was an article of excise.

A good deal has been made of what is termed the reaction in morals after the republican spell. For instance, Mr. Samuelson says (Hist. of Drink):—

One would almost imagine from this, and kindred statements, that vice was unknown to the Protector and his adherents; whereas it is matter of history that Cromwell’s early life was dissolute and disorderly, and that he consumed in gaming, drinking, debauchery, and country riots, the more early years of his youth.[161] The Roundheads liked ale as well as the Cavaliers. Does not Pepys tell of Monk’s troops (Feb. 13, 1659):—‘The city is very open-handed to the soldiers; they are most of them drunk all day’? Surely, then, bias must have possessed Lord Macaulay when he would have us believe that ‘in the Puritan camp no drunkenness was seen.’ Some prefer the evidence of a contemporary.

It is possible to contrast the Courts of the two Charleses, and the contrast is terrible; but was no one responsible besides Charles II. for his wandering life, when he herded with inferiors? If he was a creature of frailty and vice, he was also a creature of circumstance.

Thus much prefaced, let it be freely admitted that drunkenness prevailed in every rank of society, and that the king set the example. Mr. Samuelson adduces from Evelyn, as an instance, a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham when the Prince of Orange was over on a visit, on which occasion the king made the prince drink hard (though he could not have required much making), under the influence of which, the Dutchman broke the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour, with other mischiefs.

Nor does the famous story in the Spectator impress us with his bias towards temperance. The king had been dining with the Lord Mayor at Guildhall, where his cups did not prevent his observing that conviviality had occasioned familiarity; whereupon, with an abrupt farewell, he left the banquet. The mayor pursued the monarch, overtook him in the courtyard, and swore that he should not go till they had ‘drunk t’other bottle!’ The airy monarch looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and, with a smile and graceful air, repeated the line of the old song:—

And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!

and immediately turned back and complied with his host’s bidding.

But the veil is more thoroughly lifted by Pepys, who notes:—

Again he writes (1661):—

Two of the notables about Court have already been alluded to. Rochester—that is, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—in the language of Dr. Johnson, ‘blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness,’ dying at the age of thirty-three. Some lines of his favour the notion that the origin of the term toasting, as given in the Tatler, may be the correct one. They are:—

Make it so large that, fill’d with sack
Up to the swelling brim,
Vast toasts on the delicious lake,
Like ships at sea, may swim.

A confirmation of the same may be derived from a verse of Warton:—

My sober evening let the tankard bless,
With toast embrown’d, and fragrant nutmeg fraught,
While the rich draught, with oft-repeated whiffs,
Tobacco mild improves.

Of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the criticism of Dryden must suffice—lines well known:—

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long.
But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.
Then all for women, paintings, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Another drinking notoriety was Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (n. 1637, ob. 1684).

Lord Macaulay, in his History of England, chap. vi. has the following description of the same disgraceful event:—

It is perfectly clear that the higher motives for restraint were lacking, though expediency acted as a curb upon occasions. The following passage from Evelyn’s Diary will serve as an illustration:—

[Italics not in the original.]

From the same author we find that the same vice beset women of rank. The Duchess of Mazarine, he observes, is reported to have hastened her death by intemperate drinking of strong spirits.

The Lower House of Parliament seems to have been infected with the moral distemper. Evelyn writes:—

(What made this worse was that Sir Allen Brodericke was an official—Surveyor-General in Ireland to his Majesty.)

But there was a vast amount of drinking that is really intemperance, though it passes under another name. Very apposite are the words of a contemporary, Sir William Temple:—

It is refreshing in reading Johnson’s Lives to come upon a poet really free from a suspicion of fondness for drink. Such a one was Edmund Waller, born 1605, died 1687. Would he have lived so long had he been a drink-hard? Johnson remarks of him:—

An excellent companion for the poet would have been Guy, Earl of Warwick, in whose ‘Tragical History’ occur the lines:—

Phillis. Give me some bread. I prithee, father, eat.
Guy. Give me brown bread, for that’s a pilgrim’s meat.
Phillis. Reach me some wine; good father, taste of this.
Guy. Give me cold water, that my comfort is.
I tell you, Lady, your great Lord and I
Have thought ourselves as happy as a king,
To drink the water of a christal spring.

Coffee came into general use in England, according to John Evelyn (Diary), about 1667. But he records, under date May 1637, that ‘one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was the first he ever saw drink coffee.’

