Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/66

 46 at cards and he did not demur, when he had finished his Sunday duty, to pass to the pleasures of the table and to the rubber at whist with bolted doors, that followed. " Ay sir !" he cries to Selwyn in impassioned language, " that game of whist of an evening, and its events, is a vast thing. Last night, by a lucky deal, I gave myself eight trumps, and my partner the other five. I won the first trick and led a trump, when, upon my adversary on the left hand renouncing, his partner (a grave divine with a large black wig, and a solemn face with a pipe stuck in it), gave with an impetuosity which made him drop his said pipe that had been newly lighted, a ' what ! ' of such sharp, shrill astonishment, that you could not but have laughed at it if present, and have remembered it in future." His friends allowed that he was a prodigious smoker and that in his rooms he was rarely seen without a pipe in his mouth. In that pastime they could even claim for him equality with the other whig doctor of divinity, Dr. Parr. But they insisted that he was a gourmet in eating and not given to excess over his wine. Some of the more enthusiastic of his friends went beyond these assertions. The chronicler in the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1800 laid down that Warner was " moderate to an extreme at the table and equally abstemious at the bottle ; a book and a pipe and cheerful conversation (in which he eminently excelled) were his supreme delight." Against this must be set Warner's own account to Selwyn of his dinner with Henry Hoare of the banking family and Philip Champion Crespigny, King's proctor and M.P. for Sudbury, a wit and diner-out. " The whim took them, as it sometimes will, to have a blackguard scheme of dining in my cabin, and ordering their dinner ; and a very good one they had : mackerel, a delicate neck of veal, a piece of Hamborough beef, cabbage and salad, and a gooseberry tart ; and when they had drunk the bottle of white wine, and of port, which accompanied the dinner, and