Here at last is the true ring, without bravado, without conceit, without bestiality,—only the splendid high spirits, the foolish, unhesitating happiness of youth:—
“It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That’s blinkin’ in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright to wyle us hame,
But, by my sooth, she’ll wait a wee!”
When Burns sings in this strain, even those who wear the blue ribbon may pause and listen kindly, remembering, if they like, before leaving the world of “Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink,” so repellent to Mr. Arnold’s pitiless good taste, how another jovial north-countryman has defined for them the inestimable virtue of temperance. “Nae man shall ever stop a nicht in my house,” says the Ettrick Shepherd, “without partakin’ o’ the best that’s in it, be ’t meat or drink; and if the coof canna drink three or four tummlers or jugs o’ toddy, he has nae business in the Forest. Now, sir, I ca’ that no an abstemious life,—for why should any man be abstemious?—but I ca’ ’t a temperate life, and o’ a’ the virtues, there’s nane mair friendly to man than Temperance.”
Friendly indeed! Why, viewed in this genial light, she is good-fellowship itself, and hardly to be distinguished from the smiling nymph whom Horace saw in the greenwood, learning attentively the strains dictated to her by the vine-crowned god of wine.
The best of the English drinking-songs were written by the dramatists of the seventeenth century, men who trolled out their vigorous sentiments, linked sweetly together in flowing verse, without the smallest thought or fear of shocking anybody. Frankly indecorous, they invite the whole wide world to drink with them, to empty the brimming tankard passed from hand to hand, and to reel home through the frosty streets, where the watchman grins at their unsteady steps, and quiet sleepers, awakened from dull dreams, echo with drowsy sympathy the last swelling cadence of their uproarious song. Where there is no public sentiment to defy, even Bacchanalian rioters and Bacchanalian verses cease to be defiant. What admirable good temper and sincerity in Fletcher’s generous importunity!
“Drink to-day, and drown all sorrow,
You shall perhaps not do it to-morrow: