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That famous surfeit of Rhenish and pickled herrings, which banquet proved so fatal to Robert Green, a congenial wit and associate of our Nash, was occasioned by these shoeing-horns.

Massinger has given a curious list of “a service of shoeing-horns.”

—- I usher
Such an unexpected dainty bit for breakfast
As never yet I cook’d; ’tis not Botargo,
Fried frogs, potatoes marrow’d, cavear,
Carps’ tongues, the pith of an English chine of beef,
Nor our Italian delicate, oil’d mushrooms,
And yet a drawer-on too;[162] and if you show not
An appetite, and a strong one, I’ll not say
To eat it, but devour it, without grace too,
(For it will not stay a preface) I am shamed,
And all my past provocatives will be jeer’d at,

MASSINGER, The Guardian, A. ii. S. 3.

To knock the glass on the thumb, was to show they had performed their duty. Barnaby Rich describes this custom: after having drank, the president “turned the bottom of the cup upward, and in ostentation of his dexterity, gave it a fillip, to make it cry ting.”

They had among these “domineering inventions” some which we may imagine never took place, till they were told by “the hollow cask”

How the waning night grew old.

Such were flap-dragons, which were small combustible bodies fired at one end and floated in a glass of liquor, which an experienced toper swallowed unharmed, while yet blazing. Such is Dr. Johnson’s accurate description, who seems to have witnessed what he so well describes.[163] When Falstaff says of Poins’s acts of dexterity to ingratiate himself with the prince, that “he drinks off candle-ends for flap-dragons,” it seems that this was likewise one of these “frolics,” for Nash notices that the liquor was “to be stirred about with a candle’s-end, to make it taste better, and not to hold your peace while the pot is stirring,” no doubt to mark the intrepidity of the miserable “skinker.” The most illustrious feat of all is one, however, described by Bishop Hall. If the drinker “could put his finger into the flame of the candle without playing hit-I-miss-I! he is held a sober man, however otherwise drunk he might be.” This was considered as a trial of victory among these “canary-birds,” or bibbers of canary wine.[164]

We have a very common expression to describe a man in a state of ebriety, that “he is as drunk as a beast,” or that “he is beastly drunk.” This is a libel on the brutes, for the vice of ebriety is perfectly human. I think the phrase is peculiar to ourselves: and I imagine I have discovered its origin. When ebriety became first prevalent in our nation, during the reign of Elizabeth, it was a favourite notion among the writers of the time, and on which they have exhausted their fancy, that a man in the different stages of ebriety showed the most vicious quality of different animals; or that a company of drunkards exhibited a collection of brutes, with their different characteristics.

“All dronkardes are beasts,” says George Gascoigne, in a curious treatise on them,[165] and he proceeds in illustrating his proposition; but the satirist Nash has classified eight kinds of “drunkards;” a fanciful sketch from the hand of a master in humour, and which could only have been composed by a close spectator of their manners and habits.

“The first is ape-drunk, and he leaps and sings and hollows and danceth for the heavens; the second is lyon-drunk, and he flings the pots about the house, calls the hostess w— e, breaks the glass-windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrel with any man that speaks to him; the third is swine-drunk, heavy, lumpish, and sleepy, and cries for a little more drink and a few more clothes; the fourth is sheep-drunk, wise in his own conceit when he cannot bring forth a right word; the fifth is maudlen-drunk, when a fellow will weep for kindness in the midst of his drink, and kiss you, saying, ‘By God! captain, I love thee; go thy ways, thou dost not think so often of me as I do of thee: I would (if it pleased God) I could not love thee so well as I do,’ and then he puts his finger in his eye and cries. The sixth is martin-drunk, when a man is drunk, and drinks himself sober ere he stir; the seventh is goat-drunk, when in his drunkenness he hath no mind but on lechery. The eighth is fox-drunk, when he is crafty-drunk, as many of the Dutchmen be, which will never bargain but when they are drunk. All these species, and more, I have seen practised in one company at one sitting; when I have been permitted to remain sober amongst them only to note their several humours.” These beast-drunkards are characterised in a frontispiece to a curious tract on Drunkenness where the men are represented with the heads of apes, swine, etc. etc.