"From hence, pursuant to my friend's inclination, we adjourned to the sign of the Angel, in Fenchurch-street, where the vintner, like a double-dealing citizen, condescended as well to draw carmen's comfort as the consolatory juice of the vine. "Having at the King's Head well freighted the hold of our vessels with excellent food and delicious wine, at a small expense, we scribbled the following lines with chalk upon the wall." (See page 98.) The tapster was a male vendor, not "a woman who had the care of the tap," as Tyrwhitt states. In the 17th century ballad, _The Times_, occurs: "The bar-boyes and the tapsters Leave drawing of their beere, And running forth in haste they cry, 'See, where Mull'd Sack comes here!'" The ancient drawers and tapsters were now superseded by the barmaid, and a number of waiters: Ward describes the barmaid as "all ribbon, lace, and feathers, and making such a noise with her bell and her tongue together, that had half-a-dozen paper-mills been at work within three yards of her, they'd have signified no more to her clamorous voice than so many lutes to a drum, which alarmed two or three nimble fellows aloft, who shot themselves downstairs with as much celerity as a mountebank's mercury upon a rope from the top of a church-steeple, every one charged with a mouthful of coming, coming, coming." The barmaid (generally the vintner's daughter) is described as "bred at the dancing-school, becoming a bar well, stepping a minuet finely, playing sweetly on the virginals, 'John come kiss me now, now, now,' and as proud as she was handsome." Tom Brown sketches a flirting barmaid of the same time, "as a fine lady that stood pulling a rope, and screaming like a peacock against rainy weather, pinned up by herself in a little pew, all people bowing to her as they passed by, as if she was a goddess set up to be worshipped, armed with the chalk and sponge, (which are the principal badges that belong to that honourable station you beheld her in,) was the _barmaid_." Of the nimbleness of the waiters, Ward says in another place--"That the chief use he saw in the Monument was, for the improvement of vintners' boys and drawers, who came every week to exercise their supporters, and learn the tavern trip, by running up to the balcony and down again." Owen Swan, at the Black Swan tavern, Bartholomew Lane, is thus apostrophized by Tom Brown for the goodness of his wine:-- "Thee, _Owen_, since the God of wine has made Thee steward of the gay carousing trade, Whose art decaying nature still supplies, Warms the faint pulse, and sparkles in our eyes. Be bountiful like him, bring t'other _flask_, Were the stairs wider we would have the _cask_. This pow'r we from the God of wine derive, Draw such as this, and I'll pronounce thou'lt live." THE BEAR AT THE BRIDGE FOOT.