Chapter X · (continued 2)

One would almost imagine from this, and kindred statements, that vice was unknown to the Protector and his adherents; whereas it is matter of history that Cromwell’s early life was dissolute and disorderly, and that he consumed in gaming, drinking, debauchery, and country riots, the more early years of his youth.[161] The Roundheads liked ale as well as the Cavaliers. Does not Pepys tell of Monk’s troops (Feb. 13, 1659):—‘The city is very open-handed to the soldiers; they are most of them drunk all day’? Surely, then, bias must have possessed Lord Macaulay when he would have us believe that ‘in the Puritan camp no drunkenness was seen.’ Some prefer the evidence of a contemporary.

It is possible to contrast the Courts of the two Charleses, and the contrast is terrible; but was no one responsible besides Charles II. for his wandering life, when he herded with inferiors? If he was a creature of frailty and vice, he was also a creature of circumstance.

Thus much prefaced, let it be freely admitted that drunkenness prevailed in every rank of society, and that the king set the example. Mr. Samuelson adduces from Evelyn, as an instance, a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham when the Prince of Orange was over on a visit, on which occasion the king made the prince drink hard (though he could not have required much making), under the influence of which, the Dutchman broke the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour, with other mischiefs.

Nor does the famous story in the Spectator impress us with his bias towards temperance. The king had been dining with the Lord Mayor at Guildhall, where his cups did not prevent his observing that conviviality had occasioned familiarity; whereupon, with an abrupt farewell, he left the banquet. The mayor pursued the monarch, overtook him in the courtyard, and swore that he should not go till they had ‘drunk t’other bottle!’ The airy monarch looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and, with a smile and graceful air, repeated the line of the old song:—

And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!

and immediately turned back and complied with his host’s bidding.

But the veil is more thoroughly lifted by Pepys, who notes:—

September 23, 1667.—With Sir H. Cholmly to Westminster; who by the way told me how merry the King and Duke of York and Court were the other day, when they were abroad a-hunting. They came to Sir G. Cartaret’s house at Cranbourne, and there were entertained and all made drunk; and, being all drunk, Armerer did come to the king, and swore to him ‘By God, sir,’ says he, ‘you are not so kind to the Duke of York of late as you used to be.’ ‘Not I?’ says the king. ‘Why so?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘if you are, let us drink his health.’ ‘Why let us,’ says the king. Then he fell on his knees and drank it; and having done, the king began to drink it. ‘Nay, sir,’ says Armerer, ‘by God, you must do it on your knees!’ So he did, and then all the company: and having done it, all fell a-crying for joy, being all maudlin and kissing one another, the king the Duke of York, and the Duke of York the king; and in such a maudlin pickle as never people were: and so passed the day.

Again he writes (1661):—

At Court things are in very ill condition, there being so much emulacion, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it but confusion.

Two of the notables about Court have already been alluded to. Rochester—that is, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—in the language of Dr. Johnson, ‘blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness,’ dying at the age of thirty-three. Some lines of his favour the notion that the origin of the term toasting, as given in the Tatler, may be the correct one. They are:—

Make it so large that, fill’d with sack Up to the swelling brim, Vast toasts on the delicious lake, Like ships at sea, may swim.

A confirmation of the same may be derived from a verse of Warton:—

My sober evening let the tankard bless, With toast embrown’d, and fragrant nutmeg fraught, While the rich draught, with oft-repeated whiffs, Tobacco mild improves.

Of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the criticism of Dryden must suffice—lines well known:—

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long. But in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon. Then all for women, paintings, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Another drinking notoriety was Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (n. 1637, ob. 1684).

One of his frolics [says Dr. Johnson] has by the industry of Wood come down to posterity. Sackville, who was then Lord Buckhurst, with Sir Charles Sedley and Sir Thomas Ogle, got drunk at the Cock in Bow Street, by Covent Garden, and going into the balcony utterly disgraced themselves. The public indignation was awakened; the crowd attempted to force the door, and being repulsed drove in the performers with stones, and broke the windows of the house. For this misdemeanour they were indicted, and Sedley was fined five hundred pounds: what was the sentence of the others is not known. Sedley employed Killigrew and another to procure a remission from the king; but (mark the friendship of the dissolute) they begged the fine for themselves, and exacted it to the last groat.

Lord Macaulay, in his History of England, chap. vi. has the following description of the same disgraceful event:—

The morals of Sedley were such as even in that age gave great scandal. He on one occasion, after a wild revel, exhibited himself without a shred of clothing in the balcony of a tavern near Covent Garden, and harangued the people who were passing in language so indecent and profane that he was driven in by a shower of brickbats, was prosecuted for a misdemeanour, was sentenced to a heavy fine, and was reprimanded by the Court of King’s Bench in the most cutting terms.

It is perfectly clear that the higher motives for restraint were lacking, though expediency acted as a curb upon occasions. The following passage from Evelyn’s Diary will serve as an illustration:—

October 30, 1682.—I was invited to dine with Mons. Lionberg, the Swedish Resident, who made a magnificent entertainment, it being the birthday of his king. There dined the Duke of Albemarle, D. of Hamilton, Earle of Bathe, E. of Aylesbury, Lord Arran, Lord Castlehaven, the sonn of him who was executed 50 yeares before, and several greate persons. I was exceeding afraide of drinking (it being a Dutch feast), but the Duke of Albemarle, being that night to waite on his Majestie, excesse was prohibited; and to prevent all, I stole away and left the company as soone as we rose from table.

[Italics not in the original.]

From the same author we find that the same vice beset women of rank. The Duchess of Mazarine, he observes, is reported to have hastened her death by intemperate drinking of strong spirits.

The Lower House of Parliament seems to have been infected with the moral distemper. Evelyn writes:—

December 19, 1666.—Among other things Sir R. Ford did make me understand how the House of Commons is a beast not to be understood, it being impossible to know beforehand the success almost of any small plain thing.... He did tell me, and so did Sir W. Batten, how Sir Allen Brodericke and Sir Allen Apsly did come drunk the other day into the House, and did both speak for half an hour together, and could not be either laughed, or pulled, or bid to sit down and hold their peace, to the great contempt of the king’s servants and cause; which I am grieved at with all my heart.

(What made this worse was that Sir Allen Brodericke was an official—Surveyor-General in Ireland to his Majesty.)

But there was a vast amount of drinking that is really intemperance, though it passes under another name. Very apposite are the words of a contemporary, Sir William Temple:—

Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy; ... the best guardian of youth, and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion; and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelar goddess of health, and universal medicine of life, that clears the head and cleanses the blood, that eases the stomach, and purges the bowels, that strengthens the nerves, enlightens the eyes, and comforts the heart; in a word, that secures and perfects the digestion.... I do not allow the pretence of temperance to all such as are seldom or never drunk, or fall into surfeits; for men may lose their health without losing their senses, and be intemperate every day, without being drunk perhaps once in their lives; nay, for aught I know, if a man should pass the month in a college diet, without excess or variety of meats or of drinks, but only the last day give a loose in them both, and so far till it comes to serve him for physic rather than food, and he utter his stomach as well as his heart, he may perhaps, as to the mere considerations of health, do much better than another that eats every day ... in plenty and luxury, with great variety of meats, and a dozen glasses of wine at a meal, still spurring up appetite when it would lie down of itself; flushed every day, but never drunk.[162]

It is refreshing in reading Johnson’s Lives to come upon a poet really free from a suspicion of fondness for drink. Such a one was Edmund Waller, born 1605, died 1687. Would he have lived so long had he been a drink-hard? Johnson remarks of him:—

In the first parliament summoned by Charles the Second (March 8, 1661) Waller sat for Hastings, in Sussex, and served for different places in all the parliaments of that reign. In a time when fancy and gaiety were the most powerful recommendations to regard, it is not likely that Waller was forgotten. He passed his time in the company that was highest both in rank and wit, from which even his obstinate sobriety did not exclude him. Though he drank water, he was enabled by his fertility of mind to heighten the mirth of Bacchanalian assemblies; and Mr. Saville said that ‘no man in England should keep him company without drinking but Ned Waller.’

