On the other hand his satirists accused him of excess. One of them says, ‘He was heard to make some self-denying promises in prayer, that, for the time to come, he would stint himself to two or three bottles in an evening.’[221] Again, the Archbishop of Cashel seems to have known his weak point. In a letter, inviting him on a visit, and giving him minute instructions as to the route, he baits him by the intelligence that he would pass a parson’s cabin where was a private cellar of which the parson kept the key, in which was always a hogshead of the best wine that could be got, in bottles well-corked, upon their side.[222]
His poems often betrayed the flavour of the bottle. Witness his Country Quarter Sessions, which begins:—
Three or four parsons full of October,
Three or four squires between drunk and sober.
Again, in his Baucis and Philemon; Goody Baucis in bestirring herself to provide the hermit’s hospitality—
Then stepp’d aside to fetch ‘em drink,
Fill’d a large jug up to the brink,
And saw it fairly twice go round.
Somerville, the author of The Chase, was no doubt fond of the bottle, as we see very clearly from the letter of his friend Shenstone after his death:—
Our old friend Somerville is dead! I did not imagine I could have been so sorry as I find myself on this occasion.—Sublatum quærimus. I can now excuse all his foibles; impute them to age, and to distress of circumstances: the last of these considerations wrings my very soul to think on. For a man of high spirit, conscious of having (at least in one production) generally pleased the world, to be plagued and threatened by wretches that are low in every sense; to be forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind, is a misery.
James Quin the tragedian was a bon vivant. After being engaged at Drury Lane Theatre, a tavern brawl involved him in law proceedings, and he was obliged for a time to leave the country. His epitaph, by Garrick, depicts the man:—
A plague on Egypt’s arts! I say;
Embalm the dead, on senseless clay
Rich wines and spices waste!
Like sturgeon, or like brawn, shall I,
Bound in a precious pickle, lie,
Which I shall never taste.
Let me embalm this flesh of mine
With turtle fat and Bordeaux wine,
And spoil th’ Egyptian trade.
Than Humphry’s Duke more happy I;
Embalm’d alive, old Quin shall die,
A mummy ready made.
Richard Savage lived a very profligate life. Johnson says that ‘in no time of his life was it any part of his character to be the first of the company that desired to separate.’ It was when inebriated that he killed one Mr. James Sinclair, 1727, and was within an ace of being hanged for the same. Lord Tyrconnel, who had been very kind to him, and suddenly dropped him, gives a very bad account of his drinking habits.