A Short History of Toasts and Toasting

Cheers! Prosit! Skoal! !Salud! Bottoms up! Here's how! Na Zdorovje! Okole Maluna! Down the hatch! A votre sante! Lang may your lum reek! Oogy Wawa! and Here's to it!

Ranging at random from High German to colloquial Scotch on the rocks, such are some of the innumerable sentiments and exclamations drinking men have used to salute their fellow booze buffs in the ancient and well-nigh universal custom of toasting -- a gracious practice which the 18th Century wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan gaily hailed as "an excuse for the glass," and the 17th Century Puritan William Prynne glumly denounced as "a kind of shoehorn to draw on drink in great abundance."

Tugging on our own merry mukluks, and dipping into a few well-aged volumes of liquid lore. we soon learn that most of mankind has traditionally drunk "healths," and that the idea of drinking a "toast" is peculiar to those who quaff and converse in English.

As a matter of sober fact, even the English drank nothing but healths until the latter part of the 17th Century. Prior to that time, a toast was only a slice of lightly browned bread which people ate for breakfast, just as they do today -- with the singular exception that a bit of toast was often floated in a tankard or bowl of warm spiced ale to provide a morsel of solid nourishment. In the earliest historical account of how the word "toast" came to be associated with the ritual of drinking to someone's health, Richard (The Spectator) Steele reported, in 1709, that the expression first came into vogue among the hard-drinking blue bloods of the Restoration, who were wont to resort to the city of Bath to soak up the fashionable mineral waters in an atmosphere of wine, women and whist. "It happened," as Steele explained in The Tatler, "that on a publick Day a celebrated Beauty of those Times was in the Cross Bath, and one of the Crowd of her Admirers took a Glass of the Water in which the Fair one stood, and drank her Health to the Company. There was in the Place a gay Fellow, half-fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore, Tho' he liked not the Liquor, he would have the Toast. He was opposed in his Resolution; yet this whim gave Foundation to the present Honor which is done to the Lady we mention in our Liquors, who has ever since been called a Toast."

According to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the "custom of drinking 'health' to the living is probably derived from the ancient religious rite of drinking to the gods and the dead. The Greeks and Romans at meals poured out libations to their gods, and at ceremonial banquets drank to them..." In distilling this information down into a couple of quick verbal jiggers, Britannica allows several essential facts to evaporate, however. In a libation, for example, a given quantity of liquor is poured out on the ground as a sacrifice to a deity, while in drinking to someone's health the liquor goes gliding down the drinker's own throat. The Greek and Roman custom of passing around a "cup to the good spirit," furthermore, is believed to have originated with the "cup of salvation" which was religiously quaffed by the ancient Hebrews, whose drinking vessels were often smashed on the ground to prevent their being defiled by secular use -- a practice which led to the traditional Jewish wedding custom of shattering the glass from which the bride and groom have drunk.

The custom of raising a glass aloft in honor of the person being toasted is also attributed to the early Greeks, who were wine-guzzling health addicts of heroic capacity. (continued on page 212) Short History of Toasts (continued from page 89)Their communal toasting goblets were usually of prodigious size, and were the ancient prototypes of the large trophy cups awarded to winners of moderen yacht races and other sporting events. "Nothing in Nature's sober found," the poet Anacreon sang, in expressing the Athenian world view, circa 500 B.C., "but an eternal Health goes round."

To the old Greek ritual of drinking to every god in the Parthenon, Roman revelers added a rousing "three times three" in honor of the Graces and Muses, and pledged their loyalty to Caesar by downing a cup for each letter in the emperor's name -- a stupefying custom which was also employed in toasting one another's mistresses. As Martial described it, "Six cups to Naevia's health go quickly round," and fair Justina must be honored with an additional seven.

One English historian maintains that it was the Roman conquerors who taught ancient Britons "to drink healths to the Emperor, and to toast the reigning belles with brimming bumpers." Actually, though, the Romans had very little to teach the booze-thirsty bar barians of the North, who had been belting down liquid tributes to gods, chieftains, kinsmen and chums since the prehistoric discovery that the fermentation of honeycombs in water would produce a kind of beer called "mead." The Norse Valhalla, for instance, was hardly more than a heavenly beer hall where the spirits of deserving heroes quaffed healths through all eternity, and one of the most ancient of all toasting terms -- "skoal," or skal -- survives from the grisly and forgotten age when Norse warriors drank victorious toasts from the skalle, or "skull," of a slain enemy. In like manner, the English word "health" stems from the Old Norse greeting Heill! which also gave us "hail," "heal," "hale" and "whole." From the Norsemen's Ves heill! or "Be thou well!" came the Anglo-Saxon toast, Wes hal! which the hale-and-hardy English eventually slurred into "wassail."

The festive custom of wassailing antedates Christmas by many centuries, however, and is believed to have evolved from the Northerners' midwinter fertility rites, in which bands of boozy celebrants trooped through the forests and made libations of ale, mead or hard cider to restore the dormant fertility of fruit trees. This quaint old pagan practice is said to be still observed in some tradition-rich rural areas of Britain, and was fetchingly described by The Gentlemen's Magazine as part of the Twelfth-night ceremonies in Devonshire, in 1791:

"On the Eve of the Epiphany, the farmer, attended by his workmen, with a large pitcher of cyder, goes to the orchard, and there, encircling one of the best-bearing trees, they drink a toast there several times."

