s of a gang of drunkards and debauchees who called
themselves and were called the King's friends, the evil communications
had not the slightest influence upon the royal good manners, and did
not alter by one jot the rigid frugality of George's life and that of
his royal consort. The King's friends were only the King's jackals;
they never were suffered for a moment to cross the line which severed
the {19} sovereign's private life from his public actions. Indeed, it
may be assumed that few of the hard-drinking, hard-living, gambling,
raking ruffians who battened on the King's bounty, and who voted white
black and good bad with uncompromising pertinacity and unappeasable
relish, would have welcomed the hard seats at the royal table, the
meagre fare on the royal platters, the homely countrified air the royal
couple breathed, and the homely countrified hour at which the royal
couple took up their candles and went to bed. George the Third would
be long asleep at an hour when his friends would be thinking of paying
a visit to Ranelagh, or preparing to spend a pleasant evening over
their cards, their dice-box, and their wine.

Especially their wine. The one great characteristic of the gentility
of the day was its capacity for drinking wine. "Wine, dear child, and
truth," says a Greek poet, naming the two most admirable gifts of life.
Truth was not always very highly prized by the men who set manners and
made history in the second half of the eighteenth century, but to wine
they clung with an absolutely unswerving and unalterable attachment.
If the great Oriental scholar who adorned the age had been more
fortunate in his studies, if Sir William Jones had chanced to make
acquaintance with a Persian poet who has since become very famous among
Englishmen, he would have found in the quatrains of Omar Khayyam the
very verses to please the minds and to interpret the desires of the
majority of the statesmen, soldiers, divines, lawyers, and fine
gentlemen of the day. It is as impossible to imagine the men of the
eighteenth century without their incessant libations of wine as it is
impossible to imagine what the eighteenth century would have been like
if it had been for the most part abstemious, sober, or even reasonably
temperate. As we read the memoirs of the day, and if we believe only a
part of what they tell us, making the most liberal allowance for the
exaggeration of the wit and the satire of the cynic, we have to picture
t