THE PRINCE REGENT
(After Gilray).
His sometime model and subsequent victim, poor Brummell, is said to have put the wine to a still more ignoble use. One day a youthful beau approached the great master in the arts of dress and deportment, and said, ‘Permit me to ask you where you get your blacking?’ ‘Ah,’ replied Brummell, gazing complacently at his boots, ‘my blacking positively ruins me. I will tell you in confidence it is made with the finest Champagne.’[360] Probably the great dandy was merely quizzing his interlocutor, though such an act of extravagance would have been a pull on even the longest purse in those days, ‘your bottle of Champagne in the year 1814 costing you a guinea.’[361]
As to the Prince Regent’s brothers, we know that the Duke of York was such a powerful toper, that ‘six bottles of Claret after dinner scarce made a perceptible change in his countenance,’[362] and remember the Duke of Clarence making his appearance at the table of the Royal household at Windsor, and getting so helplessly drunk on Champagne as to be utterly incapable of keeping his promise to open the ball that evening with his sister Mary.[363] Two prominent orators of that day are credited with mots upon Champagne. Curran said, apropos of the rapid but transient intoxication produced by this wine, that ‘Champagne made a runaway rap at a man’s head;’ while Canning maintained that any man who said he really liked dry Champagne simply lied.
After Waterloo, although a few gourmets continued to prefer the still wine, sparkling Champagne became the almost universally accepted variety. Nevertheless, Henderson, while noting that ‘by Champagne wine is usually understood a sparkling or frothy liquor,’ gives the foremost place to the wine of Sillery, which, he remarks, ‘has always been in much request in England, probably on account of its superior strength and durable quality.’ He extols the Ay wine as ‘an exquisite liquor, lighter and sweeter than the Sillery, and accompanied by a delicate flavour and aroma somewhat analogous to that of the pine-apple.’[364]
The poets of the first half of the present century have hardly done justice to Champagne. Tom Moore, the most Anacreontic of them all, although ready, like his Grecian prototype, to ‘pledge the universe in wine,’ the merits of which he was continually chanting in the abstract, has seldom been so invidious as to particularise any especial vintage. Champagne, the wine of all others best fitted to inspire his bright and sparkling lyrics, has received but scant attention in his earlier productions. Bob Fudge, writing from Paris in 1818, is made to speak approvingly of Beaune and Chambertin, but only mentions Champagne as a vehicle in which to sauter kidneys;[365] and in the Sceptic it is simply brought in to point a moral respecting the senses:
‘Habit so mars them, that the Russian swain
Will sigh for train-oil while he sips Champagne.’[366]
In two instances only the poet who sang in such lively numbers of woman and wine pointedly refers to the vintage of the Champagne. One is when he says:
‘If ever you’ve seen a party
Relieved from the presence of Ned,