I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.

The speaker comically exaggerates a life sustained entirely by ale—eating it, drinking it, even “sleeping upon” it—to signal both poverty and dissipation. The humor depends on hyperbole and on treating ale as a universal necessity, a stand‑in for food, comfort, and bed. In Farquhar’s comic world, such lines often mark a character as roguish, improvident, and socially marginal, while also satirizing the period’s hard-drinking masculine culture. The phrasing (“I have eat my ale”) mimics colloquial or unpolished speech, reinforcing the character’s low status and turning deprivation into bravado.