Stole from her consort the pernicious glass.
As glorious as the British Queen renown’d,
Who suck’d the poison from her husband’s wound.”
Manners and morals generally go hand in hand; but those of the ladies satirized by Young were not so bad as those of the French Princesses of a few years before, when they and Duchesses were so addicted to drinking, that no one thought it a vice, since royalty and aristocracy practised it. The Dauphine of Burgundy is indeed praised by her biographers as not drinking to any great excess during the three last years of her life. But this was exceptional. The Duchess of Bourbon and her daughters drank like dragoons; but the latter were unruly in their cups, whereas the old lady carried her liquor discreetly. Henrietta, Madame de Montespan, and the Princess di Monaco, were all addicted, more or less, to tippling. The Duchess de Bourbon and Her Grace of Chartres added smoking to their other boon qualities; and the Dauphin once surprised them with pipes which had been cullotés for them by common soldiers of the Swiss Guard! In France, devotion even was made a means towards drunkenness. Bungener tells us, in his “Trois Sermons sous Louis XV.,” that Monsieur Basquiat de la House owned a small estate in Gascony, which produced a wine which no one would buy. Being at Rome, as Secretary of an Embassy, he procured a body from the catacombs, which he christened by the name of a saint venerated in his part of the country. The people received it with great pomp. A fête was appointed by the Pope, a fair by the Government, and the wine was sold by hogsheads! It was a wine as thin as the beverage which Mr. Chute lived on when he had the gout, at which time, says Walpole, “he keeps himself very low, and lives upon very thin ink.”
There was a good deal of latitude of observation and conversation at the dinner-tables of the last century; and the letter-writer I have just cited affords us ample evidence of the fact. John Stanhope, of the Admiralty, he informs us, “was sitting by an old Mr. Curzon, a nasty wretch, and very covetous; his nose wanted blowing, and continued to want it; at last Mr. Stanhope, with the greatest good breeding, said, ‘Indeed, Sir, if you don’t wipe your nose, you will lose that drop.’”
A hundred years ago, Walpole remarked that Methodism, drinking, and gambling were all on the increase. Of the first he sneeringly says, “It increases as fast as any religious nonsense did.” Of the second he remarks, “Drinking is at the highest wine-mark;” and he speaks of the third as being so violent, that “at the last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both gaming and drinking, a bank bill was thrown down, and, nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a man who was standing by!”
There was a love of good eating, as well as of deep drinking, even among the upper classes of the last century. What a picture of a Duchess is that of her Grace of Queensberry, posting down to Parson’s Green, to tell Lady Sophia Thomas “something of importance;” namely, “Take a couple of beefsteaks, clap them together as if they were for a dumpling, and eat them with pepper and salt: it is the best thing you ever tasted! I could not help coming to tell you this;”—and then she drove back to town. And what a picture of a Magistrate is that of Fielding, seated at supper with a blind man, a Drury-Lane Chloris, and three Irishmen, all eating cold mutton and ham from one dish, on a very dirty cloth, and “his worship” refusing to rise to attend to the administration of Justices’ justice! It is but fair, however, to Fielding to add, that he might have had better fare had he been more oppressive touching fees. And, besides, great dignitaries set him but an indifferent example. Gray, speaking of the Duke of Newcastle’s installation at Oxford, remarks, that “every one was very gay and very busy in the morning, and very owlish and very tipsy at night. I make no exceptions, from the Chancellor to Blewcoat.” Lord Pembroke, truly, was temperate enough to live upon vegetables; but the diet did not improve either his temper or his morals. Ladies—and they were not over delicate a century ago—as much dreaded sitting near him at dinner, as their daughters and grand-daughters dreaded to be near the late Duke of Cumberland, who was pretty sure to say something in the course of dinner expressly to embarrass them. The vegetarian Lord Pomfret was so blasphemous at tennis, that the Primate of Ireland, Dr. George Stone, was compelled to leave off playing with him. For Primates handled the rackets then, as Pope and Cardinals do now the cue. Pio Nono and the expertest of the Sacred College play la poule at billiards, after dinner, with the view of keeping down the good Pontiff’s obesity. This is almost as curious a trait as that of Taafe, the Irishman, who, conceiving himself to have been insulted at a dinner, and not being then able, as a Roman Catholic, to wear a sword, changed his religion, and ran his adversary through the body. The confusion of ideas which prompted a man to follow a particular faith, in order that he might commit murder, was something like that which influenced the poor woman who, suddenly becoming pious, after hearing a sermon from Rowland Hill, went to a book-stall, and stole a Bible.
