he political and social life of the time as a drunken orgy.
Undoubtedly there were then, as always, men of decent behavior and
discreet life, men who would {20} no more have exceeded in wine than in
any other way. But the temper of the age and the tone of the
fashionable world was not in tune with their austerity. Wonder at the
frequency with which men of position got drunk then is only rivalled by
wonder at the amount which they could drink without getting drunk.

[Sidenote: 1761--Unpropitious time for the King's rule]

The cry of the Persian nightingale to the Persian rose, "wine, wine,
wine," was the cry to which hearts responded most readily in all the
Georgian era. Walpole the father made Walpole the son drink too much,
that he might not be unfilially sober while his father was unpaternally
drunk. A generation later the younger Pitt plied himself with port as
a medicine for the gout. The statesmen of the period, in the words of
Sir George Trevelyan, sailed on a sea of claret from one comfortable
official haven to another. The amount of liquor consumed by each man
at a convivial gathering was Gargantuan, prodigious, hardly to be
credited. Thackeray tells, in some recently published notes for his
lectures on the four Georges, of a Scotch judge who was forced to drink
water for two months, and being asked what was the effect of the
_regime_, owned that he saw the world really as it was for the first
time for twenty years. For a quarter of a century he had never been
quite sober. This man might be taken as a type of the _bons vivants_,
the _buveurs tres illustres_ of the eighteenth century. They were
never quite sober all through their lives. They never saw the world as
it really was. They pleaded, preached, debated, fought, gambled,
loved, and hated under the influence of their favorite vintage, saw all
things through a vinous fume, and judged all things with inflamed
pulses and a reeling brain. But it must not be forgotten that the
population of the country was not entirely composed of corrupt,
hard-drinking politicians, profligate, hard-drinking noblemen, and
furious, hard-drinking country gentlemen. If these were, in a sense,
the more conspicuous types, there were other types very different and
very admirable. Apart from the great mass of the people, living their
dull daily lives, doing their dull daily tasks, quiet, ignorant,
unconscious that they {21} could or should ever have any say in the
dispo