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At this point it is necessary to look back a little, and to clear our minds of the delusion that an age of splendour is necessarily an age of refinement. We have seen something of the regal state and prodigal luxury which surrounded the English aristocracy in the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet at no period of our national history—unless, perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals at so low an ebb. Edmund Burke, in a passage which is as ethically questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses half its evil when it loses all its grossness. But in the English society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it infected not only the region of morals, but also that of manners.

Sir Walter Scott has described how, in his youth, refined gentlewomen read aloud to their families the most startling passages of the most outrageous authors. I have been told by one who heard it from an eye-witness that a great Whig duchess, who figures brilliantly in the social and political memoirs of the eighteenth century, turning to the footman who was waiting on her at dinner, exclaimed, "I wish to G---- that you wouldn't keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back of my chair." Men and women of the highest fashion swore like troopers; the Princes of the Blood, who carried down into the middle of the nineteenth century the courtly habits of their youth, setting the example. Mr. Gladstone told me the following anecdote, which he had from the Lord Pembroke of the period, who was present at the scene.

In the early days of the first Reformed Parliament the Whig Government were contemplating a reform of the law of Church Rates. Success was certain in the House of Commons, but the Tory peers, headed by the Duke of Cumberland, determined to defeat the Bill in the House of Lords. A meeting of the party was held, when it appeared that, in the balanced state of parties, the Tory peers could not effect their purpose unless they could rally the bishops to their aid. The question was, What would the Archbishop of Canterbury do? He was Dr. Howley, the mildest and most apostolic of men, and the most averse from strife and contention. It was impossible to be certain of his action, and the Duke of Cumberland posted off to Lambeth to ascertain it. Returning in hot haste to the caucus, he burst into the room, exclaiming, "It's all right, my lords; the Archbishop says he will be d----d to hell if he doesn't throw the Bill out." The Duke of Wellington's "Twopenny d----n" has become proverbial; and Sydney Smith neatly rebuked a similar propensity in Lord Melbourne by saying, "Let us assume everybody and everything to be d--- d, and come to the point." The Miss Berrys, who had been the correspondents of Horace Walpole, and who carried down to the 'fifties the most refined traditions of social life in the previous century, habitually "d----d" the tea-kettle if it burned their fingers, and called their male friends by their surnames—"Come, Milnes, will you have a cup of tea?" "Now, Macaulay, we have had enough of that subject."

So much, then, for the refinement of the upper classes. Did the Social Equalization of which we have spoken bring with it anything in the way of Social Amelioration? A philosophical orator of my time at the Oxford Union, now a valued member of the House of Lords, once said in a debate on national intemperance that he had made a careful study of the subject, and, with much show of scientific analysis, he thus announced the result of his researches: "The causes of national intemperance are three: first, the adulteration of liquor; second, the love of drink; and third, the desire for more." Knowing my incapacity to rival this masterpiece of exact thinking, I have not thought it necessary in these chapters to enlarge on the national habit of excessive drinking in the late years of the eighteenth century. The grossness and the universality of the vice are too well known to need elaborating. All oral tradition, all contemporary literature, all satiric art, tell the same horrid tale; and the number of bottles which a single toper would consume at a sitting not only, in Burke's phrase, "outraged economy," but "staggered credibility." Even as late as 1831, Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop, wrote thus in his diary:—"A good Audit Dinner: 23 people drank 11 bottles of wine, 28 quarts of beer, 2–½ of spirits, and 12 bowls of punch; and would have drunk twice as much if not restrained. None, we hope, drunk!" Mr. Gladstone told me that once, when he was a young man, he was dining at a house where the principal guest was a Bishop. When the decanters had made a sufficient number of circuits, the host said, "Shall we have any more wine, my Lord?" "Thank you—not till we have disposed of what is before us," was the bland episcopal reply.

But still, in the matter of drinking, the turn of the century witnessed some social amelioration among the upper classes. There was a change, if not in quantity, at least in quality. Where port and Madeira had been the Staple drinks, corrected by libations of brandy, less potent beverages became fashionable. The late Mr. Thomson Hankey, formerly M.P. for Peterborough, told me that he remembered his father coming home from the city one day and saying to his mother, "My dear, I have ordered a dozen bottles of a new white wine. It is called sherry, and I am told the Prince Regent drinks nothing else." The fifteenth Lord Derby told me that the cellar-books at Knowsley and St. James's Square had been carefully kept for a hundred years, and that—contrary to what every one would have supposed—the number of bottles drunk in a year had not diminished. The alteration was in the alcoholic strength of the wines consumed. Burgundy, port, and Madeira had made way for light claret, champagne, and hock. That, even under these changed conditions of potency, the actual number of bottles consumed showed no diminution, was accounted for by the fact that at balls and evening parties a great deal more champagne was drunk than formerly, and that luncheon in a large house had now become practically an earlier dinner.

The growth of these subsidiary meals was a curious feature of the nineteenth century. We exclaim with horror at such preposterous bills of fare as that which I quoted in my last chapter, but it should be remembered, in justice to our fathers, that dinner was the only substantial meal of the day. Holland House was always regarded as the very temple of luxury, and Macaulay tells us that the viands at a breakfast-party there were tea and coffee, eggs, rolls, and butter. The fashion, which began in the nineteenth century, of going to the Highlands for shooting, popularized in England certain northern habits of feeding, and a morning meal at which game and cold meat appeared was known in England as a "Scotch breakfast." Apparently it had made some way by 1840, for the Ingoldsby Legends published in that year thus describe the morning meal of the ill-fated Sir Thomas:—