‘Jack Wildish sent for a dozen more Champaign, and a brace of such girls as we should have made honourable love to in any other place.’[276]
With such manners and customs can we wonder at one gentleman complaining how another
‘came where I was last night roaring drunk; swore—d—him!—he had been with my Lord Such-a-one, and had swallowed three quarts of Champaign for his share;’[277]
or have any call to feel surprised that such boon companions should
‘come, as the sparks do, to a playhouse too full of Champaign, venting very much noise and very little wit’?[278]
Champagne remains ignored in such books as the Mystery of Vintners;[279] but although technical works may be silent, the poets vie with the dramatists in extolling its exhilarating effects—effects surely perceptible in the witty, careless, graceful verse with which the epoch abounds. John Oldham—who, after passing his early years as a schoolmaster, was lured into becoming, in the words of his biographer, ‘at once a votary of Bacchus and Venus’ by the patronage of Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley in 1681, and who realised the fable of the pot of brass and the pot of earthenware by dying from the effects of the company he kept two years later—has given a list of the wines in vogue in his day:
‘Let wealthy merchants, when they dine,
Run o’er their witty names of wine:
Their chests of Florence and their Mont Alchine,