The punch-bowl comes straight from this period. We take it as we find it, symbolic of days when Members of Parliament did not disdain to hiccough their drunken speeches in the House, when Cabinet Ministers were not ashamed of being drunk.
This belongs to the early Georgian era; it is associated with Jacobite plots, with suppers held in secret, with toasts drunk in solemn ritual to the King over the water. It belongs to the hunting squires and parsons too, to the nabobs from “John Company,” and to the nebulous period of Hanoverian ascendancy. The Stuarts were dead with their fateful, romantic, and final downfall. Their memory lingered in the people’s hearts; it was kept alive by the old religion, and it haunted the songs of the people. But the Georges, by law elect, had planted their feet firmly--and the House of Hanover survived all romance.
Among the classes of punch-bowls the Monteith takes the aristocratic place. Its decoration is pretentious. Its utility, with its removable rim with the scalloped edge, is its claim to recognition, by the collector. The specimen illustrated (page 135), in date 1704, comes straight from the days when Charles Mordaunt, Lord Peterborough, performed his marvellous exploits in Spain. He captured Barcelona in 1705. Scholar, wit, man of fashion, he was Commander-in-Chief of the armies and the fleet in the Spanish War. He was as chivalrous as Don Quixote. He married Anastasia Robinson, the _prima donna_ of her day. “Brave to temerity, liberal to profusion, courteous in his dealings with his enemies, a protector of the oppressed, an adorer of woman--the last of the knights-errant. He lived,” says Walpole, his biographer, “a romance, but was capable of making it a history.” This specimen comes straight from these days of sea fight and land fight in Spain and in the Low Countries under Marlborough, when “our army,” to quote Uncle Toby, “swore terribly in Flanders.”
The Queen Anne soberness of design seems to have been discarded in these Monteiths. There is something rococo and elaborate, as though in defiance of established reticence. The heavy ornament of lion’s head and handles, the massive gadrooned edge of the scalloped design, the bowl deeply fluted, the embossed medallion with coat of arms, and the foot enriched with beaded ornament, all indicate that such specimens were regarded as the Standing Cup, so to speak, of the period.