Richard Valpy French

HANOVERIAN PERIOD.

A change of dynasty brought with it no amelioration of manners. The fatal permission to set up distilleries, which was granted after the Revolution of 1688, and which was not withdrawn by William, was encouraged by the Legislature in the reign of the first George. The consequence was natural: distilleries multiplied, and drink was sold so cheap that unrestrained indulgence prevailed. The condition of things has been ably recorded by Mr. Lecky.[206] It was not till about 1724 that the passion for gin-drinking infected the masses of the population, and spread with the violence of an epidemic.

Small as is the place which this fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the consequences that have flowed from it, the most momentous in that of the eighteenth century—incomparably more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country. The average of British spirits distilled, which is said to have been only 527,000 gallons in 1684, had risen in 1727 to 3,601,000. Physicians declared that in excessive gin-drinking a new and terrible source of mortality had been opened for the poor. The grand jury of Middlesex declared that much the greater part of the poverty, the murders, the robberies of London, might be traced to this single cause. Retailers of gin were accustomed to hang out painted boards announcing that their customers could be made drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and have straw for nothing; and cellars strewn with straw were accordingly provided, into which those who had become insensible were dragged, and where they remained till they had sufficiently recovered to renew their orgies.

What preventive measures had soon to be taken, we shall learn later on. But the home distilleries were not the only bane. In consequence of the heavy duty to which foreign spirits were subjected, the smuggling trade began to be brisk. Rum, brandy, and hollands were brought over from the Channel Islands in small barrels, and were either landed at once or sunk in rafts to be taken up when convenient. The smuggling trade threw into the country immense quantities of spirits. Indeed ale and beer were almost superseded by spirits and water, or ‘grog,’ as it then began to be called.

The origin of the term ‘grog’ may interest, and is as follows:—The British sailors had always been accustomed to drink their allowance of brandy or rum clear, till Admiral Vernon ordered those under his command to mix it with water. The innovation gave offence to the sailors, and for a time rendered the commander unpopular. The admiral at that time wore a grogram coat, for which reason they nicknamed him ‘Old Grog’—hence by degrees the mixed liquor that he ordered obtained universally the name of ‘grog.’

The brewing of porter began about the year 1722. It is a drink which chiefly differs from beer by being made with higher dried malt. It was then the common practice in taverns to call for a pot of half-and-half, meaning half ale and half twopenny, or sometimes an equal portion of ale, beer, and twopenny, which was called three threads. To avoid the trouble of drawing these liquors from their respective casks, a person named Harwood formed the plan of brewing a drink that would at once yield the flavour of these combined ingredients. He effected his object, calling the beverage ‘entire,’ or entire butt, because it was taken from one butt or vessel. And inasmuch as it was purchased by porters and such like persons, it became ever afterwards distinguished by the name of porter.

The drink called saloop came into vogue at this time. Reide’s coffee-house, in Fleet Street, was one of the first houses in which it was sold. Called also salep, and salop; it was a greasy-looking beverage, sold much on stalls in the early morning. It was prepared from a powder made of the root of the Orchis mascula, and from the green-winged meadow orchis. Salep was long imported from the Levant, till it was discovered that our native plants could supply it, specially the early purple orchis. It used, like porter, to be a favourite drink of porters, coal-heavers, &c. It is said to contain more nutritious matter in proportion to its bulk than any other known root: an ounce of salep was thought to be support for a man for a day. It is still much used in the East. In Hindoostanee it is called salab-ee-misree, in Persian sahleb. In the present century it has been superseded by coffee-barrows; but Charles Lamb has left some account of this drinkable, which he says was of all preparations the most grateful to the stomachs of young chimney-sweeps.[207]

Ales commonly became known by the name of the district that produced them—e.g. Dorset beer, Oxford ale. Thus, John Byrom writes:—

May 18, 1725.—I found the effect of last night’s drinking that foolish Dorset, which was pleasant enough, but did not at all agree with me, for it made me very stupid all day.[208]

Oxford Ale was the subject of a panegyric written by Warton in 1720—and a panegyric from such a man would be, in the opinion of many, a boon of immortality.

The drinking at this time has already been spoken of as an epidemic. Wine was necessary on all occasions. The marriage ceremony was incomplete without it, as is abundantly evident from contemporary verse. More than one ridiculed the notion so prevalent, that

Wine must seal the marriage-bands.

But the Church had long since sanctioned a belief in its spell. The Sarum Missal had taught that the bridal cup must be blessed by the priest:—

Post missam, panis et vinum, vel aliud bonum potabile, in vasculo proferatur.

And so the hallowing of wine and sops was usual from the court to the cottage.

Burials were imperfect without the cup. M. Misson, in his Observations, notes:—

Butler, the keeper of the Crown and Sceptre Tavern in St. Martin’s Lane, told me that there was a tun of red port drunk at his wife’s burial, besides mulled white wine.—No men ever go to women’s burials, nor women to men’s, so that there were none but women at the drinking of Butler’s wine. Such women in England will hold it out with the men, when they have a bottle before them, as well as upon the other occasion, and battle infinitely better than they.

The number of public-houses was excessive. In 1725 a report from a committee of Middlesex magistrates stated that at that period there were in the metropolis, exclusive of the City of London and Southwark, 6,187 houses and shops wherein ‘geneva, or other strong waters,’ were sold by retail. The population was then about 700,000. In some cases every seventh house was employed in the sale of intoxicants.

We get a life-like picture of the times from Daniel Defoe; and if it be objected that his writing is fiction, we reply with Thackeray that the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true. On the subject of drink amongst women, and drink as a medicine, what can be more touching than the following from his Life of Colonel Jack?—

The hero, Colonel Jack, is giving an account of his third wife:—

I was infinitely satisfied with my wife, who was, indeed, the best-humoured woman in the world, and a most accomplished beautiful creature—indeed, perfectly well bred, and had not one ill quality about her; and this happiness continued without the least interruption for about six years. But I at last had a disappointment of the worst sort even here. She caught cold, and grew very sickly. In being so continually ill and out of order, she very unhappily got a habit of drinking cordials and hot liquors.

Drink, like the devil, when it gets hold of any one, though but a little, goes on by little and little to their destruction; so in my wife, her stomach being weak and faint, she first took this cordial, then that—till, in short, she could not live without them; and from a drop to a sup, from a sup to a dram, from a dram to a glass, and so on to two, till at last she took, in short, to what we call drinking.

As I likened drink to the devil in its gradual possession of the habits and person, so it is yet more like the devil in its encroachment on us, where it gets hold of our senses. In short, my beautiful, good-humoured, modest, well-bred wife, grew a beast, a slave to strong liquor, and would be drunk at her own table, nay, in her own closet by herself, till she lost her beauty, her shape, her manners, and at last her virtue.

Oh! the power of intemperance! And how it encroaches on the best disposition in the world; how it comes upon us gradually and insensibly, and what dismal effects it works upon our morals, changing the most virtuous, regular, well-instructed, and well-inclined tempers into worse than brutal! Never was a woman more virtuous, sober, modest, and chaste, than my wife. She never so much as desired to drink anything strong. It was with the greatest entreaty that I could prevail with her to drink a glass or two of wine, and rarely, if ever, above one or two at a time; even in company she had no inclination to it. Not an immodest word ever came out of her mouth, nor would she suffer it in any one else in her hearing without resentment.

But during her illness and weakness, her nurse pressed her, whenever she found herself faint, and a sinking of her spirits, to take this cordial, and that dram, till it became necessary to keep her alive, and gradually increased to a habit, so that it was no longer her physic but her food. Her appetite sunk and went quite away, and she ate little or nothing, but she came at last to a dreadful height, that, as I have said, she would be drunk in her dressing-room before eleven o’clock in the morning, and, in short, at last was never sober.

Let any one judge of my case now; I, that for six years thought myself the happiest man alive, was now the most miserable distracted creature. As to my wife, I loved her well and pitied her heartily. I almost locked her up, and set people over her to take care of her; but her health was ruined, and in about a year and a half she died.

Rightly did the poet Gay in his Court of Death make Death give the palm to intemperance amongst the claimant diseases:—

Merit was ever modest known.
What, no physician speak his right!
None here! but fees their toil requite.
Let then Intemperance take the wand,
Who fills with gold their zealous hand:
You, Fever, Gout, and all the rest—
Whom wary men as foes detest—
Forego your claims. No more pretend;
Intemperance is esteemed a friend;
He shares their mirth, their social joys,
And as a courted guest destroys.
The charge on him must justly fall,
Who finds employment for you all.

Amongst the many who shortened their days through excess, must be mentioned the name of Thomas Parnell. Dr. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, observes:—

Pope represents him as falling into intemperance of wine after Queen Anne’s death, in consequence of disappointed ambition. That in his later life he was too much of a lover of the bottle is not denied; but I have heard it imputed to a cause more likely to obtain forgiveness from mankind, the untimely death of a darling son; or, as others tell, the loss of his wife, who died 1712.

The latter is probably the true solution. He had married a woman of great beauty, Miss Anne Minchin, who died soon after that event, and grief probably preyed upon his fitful spirits, and led him into intemperance. He died before he was forty. Well for him had he imitated the character drawn in his exquisite poem The Hermit:—

The great vain man who fared on costly food,
Whose life was too luxurious to be good;
Who made his ivory stands with goblets shine,
And forced his guests to morning draughts of wine;
Has, with the cup, the graceless custom lost,
And still he welcomes, but with less of cost.

The most advanced exponent of the conviviality of the time was William Congreve, at one time commissioner of wine licences. His comedies are steeped in vice. Congreve’s comic feast (says Thackeray) flares with lights, and round the table, emptying their flaming bowls of drink, and exchanging the wildest jests and ribaldry, sit men and women, waited on by rascally valets and attendants—perhaps the very worst company in the world. To him (says the same author) the world seemed to have no moral at all. His ghastly doctrine seemed to be that we should eat, drink, and be merry when we can, and go to the deuce (if there be one) when the time comes!

The experience of the self-made Franklin is very suggestive as to the drinking habits of working men in London 160 years ago. For from the habits of printers one may infer the habits of other craftsmen.

When the famous Dr. Franklin was a printer’s boy in England—he came to England in 1724 or 1725—he found all his companions in the printing office drank five pints of porter daily at their work, and one of them even six. He was himself a water-drinker, but could not get any of them to see his argument ‘that bread contained more materials of strength than beer, and that it was only corn in the beer that produced the strength in the liquid.’

Now, as it is quite clear that, if these printing ‘prentices drank five pints of porter at their work, they would have extra drink out of work hours, we have in this anecdote an appalling picture of the drinking in England 160 years ago. What working man now averages five pints per diem?[209]

A useful little work was published in 1725, entitled The Publick-House-keeper’s Monitor. The author prefaces, that the reigning vices of the age make it a duty to consider and use any practicable methods to put a stop to ‘that deluge of Impiety which overflows almost this whole nation.’ He complains that there are too many of these houses which enjoy ‘a legal allowance,’ that many ought to be suppressed, but that it is persistently urged

that they are beneficial to the Publick; that they raise the Revenues of the Crown, and must therefore be supported in Complaisance to the Government. So far have Political Motives in this, as well as many other cases, got the better of religious ones; the Almighty must be serv’d last, if at all: And too many of the Substitutes of an Earthly Power, are apt to forget whose Vicegerent he is, and consequently from whom originally they derive their Authority, which would discover to them to whom they principally owe their Duty.

For indeed the same Argument, which prevails for the allowing of so many publick Houses, must, and, I fear, too often does prevail for the Neglect of a careful Inspection into the Management of them, and for a Connivance at the many Irregularities committed in them; ‘twould be a Means of sinking the Publick Revenues, if they were strictly confin’d to the Observance of those Laws, which were made for good Purposes. And what does all this amount to, but that CÆsar must have his Due, with a non obstante that the Almighty is defrauded?

He then proceeds to discuss the legitimate uses of taverns:—

The First Use of Publick-Houses is, to refresh hungry or weary Travellers; to receive those, whose Time or Strength permits them not to go farther, and to furnish them with such Lodging and Provision, that being recruited, they may be the better able to proceed in their Journey.

But such houses are too numerous:

Instead of their being too few, there are upon most Roads abundantly too many Houses of Reception; so many, that they not only destroy one another’s lawful and honest Maintenance, but lie like so many Snares in the way of Travellers. There are but few Parts of this Kingdom, if any, where Market-Towns are not near enough together, to serve all the Ends and Purposes of Publick Houses; and I may say, there are but few, if any, Market-Towns, which are not greatly over-stock’d with them. However, as to the Usefulness of them in general, let it suffice to observe, that where they stand conveniently situated, and are wisely and honestly manag’d, they are undoubtedly a very great Advantage to a Nation.

Another use, he tells us, is to receive and provide for those who live in the same place and who are not housekeepers themselves, but who, being sojourners, journeymen, or servants, find it a great conveniency to repair to such houses for their meals.

Then again they are useful (he urges) to receive persons who meet together

upon making Contracts or Bargains in the Way of Commerce; and whether this be done at common and ordinary Times, or at the more publick and stated Seasons of Fairs and Markets; or lastly, whether the publick Business of the Nation, or the more private Affairs of Lordships, Parishes, &c., do require the Meeting together of many Persons; so that the most convenient Places for these are generally esteemed such Houses as I am treating of. However, this may be affirm’d of them all in general, that the Design of them is to be useful; and that their Usefulness consists in their being duly and regularly kept, according to the several Laws of the Nation, provided for that purpose, and founded upon the necessities and Conveniences of the People.

He proceeds to lay down stated rules to be observed by such persons as keep taverns. He urges upon them first of all, personal sobriety, a strict regard to chastity, a scrupulous regard to honesty, that every one have goods, in quantity and quality, according to the value of their money. He exposes fearlessly the injustice of the

high Rents, to which Publick-Houses are generally advanced, so as very often to exceed double the Rents of private ones of the same real Goodness. This tempts the Land-lords of Houses to let them for that Purpose; and this tempts, and, as they will probably urge, obliges the Tenants, by some Means or other, to make more than ordinary Gains upon their Guests; but surely neither of them consider what they are about; how they jointly conspire to carry on a Trade of Iniquity, and are Partakers of each other’s Sins. He that lets his House for a publick one, only because he can thereby advance his Rent, is not aware how deeply he is concern’d in all the Wickedness that is consequent thereupon; and he who gives above the just Value of an House upon the same Account, does not regard how many Tricks and Frauds, what Impositions and Extortions, what Allowance of Wickedness and Debauchery, what a continued Scene of Iniquity, in short, he will be tempted to go through, in Order to discharge so heavy a burthen of expences, and yet to maintain himself and his family.

Secondly, he urges that the landlord should avoid and decline every thing that may encourage intemperance.

The World is indeed sufficiently inclin’d to Sensuality of all Sorts, and Multitudes do frequent Publick-Houses, especially with a previous Purpose and Design of committing Excess. But even those, who design it not, are often betray’d into it by the Arts and Contrivances of them, who are to be Gainers by it, by drawing them on from one Quantity to another, by helping ‘em to Companions that will set forward Intemperance, or by doing it themselves; but especially by giving Credit to those of the meaner Sort, who must otherwise be sober upon Necessity.

‘Tis surprizing to observe, what Scores a Sot shall be allow’d to contract at some Houses for Liquor, who would not be trusted for half the Sum by any of his Neighbours, to provide Bread for his Family; one, who thus reduces them to a Necessity of begging, stealing, or perishing, whilst he riotously consumes what might preserve them from all; but this he finds Means to do, through the Encouragement of those who have so little love for their neighbours that they care not how many families they starve to support their own.

The little book is thoroughly worthy to be reprinted. Would that every one engaged in ‘the trade’ would lay its maxims to heart!

About this time was published a guide-book, under the title of Vade-mecum of Malt-worms, containing a list of all the ale-houses in London, &c. Some of these, says Wright, in his Caricature History of the Georges, under the name of mug-houses, became the resort of small societies or clubs of political partisans. Some of these were the scenes of terrible party turbulence.

But we cannot leave the first Hanoverian reign without noticing another treatise much needed—quite as much—viz. that of Dr. Peter Browne, Bishop of Cork, who in 1716 wrote A Discourse of Drinking Healths.

By this time the abuse of the practice of toasting had become a national disgrace.

The way in which anything or anybody that one drank a health to, came to be called a toast has baffled derivation hunters of all degrees, and we are no wiser to-day than we were in 1709, when Isaac Bickerstaffe, in the twenty-fourth number of the newly-established Tatler, attempted to settle the matter by saying how, at Bath, in the time of Charles II., a celebrated beauty happened to be in the Cross-Bath, and out of the crowd of her admirers who were in the room, one of them took from her bath a cup of the water in which the lady was standing and drank her health to the company. Another of her admirers who was present, being half intoxicated, instead of pledging or drinking in response to the sentiment, announced his attention of jumping into the water and carrying off the bather, swearing that though he liked not the liquor, yet he would have the toast. He was opposed in his resolution, yet this whim gave foundation to the present honour which is due to the lady we mention in our liquor, who has ever since been called a toast. It is far more likely that, as Ellis observes, the use of the word on this occasion was a consequence of its previous employment for a like purpose, and not the cause of its being adopted. It is probable that toast came to be used in the sense it is stated to have been by the bath gallant, gradually, at first meaning a mere material relish or improvement to a glass of liquor, and afterwards getting to be applied to the ‘sentimental relish,’ or, as Sheridan truly calls it, the ‘excuse for the glass.’ Toasted bread formed a favourite addition to English drinks so early as the sixteenth century, and in the cups of sack and punch, brown toasts frequently floated at the top. In Wyther’s Abuses Stript and Whipt (published 1618) mention is made, as has been already noticed, of a draught ‘that must be spiced with a nut-browne tost.’

Hall states that there were some who drank healths upon their knees; some put their own blood into their drink and then drank a health to the king. So that the young Hectors not only cultivated habits of barbarity, but also linked themselves with blasphemy. But there was one other way of drinking healths still to be told, a piece of unparalleled tomfoolery—that of toasting a lady in some nauseous decoction. When this fashion was popular, two students at Oxford were each enamoured of the reigning belle of that sober University, and, as a test of the relative depth of their devotion, they applied themselves to toasting her in the manner we have mentioned. One, determined to prove that his love did not stick at trifles, took a spoonful of soot, mixed it with his wine, and drank off the mixture. His companion, determined not to be outdone, brought from his closet a phial of ink, which he drank, exclaiming, ‘Io triumphe and Miss Molly.’ These crackbrained young men also esteemed it a great privilege to get possession of any great beauty’s shoe, in order that they might ladle wine out of a bowl down their throats with it, the while they drank to the ‘lady of little worth’ or the ‘light-heeled mistress’ who had been its former wearer.

Is there any wonder that Dr. Peter Browne spoke out? He strongly condemned the practice on theological, moral, and common-sense grounds, of opinion that it had its origin in Pagan usages, though he is vague as to the particular custom out of which it arose. He classifies the various acceptations of a health under six heads:—(1) When a curse or imprecation is intended upon the person drinking, or (2) upon any other person; (3) when one drinks in honourable remembrance of absent living friends; or (4) by way of wishing others health and prosperity; or (5) in token of our respect and good-will to another, or approbation of any affair; and (6) as an outward indication of our loyalty. All such health-drinking, the learned prelate urges, is incompatible with the duty of good Christians, whom he exhorts to suppress the practice. He also cites an interesting formula used by the Jews in drinking, which is the first instance, to my knowledge, of a curse being intended instead of an expression of good-will; the words, upon the authority of Buxtorf, meaning, in their ordinary signification, ‘much good may it do you;’ but the utterer thereof, by a kind of mental reservation or adaptation, implied a curse—nay, as many curses as the letters stand for, viz. 165.[210]

From incidental notices we discover how very exceptional was the absence of toasts. Thus, in a description of home life at Badminton, we read:—

If the gentlemen chose a glass of wine the civil offers were made to go down into the vaults, which were very large and sumptuous, or servants, at a sign given, attended with salvers, &c., and many a brisk went round about; but no sitting at table with tobacco and healths, as the common use is.[212]

But the full extent of the unbridled excess of the period can best be estimated from a survey of the legislative enactments of the reign of the second George. They are worthy of careful consideration.

In the second year of this reign such a duty was placed upon spirits as to be nearly tantamount to a prohibition of their retail sale. A duty of 20l. was imposed on the spirit retail licence, which for the first time was ordered to be renewed annually. Moreover, dealers in spirits were placed under the same regulations as Publicans, in respect to Licences. This Act, after reciting the inconveniences arising from persons being licensed to keep inns and common ale-houses by justices living at a distance, who were not truly informed as to the need of such inns, or the character of the persons licensed, provides that no licence to keep an inn, ale-house, or victualling-house, or to retail strong waters, should be granted, but at a general meeting of justices of the division. This Act failed to answer the purpose of its promoters. Hawkers went about the streets selling coloured spirits under feigned names; so in the sixth year of the same reign the Act was repealed, and in its place an Act was passed (1732) which imposed a penalty of 10l. upon the retail sale of spirits, except sold in dwelling-houses. By this masterpiece of wisdom (!) every householder was potentially converted into a publican; nor did they fail to avail themselves of the permission. Intemperance spread like a plague.

When matters had reached a pitch absolutely intolerable, a petition was presented to Parliament (Feb. 20, 1736) from the magistrates of Middlesex assembled at quarter sessions. In this petition it was stated:—

That the drinking of Geneva, and other distilled liquors, had for some years past greatly increased:

That the constant and excessive use thereof had destroyed thousands of his Majesty’s subjects:

That great numbers of others were by its use rendered unfit for useful labor, debauched in morals, and drawn into all manner of vice and wickedness:

That those pernicious liquors were not only sold by distillers and geneva shop-keepers, but by many persons in inferior trades, by which means journeymen apprentices and servants were drawn in to taste and by degrees to like, approve, and immoderately to drink thereof:

That the public welfare and safety, as well as the trade of the nation, would be greatly affected by it:

That the practice was dangerous to the health, strength, peace, and morals; and tended greatly to diminish the labour and industry of his Majesty’s subjects.[213]

Upon the petition being referred to a committee of the entire House, it was resolved:—

That the low price of spirituous liquors is the principal inducement to the excessive and pernicious use thereof.

That in order to prevent this excessive and pernicious use, a discouragement be given thereto by a duty to be laid on spirits sold by retail.

That the selling of such liquors be restrained to persons keeping public brandy-shops, victualling-houses, coffee-houses, ale-houses, innholders, and to such Surgeons and Apothecaries as shall make use of it by way of medicine only.[214]

The Government were at last in earnest: a bill was introduced, the intention of which was to strike a fatal blow, to annihilate the gin traffic. But the blow was too sudden. A rebound was almost inevitable. The Gin Act, which has rendered the year 1736 famous in the annals of history, was introduced into and carried through Parliament by Sir Joseph Jekyll. It runs thus:—

Whereas the excessive drinking of spirituous liquors by the common people tends not only to the destruction of their health and the debauching of their morals, but to the public ruin:

For remedy thereof—

Be it enacted, that from September 29th no person shall presume, by themselves or any others employed by them, to sell or retail any brandy, rum, arrack, usquebaugh, geneva, aqua vitÆ, or any other distilled spirituous liquors, mixed or unmixed, in any less quantity than two gallons, without first taking out a licence for that purpose within ten days at least before they sell or retail the same; for which they shall pay down 50l., to be renewed ten days before the year expires, paying the like sum, and in case of neglect to forfeit 100l., such licenses to be taken out within the limits of the penny post at the chief office of Excise, London, and at the next office of Excise for the country. And be it enacted that for all such spirituous liquors as any retailers shall be possessed of on or after September 29th, 1736, there shall be paid a duty of 20s. per gallon, and so in proportion for a greater or lesser quantity above all other duties charged on the same.

