2d Drawer. Mass, thou sayest true. The prince once set a dish of apple-Johns before him, and told him there were five more Sir Johns, and, putting off his hat, said, ‘I will now take my leave of these six dry, round, old, withered knights.’”
This apple, too, is well described by Phillips (“Cider,” bk. i.):
“Nor John Apple, whose wither’d rind, entrench’d
By many a furrow, aptly represents
Decrepit age.”
In Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” (i. 1), where Littlewit encourages Quarlus to kiss his wife, he says: “she may call you an apple-John if you use this.” Here apple-John[459] evidently means a procuring John, besides the allusion to the fruit so called.[460]
(b) The “bitter-sweet, or sweeting,” to which Mercutio alludes in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4): “Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce;” was apparently a favorite apple, which furnished many allusions to poets. Gower, in his “Confessio Amantis” (1554, fol. 174), speaks of it:
“For all such time of love is lore
And like unto the bitter swete,
For though it thinke a man first sweete,
He shall well felen atte laste
That it is sower, and maie not laste.”
The name is “now given to an apple of no great value as a table fruit, but good as a cider apple, and for use in silk dyeing.”[461]
(c) The “crab,” roasted before the fire and put into ale, was a very favorite indulgence, especially at Christmas, in days gone by, and is referred to in the song of winter in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):
“When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl
Then nightly sings the staring owl.”
The beverage thus formed was called “Lambs-wool,” and generally consisted of ale, nutmeg, sugar, toast, and roasted crabs, or apples. It formed the ingredient of the wassail-bowl;[462] and also of the gossip’s bowl[463] alluded to in “Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), where Puck says: