to the next pin, &c.; by which means the
pins were so many measures to the compotators, _making them all drink
alike_, or the same quantity: and as the distance of the pins was such
as to contain a large draught of liquor, _the company would be very
liable by this method to get drunk_, especially when, if they drank
short of the pin or beyond it, they were obliged to drink again. In
Archbishop Anselm's Canons, made in the council at London in 1102,
priests are enjoined not to go to drinking-bouts, nor _to drink to
pegs_. The words are--"_Ut Presbyteri non, eant ad potationes_, nec AD
PINNAS bibant." (Wilkins, vol. i. p. 388.) This shows the antiquity of
this invention, which at least was as old as the Conquest.]

[Footnote 162: And yet a _drawer-on too_; i.e. an incitement to
appetite: the phrase is yet in use. This drawer-on was also technically
termed a _puller-on_ and a _shoeing-horn_ in drink.

On "the Italian delicate oil'd mushrooms," still a favourite dish with
the Italians, I have to communicate some curious knowledge. In an
original manuscript letter dated Hereford, _15th November 1659_, the
name of the writer wanting, but evidently the composition of a physician
who had travelled, I find that the dressing of MUSHROOMS was then a
novelty. The learned writer laments his error that he "disdained to
learn the cookery that occurred in my travels, by a sullen principle of
mistaken devotion, and thus declined the great helps I had to enlarge
and improve human diet." This was an age of medicine, when it was
imagined that the health of mankind essentially depended on diet; and
Moffet had written his curious book on this principle. Our writer, in
noticing the passion of the Romans for mushrooms, which was called "an
Imperial dish," says, "he had eaten it often at Sir Henry Wotton's table
(our resident ambassador at Venice), always dressed by the inspection of
his Dutch-Venetian Johanna, or of Nic. Oudart, and truly it did deserve
the old applause as I found it at his table; it was far beyond our
English food. Neither did any of us find it of hard digestion, for we
did not eat like Adamites, but as modest men would eat of musk-melons.
If it were now lawful to hold any kind of intelligence with Nic. Oudart,
I would only ask him _Sir Henry Wotton's art of dressing mushrooms_, and
I hope that is not high treason,"--_Sloane MSS._ 4292.]

[Footnote 163: See Mr. Douce's curious "Illustrations of Shakspeare,"
vol. i. 457; a