II. That strict temperance is a source of health.
Thus in As You Like It, act ii. scene 3, Adam declares—
Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility;
Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly.
III. That the Danes had an established character for deep drinking. Thus Hamlet, act i. scene 4:—
Hamlet. The king doth awake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassel, and the swaggering upspring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
Hor. Is it a custom?
Ham. Ay, marry, is’t;
But to my mind—though I am native here
And to the manner born—it is a custom
More honour’d in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel, east and west,
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
‘They clepe us drunkards.’ And well our Englishmen might, for in Queen Elizabeth’s time there was a Dane in London, of whom the following mention is made in a collection of characters, entitled Looke to it, for Ile stab ye (no date):—
You that will drinke Keynaldo unto deth,
The Dane that would carouse out of his boote.
Mr. W. Mason adds that ‘it appears from one of Howell’s letters, dated at Hamburg in the year 1632, that the then King of Denmark had not degenerated from his jovial predecessor. In his account of an entertainment given by his majesty to the Earl of Leicester, he tells us that the king, after beginning thirty-five toasts, was carried away in his chair, and that all the officers of the court were drunk.’