Whether held on Twelfth-night, New Year's or Christmas Eve, the chief feature of the feast was the bowl of wassail, in which the ancient fruit-and-livestock theme was further evidenced by the addition of roasted crab apples to the brew, and the fact that the warm and comforting concoction was affectionately known as "lamb's wool." In a rhymed recipe for this traditional yuletide treat, the poet Herrick directed 17th Century wassailmen to "crown the bowl full with gentle lamb's wooll,"

Adde sugar, nutmeg and ginger,With store of ale too;And thus ye must doe,To make the wassaile a swinger.

Long before Herrick hipped to the ginger-and-apples bit, the pagan toasts of the North Europeans had been adapted to Christian devotions, and healths which were once drunk to mythical nature gods were now addressed to the Savior and all the saints and angels. Gallic healths to the Pope were drunk "to the good Father," or au bon Pére, which the English called drinking "a bumper," and the old wassailing songs set a joyous precedent for the first Christmas carols -- the earliest of which often imposed the obligation to drink or be damned.

Since no true Christian could refuse to drink to the saints, or the "Christ Mass" which was Christmas, toasting and wassailing soon made drunkenness as obligatory as it had ever been in the heathen days of yore and gore. As early as the Fourth Century, St. Augustine denounced the "filthy and unhappy custom of drinking healths," which was "but a ceremony and relic of Pagans." But the best vineyards and breweries in all Christendom flourished behind monastery walls, and many of the clergy were so habitually and publicly imbued with the blessings of fermentation, that in the Eighth Century St. Boniface felt compelled to bring the matter to the attention of Archbishop Cuthbert: "In your dioceses certain Bishops not only do not hinder drunkenness, but they themselves indulge in excess of drink, and force others to drink till they are intoxicated," Boniface complained. "This is most certainly a great crime for a servant of God to do or to have done..."

Distasteful as the idea of tippling monks and fuddled bishops may be to modern churchgoers, it should be recognized that the convivial health-drinking of the clergy brought a touch of civilizing ceremony to the secular drinking bouts of the Dark Ages. Prior to the Christian conversion of Scandinavia, for example, Viking freebooters had the nasty habit of inviting Britons to drink, only in order to cut their thoats when they tossed back their heads to drain the proffered beaker -- a savage bit of skàl duggery that led to the old English practice of "pledging the health" of a kinsman or friend, and standing guard while he drank. Bloody and murderous, too, were the quarrels that broke out among drinkers when one was accused of swigging more than his share from the communal bowl or cup. Under the influence of the clergy, drinkers were organized into fraternal guilds, where brotherhood and mutual aid were pledged from a large "loving cup" in which the portions were measured off by a set of metal pegs.

Though brawling and bloodshed decreased, it soon became apparent that the new societies merely ensured that members all had an equal chance to get thoroughly stoned, while the practice of "drinking to pegs" resulted in brotherly contests to see who could guzzle the most portions in honor of the patron saint, and take his fellows "down a peg" by quaffing a measure more. For this reason, toasting "between pegs" was condemned by the Council of Westminster in 1101, and again at the Lateran Council of Innocent III. But despite all decrees and injunctions, monks, monarchs and lushes of lowly station continued to invoke the names of saints, and do honor to things sacred, in order to guarantee that no toast would be refused. At the court of good King Wenceslaus, the toastmaster commanded all to drink "in the name of the blessed archangel St. Michael," and more than a century later, no less a protesting monk than Martin Luther cherished a pet drinking mug, "around which were three rings. The first," he said, "represented the Ten Commandments, the second the Apostles' Creed, and the third the Lord's Prayer." Luther, we are told, "was highly amused that he was able to drain the glass of wine through the Lord's Prayer, whereas his friend Agricola could not get beyond the Ten Commandments."

In France, the chugalugging churchmen of the 16th Century were ribaldly satirized by Rabelais, whose own literary toasts were robustly secular and brief: "Luck to you, comrade!" "Drink up, friends: your health, there!" "Hail to all tosspots! Pity the thirsty!"

England's good Queen Bess was no teetotaler, but the continual drinking of courtly toasts often left her counselors too befuddled to be entrusted with affairs of state, and prompted her to declare that she never fared worse than when her health was drunk.

Considering the intemperance of the period, literary skoalers may be moved to speculate whether Ben Jonson's classic toast To Celia owed its inspiration to the Muse of poetry or the morning-after shakes and megrims:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,And I will pledge with mine;Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I'll not look for wine...

If one can take the word of the English Puritans, neither Johnson's Celia nor any other city belle was likely to be satisfied with an exchange of intoxicating looks and saucy glances, however. In 17th Century London there was reputed to be a "multitude" of "sottish women," who would "quaff with the most riotous, and give pledge for pledge." Even more deplorable was the fact that in some parts of England young maidens became so depraved by the unbridled license of Maypole festivities as to "drink healths upon their knees." Kneeling toasts were "vile in men but abominable in women," the puritanical author of Funebria Florae fumed -- and, in this respect at least, his sentiments were seconded by that hard-drinking advocate of the eyeball highball, Ben Johnson himself.

