It was the aim of Addison and Steele to represent, and in some degree to caricature, the follies of fashionable life in the Town. That life had also its vices, which, if less unblushingly displayed than under the 'merry Monarch,' were visible enough. 'In the eighteenth century,' says Victor Hugo, in his epigrammatic way, 'the wife bolts out her husband. She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan. Adam is left outside.' Drunkenness was a habit familiar to the fine gentlemen of the town and to men occupying the highest position in the State. Harley went more than once into the queen's presence in a half-intoxicated condition; Carteret when Secretary of State, if Horace Walpole may be credited, was never sober; Bolingbroke, who practised every vice, is said to have been a 'four-bottle man;' and Swift found it perilous to dine with Ministers on account of the wine which circulated at their tables. 'Prince Eugene,' he writes, 'dines with the Secretary to-day with about seven or eight general officers or foreign Ministers. They will be all drunk I am sure.' Pope's frail body could not tolerate excess, and he is said to have hastened his end by good living. His friend Fenton 'died of a great chair and two bottles of port a day.' Parnell, who seems to have been in many respects a man of high character, is said to have shortened his life by intemperance; and Gay, who was cossetted like a favourite lapdog by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, died from indolence and good living. It may be questioned whether there is a single Wit of the age who did not love port too well, like Addison and Fenton, or suffer from 'carnivoracity' like Arbuthnot. Every section of English society was infected with the 'devil drunkenness,' and the passion for gin created by the encouragement of home distilleries produced a state of crime, misery, and disease in London and in the country which excited public attention. 'Small as is the place,' writes Mr. Lecky, 'which this fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the consequences that have flowed from it, the most momentous in that of the eighteenth century--incomparably more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country.'[6]