Lords of the street and terrors of the way,
Flush'd as they are with folly, youth, and wine.
--Johnson's London.

Hol. Novi hominem tanquam te--his humour is lofty, his
discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his
gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous,
and thrasonical.
--Shakspeare.

I went a little after seven o'clock to keep my dinner engagement at---'s;
for very young men are seldom unpunctual at dinner. We sat down, six in
number, to a repast at once incredibly bad, and ridiculously extravagant;
turtle without fat--venison without flavour--champagne with the taste of
a gooseberry, and hock with the properties of a pomegranate. [Note: Pomum
valde purgatorium.] Such is the constant habit of young men: they think
any thing expensive is necessarily good, and they purchase poison at a
dearer rate than the most medicine-loving hypochondriac in England.

Of course, all the knot declared the dinner was superb; called in the
master to eulogize him in person, and made him, to his infinite dismay,
swallow a bumper of his own hock. Poor man, they mistook his reluctance
for his diffidence, and forced him to wash it away in another potation.
With many a wry face of grateful humility, he left the room, and we then
proceeded to pass the bottle with the suicidal determination of defeated
Romans. You may imagine that we were not long in arriving at the devoutly
wished for consummation of comfortable inebriety; and with our eyes
reeling, our cheeks burning, and our brave spirits full ripe for a
quarrel, we sallied out at eleven o'clock, vowing death, dread, and
destruction to all the sober portion of his majesty's subjects.