Who was the first English teetotaler? If we could find him, I suspect our temperance friends would erect a monument to him. There are seven “Drinkwaters” in the Metropolitan register; and I am glad to say that Camden’s statement is wrong—it was only a guess—that Drinkwater is a corruption of “Derwentwater.” In the first place it is an impossible corruption; for the corruptive changes that pass over words and names are not accidental, but follow fixed rules, so to say. In the second place, I have been able to discover the name in its present guise up to the very time when hereditary surnames were established. “John Drinkwater” occurs in the Hundred Rolls, and “Richard Drynkwatere” in the Parliamentary Writs. {120} No wonder their posterity has survived, no wonder their name endures, for they can boast that in their sobriquet lies the record of the first English temperance movement. In a word, Mr. Drinkwater number one must have been the forerunner of total abstinence. None of his neighbours could have pointed to him as a man who habitually, or occasionally upon days of festival, “got tight”; his name, whereby they had nicknamed him, was in itself a safeguard. His very title pledged him to the principles it professed. No, he never “got tight,” or if he did, like a good sailing craft, he was _watertight_. Some day I hope there will be a monument erected to “Drinkwater Number One.” It might be in the shape of a drinking fountain. What a heap of people there are buried in state in Westminster Abbey who ought to give place to “Drinkwater Number One”! But, alas! we don’t all get our deserts. But enough of this. We have reminiscences in our directories of meat as well as drink. Chaucer, speaking of the “Franklein,” says,— “Withoute bake mete never was his house, Of fish, and flesh, and that so plenteous, It snowèd in his hous of mete and drink, Of allè deintiès that men coud thinke. * * * * * Wo was his cook, but if his saucè were Poignant and sharpe, and redy all his gear.”