of the vraw, who peels the carrots, swaddles the child, and beats the servant maid with a broomstick; of the ruffian soldier, rubbing down his eternal white horse, braying away with his trumpet, gambling under the tilt of his tent, or brabbling with the baggage-waggon woman, who reclines yonder among her pots and kettles. These things come upon us at once; and we are seized and possessed with the life of the time; but the force and suggestiveness of the works I have named become weak and ambiguous when compared with this _Modern Midnight Conversation_, this picture paraphrase of the immortal “_Prospos des Buveurs_” of Francois Rabelais. You see an epoch of dull, brutish, besotted revelry: an epoch when my lord duke was taken home drunk in his sedan from the Rose to his mansion in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields; his chair-men and flambeau-men very probably as drunk as he; and his chaplain and groom of the chambers receiving him with bloodshot eyes and hiccuping speech;—when Jemmy Twitcher lay in the kennel as drunk as my lord duke; only, there was nobody to take him home; when there were four thousand ginshops in London; and a grave publicist issued a broadsheet, giving “two hundred and sixty plain and practical reasons” for the legislative suppression of the trade in “the dreadful liquor called Geneva.” I wish I could persuade the temperance societies that this is in comparison a sober age; and that 130 years ago, not only did wine and punch slay their thousands among the upper classes, but gin and brandy—both of which were horribly cheap—slew their tens of thousands among the populace. Wait till we come to the Hogarthian tableaux of Beer Street and Gin Lane. In this _Modern Midnight Conversation_, everybody is tipsy. The parson, the doctor, the soldier, the gambler, and the bully—the very drawer himself—are all intoxicated. Few of the company can see out of more than one eye. Pipes are lighted, and go out again for want of sober puffing. Songs are commenced, and the second couplet forgotten. Wigs are pushed awry, or quite fall off. The furniture is overturned; rivulets of punch flow over the table, and on to the puddled ground. Men, losing the reins of reason, not only see, but think double; take their own cracked voices for those of interlocutors; quarrel with themselves; give each other the lie, and vow they will draw upon themselves if they, themselves, say something—they know not what—again. This is the drunkenness that cankered, and bloated, and corrupted Church and State, in the debased reigns of the two first Brunswickers; that sent the king fuddled to Heidegger’s masquerade, and the minister reeling in his blue ribbon to the House, and made tavern roysterers of the young nobles of Britain. When one has had to wade through the minor chronicles of this time, it becomes distressingly easy to recognize the terrible truth of the _Modern Midnight Conversation_.[16]