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:—­

  “It seems he had taken A light breakfast—­bacon,
  An egg, with a little broiled haddock; at most
  A round and a half of some hot buttered toast;
  With a slice of cold sirloin from yesterday’s roast.”

Luncheon, or “nuncheon” as some very ancient friends of mine always called it, was the merest mouthful.  Men went out shooting with a sandwich in their pocket; the ladies who sat at home had some cold chicken and wine and water brought into the drawing-room on a tray.  Miss Austen in her novels always dismisses the midday meal under the cursory appellation of “cold meat.”  The celebrated Dr. Kitchener, the sympathetic author of the Cook’s Oracle, writing in 1825, says:  “Your luncheon may consist of a bit of roasted poultry, a basin of beef