The punch-bowl is comparatively modern, inasmuch as the beverage itself is not of ancient date. The word “punch” is said to have been derived from the Hindustani, signifying the five ingredients--spirit, water, sugar, lemon, and spice. “A quart of ale is a dish for a king,” says Shakespeare in _A Winter’s Tale_; “Then to the spicy nut-brown ale,” says Milton in his _L’Allegro_. With the advent of William III there is no doubt that spirit drinking became prevalent, though it was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that the evil became a national crime fostered by the greed of the Government for taxes. The drunkenness in the reign of George II was appalling. William Hogarth, the great satirist of the eighteenth century, holds the mirror to his day in the two prints, _Beer Street_ and _Gin Lane_, published in 1751. In the former, though it cannot be said to be idyllic, the comparative prosperity of the populace under the beer-drinking regime is satirically compared with their condition under the dominion of Gin in his companion picture, where for gruesome details the graver of the satirist is unsurpassed. In the foreground of this truly horrible print is a woman half in rags, evidently in a drunken condition, while the infant is slipping from her arms into a cellar, from which hangs the distiller’s spirit measure. Hogarth does not believe in half-truths. A stupefied wretch close by is clutching a keg of gin. On an adjacent parapet a dog is sharing a bone with a sot. The pawnbroker is shown as doing a busy trade. A woman is giving gin to her infant from a glass. The tottering buildings with falling bricks are symbolic of the utter rottenness of the social fabric. The spire of St. George’s, Bloomsbury, stands out as indicative of the aloofness of the Church to this devilish orgy. St. Giles is triumphant. The lurid background completes a terrible indictment of the Government of the day--the ghouls lifting a man into a coffin with a naked child at the foot, the bandaged heads and lifted stools of a drunken mob, the drunken man in a wheelbarrow with more gin being poured down his throat. Hogarth with his touch of irony combines the pathos of tears, young children standing innocently apathetic to all this, the everyday environment of their lives. This was Hogarth’s biting criticism on the attempt to stimulate the drinking of spirits and decrease the consumption of beer. Hogarth is coarse, he is offensive, he is brutal; but he deserves well of all who love truth. Rabelais had to paint his satires in gigantic gruesomeness to reach the ear of his day. Brutishness cannot be exorcised by the sprinkling of rose-water. The punch-bowl comes straight from this period. We take it as we find it, symbolic of days when Members of Parliament did not disdain to hiccough their drunken speeches in the House, when Cabinet Ministers were not ashamed of being drunk.