I went with Lord Howard of Norfolk to visit Sir William Ducie at Charlton, where we din’d; the servants made our coachmen so drunk that they both fell off their boxes on the heath, where we were fain to leave them, and were driven to London by two servants of my Lord’s. This barbarous custom of making the masters welcome by intoxicating the servants had now the second time happen’d to my coachmen.
[The italics are not Evelyn’s.]
A writer, by name Joseph Rigbie, slashingly exposes intemperance and its incentives, the tavern and toasting:—
The tap-house fits them for a jaile,
The jaile to the gibbet sends them without faile;
For those that through a lattice sang of late
You oft find crying through an iron grate.
And again:—
Yea every cup is fast to others wedged.
They always double drink, they must be pledged.
He that begins, how many so’er they be,
Looks that each one do drink as much as he.
And further on, to the same effect:—
Oh! how they’ll wind men in, do what they can,
By drinking healths, first unto such a man,
Then unto such a woman! Then they’ll send
An health to each man’s mistresse or his friend;
Then to their kindreds or their parents deare,
They needs must have the other jug of beere;
Then to their captains and commanders stout,
Who for to pledge they think none shall stand out;
Last to the king and queen they’ll have a cruse.
Whom for to pledge they think none dare refuse.[147]
‘We seem,’ wrote Reeve in his Plea for Nineveh, quoted in Malcolm’s Manners and Customs of London, i. p. 286, ‘to be steeped in liquors, or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but sponges ... or had tunnels in our mouths.... We are the grape-suckers of the earth.’
That the ignorant and thoughtless should have been swept into this vortex of dissipation is not surprising, but one marvels that a man of power, and in some sort a philosopher, should have stooped to translate an utterly frivolous and worthless poem of St. Amant, of which a mere quotation is sickening:—