Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/337

Rh will dress like tradesmen, and tradesmen like great men, it will be necessary to make a new law for fashion," sighed one whose mind could not grasp the inevitable change. As in dress, so in manners and morals changes were taking place. The King had stopped gambling at the Palace, and in one short year the four hundred lottery offices in London had decreased to fifty-one. Two of the highest ladies in the land were summoned for playing high stakes, and fined £50, after which gambling was no longer reputable. The hard drinking of the early Hanoverian period was likewise diminishing. Dr. Johnson, who had systematically drunk three bottles of port at a sitting in his young days, and remembered the time when all decent people got drunk every night without social criticism, ascribed the change to the substitution of wine for beer. But there was also a growing delicacy of feeling in the matter, and a repulsion to the demeanour and language of a drunken gentleman. True, they still ate enormously. "I see here every day," writes Walpole, "men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form." He himself was moderate in all things, and usually drank