A cold climate demands hot cordials. There was no elaborate system of hot-water pipes in the draughty, cold, and damp Elizabethan mansions with their rush-covered floors. It was a necessity, apart from long and deep potations of strong drinks, to take a nightcap or caudle-cup of something hot. In the eighteenth century the drinking of hot punch superseded this. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the custom of the posset of hot sack with spices and having milk and eggs, as a supper beverage was universal. Not that the posset-cup was idle in the daytime. It succeeded, even if it did not replace, the standing or loving-cup at weddings and other ceremonies. “Mix a posset for the merry Sir John Falstaff,” might, and possibly did, refer to any hour of the day, for that jovial soul did not stand on ceremony as to when he drank, so long as it was copious and oft-repeated. That the posset-cup was of something thicker than mere spiced ale or hot wine is shown by Shakespeare’s “Thou shalt eat a posset to night at my house” (_Merry Wives of Windsor_). And Lady Macbeth, as a last act before the final commission of the treacherous crime, says:-- I have drugged their possets, That death and nature do contend about them, Whether they live or die. We have seen that the caudle was curdled milk, with wine and hot spices, and that it was smoking hot. Shakespeare says, “We’ll have a posset for’t soon at night, i’ faith, at the latter end of a sea-coal fire.” It was undoubtedly hot, and it seems to have been, sometimes for medical reasons, made doubly so. Hence Dryden writes: A sparing diet did her health assure; Or sick, a pepper posset was her cure. The object of a vessel, in the end, determines its established form. Its purpose being to receive a hot caudle, demanded that the posset-pot or cup should have a cover to keep its contents warm. Its two handles never seem to have deserted it, until it became a shallow dish or bowl for broth. These handles undoubtedly served a purpose, but the love of ornament and the balance of vessels which were always of beautiful form and perfect symmetry demanded two handles, by which design they succeeded the style of the loving-cup handed around, but it is not possible to conceive that the posset-cup was other than for personal use. [Illustration: POSSET-CUP AND COVER. London, 1679. Cover, 1660. Height 7¹/₂ in. (_By courtesy of Lord Dillon._)] [Illustration: CHARLES II PORRINGER. London, 1666. (_Photograph by courtesy of Messrs. Crichton Brothers._) (_In possession of A. S. M. Smedley, Esq._)]