The posset-pot had some cousins in England—the goddard, the wassail-bowl, the gossip-bowl, the caudle-cup—poor relations, however, and feeble ancestors of the glorious punch-bowl. To the Orientals, not to the English, we owe our punch-bowls and our punches. Punch or “pauch” was an Indian drink, and the word meant five, and was named from the five ingredients used in its composition—arrack, tea, sugar, water, and lemon-juice. A “pauch” was also a conclave of five men, a “pauch-pillav” a medicine of five ingredients, and so on. The English people took very readily to the new Oriental drink and the new vessel to hold it, as it did to everything else in India. We read in the old ballad of “Jock-o’-the-Side,” “They hae gard fill up a punch-bowl,” and when a ballad adopts a word, then it is the people’s. As the potter’s art advanced in England, great bowls were made to hold punch at taverns and halls, often for the special use of the potters themselves. Cheerful mottoes did these potters’ punch-bowls sometimes bear. For simplicity and terseness this excels, “One Bowie more, and then”—does it not speak a never-ending welcome? A blue and white potter’s bowl ten inches in diameter has this descriptive motto: “John Udy of Luxillion his tin was so fine it glidered this punch-bowl and made it to shine, pray fill it with punch let the tinners sitt round they never will budge till the bottom they sound.” Glider meant to glaze, not to gild, and the verses refer to the stanniferous opaque white glaze formed by the use of Cornish tin. Another bowl has these sententious lines: “What art can with the potter’s art compare? For of what we are ourselves of such we make our wares.” More serious rhymes still are found. At North Hylton, in England, were made many punch-bowls of lustre ware, and the proprietor, Mr. Phillips, must have been a very serious-minded and inconsequential man, or he never would have put these lines on so worldly a vessel: “The loss of gold is great, The loss of health is more, But losing Christ is such a loss As no man can restore.” This bowl may, however, have been for a parson. On another specimen of the Hylton pottery gayly decorated with a print of a ship, a public house, and a hat-and-feathered young woman with an umbrella and small dog, are these sober and comically incongruous verses: “There is a land of peaceful rest To mourning wanderers given, There’s a tear for souls distrest, A balm for every wounded breast, ’Tis found above in Heaven!”