Meercraft.—The laudable use of forks,
Brought into custom here, as they are in Italy,
To the sparing o’ napkins
Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, act v. scene 3.
[207] Lee of Virginia, p. 116.
[208] Lee of Virginia, loc. cit.
For Planters’ Cellars, you must know,
Seldom with good October flow,
But Perry Quince and Apple Juice
Spout from the Tap like any Sluce.
Cook’s Sot-Weed Factor, p. 22.
[210] A minute account of the beverages and their use is given in Bruce, op. cit. ii. 211-231.
[211] Smyth’s Tour in the United States, London, 1784, i. 41.
[212] Samuel Peters, a Tory refugee, published in London, in 1781, an absurd “History of Connecticut,” in which he started the story of the “Blue Laws” of the New Haven Colony, which most people allude to incorrectly as “Blue Laws of Connecticut.” These “Blue Laws” were purely an invention of the mendacious Peters. There never were any such laws. See my Beginnings of New England, p. 136.
[213] Miss Rowland’s Life of George Mason, i. 101, 102. This Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, and member of the Federal Convention of 1787, was great-grandson of the George Mason who figured in Bacon’s rebellion. His son John, whose narrative I here quote, was father of James Murray Mason, author of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and one of the Confederacy’s commissioners taken from the British steamer Trent by Captain Wilkes in 1861.