Horace Walpole, who deals with men rather than manners, with sayings rather than doings, and whose forte is epigram and not description, has little to tell us about the drinking customs of his day. The strictly temperate regimen that marked his later years, and rendered him unfit for mere convivial gatherings, extended to his writings, and he seldom permits his pen to expatiate on those pleasures in which he sought no share. Even in his letters from Reims, written in 1739, when he was doing the grand tour, he omits all mention of the wine for which that city is famed. Still he incidentally furnishes a few instances of the esteem in which Champagne was held by the upper classes in the middle of the eighteenth century. In a letter to George Montague, dated June 23, 1750, he describes how Lord Granby joined his party at Vauxhall whilst suffering considerably under the influence of the Champagne he had consumed at 'Jenny's Whim,' a noted tavern at Chelsea; and writing to Sir Horace Mann, a year later, he says that the then chief subjects of conversation in London were the two Miss Gunnings and an extravagant dinner at White's. [Illustration: SCENE AT VAUXHALL GARDENS (From an engraving after a drawing by Gravelot).] 'The dinner was a frolic of seven young men, who bespoke it to the utmost extent of expense; one article was a tart made of duke cherries, from a hothouse; and another, that they tasted but one glass out of each bottle of Champagne. The bill of fare has got into print, and with good people has produced the apprehension of another earthquake.'[330] The Earl of March, afterwards 'Old Q,' in a letter to Walpole's friend, George Selwyn, in November 1766, writes: 'I have not yet received some Champaign that Monsieur de Prissieux has sent me.'[331] And we find Horace Walpole's fair foe, that eighteenth-century exemplar of strong-minded womanhood, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, whose letters indicate a _penchant_ for Burgundy, acknowledging in verse the exhilarating effects of Champagne. Of the _beaux_ of 1721 she says that 'They sigh, not from the heart but from the brain, Vapours of vanity and strong Champagne.'[332] Better known by far are her oft-quoted lines, 'But when the long hours of the public are past, And we meet with Champagne and a chicken at last, May every fond pleasure that moment endear, Be banished afar both discretion and fear,'[333] which drew from Byron the terror-stricken comment, 'What say you to such a supper with such a woman?'[334] [Illustration] [Illustration]