* * * * *
Though ominous signs of the approaching storm might already be seen, the noble and wealthy wasted their substance in the usual round of riotous living. It may be well to glance at two of the typical vices of the age, drinking and gambling, of course in those circles alone where they are deemed interesting, for thence only do records reach us.
Drinking did not count as a vice, it was a cherished custom. The depths of the potations after dinner, and on suitable occasions during the day, had always been a feature of English life. Shakespeare seems to aim these well-known lines at the English rather than the Danes:
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition.[22]
Certainly in the eighteenth century drinking came to be in a sense a flying buttress of the national fabric. The champions of our “mercantile system” brought about the signature of the Methuen Treaty of 1703 with Portugal, in order to favour trade with that harmless little land at the expense of that with our “natural enemy,” France. Hostility to the French being the first of political maxims, good citizens thought it more patriotic to became intoxicated on port wine than to remain sober on French claret. Though we may not endorse Adam Smith’s hopeful prediction that the abolition of all duties on wine would have furthered the cause of temperance, yet we may agree that the drunkenness of the age was partly due to “the sneaking arts of underling tradesmen”—when “erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire.” Equally noteworthy is his verdict that drunkenness was not limited to people of fashion, and that “a gentleman drunk with ale has scarce ever been seen among us.”[23]
The habit of tippling, which even the moralist Johnson (aet. 70) said might “be practised with great prudence,” was everywhere dominant. The thinness and unpracticality of the studies at the old universities were relieved by the depth and seriousness of the potations. The phrase, “a port wine Fellow,” lingered to the close of the nineteenth century as a reminiscence of the crusted veterans of a bygone age, whose talk mellowed at the second bottle, and became drivel only at the fourth. Lord Eldon relates how a reverend Silenus, a Doctor of Divinity of Oxford, was once discovered in the small hours feeling his way homewards by the delusive help of the railings encircling the Radcliffe Library, and making lay remarks as to the unwonted length of the journey.[24] Where doctors led the way, undergraduates bettered the example; and the customs of Cambridge, as well as the advice of physicians, served to ingrain in Pitt that love of port wine which helped to shorten his life.
But the Universities only reflected the customs of an age when “drunk as a lord” had become a phrase. In fashionable society it was usual to set about tippling in a methodical way. Sometimes, at the different stages of the progress, travellers’ impressions were recorded in a quaintly introspective manner. Rigby, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, when jocularly asked at dinner by the Prince of Wales to advise him about his marriage, made the witty and wise reply: “Faith, your Royal Highness, I am not drunk enough yet to give advice to a Prince of Wales about marrying.”[25] The saying recalls to mind the unofficial habit of training and selecting diplomatists and ambassadors, namely, to ply the aspirants hard and then notice who divulged fewest secrets when under the table.