The Danes, also, were great health-drinkers. It is recorded that previous to the invasion of England by these ravaging pirates of the North, in the reign of Sweyne, that monarch gave a great banquet on his accession to the throne. First, the ale-horns were filled and emptied in memory of the dead King Harold; the next draught was in honour of Christ, and the third of St. Michael the Archangel. A writer of the year 1623 thus describes the ceremonies of health-drinking as practised at that time:—“He that begins the health first uncovering his head, he takes a full cup in his hand, and setting his countenance with a grave aspect, he craves for audience; silence being once obtained, he begins to breathe out the name, peradventure, of some honourable personage, whose health, is drunk to, and he that pledges must likewise off with his cap, kiss his fingers, and bow himself in sign of a reverent acceptance. When the leader sees his follower thus prepared, he sups up his broth, turns the bottom of the cup upward, and, in ostentation of his dexterity, gives the cup a fillip to make it cry _twango_. And thus the first scene is acted. The cup being newly replenished to the breadth of a hair, he that is the pledger must now begin his part; and {281} thus it goes round throughout the whole company.” To prove that each person had drunk off his measure, he had to turn the glass over his thumb, and if so much liquor remained as to make more than a drop which would stand on the nail of his thumb without running off, he had to drink off another bumper. This latter practice went by the name of _supernaculm_, and is mentioned in an old ballad, _The Winchester Wedding_:— Then Phillip began her health, And turn’d a beer-glass o’er his thumb, But Jenkin was reckoned for drinking, The best in Christendom. The author of _Memoires d’Angleterre_ (1698) mentions the absolute universality of this practice of health-drinking amongst the English. “To drink at table,” he writes, “without drinking to the health of some one in especial, would be considered drinking on the sly, and as an act of incivility. There are in this proceeding two principal and singular grimaces, which are universally observed. . . .” The person whose health is drunk must remain as inactive as a statue while the drinker drinks, after which the second grimace is “to make him an _inclinabo_, at the risk of dipping his periwig in the gravy. . . . I confess that when a foreigner first sees these manners he thinks them laughable.” And yet one would have thought that a Frenchman’s familiarity with toasting would have rendered the proceeding not so singular an one after all, for that custom was carried to an extreme in his own nation, among the choice spirits of which it was not unusual to give a toast which necessitated the drinking of a glass to each letter of a mistress’s name, as illustrated in the lines:—