December 19, 1666.—Among other things Sir R. Ford did make me understand how the House of Commons is a beast not to be understood, it being impossible to know beforehand the success almost of any small plain thing.... He did tell me, and so did Sir W. Batten, how Sir Allen Brodericke and Sir Allen Apsly did come drunk the other day into the House, and did both speak for half an hour together, and could not be either laughed, or pulled, or bid to sit down and hold their peace, to the great contempt of the king’s servants and cause; which I am grieved at with all my heart.
(What made this worse was that Sir Allen Brodericke was an official—Surveyor-General in Ireland to his Majesty.)
But there was a vast amount of drinking that is really intemperance, though it passes under another name. Very apposite are the words of a contemporary, Sir William Temple:—
Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy; ... the best guardian of youth, and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion; and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelar goddess of health, and universal medicine of life, that clears the head and cleanses the blood, that eases the stomach, and purges the bowels, that strengthens the nerves, enlightens the eyes, and comforts the heart; in a word, that secures and perfects the digestion.... I do not allow the pretence of temperance to all such as are seldom or never drunk, or fall into surfeits; for men may lose their health without losing their senses, and be intemperate every day, without being drunk perhaps once in their lives; nay, for aught I know, if a man should pass the month in a college diet, without excess or variety of meats or of drinks, but only the last day give a loose in them both, and so far till it comes to serve him for physic rather than food, and he utter his stomach as well as his heart, he may perhaps, as to the mere considerations of health, do much better than another that eats every day ... in plenty and luxury, with great variety of meats, and a dozen glasses of wine at a meal, still spurring up appetite when it would lie down of itself; flushed every day, but never drunk.[162]
It is refreshing in reading Johnson’s Lives to come upon a poet really free from a suspicion of fondness for drink. Such a one was Edmund Waller, born 1605, died 1687. Would he have lived so long had he been a drink-hard? Johnson remarks of him:—
In the first parliament summoned by Charles the Second (March 8, 1661) Waller sat for Hastings, in Sussex, and served for different places in all the parliaments of that reign. In a time when fancy and gaiety were the most powerful recommendations to regard, it is not likely that Waller was forgotten. He passed his time in the company that was highest both in rank and wit, from which even his obstinate sobriety did not exclude him. Though he drank water, he was enabled by his fertility of mind to heighten the mirth of Bacchanalian assemblies; and Mr. Saville said that ‘no man in England should keep him company without drinking but Ned Waller.’
An excellent companion for the poet would have been Guy, Earl of Warwick, in whose ‘Tragical History’ occur the lines:—
Phillis. Give me some bread. I prithee, father, eat.
Guy. Give me brown bread, for that’s a pilgrim’s meat.
Phillis. Reach me some wine; good father, taste of this.
Guy. Give me cold water, that my comfort is.
I tell you, Lady, your great Lord and I
Have thought ourselves as happy as a king,
To drink the water of a christal spring.
Coffee came into general use in England, according to John Evelyn (Diary), about 1667. But he records, under date May 1637, that ‘one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was the first he ever saw drink coffee.’