Tea became a fashionable beverage in England soon after the marriage of Catharine of Braganza with Charles II. It was not exactly introduced by her, as it was procurable in London some months, at any rate, before her marriage; for Pepys writes:—‘Sept. 28, 1660.—I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.’ Yet she set the fashion for the use of it. Strickland rightly considers that the use of these simple luxuries, tea, coffee, and chocolate, had gradually a beneficial influence on the manners of all classes of society, by forming a counter-charm against habits of intoxication. Waller wrote a complimentary poem on the queen, commending tea, in which are the lines:—

The best of Queens and best of herbs we owe
To that bold nation, who the way did show
To the fair region where the sun doth rise.

All sorts of things have been scribbled about it, good, bad, and indifferent. The same Waller writes:—

The Muses’ friend, Tea, does our fancy aid,
Repress the vapours which the head invade,
And keeps the palace of the soul serene.

Young could write, on the other hand:—

Tea; how I tremble at thy fatal stream!
As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame.
What devastations on thy banks are seen!
What shades of mighty names which once have been!
A hecatomb of characters supplies
Thy painted altars’ daily sacrifice.

In sympathy with Young would be Dr. Parr, in the well-known line of gallantry:—

Nec tea-cum possum vivere, nec sine te.

or, in mother tongue—

When failing tea, my soul and body thrive,
But failing thee, no longer I survive.

The epigram is still more severe:—

If wine be poison, so is Tea—but in another shape—
What matter whether we are kill’d by canister or grape?

We still plump for tea.

One word before leaving the drink of the Restoration. Some may be curious to inquire the nature of their cups. Pepys, telling of his dining at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, says:—

Chaffers remarks that probably pitchers and large pots were usually made of earth and leather, while the cups, or dishes, out of which the liquor was drunk, were of ash; or sometimes, among the more opulent, from cups or tankards of silver:—

His cupboard’s head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed.
Dryden’s Juvenal.

It may be here mentioned that Dryden immensely prided himself on his Bacchanalian song entitled Alexander’s Feast. He wrote to his publisher, ‘I am glad to hear from all hands that my ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry.’ Stanza III. is a sufficient specimen:—

The praise of Bacchus then the sweet Musician sung,
Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young:
The jolly god in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets; beat the drums!
Flush’d with a purple grace
He shows his honest face.
Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes!
Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drinking joys did first ordain:
Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldiers’ pleasure:
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain.

Legislation.

The Wine Acts of Car. II. were those known as 12 Charles and 22 & 23 Charles. Early in his reign he issued that remarkable proclamation, which could not but reflect on his favourite companions and strongly mark the moral disorders of those depraved times.[163] It is against ‘vicious, debauch’d, and profane persons,’ who are thus described:—

Blackstone, speaking of the king’s ordinary revenue, observes that a seventh branch might also be computed to have arisen from wine licences, or the rents payable to the Crown by such persons as are licensed to sell wine by retail throughout England, except in a few privileged places. These were first settled on the Crown by the statute 12 Car. II. c. 25, and, together with the hereditary excise, made up the equivalent in value for the loss sustained by the prerogative in the abolition of the military tenures, and the right of pre-emption and purveyance; but this revenue was abolished by 30 Geo. II. c. 19, and an annual sum of upwards of 7,000l. per annum, issuing out of the new stamp duties imposed on wine licences, was settled on the Crown in its stead.[164]

The prices of wines were fixed anew. By 12 Car. II. it was provided that no canary, muskadel, or aligant, or other Spanish or sweet wines, should be sold by retail for over 1s. 6d. the quart; Gascoigne and French wines limited to 8d. the quart, Rhenish wines to 12d.

We form an idea of the Ingredients put into wines from the order of 12 Car. II. c. 25:—

The excise duties on superior beer was 1s. 3d.; on inferior, 3d.; on a hogshead of cider or perry, 1s. 3d.; on a gallon of mead, ½d.; on a gallon of aqua-vitÆ, 1d.; on a gallon of coffee, 4d.; on a gallon of chocolate or tea, 8d. In 1670, brandy had a duty imposed on it of 8d. a gallon when imported.

Upon the accession of

James II.

after the dinner at Guildhall, their Majesties were beset with numerous crowds whose shouts declared their joy. When they reached Ludgate, a rank of loyal gentlemen stood in a balcony, charged with full glasses, which they discharged in such excellent order, that caused all the guards to answer them with a huzza![166]

John Evelyn was ordered by the sheriff to assist in proclaiming the king. He thus describes the event:—

Here is an answer to the question, ‘What is a yard of ale?’ Before the standard measures were in general use, ale was measured out in this ale-yard, which was a flint-glass a yard long, of sufficient capacity to admit a saccharometer which was a test of its strength and quality.

Many of the old ceremonies observed at the coronation banquets of the early kings were revived by James. Amongst these, the following usage may be noted. After thrice flinging down the gauntlet, the champion made his obeisance to the king, who drank to him from a gilt bowl, which he then returned with the cover. The champion then pledged his Majesty, and rode out of the hall, taking bowl and cover as his fee.

