Face.When all your alchemy, and your algebra,
Your minerals, vegetals, and animals,
Your conjuring, cozening, and your dozen of trades,
Could not relieve your corps with so much linen
Would make you tinder, but to see a fire;
I gave you countenance,[1] credit for your coals,
Your stills, your glasses, your materials;
Built you a furnace, drew you customers,
Advanced all your black arts; lent you, beside,
A house to practise in———
Sub.Your master's house!
Face.Where you have studied the more thriving skill
Of bawdry since.
Sub.Yes, in your master's house.
You and the rats here kept possession.
Make it not strange. I know you were one could keep
The buttery-hatch still lock'd, and save the chippings,
Sell the dole beer to aqua-vitæ men,[2]The which, together with your Christmas vails
At post-and-pair,[3] your letting out of counters,
- ↑ I gave you countenance,] i.e. credit, &c. See vol. ii. p. 111.
- ↑ Sell the dole beer to aqua-vitæ men,] i.e. defraud the poor of the beer which was meant for them. It was usual, at that time,
"And pity 'tis, so good a time had wings
To fly away,"
to distribute, at the buttery-hatch of great houses, a daily or weekly dole of broken bread and beer to the indigent families of the neighbourhood. - ↑ ———your Christmas vails
At post-and-pair,] "Post-and-pair," the author of the Compleat Gamester says, "is a game on the cards very much played in the west of England." If we may trust our old dramatists, it was "very much played" every where. The author's account of it, I do not very clearly understand; it seems, however, to have somewhat resembled Brag. Like most of our old games of
