Fried frogs, potatoes marroned, cavear,
Carps' tongues, the pith of an English chine of beef,
Now one Italian delicate wild mushroom,
And yet a drawer on too; and if you show not
An appetite, and a strong one, I'll not say
To eat it, but devour it, without grace too,
For it will not stay a preface. I am shamed,
And all my past provocatives will be jeered at."
Ben Jonson affords us many a glimpse of the drinking habits of all classes in his day.
After the Restoration, England seems to have abandoned herself to one great saturnalia, and men drank deeply, from the king down. The novels of Fielding and Smollett are full of the wildest debauchery and drunken extravagance. Statesmen drank deep at their councils, ladies drank in their boudoirs, the criminal on his way to Tyburn stopped to drink a parting glass. Hogarth in his wonderful pictures has held the mirror up to society to show how general was the shame, how terrible the curse.