I have noticed the love of good eating, and the coarseness connected with it. There was also a coarse economy attendant on it. The Duchess of Devonshire would call out to the Duke, when both were presiding at supper after one of their assemblies, “Good God, Duke! don’t cut the ham; nobody will eat any;” and then she would relate the circumstances of her private ménage to her neighbour: “When there’s only my Lord and I, besides a pudding, we have always a dish of roast,”—no very dainty fare for a ducal pair. Indeed, there was much want of daintiness, and of dignity, too, in many of those with whom both might have been looked for as a possession. Lord Coventry chased his Lady round the dinner-table, and scrubbed the paint off her cheeks with a napkin. The Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were more contemptible in their pomposity than their Graces of Devonshire were in their plainness. At their own house they walked in to dinner before their company, sat together at the upper end of their own table, ate together off one plate, and drank to nobody beneath the rank of Earl. It was, indeed, a wonder that they could get any one of any rank to dine with them at all. But, in point of dinners, people are not “nice” even now. Dukes very recently dined with a railway potentate, in hopes of profiting by the condescension; and Duchesses heard, without a smile, that potentate’s lady superbly dismiss them with an “au reservoir!”—an expression, by the way, which is refined, when compared with that taught by our nobility, a hundred years ago, to the rich Bohemian Countess Chamfelt; namely, “D—n you!” and, “Kiss me!” but it was apologetically said of her, that she never used the former but upon the miscarriage of the latter. This was at a time when vast assemblies were followed by vast suppers, vast suppers by vast drinking, and when nymphs and swains reached home at dawn with wigs, like Ranger’s in the comedy, vastly battered, and not very fit to be seen.
Pope, in the last century, moralized, with effect, on the deaths of the dissolute Buckingham and the avaricious Cutler; and the avarice of Sir John was perhaps more detestable than any extravagance that is satirized by Pope, or witticized by Walpole. But Sir John Cutler was ingenious in his thrift. This rich miser ordinarily travelled on horseback and alone, in order to avoid expense. On reaching his inn at night, he feigned indisposition, as an excuse for not taking supper. He would simply order the hostler to bring a little straw to his room, to put in his boots. He then had his bed warmed, and got into it, but only to get out of it again as soon as the servant had left the room. Then, with the straw in his boots and the candle at his bed-side, he kindled a little fire, at which he toasted a herring which he drew from his pocket. This, with a bit of bread which he carried with him, and a little water from the jug, enabled the lord of countless thousands to sup at a very moderate cost.
Well, this sordidness was less culpable perhaps than slightly overstepping income by giving assemblies and suppers. At the latter there was, at least, wit, and as much of it as was ever to be found at Madame du Deffand’s, where, by the way, the people did not sup. “Last night, at my Lady Hervey’s,” says Walpole, “Mrs. Dives was expressing great panic about the French,” who were said to be preparing to invade England. “My Lady Rochford, looking down on her fan, said, with great softness, ‘I don’t know; I don’t think the French are a sort of people that women need be afraid of.’” This was more commendable wit than that of Madame du Deffand herself, who, as I have previously remarked, made a whole assembly laugh, at Madame de Marchais’, when her old lover was known to be dying, by saying as she entered, “He is gone; and wasn’t it lucky? He died at six, or I could not possibly have shown myself here to-night.”