Bound in a precious pickle, lie,
Which I shall never taste?
“Let me embalm this flesh of mine
With turtle fat and Bordeaux wine,
And spoil th’ Egyptian trade.
Than Humphrey’s Duke more happy I;
Embalm’d alive, old Quin shall die,
A mummy, ready-made.”
A good many female mummies were prepared during the last century after a similar receipt. Witness Walpole’s neighbour at Strawberry Hill, “an attorney’s wife, and much given to the bottle. By the time she has finished that and daylight, she grows afraid of thieves, and makes her servants fire minute-guns out of the garret windows. The divine Asheton,” he proceeds, “will give you an account of the astonishment we were in last night at hearing guns. I began to think that the Duke (of Cumberland) had brought some of his defeats from Flanders.”
Young denounces, in his “Satires,” both tea and wine, as abused by the fair sex of the last century. In Memmia he paints Lady Betty Germain, in the lines I have quoted under the head of “Tea;” and then, hurling his shafts of satire at that which another poet has described as “cups which cheer, but not inebriate,” he adds,—