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"If I had but a cup of metheglin," said Paul, stopping to perform the necessary operation of breathing, "I should swear this was the strongest meal that was ever placed before the mouth of man!"
Then came my stratagem. I began to retch and make a noise as if vomiting, and hallooed to him that I was sick. Of course, I wanted to make him believe that it was the contents of my stomach that was falling at his feet in place of the metheglin. He said he knew better, it was too sudden an attack, and too much of a shower of the metheglin falling at their feet.
Other mild fermented drinks than beer were made and drunk in colonial days in large quantities. Mead and metheglin, wherewith the Druids and old English bards were wont to carouse, were made from water, honey, and yeast. Here is an old receipt for the latter drink, which some colonists pronounced as good as Malaga sack.
This latter house, which can be seen in its eighteenth-century guise in Hogarth's print of "Morning," in The Four Hours of the Day set, is now the quarters of the National Sporting Club. There he worked and talked and entertained, made his metheglin and aqua vitæ and other messes, till his last illness in 1665.
Peaches abounded; and a drink called metheglin, made of their juice mixed with whiskey and sweetened water, the thirsty traveller thought a rival to mint julep. One night Arlington put up at a locally celebrated tavern on the border of Tennessee.
He filled it with metheglin and said that the heat of the fire below, and warmth of the chimney above, would keep it from freezing. Being placed upon the sticks he could draw from it at his convenience, which he was quite sure to do when any of the neighbors called. Neighbors were not very plenty in those days and we were always glad to see them.
Old James Howel says, "metheglin does stupefy more than any other liquor if taken immoderately and keeps a humming in the brain which made one say he loved not metheglin because he was wont to speak too much of the house he came from, meaning the hive." Bradford tells of backsliders from Merrymount who "abased themselves disorderly with drinking too much stronge drinke aboard the Freindshipp."
They had on the tables of this banquet a great variety of drinks not only rich wines from the southern countries, but beer, and metheglin, and also sherbet, which the army had learned to make in Persia.
He is evidently not a good hater even of "priests and kings, and aristocrats, and superstition;" or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and off in debating-club speeches and leading articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong; for there is no form of lovable or right thing which this man has come across, which he does not seem to have appreciated.
You have my blessing, Billy, but 'Dost thou think because thou art virtuous There shall be no more cakes and ale? Avaunt! I'll hie me to metheglin and Muldoon's." And off he went, leaving Ray half vexed, half shaken with laughter.
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