Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/67

Rh after that the only double bottle of Harry's claret that I had left, I found in an old corner (as they could not again descend to port, or, as the boys at Eton call it, black-strap) one of the two bottles of Burgundy which I took from your cellar when you gave me the key of it ; and, by Jove ! how they did abuse my modesty, finding it so exquisite, that instead of two I did not take two dozen. But having no more, we closed the orifice of the stomach with a pint of Dantzic cherry-brandy, and have just parted in a tolerable state of insensibility to the ills of human life." On another night he dined at Camberwell at the house of sir Claude Crespigny, " Phil's elder brother." His comment was " An immense dinner and an ocean of claret ! " (George Selwyn and his contemporaries, by J. H. Jesse, 1844, IV., pp. 131-2, 365). Warner varied such entertainments by trips on horseback into the country. We find him at one time amid the pleasant fields of Warwickshire. At another he was on a visit to his cousin, George Warner, who lived at Milton near Abingdon, and there through " mauvaise honte " he caught a " most terrible cold." Next month (November 1779) when recovered from this illness he went a-hunting, his horse fell into a ditch " and dashed his rider against the opposite bank." So he was again in bed at Milton, with what might be " a broken rib " and with the news that his old uncle, who had predicted his own death for ten years, had died at last and without leaving him " sixpence to buy a stick of the black wax " with which his letter was sealed. On a third occasion he journied to Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire the seat ot Dymoke, England's champion, and with the head of that family he must have been on very friendly terms, as he held from August to November 1777 the vicarage of Scrivelsby. This was the expedition on which " the brilliant and magnificent exploit of leading a lame horse with a pair of panniers an hundred and sixty miles in five days, was