For a long time after the repeal of the “Gin Act,” there is very little improvement to be noticed in the drinking habits of the English people. Moralists, poets, and some of the clergy, were vigorous in their denunciations of the national vice, which, then more them at any other period, seems to have been a fruitful source of crime and villainy. Men of good family and station, who had ruined themselves with drinking and gambling, did not, as to-day, seek relief in the insolvency court or the colonies, but, armed with pistol and blunderbuss, they endeavoured to retrieve their broken fortunes on the highway. The metropolis was the scene of nightly robberies, whilst the neighbouring roads and commons were beset with footpads and mounted highwaymen, so that, as a contemporary (Bishop Benson) wrote, there was “not only no safety of living in this town, but scarcely any in the country now, robbery and murther are grown so frequent. Our people are now become, what they never before were, cruel and inhuman. Those accursed spirituous liquors, which, to the shame of our Government, are so easily to be had, and in such quantities drunk, have changed the very nature of our people; and they will, if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race of people themselves.”[284] That this was no exaggerated picture of society at that time we have ample testimony in the literature extending over a great part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the chief aims of the essayists in such papers as the “Spectator” was “to recover society out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age had fallen;” and Addison thus describes the typical drunkard of his time:— “I was only the other day with honest Will Funnell, the West Saxon, who was reckoning up how much liquor had passed through him in the last twenty years of his life, which, according to computation, amounted to twenty-three hogsheads of october, four tuns of port, half a kilderkin of small beer, nineteen barrels of cider, and three glasses of champagne, besides which he had assisted at four hundred bowls of punch, not to mention sips, drams, and whets without number. I question not but every reader’s memory will suggest to him several ambitious young men who are as vain in this particular as Will Funnell, and can boast of as glorious exploits.” If _our_ readers will kindly substitute “bitter” for “october,” “sherry” for “port,” and, leaving all the other drinks as they stand, will throw in a few dozen cases of champagne, and brandy and soda _ad libitum_, we shall have no hesitation in echoing Addison’s concluding sentence, inasmuch as it will obviate the necessity for any further reference to the habits of intemperance which obtain amongst a large circle of fast young gentlemen of our own time!