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With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure vanishes from active political service. No more caustic Greek epics, translated from the original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen.
The colonel, who was a three-bottle man, and had found a listener to his heart, was somewhat inclined to prolong the session into the small hours of the morning, but finding that his guest was much fatigued, and even beginning to nod in the midst of his choicest story, he felt compelled to ask him if he would not like to retire.
If it had come to me from a fine old three-bottle ancestor! But I, who never had a grandfather, and hardly tasted wine till I was thirty years old why, I feel ashamed to call myself gouty. Sit down, my wife's at church. Strange thing that people still go to church but they do, you know. Force of habit, force of habit. Rosamund's with her." "Miss Elvan?" asked Warburton, with surprise.
With hollow eyes and that weary fall of the muscles of the cheeks which betrays the votary of Bacchus, the convivial three-bottle man, Charley Vernon forced a smile, meant to be airy and impertinent, to his pale lips, as he rose with effort, and extended three fingers to his cousin. "Where have you been hiding? Catching bloom from the roses?
Contrasting strongly with the lawyers of this period, who copied in miniature the impressive state of Clarendon's princely establishments, were the jovial, catch-singing, three-bottle lawyers who preferred drunkenness to pomp; an oaken table, surrounded by jolly fellows, to ante-rooms crowded with obsequious courtiers; a hunting song with a brave chorus to the less stormy diversion of polite conversation.
"Oddsfish!" said the King, "the light begins to break in on me I thought I remembered thy physiognomy. Wert thou not the very fellow whom I met at Chiffinch's yonder morning? The matter escaped me since; but now I recollect thou saidst then, that thou wert the son of that jolly old three-bottle Baronet yonder."
Besides, as the Montenegrins very rarely get drunk, it seems rather an unnecessary movement, and the Prince himself does not favour it. Bismarck once said that England's greatness began to diminish when the "three-bottle man" died out; perhaps Prince Nicolas has like thoughts of his hardy subjects, who certainly can consume enormous quantities of alcohol with impunity.
Amongst those customs "more honoured in the breach than the observance" which are rapidly being stamped out by the advancing steps of civilization, are the institutions which we can yet remember as so popular in the days of our childhood, called pleasure fairs. Like that social dodo in a higher section of society, the "three-bottle man," with the stupid Bacchanalian usages of which he was the embodiment, these fairs are slowly but surely disappearing as education spreads among the masses of the people. In the country a fair is a simple and a necessary thing enough. At certain seasons of the year, according to the staple commodities for the sale of which the assemblage was originally instituted, our bucolic friends gather at early morning with the products of their farms; a good deal of noisy buying, selling, and barter takes place. Later in the day the ladies invest their profits in a little mild finery, or in simple pleasures; and, later still, when the public-houses have done their work, comes a greater or lesser amount of riot, rude debauchery, and vice; and then, voil
He has less tact than character, as he showed once in Vienna, where he greatly pained the Foreign Minister, Count Goluchowski, one day at a club by calling to him, "Golu, Golu, come and sit beside your Kaiser." He has the German masculine enjoyment in a kind of humour which would have delighted Fox and the three-bottle men, but would sadly shock the susceptibilities of an Oxford æsthete.
But, it was the fashion then, as usual, to substitute the praise of virtues for the practice of them; and three-bottle and ten-tumbler men had a very good right, of course, to admire sobriety and correctness, and to denounce any two-bottle and six-tumbler man who was not ashamed to confess in print the weaknesses which they confessed only by word of mouth. Just, and yet not just.
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