ABSTRACT
Early in the century, when men and women went largely their own way, there appear to have been few formal entertainments for both sexes; but by 1740 people begin to read of a great number of dinner-parties and balls, of masquerades and ridottos. Virtually no one in the great world was exempt from the itch to play, or from the punishment of losing. The age of Queen Anne was an age of great talk in which the high-born shared; the age of George III, though it possessed the greatest of all talkers — and this means Burke as well as Johnson — was nothing better, in the polite world, than an age of badinage. By modern standards, almost all eighteenth-century men of the world drank well; all the same, many got drunk, and their drunkenness resulted in practical jokes, quarrels, duels, and the tormenting and assaulting of women.
