Money is trash, and he that will spend it,
Let him drink merrily, Fortune will send it.
“Pots fly about, give us more liquor,
Brothers of a rout, our brains will flow quicker;
Empty the cask; score up, we care not;
Fill all the pots again; drink on, and spare not.”
To pause in the generous swing of verses like these, and call to mind Mrs. Jameson’s refined and chilling verdict, “It is difficult to sympathize with English drinking-songs,” is like stepping from the sunshine of life into the shaded drawing-room of genteel society. Difficult to sympathize! Why, we may drink nothing stronger than tea and Apollinaris water all our lives; yet none the less the mad music of Elizabethan song will dance merrily in our hearts, and give even to us our brief hour of illogical, unreasonable happiness. What had the author of “The Diary of an Ennuyée” to do with that robust age when ennui had still to be invented? What was she to think of the indecorous Bacchanalian catches of Lyly and Middleton, or of the uncompromising vulgarity of that famous song from “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” or of the unseemly jollity of Cleveland’s tavern-bred, tavern-sung verse?
“Come hither, Apollo’s bouncing girl,
And in a whole Hippocrene of Sherry,
Let’s drink a round till our brains do whirl,