An excellent companion for the poet would have been Guy, Earl of Warwick, in whose ‘Tragical History’ occur the lines:—

Phillis. Give me some bread. I prithee, father, eat. Guy. Give me brown bread, for that’s a pilgrim’s meat. Phillis. Reach me some wine; good father, taste of this. Guy. Give me cold water, that my comfort is. I tell you, Lady, your great Lord and I Have thought ourselves as happy as a king, To drink the water of a christal spring.

Coffee came into general use in England, according to John Evelyn (Diary), about 1667. But he records, under date May 1637, that ‘one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was the first he ever saw drink coffee.’

Tea became a fashionable beverage in England soon after the marriage of Catharine of Braganza with Charles II. It was not exactly introduced by her, as it was procurable in London some months, at any rate, before her marriage; for Pepys writes:—‘Sept. 28, 1660.—I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.’ Yet she set the fashion for the use of it. Strickland rightly considers that the use of these simple luxuries, tea, coffee, and chocolate, had gradually a beneficial influence on the manners of all classes of society, by forming a counter-charm against habits of intoxication. Waller wrote a complimentary poem on the queen, commending tea, in which are the lines:—

The best of Queens and best of herbs we owe To that bold nation, who the way did show To the fair region where the sun doth rise.

All sorts of things have been scribbled about it, good, bad, and indifferent. The same Waller writes:—

The Muses’ friend, Tea, does our fancy aid, Repress the vapours which the head invade, And keeps the palace of the soul serene.

Young could write, on the other hand:—

Tea; how I tremble at thy fatal stream! As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame. What devastations on thy banks are seen! What shades of mighty names which once have been! A hecatomb of characters supplies Thy painted altars’ daily sacrifice.

In sympathy with Young would be Dr. Parr, in the well-known line of gallantry:—

Nec tea-cum possum vivere, nec sine te.

or, in mother tongue—

When failing tea, my soul and body thrive, But failing thee, no longer I survive.

The epigram is still more severe:—

If wine be poison, so is Tea—but in another shape— What matter whether we are kill’d by canister or grape?

We still plump for tea.

One word before leaving the drink of the Restoration. Some may be curious to inquire the nature of their cups. Pepys, telling of his dining at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, says:—

Plenty of wine of all sorts; but it was very unpleasing that we had no napkins nor change of trenchers, and drunk out of earthen pitchers and wooden dishes (cups).

Chaffers remarks that probably pitchers and large pots were usually made of earth and leather, while the cups, or dishes, out of which the liquor was drunk, were of ash; or sometimes, among the more opulent, from cups or tankards of silver:—

His cupboard’s head six earthen pitchers graced, Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed. Dryden’s Juvenal.

It may be here mentioned that Dryden immensely prided himself on his Bacchanalian song entitled Alexander’s Feast. He wrote to his publisher, ‘I am glad to hear from all hands that my ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry.’ Stanza III. is a sufficient specimen:—

The praise of Bacchus then the sweet Musician sung, Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young: The jolly god in triumph comes; Sound the trumpets; beat the drums! Flush’d with a purple grace He shows his honest face. Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and young, Drinking joys did first ordain: Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure, Drinking is the soldiers’ pleasure: Rich the treasure, Sweet the pleasure, Sweet is pleasure after pain.

Legislation.

The Wine Acts of Car. II. were those known as 12 Charles and 22 & 23 Charles. Early in his reign he issued that remarkable proclamation, which could not but reflect on his favourite companions and strongly mark the moral disorders of those depraved times.[163] It is against ‘vicious, debauch’d, and profane persons,’ who are thus described:—

A sort of men of whom we are sufficiently ashamed, who spend their time in taverns, tippling-houses, and debauches, giving no other evidence of their affection to us but in drinking our health, and inveighing against all others who are not of their own dissolute temper; and who in truth have more discredited our cause by the license of their manners and lives, than they could ever advance it by their affection or courage. We hope all persons of honour, or in place and authority, will so far assist us in discountenancing such men, that their discretion and shame will persuade them to reform what their conscience would not; and that the displeasure of good men towards them may supply what the laws have not, and, it may be, cannot well provide against; there being by the license and corruption of the times, and the depraved nature of man, many enormities, scandals, and impieties, which laws cannot well provide against, which may, by the example and severity of virtuous men, be easily discountenanced and by degrees suppressed.

Blackstone, speaking of the king’s ordinary revenue, observes that a seventh branch might also be computed to have arisen from wine licences, or the rents payable to the Crown by such persons as are licensed to sell wine by retail throughout England, except in a few privileged places. These were first settled on the Crown by the statute 12 Car. II. c. 25, and, together with the hereditary excise, made up the equivalent in value for the loss sustained by the prerogative in the abolition of the military tenures, and the right of pre-emption and purveyance; but this revenue was abolished by 30 Geo. II. c. 19, and an annual sum of upwards of 7,000l. per annum, issuing out of the new stamp duties imposed on wine licences, was settled on the Crown in its stead.[164]

The prices of wines were fixed anew. By 12 Car. II. it was provided that no canary, muskadel, or aligant, or other Spanish or sweet wines, should be sold by retail for over 1s. 6d. the quart; Gascoigne and French wines limited to 8d. the quart, Rhenish wines to 12d.

From the reign of the Norman kings here, to 1660, the wines of Guienne, Poitou, and Gascony came in, subject to moderate dues, until the reign of Charles II. The amount of duties by 12 Charles II. c. 4, was 13l. 10s. per tun in London, and 16l. 10s. in the out-ports. This was at the rate of 13¼d. the gallon. The trade with France after the Revolution seems to have been carried on upon an equitable footing until 1675, when one of those popular alarms that often disgrace this country was raised, that France was ruining us, for there was a balance of trade against us of 965,128l. Land happened at the time to have fallen in price. The landed interest was shipwrecked; all, it was averred, in consequence of the money of England going over to France for the purchase of her productions. Cries were uttered like those when the calendar was rectified, ‘Give us back our ten days,’ or the old ‘No Popery,’ ‘the Church in danger,’ or more recently the cry of ‘French invasion,’ echoed from all sides, amid the shouts of the ignorant or interested. England was on the brink of ruin, if they were to be credited. The treaty of commerce concluded was soon hooted down, and in 1678, Parliament, the wisdom of which used sometimes to be very problematical, came to a vote declaring that the ‘trade with France was detrimental to the kingdom!’ An Act of absolute wisdom in the legislative sense of that time followed, the preamble of which ran, ‘Forasmuch as it hath been by long experience found that the importing French wines, brandy, silks, linen, salts, and paper, and other commodities of the growth, product, or manufactures of the territories and dominions of the French king, hath much exhausted the treasure of this nation, lessened the value of the native commodities and manufactures thereof, and caused great detriment to this kingdom, &c.’

It was also averred that, in consequence, rents fell. French wine was therefore prohibited from 1679 to 1685.[165]

We form an idea of the Ingredients put into wines from the order of 12 Car. II. c. 25:—

That no merchant, vintner, wine-cooper or other person, selling or retailing any wine, shall mingle or utter any Spanish wine mingled with any French wine, or Rhenish wine, cyder, perry, stummed wine, honey, sugar, syrups of sugar, molasses, or any other syrups whatsoever: nor put in any isinglass, brimstone, lime, raisins, juice of raisins, water, nor any other liquor nor ingredients, nor any clary or other herbs, nor any sort of flesh whatsoever.

The excise duties on superior beer was 1s. 3d.; on inferior, 3d.; on a hogshead of cider or perry, 1s. 3d.; on a gallon of mead, ½d.; on a gallon of aqua-vitæ, 1d.; on a gallon of coffee, 4d.; on a gallon of chocolate or tea, 8d. In 1670, brandy had a duty imposed on it of 8d. a gallon when imported.