The collecting the rates by this Act imposed to be under the management of the commissioners and officers of Excise by all the Excise laws now in force (except otherwise provided by this Act), and all moneys arising by the said duties or licenses for sale thereof shall be paid into the receipt of his Majesty’s Exchequer distinctly from other branches of the public revenue; one moiety of the fines, penalties, and forfeitures to be paid to his Majesty and successors, the other to the person who shall inform on any one for the same.

The Act was virtually prohibitive. But the people were too far gone to bear it. It was ineffectual to check even the progress of intemperance. The vices of the populace rendered them desperate. The Act, says Dr. Lees, produced vast excitement.

The populace of London, Bristol, Norwich, and other towns, honoured what they called the ‘death of Madame Gin’ with formal ‘funeral’ processions, whereat many of her devoted admirers, male and female, got ‘gloriously drunk.’ The distillers took out wine licences, offered gin—spiced and wined—for sale, under a new name; while drams were sold in the brandy-shops, under the quaint appellations of ‘Sangree,’ ‘Tom Row,’ ‘Cuckold’s Comfort,’ ‘Parliament Gin,’ ‘The Last Shift,’ ‘Ladies’ Delight,’ ‘King Theodore of Corsica,’ ‘Cholic-and-Gripe-Waters,’ &c. Lord Cholmondeley said, on the part of the Government, that the law exposed them to rebellion, and that they had information of its being designed; but by parading the troops in the dangerous locality, they had probably prevented riot and bloodshed. In March 1738 a proclamation was passed to enforce the Act and to protect the efforts of the officers of justice.

The consumption of spirits in England and Wales rose from 13,500,000 gallons in 1734, to 19,000,000 in 1742, and there were within the bills of mortality more than 20,000 houses and shops in which gin was sold by retail. As might be expected, informers became objects of popular hatred, and were hunted through the streets. Of course, the more respectable traffickers abandoned the proscribed business, which fell into the hands of reckless and disreputable men, who set at nought the provisions of the law. ‘Within two years of the passing of the Act,’ says the historian, though 12,000 persons had been convicted of offences against it, ‘it had become odious and contemptible;’ and policy, as well as humanity, forced the commissioners of excise to mitigate its penalties.

The House of Lords soon rang with impetuous debate; and the Act was doomed to modification. In 1743, the Lords read a Bill for repealing certain Duties on Spirituous Liquors and on Licences for retailing the same. In the debate, Lord Hervey remarked:—

As it is the quality of this malignant liquor to corrupt the mind, it likewise destroys the body.... Drunkenness not only corrupts men by taking away those restraints by which they are withheld from the perpetration of villanies, but by superadding the temptations of poverty—temptations not easily resisted even by those whose eyes are open to the consequences of their actions, but which will certainly prevail over those whose apprehensions are laid asleep, and who never extend their views beyond the gratification of the present moment.... Instead, therefore, of promoting a practice so evidently detrimental to society, let us oppose it with the most vigorous efforts; let us begin our opposition by opposing this bill, and then consider whether the execution of the former law shall be enforced, or whether another more efficacious can be formed.... No man, unacquainted with the motives by which senatorial debates are too often influenced, would suspect that after the pernicious qualities of this liquor, and the general inclination among the people to the immoderate use of it, it could be afterwards enquired, Whether this universal thirst for poison ought to be encouraged by the legislature?

Lord Lonsdale said—In every part of this great metropolis, whoever shall pass along the streets, will find wretchedness stretched upon the pavement, insensible and motionless, and only removed by the charity of passengers from the danger of being crushed by carriages or trampled by horses, or strangled with filth in the common sewers; and others, less helpless perhaps, but more dangerous, who have drunk too much to fear punishment, but not enough to hinder them from provoking it.... No man can pass a single hour in public places without meeting such objects, or hearing such expressions as disgrace human nature,—such as cannot be looked upon without horror, or heard without indignation, and which there is no possibility of removing or preventing, whilst this hateful liquor is publicly SOLD.... These liquors not only infatuate the mind, but poison the body; they not only fill our streets with madmen and our prisons with criminals, but our hospitals with cripples.... Nor does the use of spirits, my lords, only impoverish the public by lessening the number of useful and laborious hands, but by cutting off those recruits by which its natural and inevitable losses are to be supplied. The use of distilled liquors impairs the fecundity of the human race, and hinders that increase which Providence has ordained for the support of the world. Those women who riot in this poisonous debauchery are quickly disabled from bearing children, or, what is still more destructive to general happiness, produce children diseased from their birth, and who, therefore, are an additional burden, and must be supported through a miserable life by that labour which they cannot share, and must be protected by that community of which they cannot contribute to the defence.[215]

Notwithstanding volleys of violent opposition, especially from the Bishops, the Bill was carried: sixty per cent. of the House voting in its favour. The law was again relaxed. Parliament was overwhelmed with petitions which were the expression of a disappointed philanthropy.

The petitions of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London, state, ‘that the common and habitual use of spirituous liquors by the lower ranks of people, prevails to such a degree, that it destroys the health, strength, and industry of the poor of both sexes and all ages, inflames them with rage and barbarity, and occasions frequent robberies and murders in the streets of the Metropolis.’ The petition from the Minister and Churchwardens of St. Martin’s, Westminster, recites that in consequence of the low price of spirits, their use has become excessive—‘the substance of the people is wasted—idleness and disorder have taken the place of industry—and robberies and murders are committed under their influence.’ The petition from Bristol states, ‘that the bad effects of spirituous liquors have become apparent in the destruction of the habits of the people—corrupting their morals, and rendering them incapable of manly employments’—reducing them to poverty, and hardening them to the commission of crimes of the utmost enormity. That of the Merchants adds—‘commerce was injured.’ These crowds of petitions almost universally affirm that the great increase in the number of Gin-shops, and the low price of the article, were the causes of its excessive use amongst the lower orders.

On these representations, the House again resolved ‘That it was necessary to regulate the sale of spirits by retail.’ Measures were adopted for the suppression of smuggling, and the celebrated Tippling Act was passed.[216]

By this Act, no persons could recover for the price of spirits sold in less quantities than 20s. at one time.

But just in proportion as spirits were rendered legally inaccessible, appetite was diverted into the channel of beer. The rent was made possibly worse. Hitherto it had been necessary to impose restrictions upon the article sold; now the vendor must furnish guarantees. The 26th of the same George, after declaring former laws to be defective and insufficient, required the justices, when they granted licences, to take the recognisances of the persons licensed in 10l., and two sureties of 5l., for good conduct, with other restrictions.

The page of events at this time is eminently instructive. A government cannot be far in advance of the people whom it governs. Extreme repression has been and ever will be evaded. In the present instance, not only was a demand for beer created, but resort was had to any and every expedient to glut the appetite upon the favourite spirit. The clandestine sale of gin was the natural consequence. The gaols groaned under the burden of atonement for unpaid penalties. Within two years of the passing of the Gin Act some twelve thousand persons had been punished for its violation. The measure proved a failure, for (as Smollett observes) though no licence was obtained, and no duty paid, the liquor continued to be sold in all corners of the streets; informers were intimidated by the threats of the people, and the justices of the peace, either from indolence or corruption, neglected to put the law into execution.

It is important to compare the consumption of low wines (weak spirits) and spirits, before and after the passing of the Act. The total consumption for England and Wales in 1733 was 11,282,890 gallons; and in 1742 the consumption was 19,897,300 gallons. No wonder that the Act was repealed. Had the Government imposed a graduated scale of duty upon spirits, a scale ever sliding upwards, their price might have been raised by almost insensible stages, till the means of purchase would have been well-nigh precluded.

But in other directions a wiser legislation found favour. Distillation from grain, malt, or flour was prohibited, and when it was proposed in Parliament to relax this measure, abundant were the petitions for its retention. It was therefore resolved that the law should be in force till December 1759: and the success of the measure is established from the fact that the consumption of spirits in England and Wales fell, from the nineteen millions of 1742, to an annual average of about four millions during the interval between the years 1760 and 1782.

Much is said in the present day of female intemperance. The Lords’ Committee had aroused public attention to the subject. But it was rife enough in the period under discussion. A poet of the century makes no secret of the proclivity.[217]

Britannia this upas-tree bought of Mynheer,
Removed it through Holland and planted it here;
‘Tis now a stock plant of the genus wolf’s bane,
And one of them blossoms in Marybone Lane.
The House that surrounds it stands first in the row,
Two doors at right angles swing open below;
And the children of misery daily steal in,
And the poison they draw they denominate Gin.
There enter the prude, and the reprobate boy,
The mother of grief and the daughter of joy,
The serving-maid slim, and the serving-man stout,
They quickly steal in, and they slowly reel out.

The following incident related in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1748, points to a terrible condition of things:—

At a christening at Beddington in Surrey, the nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undress’d the child, instead of laying it in the cradle, she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes. She was examin’d before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood; on which she was discharged!!

Nor was any class of society exempt from the imputation; but the curtain need not be drawn.

And what a stream of ability and learning was polluted by those mischievous compounds! Men of letters, tragedians, statesmen, fell—ignobly fell—before the insidious destroyer.

Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened without sleep to his official business.[218]

Lord Stair, in a letter to Horace Walpole, writes:—

Poor Harry (Bolingbroke) is turned out from being Secretary of State.... They call him knave and traitor.... I believe all poor Harry’s fault was that he could not play his part with a grave enough face.... He got drunk now and then.

Lord Cartaret, afterwards Earl Granville, was a great scholar, and a man of invariable high spirits.

The period of his ascendency was known by the name of the Drunken Administration; and the expression was not altogether figurative. His habits were extremely convivial; and champagne probably lent its aid to keep him in that state of joyous excitement in which his life was passed.... Driven from office, he retired laughing to his books and his bottle.... Ill as he had been used, he did not seem, says Horace Walpole, to have any resentment, or indeed any feeling except thirst.[219]

Macaulay implies that Cartaret occasionally varied his champagne for ‘a daily half gallon of Burgundy.’

William Pulteney, created ‘Earl of Bath’ on the resignation of Walpole, has been generally reckoned amongst the men of the bottle. Indeed, Mr. Lecky remarks (i. 478) that he ‘is said to have shortened his life by drinking.’ But how can this be? He lived to the fairly respectable age of 82. Has he not been confounded with some namesake? For what says this same author in another volume?—‘Lord Bath, the old rival of Walpole, subscribed liberally to the orphanage of Georgia, and was a frequent and apparently devout attendant at Whitefield’s Chapel in Tottenham Court Road.’ In fact in his old age he became a Methodist. Was such a man likely to be a hard drinker?

Of Walpole, Mr. Lecky remarks, that when he was a young man, his father was accustomed to pour into his glass a double portion of wine, saying, ‘Come, Robert, you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father.’

It speaks volumes for the son of such a father, that when Mr. Chute gibed him for stupidity, which he set down to ‘temperance diet,’ Walpole protested, saying, ‘I have such lamentable proofs every day of the stupefying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nourriture.’

Methodism, drinking, and gambling, were all on the increase. So says Walpole. Of the first, he sarcastically says,—‘It increases as fast as any religious nonsense did.’ Of the second he remarks,—‘Drinking is at the highest wine-mark.’ But people were gluttons as well as drunkards.

