At a christening at Beddington in Surrey, the nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undress’d the child, instead of laying it in the cradle, she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes. She was examin’d before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood; on which she was discharged!! Nor was any class of society exempt from the imputation; but the curtain need not be drawn. And what a stream of ability and learning was polluted by those mischievous compounds! Men of letters, tragedians, statesmen, fell--ignobly fell--before the insidious destroyer. Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened without sleep to his official business.[218] Lord Stair, in a letter to Horace Walpole, writes:-- Poor Harry (Bolingbroke) is turned out from being Secretary of State.... They call him knave and traitor.... I believe all poor Harry’s fault was that he could not play his part with a grave enough face.... He got drunk now and then. Lord Cartaret, afterwards Earl Granville, was a great scholar, and a man of invariable high spirits. The period of his ascendency was known by the name of the _Drunken Administration_; and the expression was not altogether figurative. His habits were extremely convivial; and champagne probably lent its aid to keep him in that state of joyous excitement in which his life was passed.... Driven from office, he retired laughing to his books and his bottle.... Ill as he had been used, he did not seem, says Horace Walpole, to have any resentment, or indeed any feeling except thirst.[219] Macaulay implies that Cartaret occasionally varied his champagne for ‘a daily half gallon of Burgundy.’ William Pulteney, created ‘Earl of Bath’ on the resignation of Walpole, has been generally reckoned amongst the men of the bottle. Indeed, Mr. Lecky remarks (i. 478) that he ‘is said to have shortened his life by drinking.’ But how can this be? He lived to the fairly respectable age of 82. Has he not been confounded with some namesake? For what says this same author in another volume?--‘Lord Bath, the old rival of Walpole, subscribed liberally to the orphanage of Georgia, and was a frequent and apparently devout attendant at Whitefield’s Chapel in Tottenham Court Road.’ In fact in his old age he became a Methodist. Was such a man likely to be a hard drinker? Of Walpole, Mr. Lecky remarks, that when he was a young man, his father was accustomed to pour into his glass a double portion of wine, saying, ‘Come, Robert, you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father.’