But such ceremonies are not to be taken as any indication of a proneness of the king to high living. Hard drinking he hated. A contemporary writes that:—

Much light has been thrown upon the general habits of the period by Lord Macaulay, who, in describing the English country gentleman of 1688, remarks:—

Mr. Lecky observes:—

More bluntly, of course, than Macaulay, did that scourge of iniquity, Jeremy Collier, express himself. Satirising dinner invitations, he writes:—

That the delights of the table were the one thing needful is well illustrated by a cross-examination recorded by Mr. Jeaffreson[168]:—

The habit of toasting had much to do with the excesses then so common. At the birth of the male heir to the throne, claret was drunk at the expense of the Crown, and endless glasses broken in drinking the health of their Majesties and the Prince Stuart at the Edinburgh town cross. Even the malcontent city of York drank deep potations.

Rhyming toasts were then in fashion. A Court gossip writes to Lady Rachel Russell:—‘I know not whether you have heard a health that goes about, which is new to me just now, so I send it you:—

The King God bless,
And each princess,
The Church no less,
Which we profess,
As did Queen Bess.’

No doubt great abuses attended this habit of health-drinking, or we should not find Dekker, Thomas Hall, and, indeed, the moralists almost to a man, inveighing against the custom. It was only a few years before this reign that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, left the injunction to his grandchildren:—

What a contrast does Justice Hale present to the merciless Judge Jeffries, whose habitual intemperance may account for his actions. Nor should it be forgotten that Sir Henry Bellasyse, whose widow the king was so anxious to marry, was killed in a duel whilst in a state of intoxication.

A very important reminder is to be found in an Act of 1685, to the effect that—

An event which occurred in this short reign immortalised a roadside inn. The Revolution House, at Whittington, obtained its name from the accidental meeting of the Earl of Danby, the Earl of Devonshire, Lord Delamere, and Mr. John D’Arcy, one morning in 1688, on Whittington Moor, near Chatsworth, to consult about the Revolution, then in agitation. A shower of rain happening to fall, they removed to the village for shelter, and finished their conversation at a public-house called The Cock and Pynot.[169]

A fashionable spirit in this and the following reign was Jamaica Rum. When the Duke of Monmouth was being brought to London as a prisoner, in 1685, he took for a bad cold, at Romsey, while staying on his saddle, a hot glass of rum and eggs. Hot coffee would probably have done him more good. We have already noticed that it came into use in Charles II.’s time. Sir Anthony Shirley described it as made of a seed which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome. Pope went further, writing in his Rape of the Lock—

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Upon the accession of

William III.

the usual pageant was observed in London. The conduits ran with wine. The same reception greeted the king shortly after at Oxford. The drinking habits of the monarch are well known, though Evelyn speaks of him as naturally averse to drink. After the death of the queen, he became more addicted to his favourite drink, Hollands gin. The banqueting-house at Hampton Court, which was used by him as a drinking and smoking room, has been described as a royal gin-temple. Enemies he had in abundance, and so intense was their hatred, that, in their hours of debauch, they drank to the health of Sorrel, meaning the horse that fell with the king, and, under the appellation of the ‘little gentleman in velvet,’ toasted the mole that raised the hill over which the horse had stumbled.[170] Let us hope that it was the same hostility that accused the queen of fondness for drink. However this may be, it is certain that her physicians warned her most plainly against a strong spirituous cordial to which she resorted in large doses when ill.

From highest to lowest intemperance raged in the reign of William and Mary. De Foe remarks:—

From highest to lowest, we repeat, intemperance raged. Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, writing upon the curse and terrorism of mendicancy, complains that many thousands of beggars ‘meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country weddings, markets, burials, and the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.’[172]

The dissoluteness of the time found its expression, not only upon the stage, but among the actors themselves. Terribly significant is the following note by Derrick on a play written by Higden, to whom Dryden wrote a poetical epistle:—

Even the offices of religion enjoyed no immunity. Apart from the annual item of ‘communion wine,’ a by no means uncommon charge upon the parish was ‘wine for the vestry.’ A dignitary of the Church, evidently of the Mapes and Still species, thought it not beneath the dignity of his office to compose the bibulous epigram:—

Si bene commemini, causÆ sunt quinque bibendi;
Hospitis adventus; prÆsens sitis; atque futura;
Et vini bonitas; et quÆlibet altera causa.[174]

which has been rendered into English:—

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink:
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by-and-by,
Or any other reason why.