The aristocracy of letters were infected, no less than that of rank. Truly did Chesterfield observe, that wine and wassail have taken more strong places than gun or steel. Jonathan Swift is generally regarded as a free liver, though probably the company he kept is often answerable for the imputation. The following notices must serve as material for judgment. Dr. King states that about three years before his death, he observed that he was affected by the wine which he drank after dinner; next day, on his complaining of his health, he took the liberty to tell him he had drunk too much wine. Swift was startled, and replied that he always regarded himself as a very temperate man, and never exceeded the quantity his physician prescribed. But, according to King, his physician never drank less than two bottles of claret after dinner. But King was a water-drinker.[220] Scott says of Swift’s entertainments that they were economical, ‘although his guests, so far as conviviality was consistent with decorum, were welcomed with excellent wine. Swift, who used to declare he was never intoxicated in his life, had nevertheless lived intimately with those at whose tables wine was liberally consumed, and he was not himself averse to the moderate use of it.’ The same author adds that Dr. King said that Swift drank about a pint of claret after dinner, which the doctor considered too much.

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.

He affirmed that it was the constant practice of Mr. Savage to enter a tavern with any company that proposed it, drink the most expensive wines with great profusion, and when the reckoning was demanded, be without money: if, as it often happened, his company were willing to defray his part, the affair ended without any ill consequences; but if they were refractory, and expected that the wine should be paid for by him that drank it, his method of composition was to take them with him to his own apartment, assume the government of the house, and order the butler in an imperious manner to set the best wine in the cellar before his company, who often drank till they forgot the respect due to the house in which they were entertained, indulged themselves in the utmost extravagance of merriment, practised the most licentious frolics, and committed all the outrages of drunkenness.

No wonder Lord Tyrconnel dropped him. Even Savage himself admitted that Lord Tyrconnel ‘often exhorted him to regulate his method of life, and not to spend all his nights in taverns, and that he appeared desirous that he would pass those hours with him, which he so freely bestowed upon others.’ The poor fellow eventually, having estranged all his friends by his petulance as well as his bad habits, got deplorably poor, and ‘wandered about the town, slighted and neglected, in quest of a dinner, which he did not always obtain.’ It was at this period that we read the extraordinary account of him, that ‘he was not able to bear the smell of meat till the action of his stomach was restored by a cordial.’ On one occasion in great distress at Bristol, ‘he received a remittance of five pounds from London, with which he provided himself a decent coat, and determined to go to London, but unhappily spent his money at a favourite tavern.’

The tale goes on, ‘Thus was he again confined to Bristol, where he was every day hunted by bailiffs. In this exigence he once more found a friend, who sheltered him in his house, though at the usual inconveniences with which his company was attended; for he could neither be persuaded to go to bed in the night nor to rise in the day.’

But if many were the victims of excess, many too were the champions of restraint; and, first of all, we turn to Dr. Samuel Johnson. In his early life he drank wine; let him testify for himself.

In an interesting conversation with an old college friend, one Edwards, held April 17, 1778, he made a remark which Sir Wilfrid Lawson would hail:—

Edwards. How do you live, sir? For my part, I must have my regular meals and a glass of good wine. I find I require it.

Johnson. I now drink no wine, sir. Early in life I drank wine; for many years I drank none. I then for some years drank a good deal....

Edwards. I am grown old: I am sixty-five.

Johnson. I shall be sixty-eight next birthday. Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a hundred.

When he first came to London, at the age of 29, he abstained entirely (teste Boswell) from fermented liquors, ‘a practice to which he rigidly conformed for many years together at different periods of his life.’ Upon this point Croker has a suggestive note, apropos of the effect of drink on hypochondria:—

At this time his abstinence from wine may perhaps be attributed to poverty, but in his subsequent life he was restrained from that indulgence by, as it appears, moral, or rather medical, considerations. He found by experience that wine, though it dissipated for a moment, yet eventually aggravated the hereditary disease under which he suffered; and perhaps it may have been owing to a long course of abstinence that his mental health seems to have been better in the latter than in the earlier portion of his life. He says, in his Prayers and Meditations (August 17, 1767), ‘By abstinence from wine and suppers I obtained sudden and great relief, and had freedom of mind restored to me; which I have wanted for all this year, without being able to find any means of obtaining it.’ These remarks are important, because depression of spirits is too often treated on a contrary system, from ignorance of or inattention to what may be its real cause.

Dr. Johnson was very often chiefly indebted to tea for his literary afflatus. ‘The quantities which he drank of the infusion of that fragrant leaf,’ says Boswell, ‘at all hours were so great, that his nerves must have been uncommonly strong, not to have been extremely relaxed by such an intemperate use of it.’ In his defence of Tea against Mr. Jonas Hanway, Johnson describes himself as ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the morning.’ This last phrase his friend, Tom Tyers, happily parodied, ‘te veniente die—te decedente.’

Boswell often pauses to descant upon

Dr. Johnson’s Temperance.

September 16, 1773.—Last night much care was taken of Dr. Johnson, who was still distressed by his cold. He had hitherto most strangely slept without a nightcap. Miss Macleod made him a large flannel one, and he was prevailed with to drink a little brandy when he was going to bed. He has great virtue in not drinking wine or any fermented liquor because, as he acknowledged to us, he could not do it in moderation. Lady Macleod would hardly believe him, and said, ‘I am sure, sir, you would not carry it too far.’—Johnson. ‘Nay, madam, it carried me. I took the opportunity of a long illness to leave it off. It was then prescribed to me not to drink wine; and, having broken off the habit, I have never returned to it.’

Again, says Boswell:—

A.D. 1776.—Finding him still persevering in his abstinence from wine, I ventured to speak to him of it.—Johnson. Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go into excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences. One of the fathers tells us he found fasting made him so peevish that he did not practise it.

Dr. B. W. Richardson’s ideas about the harm done to constitutions by excessive palpitation of the heart (especially under the action of alcohol) seem to have had shadows cast before. Boswell’s hero rather pooh-poohed the idea, in a conversation after dinner at Thrale’s, April 10, 1776:—

Johnson mentioned Dr. Barry’s System of Physic. ‘He was a man,’ said he, ‘who had acquired a high reputation in Dublin, came over to England, and brought his reputation with him. His notion was, that pulsation occasions death by attrition, and that therefore the way to preserve life is to retard pulsation. But we know that pulsation is strongest in infants, and that we increase in growth while it operates in its regular course; so it cannot well be the cause of destruction.’

This Barry became a Baronet—Sir Edward Barry, Bart. ‘He published, in 1775, a curious work on the Wines of the Ancients.’

It should not be forgotten that when Dr. Johnson did drink, he drank heavily. On April 7, 1778, he said he had drunk three bottles of port at a time without being the worse for it. ‘University College has witnessed this.’ He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.

Boswell’s own ideas upon drinking are worth recording:—

I observed [says he of himself, April 12, 1776] that wine did some people harm, by inflaming, confusing, and irritating their minds; but that the experience of mankind had declared in favour of moderate drinking.

Sir Joshua Reynolds on the same occasion expressed similar ideas. He argued that ‘a moderate glass enlivened the mind, by giving a proper circulation to the blood.’

Probably Reynolds had studied the Familiar Letters of the Historiographer-Royal, Howell, who, as before noticed, thought that ‘good wine makes good blood.’

Johnson lived to see, as he believed, a change for the better, in the direction of temperance.

Anno Domini 1773.—We talked of change of manners. Dr. Johnson observed that our drinking less than our ancestors was owing to the change from ale to wine. ‘I remember,’ said he, ‘when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of. Ale was cheap, so you pressed strongly. When a man must bring a bottle of wine, he is not in such haste.’ [Johnson was sixty-four at the time.]

It seems strange that Johnson’s influence over his minion’s habits was so slight. At any rate the following anecdote points to this conclusion:—

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.

And the same spirit breathes again in the Deserted Village of Goldsmith. The village ale-house is clearly included among the ‘simple blessings of the lowly train.’ Yet there is nothing to condemn in the sentiments there expressed, and we may echo the words of Sir Walter Scott:—

The wreath of Goldsmith is unsullied; he wrote to exalt virtue and expose vice; and he accomplished his task in a manner which raises him to the highest rank among British authors.

But we pass on to notice the man who did more than any one of his time to expose vice, and in particular the vice of intemperance. And this is not surprising when we consider the remarkable manner in which his genius for painting discovered itself.

Going out one Sunday with some companions to Highgate, they went into an inn, where they had not been long, before a quarrel arose between some persons in the same room. One of the disputants struck the other on the head with a quart pot, which cut him badly, and the blood ran down his face freely. This, with the contortions of his countenance, afforded a striking object to Hogarth, who drew out his pencil and sketched the scene.

It will be sufficient for the present purpose to note the part which drink plays in his Marriage À la Mode, the Rake’s Progress, and in two miscellaneous Plates. In the first mentioned, Counsellor Silvertongue begins his vile work of ensnaring the Viscountess by offering her a glass of light wine at an interval between the dances. Plate ii. represents the Viscount returning home the day after the entertainment. His appearance denotes that he has been involved in some drunken fray. Plate vi. depicts ‘sin when it is finished,’ the suicide of the beguiled Viscountess by means of laudanum.

Plate iii. of the Rake’s Progress illustrates the ‘orgie at the Rose Tavern.’ Young Rakewell is lavishly expending his money in plying with drink the caressing courtesans. He himself becomes intoxicated, and is of course robbed of his watch and jewellery; one of the wretched women, in a fit of rage, sets fire to a map of the world, swearing that she will burn the entire globe and herself with it. The reflections of the morrow can be easily imagined.

In Gin Lane, the artist portrays a loathsome neighbourhood, the presiding genius of which is gin. To procure it no means are left untried. Every article of domestic comfort, even to the meanest shred of raiment, is carried to the pawnbroker for the wherewithal to purchase gin. The influence of this fire-water is everywhere apparent; in the ruined dwellings, in the sickly looks, in the emaciated frames, trembling limbs, carious teeth, livid lips, and sunken eyes. The very children in that region are habituated from the cradle to love gin. The one house that thrives is that of the pawnbroker. The details are agonising! a child ravenous, gnawing a bare bone, which a dog, equally the victim of famine, is snatching from him. A woman is seen pouring a dram down the throat of an infant. In a ruined house, the corpse of a hanging suicide is displayed. A drunken object is drawn, in female shape, whose legs have broken out in horrible ulcers, and who is taking snuff, regardless of her child slipping from her arms into the low area of the gin vault. Gin too has killed the female whom we see two men placing in a shell by order of the beadle, while the orphan child is being conveyed to the Union.

Well did the Reverend James Townley underwrite:—

Gin, cursed fiend! with fury fraught,
Makes human race a prey;
It enters by a deadly draught
And steals our life away.
Virtue and Truth, driv’n to despair,
Its rage compels to fly;
But cherishes, with hellish care,
Theft, Murder, Perjury.
Damn’d cup! that on the vitals preys,
That liquid fire contains,
Which madness to the heart conveys,
And rolls it through the veins.

The general design of the Plate Beer Street is to expose the deadly habit of gin-drinking, and to teach that if man must drink strong liquors, beer is far the best to indulge in.

Edward Young, courtier, poet, rector, a general genius, satirised tea and wine as abused by the women of his day. After bemoaning the hecatomb sacrificed upon the altar of tea, he exclaims:—

But this inhuman triumph shall decline,
And thy revolting Naiads call for wine;
Spirits no longer shall serve under thee,
But reign in thy own cup, exploded Tea!
Citronia’s nose declares thy ruin nigh;
And who dares give Citronia’s nose the lie?
The ladies long at men of drink exclaimed,
And what impaired both health and virtue blamed.
At length, to rescue man, the generous lass
Stole from her consort the pernicious glass,
As glorious as the British Queen renown’d
Who suck’d the poison from her husband’s wound.

Another champion of temperance was John Armstrong, who wrote in 1744 The Art of Preserving Health. But he was no ascetic, for he writes:—

When you smooth
The brows of care, indulge your festive vein
In cups by well-informed experience found
The least your bane, and only with your friends.

