But see the mischief; many men, knowing that merry company is the only medicine against melancholy, will therefore neglect their business, and spend all their days among good fellows in a tavern, and know not otherwise how to bestow their time but in drinking; malt-worms, men-fishes, or water-snakes, like so many frogs in a puddle.... Flourishing wits and men of good parts, good fashion, and good worth, basely prostitute themselves to every rogue’s company to take tobacco and drink.... They drown their wits, seeth their brains in ale, consume their fortunes, lose their time, weaken their temperatures, contract filthy diseases, rheumes, dropsies, calentures, tremor, get swoln juglars, pimpled red faces, sore eyes, &c.; heat their livers, alter their complexions, spoil their stomachs, overthrow their bodies (for drink drowns more than the sea and all the rivers that fall into it), mere funges and casks--confound their souls, suppress reason, go from Scylla to Charybdis. If such were the avowed expressions of Burton, we shall not wonder to find such men as George Herbert and Bishop Hall vehement in denunciation of the same bane. Because luxury is a very visible sin, the parson is very careful to avoid all the kinds thereof, _but especially that of drinking, because it is the most popular vice_; into which if he come, he prostitutes himself both to shame, and sin, and by having fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, he disableth himself of authority to reprove them: for sins make all equal whom they find together; and then they are worst, who ought to be best. Neither is it for the servant of Christ to haunt inns, or taverns, or ale-houses, to the dishonour of his person and office.[124] This passage is quoted to call attention to the words italicised (not by Herbert), _‘because it is the most popular vice_;’ an independent confirmation of the excessive drinking in the reign of James I. Again, in _The Parson in Journey_, chapter xvii.,-- When he comes to any house, where his kindred or other relations give him any authority over the family, if he be to stay for a time, he considers diligently the state thereof to God-ward, and that in two points: First, what disorders there are either in apparel, or diet, _or too open a buttery_, &c. The meaning of the words italicised is mistaken by the occasional annotator to Bohn’s edition, who explains it, ‘A repository or store-room for certain provisions.’ But in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, _buttery_ always meant the place where the beer (or wine) was kept. Evidence is forthcoming from our dramatists of those periods. Thus:-- (1) Maria, in _Twelfth Night_ (act i., scene 3), says to the unfortunate butt Sir Andrew Ague-cheek, ‘I pray you bring your hand to the buttery bar and let it drink.’