Plenty of voices were raised against the current vice. By far the most powerful warning was uttered by the Rev. Dr. William Assheton, Fellow of Brasenose,[175] who opens his discourse thus fearlessly:—

He reminds that the Act of Parliament calls the sin of drunkenness ‘odious and loathsom.’ He urges:—

He refers to Isaiah v. 11, 22, Prov. xxiii. 29, Luke xxi. 34, Rom. xiii. 13. He dilates on the sad consequence of excess to soul, body, estate, and good name. He asks:—

And again:—

When fancy is rampant, and sensual inclinations are let loose, you little know what advantage the devil can make of such a juncture.... Wine, if immoderately taken, is very Poyson, which, though it destroys not immediately, yet kills as sure as the rankest dose that was ever presented by Italian hand.

A medical writer, Dr. Richard Carr, inveighed, not only against strong drink, but against tobacco, milk, and nurses![176] And something may even be learnt from the once famous Tom Brown, classed by Thackeray with Thomas D’Urfey and Ned Ward, a writer of libels and ribaldry, but a man of humour and learning, from whose Laconics many a useful maxim may be culled. The following extract is not unworthy of Joseph Hall:—

Before estimating the causes of the prevalent declension of morals, it will be necessary to examine the legislation at the close of this seventeenth century, with which it was intimately associated.

Partly through hostility to France, and partly to encourage the home distilleries, the Government of the Revolution, in 1689, prohibited the importation of spirits from all foreign countries, and threw open the distillery trade, on payment of certain duties, to all its subjects. These measures laid the foundation of the great extension of the English manufacture of spirits.[177] Any person was permitted to set up a distillery, on giving ten days’ notice to the excise. The consequence of this was a general thriving of the distillery business, with a corresponding deterioration of the people. Indeed, legislative modification was soon found to be absolutely necessary to counteract the influence of these baneful measures upon health, sobriety, and public order.

We scarcely wonder that the king enthusiastically encouraged the new distilleries, although the measure was a reversal of all previous policy. From the Norman period downwards, the laws of the land had prohibited the conversion of malt into spirit, except a trifling quantity for medicinal uses. Elizabeth had so strictly enforced this statute as to treat an infringement of it as a moral offence.

A change so disastrous could not escape condemnation. The discursive Whiston, in his autobiographical Memoirs, laments:—

By the 5th & 6th of William and Mary, the duties were raised in 1694 to 4s. 9d. on strong, and 1s. 3d. on table beer. In 1695, the Commons resolved that a sum not exceeding 515,000l. should be granted for the support of the civil list for the ensuing year, to be raised by a malt tax, and additional duties upon mum, sweets, cyder, and perry. In 1691, owing to the tension with France, further supplies were raised by impositions which included in their number a duty of sixpence a bushel on malt, and a further duty on mum, cyder, and perry.

The price of claret rose rapidly when war with France broke out. Soon the clarets were exhausted. A substitute had to be found, and was discovered in the red wine of Portugal, then imported for the first time.

‘Some claret, boy!’—‘Indeed, sir, we have none.
Claret, sir.—Lord! there’s not a drop in town.
But we have the best red port.’—‘What’s that you call
Red port?’—‘A wine, sir, comes from Portugal;
I’ll fetch a pint, sir.’

The next quotation throws light upon its composition:—

Mark how it smells. Methinks, a real pain
Is by its odour thrown upon my brain.
I’ve tasted it—‘tis spiritless and flat,
And has as many different tastes
As can be found in compound pastes.[179]

We are now in a position to determine the causes of the prevalent intemperance at the close of the seventeenth century:—

1. The Act to encourage distillation.

2. The exhaustion of light wines.

3. The influence of the Court.

4. The development of toasting.

5. Club life.

It remains only to notice the last two of the causes.

Toasting was carried to an utter absurdity. Chamberlayne thus accounts for the fashion:—

An observant Frenchman, M. Misson, who in 1698 published his observations on England and the English, referred particularly to the custom of toasting—a custom (as he declared) almost abolished amongst French people of any distinction. He noticed that, with ourselves, to have drunk at table without making it the occasion of a toast would have been considered an act of gross discourtesy. The mode of observing the ceremony was that the person whose health was drunk remained perfectly motionless from the moment his name was uttered until the conclusion of the health. Or, as Misson sarcastically describes it:—

It is questionable if Misson was strictly correct in stating that health-drinking had gone out in good French society. Not long before this, Pepys had made this entry in his Diary:—

On a sort of progress through the country that William III. made in 1695, he was entertained, among other places, at Warwick Castle, by Lord Brook. ‘Guy’s Tower was illuminated. A cistern containing a hundred and twenty gallons of punch was emptied to his Majesty’s health.’[182]

A good specimen of the convivial songs of the Jacobites at this time is to be found in Sir Walter Scott’s collection. It is entitled:—

Three Healths.