Among university scholars, a fad for toasting women in "some nauseous decoction" paralleled our latter-day panty raids and goldfish swallowing. In describing the drinking custom of 17th Century Oxford, one disapproving clergyman tells of a student who drank his mistress' health in wine mixed with a large spoonful of soot. "His companion, determined not to be outdone, brought from his closet a phial of ink, which he drank, exclaiming, 'To triumph and Miss Molly!' " According to the same source, these "crack-brained young men also esteemed it a great privilege to get possession of a great beauty's shoe, in order that they might ladle wine out of a bowl down their throats with it, the while they drank to the 'lady of little worth' or the 'lightheeled mistress' who had been its former wearner."

It is mainly to antitoasting tracts, such as William Prynne's Health's Sicknesse and Gascoigne's Delicate Dyet for Daintie-mouthed Droonkards, that one must turn for information concerning the conspicuous cupmanship of the early Stuart era. For a detailed account of the manner in which a health was drunk in the days of the first King James, for instance, there is no better report than that of the pamphleteering poet Brathwaite, who bore the ironical nickname of "Drunken Barnabee": "He that beginnes the health hath his prescribed orders; first uncovering his head he takes a full cup in his hand, and setting his countenance with grave aspect, he craves an audience; silence being once obtained, he begins to breathe out the name peradventure of some honorable personage... and he that pledges must likewise off with his cap, kisse his fingers, and bow himself in sign of reverent acceptance. When the leader sees his follower thus prepared, he sups up his breath, turnes the bottom of his cup upward, and in ostentation of his dexteritie gives the cup a phillip to make it cry twange, and thus the first scene is acted."

Throughout the reigns of King James and his son, Charles I, drinking to the health of a king was a usual formality at tavern meetings between friends and at meals in humble cottages. But for all the toasts drunk to his health, Charles I fared far worse than Elizabeth. When, at last, the elegant Stuart lost his head to the ax of the Puritans, in 1649, the drinking of healths was forbidden by law, and the jolly wassail bowl was outlawed, together with all the other "heathenish" trappings of yuletide.

Though the celebration of Christmas was sanctimoniously avoided in Puritan New England, the "Saints" of Massachusetts displayed a most decided preference for beer over water, and were not above drinking a health whenever it suited their purpose. While excessive drinking was discouraged and punished, New England fanaticism was never as well organized as that of the puritanical Scots of Fife, who, in 1650, established a special morals squad "to take notice of all disorderly walkers...swearers, haunters of alehouses, especially at unreasonable hours and long sitters there and drinkers of healths."

Chief among the "long sitters" of London were those monarchists who had escaped the vindictiveness of Cromwell's Puritan government to gather in royalist taverns and drink subversive toasts to exiled Charles II. Eleven long years went down the hatch before Charles was restored to the throne in 1660, when an outbreak of riotous royalist health drinking caused the merry monarch to issue a troubled "Proclamation Against Prophaneness." Fun was fun, the far-from-prudish Charles acknowledged, but there was "a set of men of whom we have heard much, and are sufficiently ashamed, who spend their time in taverns, tippling houses, and debauches, giving no other evidence of affection for us but in drinking our health, and inveighing against all others who are not of their own dissolute temper."

Round-the-clock toasting and drunkenness, committed in the king's name, had already forced Louis XIV to suspend all "wine courtesies" at the French court. But Charles' proclamation seems to have been addressed solely to lowerclass tosspots, for no tavern or tippling house could boast a more dissolute group of health drinkers than the royal court of England. Palace gallants revived the old Roman custom of drinking a cup for each letter in a lady's name, and Charles himself was reported to have drunk a boozy rapprochement with his estranged brother, the Duke of York, upon his royal knees. After which, according to Samuel Pepys, the whole party "fell a-crying for joy, being all maudlin and kissing one another, the King the Duke of York, the Duke of York the King, and in such a maudlin pickle as never people were; and so passed the day."

The Stuart pickle was reportedly compounded when Charles stood to respond to a toast in the officers' mess of a Royal Navy vessel, and bumped his head on a low beam with such force that he immediately sank into his seat again -- a most painful and mortifying mishap that supposedly started a new tradition for drinking toasts while sitting down. But considering the quantities of ale, beer and wine consumed in drinking 17th Century toasts, sitting and kneeling may well have been more a matter of necessity than of choice or accident. At the wedding reception for Lady Ross, in 1693, "all the guests proceeded to the great hall, where a great cistern of sack posset was discovered, and at once began the drinking of healths, by old and young alike, at first in spoons, and afterward in silver cups." And when Charles' brother, the Duke of York, was proclaimed King James II, in 1685, his health was publicly drunk in glasses three feet long -- the so-called "yard of ale" which is still served in traditional trumpet-shaped glasses at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese tavern in London.