Upon the accession of

James II.

after the dinner at Guildhall, their Majesties were beset with numerous crowds whose shouts declared their joy. When they reached Ludgate, a rank of loyal gentlemen stood in a balcony, charged with full glasses, which they discharged in such excellent order, that caused all the guards to answer them with a huzza![166]

John Evelyn was ordered by the sheriff to assist in proclaiming the king. He thus describes the event:—

I met the Sheriff and commander of the Kentish Troop, with an appearance, I suppose, of above 500 horse and innumerable people, two of his Majesty’s trumpets, and a Sergeant with other officers, who, having drawn up the horse in a large field neere the towne, march’d thence with swords drawne, to the Market Place, where, making a ring after sound of trumpets and silence made, the High Sheriff read the proclaiming titles to his Bailiffe, who repeated them aloud, and then, after many shouts of the people, his Majesty’s health being drunk in a flint glass of a yard long by the Sheriff, commander, officers, and chief gentlemen, they all dispersed and I returned.

Here is an answer to the question, ‘What is a yard of ale?’ Before the standard measures were in general use, ale was measured out in this ale-yard, which was a flint-glass a yard long, of sufficient capacity to admit a saccharometer which was a test of its strength and quality.

Many of the old ceremonies observed at the coronation banquets of the early kings were revived by James. Amongst these, the following usage may be noted. After thrice flinging down the gauntlet, the champion made his obeisance to the king, who drank to him from a gilt bowl, which he then returned with the cover. The champion then pledged his Majesty, and rode out of the hall, taking bowl and cover as his fee.

But such ceremonies are not to be taken as any indication of a proneness of the king to high living. Hard drinking he hated. A contemporary writes that:—

The king, going to Mass, told his attendants he had been informed that since his declaring against the disorder of the household, some had the impudence to appear drunk in the queen’s presence ... but he advised them at their peril to observe his order, which he would see obeyed.[167]

Much light has been thrown upon the general habits of the period by Lord Macaulay, who, in describing the English country gentleman of 1688, remarks:—

His chief serious employment was the care of his property. He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and on market days made bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports, and from an unrefined sensuality.... His table was loaded with coarse plenty, and guests were cordially welcome to it. But as the habit of drinking was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The quantity of beer consumed in those days was indeed enormous, for beer then was to the middle and lower classes not only all that beer now is, but all that wine, tea, and ardent spirits now are; it was only at great houses, or on great occasions, that foreign drink was placed on the board. The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table.

Mr. Lecky observes:—

Among the poor ... the popular beverage was still ale or beer, the use of which—especially before the art of noxious adulteration was brought to its present perfection—has always been more common than the abuse. The consumption appears to have been amazing. It was computed in 1688 that no less than 12,400,000 barrels were brewed in England in a single year, though the entire population probably little exceeded 5,000,000. In 1695, with a somewhat heavier excise, it sank to 11,350,000 barrels, but even then almost a third part of the arable land of the kingdom was devoted to barley.

More bluntly, of course, than Macaulay, did that scourge of iniquity, Jeremy Collier, express himself. Satirising dinner invitations, he writes:—

If the invitation was sent in a letter, and the truth spoken out, it must run in the tenor following: ‘Sir, if you please to do me the favour to dine with me, I shall do my best to drink you out of your limbs and senses, to make you say a hundred silly things, and play the fool to purpose, if ever you did it in your life. And before we part you shall be well prepared to tumble off your horse, to disoblige your coach, and make your family sick at the sight of you. And all this for an opportunity of showing with how much friendship and respect I am your humble servant.’

That the delights of the table were the one thing needful is well illustrated by a cross-examination recorded by Mr. Jeaffreson[168]:—

‘You know Lord Barrymore?’ Dr. Beaufort was asked by the lords of the Privy Council. ‘Intimately, most intimately,’ replied the Doctor. ‘You are continually with him?’ urged the questioner. ‘We dine together almost daily when his lordship is in town.’ ‘What do you talk about?’ ‘Eating and drinking.’ ‘And what else?’ ‘Oh, my lord, we never talk of anything except eating and drinking, drinking and eating.’

The habit of toasting had much to do with the excesses then so common. At the birth of the male heir to the throne, claret was drunk at the expense of the Crown, and endless glasses broken in drinking the health of their Majesties and the Prince Stuart at the Edinburgh town cross. Even the malcontent city of York drank deep potations.

Rhyming toasts were then in fashion. A Court gossip writes to Lady Rachel Russell:—‘I know not whether you have heard a health that goes about, which is new to me just now, so I send it you:—

The King God bless, And each princess, The Church no less, Which we profess, As did Queen Bess.’

No doubt great abuses attended this habit of health-drinking, or we should not find Dekker, Thomas Hall, and, indeed, the moralists almost to a man, inveighing against the custom. It was only a few years before this reign that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, left the injunction to his grandchildren:—

I will not have you begin or pledge any health, for it is become one of the greatest artifices of drinking and occasions of quarrelling in the kingdom. If you pledge one health you oblige yourself to pledge another, and a third, and so onward, and if you pledge as many as will be drank, you must be debauched and drunk. If they will needs know the reason of your refusal, it is a fair answer—that your grandfather who brought you up, from whom under God you have the estate you enjoy or expect, left this in command with you that you should never begin or pledge a health.

What a contrast does Justice Hale present to the merciless Judge Jeffries, whose habitual intemperance may account for his actions. Nor should it be forgotten that Sir Henry Bellasyse, whose widow the king was so anxious to marry, was killed in a duel whilst in a state of intoxication.

A very important reminder is to be found in an Act of 1685, to the effect that—

The ancient true and principal use of ale-houses was for the lodging of wayfaring people, and for the supply of the wants of such as were not able by greater quantities to make their provisions of victuals, and not for entertainment and harbouring of lewd and idle people, to spend their time and money in a lewd and drunken manner.

An event which occurred in this short reign immortalised a roadside inn. The Revolution House, at Whittington, obtained its name from the accidental meeting of the Earl of Danby, the Earl of Devonshire, Lord Delamere, and Mr. John D’Arcy, one morning in 1688, on Whittington Moor, near Chatsworth, to consult about the Revolution, then in agitation. A shower of rain happening to fall, they removed to the village for shelter, and finished their conversation at a public-house called The Cock and Pynot.[169]

A fashionable spirit in this and the following reign was Jamaica Rum. When the Duke of Monmouth was being brought to London as a prisoner, in 1685, he took for a bad cold, at Romsey, while staying on his saddle, a hot glass of rum and eggs. Hot coffee would probably have done him more good. We have already noticed that it came into use in Charles II.’s time. Sir Anthony Shirley described it as made of a seed which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome. Pope went further, writing in his Rape of the Lock—

Coffee, which makes the politician wise, And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Upon the accession of

William III.

the usual pageant was observed in London. The conduits ran with wine. The same reception greeted the king shortly after at Oxford. The drinking habits of the monarch are well known, though Evelyn speaks of him as naturally averse to drink. After the death of the queen, he became more addicted to his favourite drink, Hollands gin. The banqueting-house at Hampton Court, which was used by him as a drinking and smoking room, has been described as a royal gin-temple. Enemies he had in abundance, and so intense was their hatred, that, in their hours of debauch, they drank to the health of Sorrel, meaning the horse that fell with the king, and, under the appellation of the ‘little gentleman in velvet,’ toasted the mole that raised the hill over which the horse had stumbled.[170] Let us hope that it was the same hostility that accused the queen of fondness for drink. However this may be, it is certain that her physicians warned her most plainly against a strong spirituous cordial to which she resorted in large doses when ill.