To ane king and no king, ane uncle and father,
To him that’s all these, yet allowed to be neither;
Come, rank round about, and hurrah to our standard;
If you’ll know what I mean, here’s a health to our landlord!
To ane queen and no queen, ane aunt and no mother,
Come, boys, let us cheerfully drink off another;
And now, to be honest, we’ll stick by our faith,
And stand by our landlord as long as we’ve breath.
To ane prince and no prince, ane son and no bastard,
Beshrew them that say it! a lie that is fostered!
God bless them all three; we’ll conclude with this one,
It’s a health to our landlord, his wife, and his son.
To our monarch’s return one more we’ll advance,
We’ve a king that’s in Flanders, another in France;
Then about with the health, let him come, let him come, then,
Send the one into England, and both are at home then.[183]

And, lastly, the Clubs. Such was their influence that Doran even wrote:—‘The Clubs ... were the chief causes that manners were as depraved as they were.’[184] But it must be remembered that they were effect as well as cause. The Calves’ Head Club was probably as bad as any. Out of a calf’s skull filled with wine, the company drank ‘to the pious memory of those worthy patriots who killed the tyrant.’ An anniversary anthem was sung. That for the year 1697 concludes thus:—

Advance the emblem of the action,
Fill the calf’s skull full of wine;
Drinking ne’er was counted faction,
Men and gods adore the wine.
To the heroes gone before us,
Let’s renew the flowing bowl;
While the lustre of their glories
Shines like stars from pole to pole.[185]

Another famous club was supposed to obtain its name from the custom of pledging favourites after dinner. Thus, Arbuthnot writes:—

Whence deathless Kit-kat took his name,
Few critics can unriddle;
Some say from pastry-cook it came,
And some from Cat and Fiddle.
From no trim beaus its name it boasts,
Grey statesmen or green wits,
But from this pell-mell pack of toasts
Of old Cats and young Kits.

In the year 1703, which was the second year of

Queen Anne,

the famous Methuen treaty was formed; war between England and France again driving us to Portuguese vintages. And thus was cancelled one of the effects of the Peace of Ryswick, which allowed the reopening of trade with France. It was during this short open-trade period that Farquhar produced his aptly named tragedy, Love and a Bottle. In this comedy we are for the first time introduced to champagne as a vin mousseux, or sparkling wine. In act ii. scene 2, the lodgings of Mockmode, a country squire, are represented; he is conversing with his landlady, Widow Bullfinch:—

The widow having retired, Club, Mockmode’s servant, re-enters with a bottle and glasses.

Evident allusion is here to the effervescence of champagne.

In his Constant Couple, we have:—

Malice ne’er spoke in generous Champaign.

But champagne, we have said, suffered like other French wines from the War of Succession and the Methuen treaty. By this treaty we were bound to receive Portuguese wines in exchange for our woollen goods, and to deduct from the duty on importation one-third of the rate levied on French wines. The new demand led to an extension of Portuguese vineyards. The demand continued to increase; the supply was forthcoming, but too often with an article grossly mixed and adulterated. Counterfeits poured into this country, especially from Guernsey, and home manufactures of spurious wine abounded. Mr. Cyrus Redding, an acknowledged authority, in his treatise on French wines, inveighs against what he considers the short-sighted policy of our ministers in this reign. He says:—

Of the manners of the time we have abundant sources of information. An interesting description is given by Grose of the little country squire of about 300l. a year in Queen Anne’s days:—

But Christmas was not what it had been. It struggled, almost in vain, to overcome the check it had sustained during the Commonwealth. Private hospitality and festivities were recovering, but the pageants and masks in the royal household and at the Inns of Court had received a death-blow. At the close of the century, a revel, which would once have been regarded as routine, was thought worthy to be recorded in a diary. Evelyn notes a riotous Christmas at the Inner Temple as late as 1697.

Such a falling off formed a common lament of the poets:—

Gone are those golden days of yore,
When Christmas was a high day;
Whose sports we now shall see no more,
‘Tis turn’d into Good Friday.[188]

To the same effect:—

Black jacks to every man
Were filled with wine and beer;
No pewter pot nor can
In those days did appear.
Good cheer in a nobleman’s house
Was counted a seemly show;
We wanted no brawn nor souse,
When this old cap was new.[189]

Perhaps the most sensible festivities of this period were certain annual feasts in London for natives of the several counties. The London Gazette, for May 30 to June 3, 1700, advertises ‘the annual feast for gentlemen of the county of Huntingdon.’ Another number announces ‘the anniversary feast for the gentlemen, natives of the county of Kent.’ On such occasions, bygone times would be recounted, mutual friends discussed, and the absent not forgotten in a toast.

