We have a very common expression to describe a man in a state of ebriety, that "he is as drunk as a beast," or that "he is beastly drunk." This is a libel on the brutes, for the vice of ebriety is perfectly human. I think the phrase is peculiar to ourselves: and I imagine I have discovered its origin. When ebriety became first prevalent in our nation, during the reign of Elizabeth, it was a favourite notion among the writers of the time, and on which they have exhausted their fancy, that a man in the different stages of ebriety showed the most vicious quality of different animals; or that a company of drunkards exhibited a collection of brutes, with their different characteristics. "All dronkardes are beasts," says George Gascoigne, in a curious treatise on them,[165] and he proceeds in illustrating his proposition; but the satirist Nash has classified eight kinds of "drunkards;" a fanciful sketch from the hand of a master in humour, and which could only have been composed by a close spectator of their manners and habits. "The first is _ape-drunk_, and he leaps and sings and hollows and danceth for the heavens; the second is _lyon-drunk_, and he flings the pots about the house, calls the hostess w--- e, breaks the glass-windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrel with any man that speaks to him; the third is _swine-drunk_, heavy, lumpish, and sleepy, and cries for a little more drink and a few more clothes; the fourth is _sheep-drunk_, wise in his own conceit when he cannot bring forth a right word; the fifth is _maudlen-drunk_, when a fellow will weep for kindness in the midst of his drink, and kiss you, saying, 'By God! captain, I love thee; go thy ways, thou dost not think so often of me as I do of thee: I would (if it pleased God) I could not love thee so well as I do,' and then he puts his finger in his eye and cries. The sixth is _martin-drunk_, when a man is drunk, and drinks himself sober ere he stir; the seventh is _goat-drunk_, when in his drunkenness he hath no mind but on lechery. The eighth is _fox-drunk_, when he is crafty-drunk, as many of the Dutchmen be, which will never bargain but when they are drunk. All these _species_, and more, I have seen practised in _one company at one sitting_; when I have been permitted to remain sober amongst them only to note their several humours." These beast-drunkards are characterised in a frontispiece to a curious tract on Drunkenness where the men are represented with the heads of apes, swine, &c. &c.