Life's Pleasures Quote by Thomas Love Peacock

The joke lands because it pretends to offer a sober, almost legalistic definition of drunkenness while obviously gaming the system. Peacock flips the expected moral lesson: the “not drunk” man is the one who can get up off the floor and keep going. That inversion is the point. It’s satire aimed less at alcohol than at the tidy hypocrisies people build around excess, class, and self-control. If you can perform competence - stand, walk, keep your wits - you’re granted the social fiction of moderation, even while you’re still actively drinking “more.”

The couplet’s sing-song rhythm and blunt rhyme (“floor/more,” “lies/rise”) mimic drinking-song cheer, but the content undercuts it. Peacock is describing a culture where the boundary between revelry and disgrace isn’t measured by consumption; it’s measured by visible collapse. Drunkenness becomes not a private bodily state but a public failure of performance.

Context matters: Peacock writes in a Regency-to-Victorian Britain that loved conviviality, clubs, and boozy masculine sociability, while also sharpening its codes of respectability. The verse reads like something traded at a dinner table: witty enough to entertain, sharp enough to sting. The subtext is that “drunk” is a label the group applies (“they”), not a truth the drinker owns. Social judgment enters at the exact moment you can’t get up to defend yourself.