James II fared badly, too, despite the healths which were drunk in his name. Deposed after three turbulent years, he fled to France, and the throne fell to the Prince of Orange, who became William III and introduced the English to the potency and economy of Holland gin. In the restless and rowdy period that followed, Jacobites who favored the return of James drank seemingly loyal toasts "to the King" by placing a bowl of water on the table between them to signify that they were secretly drinking to the exiled James, the king "over the water." While England teetered on the brink of civil war, political "mug clubs" were formed where Jacobites and anti-Jacobites could drink their partisan toasts without fear of bloodshed or reprisal. When the parties later evolved into Tory and Whig, the mug clubs became the leading political and social groups in London. Easily the most illustrious was the famed Kit-cat Club, whose membership included such Whiggish wits and worthies as the Duke of Marlborough, Sir Robert Walpole, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Addison and Steele. At meetings of the Kit-cat Club healths were drunk to the reigning beauty, who was elected each year. "The Manner of her Inauguration is much like that of a Doge in Venice . . ." Steele reported in his Tatler article on toasts. "When she is regularly chosen, her Name is written with a Diamond on a Drinking-glass. The Hieroglyphick of the Diamond is to shew her that her Value is imaginary; and that of the Glass to acquaint her that her Condition is frail, and depends on the Hand which holds her." The Kit-cat Club, as one old rhyme alleged, took its name not from any "trim beaux,"

Gray statesmen or green witsBut from its pell-mell pack of toasts,To old Cats and young Kits.

In the early 18th Century, the loyal toasts of Englishmen, at home and abroad, were offered to the health of middle-aged Queen Anne. It was on the occasion of the queen's birthday in the year 1714 that Samuel Sewall, then justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, was roused from his fireside at the ungodly hour of nine P.M. to quell "the Disorders at the Tavern at the Southend." Arriving at the house in question with a constable and party of three, Sewall found "much Company" who "refus'd to go away." They said they were there "to drink the Queen's Health," he confided to his sympathetic diary, "and they had many other Healths to drink. Call'd for more Drink: drank to me, and I took notice of the Affront . . . Mr. John Netmaker drank the Queen's Health to me. I told him I drank none; upon that he ceas'd. Mr. Brinley put on his Hat to affront me. I made him take it off. I threaten'd to send some of them to prison; that did not move them. . . . Not having Pen and Ink, I went to take their Names with my Pencil, and not knowing how to Spell their Names, they themselves of their own accord writ them. Mr. Netmaker, reproaching the Province, said they had not made one good Law."

Mr. Netmaker and his health-quaffing cronies were sentenced to pay a fine of five shillings each -- a mild enough penalty by the older Puritan standards. But Samuel Sewall was still burdened by his self-confessed error in condemning the many innocent victims of the Salem witch trials in 1692. A man of disturbingly human contrasts, he was also the author of the first plea against Negro slavery to be published in the Colonies, and a determined wooer of comely widows. Though he refused to drink the health of Queen Anne, he often drank wine with Mrs. Denison, and exchanged amorous courtesies of the glass with Madam Winthrop: "She drank to me, I to her ...She had talk'd of Canary, her Kisses were to me better than the best Canary . . ."

Imported Canary wine was too highline for the purses of most Colonial Americans, who drank their toasts with a variety of homemade brews. There were hard cider and metheglin (made of honey, yeast and water), perry (made from pears) and peachy (made from peaches). Other alcoholic curiosities were made from leaves, bark, berries, beans, roots and cornstalks. In an old sing-along favorite, the courageous Col- onists proudly claimed:

Oh, we can make liquor to sweeten our lips

Of pumpkins, of parsnips, of walnut-tree chips.

Gourds and coconut shells supplemented bowls, beakers and tankards as basic equipment for the drinking of Colonial healths. But "there was no attempt made to give separate drinking cups of any kind to each individual at the table," Alice M. Earle, the author of Home Life in Colonial Days, noted at the close of the last century. "Even when tumbler-shaped glasses were seen in many houses... they were of communal size -- some held a gallon -- and all drank from the same glass. The great punch bowl, not a very handy vessel to handle when filled with punch, was passed up and down as freely as though it were a loving cup, and all drank from its brim..."

At Harvard and Yale this was the original college bowl game, later immortalized by a Dartmouth man in the Hanover Winter Song: "Ho, a song by the fire! (Pass the pipes, fill the bowl!) Ho, a song by the fire! With a Skoal..." Sarah Kemble Knight, who was said to be Benjamin Franklin's old schoolteacher, watched the communal cup go round a Yankee tavern board, and described the drinkers as "being tyed by the Lipps to a pewter engine." Her star pupil, the Sage of Philadelphia himself, referred to the glass-passing custom in an original Drinking Song dedicated to the proposition "That Virtue and Safety in Wine-bibbing's found,"

While all that drink Water deserve to be drown'd.

So for Safety and Honesty put the Glass round.

A few decades later, the American toast was not "Safety and Honesty" drunk in mellow wine, but "Liberty and property" drunk in the fiery New England rum which was the alcoholic embodiment of the Spirit of '76. As Catherine Drinker Bowen has pointed out in her study of John Adams and the American Revolution, "Liberty and property" was the password of the entire American rebellion. "Liberty and property were synonymous.... What a man owned was his, as his soul was his. No prince, no king, no parliament could take it from him without his consent..."

