‘A Walking Swill Tub’
DOD, John, attributed.
A Sermon on Malt. [S.l., s.n., c. 1840]. [c. 1840].
Broadside (c. 217 x 135 mm), the beginning of the text arranged to spell the word ‘malt’, 59 lines of text within quadruple frame of type ornaments; very good; laid down on later paper.
A seemingly unrecorded printing of the famous sermon against student drunkenness attributed to the Puritan divine John Dod (1550–1645), the word ‘malt’ in the title formed from the opening of the text: ‘Mr. Dodd was a Gentleman lived within a few miles of Cambridge and had been preaching against drunkenness for some time, this affronted some of the Cambridge Scholars …’
‘Dod is the reputed author of the famous Sermon on Malt. According to the edition of 1777 … he had preached strongly at Cambridge against the drinking indulged in by the students, and had greatly angered them. One day some of them met “Father Dod,” as he was called, passing through a wood, seized him, and set him in a hollow tree, declaring that he should not be released until he had preached a sermon on a text of their choosing. They gave him the word “malt” for a text, and on this he preached’ (DNB).
The letters of the word ‘malt’ are cleverly employed throughout, e.g. drunkenness leads to Mischief & murder, Adultery, Loseness of life, and Treason. A drunkard, the sermon concludes, is ‘a walking swill tub – the picture of a beast – and the monster of a man’.
The Newberry Library has a similar sounding broadside, somewhat larger, printed by T. Willey of the Temperance Press in Cheltenham in 1842.