And after his good wife
Our spiced bowl will try,
The Lord prolong your life,
Good fortune we espy,
For our Wassel.
Some bounty from your hands,
Our Wassel to maintain.
We’ll buy no house nor lands
With that which we do gain,
With our Wassel.
This is our merry night
Of choosing King and Queen,
Then be it your delight
That something may be seen
In our Wassel.
It is a noble part
To bear a liberal mind,
God bless our master’s heart,
For here we comfort find,
With our Wassel.
And now we must be gone,
To seek out more good cheer;
Where bounty will be shown,
As we have found it here,
With our Wassel.
Much joy betide them all,
Our prayers shall be still,
We hope and ever shall,
For this your great good will,
To our Wassel.
From the “Wassail” we derive, perhaps, a feature by which we are distinguished. An Englishman eats no more than a Frenchman; but he makes yule-tide of all the year. In virtue of his forefathers, he is given to “strong drink.” He is a beer-drinker, an enjoyer of “fat ale;” a lover of the best London porter and double XX, and discontented unless he can get “stout.” He is a sitter withal. Put an Englishman “behind a pipe” and a full pot, and he will sit till he cannot stand. At first he is silent; but as his liquor gets towards the bottom, he inclines towards conversation; as he replenishes, his coldness thaws, and he is conversational; the oftener he calls to “fill again,” the more talkative he becomes; and when thoroughly liquefied, his loquacity is deluging. He is thus in public-house parlours: he is in parties somewhat higher, much the same. The business of dinner draws on the greater business of drinking, and the potations are strong and fiery; full-bodied port, hot sherry, and ardent spirits. This occupation consumes five or six hours, and sometimes more, after dining. There is no rising from it, but to toss off the glass, and huzza after the “hip! hip! hip!” of the toast giver. A calculation of the number who customarily “dine out” in this manner half the week, would be very amusing, if it were illustrated by portraits of some of the indulgers. It might be further, and more usefully, though not so agreeably illustrated, by the reports of physicians, wives, and nurses, and the bills of apothecaries. Habitual sitting to drink is the “besetting sin” of Englishmen—the creator of their gout and palsy, the embitterer of their enjoyments, the impoverisher of their property, the widow-maker of their wives.
By continuing the “wassail” of our ancestors, we attempt to cultivate the body as they did; but we are other beings, cultivated in other ways, with faculties and powers of mind that would have astonished their generations, more than their robust frames, if they could appear, would astonish ours. Their employment was in hunting their forests for food, or battling in armour with risk of life and limb. They had no counting-houses, no ledgers, no commerce, no Christmas bills, no letter-writing, no printing, no engraving, no bending over the desk, no “wasting of the midnight oil” and the brain together, no financing, not a hundredth part of the relationships in society, nor of the cares that we have, who “wassail” as they did, and wonder we are not so strong as they were. There were no Popes nor Addisons in the days of Nimrod.
The most perfect fragment of the “wassail” exists in the usage of certain corporation festivals. The person presiding stands up at the close of dinner, and drinks from a flaggon usually of silver having a handle on each side, by which he holds it with each hand, and the toast-master announces him as drinking “the health of his brethren out of the ‘loving cup.’” The loving cup, which is the ancient wassail-bowl, is then passed to the guest on his left hand, and by him to his left-hand neighbour, and as it finds its way round the room to each guest in his turn, so each stands up and drinks to the president “out of the loving cup.”
The subsequent song is sung in Gloucestershire on New-year’s eve:—