LORD BROUGHAM
SIR ROWLAND HILL
LORD PALMERSTON
LORD BEACONSFIELD
RICHARD COBDEN
W. E. GLADSTONE
LORD SALISBURY
REPRESENTATIVE STATESMEN OF THE REIGN
If a bottle of port was considered a sufficient allowance of drink for a moderate man, what was it for a toper? The amount of drinking in these country inns was, in fact, incredible. Men who were considered quite temperate, as a rule, would sit drinking at a public dinner half the night through. They drank, not weak potations of whisky and Apollinaris, but strong fiery port, which they liked, as Tennyson is reported to have liked it, strong and black and sweet. Not for such drinkers as these did mine host produce his best and rarest; a more common and a ranker liquid did for them. The public dinner was rare. There was generally in the bar-parlour, however, the town toper. He was a man whose father had amassed money in trade and left his son a small fortune, enough to keep him in idleness. The small fortune proved, as usual, a danger and a pitfall; idleness led to temptation, temptation led him to the bar-parlour. We may see him sitting in the wooden armchair, where he spends all his evenings. He is close upon fifty—the toper’s limit. A tumbler of rum and water is on the table beside him. He is silent, for very good reasons. He smiles upon the company to show how sober he is. He has been drinking all day long, and is now quite full and quite drunk; yet at ten o’clock he will get up and walk home by himself without so much as a reel or a lurch. He presents to the world when he goes out into it a nose of a kind that you cannot find now, a red, even a purple nose, largely swollen, covered with red blotches; it is a nose enlarged and painted by rum.
PRINCE CONSORT IN ROYAL ROBES
The tradesmen of the town have their club, which meets every night, but not in the tavern; they frequent a place of lesser repute, where they are alone. They are shy of admitting strangers. It is not known how much they drink; but one hears of families where there are daughters who, on the arrival of the familiar footstep, hurry out of the way.
The town is eight miles from any other town. A stage-coach passes through every day, but there is very little done to encourage it. The oldest inhabitant has lived here, man and boy, for eighty years, but he has never seen any other town. The coach drives merrily down the High Street, with the horn blowing: the coachman pulls up at the inn, the passengers all get down and have a drink, the horses are changed, the coachman mounts, the guard blows his horn, and the excitement of the day is over. The interests of the town are wholly self-centred: it is not conscious of any other place. There were wars twenty years ago. There is a fellow, somewhere, who fought at Waterloo; but nobody asks him questions. A weekly paper, published at the nearest town, comes over on Sunday mornings and gives them news of the outer world; but, indeed, the news of the outer world drops on their ears like the murmurs of the ocean in the shell, it means nothing.
The yearly holiday has not yet reached this place. The vicar, the lawyer, the doctor, want no holiday, and take none. The schoolmaster takes his in his garden. Year after year, month after month, day after day, they do the same things in the same way, they have the same talk. As for books they have none, only a dozen or so in a row. Boys who are fond of books are regarded askance; they are dragging down upon their heads a terrible future; no money is to be made by reading books. Boys who are fond of making music, who take to a piano as other boys do to a cricket bat, are considered as in a dangerous way. It is remarkable, and is to me inexplicable, how this country, where formerly every gentleman played some instrument, came to regard music with suspicion. The fact, however, is undoubted. In the same way, a boy who could draw and paint was looked upon with mingled pity and contempt. There was a great deal of caste in the profession chosen by the boys. The vicar’s son went to Oxford or Cambridge and took orders; the lawyer’s eldest son was articled to his father; the doctor’s eldest son was articled to his father; in the principal shops the eldest son was brought up to carry on the shop. The professional people, who called themselves gentlemen, would not associate with the shopkeepers; the county people would not associate with the professional people; thus society was hedged about and kept in gradations. As regards other professions, the banks took some of the young men; one or two turned out to be clever, got scholarships, and went to the universities, there to settle down for life on a College Fellowship; necessity compelled a few into teaching, then considered the last refuge of the destitute; the boy who could draw was articled to an architect in the nearest big town; some went up to London and became clerks; here and there one or two, greatly daring, disappeared altogether beyond the seas.
DRAWING-ROOM AT ST. JAMES’S PALACE, 1861—THE LAST ATTENDED BY THE PRINCE CONSORT