stiff-drinking

Updated: May 23, 2025

It appears that families, for the sake of their exterior show, miserably contracted their domestic establishment; for Taylor, the Water-poet, complains that when they used formerly to keep from ten to a hundred proper serving-men, they now made the best shift, and for the sake of their coach and horses had only "a butterfly page, a trotting footman, and a stiff-drinking coachman, a cook, a clerk, a steward, and a butler, which hath forced an army of tall fellows to the gatehouses," or prisons.

Isaac Disraeli - Literary Character of Men of Genius: Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions