All the prince's time tells a similar strange story of manners and pleasure. In Wraxall we find the prime minister himself, the redoubted William Pitt, engaged in high jinks with personages of no less importance than Lord Thurlow the lord chancellor, and Mr. Dundas the treasurer of the navy. Wraxall relates how these three statesmen, returning after dinner from Addiscombe, found a turnpike open and galloped through it without paying the toll. The turnpike man, fancying they were highwaymen, fired a blunderbuss after them, but missed them; and the poet sang,—
How as Pitt wandered darkling o'er the plain,
His reason drown'd in Jenkinson's champagne,
A rustic's hand, but righteous fate withstood,
Had shed a premier's for a robber's blood.
Here we have the treasurer of the navy, the lord high chancellor, and the prime minister, all engaged in a most undoubted lark. In Eldon's Memoirs, about the very same time, I read that the Bar loved wine, as well as the woolsack. Not John Scott himself; he was a good boy always; and though he loved port wine, loved his business and his duty and his fees a great deal better.
He has a Northern Circuit story of those days, about a party at the house of a certain Lawyer Fawcett, who gave a dinner every year to the counsel.
“On one occasion,” related Lord Eldon, “I heard Lee [pg 794] say, ‘I cannot leave Fawcett's wine. Mind, Davenport, you will go home immediately after dinner, to read the brief in that cause that we have to conduct to-morrow.’
“ ‘Not I,’ said Davenport. ‘Leave my dinner and my wine to read a brief! No, no, Lee; that won't do.’
“ ‘Then,’ said Lee, ‘what is to be done? who else is employed?’