From highest to lowest intemperance raged in the reign of William and Mary. De Foe remarks:—

If the history of this well-bred vice was to be written, it would plainly appear that it began among the gentry, and from them was handed down to the poorer sort, who still love to be like their betters. After the Restoration, when the king’s health became the distinction between a Cavalier and Roundhead, drunkenness began to reign. The gentry caressed the beastly vice at such a rate that no servant was thought proper unless he could bear a quantity of wine; and to this day, when you speak well of a man, you say he is an honest, drunken fellow—as if his drunkenness was a recommendation to his honesty. Nay, so far has this custom prevailed, that the top of a gentlemanly entertainment has been to make his friend drunk, and the friend is so much reconciled to it that he takes it as the effect of his kindness. The further perfection of this vice among the gentry appears in the way of their expressing their joy for any public blessing. ‘Jack,’ said a gentleman of very high quality, when, after the debate in the House of Lords, King William was voted into the vacant throne, ‘Jack, go home to your lady, and tell her we have got a Protestant king and queen, and go make a bonfire as big as a house, and bid the butler make ye all drunk, ye dog.’[171]

From highest to lowest, we repeat, intemperance raged. Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, writing upon the curse and terrorism of mendicancy, complains that many thousands of beggars ‘meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country weddings, markets, burials, and the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.’[172]

The dissoluteness of the time found its expression, not only upon the stage, but among the actors themselves. Terribly significant is the following note by Derrick on a play written by Higden, to whom Dryden wrote a poetical epistle:—

This gentleman (Henry Higden, Esq.) brought a comedy on the stage in 1693, called The Wary Widow, or Sir Noisy Parrot, which was damned, and he complains hardly of the ill-usage; for the bear-garden critics treated it with cat-calls. It is printed and dedicated to the courtly Earl of Dorset; Sir Charles Sedley wrote the prologue, and it was ushered into the world with several copies of verses. The audience were dismissed at the end of the third act, the author having contrived so much drinking of punch in the play, that the actors all got drunk, and were unable to finish it.[173]

Even the offices of religion enjoyed no immunity. Apart from the annual item of ‘communion wine,’ a by no means uncommon charge upon the parish was ‘wine for the vestry.’ A dignitary of the Church, evidently of the Mapes and Still species, thought it not beneath the dignity of his office to compose the bibulous epigram:—

Si bene commemini, causæ sunt quinque bibendi; Hospitis adventus; præsens sitis; atque futura; Et vini bonitas; et quælibet altera causa.[174]

which has been rendered into English:—

If all be true that I do think, There are five reasons we should drink: Good wine, a friend, or being dry, Or lest we should be by-and-by, Or any other reason why.

Plenty of voices were raised against the current vice. By far the most powerful warning was uttered by the Rev. Dr. William Assheton, Fellow of Brasenose,[175] who opens his discourse thus fearlessly:—

Their Majesties, being sensible that as Righteousness exalteth a nation, so sin is a reproach to any people; and being desirous to reform the lives and manners of all their subjects, have commanded the clergy to Preach frequently against those particular sins and vices which are most prevailing in this realm—viz. against Blasphemy, Swearing, Cursing, Perjury, Drunkenness, and Prophanation of the Lord’s day.

He reminds that the Act of Parliament calls the sin of drunkenness ‘odious and loathsom.’ He urges:—

The known ends of drink are these: the digestion of our meat, chearfulness and refreshment of our spirits, and the preserving of health. And whilst it contributes to those ends, so far Drinking is regular and moderate; but when it destroys them, ‘tis irregular and sinful. When therefore wine or any other drink is taken in such excess that by overloading nature it hinders digestion, drowns and suffocates the spirits, disorders the faculties, hinders the free use of reason, and thereby makes men unfit for business, and indisposeth them either for civil or religious duties, then its use is irregular and immoderate, and consequently sinful.

He refers to Isaiah v. 11, 22, Prov. xxiii. 29, Luke xxi. 34, Rom. xiii. 13. He dilates on the sad consequence of excess to soul, body, estate, and good name. He asks:—

What sin is so heinous which a man intoxicated may not commit? The reason is plainly this: Erranti terminus nullus. An intemperate man is under no conduct: he is neither under God’s keeping, nor his own. He hath quenched God’s Spirit, whilst he inflamed his own.

And again:—

When fancy is rampant, and sensual inclinations are let loose, you little know what advantage the devil can make of such a juncture.... Wine, if immoderately taken, is very Poyson, which, though it destroys not immediately, yet kills as sure as the rankest dose that was ever presented by Italian hand.

A medical writer, Dr. Richard Carr, inveighed, not only against strong drink, but against tobacco, milk, and nurses![176] And something may even be learnt from the once famous Tom Brown, classed by Thackeray with Thomas D’Urfey and Ned Ward, a writer of libels and ribaldry, but a man of humour and learning, from whose Laconics many a useful maxim may be culled. The following extract is not unworthy of Joseph Hall:—

If your friend is in want, don’t carry him to the tavern, where you treat yourself as well as him, and entail a thirst and headache upon him next morning. To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, or fill his snuff-box, is like giving a pair of lace ruffles to a man that has never a shirt on his back. Put something into his pocket.

Before estimating the causes of the prevalent declension of morals, it will be necessary to examine the legislation at the close of this seventeenth century, with which it was intimately associated.

Partly through hostility to France, and partly to encourage the home distilleries, the Government of the Revolution, in 1689, prohibited the importation of spirits from all foreign countries, and threw open the distillery trade, on payment of certain duties, to all its subjects. These measures laid the foundation of the great extension of the English manufacture of spirits.[177] Any person was permitted to set up a distillery, on giving ten days’ notice to the excise. The consequence of this was a general thriving of the distillery business, with a corresponding deterioration of the people. Indeed, legislative modification was soon found to be absolutely necessary to counteract the influence of these baneful measures upon health, sobriety, and public order.

We scarcely wonder that the king enthusiastically encouraged the new distilleries, although the measure was a reversal of all previous policy. From the Norman period downwards, the laws of the land had prohibited the conversion of malt into spirit, except a trifling quantity for medicinal uses. Elizabeth had so strictly enforced this statute as to treat an infringement of it as a moral offence.

A change so disastrous could not escape condemnation. The discursive Whiston, in his autobiographical Memoirs, laments:—

An Act of Parliament has abrogated a very good law for discouraging the poor from drinking gin; nay, they have in reality encouraged men to drunkenness, and to the murder of themselves by such drinking. Judge Hale earnestly supported the restrictive law, and opposed its abrogation, declaring that millions of persons would kill themselves by these fatal liquors.[178]

By the 5th & 6th of William and Mary, the duties were raised in 1694 to 4s. 9d. on strong, and 1s. 3d. on table beer. In 1695, the Commons resolved that a sum not exceeding 515,000l. should be granted for the support of the civil list for the ensuing year, to be raised by a malt tax, and additional duties upon mum, sweets, cyder, and perry. In 1691, owing to the tension with France, further supplies were raised by impositions which included in their number a duty of sixpence a bushel on malt, and a further duty on mum, cyder, and perry.

The price of claret rose rapidly when war with France broke out. Soon the clarets were exhausted. A substitute had to be found, and was discovered in the red wine of Portugal, then imported for the first time.

‘Some claret, boy!’—‘Indeed, sir, we have none. Claret, sir.—Lord! there’s not a drop in town. But we have the best red port.’—‘What’s that you call Red port?’—‘A wine, sir, comes from Portugal; I’ll fetch a pint, sir.’

The next quotation throws light upon its composition:—

Mark how it smells. Methinks, a real pain Is by its odour thrown upon my brain. I’ve tasted it—‘tis spiritless and flat, And has as many different tastes As can be found in compound pastes.[179]

We are now in a position to determine the causes of the prevalent intemperance at the close of the seventeenth century:—

1. The Act to encourage distillation.

2. The exhaustion of light wines.

3. The influence of the Court.

4. The development of toasting.

5. Club life.

It remains only to notice the last two of the causes.