Burton ale was celebrated at least as early as 1712. So remarks a writer who had probably found in the Spectator, No. 383, the remark:—‘We concluded our walk with a glass of Burton ale, and a slice of hung beef.’ Had he forgotten that the author of Ivanhoe carries back the fame of Burton ale to a date before the time of Richard I.? And the accuracy of Sir Walter is remarkable, for, in 1295, Matilda, daughter of Nicholas de Shobenhale, ‘released to the Abbot and Convent of Burton-on-Trent that service and custody of their abbey gate, together with the custody and annual rent thereto belonging, and all the tenements within and without the town of Burton which came to her by inheritance from Walter de Scobenhale.... For which release they granted her daily for life two white loaves from the monastery, two gallons of conventual beer, or cider, if they drank it, and one penny; also seven gallons of beer for the men,’ &c. These ales were brewed on the abbey premises, where probably the abbots had their own maltings: as it was a common covenant in leases of mills, where were abbey property, for the malt of the lords of the manor to be ground free.[190]

It is truly sad to contemplate the stream of talent which was polluted at this time by unrestrained indulgence in strong drink. The infernal compounds which were substituted for the light wines of a previous age played infinite havoc, not only with the Mohocks of aristocracy, but with the giants of intellect. Of the Court itself, Macaulay writes:—

Of Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was successively Speaker of the House of Commons, Secretary of State, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord High Treasurer, and who will always be remembered as the collector of the Harleian Manuscripts, the same author, Macaulay, writes, that he was in the habit of ‘flustering himself daily with claret, which was hardly considered as a fault by his contemporaries.’[192]

Among the reasons given by the queen to the cabinet for dismissing her Lord Treasurer, she alleges that he neglected all business, was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself, she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed: that he often came drunk.[193]

Notorious as a drunkard in high places was Lord Mohun, who was twice tried for committing murder whilst in a state of intoxication. The duel between this lord and the Duke of Hamilton—the wives of whom were sisters at variance—is spoken of as probably the last of the kind where the seconds were expected to engage as well as the principals, and fight to the death.

There is a wide discrepancy between the writings and the reputed actions of Joseph Addison. He was fond of wine, and indulged in it. His contemporary, Swift, acknowledges the weakness. Dr. Johnson does not conceal it. Macaulay laments the fact, Thackeray glories in it.[194] His biographer, Miss Aikin, is almost singular in trying to defend him from the imputation. She refers to the tone and temper, the correctness of taste and judgment, of his writings in proof of his sobriety, and doubts whether a man stained with the vice of intoxication would have dared to write the essay on drunkenness in the Spectator [No. 569]. But the facts leave no room for doubt. He was from his youth a great man for toasts. Verses are extant, in honour of King William, from which we learn that it was his custom to toast that king in bumpers of wine. In a letter written at the age of 31 (1703), ‘to Mr. Wyche, his Majesty’s Resident at Hambourg,’ he says:—

So much from himself. Dr. Johnson remarks of him:—

And yet this was the man who could declare that ‘temperance and abstinence, faith and devotion, are in themselves, perhaps, as laudable as any other virtues.’[195] His essay on Drunkenness, in the Spectator, might well have proceeded from the pen of Hall or Taylor, Decker or Wither. He exclaims:—

And more to the same effect. But a passage of his, to be found elsewhere, is far more terribly telling:—

Addison did another good service in exposing, in the Tatler,—

Adulteration.

He says (No. 131):—

But adulteration was no new expedient. In the reign of Edward III., a law was enacted, imposing penalties on adulterations, and directing that an essay of all the wines imported should be made, at least twice a year in every town.

In 1426, Sir John Rainewell, mayor, received information that the Lombard merchants were guilty of malpractices in the adulteration of wines; upon inquiry, he ascertained that the charge was well founded, and ordered that the noxious compound, to the quantity of 150 butts, should be thrown into the kennel.

In the sixteenth century, a similar enactment was passed in the fifth year of Mary. Much dread is expressed of adulteration of good wine, either with inferior wines or water, the penalty on discovery being the loss of their whole stock.

In the seventeenth century Sir William Hawkins writes:—

Henderson observes that according to the Custom House Books of Oporto, for the year 1812, 135 pipes and 20 hogsheads of wine were shipped for Guernsey. In the same year, there were landed at the London Docks alone 2,545 pipes and 162 hogsheads from that island, reported to be port wine.

The subject of adulteration is much too large to attempt to do any justice thereto; it must suffice to draw attention to one or two specimens. The authorities shall be disinterested.

The following receipt for Port is from a wine guide:—

In the Mechanics’ Magazine is given the chemical analysis of a bottle of cheap Port:—

Mr. Cyrus Redding, in his work on Modern Wines, lets us into the secrets of cheap Sherry:—It ‘is mingled with Cape wine and cheap brandy, the washings of brandy casks, sugar candy, bitter almonds, &c. The colour, if too great, is taken out by the addition of a small quantity of lamb’s blood; it is then passed off for best sherry.’

Professor Mulder, in his Chemistry of Wine, tells that during the process of wine-clearing such aids as albumen, blood, cream, gypsum, marble, nutgalls, lime, salt, gum-arabic, sulphuric acid, &c., are furnished.

The scientific writer Dunovan, in his Domestic Economy, makes us acquainted with a few of the drugs with which beer is doctored.

But the subject is, like the frauds practised, without a limit; references can only be subjoined.[196]

The principal writer in the Tatler, that censor morum, Richard Steele, was a prominent figure in the convivial circle. Wine and extravagance were his bane. He loved drink and was fond of acknowledging it. The author of the Christian Hero wrote his devotional treatise in drink and in debt. The arrival of a hamper of wine could interrupt his moments of tenderest grief. The emotions were forgotten as he sent for his friends, who join him in drinking ‘two bottles apiece, with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o’clock in the morning.’

A story told of him by Dr. Hoadley is characteristic of the man:—

One of his own letters to Mrs. Scurlock reveals the man:—

Matthew Prior, the poet, demands a notice. Whether he was the son of a vintner or a joiner is a moot point. He was certainly nephew to Samuel Prior, landlord of the Rummer Tavern at Charing Cross, at which house, in 1685, was held the annual feast of the nobility and gentry living in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. By this uncle he was brought up and sent to Westminster School, after which he was employed, it is said, at his uncle’s as server. Taken up by Lord Dorset, his career was remarkable, as author, as secretary to successive embassies, as member of Parliament, as favourite of the king. Dr. Johnson remarks that a survey of Prior’s life and writings may exemplify a sentence which he doubtless understood well when he read Horace at his uncle’s:—

Mrs. Barbauld informs us, that having spent the evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, he would go to Long Acre and there drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife. Thus does the dog return to his vomit. Swift has left us a lively picture of manners in his descriptive breakfast with my Lady Smart at 11 a.m. Lord Smart, who was absent at the levee, returns to dinner at 3 p.m. to receive the guests. Seven of them dined, and were joined by a country baronet, who had no appetite, having already eaten a beefsteak and drunk two mugs of ale, besides a tankard of March beer when he got up in the morning. They drank claret, which the host said should always be drunk after fish, and my Lord Smart particularly recommended some cider to my Lord Sparkish. When the host called for wine, he nodded to one or other of his guests, and said, ‘Tom Neverout, my service to you.’ After the first course came pudding. Wine and small beer were drunk during this second course.... After the puddings came the third course.... Beer and wine were freely imbibed during this course, the gentlemen always pledging somebody with every glass which they drank.... After the goose, some of the gentlemen took a dram of brandy. Dinner ended, Lord Smart bade the butler bring up the great tankard full of October to Sir John. The great tankard was passed from hand to hand and mouth to mouth; but when pressed by the noble host upon the gallant Tom Neverout, he said, ‘No faith, my lord, I like your wine, and won’t put a churl upon a gentleman. Your honour’s claret is good enough for me.’ The cloth removed, a bottle of Burgundy was set down, of which the ladies were invited to partake before they went to tea. When they left, fresh bottles were brought, the ‘dead men’—meaning the empty bottles—removed, and ‘D’you hear, John? bring clean glasses,’ my Lord Smart said. On which the Colonel said, ‘I’ll keep my glass; for wine is the best liquor to wash glasses in.’

It was at this time that the works were published of one who was at once the creature and exponent of the times, Edward (better known as Ned) Ward. Campbell observes that ‘his works give a complete picture of the mind of a vulgar but acute cockney. His sentiment is the pleasure of eating and drinking.’[197] Ward possessed two qualifications for his depiction of manners; he was a tavern-keeper, and a poet. At any rate his doggerel secured him notice in the Dunciad. His Secret History of Clubs is the authority for that kind of life at the beginning of the eighteenth century. His London Spy describes the coffee-houses of the day:—‘In we went (says he), where a parcel of muddling muckworms were as busy as so many rats in an old cheese-loft; some going; some coming; some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jangling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot or a boatswain’s cabin.’

Some of the famous taverns are also described in this work, such as the ‘Angel’ in Fenchurch Street, ‘where the vintner, like a double-dealing citizen, condescended as well to draw carman’s comfort, as the consolatory juice of the vine.’ The ‘Rose,’ in the Poultry, has gained a reputation:—‘There in a snug room, warmed with brash and faggot, over a quart of good claret, we laughed over our night’s adventure.’