The effects of a surfeit of drink he has most ably drawn:—

But most too passive, when the blood runs low,
Too weakly indolent to strive with pain,
And bravely by resisting conquer fate,
Try Circe’s arts; and in the tempting bowl
Of poisoned nectar sweet oblivion swill.
Struck by the powerful charm, the gloom dissolves
In empty air; Elysium opens round,
A pleasing frenzy buoys the lightened soul,
And sanguine hopes dispel your fleeting care;
And what was difficult, and what was dire,
Yields to your prowess and superior stars:
The happiest you of all that e’er were mad,
Or are, or shall be, could this folly last.
But soon your heaven is gone: a heavier gloom
Shuts o’er your head; and, as the thundering stream,
Swollen o’er its banks with sudden mountain rain,
Sinks from its tumult to a silent brook,
So, when the frantic raptures in your breast
Subside, you languish into mortal man;
You sleep, and waking find yourself undone,
For, prodigal of life, in one rash night
You lavished more than might support three days.
A heavy morning comes; your cares return
With tenfold rage. An anxious stomach well
May be endured; so may the throbbing head;
But such a dim delirium, such a dream,
Involves you; such a dastardly despair
Unmans your soul, as maddening Pentheus felt,
When, baited round CithÆron’s cruel sides,
He saw two suns, and double Thebes ascend.

How does this remind of the rich fool in the parable! The earlier lines of irony seem almost taken in idea from some sentiments of Hafiz, the favourite poet of the Persians.

I am [says he] neither a judge nor a priest, nor a censor, nor a lawyer; why should I forbid the use of wine?

Do not be vexed at the trifles of the world; drink, for it is folly for a wise man to be afflicted....

The only friends who are free from care are a goblet of wine and a book of odes.

Give me wine! wine that shall subdue the strongest: that I may for a time forget the cares and troubles of the world.

Armstrong joined in the general growl at the substitution of port for the lighter French wine.

In describing a man’s sensations on awaking he says:—

You curse the sluggish port, you curse the wretch,
The felon, with unnatural mixture, first
Who dared to violate the virgin wine.

Again, when speaking of wholesome wine, he praises:—

The gay, serene, good-natured Burgundy,
Or the fresh fragrant vintage of the Rhine.

Again, he describes Burgundy as the drink for gentlemen, and port as an abomination:—

The man to well-bred Burgundy brought up,
Will start the smack of Methuen in the cup.

What Armstrong said one hundred and thirty years ago I entreat my medical brethren to believe now. I repeat it: if you want to prescribe spirits, do so; if you want to give wine, give pure wine. One bottle of good Burgundy will give twice the flavour and half the spirit that port does.[223]

In 1735 was published A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Brandy and other Distilled Spirituous Liquors. The author laments that man has found means to extract from what God intended for his refreshment, a most pernicious and intoxicating liquor. Singularly does this anonymous writer anticipate the results of modern inquiries. He tells us that distilled liquors coagulate and thicken the blood, contract and narrow the blood-vessels, as has been proved by experiments purposely made.

Whence [says he] we may evidently see the reason why those liquors do so frequently cause Obstructions and Stoppages in the Liver; whence the Jaundice, Dropsy, and many other fatal Diseases: It is in like manner also that they destroy and burn up the Lungs too: Hence also it is, that by frequently contracting and shrivelling, and then soon after relaxing, they weaken and wear out the Substance and Coats of the Stomach, on which they more immediately prey, every time they are drank: Hence, I say, it is, that these spirituous Liquors rarely fail to destroy the Appetite and Digestion of those who habituate themselves to them; for by drying up, and spoiling the Nerves, they make them insensible; they destroy also many of the very fine Blood-Vessels, especially where their Fibres are most tender, as in the Brain; whereby they spoil the Memory and intellectual Faculties: And by thus inflaming the Blood, and disordering the Blood Vessels and Nerves, they vitiate and deprave the Natural Temper.

When first drank, they seem to comfort the Stomach, by contracting its too relaxed and flabby Fibres, and also to warm the Blood; but as the Warmth which they give, on mixing with the Blood, soon goes off, as it is in fact found to do, when we mix Brandy with Blood; so also the spirituous Part of the Brandy being soon dissolved, and soaking into the watery Humours of the Body, it can no longer contract and warm the Substance and Coats of the Stomach and other Parts; which therefore as soon relaxing, the unhappy persons are thereby in a little time reduced to a cold, languid, and dispirited state, which gives them so much uneasiness that they are impatient to get out of it by Supplies of the same deadly Liquor, which, instead of curing, daily increases their Disease more and more.

But the worst is not yet told.

As when immediately put into the Veins of an Animal they cause sudden Death, so when drank in a large Quantity at once, they coagulate and thicken the Blood to such a degree as to kill instantly: And when they are not drank in such Quantities as to kill immediately, but are daily used, then, besides many other Diseases, they are apt to breed Polypuses, or fleshy Substances in the Heart, by thickening the Blood there; which Polypuses, as they grow larger and larger, do, by hindering and retarding the Motion of the Blood through the Heart, thereby farther contribute to the Faintness and Dispiritedness of those unhappy Persons, and at length, by totally stopping the Course of the Blood, do as effectually kill, as if a Dart had been struck thro’ the Liver.

And again, speaking of these same spirituous liquors, he adds:—

Some may indeed be more palatable than others, but they are all in a manner equally pernicious and dangerous, that are of an equal Strength; and those most destructive and deadly, which are the strongest, that is, which have most Spirit in them. Which Spirit being of a very harsh, fiery, and acrimonious Nature, as it is found to seize on and harden raw Flesh put into it; so does it greatly injure the Stomach, Bowels, Liver, and all other Parts of human Bodies, especially the Nerves; which being the immediate and principal Instruments of Life and Action, hence it is, that it so remarkably enfeebles the habitual Drinkers of it; and also depraves the Memory, by hardening and spoiling the Substance of the Brain, which is the Seat of Life, and this is an Inconvenience which the great Drinkers of Punch often find, as well as the Dram Drinkers.

Fifteen years later (1751) a Scotchman, James Burgh (cousin to the historian Robertson), wrote A warning to Dram-Drinkers. Would that it had been effectual!

At this time cider seems to have risen to the dignity of civic feasts. At a feast held Nov. 5th, 1737, at an inn, the following are the charges:—

	£	s.	d.
Ordinaries	1	10	0
Wine	2	6	0
Beer, Cider, Ale	0	8	10
Candles and tobacco	0	3	6
Beer, gunners and drummers	0	3	4
For firing	0	1	6
Sugar, lemons, and glasses	0	14	0
Wine after the bill delivered	0	6	0
Beer firing, tobacco	0	1	10
	—	—	—
	5	15	0

No bill for feast or treat at any place ... was found to have any mention of cider as used at table, and charged for with beer and ale before this one.[224]

In 1746 A Bowl of Punch appears as a novelty in the bill of a corporation dinner. When Coade was Mayor in 1737, sixteen bowls of punch were drunk at a corporation banquet.

Whitsun-ales were still in force. In the postscript of a letter from a minister to his parishioners in the Deanery of Stow, Gloucestershire, 1736, the author writes:—

What I have now been desiring you to consider as touching the evil and pernicious consequences of Whitsun-ales among us, doth also obtain against Dovers Meeting ... and also against Midsummer Ales and Mead-mowings; and likewise against the ordinary violations of those festival seasons commonly called Wakes.

In the year 1735 occurred a scene which fairly gives colour to the Secret History of the Calves’ Head Club. The following account is given in the letters of L’AbbÉ Le Blanc:—

Some young men of quality chose to abandon themselves to the debauchery of drinking healths on the 30th of January, a day appointed by the Church of England for a general fast, to expiate the murder of Charles I., whom they honour as a martyr. As soon as they were heated with wine, they began to sing. This gave great offence to the people, who stopped before the tavern, and gave them abusive language. One of these rash young men put his head out of the window and drank to the memory of the army which dethroned this king, and to the rebels which cut off his head upon a scaffold. The stones immediately flew from all parts, the furious populace broke the windows of the house, and would have set fire to it.

The Chapter Coffeehouse was opened at this time, famous for punch, pamphlets, and newspapers. Buchan, of Domestic Medicine fame, was an habituÉ; so was Dr. Gower.

These eminent physicians sat and prescribed for the maladies of their mates, Chapter punch; ‘If one won’t do, call for a second.’ But clubs, whatever they may have been, are anything but unfavourable to temperance now. The worst that can be honestly thought of them is—that they may minister to selfishness.

Thus are clubs an exception to the usual tendency of the moral law of gravitation—downwards. What is there in common, save the name, between the AthenÆum of to-day, and the Roxburghe of the beginning of the century?

The entertainments of the latter have found their way into print under the title ‘Roxburghe Revels; or, An Account of the Annual Display, culinary and festivous, interspersed incidentally with matters of Moment or Merryment.’[225]

George III. was an example of moderation. One of his biographers, Edward Holt, observes:—

Exercise, air, and little diet were the grand fundamentals in the King’s idea of health and sprightliness: his Majesty fed chiefly on vegetables and drank little wine. The Queen was what many private gentlewomen styled whimsically abstemious.

The story is told that at Worcester, the mayor, knowing that the King never took drink before dinner, asked him if he would be pleased to take a jelly, when the King replied: ‘I do not recollect drinking a glass of wine before dinner in my life, yet upon this pleasing occasion I will venture.’ A glass of rich old Mountain was served, when his Majesty immediately drank ‘Prosperity to the Corporation and Citizens of Worcester.’ This occurred in the twenty-eighth year of the King’s reign (1788). The rigid rule was still observed by his Majesty, as we learn from an incident which occurred twelve years later. One morning, when visiting as usual his stables, the King heard the following conversation between the grooms: ‘I don’t care what you say, Robert, but every one agrees that the man at the Three Tuns makes the best purl in Windsor.’ ‘Purl, purl!’ said the King, quickly. ‘Robert, what’s purl?’ This was explained to be warm beer with a glass of gin, &c. His Majesty listened attentively, and turning round, said: ‘I dare say, very good drink, but too strong for the morning; never drink in a morning.’

In the description of the King’s visit to Whitbread’s brewery, we learn incidentally the large scale on which even then the wholesale trade was conducted—e.g. in the great store were three thousand and seven barrels of beer. The stone cistern, into which he entered, held four thousand barrels of beer. The royal party were offered some of Whitbread’s entire.

The King drank and responded to toasts. Thus, at a dinner of The Knights, we read that towards the end of the first course, a large gilt cup was brought to the Sovereign by the cupbearer. The King drank to the knights, who, being at his Majesty’s command, informed of the same by Garter, stood up uncovered, pledged the King, and then sat down.

At the jubilee, the commemoration of the fiftieth year of the King’s reign, the mayor at the banquet gave ‘The King, God bless him, and long may he reign over a free and united people,’ which was drunk with three times three.

The general habits of the time formed a striking contrast to the personal example of the King. In the recently issued elaborate Life of George IV., by Percy Fitzgerald, we get a picture into the social manners and customs prevailing about 1787:—

‘How the men of business and the great orators of the House of Commons contrive to reconcile it with their exertions I cannot conceive,’ writes that most charming of public men, Sir Gilbert Elliot, to his wife. ‘Men of all ages drink abominably. Fox (a Prime Minister) drinks what I should call a great deal, though he is not reckoned to do so by his companions; Sheridan (M.P. and dramatist, and withal the bosom friend of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV.) excessively; and Grey (Viscount Howick) more than any of them. But it is in a much more gentlemanly way than our Scotch drunkards, and is always accompanied with lively clever conversation on subjects of importance. Pitt (a Prime Minister), I am told, drinks as much as anybody.’

