Though the English upper classes, as I have said, drink with a certain moderation, their moderation really embraces a quantity of liquor which would send the artisan quite off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon, Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's coffee, three kinds of wine at dinner, followed by liqueurs and whisky, make no appreciable mark on a man who is living at his ease and can sleep as long as he likes; but the sum total of alcohol is quite considerable, and probably greater than that consumed by the "drunken sot" for whom my lord has such contempt.
Of English drinking, generally, one may remark that it is done in a very deliberate and unsociable way. The English cannot be said to drink for company's sake. They do not foregather and carry on their drinking merrily. In their cups they are neither witty nor happy, but just dull and dour and inclined to be quarrelsome. They drink for drinking's sake,--for the sake of intoxication, and to drown trouble. I wish them good luck and less of their vile concoctions!
The subject of diet--he prefers to call it diet--is apparently one of unlimited interest to the Englishman. Meet him where you will, he is ever ready to discuss, first, the weather, and then the things--that is to say, the kinds of food--that agree with him. Indeed, you could almost stake your life on extracting from any strange Englishman you happen to come across some such statement as, "I can't abide eggs," or, "Veal always makes me bilious," within ten minutes of opening up a conversation with him. The Englishman's house, we are told, is his castle; and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his digestion. In point of fact, ninety-nine per cent. of adolescent and adult English people suffer from chronic indigestion in a more or less severe form. Flatulence, heartburn, colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mortal heritage. He is invariably troubled with some of them, and quite commonly with all. If you relieved him of them he would scarcely thank you, because he has nursed them from his youth up, and what he really wants is amelioration, and not cure. Probably this is the reason why in the midst of his wails and his unholy talk about diet he continues to feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and least rational manner that generations of bad feeders have been able to develop.