Toasting was carried to an utter absurdity. Chamberlayne thus accounts for the fashion:—

As the English, returning from the wars in the Holy Land, brought home the foul disease of leprosy, ... so, in our fathers’ days, the English, returning from service in the Netherlands, brought with them the foul vice of drunkenness.... This vice at present prevails so much that some persons, and those of quality, may not safely be visited in an afternoon without running the hazard of excessive drinking of healths (whereby, in a short time, twice as much liquor is consumed as by the Dutch, who sip and prate); and in some places it is esteemed a piece of wit to make a man drunk, for which purpose some swilling insipid buffoon is always at hand.[180]

An observant Frenchman, M. Misson, who in 1698 published his observations on England and the English, referred particularly to the custom of toasting—a custom (as he declared) almost abolished amongst French people of any distinction. He noticed that, with ourselves, to have drunk at table without making it the occasion of a toast would have been considered an act of gross discourtesy. The mode of observing the ceremony was that the person whose health was drunk remained perfectly motionless from the moment his name was uttered until the conclusion of the health. Or, as Misson sarcastically describes it:—

If he is in the act of taking something from a dish, he must suddenly stop, return his fork or spoon to its place, and wait, without stirring more than a stone, until the other has drunk ...; after which an inclinabo, at the risk of dipping his periwig in the gravy in his plate. I confess that when a foreigner first sees these manners he thinks them laughable. Nothing appears so droll as to see a man who is in the act of chewing a morsel which he has in his mouth, or doing anything else, who suddenly takes a serious air, when a person of some respectability drinks to his health, looks fixedly at his person, and becomes as motionless as if a universal paralysis had seized him.[181]

It is questionable if Misson was strictly correct in stating that health-drinking had gone out in good French society. Not long before this, Pepys had made this entry in his Diary:—

To the Rhenish wine-house, where Mr. Moore showed me the French manner when a health is drunk to bow to him that drunk to you, and then apply yourself to him whose lady’s health is drunk, and then the person that you drink to—which I never knew before; but it seems it is now the fashion.

On a sort of progress through the country that William III. made in 1695, he was entertained, among other places, at Warwick Castle, by Lord Brook. ‘Guy’s Tower was illuminated. A cistern containing a hundred and twenty gallons of punch was emptied to his Majesty’s health.’[182]

A good specimen of the convivial songs of the Jacobites at this time is to be found in Sir Walter Scott’s collection. It is entitled:—

Three Healths.

To ane king and no king, ane uncle and father, To him that’s all these, yet allowed to be neither; Come, rank round about, and hurrah to our standard; If you’ll know what I mean, here’s a health to our landlord! To ane queen and no queen, ane aunt and no mother, Come, boys, let us cheerfully drink off another; And now, to be honest, we’ll stick by our faith, And stand by our landlord as long as we’ve breath. To ane prince and no prince, ane son and no bastard, Beshrew them that say it! a lie that is fostered! God bless them all three; we’ll conclude with this one, It’s a health to our landlord, his wife, and his son. To our monarch’s return one more we’ll advance, We’ve a king that’s in Flanders, another in France; Then about with the health, let him come, let him come, then, Send the one into England, and both are at home then.[183]

And, lastly, the Clubs. Such was their influence that Doran even wrote:—‘The Clubs ... were the chief causes that manners were as depraved as they were.’[184] But it must be remembered that they were effect as well as cause. The Calves’ Head Club was probably as bad as any. Out of a calf’s skull filled with wine, the company drank ‘to the pious memory of those worthy patriots who killed the tyrant.’ An anniversary anthem was sung. That for the year 1697 concludes thus:—

Advance the emblem of the action, Fill the calf’s skull full of wine; Drinking ne’er was counted faction, Men and gods adore the wine. To the heroes gone before us, Let’s renew the flowing bowl; While the lustre of their glories Shines like stars from pole to pole.[185]

Another famous club was supposed to obtain its name from the custom of pledging favourites after dinner. Thus, Arbuthnot writes:—

Whence deathless Kit-kat took his name, Few critics can unriddle; Some say from pastry-cook it came, And some from Cat and Fiddle. From no trim beaus its name it boasts, Grey statesmen or green wits, But from this pell-mell pack of toasts Of old Cats and young Kits.

In the year 1703, which was the second year of

Queen Anne,

the famous Methuen treaty was formed; war between England and France again driving us to Portuguese vintages. And thus was cancelled one of the effects of the Peace of Ryswick, which allowed the reopening of trade with France. It was during this short open-trade period that Farquhar produced his aptly named tragedy, Love and a Bottle. In this comedy we are for the first time introduced to champagne as a vin mousseux, or sparkling wine. In act ii. scene 2, the lodgings of Mockmode, a country squire, are represented; he is conversing with his landlady, Widow Bullfinch:—

Mock. But what’s most modish for beverage now? For I suppose the fashion of that always alters with the clothes.

Bullf. The tailors are the best judges of that; but Champaign, I suppose.

Mock. Is Champaign a tailor? Methinks it were a fitter name for a wig-maker. I think they call my wig a campaign.

Bullf. You’re clear out, sir—clear out. Champaign is a fine liquor, which all great beaux drink to make ‘em witty.

Mock. Witty! Oh, by the universe, I must be witty! I’ll drink nothing else; I never was witty in my life. Here, Club, bring us a bottle of what d’ye call it—the witty liquor.

The widow having retired, Club, Mockmode’s servant, re-enters with a bottle and glasses.

Mock. Is that the witty liquor? Come, fill the glasses.... But where’s the wit now, Club? Have you found it?

Club. Egad, master, I think ‘tis a very good jest.

Mock. What?

Club. Why, drinking, you’ll find, master, that this same gentleman in the straw doublet, the same will o’ the wisp, is a wit at the bottom. Here, here, master, how it puns and quibbles in the glass!

Mock. By the universe, now I have it; the wit lies in the jingling. Hear how the glasses rhyme to one another.[186]

Evident allusion is here to the effervescence of champagne.

In his Constant Couple, we have:—

Malice ne’er spoke in generous Champaign.

But champagne, we have said, suffered like other French wines from the War of Succession and the Methuen treaty. By this treaty we were bound to receive Portuguese wines in exchange for our woollen goods, and to deduct from the duty on importation one-third of the rate levied on French wines. The new demand led to an extension of Portuguese vineyards. The demand continued to increase; the supply was forthcoming, but too often with an article grossly mixed and adulterated. Counterfeits poured into this country, especially from Guernsey, and home manufactures of spurious wine abounded. Mr. Cyrus Redding, an acknowledged authority, in his treatise on French wines, inveighs against what he considers the short-sighted policy of our ministers in this reign. He says:—

We have only done now what wiser heads offered us nearly 150 years ago. M. de Torcy, in vain, proposed an open trade, the advantages of which (now obvious enough to every man of common sense) were scouted by the Government here, and the proposition opposed, not only by the Parliament, but by that suffrage satirically denominated, if not profanely, the vox populi, vox Dei. It was almost an axiom in the last century, in relation to trade, that the success or ruin of our commerce continually inclined for or against us, as the trade of France with England was shut or open. Well and justly did the late Lord Liverpool remark that the trade of England had flourished in spite of our legislation. When France proposed, in 1713-14, that a tariff should be made in England similar to that of France and England in 1664, Lord Bolingbroke treated the proposal with disdain. This tariff was simply that the duties and prohibitions in both countries should be reciprocal. The duty to be paid on both sides was five per cent. After so much of two centuries has elapsed since, we can hardly do otherwise than admit that our ideas of the true principles of trade continued to be erroneous too long, that the offer of de Torcy was a just offer, and that any can still be found obtuse enough to deny this fact shows that there must be exceptions even to the common run of vulgar intellect.

Of the manners of the time we have abundant sources of information. An interesting description is given by Grose of the little country squire of about 300l. a year in Queen Anne’s days:—

He never played at cards but at Christmas, when a family pack was produced from the mantel-piece. His chief drink, the year round, was generally ale, except at this season, the fifth of November, or some other gala days, when he would make a bowl of strong brandy-punch, garnished with a toast and nutmeg.... In the corner of his hall, by the fireside, stood a large wooden two-armed chair with a cushion, and within the chimney corner were a couple of seats. Here at Christmas he entertained his tenants, assembled round a glowing fire.... In the meantime the jorum of ale was in continual circulation.[187]

But Christmas was not what it had been. It struggled, almost in vain, to overcome the check it had sustained during the Commonwealth. Private hospitality and festivities were recovering, but the pageants and masks in the royal household and at the Inns of Court had received a death-blow. At the close of the century, a revel, which would once have been regarded as routine, was thought worthy to be recorded in a diary. Evelyn notes a riotous Christmas at the Inner Temple as late as 1697.

