Carouse the hunter’s hoop.—­“Carouse” has been already explained:  the hunter’s hoop alludes to the custom of hoops being marked on a drinking-pot, by which every man was to measure his draught.  Shakspeare makes the Jacobin Jack Cade, among his furious reformations, promise his friends that “there shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it a felony to drink small beer.”  I have elsewhere observed that our modern Bacchanalians, whose feats are recorded by the bottle, and who insist on an equality in their rival combats, may discover some ingenuity in that invention among our ancestors of their peg-tankards, of which a few may yet occasionally be found in Derbyshire;[161] the invention of an age less refined than the present, when we have heard of globular glasses and bottles, which by their shape cannot stand, but roll about the table; thus compelling the unfortunate Bacchanalian to drain the last drop, or expose his recreant sobriety.

We must have recourse again to our old friend Tom Nash, who acquaints us with some of “the general rules and inventions for drinking, as good as printed precepts or statutes by act of parliament, that go from drunkard to drunkard; as, still to keep your first man; not to leave any flocks in the bottom of the cup; to knock the glass on your thumb when you have done; to have some shoeing-horn to pull on your wine, as a rasher on the coals or a red-herring.”

Shoeing-horns, sometimes called gloves, are also described by Bishop Hall in his “Mundus alter et idem.”  “Then, sir, comes me up a service of shoeing-horns of all sorts; salt cakes, red-herrings, anchovies, and gammon of bacon, and abundance of such pullers-on.”

That famous surfeit of Rhenish and pickled herrings, which banquet proved so fatal to Robert Green, a congenial wit and associate of our Nash, was occasioned by these shoeing-horns.

Massinger has given a curious list of “a service of shoeing-horns.”

                                 ——­I usher
    Such an unexpected dainty bit for breakfast
    As never yet I cook’d; ’tis not Botargo,
    Fried frogs, potatoes marrow’d, cavear,
    Carps’ tongues, the pith of an English chine of beef,
    Nor our Italian delicate, oil’d mushrooms,
    And yet a drawer-on too;[162] and if you show not
    An appetite, and a strong one, I’ll not say
    To eat it, but devour it, without grace too,
    (For it will not stay a preface) I am shamed,
    And all my past provocatives will be jeer’d at,
                           MASSINGER, The Guardian, A. ii.  S. 3.

To knock the glass on the thumb, was to show they had performed their duty.  Barnaby Rich describes this custom:  after having drank, the president “turned the bottom of the cup upward, and in ostentation of his dexterity, gave it a fillip, to make it cry ting.”