Drinke and vvelcome: or The famous historie of the most part of drinks, in use now in the kingdomes of Great Brittaine and Ireland with an especiall declaration of the potency, vertue, and operation of our English ale. With a description of all sorts of waters, from the ocean sea, to the teares of a woman. As also, the causes of all sorts of weather, faire or foule ... Compiled first in the high Dutch tongue, by the painefull and industrious Huldricke Van Speagle, a grammaticall brewer of Lubeck, and now most learnedly enlarged, amplified, and translated into English prose and verse. By Iohn Taylor.

Mead or Meath.

FOr Meade or Meath (as some will have it) there are diverse un∣warrantable Authors that would wrest the originall and deri∣vation of the name from Medusa, the inchantresse, some there are that the crewell Media was the inventor of it: but Padesh shellum Shagh, a learned Gimnosophist (whose opinion I most leaue unto) in his ninth booke of Hidromancy, faith, that it was a drinke in use and potable by the Medes and Persians in the first erection of that Monarchy (from whence most significantly it hath the name) and that a Brittish Lord, a favourite of a Soldan there, first brought it to these parts, the Receipt being freely bestowed upon him, for his especiall service; in the beliefe of all which, I must crave pardon, that I am not guilty, but I rather thinke it as an abstract from the former, however it hath some severall vertues, but in regard of the cheapnesse it is now growne contemptible, being altogether ecclipsed by the vertue of Metheglin.