In virtually every small village the symbolic "liberty pole" was planted outside a tavern which served as headquarters for the Sons of Liberty, whose early toasts were a peculiar mixture of the loyal and the rebellious. When members of the Boston group met at Chase's Distillery in 1769, to celebrate the anniversary of Boston's protest to the Stamp Act, 45 toasts were drunk, commencing with "the King and Queen" and ending with the threat of "Strong halters, firm blocks and sharp axes to all such as deserve either!"

In the opinion of the majority, the man most deserving of sharp axes was none other than Governor Bernard, the king's representative in the Province of Massachusetts, who was credited with having introduced a toasting song which was a favorite with American Tories:

Here's a health to all those that we love,

Here's a health to all those that love us,

Here's a health to all those that love them that love those

That love those that love them that love us.

To the modern American drinker this insidious little tongue twister seems sufficient cause for rebellion in itself. In the light of such repeated provocations, we can only marvel at the restraint of those planter patriots who, upon the dissolution of the Virginia House of Burgesses by the crown, retired to the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg to drink loyal toasts to the king, the royal family, "The Farmer" and a "Speedy and Lasting Union between Great Britain and her Colonies." The bar tab, which came to 32 shillings 9 pence, was picked up by a committeeman who was understandably destined to become "first in the hearts of his countrymen" -- George Washington. "It was," according to his biographer, Frances Rufus Bellamy, "his first expenditure for liberty."

In 1777, when the embattled Americans were hoisting their mugs of rum grog with shouts of "Death to the tyrant!" and "Freedom forever!" Richard Brinsley Sheridan attended the London opening of his brilliant new comedy, The Rivals, and heard Sir Harry Bumper sing one of the merriest toasting songs which the wit of an Englishman had ever devised:

Here's to the maiden of bashful 15;

Here's to the widow of 50;

Here's to the flaunting extravagant quean,

And here's to the housewife that's thrifty.

Chorus: Let the toast pass --

Drink to the lass,

I'll warrent she'll prove an excuse for the glass.

Here's to the charmer whose dimples we prize;

Now to the maid who has none, sir;

Here's to the girl with a pair of blue eyes,

And here's to the nymph with but one, sir.

Whether slim or clumsy, white-bosomed or brown-skinned, any woman could, in short, be toasted with a bumper, and thus provide "an excuse for the glass." But in October 1781, a more momentous excuse was offered by the surrender of the British forces at Yorktown, which brought the American Revolution to a close. General Washington and Rochambeau, commander of the French allies, sat down to dinner with the defeated Lord Corn-wallis and his officers. Rochambeau raised his glass "To the United States!" Washington responded with a health "To the King of France!" Cornwallis, with the air of a man playing a verbal trump, pointedly proposed a toast "To the King!" "Of England!" Washington quickly qualified. "Confine him there and I'll drink him a full bumper!"

No event in American history has been celebrated by the drinking of quite so many toasts as the winning of the War for Independence. When Congress demobilized the Continental Army, Washington's triumphal journey into retirement was the occasion for a series of banquets at which the formal toasts numbered a symbolic 13. At Annapolis Washington added a 14th: "Sufficient Powers to Congress for general purposes!"

While Washington was being toasted as "the Man who Unites all Hearts" and "Columbia's Favorite Son," the members of a convivial London health club, called "The Anacreonitic Society," were meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern where they opened their meetings with raised glasses and the singing of their club song, To Anacreon in Heaven. The anthem toasted the memory of the Greek poet who had declared life to be an eternal round of healths. The melody, which every American would immediately recognize as that of The Star-Spangled Banner, was adapted to Yankee use as a tribute to Adams and Liberty, and was later used as the musical setting for the stirring stanzas written by Francis Scott Key.

Another 18th Century toasting song, Auld Lang Syne, was fated to become the midnight anthem of all Englishspeaking New Year's Eve celebrants. The melody was supposed to have been borrowed from the music of the Roman Catholic Church, and the words copied down by Robert Burns from the lips of an old Scottish singer. In the land of lively jigs and brimming jiggers, the mood of boozy nostalgia was not confined to one night of the year, however. Clannish quaffers were prepared to share "a cup of kindness" at any season, and have traditionally saluted each other with practical wishes for "Mair sense and mair silver!" "Health, wealth, wit and meal!" -- and that most canny of all alcoholic benedictions, "Lang may your lum reek [or "Long may your chimney smoke"] wi' ither folks' coal!" But, in justice to the Scots, a similar emphasis upon material well-being is to be found in other folk toasts, such as the Irish Gaelic Sheed Arth! ("May you always wear silk!").

