"The taverner took me by the sleeve, 'Sir,' saith he, 'will you our wine assay?' I answered, 'That cannot much me grieve, A penny can do no more than it may;' I drank a pint, and for it did pay; Yet, sore a-hungered from thence I yede, And, wanting money, I could not speed," etc. There was no eating at taverns at this time, beyond a crust to relish the wine; and he who wished to dine before he drank, had to go to the cook's. The furnishing of the Boar's Head, in Eastcheap, with sack, in Henry IV., is an anachronism of Shakspeare's; for the vintners kept neither sacks, muscadels, malmseys, bastards, alicants, nor any other wines but white and claret, until 1543. All the other sweet wines before that time, were sold at the apothecaries' shops for no other use but for medicine. Taking it as the picture of a tavern a century later, we see the alterations which had taken place. The single drawer or taverner of Lydgate's day is now changed to a troop of waiters, besides the under skinker, or tapster. Eating was no longer confined to the cook's row, for we find in Falstaff's bill "a capon 2_s._ 2_d._; sack, two gallons, 5_s._ 8_d._; anchovies and sack, after supper, 2_s._ 6_d._; bread, one halfpenny." And there were evidently _different rooms_[27] for the guests, as Francis[28] bids a brother waiter "Look down in the Pomgranite;" for which purpose they had windows, or loopholes, affording a view from the upper to the lower apartments. The custom of naming the principal rooms in taverns and hotels is usual to the present day. Taverns and wine-bibbing had greatly increased in the reign of Edward VI., when it was enacted by statute that no more than 8_d._ a gallon should be taken for any French wines, and the consumption limited in private houses to ten gallons each person yearly; that there should not be "any more or great number of taverns in London of such tavernes or wine sellers by retaile, above the number of fouretye tavernes or wyne sellers," being less than two, upon an average to each parish. Nor did this number much increase afterwards; for in a return made to the Vintners' Company, late in Elizabeth's reign, there were only one hundred and sixty-eight taverns in the whole city and suburbs. It seems to have been the fashion among old ballad-mongers, street chroniclers, and journalists, to sing the praises of the taverns in rough-shod verse, and that lively rhyme which, in our day, is termed "patter." Here are a few specimens, of various periods. In a black-letter poem of Queen Elizabeth's reign, entitled _Newes from Bartholomew Fayre_, there is this curious enumeration: