Bring the choicest drugs of Spain,
Produce of the poisonous plain,
Then into the charm be thrown,
Snatch’d from famish’d bitch, a bone,
Burn them all with magic flame,
Kindled first by Colchian dame.
John Gay, the eighteenth century playwright, in The Shepherd’s Week, has one of the characters refer to a philtre in a casual and incidental manner, implying that the practice of this usage was in common vogue:
And in love powder all my money spent;
Behap what will, next Sunday after prayers,
When to the ale house Lupperkin repairs,