A few great men might regard Johnson’s objection to Reynolds’ remark as a quibble. The restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee drank himself into Bedlam, saying, “They said I was mad: and I said they were mad: damn them, they outvoted me.” But for sheer volume of drink combined with wit and learning one cannot top the great scholar Richard Porson. From Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography:

The editor of Euripides, he was a renowned scholar who “could hiccup Greek like a helot,” but preferred to boast that he could repeat from memory the whole of Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). “It was said of Porson,” according to Walford’s Old and New London, “that he drank everything he could lay his hands upon, even to embrocation and spirits of wine intended for the lamp. Samuel Rogers described him returning to the dining room after the people had gone, and drinking all that was left in their glasses.” His usual and familiar exclamation, when surprised or perplexed, was “Whooe!” and, on the day of his death, he was heard quoting from the Greek Anthologia. A friend noticed that on this last occasion “he gave the Greek rapidly, but the English withy painful slowness, as if the Greek came more naturally.”

For generations, schoolchildren were taught Porson’s Canon to get their Greek accents right.