Such a falling off formed a common lament of the poets:—

Gone are those golden days of yore, When Christmas was a high day; Whose sports we now shall see no more, ‘Tis turn’d into Good Friday.[188]

To the same effect:—

Black jacks to every man Were filled with wine and beer; No pewter pot nor can In those days did appear. Good cheer in a nobleman’s house Was counted a seemly show; We wanted no brawn nor souse, When this old cap was new.[189]

Perhaps the most sensible festivities of this period were certain annual feasts in London for natives of the several counties. The London Gazette, for May 30 to June 3, 1700, advertises ‘the annual feast for gentlemen of the county of Huntingdon.’ Another number announces ‘the anniversary feast for the gentlemen, natives of the county of Kent.’ On such occasions, bygone times would be recounted, mutual friends discussed, and the absent not forgotten in a toast.

Burton ale was celebrated at least as early as 1712. So remarks a writer who had probably found in the Spectator, No. 383, the remark:—‘We concluded our walk with a glass of Burton ale, and a slice of hung beef.’ Had he forgotten that the author of Ivanhoe carries back the fame of Burton ale to a date before the time of Richard I.? And the accuracy of Sir Walter is remarkable, for, in 1295, Matilda, daughter of Nicholas de Shobenhale, ‘released to the Abbot and Convent of Burton-on-Trent that service and custody of their abbey gate, together with the custody and annual rent thereto belonging, and all the tenements within and without the town of Burton which came to her by inheritance from Walter de Scobenhale.... For which release they granted her daily for life two white loaves from the monastery, two gallons of conventual beer, or cider, if they drank it, and one penny; also seven gallons of beer for the men,’ &c. These ales were brewed on the abbey premises, where probably the abbots had their own maltings: as it was a common covenant in leases of mills, where were abbey property, for the malt of the lords of the manor to be ground free.[190]

It is truly sad to contemplate the stream of talent which was polluted at this time by unrestrained indulgence in strong drink. The infernal compounds which were substituted for the light wines of a previous age played infinite havoc, not only with the Mohocks of aristocracy, but with the giants of intellect. Of the Court itself, Macaulay writes:—

All places where he could have his three courses and his three bottles were alike to Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne.[191]

Of Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was successively Speaker of the House of Commons, Secretary of State, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord High Treasurer, and who will always be remembered as the collector of the Harleian Manuscripts, the same author, Macaulay, writes, that he was in the habit of ‘flustering himself daily with claret, which was hardly considered as a fault by his contemporaries.’[192]

Among the reasons given by the queen to the cabinet for dismissing her Lord Treasurer, she alleges that he neglected all business, was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself, she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed: that he often came drunk.[193]

Notorious as a drunkard in high places was Lord Mohun, who was twice tried for committing murder whilst in a state of intoxication. The duel between this lord and the Duke of Hamilton—the wives of whom were sisters at variance—is spoken of as probably the last of the kind where the seconds were expected to engage as well as the principals, and fight to the death.

There is a wide discrepancy between the writings and the reputed actions of Joseph Addison. He was fond of wine, and indulged in it. His contemporary, Swift, acknowledges the weakness. Dr. Johnson does not conceal it. Macaulay laments the fact, Thackeray glories in it.[194] His biographer, Miss Aikin, is almost singular in trying to defend him from the imputation. She refers to the tone and temper, the correctness of taste and judgment, of his writings in proof of his sobriety, and doubts whether a man stained with the vice of intoxication would have dared to write the essay on drunkenness in the Spectator [No. 569]. But the facts leave no room for doubt. He was from his youth a great man for toasts. Verses are extant, in honour of King William, from which we learn that it was his custom to toast that king in bumpers of wine. In a letter written at the age of 31 (1703), ‘to Mr. Wyche, his Majesty’s Resident at Hambourg,’ he says:—

My hand, at present, begins to grow steady enough for a letter, so the properest use I can put it to is to thank ye honest gentleman that set it a-shaking.... As your company made our stay at Hambourg agreeable, your wine has given us all ye satisfaction that we have found in our journey through Westphalia. If drinking your health will do you any good, we may expect to be as long-lived as Methusaleh—or, to use a more familiar instance, as ye hoc in ye cellar.

So much from himself. Dr. Johnson remarks of him:—

He studied all morning; then dined at a tavern; and went afterwards to Button’s.

Button had been a servant in the Countess of Warwick’s family, who, under the patronage of Addison, kept a coffee-house on the south side of Russell Street, about two doors from Covent Garden. Here it was that the wits of that time used to assemble. It is said when Addison had suffered any vexation from the countess, he withdrew the company from Button’s house. From the coffee-house he went again to a tavern, where he often sat late, and drank too much wine. In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence. It is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours. He that feels oppression from the presence of those to whom he knows himself superior, will desire to set loose his powers of conversation; and who that ever asked succours from Bacchus was able to preserve himself from being enslaved by his auxiliary?

And yet this was the man who could declare that ‘temperance and abstinence, faith and devotion, are in themselves, perhaps, as laudable as any other virtues.’[195] His essay on Drunkenness, in the Spectator, might well have proceeded from the pen of Hall or Taylor, Decker or Wither. He exclaims:—

A drunken man is a greater monster than any that is to be found among all the creatures which God has made: as indeed there is no character which appears more despicable and deformed, in the eyes of all reasonable persons, than that of a drunkard.... This vice has very fatal effects on the mind, the body, and fortune of the person who is devoted to it. In regard to the mind, it first of all discovers every flaw in it. The sober man, by the strength of reason, may keep under and subdue every vice or folly to which he is most inclined; but wine makes every latent seed sprout up in the soul, and shew itself; it gives fury to the passions, and force to those objects which are apt to produce them. Wine heightens indifference into love, love into jealousy, and jealousy into madness. It often turns the good-natured man into an idiot, and the choleric into an assassin. It gives bitterness to resentment, it makes vanity insupportable, and displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

And more to the same effect. But a passage of his, to be found elsewhere, is far more terribly telling:—

Death, the King of Terrors, was determined to choose a Prime Minister; and his pale courtiers, the ghastly train of diseases, were all summoned to attend, when each preferred his claim to the honour of this illustrious office. Fever urged the numbers he had destroyed; Cold Palsy set forth his pretensions by shaking all his limbs; Gout hobbled up and alleged his great power of racking every joint; and Asthma’s inability to speak was a strong though silent argument in favor of his claim; Stone and Colic pleaded their violence; Plague his rapid progress in destruction; and Consumption, though slow, insisted that he was sure. In the midst of this contention the court was disturbed with the noise of music, dancing, feasting, and revelry: when immediately entered a lady, with a bold lascivious air and flushed countenance. She was attended, on the one hand, by a troop of bacchanals, and on the other by a train of wanton youths and damsels who danced half naked to the softest musical instruments. Her name was Intemperance. She waved her hand, and thus addressed the crowd of diseases:—‘Give way, ye sickly band of pretenders, nor dare to vie with my superior merits in the service of this monarch; am I not your Queen? Do ye not receive your power of shortening human life almost wholly from me? Who then so fit as myself for this important office?’ The grisly monarch grinned a smile of approbation, placed her on his right hand, and she immediately became his principal favourite and Prime Minister.

Addison did another good service in exposing, in the Tatler,—

Adulteration.

He says (No. 131):—

There is in this city a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns, and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors, and, by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple. Virgil, in that remarkable prophecy,

Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva. Virg., Ecl. iv. 29. (The ripening grape shall hang on every thorn),

seems to have hinted at this art, which can turn a plantation of northern hedges into a vineyard. These adepts are known among one another by the name of wine-brewers; and, I am afraid, do great injury, not only to her Majesty’s customs, but to the bodies of many of her good subjects.

