You might think that, after such indulgence, a day or so of dry toast and herbal tea might be just the thing. But the following day seven men were at table, and if anything they exceeded the potations of the previous evening. They again drank seven bottles of claret, two Scotch pints of claret, and three bottles of port, before varying the conclusion of the entertainment with two bottles of Lisbon, one bottle of Madeira and no fewer than three bottles of rum. Boswell's journal entry after this debauch says something for his stamina: 

I drank a great deal of wine without feeling any bad effect...While I kept the highest pitch of jollity, I at the same time maintained the peculiar decorum of the family of Auchinleck.

It is a typically Boswellian touch to re-describe self-indulgence as dutiful observance of "the peculiar decorum of the family of Auchinleck". In the 1760s a recurrent feature of the rackety life he had led in Edinburgh was an initial phase of reckless drinking, followed by a night spent in a brothel.  On one occasion he had given a dinner for some friends to whom he had lost a bet that he would not get a dose of the clap while travelling in Europe. Overwhelmed with drink, he became confused on his way back to his lodgings, and wandered instead into "a low house in one of the alleys in Edinburgh where I knew a common girl lodged, and like a brute as I was I lay all night with her". 

The next morning he showed clear signs of the pox. Five weeks later he repeated the frolic, spending the night with "a whore worthy of Boswell, if Boswell must have a whore". Marriage did not bring with it a permanent amendment of life. After a while Boswell began once more to stay out late drinking and whoring, and responded violently to expressions of concern from his long-suffering wife. The arrival of morning was often accompanied with remorse, Boswell being "vexed to think of having given my valuable spouse so much uneasiness; for she scarcely slept any the whole night watching me. The reflection, too, of my having this summer so frequently been intoxicated galled me."

Even a constitution as vigorous as that of Boswell will eventually buckle under such a relentless regime of dissipation. By the summer of 1794, Boswell — who had always been prone to intermittent fits of sobriety — wrote to his son Jamie from Auchinleck to claim that "I have not drunk half a bottle of wine any day since I came here, some days not more than two glasses, some none at all.  This moderation I am convinced has produced a calmness in my blood and spirits very different from the effects of too free living in the metropolis."

There is a pathos in this solitary and largely sober Boswell after the riotous parties of the early 1780s. On Christmas Day 1794, Boswell ate his Christmas dinner alone:

I sat down by myself in my own dining room to excellent leek soup a roast turkey and a minced pie with all which having regaled myself sufficiently I drank a bottle of rich gold wine. In the evening I had coffee and Edinburgh seedcake.