The opinion of the great Doctor already quoted was not confined either to himself or to his times. Bishop Earle, writing in the seventeenth century of those social functions of the tavern or alehouse, now in a great measure discharged by the Clubs, sums up his description as follows:—“To give you the total reckoning of it, it is the busy man’s recreation, the idle man’s business, the melancholy man’s sanctuary, the stranger’s welcome, the inns of court man’s entertainment, the scholar’s kindness, and the citizens’ courtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of comedy their book; whence we leave them.”
Old Izaak Walton had a lively appreciation of the comforts of an inn and the virtues of English ale. Piscator, of _The Complete Angler_, thus addresses the hostess of an inn: “Come, hostess, dress it (a trout) presently, and get us what other meat the house will afford, and give us some of your best barley wine, the good liquor that our honest forefathers did use to drink of; the drink which preserved their health, and made them live so long and do so many good deeds.”
The quaint old author of _The Haven of Health_ (1584) gives his readers directions how to find out the best alehouse in a strange town, and also some prudent maxims as to the behaviour there:—“But if you come as a stranger to any towne, and would faine know where the best ale is, you neede do no more than marke where the greatest noyse is of good fellows, as they call them, and the greatest repaire of beggars. But withall take good heed that malt bee not above wheat before you part. For it is worse to be drunke of Ale than wine, and the drunkenness indureth longer: by reason that the fumes and vapours of ale that ascend to the head, are more grosse, and therefore cannot be so soone resolved as those that rise up of wine.”
Malvolio is alluding to the custom of alehouse singing when he says: “Do you make an alehouse of my lady’s house, that ye squeak out your cozier’s catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice?”
The English custom of wives following their husbands to the ale { 192} house is mentioned with reprehension by Gascoigne in _A Delicate Diet for Daintie-mouthed Droonkards_ (1576). “What woman,” he exclaims, “(even among the droonken Almaines), is suffered to follow her husband into the Alehouse or Beerhouse?” However, if we are to believe the author of the following verses, the practice does not always seem to have been unfavourable to temperance:—