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Updated: June 3, 2025
At nightfall the uproar lessens, and as the evening wanes, the unaccustomed sounds diminish, though till midnight, ever and anon, the tired and sleepy citizens are startled from their dreams by whoops, hurrahs, snatches of songs, and outbursts of rude laughter ringing through the frosty air and mingling with the clattering of horses' feet and the whirring rumble of swift-revolving wheels, as some party of roystering blades, excited by deep potations, drive shouting homewards from the village inns.
And so after a voyage to Paris, where he finds Montigny and De Cayeux clattering their bones upon the gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets, "with their thumbs under their girdles," down sits Master Francis to write his "Large Testament," and perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious ignominy.
His days were given wholly to the pursuit of knowledge; his nights to the pursuit of pleasure, as pleasure was then counted by the roystering young Scotchmen, whose favorite resort was the tavern, and whose most popular pastime was filching signs, bell handles, and knockers, and stirring the city guard to unwonted energy.
Thus it will be plain to the Reader that a Knight of Malta is a kind of Medley of Seaman, Swashbuckler, and Saint Admiral Benbow, Field-Marshal Wade, and Friar Tuck all rolled up into one. I did become acquainted with one of these Holy Roystering Cavalieros, by the name of Don Ercolo Amadeo Sparafucile di San Lorenzo, that was a perfect Model of all these Characteristics.
There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked into the kennel by a mediaeval bishop returning from a revel with his roystering train, when he wants to cross the river there is no bridge; and after vainly inquiring his way in a tavern full of very rough customers, he wishes himself in the moon, and to the moon appropriately he goes.
Now I've had an adventure like this before. Once in Regenwalde, between Danzig and Stettin, where we lay for two months, I spent a night with a company of Hepburn's blades in a castle abandoned by a cousin of the Duke of Pomerania. Roystering dogs! Stout hearts! Where are they now, those fine lads in corslet and morgensterne, who played havoc with the casks in the Regenwalde cellar?
A great man was he at all weddings, christenings, churchings, and funerals, and never neglected his bottle at these ceremonies, nor any sport in doors or out of doors, meanwhile. In short, such a roystering Puritan was never known.
So we laid deep schemes to fill the house to overflowing and to have a roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a widowed cousin of mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children; and we sent out invitations to the ban and arrière ban of the county's juvenility, to say nothing of that of London, for a Boxing-day orgy.
Who would have thought that they wanted to have their portraits painted? And who, accordingly, could have induced them to do so except a bluff, roystering genius like Hals, who slashed them down on canvas before they had time to stop him?
Although the legends containing this account are not all found among Teutonic peoples, it cannot be deemed irrelevant to draw attention to the fact that similar fights are mentioned as the daily occupation of the heroes who attain to Valhalla, just as the nightly feasts of that roystering paradise correspond to the refreshments provided for the warriors around the tables of stone in their subterranean retreats.
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