FullReads

According to Blount’s “Glossographia,” carouse is a corruption of two old German words, gar signifying all, and ausz, out; so that to drink garauz is to drink all out: hence carouse.
]

[Footnote 159:
“Pierce Pennilesse,” sig. F 2, 1595. ]

[Footnote 160:
When Christian IV. of Denmark was at the court of our James I. on a visit, drinking appears to have been carried to an excess; there is extant an account of a court masque, in which the actors were too tipsy to continue their parts; luckily, their majesties were not sufficiently sober to find fault. ]

[Footnote 161:
These inventions for keeping every thirsty soul within bounds are alluded to by Tom Nash; I do not know that his authority will be great as an antiquary, but the things themselves he describes he had seen. He tells us, that “King Edgar, because his subjects should not offend in swilling and bibbing as they did, caused certain iron cups to be chained to every fountain and well-side, and at every vintner’s door, with iron pins in them, to stint every man how much he should drink; and he who went beyond one of those pins forfeited a penny for every draught.”

Pegge, in his “Anonymiana,” has minutely described these peg-tankards, which confirms this account of Nash, and nearly the antiquity of the custom. “They have in the inside a row of eight pins one above another, from top to bottom; the tankard holds two quarts, so that there is a gill of ale, i.e., half a pint of Winchester measure between each pin. The first person that drank was to empty the tankard to the first peg or pin; the second was to empty to the next pin, etc. by which means the pins were so many measures to the compotators, making them all drink alike, or the same quantity: and as the distance of the pins was such as to contain a large draught of liquor, the company would be very liable by this method to get drunk, especially when, if they drank short of the pin or beyond it, they were obliged to drink again. In Archbishop Anselm’s Canons, made in the council at London in 1102, priests are enjoined not to go to drinking-bouts, nor to drink to pegs. The words are–“Ut Presbyteri non, eant ad potationes, nec AD PINNAS bibant.” (Wilkins, vol. i. p. 388.) This shows the antiquity of this invention, which at least was as old as the Conquest.
]

[Footnote 162:
And yet a drawer-on too; i.e. an incitement to appetite: the phrase is yet in use. This drawer-on was also technically termed a puller-on and a shoeing-horn in drink.

On “the Italian delicate oil’d mushrooms,” still a favourite dish with the Italians, I have to communicate some curious knowledge. In an original manuscript letter dated Hereford, 15th November 1659, the name of the writer wanting, but evidently the composition of a physician who had travelled, I find that the dressing of MUSHROOMS was then a novelty. The learned writer laments his error that he “disdained to learn the cookery that occurred in my travels, by a sullen principle of mistaken devotion, and thus declined the great helps I had to enlarge and improve human diet.” This was an age of medicine, when it was imagined that the health of mankind essentially depended on diet; and Moffet had written his curious book on this principle. Our writer, in noticing the passion of the Romans for mushrooms, which was called “an Imperial dish,” says, “he had eaten it often at Sir Henry Wotton’s table (our resident ambassador at Venice), always dressed by the inspection of his Dutch-Venetian Johanna, or of Nic. Oudart, and truly it did deserve the old applause as I found it at his table; it was far beyond our English food. Neither did any of us find it of hard digestion, for we did not eat like Adamites, but as modest men would eat of musk-melons. If it were now lawful to hold any kind of intelligence with Nic. Oudart, I would only ask him Sir Henry Wotton’s art of dressing mushrooms, and I hope that is not high treason,”–Sloane MSS. 4292.
]

[Footnote 163:
See Mr. Douce’s curious “Illustrations of Shakspeare,” vol. i. 457; a gentleman more intimately conversant with our ancient and domestic manners than, perhaps, any single individual in the country. ]

[Footnote 164:
This term is used in Bancroft’s “Two Books of Epigrams and Epitaphs,” 1639. I take it to have been an accepted one of that day. ]

[Footnote 165:
“A delicate Diet for daintie mouthed Dronkardes, wherin the fowle Abuse of common carowsing and quaffing with hartie Draughtes is honestlie admonished.” By George Gascoigne, Esquier. 1576. ]

[Footnote 166:
I shall preserve the story in the words of Whitelocke; it was something ludicrous, as well as terrific.

“From Berkshire (in May, 1650) that five drunkards agreed to drink the king’s health in their blood, and that each of them should cut off a piece of his buttock, and fry it upon the gridiron, which was done by four of them, of whom one did bleed so exceedingly, that they were fain to send for a chirurgeon, and so were discovered. The wife of one of them hearing that her husband was amongst them, came to the room, and taking up a pair of tongs laid about her, and so saved the cutting of her husband’s flesh.”–Whitelocke’s Memorials, p. 453, second edition.
]

[Footnote 167:
Burnet’s Life of Sir Matthew Hale. ]