Lord Eldon tells us, in his ‘Anecdote Book,’ that at an assize in Lancaster about the year 1782, Jemmy Boswell, the biographer of Dr. Johnson, was found dead drunk and stretched upon the pavement. His merry colleagues, of whom the sage Lord Eldon was one, subscribed among them a guinea at supper, which they sent next morning to Boswell, with instructions to move in Court for the writ of ‘Quare adhæsit pavimento.’ In vain did the perplexed and bibulous barrister apply to all the attorneys of his acquaintance for information as to the nature of the writ for which he was instructed to move, and great was the astonishment of the Judge when the application was made to him. At last one of the Bar, amidst the laughter of the Court, exclaimed, ‘My Lord, Mr. Boswell adhæsit pavimento last night. There was no moving him for some time. At length he was carried to bed, and has been dreaming of what happened to himself.’
It is unfortunate that Johnson should have been guilty of the lapsus linguæ for which Bacchanalians have often claimed him as their hero, and by which careful historians have been misled. Mr. Mallet, speaking of the Icelanders of the middle ages, tells that ‘after they had finished eating their boiled horseflesh, they generally sat swilling their ale out of capacious drinking-horns and listening to the lay of a skald, or the tale of a Saga-man, until they were most of them in that happy state of mind, when, according to Johnson, man is alone capable of enjoying the passing moment of his fleeting existence.’ He refers doubtless to a saying of the savant recorded by his biographer. Johnson being asked whether a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, answered, ‘Never but when he is drunk.’ Most Johnsonians would readily admit that this was a lapsus, a sally of the moment, not his deliberate judgment, such as is obtainable from a set work like his incomparable Rasselas. There we read:—‘Intemperance, though it may fire the spirits for an hour, will make life short or miserable.’
Oliver Goldsmith, in The Bee, has some pungent observations upon ale-houses:—
Ale-houses are ever an occasion of debauchery and excess, and either in a religious or political light it would be our highest interest to have the greatest part of them suppressed. They should be put under laws of not continuing open beyond a certain hour, and harbouring only proper persons. These rules, it may be said, will diminish the necessary taxes; but this is false reasoning, since what was consumed in debauchery abroad would, if such a regulation took place, be more justly and perhaps more equitably for the workman’s family spent at home: and this, cheaper to them and without loss of time. On the other hand, our ale-houses, being ever open, interrupt business.
This same delightful author wrote that convivial satire entitled The Three Pigeons, which he put into the mouth of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, of which the following is a part:—
Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning;
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genus a better discerning.
When Methodist preachers come down,
A-preaching that drinking is sinful,
I’ll wager the rascals a crown,
They always preach best with a skin-full.
Then come, put the jorum about,
And let us be merry and clever;
Our hearts and our liquors are stout,
Here’s the Three Jolly Pigeons for ever!
Shenstone, another contemporary poet, though he spent so large a portion of his time in adorning The Leasowes, till he had made it a kind of rural paradise, could also rave about the freedom of an inn:—
‘Tis here with boundless power I reign,
And every health which I begin
Converts dull port to bright champagne;
Such freedom crowns it at an inn.
Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.