The same observer, Sir Gilbert Elliot (1787), describes a scene at W. Crewe’s, where three young men of fashion, Mr. Orlando Bridgman, Mr. Charles Greville, of the Picnic Club, and Mr. Gifford were so drunk, ‘as to puzzle the whole assembly.’ The last was a young gentleman lately come out, of a good estate of about five thousand pounds a year, the whole of which he is in the act of spending in one or two years at least (125,000l.), and this without a grain of sense, without any fun to himself or entertainment to others. He never uttered a word, though as drunk as the other two, who were both riotous, and began at last to talk so plain, that Lady Francis and Lady Valentine fled from the side table to ours, and Mrs. Sheridan would have followed them, but did not escape till her arms were black and blue, and her apron torn off.

Pitt, the model young minister, broke down in the house in the following year, owing to a debauch the night before at Lord Buckingham’s, when, in company with Dundas and the Duke of Gordon, he took too much wine.

Indeed, the manners and customs of the times (1780-1830) might be called a ‘precious school’ for the young princes (Prince of Wales, Dukes of York, Cumberland, and Kent), and there was no public opinion to check these vices.

The lawlessness that was abroad reached even to the young, who disdained the control of their parents.

To the same effect writes Dr. Doran:—

Any one who will take the trouble to go carefully through the columns of the ill-printed newspapers of the last century, will find that drunkenness, dissoluteness, and the sword hanging on every fool’s thigh ready to do his bidding, were the characteristics of the period. People got drunk at dinners, and then slew one another, or in some other way broke the law.

The taverns were crowded with morning drinkers. On the site occupied by the Bank of England, four inns used to stand; one of them was called The Crown. Sir John Hawkins, in his History of Musick, mentions that it was not unusual to draw a butt (120 gallons) in half-pints in the course of a single morning.

The drinking at the Universities was terrible.

Henry Gunning, M.A., Christ’s College, Cambridge (a descendant of the Bishop of Ely, who wrote the prayer for the Church Militant), had great opportunities of judging of the Cambridge of his day, for he was born 1768 in a Cambridgeshire vicarage, went up to Cambridge at an early age, was made Esquire Bedell 1789, and continued in that capacity till his death early in 1854. In his charming Reminiscences of the University, Town, and County of Cambridge, from the year 1780, he observes:—

Drunkenness was the besetting sin of the period when I came to college. I need scarcely add that many other vices followed in its train.

Again, speaking of a college friend:—

I do not remember ever to have seen him guilty of drunkenness, at that time almost universal.

Again (pp. 147-148):—

For many years during Rev. Charles Simeon’s ministry (I speak from my own personal knowledge) Trinity Church and the streets leading to it were the scenes of the most disgraceful tumults. On one occasion an undergraduate, who had been apprehended by Simeon, was compelled to read a public apology in the church. Mr. Simeon made a prefatory address: ‘We have long borne during public worship with the most indecent conduct from those whose situation in life should have made them sensible of the heinousness of such offences; we have seen persons coming into this place in a state of intoxication; we have seen them walking about the aisles, notwithstanding there are persons appointed to show them into seats; we have seen them coming in and going out without the slightest reverence or decorum; we have seen them insulting modest persons, both in and after divine service; in short, the devotions of the congregation have been disturbed by almost every species of ill conduct.’

About 1788, Gunning was for some time a tutor in Herefordshire; there he observed that immense quantities of cider were drunk:—

In years when apples were abundant, the labourers in husbandry were allowed to drink as much cider as they thought proper. It was no unusual thing for a man to put his lips to a wooden bottle containing four quarts, and not remove them until he had emptied it. I have myself witnessed this exploit; but I never ventured to mention a circumstance apparently so incredible, until I read Marshall’s History of Herefordshire, in which he relates the same fact.

George Pryme (b. 1781, obiit 1868) in his Autobiographic Recollections, 1870, fully confirms Gunning’s picture of Cambridge:—

When I first went to Cambridge [in 1799] the habit of hard drinking was almost as prevalent there as it was in country society....

‘Buzzing,’ unknown in the present day, was then universal. When the decanter came round to any one, if it was nearly emptied, the next in succession could require him to finish it; but if the quantity left exceeded the bumper, the challenger was obliged to drink the remainder and also a bumper out of the next fresh bottle. There was throughout these parties an endeavour to make each other drunk, and a pride in being able to resist the effects of the wine.

This Pryme was a person of distinction; sometime Fellow of Trinity, first Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge University, and thrice M.P. for the Borough. Moreover he was no teetotaller; though a moderate man, he had full belief in the medicinal virtue of brandy. And he had reason; for he says:—

In the winter of 1788-9 I was attacked by a severe fever, and was attended by Dr. Storer of Nottingham, the most eminent physician in that part of the country. After prescribing every medicine that he could think of as suitable to the case, he called one evening on my mother but declined seeing me, as he said everything had been tried, and that giving more medicine was only harassing me in vain. He however asked a few questions about me, and was told that I had repeatedly begged for brandy. He mixed some in a wine-glass with water, which I eagerly drank and asked for more; he then mixed a second glass. The next forenoon he called to inquire if I was still alive, and was told that I had had a good night and was much better. He saw me, and from that time I steadily recovered.

The habits of a University are very fair tests of the habits of the more affluent, and upper middle classes of the nation. Outside this for the most part is the great class generally known as tradesmen. Probably nothing has contributed so much to the deterioration of this class, as the almost invariable habit of spending the evening in some hotel or tavern. It is still common in Germany. It is much to be hoped that it is dying out in England. Charles Knight, in his Passages of a Working Life, seems to speak of it as universally the case early in the present century. He speaks of the tradesmen as habitually

Sallying forth to spend their long evenings in their accustomed chairs at the ale-house, which had become their second home. Some had a notion that they secured custom to the shop by a constant round among the numerous hostelries. I knew a most worthy man, occupying a large house which his forefathers had occupied from the time of Queen Anne, who, when he gave up the business to his son, who, recently married, preferred his own fireside, told the innovator that he would infallibly be ruined if he did not go out to make friends over his evening glass.

But does not every grade in society sensibly or insensibly take its cue from that immediately above it? And what were those who should have set a virtuous example doing? How much have such men to answer for, as Byron, Porson, Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Smart, Lamb, and Churchill!

Of the first named, it has been observed that when he was not impairing a naturally delicate constitution with drastic medicines and protracted fasts, he would sometimes eat and drink excessively. And this was especially the case in fits of mortification. Everyone will remember the circumstance of the Edinburgh Review proscribing Byron’s early production, Hours of Idleness. Though he affected indifference, and spoke of the critique as a paper bullet of the brain, yet he afterwards acknowledged that he tried to drown his irritation on the day he read it with three bottles of claret after dinner. His excesses of all kinds, in his continental life, are matters of history. They are usually considered to have contributed to terminate his fever fatally. This recalls his clever lines:—

On a Carrier who died of Drunkenness.

John Adams lies here, of the parish of Southwell:
A carrier who carried his can to his mouth well;
He carried so much, and he carried so fast,
He could carry no more, so was carried at last;
For the liquor he drank being too much for one,
He could not carry off, so he’s now carrion.

Charles Churchill, the author of the Rosciad, was a sad drunkard. The caricature drawn of him by Hogarth will be remembered. A number of them had met as usual at their whist club in the Bedford Arms parlour. There it was that Churchill insulted Hogarth, called him a ‘very shallow fellow,’ and afterwards in writing derided the man, his productions, and his belongings. Hogarth revenged the sneer. He converted an old copper-plate into a palimpsest, on which he drew a caricature of Churchill as a growling bear with the ragged canonicals of a parson (for such the poet had been), a pot of porter by his side, and a ragged staff in his paw, each knot inscribed ‘lye.’

Theodore Hook was a highly convivial man. In a memoir of this once popular man, it is stated that the disorder under which he long laboured arose from a diseased state of the liver and stomach, brought on partly by anxiety, but chiefly, it is to be feared, by that habit of over indulgence at table, the curse of colonial life. (At the instance of the Prince Regent he had obtained a Government appointment in the Mauritius.)

A stanza of his own composition reveals in brief the man:—

Then now I’m resolved at all sorrows to blink—
Since winking’s the tippy I’ll tip ‘em the wink,
I’ll never get drunk when I cannot get drink,
Nor ever let misery bore me.
I sneer at the Fates, and I laugh at their spite,
I sit down contented to sit up all night,
And when my time comes, from the world take my flight,
For—my father did so before me.[226]

The name of Charles Lamb will naturally suggest itself. Of him one would fain observe silence in this connection. He must at any rate speak for himself: ‘A small eater but not drinker.’ He acknowledges a partiality for the production of the juniper. This would probably prepossess Hazlitt, who observes in his Thoughts and Maxims: ‘We like a convivial character better than an abstemious one, because the idea of conviviality in the first instance is pleasanter than that of sobriety.’ Lamb considered it a great qualification in his father that he made punch better than any man of his degree in England. C. Lamb was a schoolfellow of S. T. Coleridge, and something more—a friend, not of a day, but of a life. Severed during the University career of the Lake poet, the friendship was maintained by occasional visits of the latter to town, where at the Salutation and Cat, they supped, heard the midnight chimes, and possibly heard the clock strike one several times, in the little smoky room now historical. More than twenty years passed, and Lamb is found dedicating his works, then first collected, to the same old friend. Meantime, countless letters pass between them; on Lamb’s part the lower side of the convivial blending too freely with the literary. Does he anticipate a visit to his friend? The joy is infinitely heightened by the prospect of the tavern and the ‘egg-hot.’ Nor does he blush to confess ‘I am writing at random, and half tipsy.’

In his The Old Familiar Faces, he writes:—

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom-cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Reference need not be made to that terribly tragical dissertation in his incomparable Essays of Elia, entitled The Confessions of a Drunkard. The passage which begins: ‘The waters have gone over me, but out of the dark depths could I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have set foot on that perilous flood,’ is familiar to most lovers of literature. But whether the dismal language is the mirror of his own experience, may remain a moot point. However, facts contradict the assertion of Barry Cornwall, that ‘much injustice has been done to Lamb, by accusing him of excess in drinking,’ and Hazlitt was perfectly justified in unequivocally stating what he had taken scrupulous pains to verify. Thus much admitted, we may endorse the sentiment expressed so feelingly:—

We admire his genius; we love the kind nature which appears in all his writings; and we cherish his memory as much as if we had known him personally.[227]

From the social man of letters, we turn to one who moved in a far wider circle; who, in Byron’s opinion, wrote the best comedy, the best opera, the best farce, the best address, and delivered the very best oration ever conceived or heard in this country—Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He, like Lamb, can be judged out of his own mouth. It was he who with piquant humour declared that he could drink with advantage any given quantity of wine. Wine, says his biographer, Tom Moore, was one of his favourite helps to inspiration: ‘If the thought (he would say) is slow to come, a glass of good wine encourages it, and when it does come, a glass of good wine rewards it.’ To the same effect, Leigh Hunt remarks: ‘His table songs are always admirable. When he was drinking wine he was thoroughly in earnest.’ Lady Holland, at whose house Sheridan was a constant guest, told Moore that he used to take a bottle of wine and a book up to bed with him always; the former alone intended for use. He took spirits with his morning tea or coffee, and on his way from Holland House to town, invariably stopped at the old roadside inn, the Adam and Eve, where he ran up a long bill which Lord Holland was left the privilege of paying.

In the very amusing and instructive Reminiscences of Captain Gronow, speaking of Sheridan’s prosperity, the author urges:—

Many of the follies and extravagances that marked the life of this gifted but reckless personage must be attributed to the times in which he existed. Drinking was the fashion of the day. The Prince [Regent], Mr. Pitt, Dundas, the Lord Chancellor Eldon, and many others who gave the tone to society, would, if they now appeared at an evening party, ‘as was their custom of an afternoon,’ be pronounced fit for nothing but bed. A three-bottle man was not an unusual guest at a fashionable table; and the night was invariably spent in drinking bad port wine to an enormous extent.

