a gentleman, or such a gallant that was here, and will be again ere long. Hot weather and thunder, and want of company are the hostess's grief, for then her ale sours. Your drink usually is very young, two days old: her chiefest wealth is seen, if she can have one brewing under another: if either the hostess, or her daughter, or maid will kiss handsomely at parting, it is a good shoeing-horn or birdlime to draw the company thither again the sooner. She must be courteous to all, though not by nature, yet by her profession; for she must entertain all, good and bad, tag and rag, cut and long-tail. She suspects tinkers and poor soldiers most, not that they will not drink soundly, but that they will not pay lustily. She must keep touch with three sorts of men; that is, the malt-man, the baker, and the justice's clerks. She is merry, and half mad, upon Shrove Tuesday, May days, feast days, and morris-dances: a good ring of bells in the parish helps her to many a tester; she prays the parson may not be a puritan: a bagpiper, and a puppet-play brings her in birds that are flush, she defies a wine tavern as an upstart outlandish fellow, and suspects the wine to be poisoned. Her ale, if new, looks like a misty morning, all thick; well, if her ale be strong, her reckoning right, her house clean, her fire good, her face fair, and the town great or rich, she shall seldom or never sit without chirping birds to bear her company, and at the next churching or christening, she is sure to be rid of two or three dozen of cakes and ale by gossiping neighbours. DONALD LUPTON, London and the Countrey carbonadoed 1632 A tavern is a degree, or (if you will) a pair of stairs above an alehouse, where men are drunk with more credit and apology. If the vintner's nose be at door, it is a sign sufficient, but the absence of this is supplied by the ivy bush. The rooms are ill breathed, like the drinkers that have been washed well over A night, and are smelt too fasting next morning....It is a broacher of more news than hogsheads, and more jests than news, which are sucked up here by some spongy brain, and from thence squeezed into a comedy. Men come here to make merry, but indeed make a noise, and this music above is answered with the clinking below. The drawers are the civilest people in it, men of good bringing up, and howsoever we esteem of them, none can boast more justly of their high calling. 'Tis the best theatre of natures, where they are truly acted, not played, and the business, as in the rest of the world, up and down, to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber. melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads as brittle as glasses, and often broken. Men come hither to quarrel, and come hither to be made friends; and if Plutarch will lend me his simile, it is even Telephus his sword that makes wounds and cures them. It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker away of a rainy day. It is the Torrid Zone that scorches the face, and tobacco the gun-powder that blows it up. Much harm would be done, if the charitable vintner had not water ready for these flames. A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out, and it is like those countries far in the north, where it is as clear at mid-night as at mid-day....To give you the total reckoning of it: it is the busy man's recreation, the idle man's business, the melancholy man's sanctuary, the stranger's welcome, the Inns of Court man's entertainment, the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's courtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of canary their book, where we leave them. JOHN EARLE, Micro-cosmographie 1628 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow, in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. THOMAS FULLER, English Worthies 1662 The Sobriety of the English (two views) lago. Some wine, ho! And let me the canakin clink, clink; A soldier's a man; A life's but a span; Why then let a soldier drink. Some wine, boys! Cassio. 'Fore God, an excellent song. Iago. I learned it in England, where indeed they are most potent in potting; your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander,drink, ho-are nothing to your English. Othello, 11. iii. 71-82 For the point of drinking, the English at the feast will drink two or three healths in remembrance of special friends, or respected honourable persons, and in our time some gentlemen and commanders from the wars of Netherland brought in the custom of the Germans' large carousing, but this custom is in our time also in good measure left. Likewise in some private gentlemen's houses, and with some captains and soldiers, and with the vulgar sort of citizens and artisans, large and intemperate drinking is used; but in general the greater and better part of the English, hold all excess blameworthy, and drunkenness a reproachful vice. FYNES MORYSON, Itinerary 1617 B. Tobacco A tobacco-seller Is the only man that finds the good in it which others brag of, but do not; for it is meat, drink, and clothes to him. No man opens his ware with greater seriousness, or challenges your judgment more in the approbation. His shop is the rendezvous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses, and their communication is smoke. It is the place only where Spain is commended and preferred before England itself. He should be well experienced in the world; for he has daily trial of men's nostrils, and none is better acquainted with humours. He is the piecing, commonly, of some other trade, which is bawd to his tobacco, and that to his wife, which is the flame that follows this smoke. JOHN EARLE, Micro-cosmographie 1628 Royal disapprobation of tobacco How you are by this custom disabled in your goods, let the gentry of this land bear witness, some of them bestowing three, some four hundred pounds a year upon this precious stink, which I am sure might be bestowed upon many far better uses. I read indeed of a knavish courtier, who for abusing the favour of the emperor Alexander Severus, his master, by taking bribes to intercede for sundry persons in his master's ear (for whom he never once opened his mouth), was justly choked with smoke, with this doom, Fumo pereat, qui fumum vendidit: but of so many smoke-buyers, as are at this present in this kingdom, I never read nor heard. And for the vanities committed in this filthy custom, is it not both great vanity and uncleanness, that at the table, a place of respect, of cleanliness, of modesty, men should not be ashamed to sit tossing of tobacco pipes, and puffing of the smoke of tobacco one to another, making the filthy smoke and stink thereof to exhale athwart the dishes, and infect the air, when very often men that abhor it are at their repast? Surely smoke becomes a kitchen far better than a dining chamber, and yet it makes a kitchen also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them, with an unctuous and oily kind of soot, as hath been found in some great tobacco takers, that after their death were opened. And not only meat time, but no other time nor action is exempted from the public use of this uncivil trick: so as if the wives of Dieppe list to contest with this nation for good manners, their worst manners would in all reason be found at least not so dishonest (as ours are) in this point. The public use whereof, at all times and in all places, hath now so far prevailed, as divers men very sound both in judgment and complexion, have been at last forced to take it also without desire, partly because they were ashamed to seem singular (like the two philosophers that were forced to duck themselves in that rain water, and so become fools as well as the rest of the people), and partly, to be as one that was content to eat garlic (which he did not love) that he might not be troubled with the smell of it in the breath of his fellows. And is it not a great vanity, that a man cannot heartily welcome his friend now, but straight they must be in hand with tobacco? No, it is become in place of a cure a point of good fellowship, and he that will refuse to take a pipe of tobacco among his fellows (though by his own election he would rather feel the savour of a sink), is accounted peevish and no good company, even as they do with tippling in the cold eastern countries. Yea the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant, than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco. But herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's good gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be wilfully corrupted by this stinking smoke, wherein I must confess, it hath too strong a virtue and so that which is an ornament of nature, and can neither by any artifice be at the first acquired, nor once lost, be recovered again, shall be filthily corrupted with an incurable stink, which vile quality is as directly contrary to that wrong opinion which is holden of the wholesomeness thereof, as the venom of putrifaction is contrary to the virtue preservative. Moreover, which is a great iniquity and against all humanity, the husband shall not be ashamed to reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome, and clean complexioned wife to that extremity, that either she must also corrupt her sweet breath therewith, or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment. Have you not reason then to be ashamed, and to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming yourselves both in persons and goods, and raking [? taking] also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you: by the custom thereof making yourselves to be wondered at by all foreign civil nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. KING JAMES I., A counter-blast to Tobacco 1672 (written 1604) |