These were the days when the Duke of Grafton, the Premier, lived openly with Miss Nancy Parsons. Rigby, the Paymaster of the Forces, had only one merit, that he drank fair. He used brandy as the rest of the world used small beer. Lord Weymouth, grandson of Lord Cartaret, had more than his grandfather’s capacity for liquor, and a fair portion of his abilities. He constantly boozed till daylight, even when a Secretary of State. His occasional speeches were extolled by his admirers as preternaturally sagacious, and his severest critics admitted them to be pithy. Walpole made the following smart hit at him: ‘If I paid nobody, and went drunk to bed every morning at six, I might expect to be called out of bed by two in the afternoon to save the nation, and govern the House of Lords by two or three sentences as profound and short as the proverbs of Solomon.’ ‘They tell me, Sir John,’ said George the Third to one of his favourites, ‘that you love a glass of wine.’ ‘Those who have so informed your Majesty,’ was the reply, ‘have done me great injustice; they should have said a bottle.’ ‘Two of the friends of Philip Francis, without any sense of having performed an exceptional feat, finished between them a gallon and a half of Champagne and Burgundy, a debauch which in this unheroic age it almost makes one ill to read of.’
The sobriety of Pitt has been the subject of much debate. Mr. Jeaffreson has well said that free livers delight to attribute their own failings to great people who are free from them. Till Lord Stanhope relieved Pitt’s fame of groundless aspersions of intemperance, it suffered from drunken epigrams, and the idle tales of pot-loving detractors. Of the former, the following is a specimen:—
On folly every fool his talent tries;
It needs some toil to imitate the wise;
Though few like Fox can speak—like Pitt can think,
Yet all like Fox can game—like Pitt can drink.
Perhaps no form of detraction is so insidious as caricature, and Pitt was its sport. The pencil of Gillray was busy in 1788 with a caricature entitled, Market Day—Every Man has His Price. The Ministerial supporters are represented as horned cattle exposed for sale. The scene is laid in Smithfield. At the window of a public-house adjoining appear Pitt and Dundas, a jovial pair drinking and smoking.
Again, when the dearth of 1795 was just beginning, a print by the same Gillray represents a convivial scene at Pitt’s country house. It is entitled, ‘God save the King! in a bumper; or, an Evening Scene three times a Week at Wimbleton.’ Pitt is trying to fill his glass from the wrong end of the bottle, while his companion, grasping pipe and bumper, ejaculates the words, ‘Billy, my boy—all my joy!’
Still there is an element of truth underlying both epigram and burlesque; but, having admitted this, we may assert that his wont formed a contrast to the wild habits of many of his contemporaries, and that with justice he was favourably compared by the Court with the irregularities of Fox and his associates.
Professor Richard Porson was at one time a prominent figure in the Cider Cellars in Covent Garden. It was his nightly haunt. It was there that one of his companions is said to have shouted in his presence, ‘Dick can beat us all; he can drink all night and spout all day.’ This sounds bad, but it must be remembered that Porson had struggled long on the then miserable pittance attached to the Greek Professorship at Cambridge, 40l. a year, and had suddenly obtained the post of head librarian of the London Institution, with a salary increased five-fold. He thus had facilities for indulgence, and with them, possibly for a time, the appetite. An habitual drunkard he was not. Like Johnson, he could practise abstinence more easily than temperance. He lived in days when the leading statesmen and politicians were not ashamed of being seen under the influence of wine, and though Porson has been vilified for his occasional intemperance, it may, without much hesitation, be affirmed that it was his reforming principles in Church and State that brought much of the obloquy upon him.
Thomson, the author of the Seasons, was a convivial man.
Mrs. Hobart, Thomson’s housekeeper, often wished Quin dead, he made her master drink so. He and Quin used to come sometimes from the Castle together at four o’clock in a morning, and not over sober you may be sure. When he was writing in his own house he frequently sat with a bowl of punch before him, and that a good large one too.