'I find myself disordered with a pain all round the small of my back, which I imputed to Champaign I had drunk, but find it to have been only my new cold.'[319]
The Dean does not appear to have been the only sufferer, for we find him writing:
'I called this evening to see Mr. Secretary, who had been very ill with the gravel and pains in his back, by Burgundy and Champaign, added to the sitting up all night at business; I found him drinking tea, while the rest were at Champaign, and was very glad of it.'[320]
Even Pope, the perforcedly abstemious, was lured into similar excesses by the young Earl of Warwick and Colley Cibber, during his visits to London, whilst engaged on his translation of the _Iliad_, and writes to Congreve,
'I sit up till two o'clock over Burgundy and Champagne.'[321]
A proof of the popularity of French wines at this period is found in the fact that in 1713, the year of the Peace of Utrecht, the registered imports, despite high duties, reached 2551 tuns, an amount not exceeded till 1786. The Treaty of Commerce, with which Bolingbroke (whose partiality to Champagne we have seen) and M. de Torcy sought to supplement that of Peace, having fallen through, the tavern-keepers put such a price on these wines that it was only members of the fashionable world who could afford to have what was termed 'a good Champagne stomach.'[322] Their vogue is confirmed by the order given to her servant by a lady aspiring to take a leading position in the _beau monde_ to
'go to Mr. Mixture, the wine-merchant, and order him to send in twelve dozen of his best Champaign, twelve dozen of Burgundy, and twelve dozen of Hermitage,'[323]
as the entire stock for her cellar. 'Good wine' was indeed, in those days, 'a gentleman.'
The unvarying rule that the fashions set by the most select are inevitably aped by the most degraded, so far as lies in their power, is exemplified in the Tavern Scene of Hogarth's _Rake's Progress_, where the table at which the hero and his _inamoratas_ are seated is set out with the tall wine-glasses wherein
[Illustration: TAVERN SCENE FROM 'THE RAKE'S PROGRESS.']
The Jacobites, faithful to their traditional ally, continued to toast 'the King over the water' by passing glasses charged with the sparkling wine of France across a bowl filled to the brim with the pure element. The middle classes clung to their beer, or at most indulged in Port and punch; whilst the lower orders seem to have become seized with that insane passion for ardent spirits which Hogarth satirised in his 'Gin Lane,' and hailed with glee Sir Robert Walpole's