that is, he would drink with his friend to the last. In a manuscript
letter of the times, I find an account of Columbo, the Spanish
ambassador, being at Oxford, and drinking healths to the Infanta. The
writer adds--"I shall not tell you how our doctors pledged healths to
the Infanta and the arch-duchess; and if any left _too big a snuff_,
Columbo would cry, _Supernaculum! supernaculum!_"[160]
This Bacchic freak seems still preserved: for a recent traveller, Sir
George Mackenzie, has noticed the custom in his Travels through Iceland.
"His host having filled a silver cup to the brim, and put on the cover,
then held it towards the person who sat next to him, and desired him to
take off the cover, and look into the cup, a ceremony intended to secure
fair play in filling it. He drank our health, desiring to be excused
from emptying the cup, on account of the indifferent state of his
health; but we were informed at the same time that if any one of us
should neglect any part of the ceremony, or _fail to invert the cup,
placing the edge on one of the thumbs_ as a proof that we had swallowed
every drop, the defaulter would be obliged by the laws of drinking to
fill the cup again, and drink it off a second time. In spite of their
utmost exertions, the penalty of a second draught was incurred by two of
the company; we were dreading the consequences of having swallowed so
much wine, and in terror lest the cup should be sent round again."
_Carouse the hunter's hoop._--"Carouse" has been already explained: _the
hunter's hoop_ alludes to the custom of hoops being marked on a
drinking-pot, by which every man was to measure his draught. Shakspeare
makes the Jacobin Jack Cade, among his furious reformations, promise his
friends that "there shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for
a penny; _the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops_, and I will make it
a felony to drink small beer." I have elsewhere observed that our modern
Bacchanalians, whose feats are recorded by the bottle, and who insist on
an equality in their rival combats, may discover some ingenuity in that
invention among our ancestors of their _peg-tankards_, of which a few
may yet occasionally be found in Derbyshire;[161] the invention of an
age less refined than the present, when we have heard of globular
glasses and bottles, which by their shape cannot stand, but roll about
the table; thus compelling the unfortunate Bacchanalian to drain the
last drop, or expose his recreant sobriety.
We must have recourse again to our old friend Tom Nash, who acquaints us
with some of "the general rules and inventions for drinking, as good as
printed precepts or statutes by act of parliament, that go from drunkard
to drunkard; as, still to _keep your first man_; not to leave any
_flocks_ in the bottom of the cup; _to knock the glass on your thumb_
when you have done; to have some _shoeing-horn_ to pull on your wine, as
a rasher on the coals or a red-herring."
_Shoeing-horns_, sometimes called _gloves_, are also described by Bishop
Hall in his "Mundus alter et idem." "Then, sir, comes me up _a service
of shoeing-horns_ of all sorts; salt cakes, red-herrings, anchovies, and
gammon of bacon, and abundance of _such pullers-on_."
That famous surfeit of Rhenish and pickled herrings, which banquet
proved so fatal to Robert Green, a congenial wit and associate of our
Nash, was occasioned by these _shoeing-horns_.