I am writing of the present, that is, of the ninth decade of the nineteenth century, when excessive drinking has come to be considered vulgar in England. French accusers delight in taking the worst examples of the past and in representing them as the average of the present. I was reading lately a French book of travels in England, including an account of a visit to a large country house. There are certain signs by which an English critic knows at once whether narratives of this kind are genuine or fictitious. A Frenchman who invents anything about England, and pretends that he is recounting a real experience, is sure to invent clumsily. In the present instance, I know by two pieces of evidence that the writer has been drawing upon his imagination. He makes the men in the smoking-room, after dinner, talk about the absent ladies in a style absolutely incompatible with English breeding, and he describes these gentlemen as having all got nearly or completely drunk before they were helped to bed by the domestics. This Frenchman has read that such things happened under the Georges, and as he is not describing a real experience he makes our contemporaries drunk to gratify the malevolence of French readers. [Sidenote: Present Condition of England.] England is now a country of very temperate, very intemperate, and very abstemious people. If a man belongs to the refined classes he will probably take wine in moderation, perhaps in great moderation; if he belongs to the humbler classes he may be a besotted drunkard, a sober workman who appreciates a glass of beer, or an apostle of total abstinence with a blue ribbon in his button-hole. The country spends too much in drink, but its expenditure is gradually diminishing, and the burden of it falls very unequally on the citizens. Looking to the future, which is more interesting than the past, I may add that it is hopeful for England, which is improving, and discouraging for France, which is going from bad to worse. [Sidenote: Eating in England.] [Sidenote: Peculiar Form of English Extravagance.] [Sidenote: Waste in the Poorer Classes.] [Sidenote: Utility of Soups in France.] [Sidenote: Both Countries Extravagant, but in Different Ways.]