Rider. I wish your sillabub were nectar, Lady.
Mistress Bonavent. We thank you, sir, and here it comes already.
Enter Milkemaide.
Mistress Julietta. So, so, is it good milke?
Bon. Of a Red Cow.
Mistress Caroll. You talke as you inclin’d to a consumption. Is the wine good?
Pepys mentions this Lodge and its refreshments more than once. “June 3, 1668. To the Park, where much fine company and many fine ladies, and in so handsome a hackney I was, that I believe, Sir W. Coventry and others who looked on me, did take me to be in one of my own, which I was a little troubled for: so to the Lodge and drank a cup of new milk, and so home.”—“April 25, 1669. Abroad with my wife in the afternoon to the Park, where very much company, and the weather very pleasant. I carried my wife to the Lodge, the first time this year, and there, in our coach, eat a cheese cake and drank a tankard of milk.”
Not to know the Lodge was to show oneself of small account, as we see in a comedy called “The English Monsieur,” by the Hon. James Howard, son of the Earl of Berkshire, acted with much applause at the Theatre Royal, in 1674.
“Comely. Nay, ’tis no London female; she’s a thing that never saw Cheesecake, Tart, or Syllabub at the Lodge in Hyde Park.”
According to Thomas Brown, of Shifnall, the ladies also partook of refreshment in their coaches, for he says,—“See, says my Indian, what a Bevy of Gallant Ladies are in yonder Coaches; some are Singing, others Laughing, others Tickling one another, and all of them Toying and devouring Cheese Cakes, March-Pane, and China Oranges.”[23] And this in the sober days of William and Mary!