‘The dinner was a frolic of seven young men, who bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense; one article was a tart made of duke cherries, from a hothouse; and another, that they tasted but one glass out of each bottle of Champagne. The bill of fare has got into print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another earthquake.’[330]
The Earl of March, afterwards ‘Old Q,’ in a letter to Walpole’s friend, George Selwyn, in November 1766, writes: ‘I have not yet received some Champaign that Monsieur de Prissieux has sent me.’[331] And we find Horace Walpole’s fair foe, that eighteenth-century exemplar of strong-minded womanhood, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, whose letters indicate a penchant for Burgundy, acknowledging in verse the exhilarating effects of Champagne. Of the beaux of 1721 she says that
‘They sigh, not from the heart but from the brain,
Vapours of vanity and strong Champagne.’[332]
Better known by far are her oft-quoted lines,
‘But when the long hours of the public are past,
And we meet with Champagne and a chicken at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear,
Be banished afar both discretion and fear,’[333]