But adulteration was no new expedient. In the reign of Edward III., a law was enacted, imposing penalties on adulterations, and directing that an essay of all the wines imported should be made, at least twice a year in every town.

In 1426, Sir John Rainewell, mayor, received information that the Lombard merchants were guilty of malpractices in the adulteration of wines; upon inquiry, he ascertained that the charge was well founded, and ordered that the noxious compound, to the quantity of 150 butts, should be thrown into the kennel.

In the sixteenth century, a similar enactment was passed in the fifth year of Mary. Much dread is expressed of adulteration of good wine, either with inferior wines or water, the penalty on discovery being the loss of their whole stock.

And besyde the samin sic wynes as are sould in commoun tavernis ar commounlie mixt with auld corrupt wines and with watter, to the greit appeir and danger and seikness of the byaris and greit perrell of the saulis of the sellaris.

In the seventeenth century Sir William Hawkins writes:—

Since the Spanish sacks have been common in our taverns, which for conservation are mingled with the lime in the making, our nation complains of calentures, stone, dropsy, and infinite other distempers not heard of before this wine came into common use.

Henderson observes that according to the Custom House Books of Oporto, for the year 1812, 135 pipes and 20 hogsheads of wine were shipped for Guernsey. In the same year, there were landed at the London Docks alone 2,545 pipes and 162 hogsheads from that island, reported to be port wine.

The subject of adulteration is much too large to attempt to do any justice thereto; it must suffice to draw attention to one or two specimens. The authorities shall be disinterested.

The following receipt for Port is from a wine guide:—

Take of good cider 4 gallons; of the juice of red beet, 2 quarts; logwood, 4 oz.; rhatany root brewed, ½ a pound; first infuse the logwood and rhatany root in brandy and a gallon of cider for a week; then strain off the liquor, and mix the other ingredients; keep in a cask for a month, when it will be fit to bottle.

In the Mechanics’ Magazine is given the chemical analysis of a bottle of cheap Port:—

Spirits of wine, 3 oz.; cider, 14 oz.; sugar, 1½ oz.; alum, 2 scruples; tartaric acid, 1 scruple; strong decoction of logwood, 4 oz.

Mr. Cyrus Redding, in his work on Modern Wines, lets us into the secrets of cheap Sherry:—It ‘is mingled with Cape wine and cheap brandy, the washings of brandy casks, sugar candy, bitter almonds, &c. The colour, if too great, is taken out by the addition of a small quantity of lamb’s blood; it is then passed off for best sherry.’

Professor Mulder, in his Chemistry of Wine, tells that during the process of wine-clearing such aids as albumen, blood, cream, gypsum, marble, nutgalls, lime, salt, gum-arabic, sulphuric acid, &c., are furnished.

The scientific writer Dunovan, in his Domestic Economy, makes us acquainted with a few of the drugs with which beer is doctored.

It is absolutely frightful to contemplate the list of poisons and drugs with which malt liquors have been (as it is technically and descriptively called) doctored. Opium, henbane, cocculus indicus, and Bohemian rosemary, which is said to produce a quick and raving intoxication, supplied the place of alcohol; aloes, quassia, gentian, sweet-scented flag, wormwood, horehound, and bitter oranges, fulfilled the duties of hops; liquorice, treacle, and mucilage of flax seed, stood for attenuated malt sugar. Capsicum, ginger, and cinnamon, or rather cassia-buds, afforded to the exhausted drink the pungency of carbonic acid. Burnt flour, sugar, or treacle, communicated a peculiar taste, which porter-drinkers generally fancy. Preparations of fish, assisted, in cases of obstinacy, with oil of vitriol, procured transparency. Besides these, the brewer had to supply himself with lime, potash, salt, and a variety of other substances, which are of no other use, than in serving the office of more valuable materials, and defrauding the customer.

But the subject is, like the frauds practised, without a limit; references can only be subjoined.[196]

The principal writer in the Tatler, that censor morum, Richard Steele, was a prominent figure in the convivial circle. Wine and extravagance were his bane. He loved drink and was fond of acknowledging it. The author of the Christian Hero wrote his devotional treatise in drink and in debt. The arrival of a hamper of wine could interrupt his moments of tenderest grief. The emotions were forgotten as he sent for his friends, who join him in drinking ‘two bottles apiece, with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o’clock in the morning.’

A story told of him by Dr. Hoadley is characteristic of the man:—

My father, when Bishop of Bangor, was, by invitation, present at one of the Whig meetings, held at the Trumpet in Shoe Lane, when Sir Richard, in his zeal, rather exposed himself, having the double duty of the day upon him, as well to celebrate the immortal memory of King William, it being the 4th November, as to drink his friend Addison up to conversation pitch, whose phlegmatic constitution was hardly warmed for society by that time. Steele was not fit for it. Two remarkable circumstances happened. John Sly, the hatter of facetious memory, was in the house; and John, pretty mellow, took it into his head to come into the company on his knees, with a tankard of ale in his hand to drink off to the immortal memory, and to return in the same manner. Steele, sitting next my father, whispered him—Do laugh. It is humanity to laugh. Sir Richard, in the evening, being too much in the same condition, was put into a chair, and sent home. Nothing would serve him but being carried to the Bishop of Bangor’s, late as it was. However, the chairmen carried him home, and got him upstairs, when his great complaisance would wait on them downstairs, which he did, and then was got quietly to bed.

One of his own letters to Mrs. Scurlock reveals the man:—

I have been in very good company, where your health, under the character of the woman I loved best, has been often drunk; so that I may say that I am dead drunk for your sake, which is more than I die for you.

Matthew Prior, the poet, demands a notice. Whether he was the son of a vintner or a joiner is a moot point. He was certainly nephew to Samuel Prior, landlord of the Rummer Tavern at Charing Cross, at which house, in 1685, was held the annual feast of the nobility and gentry living in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. By this uncle he was brought up and sent to Westminster School, after which he was employed, it is said, at his uncle’s as server. Taken up by Lord Dorset, his career was remarkable, as author, as secretary to successive embassies, as member of Parliament, as favourite of the king. Dr. Johnson remarks that a survey of Prior’s life and writings may exemplify a sentence which he doubtless understood well when he read Horace at his uncle’s:—

The vessel long retains the scent which it first receives.

Mrs. Barbauld informs us, that having spent the evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, he would go to Long Acre and there drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife. Thus does the dog return to his vomit. Swift has left us a lively picture of manners in his descriptive breakfast with my Lady Smart at 11 a.m. Lord Smart, who was absent at the levee, returns to dinner at 3 p.m. to receive the guests. Seven of them dined, and were joined by a country baronet, who had no appetite, having already eaten a beefsteak and drunk two mugs of ale, besides a tankard of March beer when he got up in the morning. They drank claret, which the host said should always be drunk after fish, and my Lord Smart particularly recommended some cider to my Lord Sparkish. When the host called for wine, he nodded to one or other of his guests, and said, ‘Tom Neverout, my service to you.’ After the first course came pudding. Wine and small beer were drunk during this second course.... After the puddings came the third course.... Beer and wine were freely imbibed during this course, the gentlemen always pledging somebody with every glass which they drank.... After the goose, some of the gentlemen took a dram of brandy. Dinner ended, Lord Smart bade the butler bring up the great tankard full of October to Sir John. The great tankard was passed from hand to hand and mouth to mouth; but when pressed by the noble host upon the gallant Tom Neverout, he said, ‘No faith, my lord, I like your wine, and won’t put a churl upon a gentleman. Your honour’s claret is good enough for me.’ The cloth removed, a bottle of Burgundy was set down, of which the ladies were invited to partake before they went to tea. When they left, fresh bottles were brought, the ‘dead men’—meaning the empty bottles—removed, and ‘D’you hear, John? bring clean glasses,’ my Lord Smart said. On which the Colonel said, ‘I’ll keep my glass; for wine is the best liquor to wash glasses in.’

