direction for making it in his English Dispensatory (Ed. 1730, p. 553), and he speaks of herbs of various kinds being added to produce different effects.

Mrs. Wooley, writing in the seventeenth century, speaks of bottling the metheglin; and we read in The Spectator, of May 20th, 1712, that at Vauxhall a masked lady asked Sir Roger de Coverley "if he would drink a bottle of mead with her". Dr. Quincy, George Fisher, and Sir John Hill, in the eighteenth century, direct keeping it in barrels; but in what form of vessel was it placed on the table for the guests? We hear of mead pots, but what were their fashion and material? If credit may be given to report, silver tankards of mead were to be seen at olden feasts, as well as vessels of less costly price, but as yet we have little evidence to produce regarding this portion of our subject.

In the ninth song of Aneurin's Gododin we are told of "Wine and Mead from Golden Cups":

and though vessels of the precious metal may have been employed by the Keltic chieftains we may be sure that the commonalty quaffed their mead from ox-horns; and Cynddelw, who flourished in the twelfth century, speaks of Meddgyrn, or Mead-Horns. In one of the ancient Fenian poems, entitled The Chase, it is said :

"A chalice She bore of angled mould,

And sparkling rich with gems and gold";

and the Hibernians seem to have designed, at a remote period, mead vessels of entirely different fashion from those employed in England, which, from the beverage they held, received the name of Meadars, or Methers. The examples which have survived to our time are beaker-shaped, quadrangular at the mouth, as described in the Fenian poem, and round at the base, with from one to four loop-handles, remindful of the old English Tygs. They measure in height from 6 ins. to 12 ins., and will hold from one to three pints of liquor. They are wrought out of single blocks of wood: beech, crab, elm, oak, pine, sycamore, walnut, willow and yew, all having been employed in their manufacture. They are occasionally slightly ornamented with incised lines, and some have been discovered inscribed with initials and dates. In the Dublin Penny Journal, ii, 249, is an engraving of a two-quart four-handled crab-trée methir, on which is cut DERMOT TVLLY 1590, but the cup itself is of greater age than the date. A very good example of an unadorned four-handled crab-tree mether is given in the same journal, i, 300. If the truth may be told, the

famous Dunvegan Cup, in the Isle of Skye, is nothing more than an oaken mether of bizarre design, mounted on four silver legs, and its antiquity must be brought down from the tenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. It may be well to note that those who assayed to drink from the side of the mether were sure to spill the liquor; it was one of the four corners of the cup that was to be applied to the lips.

Those oft-repeated lines of Southey's

"They thought

One day from Ella's skull to quaff the mead,
Their valour's guerdon,"

conveys a false idea of the Scandinavian's festive goblets, which were certainly, generally speaking, the horns of oxen, which at times were accoutred with silver. But it is highly probable that the glass cornets occasionally discovered in the Anglo-Saxon barrows were frequently filled with the favourite metheglin.

It is uncertain when the ordinary mead cup came into vogue, but it positively dates back to the seventeenth century, and is probably of much older date. In some respects it may be likened to the Roman calix, inasmuch as it is broader than it is high, and contracts at the mouth like the old Bohemian hock-glasses. In a seventeenth-century 12mo work, the title-page of which is unfortunately lost, which appears to be a sort of pictorial encyclopedia in Dutch and Latin, wine is figuratively expressed by a tali glass, beer by a Wiederkomman, and mead by a low cup, wide in proportion to its height, rather contracted at the mouth, and standing on a flat foot, p. 252.

I possess a fine example of a mead cup of the seventeenth century, 21⁄2 ins. high, 31⁄2 ins. in diameter at its

Mead Cup of White Glass.
(Cuming Collection.)

greatest swell, and 23 ins. in diameter at the mouth. It is of colourless transparent glass, the whole surface displaying a bold reticulated pattern, much like that seen on some of the Roman vitrea of the third and fourth centuries. This rare cup is thought by some to be of

foreign fabric, but I know no reason why it should not be of English manufacture, p. 255.

I have another mead cup, of somewhat later date than the foregoing, which is said to be of German origin. The bowl is of milk-white hue, 211 ins, deep, 4 ins. in diameter at its greatest swell, and 31⁄2 ins. in diameter at the mouth. It stands on a short, thick, annulated stem, with a foot 3 ins. in diameter, making the entire height of the vessel 43 ins.; the stem and foot being of transparent glass; and the under surface of the latter indicates that it has been pushed about the festive board for a lengthy time.

Samuel Pepys extols the ice-cooled metheglin which King Charles II and himself found so refreshing at Whitehall, on July 27th, 1666, but says nothing about the vessels out of which the "most brave drink" was taken.

Though these desultory notes do not record the name of the inventor of mead, they fully establish the high antiquity of the beloved beverage, and trace its career from the simple hydromel, the honey-water of the classic ages, to the rich spicy compound of mediæval and later times, when " metheglin" was its familiar title. They also show that the vessels out of which mead was quaffed were of different shapes, and wrought of metal, horn, wood and glass. In these degenerate days, if mead can be obtained in some far remote country cottage, the thirsty soul must be content to drink it out of a common earthen mug or glass tumbler of ordinary type, and look not for the golden cup and silver-mounted horn, nor treen beaker adorned with graven work, such as his ancestors indulged in.