Yea every cup is fast to others wedged. They always double drink, they must be pledged. He that begins, how many so’er they be, Looks that each one do drink as much as he. And further on, to the same effect:-- Oh! how they’ll wind men in, do what they can, By drinking healths, first unto such a man, Then unto such a woman! Then they’ll send An health to each man’s mistresse or his friend; Then to their kindreds or their parents deare, They needs must have the other jug of beere; Then to their captains and commanders stout, Who for to pledge they think none shall stand out; Last to the king and queen they’ll have a cruse. Whom for to pledge they think none dare refuse.[147] ‘We seem,’ wrote Reeve in his _Plea for Nineveh_, quoted in Malcolm’s _Manners and Customs of London_, i. p. 286, ‘to be steeped in liquors, or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but sponges ... or had tunnels in our mouths.... We are the grape-suckers of the earth.’ That the ignorant and thoughtless should have been swept into this vortex of dissipation is not surprising, but one marvels that a man of power, and in some sort a philosopher, should have stooped to translate an utterly frivolous and worthless poem of St. Amant, of which a mere quotation is sickening:-- Wine, my boy; we’ll sing and laugh, All night revel, rant, and quaff; Till the morn stealing behind us, At the table sleepless find us. When our bones (alas!) shall have A cold lodging in the grave; When swift death shall overtake us, We shall sleep and none can wake us. Drink we then the juice o’ the vine, Make our breasts Lyæus’ shrine; Bacchus, our debauch beholding, By thy image I am moulding, Whilst my brains I do replenish With this draught of unmixed Rhenish; By thy full-branched ivy twine; By this sparkling glass of wine; By thy thyrsus so renowned, By the healths with which th’art crowned; * * * * * To thy frolic order call us, Knights of the deep bowl install us; And to shew thyself divine, Never let it want for wine. It would be thoroughly to the liking of such a patient that Dr. Tobias Whitaker (1638) should publish his _Blood of the Grape_, ‘proving the possibility of maintaining Life from Infancy to Old Age without Sickness, by the Use of Wine.’