“Ah, Ben! Say how or when Shall we, thy guests, Meet at these lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun? Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad! And yet such verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”
Another Sun, that behind the Exchange, was a famous house frequented by Pepys; it was rebuilt after the Fire by John Wadlow, the host of the Devil Tavern, and son of the more famous Simon Wadlow whom Ben Jonson dubbed “Old Sym, the King of Skinkers.” Pepys often went with his colleagues to the Dolphin, and drank “a great quantity of sack” there. On April 25th, 1661, he “went to an ordinary at the King’s Head, in Tower Street, and there had a dirty dinner.” On June 21st, of the same year, we read, “This morning, going to my father’s, I met him, and so he and I went and drank our morning draft at the Samson, in Paul’s Churchyard.” On October 9th, he went after the theatre “to the Fleece tavern, in Covent Garden, where Luellin, and Blurton, and my old friend, Frank Bagge, was to meet me, and there staid till late, very merry.” This was the chief tavern in Covent Garden, but being the resort of bullies, it obtained a very unenviable notoriety. The Green Dragon, on Lambeth Hill, the Golden Lion, near Charing Cross, the Old Three Tuns at the same place, and the Pope’s Head, in Chancery Lane, are among the other taverns mentioned by Pepys. The Rhenish Wine-house, in the Steelyard, Upper Thames Street, was a favourite resort, and is frequently mentioned by the old dramatists. Pepys went there sometimes, but he more often visited another house so called in Cannon Row. All kinds of drinks were alike agreeable to our Diarist, and he did not even disdain “mum,” a strong beer brewed from wheat, which was once popular and sold at special mum-houses.
These constant visits to taverns were not very conducive to temperate habits of life, and we therefore read much of the midday revellings of the business men. One day, Pepys being a little more sober than Sir W. Penn, has to lead that worthy knight home through the streets, and on another occasion he resolves not to drink any more wine,--a rash vow which he forthwith breaks. Sometimes with amusing casuistry he tries to keep his vow to the letter while he breaks it in the spirit; thus, to allude again to the characteristic entry, on October 29th, 1663, we read, “Went into the Buttery, and there stayed and talked, and then into the Hall again; and there wine was offered, and they drunk, I only drinking some hypocras,[152] which do not break my vow, it being, to the best of my present judgement, only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine. If I am mistaken, God forgive me! but I hope and do think I am not.”