"I asked
Such an unexpected dainty bit for breakfast
As never yet I cooked; 'tis red _botargo_,
Fried frogs, potatoes marroned, _cavear_,
Carps' tongues, the pith of an English chine of beef,
Now one Italian delicate wild mushroom,
And yet a drawer on too; and if you show not
An appetite, and a strong one, I'll not say
To eat it, but devour it, without grace too,
For it will not stay a preface. I am shamed,
And all my past provocatives will be jeered at."
Ben Jonson affords us many a glimpse of the drinking habits of all
classes in his day.
After the Restoration, England seems to have abandoned herself to one
great saturnalia, and men drank deeply, from the king down. The novels
of Fielding and Smollett are full of the wildest debauchery and
drunken extravagance. Statesmen drank deep at their councils, ladies
drank in their boudoirs, the criminal on his way to Tyburn stopped to
drink a parting glass. Hogarth in his wonderful pictures has held the
mirror up to society to show how general was the shame, how terrible
the curse.
In Germany the _Baierisch bier_, drunk out of _biergläschen_
ornamented as they are with engraved wreaths, "_Zum Andenken_," "_Aus
Freundschaft_," and other little bits of national harmless sentiment,
has come down from the remotest antiquity, and has never failed to
provoke quiet and decorous, if sleepy hilarity.
We are afraid that the "Dew of Ben Nevis" is not so peaceful, nor the
juice of the juniper, nor New England rum, nor the _aquadiente_ of the
Mexican, nor the _vodka_ of the Russian. All these have the most
terrible wild madness in them. To the honour of civilization, it is no
longer the fashion to drink to excess. The vice of drunkenness rarely
meets the eye of a refined woman; and let us hope that less and less
may it be the bane of society, the disgrace of the art of
entertaining.