In the opinion of the Reverend Richard Valpy French, Rector of Llanmartin and Wilcrick, who once gave a temperance lecture which was published in 1880 as the first and only history of toasting in the English language, the drinking of healths, "especially in Scotch society, was tyrannically enforced." In the early 1800s persons named in a toast were bound to acknowledge the honor "by placing the right hand on the heart, saying in a very distinct and audible voice, and with a smile of gratification on the countenance, 'Your good health,' then drinking off the glass of wine." At any well-run dinner party, the host was obliged to "drink the health of every one of the guests, who were obliged to follow suit, so that supposing 10 people to be present, no less than 90 healths would be drunk. The ladies participated in this part of the entertainment, and before they retired they had to take part in another species of drinking diversion, i.e., the rounds of toasts. This little game was played thus -- each lady present had to name an absent gentleman, and each gentleman an absent lady ... and the pair being thus matched, were toasted together amidst many jocular allusions to the fitness of the union." Of all such guzzling games, the Reverend French singles out the drinking of "sentiments" as the one which "filled Lord Cockburn with the greatest disgust." This was a kind of round robin in which each person was asked to contribute some pretty little platitude to which all could drink. Among the many "idiotic inanities" calculated to make Lord Cockburn queasy with revulsion were such genteel gems as "May the pleasures of the evening bear the reflections of the morning.... May the hand of charity wipe away the tear from the eye of sorrow."

Unlike Lord Cockburn and the abstemious Rector of Wilcrick, most Scots and Englishmen were quite amiably disposed to drink to any sentiment that did not dishonor their country's flag or cast doubt upon their mothers' virtue:

"Oaken ships, and British hands to man them!"

"Merry hearts to village maidens!"

"May the game laws be repealed!"

"May the village 'belle' never be too long in the clapper!"

"May the skin of your bum never cover a drum!"

"Lots of beef, oceans of beer, a pretty girl and a thousand a year!"

The last toast, with its heroic allusion to "oceans of beer," presumably dates from the passage of the Beer Bill of 1832, when legislation was introduced to induce the British workingman to kick the gin habit in favor of milder malt beverages. In the interest of national temperance, 30,000 beer shops were opened within a year, and Britons responded to the challenge by drinking more beer and gin, too. "Everybody is drunk," Sydney Smith reported. "Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state."

When young Victoria inherited the throne in 1837, her swacked and sprawling subjects enthusiastically toasted "The Queen, God bless her!" By 1845, a fad for adding shouts of "huzza" to every toast had become standard procedure. "Nine times nine cheers" were given for " 'Er Royal Majesty" and any deserving 'Arry, 'Erbert or Halbert -- a noisy ritual that eventually diminished into a restrained 20th Century murmur of "Cheers."

With or without huzzas, the practice of toasting had to be abolished, temperance forces were still insisting a generation later. "Would that the archbishops and bishops of the Church of England would cease to submit to these appendages at public breakfasts, luncheons and dinners," the Reverend French exclaimed from his temperance platform in 1880, and cited, by way of example, a newspaper account of an "educational dinner" at which "'The Royal Family' was drunk; 'Her Majesty's Ministers' were drunk; 'The Houses of Parliament' were drunk; 'The Universities of Scotland' were drunk; 'Popular Education in its extended sense' was drunk; 'The Clergy of Scotland of all Denominations' were drunk; 'The Parish Schoolmasters' were drunk; other parties not named were drunk; 'The Fine Arts' were drunk; 'The Press' was drunk ..."

An equally healthful state of affairs had long obtained in democratic America, where, for more than a century, "The President of the United States" was drunk; "The Members of both Houses of Congress" were drunk; "The American Farmer" and "The American Eagle" were drunk; "The Wives and Mothers of all Free Men" were drunk -- together with the governors, legislators, citizens and judiciary of all the several sovereign states. "Drink rum, drink rum, drink rum, by gum, with me," expressed the will of a free and thirsty people whose manifest destiny can be traced through the innumerable slogans and rallying cries which have served Americans as an excuse for a glass, a mug or a gallon jug: "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" "Fifty-four Forty or Fight!" "Remember the Alamo!" "Pike's Peak or Bust!" "The Union Forever!" "The Stars and the Bars!" "Remember the Maine!" "To hell with the Kaiser!" "Happy days are here again!" "Remember Pearl Harbor!" "Keep 'em flying!" "Get America moving again!"

In the days of "wooden ships and iron men," official toasts were in the patriotic vein of naval hero Stephen Decatur's "Our country: in her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be right; but our country, right or wrong!" But in grog shops along the water front, the old bosun's toast was more likely to be:

Here's to the ships of our Navy,And the ladies of our land,May the first be ever well rigged,And the latter ever well manned!

While a gentleman of the old South might propose a courtly toast "To the ladies," the Irish immigrant of the North was likely to be knocking back a crock of "blue ruin" with "Here's to the flea that jumped over me and bit the behind of me missus!" While literary and social lights of New York and Boston were toasting the delights of sherry with verses from Omar Khayyám, earthy Pennsylvania Dutchmen set the scene for a shot of schnapps with:

So drink ich, so stink ich,Drink ich net, so stink ich doch,So ist besser gedrinka und gestunka,Os net gedrunka, und doch gestunka!

