Especially their wine. The one great characteristic of the gentility of the day was its capacity for drinking wine. "Wine, dear child, and truth," says a Greek poet, naming the two most admirable gifts of life. Truth was not always very highly prized by the men who set manners and made history in the second half of the eighteenth century, but to wine they clung with an absolutely unswerving and unalterable attachment. If the great Oriental scholar who adorned the age had been more fortunate in his studies, if Sir William Jones had chanced to make acquaintance with a Persian poet who has since become very famous among Englishmen, he would have found in the quatrains of Omar Khayyam the very verses to please the minds and to interpret the desires of the majority of the statesmen, soldiers, divines, lawyers, and fine gentlemen of the day. It is as impossible to imagine the men of the eighteenth century without their incessant libations of wine as it is impossible to imagine what the eighteenth century would have been like if it had been for the most part abstemious, sober, or even reasonably temperate. As we read the memoirs of the day, and if we believe only a part of what they tell us, making the most liberal allowance for the exaggeration of the wit and the satire of the cynic, we have to picture the political and social life of the time as a drunken orgy. Undoubtedly there were then, as always, men of decent behavior and discreet life, men who would {20} no more have exceeded in wine than in any other way. But the temper of the age and the tone of the fashionable world was not in tune with their austerity. Wonder at the frequency with which men of position got drunk then is only rivalled by wonder at the amount which they could drink without getting drunk. [Sidenote: 1761--Unpropitious time for the King's rule]