From the social man of letters, we turn to one who moved in a far wider circle; who, in Byron’s opinion, wrote the best comedy, the best opera, the best farce, the best address, and delivered the very best oration ever conceived or heard in this country--Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He, like Lamb, can be judged out of his own mouth. It was he who with piquant humour declared that he could drink with advantage any _given_ quantity of wine. Wine, says his biographer, Tom Moore, was one of his favourite helps to inspiration: ‘If the thought (he would say) is slow to come, a glass of good wine encourages it, and when it _does_ come, a glass of good wine rewards it.’ To the same effect, Leigh Hunt remarks: ‘His table songs are always admirable. When he was drinking wine he was thoroughly in earnest.’ Lady Holland, at whose house Sheridan was a constant guest, told Moore that he used to take a bottle of wine and a book up to bed with him always; the _former_ alone intended for use. He took spirits with his morning tea or coffee, and on his way from Holland House to town, invariably stopped at the old roadside inn, the _Adam and Eve_, where he ran up a long bill which Lord Holland was left the privilege of paying. In the very amusing and instructive _Reminiscences of Captain Gronow_, speaking of Sheridan’s prosperity, the author urges:-- Many of the follies and extravagances that marked the life of this gifted but reckless personage must be attributed to the times in which he existed. Drinking was the fashion of the day. The Prince [Regent], Mr. Pitt, Dundas, the Lord Chancellor Eldon, and many others who gave the tone to society, would, if they now appeared at an evening party, ‘as was their custom of an afternoon,’ be pronounced fit for nothing but bed. A three-bottle man was not an unusual guest at a fashionable table; and the night was invariably spent in drinking bad port wine to an enormous extent. The same writer observes:--