The audience was pleased at this, and cheered for several minutes. They shouted for the author, for old Ben, and went on shouting while people hurried backward and forward across the stage. The author did not come forward, and the shouting continued. At last the chief actor returned, and bowing to the audience, said that old Ben was no longer in the house: he had gone to the tavern. After this there was more cheering, and the actor, kissing his hand to the audience, left the stage. Guasconi took me to the Mermaid Tavern, a low place where the actors go after such performances, and where some of the nobles and the learned repair also, for the sake of change and to enjoy the spectacle. Here we were obliged to drink a great deal of a hot and nauseous mixture called sack, which is made of good wines spoilt by the admixture of much sugar and spice. I hate these English mixtures; their sweetmeats are made of sugared cake mixed with meat, and with their meat they eat sugared fruits. You can imagine how nauseous is this system, and indeed it reminds me of their plays. Their plays are like their plum puddings, full of great lumps of suet in which little sweet plums and currants are imbedded, but difficult to find. I said this to Guasconi, but he told me I must not judge of the English either by their food or their plays, but that if I wished to judge of their literature I should read the Sonnets of the Countess of Rutland, and he quoted one which begins: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Moreover, he said, the English were not a literary but a musical nation. Their music was unequalled in all Europe; it was the art (and the only art) in which they excelled; witness the divine melodies of Orlando Gibbons, Morley, and Dowland, which, indeed, I had heard performed at the Court, and had greatly enjoyed, for we have nothing like it in France.