Space is ot afforded in the present work to do more than glance at the diversity of D. U. in connection with domestic events and social intercourse. There were, as is well known, at one time drinkings on the occasion of births, baptisms, marriages, and even deaths; these last, which included the gloomy festivities of the Lykwake, or wake over the corpse of the deceased, being a relic of a very ancient custom, as was that, at least in Scotland, of drinking the dredgy (dirge) after the funeral solemnities were completed. In whatever manner these, as well as many other D. U., originated, it cannot be doubted that they were long maintained from the force of custom, along with that demand for artificial stimulus provoked by the naturally phlegmatic character of a northern people. For the long nights of a cheerless climate, there seems to have been sought the solace ment of those intoxicating agents, in which it would have been fatal to indulge—where they were not needed—under the sunny skies of the south. We believe this is really the philosophy of the subject, if there be any philosophy in it; and it cannot fail to be observed, that just in proportion to an increase in the number of comfortable homes, the cultivation of mental resources, and the spread of a taste for harmless recreations, the more odious of the old convivialities disappear. Latterly, many amusing traditions respecting the drinking habits of a past age in Scotland, where they longest flourished without alteration, have been given in the ilemoirs of Lord Cockburn; the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle; and the Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, by the Very Rev. Dean Ramsay (1860).
As regards miscellaneous drinking observances at one time common, we can refer but to a few of the more prominent. Perhaps the most offensive of all was that custo mary among tradesmen of imposing fines to be consumed in liquor. Apprentices, on being introduced to a workshop, paid so much entry-money to be spent in drink, and similar exactions were made from journeymen on entering a new employment. This
was called paying their footing. When Benjamin Franklin, on his getting employment in a printing-office in London, refused to comply with this mischievous custom, he experienced, as he tells us, a variety of petty annoyances. Among shipwrights, the penalty of non-payment was flogging with a hand-saw from time to time, and other maltreatment. We refer to Dunlop's Drinking Usages of Great Britain (1839) for many curious details of this kind. Happily, the abolition of these usages has kept pace with the increasing intelligence of the working-classes, and of such outrages little is now heard. Prisoners, on being lodged in jail, as related in the novels of Smollett and others, were obliged to pay gairnish, for drink to the brotherhood of which they had become members. This pitiless exaction is now totally gone, through the efficacy of modern prison-disci pli ne.
The giving of rails (Lat. vale, farewell) to servants on quitting a gentleman's house, which became so intolerable in the 18th c., as at length to be given up by universal consent, meant, doubtless, a gift to be spent in drink to the health of the donor, and was analogous to the custom of giving a trink-geld in Germany, and a pour boire in France, to servants, drivers of carriages, and others. There were, at one time, numerous drink ing usages connected with departures. We need only notice the bonailie (Fr. ban allez), or, as it is sometimes called, a fay (Fr. vole), a festive drinking at the away-going of servants or of persons in a still higher degree, once common in the lowlands of Scot land; also the stirrup-cup, or, as it is called in the Highlands, death an dorris, or drink on getting on horseback, and being ready to set off.—For the moral and physical evils connected with DJT., and the means taken to redress them, we refer to the article TEM PERANCE. w. C.