Convivial life at the Universities may find its illustration in the person of Bentley.

The following is told about Lord Cartaret and Bentley, in Monk’s Life of Bentley, vol. ii. p. 324 (2nd edit. 1833).

Lord Cartaret was a great scholar, and, being an old Westminster boy, especially fond of Terence, which Dr. Bentley had edited. Kippis relates this anecdote, in the Biographia Britannica, vol. ii. p. 280:—

Kippis, however, ought not to have called Lord Cartaret’s mother Lady Granville, as her son was the first Lord Granville, to which title he was not yet appointed. She was the Dowager Lady Cartaret.

Bentley himself ‘is stated to have been an admirer of good port wine, while he thought contemptuously of claret, which, he said, “would be port if it could.”’[198]

We infer also that Bentley did not despise ale. At any rate a great quantity was drunk at the lodge of the Master.

In 1710, when the Fellows appealed against Bentley to the Visitor of Trinity, the Bishop of Ely, this was one of the counts:—

The Fellows greatly protested against all this. And Dr. King, an old opponent of Bentley’s, made great stock of the immense consumption of bread, beer, and fuel in Bentley’s lodge:—

He wrote a piece of humour, entitled ‘Horace in Trinity College.’ The fiction supposes Horace, in fulfilment of his well-known prophecy, Visam Britannos hospitibus feros, to visit Britain and take up his abode in the Master’s lodge of Trinity College, where he gets immensely fat (Epicuri de grege porcus) by the good cheer maintained at the expense of the society.... Perhaps the most laughable matter in the piece is the representation of a medal, bearing on one side a figure of Horace, with a cup of audit ale in one hand, some college rolls in the other, and an immeasurable rotundity of person; and on the reverse E Promptuar. Col. Trin. Cant.

What the excellent bishop describes as ‘an immeasurable rotundity of person’ seems to have been far from uncommon in the Universities in these high days. We read in a note in Monk’s book, vol. ii. p. 394:—

We have certainly in Pope’s Dunciad also an allusion to Bentley’s love of port (book iv.) in the following lines:—

As many quit the streams[201] that murmuring fall,
To lull the sons of Margaret and Clare-hall,
Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport
In troubled waters, but now sleeps in port.[202]

Pope always seemed to have disliked Bentley. But these lines, and, still more, Pope’s note, rather imply that Bentley liked his port.

But everybody was not a bon-vivant. Many were in the world, but not of it. What a contrast to the authors quoted was John Philips, the author of Cyder, a Poem.[203] And it is a poem worth reading. Johnson calls it a Georgic after the manner of Virgil, nor does it suffer from the comparison. The advice contained in it is excellent. It praises use, it condemns abuse. It well serves temperance. Thus in book ii., after praising Nature for her annual gifts, which tend to the exhilaration of languid minds, he continues:—

Within
The golden Mean confined: beyond, there’s naught
Of health, or pleasure. Therefore, when thy Heart
Dilates with fervent joys, and eager soul
Prompts to persue the sparkling glass, be sure
‘Tis time to shun it; if thou wilt prolong
Dire compotation, forthwith Reason quits
Her Empire to Confusion, and Misrule,
And vain Debates; then twenty Tongues at once
Conspire in senseless Jargon, naught is heard
But din, and various clamour, and mad Rant:
Distrust, and Jealousie to these succeed,
And anger-kindling Taunt, the certain Bane
Of well-knit Fellowship. Now horrid Frays
Commence, the brimming glasses now are hurled
With dire intent; Bottles with Bottles clash
In rude Encounter.
****
Nor need we tell what anxious cares attend
The turbulent Mirth of Wine; nor all the kinds
Of Maladies, that lead to Death’s grim cave,
Wrought by Intemperance: joint-racking Gout,
Intestine stone, and pining Atrophy,
Chill, even when the sun with July Heats
Frys the scorch’d soil; and Dropsy all afloat,
Yet craving Liquids.

When a poet could thus write, there is no wonder that divines should have used still stronger language. John Disney, in a powerful treatise,[204] agitates for the execution of the laws against immorality. His remarks on the Sunday closing of public-houses are especially applicable now:—

Bishop Beveridge, who died in Anne’s reign, wrote an important sermon on ‘The Duty of Temperance and Sobriety.’[205] He says:—

The legislation of the reign was not important. The 1st Anne permitted tradesmen whose principal dealings were in other goods to sell spirits by retail, without a licence, provided they did not allow tippling in their shops or houses.

Another law enacted in this reign allowed French wines and other liquors to be imported in neutral bottoms. Without this expedient it was believed that the revenue would have been insufficient to maintain the government.