The same writer observes:—

Drinking and play were more universally indulged in then [about 1814] than at the present time, and many men still living must remember the couple of bottles of port at least which accompanied his dinner in those days.... The dinner-party, commencing at seven or eight, frequently did not break up before one in the morning. There were then four and even five-bottle men; and the only thing that saved them was drinking very slowly, and out of very small glasses. The learned head of the law, Lord Eldon, and his brother Lord Stowell, used to say that they had drunk more bad port than any two men in England; indeed, the former was rather apt to be overtaken, and to speak occasionally somewhat thicker than natural after long and heavy potations. The late Lords Panmure, Dufferin, and Blayney, wonderful to relate, were six-bottle men at this time; and I really think that if the good society of 1815 could appear before their more moderate descendants, in the state they were generally reduced to after dinner, the moderns would pronounce their ancestors fit for nothing but bed.

Sheridan’s success in life, as well as his attachment to party, was mainly owing to his connection with one of whom we shall next speak, viz. Charles James Fox. A few months after his first appointment to office, Walpole went to the House to hear the young orator, and he tells us—

More than once is he said to have taken his place in the House of Commons in a state of absolute intoxication.

Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, M.P., gives in his Early History of Charles James Fox a very bad picture of the drinking habits of great men in England at that period.

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.

The following anecdote is told of him:—

His Autumn came out in 1730, in which occur the lines:—

But first the fuel’d chimney blazes wide;
The tankards foam; and the strong table groans
Beneath the smoking sirloin, stretch’d immense
From side to side; in which with desperate knife
The deep incision make, and talk the while
Of England’s glory, ne’er to be defaced
While hence they borrow vigour; or amain
Into the pasty plunged at intervals,
If stomach keen can intervals allow,
Relating all the glories of the chace.
Then sated Hunger bids his brother Thirst
Produce the mighty bowl; the mighty bowl,
Swell’d high with fiery juice, steams liberal round
A potent gale, delicious as the breath
Of MÄia to the love-sick shepherdess
On violets diffus’d, while soft she hears
Her panting shepherd stealing to her arms.
Nor wanting is the brown October, drawn
Mature and perfect from his dark retreat
Of thirty years; and now his honest front
Flames in the light refulgent, not afraid
Even with the vineyard’s best produce to vie.
****
At last these puling idlenesses laid
Aside, frequent and full the dry divan
Close in firm circle; and set ardent in
For serious drinking. Nor evasion sly,
Nor sober shift, is to the puking wretch
Indulg’d apart; but earnest brimming bowls
Lave every soul, the table floating round,
And pavement, faithless to the fuddled foot.
****
Before their maudlin eyes
Seen dim and blue the double tapers dance,
Like the sun wading through the misty sky.
Then sliding soft, they drop. Confus’d above
Glasses and bottles, pipes and gazeteers,
As if the table even itself was drunk,
Lie a wet broken scene; and wide below
Is heap’d the social slaughter: where astride
The lubber Power in filthy triumph sits
Slumbrous, inclining still from side to side,
And steeps them drench’d in potent sleep till morn.
Perhaps some doctor, of tremendous paunch
Awful and deep, a black abyss of drink,
Outlives them all; and from his buried flock
Retiring, full of rumination sad,
Laments the weakness of these latter times.

In Autumn, somewhat later, he sings the praises of cider:—

The piercing cider for the thirsty tongue;
Thy native theme and boon inspirer too,
Phillips, Pomona’s bard, the second thou
Who nobly durst in rhyme-unfetter’d verse
With British freedom sing the British song;
How from Silurian vats high-sparkling wines
Foam in transparent floods; some strong to cheer
The wintry revels of the labouring hind;
And tasteful some to cool the summer hours.

Again, we read a few lines later of the autumnal vintage:—

Round the raised nations pours the cup of joy:
The claret smooth, red as the lip we press
In sparkling fancy while we drain the bowl;
The mellow-tasted Burgundy; and quick
As is the wit it gives the gay champagne.

Wordsworth says of the Seasons:—‘Much of it is written from himself.’ Probably this is true.

In 1798 was published a collection of the dramatic works of John O’Keefe. In the following lines from his Poor Soldier occurs a phrase which has become household:—

Dear Tom, this brown jug that now foams with mild ale,
From which I now drink to sweet Nan of the Vale,
Was once Toby Filpot’s, a thirsty old soul
As e’er cracked a bottle or fathomed a bowl.

The allusion is simply to drunken frolics, during which glass was broken. Mr. Oldbuck says in the Antiquary:—‘We never were glass-breakers in this house.’

In 1805 Robert Bloomfield published his rural poem, the Farmer’s Boy. It is a very humorous and suggestive account of the manners of clod-hopping England as engaged about the Harvest-home supper in Suffolk and Norfolk, here entitled the Horkey. This has been already discussed. Suffice it to add that Bloomfield’s charming little provincial ballad, entitled, The Horkey, has been recently published by Macmillan, and is abundantly illustrated.

But of all the marvellous issues from the press at the beginning of the present century, nothing could be more monstrous than the publication of a work entitled ‘Ebrietatis Encomium; or, the Praise of Drunkenness, wherein is authentically and most evidently proved the Necessity of Frequently Getting Drunk; and the Practise is most ancient, primitive, and Catholick.’

The author, not unnaturally, thinks that some apology is needed in his preface. He declares that he did not undertake the work on account of any zeal he had for wine, but only to divert himself(!), and not to lose a great many curious remarks he had made upon this most Catholic liquid.

Verily, ‘nulli vitio unquam defuit advocatus.’ He seems to have hunted up bon-mots, or rather mal-mots from every toping author that was to hand, e.g. he cites Seneca (De Tranquillitate):—‘As drunkenness causes some distempers, so it is a sovereign remedy for our sorrows.’ Propertius—‘Alas! so then wine lives longer than man, let us then sit down and drink bumpers; life and wine are the same thing.’ Horace—‘That nectar which the blessed vines produce, the height of all our joy and wishes here.’ La Motte:—

A l’envi laissons nous saisir,
Aux transports d’une douce ivresse:
Qu’importe si c’est un plaisir,
Que ce soit folie ou sagesse.

These are specimens of the sources from which the author, ‘Boniface Oinophilus’ drew.[228]

But we travel to far other soil.

The poet Cowper [b. 1781, d. 1800], the intellectual ancestor of Wordsworth, has several pictures of his times in his writings.

With a lofty and noble morality does he describe the truly gay:—

Whom call we gay? That honour has been long
The boast of mere pretenders to the name.
The innocent are gay—the lark is gay,
That dries his feathers saturate with dew
Beneath the rosy cloud, while yet the beams
Of dayspring overshoot his humble nest.
The peasant too, a witness of his song,
Himself a songster, is as gay as he.
But save me from the gaiety of those
Whose headaches nail them to a noon-day bed;
And save me too from theirs whose haggard eyes
Flash desperation, and betray their pangs
For property stripp’d off by cruel chance;
From gaiety that fills the bones with pain,
The mouth with blasphemy, the heart with woe.
The Task, Book I., ‘The Sofa.’

Noble lines these, breathing much of the spirit of Horace’s noble ethics:—

Non possidentem multa vocaveris
Recte beatum. Rectius occupat
Nomen beati qui deorum
Muneribus sapienter uti,
Calletque duram pauperiem pati,
Pejusque leto flagitium timet.
Non ille pro caris amicis,
Non patri timidus perire.

There was not perhaps much need for our poet to dread the gout:—

Oh may I live exempted (while I live
Guiltless of pamper’d appetite obscene),
From pangs arthritic, that infest the toe
Of libertine Excess!
The Task, Book I., ‘The Sofa.’

Certainly not if the following picture was his usual evening condition:—

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
The Task, Book IV., ‘The Winter Evening.’

Commenting upon the usual misquotation of this passage, which provincial newspapers make a point of rendering:—‘The cup that cheers’ &c., Cuthbert Bede adds:—

But this sort of evening was not the usual evening in England in 1785. Much more frequently was the evening spent in what our poet himself calls ‘the quenchless thirst of ruinous ebriety,’ and describes in the following lines (Task, lib. iv.):—

Pass where we may, through city or through town,
Village or hamlet of this merry land,
Though lean and beggar’d, every twentieth pace
Conducts the unguarded nose to such a whiff
Of stale debauch, forth issuing from the styes
That Law has licensed, as makes Temperance reel.
There sit, involved and lost in curling clouds
Of Indian fume, and guzzling deep, the boor,
The lackey, and the groom: the craftsman there
Takes a Lethean leave of all his toil;
Smith, cobbler, joiner, he that plies the shears,
And he that kneads the dough; all aloud alike,
All learned, and all drunk! the fiddle screams
Plaintive and piteous, as it wept and wail’d
Its wasted tones and harmony unheard.
****
‘Tis here they learn
The road that leads from competence and peace
To indigence and rapine; till at last
Society, grown weary of the load,
Shakes her encumber’d lap, and casts them out.
But censure profits little: vain the attempt
To advertise in verse a public pest
That, like the filth with which the peasant feeds
His hungry acres, stinks and is of use.
The excise is fatten’d with the rich result
Of all this riot: and ten thousand casks
For ever dribbling out their base contents,
Touch’d by the Midas finger of the State,
Bleed gold for ministers to sport away.
Drink and be mad then; ‘tis your country bids!
Gloriously drunk obey the important call!
Her cause demands the assistance of your throats
Ye all can swallow, and she asks no more.

Towards the end of the progress of error is the sage advice:—

With caution taste the sweet CircÆan cup;
He that sips often at last drinks it up.
Habits are soon assumed, but when we strive
To strip them off ‘tis being flayed alive.
Call’d to the temple of impure delight
He that abstains, and he alone, does right.

Finally, an admirable moral is contained in the lines:—

Pleasure admitted in undue degree
Enslaves the will, nor leaves the judgment free.
‘Tis not alone the grape’s enticing juice
Unnerves the moral powers, and mars their use;
Ambition, avarice, and the lust of fame,
And woman, lovely woman, does the same.

Wordsworth was a most abstemious man. He and his wife drank water, and ate the simplest fare. When Scott stayed with him at Rydal Mount, he had to hie him to the nearest public-house not unfrequently.

Myers has observed, in his monograph on the poet in English Men of Letters:—

The poet Southey’s opinion of the ale-house, versus the home, is as true of our own times as his own:—

Of the drink itself he writes:—

But Thalaba took not the draught,
For right he knew the Prophet had forbidden
That beverage, the mother of sins;
Nor did the urgent guests
Proffer the second time the liquid fire,
For in the youth’s strong eye they saw
No movable resolve.

William Playfair, the famous political economist, wrote in 1805 his Enquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. He has some striking remarks upon the bearing of revenue upon the drink traffic:—

We now pass to some of the political action of the reign. In 1768, Sir Francis Dashwood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed a new tax on cider and perry, amounting to ten shillings on the hogshead. Earl Stanhope states that the outcry was so vehement that a modification of the scheme was all that was granted, and four shillings were to be paid by the grower. In the Upper House the Bill was also strongly opposed, but the Ministry carried the point. Bute incurred much odium. People compared the rash disregard of popular opinion with which this measure was pushed through with the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole, who had bowed to the public demonstrations against his system of excise; and when Bute’s resignation was announced many ascribed his retreat to the alarm raised by the popular indignation. A caricature entitled, The Roasted Exciseman; or, the Jack Boot’s exit, represents the enraged mob burning the effigy of a Scotchman suspended on a gallows; a great worn boot lies on the bonfire, into which a man is throwing an excised cider barrel as fuel.

The City of London presented a petition against the tax at the bar of the House of Commons, but to no effect; and in the cider counties it was found hard indeed to enforce the duties imposed.

