Dear Tom, this brown jug that now foams with mild ale,
From which I now drink to sweet Nan of the Vale,
Was once Toby Filpot’s, a thirsty old soul
As e’er cracked a bottle or fathomed a bowl.
The allusion is simply to drunken frolics, during which glass was broken. Mr. Oldbuck says in the Antiquary:—‘We never were glass-breakers in this house.’
In 1805 Robert Bloomfield published his rural poem, the Farmer’s Boy. It is a very humorous and suggestive account of the manners of clod-hopping England as engaged about the Harvest-home supper in Suffolk and Norfolk, here entitled the Horkey. This has been already discussed. Suffice it to add that Bloomfield’s charming little provincial ballad, entitled, The Horkey, has been recently published by Macmillan, and is abundantly illustrated.
But of all the marvellous issues from the press at the beginning of the present century, nothing could be more monstrous than the publication of a work entitled ‘Ebrietatis Encomium; or, the Praise of Drunkenness, wherein is authentically and most evidently proved the Necessity of Frequently Getting Drunk; and the Practise is most ancient, primitive, and Catholick.’
The author, not unnaturally, thinks that some apology is needed in his preface. He declares that he did not undertake the work on account of any zeal he had for wine, but only to divert himself(!), and not to lose a great many curious remarks he had made upon this most Catholic liquid.
Verily, ‘nulli vitio unquam defuit advocatus.’ He seems to have hunted up bon-mots, or rather mal-mots from every toping author that was to hand, e.g. he cites Seneca (De Tranquillitate):—‘As drunkenness causes some distempers, so it is a sovereign remedy for our sorrows.’ Propertius—‘Alas! so then wine lives longer than man, let us then sit down and drink bumpers; life and wine are the same thing.’ Horace—‘That nectar which the blessed vines produce, the height of all our joy and wishes here.’ La Motte:—
A l’envi laissons nous saisir,
Aux transports d’une douce ivresse:
Qu’importe si c’est un plaisir,
Que ce soit folie ou sagesse.
These are specimens of the sources from which the author, ‘Boniface Oinophilus’ drew.[228]
But we travel to far other soil.
The poet Cowper [b. 1781, d. 1800], the intellectual ancestor of Wordsworth, has several pictures of his times in his writings.