Which may be translated as: "If I drink, I stink. If I don't drink, I stink anyway. So it's better to drink and stink, than to not drink and stink anyway!" Though the jargon was mostly German, the reasoning was 100-proof American. In the great age of folk toasting that preceded Prohibition, Americans drank to just about every sentiment conceivable, and in a wide range of moods. Some toasts were a strange blend of friendliness and hostility:

Here's a toast for you and me:And may we never disagree;But, if we do, then to hell with you.So here's to me!

Some expressed a touching fondness for a few close friends and cherished possessions:

Hail, good old hat, my companion devoted!

Hail, good old shoes, blest deliverers from pain!

Hail, good old glass, my unfailing inspirer!

Hail, good old friends, ne'er appealed to in vain!

Others were frankly Oedipal:

Here's to the happiest days of my life,

Spent in the arms of another man's wife

-- My mother!

Some were dependent rather than devoted, and raised the thorny question, "Is there booze after death?":

Here's to you and you and you! If I should die and go to Heaven, and not find you,

I would turn around and go to hell, Just to be with you and you and you!

Others were defiantly fatalistic:

Here's to hell! May the stay there Be as much fun as the way there!

There were toasts for tightwads:

Lift 'em high and drain em dry To the guy who says, "My turn to buy!"

There were toasts for truculent underachievers:

Here's to the men who lose!

It is the vanquished's praises that I sing,

And this is the toast I choose:

"A hard-fought failure is a noble thing!"

And there was even a short production number for whimsical nature lovers:

A wee little dog passed a wee little tree.

Said the wee little tree, "Won't you have one on me?"

"No," said the little dog, no bigger than a mouse.

"I just had one on the house."

But the favorite toast was still to a woman. To her face, the smooth-toasting ladies' man of the Eighties and Nineties might raise his glass and murmur, "I have known many, liked a few, loved but one, darling -- here's to you!" But in the all-male atmosphere of the corner saloon, the same health-hip Lothario could earn comradely guffaws and envious glances with:

Here's to you, and here's to me,

Here's to the girl with the dimpled knee.

Here's to the boy who fastened her garter;

It wasn't much -- but a darned good starter!

Another swain, either less fortunate or more truthful, might be moved to sadly declare:

Here's to dear Alice, so sweet and good.

God made Alice -- I wish I could!

Which, in turn, might inspire a recitation of:

Here's to the girl who lives on the hill.

She won't, but her sister will.

Here's to her sister!

In the highly agitated opinion of one temperance poet of the early 20th Century, anybody's sister would, if she were properly plied with passionate toasts. "Oh, lovely maids!" he expostulated:

Never for all Pactolus' wealth,In wine let lover drink your health!Beware the traitor who shall dare For you the cursed draught prepare...

As the tempo of American drinking began to swing from a wine-and-beery waltz time to a jazzy cocktail quickstep, male toasters contributed to the growing emancipation of women by concocting draughts that would liberate even the most fettered female libido, and boy-girl toasts became more outspokenly sexual. Removing the rakish overseas cap which was part of his World War I uniform, the citizen soldier toasted his sweetheart of the week with a peppy switch on a sentiment that had once made Lord Cockburn limp with nausea:

Here's to the wings of love -- May they never moult a feather,Till my big boots and your little shoesAre under the bed together!

Whether she giggled or silently raised her glass to lips that shaped a smile of promise, the soldier's sweetie might complete her patriotic tour of duty with the cordial cuteness of:

Here's to the night I met you.

If I hadn't met you, I wouldn't have let you.

Now that I've let you, I'm glad that I met you.

And I'll let you again, I bet you!

On leave in Paris, doughboys found that French mesdemoiselles had a rhymed health hint to convey the same hospitable idea:

Je vous baissez, je vous amour.

Si voulez vous, je vous encore.

Which few members of the Signal Corps needed to have decoded as, "I kiss you, I love you. If you wish, I'll do it again." The French toast, Yanks soon learned, was not only A votre santé! or "To your health!" but A vos amours! -- "To your loves!" -- with a regard for the plural that brought French grammar into complete agreement with the facts of French life. "Here's to the girl who gives and forgives and never sells!" a Gallic grenadier would thunder, with the aid of English subtitles. "Here's to the man who gets and forgets and never tells!" A nos femmes, à nos chevaux et à ceux qui les montent! the cavalryman could be heard to reply: "To our women, our horses and the men who ride them!"

Italian infantrymen toasted and trudged to the tune of Viva, viva, viva l'amor...Viva la compagnia! British tommies of the Middlesex Regiment drank "Here's to the Middlesex! Here's to the fair sex! Here's to the middle of the fair sex!" Battalions who fought their way through Flanders found the friendly Flemings eager to drink Dat we het nog lang mogen mogen! -- "That we may still like it for a long time!" And troops who went the whole route into Germany found that Prosit! was prosaic compared to the boy-girl Brüderschaft toast, in which everlasting "brotherhood" was drunk by linking one's drinking arm through that of a frolicsome Fraulein for a face-to-face rendition of:

Trink, trink, Brüderlein, trink;Geh' nicht alleine nach Haus!

Meide den Kummer und meide denSchmerz,

Dann ist das Leben ein Scherz!