One of many lachrymations was Benjamin Heath’s The Case of the County of Devon, 1763. An address to honest English hearts, being an honest countryman’s reflections on the cider tax, 1763. Some plain reasons for the repeal of the cider tax, dedicated to every man who pays taxes, and particularly to the Honourable G—— J——, M.P. for Norfolk, &c., 1763. An address to the electors, such as are not makers of cider and perry, 1787.

The tax on beer, too, early in the reign, had greatly exasperated the mob. The Royal Magazine tells that while their Majesties were at Drury Lane Theatre, to see the Winter’s Tale, as Garrick was repeating the lines:—

‘For you, my hearts of oak, for your regale,
Here’s good old English stingo, mild and stale,’

a fellow cried out of the gallery: ‘At threepence a pot, Master Garrick, or confusion to the brewers!’

Imposts on malt were continually brought forward. The brewers as well as their clients were wild. Mr. Whitbread inveighed on one occasion against the Ministers for laying a war tax upon malt. Sheridan, who was present, could not resist a shy at the brewer. He wrote on a paper the following lines, and handed them to Mr. Whitbread across the table:—

They’ve raised the price of table drink;
What is the reason, do you think?
The tax on malt’s the cause I hear—
But what has malt to do with beer?

In 1791, the House of Commons was again induced to consider the question, and a committee came to the resolution: ‘That the number of persons empowered to retail spirits should be greatly diminished,’ &c. Certain Acts were passed, encouraging the rival trade of the brewers. Grocers were prohibited from selling drams in their shops, &c. The Speaker of the House, in his speech at the bar of the Lords, March, 1795, and in an address delivered on presenting the Bills of Supply, which received the unanimous thanks of the Lower House, thus referred to the excellent result of even these small measures, and at the same time enunciated a pregnant political truth. After alluding to the increased prosperity and resources of the country, and to some measures for decreasing the sale of spirits, he observes: ‘Satisfied, however, that those resources and that prosperity cannot be permanent without an effectual attention to the sobriety of the people, their morals and peaceable subordination to the laws, they have, by an arrangement of duties which promises also an increase of revenue, relieved the brewing [trade] from all restriction of taxes, so as to give it a decided advantage over the distilling, and thereby discourage the too frequent and immoderate use of spirituous liquors, a measure which must conduce to sobriety, tranquillity, and content, and under which the people, encouraged in regular industry, and the consequent acquisition of wealth, must feel the blessings,’ &c., of good government.

Under the dark days that followed, from 1795 to 1800—days of rebellion at home and revolution abroad—this subject was lost sight of, unhappily for the interests of all. The Acts which had initiated so much good, were allowed to expire, discouragement to the use of spirits ceased, grocers were again allowed to dispense the drug to women and families, and debauchery rioted and revelled as before.[229]

In 1796, among the next taxes introduced, was an additional duty of twenty pounds per butt on wine. Discontent ensued. Pitt’s alleged propensity furnished the material for satire. Gillray represented him under the character of Bacchus, and his friend Dundas under that of Silenus, in a caricature entitled The Wine Duty, or the Triumph of Bacchus and Silenus. John Bull, with empty bottle and empty purse, and with long face, addresses his remonstrance: ‘Pray, Mr. Bacchus, have a bit of consideration for old John; you know as how I’ve emptied my purse already for you, and it’s woundedly hard to raise the price of a drop of comfort, now that one’s got no money left for to pay for it!’

Among the taxes of 1799 was one upon beer, which would have the effect of raising the price of porter to fourpence the pot, and which would most affect the working classes. The Tory satirists pretended to sympathise most with the Whig Dr. Parr, a great porter drinker. Gillray published a sketch of the supposed Effusions of a Pot of Porter, or ‘ministerial conjurations for supporting the war, as lately discovered by Dr. P——r, in the froth and fumes of his favourite beverage.’ A pot of four-penny is placed on a stool, from the froth of which arises Pitt, mounted on the white horse, brandishing a flaming sword. The Doctor’s reverie is a satire on the innumerable mischiefs which popular clamour laid to the charge of the Minister:—

Wine was manufactured in England at this period. Sir Richard Worsley tried the experiment of an English vineyard. He planted the most hardy species of vine in a rocky soil at St. Lawrence, Isle of Wight, and engaged a French vine-dresser. He achieved a success, but only temporary. He abandoned the project. A certain Mr. Hamilton attempted the same at Painshill, on a soil of gravelly sand. His first attempt at red wine failed. He then turned his attention to white wine, in which he tells Sir E. Barry, the experiment surpassed his most sanguine expectations. Many good judges thought it better than any champagne they had ever drunk. Such an experience was certainly exceptional.

Faulkner (Antiquities of Kensington) quotes the following memorandum from the MS. notes of Peter Collinson:—

George IV. was born in 1770, and came to the throne in 1820. Intemperance, amidst other vices, was a feature of his moral career. The surroundings of his birth augured ill. Mrs. Draper, who attended the Queen with her two first children, was dismissed from her duties in consequence of her habitual inebriety. His proclivity very nearly cost him dear while yet a youth. At a dinner party at Lord Chesterfield’s house at Blackheath, the whole company drank to excess, and betook themselves to riotous frolic. One of the party let loose a big fierce dog, which at once flew at one of the footmen, tore one of his arms terribly, and nearly strangled a horse. The whole party now formed themselves into a compact body and assailed Towzer, who resolutely defended himself, and had just caught hold of the skirts of the coat of his Royal Highness, when one of the party by a blow on the head felled the dog to the ground. In the confusion, however, the Earl of Chesterfield fell down the steps leading to his house, and severely injured the back of his head. The Prince, who scarcely knew whether he had been fighting a dog or a man, jumped into his phaeton, and there fell asleep, leaving the reins to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who took him safely to town.[230]

The Prince was a member of the Catch and Glee Club at the Thatched House Tavern. He is (says Huish) the reputed author of the second verse to the glee of the Happy Fellow, ‘I’ll ne’er,’ &c.; and of the additional verse to the song, ‘By the gaily circling glass,’ which he used to sing in his convivial moments with great effect. Nothing more distinctly points to the ineradicable nature of his diseased habit, than his conduct upon the arrival of his bride-elect—Caroline of Brunswick. Lord Malmesbury, the sole witness, tells the story:—

The remark of the princess to Malmesbury, was: ‘Mon Dieu, est-ce que le Prince est toujours comme cela?’

Lord Holland has stated that at the wedding the Prince had drunk so much brandy, that he could scarcely be kept upright between two dukes. The reckless extravagance of the Prince involved him in pecuniary straights:—

It must, however, be admitted, that when once upon the throne, he had the rare capability of uniting dignity with hilarity. An incident in connection with a public toast is worthy of narration. When the King visited Scotland, a banquet was given by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh in the Parliament House. The King, in returning thanks for the reception given him, said:—

Thus did the King confer the baronetcy upon the president. A complication of disease terminated his reign in 1880.

The Public-house Regulation Act of 1758 was in force till 1828, when a consolidating Act was passed, with an appeal to justices in quarter sessions.

Its chief provisions are:—

The Distillery Act of 1825 requires notice.

By the enactment of 1825, no person can obtain a licence for conducting a distillery, unless he occupies a tenement of the value of 20l. a year, pays parish rates, and resides within a quarter of a mile of a market town containing 500 inhabited houses. Before obtaining a licence, the amount of which is 10l., he must lodge with the collector, or other officer of excise, an entry or registry of his premises, the several apartments and utensils, specifying the contents of the vessels and the purposes for which they are intended; and every such room and utensil must be properly labelled with its appropriate name and object. With the registry must be delivered a drawing, or description of the construction, use, and course of every fixed pipe in the distillery, as well as of all casks and communications therewith connected. Pipes for the conveyance of worts or wash must be painted red, those for low wines or feints, blue; those for spirits, white; for water, black. No still can be licensed of a less content than 400 gallons, nor can the distiller make spirits at the same time from different materials. The distiller must give notice of the gravity at which he intends to make his wort. These are specimens only of the conditions imposed. Before this enactment, distillation was confined to a few capitalists; but, with a view of encouraging a fair competition in the trade, and inducing the people to take the spirits directly from the distillers, the Act was passed.

The drink temperature was maintained throughout all classes of society. Charles Knight gives an apt description of a Christmas in London in 1824:—

The stronger spirituous liquors were all the rage; and it was under the impression that by making beer, &c., more readily accessible, there would be less demand for the fire-water, that the Beerhouse Act was passed, of which we shall soon speak. But before doing so, let us recall the names of one or two who ranged themselves on the side of temperance.

James Montgomery writes:—

Sydney Smith writes thus to Lady Holland, in 1828:—

In 1824 Carolina Nairne, nÉe Carolina Oliphant, became Baroness Nairne, her husband, Major Nairne, being restored to a barony granted to his family in the time of Charles I.

She appears to be the first writer of a thorough teetotal song. It was entitled Haud ye frae the cogie.

There’s cauld kail in Aberdeen,
There’s custocks in Stra’bogie;
And morn and e’en they’re blythe and bein
That haud them frae the cogie.
Now haud ye frae the cogie, lads:
Oh, bide ye frae the cogie!
I’ll tell ye true, ye’ll never rue
O’ passin by the cogie.
Young Will was braw and weel put on,
Sae blythe was he and vogie;
And he got bonnie Mary Don,
The flower o’ a’ Stra’bogie.
Wha wad ha’e thocht at wooin’ time,
He’d e’er forsaken Mary,
And ta’en him to the tipplin’ trade
Wi’ boozin’ Rob and Harry?
Sair Mary wrought, sair Mary grat,
She scarce could lift the ladle;
Wi’ pithless feet, ‘tween ilka greet,
She’d rock the borrow’d cradle.
Her weddin’ plenishin’ was gane—
She never thocht to borrow;
Her bonnie face was waxin’ wan—
And Will wrought a’ the sorrow.
He’s reelin’ hame ae winter’s nicht,
Some later than the gloamin’;
He’s ta’en the rig, he’s missed the brig,
And Bogie’s o’er him foamin’.
Wi’ broken banes, out ower the stanes,
He creepit up Stra’bogie,
And a’ the nicht he prayed wi’ micht
To keep him frae the cogie.
Now Mary’s heart is light again—
She’s neither sick nor silly;
For auld or young, nae sinfu’ tongue
Could e’er entice her Willie;
And aye her sang through Bogie rang—
‘O haud ye frae the cogie;
The weary gill’s the sairest ill
On braes o’ fair Stra’bogie.’

King William IV. (1830-1837) rigidly practised temperance. Indeed he zealously promoted it before his accession to the throne. One incident may serve as an illustration. On the death of the keeper of Bushy Park, the King, then Duke of Clarence, appointed the keeper’s son to succeed him. This young man broke his leg, a circumstance which elicited the practical sympathy of the Duke. After his recovery, the young man took to drinking; so the Duke, in order to cure him of the propensity, required his attendance every night at eight o’clock, and if he appeared in liquor reprimanded him the following morning. But all to no purpose. The infatuated keeper died from the effects of intemperance.

The King however was fond of giving toasts after dinner, when his prosy speeches were notorious.

The following specimen of toasts at a public banquet is taken from that given on the occasion of the opening of London Bridge.

As soon as the royal visitors had concluded their repast, the Lord Mayor rose, and said: ‘His most gracious Majesty has condescended to permit me to propose a toast. I therefore do myself the high honour to propose that we drink His Most Gracious Majesty’s Health, with four times four.’ The company rose, and, after cheering him in the most enthusiastic manner, sang the national anthem of ‘God save the King.’ His Majesty bowed to all around, and appeared to be much pleased.

Alderman Sir Claudius Hunter then rose, and said: ‘I am honoured with the permission of his Majesty to propose a toast. I therefore beg all his good subjects here assembled to rise, and to drink that ‘Health and every Blessing may attend Her Majesty the Queen.’’ Which was accordingly done, with the utmost enthusiasm.