It was at this time that the works were published of one who was at once the creature and exponent of the times, Edward (better known as Ned) Ward. Campbell observes that ‘his works give a complete picture of the mind of a vulgar but acute cockney. His sentiment is the pleasure of eating and drinking.’[197] Ward possessed two qualifications for his depiction of manners; he was a tavern-keeper, and a poet. At any rate his doggerel secured him notice in the Dunciad. His Secret History of Clubs is the authority for that kind of life at the beginning of the eighteenth century. His London Spy describes the coffee-houses of the day:—‘In we went (says he), where a parcel of muddling muckworms were as busy as so many rats in an old cheese-loft; some going; some coming; some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jangling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot or a boatswain’s cabin.’

Some of the famous taverns are also described in this work, such as the ‘Angel’ in Fenchurch Street, ‘where the vintner, like a double-dealing citizen, condescended as well to draw carman’s comfort, as the consolatory juice of the vine.’ The ‘Rose,’ in the Poultry, has gained a reputation:—‘There in a snug room, warmed with brash and faggot, over a quart of good claret, we laughed over our night’s adventure.’

Convivial life at the Universities may find its illustration in the person of Bentley.

The following is told about Lord Cartaret and Bentley, in Monk’s Life of Bentley, vol. ii. p. 324 (2nd edit. 1833).

Lord Cartaret was a great scholar, and, being an old Westminster boy, especially fond of Terence, which Dr. Bentley had edited. Kippis relates this anecdote, in the Biographia Britannica, vol. ii. p. 280:—

Dr. Bentley, when he came to town, was accustomed, in his visits to Lord Cartaret, sometimes to spend the evenings with his lordship. One day old Lady Granville reproached her son with keeping the country clergyman, who was with him the night before, till he was intoxicated. Lord Cartaret denied the charge; upon which the lady replied that the clergyman could not have sung in so ridiculous a manner unless he had been in liquor. The truth of the case was, that the singing thus mistaken by her ladyship was Dr. Bentley’s endeavour to instruct and entertain his noble friend by reciting Terence according to the true cantilena of the ancients.

Kippis, however, ought not to have called Lord Cartaret’s mother Lady Granville, as her son was the first Lord Granville, to which title he was not yet appointed. She was the Dowager Lady Cartaret.

Bentley himself ‘is stated to have been an admirer of good port wine, while he thought contemptuously of claret, which, he said, “would be port if it could.”’[198]

We infer also that Bentley did not despise ale. At any rate a great quantity was drunk at the lodge of the Master.

In 1710, when the Fellows appealed against Bentley to the Visitor of Trinity, the Bishop of Ely, this was one of the counts:—

Why have you for many years last past wasted the College Bread, Ale, Beer, Coals, Wood, Turfe, Sedge, Charcoal, Linnen, Pewter, Corn, Flower (sic), Brawn, and Bran, &c.?[199]

In a single year—1708—the expense of ale and small beer was no less at Trinity Lodge than 107l. 16s.[200]

The Fellows greatly protested against all this. And Dr. King, an old opponent of Bentley’s, made great stock of the immense consumption of bread, beer, and fuel in Bentley’s lodge:—

He wrote a piece of humour, entitled ‘Horace in Trinity College.’ The fiction supposes Horace, in fulfilment of his well-known prophecy, Visam Britannos hospitibus feros, to visit Britain and take up his abode in the Master’s lodge of Trinity College, where he gets immensely fat (Epicuri de grege porcus) by the good cheer maintained at the expense of the society.... Perhaps the most laughable matter in the piece is the representation of a medal, bearing on one side a figure of Horace, with a cup of audit ale in one hand, some college rolls in the other, and an immeasurable rotundity of person; and on the reverse E Promptuar. Col. Trin. Cant.

What the excellent bishop describes as ‘an immeasurable rotundity of person’ seems to have been far from uncommon in the Universities in these high days. We read in a note in Monk’s book, vol. ii. p. 394:—

The portly appearance of the three esquire-beadles at that day [about 1739] did much credit to university cheer. They are described by Christopher Smart, in a copy of Latin verses, by the following periphrasis:—

‘Pinguia tergeminorum abdomina Bedellorum.’

We have certainly in Pope’s Dunciad also an allusion to Bentley’s love of port (book iv.) in the following lines:—

As many quit the streams[201] that murmuring fall, To lull the sons of Margaret and Clare-hall, Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport In troubled waters, but now sleeps in port.[202]

Pope always seemed to have disliked Bentley. But these lines, and, still more, Pope’s note, rather imply that Bentley liked his port.

But everybody was not a bon-vivant. Many were in the world, but not of it. What a contrast to the authors quoted was John Philips, the author of Cyder, a Poem.[203] And it is a poem worth reading. Johnson calls it a Georgic after the manner of Virgil, nor does it suffer from the comparison. The advice contained in it is excellent. It praises use, it condemns abuse. It well serves temperance. Thus in book ii., after praising Nature for her annual gifts, which tend to the exhilaration of languid minds, he continues:—

Within The golden Mean confined: beyond, there’s naught Of health, or pleasure. Therefore, when thy Heart Dilates with fervent joys, and eager soul Prompts to persue the sparkling glass, be sure ‘Tis time to shun it; if thou wilt prolong Dire compotation, forthwith Reason quits Her Empire to Confusion, and Misrule, And vain Debates; then twenty Tongues at once Conspire in senseless Jargon, naught is heard But din, and various clamour, and mad Rant: Distrust, and Jealousie to these succeed, And anger-kindling Taunt, the certain Bane Of well-knit Fellowship. Now horrid Frays Commence, the brimming glasses now are hurled With dire intent; Bottles with Bottles clash In rude Encounter. * * * * Nor need we tell what anxious cares attend The turbulent Mirth of Wine; nor all the kinds Of Maladies, that lead to Death’s grim cave, Wrought by Intemperance: joint-racking Gout, Intestine stone, and pining Atrophy, Chill, even when the sun with July Heats Frys the scorch’d soil; and Dropsy all afloat, Yet craving Liquids.

When a poet could thus write, there is no wonder that divines should have used still stronger language. John Disney, in a powerful treatise,[204] agitates for the execution of the laws against immorality. His remarks on the Sunday closing of public-houses are especially applicable now:—

If they must have refreshment, why cannot they have it at their own houses? In truth refreshment is but a pretence for excess and drunkenness. If company meets together in a public-house on Sunday evening, when there is no danger of other business that shall call them away, who shall tell them the critical minute when they are sufficiently refreshed? Except the constable beat up their quarters, they sit very contentedly hour after hour, and call for pint after pint, and make themselves judges of their refreshment till they’re able to judge of nothing at all. If you still ask what harm there is in going to a public-house for only an hour or two, and to stay no longer, I might tell you that ‘tis enough that the Laws have forbidden it, and that her Majesty has reinforced those laws.

Bishop Beveridge, who died in Anne’s reign, wrote an important sermon on ‘The Duty of Temperance and Sobriety.’[205] He says:—

There is no sin but some have committed it in their drink; and if there be any that a drunken man doth not commit, it is not because he would not, but because he could not. He had not an opportunity.... For a man in such a condition hath no sense of the difference between good and evil; for ‘wind,’ as the prophet speaks (Hos. iv. 11), ‘hath taken away his heart.’ His reason, his understanding, his conscience, is gone; and therefore, all sins are alike to him. Hence it is that their sin never goes alone, but hath a great train of other sins always following it; insomuch that it cannot so properly be called one single sin, as all sin is one.

The legislation of the reign was not important. The 1st Anne permitted tradesmen whose principal dealings were in other goods to sell spirits by retail, without a licence, provided they did not allow tippling in their shops or houses.

Another law enacted in this reign allowed French wines and other liquors to be imported in neutral bottoms. Without this expedient it was believed that the revenue would have been insufficient to maintain the government.

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