This was followed by a most unbrotherly kiss, and repeated until both parties were higher than a Gemütlichkeit: "Drink, drink, brother dear, drink; do not go home alone! Avoid sorrow and pain, and all your life will be fun."

Willst du Bier, Komm zu mir! -- "If you want beer, you must come here!" -- was not the slogan of the American Anti-Saloon League, however. When American veterans returned home, they barely had time to say "Here's mud in your eye!" before Prohibition was upon them, and American toasting was on its way to becoming a lost art. Raw bootleg booze and the quick-shot speak-easy atmosphere did not lend themselves to the savoring of either sauce or sentiment.

I'm tired of drinking toasts for eachlittle shot of gin,

Let's toss out all the hooey, and tossthe alky in!

Such were the jingled but unpoetic views of most speak-easy patrons, whose desire for the forbidden delights of booze often exceeded that for the pleasures of the boudoir:

When I want it, I want it awfulbad.

When I don't get it, it makes meawful mad.

When I do get it, it makes me, oh,so frisky --

Don't get me wrong, I mean a shotof whiskey!

Though women were much more available than good Scotch, sex was not entirely overlooked. But the excuse for a fast blast of hooch was less likely to be a woman than it was the act of intercourse itself:

Here's to it, and to it again!

If you get to it and don't do it,You may never get to it to do it again!

Prohibition was still in full force when a fad for things collegiate put drinkers of all ages into raccoon coats, and hip flaskers who had flunked out of high school lifted their steins and highball glasses "to dear old Maine" at the soulfully crooned behest of an Ivy League-type bandleader named Rudy Vallee. The University of Maine became the alcoholic alma mater of the masses and the classes, along with such great toasting institutions as Georgia Tech, whose famous Rambling Wreck song gave rah-rah encouragement to thousands of unmatriculated rummies:

I'd drink to ev'ry fellow who comesfrom far and near;

I'm a rambling wreck from GeorgiaTech and a hell of an engineer!

Then as now, Joe College was also one hell of a drinker, and fraternity brothers made a ritual of singing "Here's to Joe, he's true blue. He's a drunkard, through and through! Drink it down, chugalug, chugalug," until Joe had drained his glass, stein or pitcher. On the eve of the 1929 stock-market crash, affluent frosh were offering humorous healths "To dad -- the kin you love to touch!" But with the onset of the Depression, unemployed alumni and undergraduates on short allowances were seldom in the mood for anything more spirited than "Here's how" or "Down the hatch." Repeal of the 18th Amendment brought back legal beer and bonded whiskey, but no event in the past 30 years has managed to inspire a renaissance in American toasting.

A similar decline in toasting is said to have taken place in Japan, where ornate feudal healths have been streamlined down into something that sounds like "Can pay!" and suave sake sippers salute each other with sentiments like "I think you are getting along very well!" and "You seem to have put on weight, haven't you?"

Translated to these shores, such highly provocative healths could only lead to misunderstandings and hasten a return to Prohibition. In a fluid society, such as our own, the interested health enthusiast would do better to experiment with toasts to blondes, brunettes, redheads, Republicans, Democrats, repeal of the income-tax laws, planned parenthood for Belgian rabbits -- or anything else that strikes his fancy. But it would seem likely that mass enthusiasm for toasting could be aroused most easily by drinking to the joys of drinking itself. Other cultures have long since recognized that booze is, after all, the best excuse for raising a glass that man has ever devised. Hence, the Russians have traditionally promoted peaceful coexistence among themselves with "Drink until green imps appear!" and the Germans with "Drink until your nose shines red as a carbuncle, that it may be your light in this life's darkness!"

"Hurray for enjoyment, hurray for fun! We're going home drunk!" is a year-round Portuguese toast which most Americans would openly endorse only at yuletide -- the one season of the year when we abandon our usual mumbled monosyllables for the exuberant eloquence of "Merry Christmas!" and "Happy New Year!" Though unsuitable for use in August, and inappropriate for weddings and bar mizvahs, "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" are undoubtedly the two jolliest toasts we have, and can hold their own with such exotic seasonal toasts as the French Joyeux Noel! the Spanish ¡Feliz Navi-dad! and the Italian Buone Natale!

Depending on where one spends the holidays, the Christmas toast may be Gledelig Jul! (Norwegian), Vroolijk Kerfeest! (Dutch), Weselych Swait! (Polish) or Mele Kalikimaka! (Hawaiian).

A Welshman may say:

Oes o lwydd gwir sylweddol -- agaffo

'N deg effaith hanfodol --

A Gwynfa 'n ei ran, ar ol,

Yn gu haddef dragwyddol!

He's just recited a toast to your earthly success, and offering the wish that Paradise may be your everlasting home.

Those who are not conversant in Welsh may make a reasonably appropriate reply by repeating the Albanian for "May you be happy too!" -- Gëzuar gofsh!

Should he counter with "Brromp!" don't put him down for "Swine drunke." It only means that he's challenging you to a friendly drink in your adopted tongue.

Clink your glass against his with a smart twange, bow three times, kiss your fingers, and reply with a resonant "Brromp pach!" -- "I accept your challenge!"