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, 2-1/2 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.