In and About Drury Lane, and Other Papers: Volume 1 by Dr. Doran - HTML preview

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Perusing records that are a century old is something better than listening to a centenarian, even if his memory could go back so far. The records are as fresh as first impressions, and they bring before us men and things as they were, not as after-historians supposed them to be.

The story which 1773 has left of itself is full of variety and of interest. Fashion fluttered the propriety of Scotland when the old Dowager Countess of Fife gave the first masquerade that ever took place in that country, at Duff House. In England, people and papers could talk or write of nothing so frequently as masquerades. ‘One hears so much of them,’ remarked that lively old lady, Mrs. Delany, ‘that I suppose the only method not to be tired of them is to frequent them.’ Old-fashioned loyalty in England was still more shocked when the Lord Mayor of London declined to go to St. Paul’s on the 30th of January to profess himself sad and sorry at the martyrdom of Charles I. In the minds of certain religious people there was satisfaction felt at the course taken by the University of Oxford, which refused to modify the Thirty-nine Articles, as more liberal Cambridge had done. Indeed, such Liberalism as that of the latter, prepared ultra-serious people for awful consequences; and when they heard that Moelfammo, an extinct volcano in Flintshire, had resumed business, and was beginning to pelt the air with red-hot stones, they naturally thought that the end of a wicked world was at hand. They took courage again when the Commons refused to dispense with subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, by a vote of 150 to 64. But no sooner was joy descending on the one hand than terror advanced on the other. Quid-nuncs asked whither the world was driving, when the London livery proclaimed the reasonableness of annual parliaments. Common-sense people also were perplexed at the famous parliamentary resolution that Lord Clive had wrongfully taken to himself above a quarter of a million of money, and had rendered signal services to his country!

Again, a hundred years ago our ancestors were as glad to hear that Bruce had got safely back into Egypt from his attempt to reach the Nile sources, as we were to know that Livingstone was alive and well and in search of those still undiscovered head-waters. A century ago, too, crowds of well-wishers bade God speed to the gallant Captain Phipps, as he sailed from the Nore on his way to that North-west Passage which he did not find, and which, at the close of a hundred years, is as impracticable as ever. And, though history may or may not repeat itself, events of to-day at least remind us of those a hundred years old. The Protestant Emperor William, in politely squeezing the Jesuits out of his dominions, only modestly follows the example of Pope Clement XIV., who, in 1773, let loose a bull for the entire suppression of the order in every part of the world. Let us not forget too, that if orthodox ruffians burnt Priestley’s house over his head, and would have smashed all power of thought out of that head itself, the Royal Society conferred on the great philosopher who was the brutally treated pioneer of modern science, the Copley Medal, for his admirable treatise on different kinds of air.

But there was a little incident of the year 1773, which has had more stupendous consequences than any other with which England has been connected. England, through some of her statesmen, asserted her right to tax her colonists, without asking their consent or allowing them to be represented in the home legislature. In illustration of such right and her determination to maintain it, England sent out certain ships with cargoes of tea, on which a small duty was imposed, to be paid by the colonists. The latter declined to have the wholesome herb at such terms, but England forced it upon them. Three ships, so freighted, entered Boston Harbour. They were boarded by a mob disguised as Mohawk Indians, who tossed the tea into the river and then quietly dispersed. A similar cargo was safely landed at New York, but it was under the guns of a convoying man-of-war. When landed it could not be disposed of, except by keeping it under lock-and-key, with a strong guard over it, to preserve it from the patriots who scorned the cups that cheer, if they were unduly taxed for the luxury. That was the little seed out of which has grown that Union whose President now is more absolute and despotic than poor George III. ever was or cared to be; little seed, which is losing its first wholesomeness, and, if we may trust transatlantic papers, is grown to a baleful tree, corrupt to the core and corrupting all around it. Such at least is the American view—the view of good and patriotic Americans, who would fain work sound reform in this condition of things at the end of an eventful century, when John Bull is made to feel, by Geneva and San Juan, that he will never have any chance of having the best argument in an arbitration case, where he is opposed by a system which looks on sharpness as a virtue, and holds that nothing succeeds like success.

Let us get back from this subject to the English court of a century since. A new year’s day at court was in the last century a gala day, which made London tradesmen rejoice. There were some extraordinary figures at that of 1773, at St. James’s, but no one looked so much out of ordinary fashion as Lord Villiers. His coat was of pale purple velvet turned up with lemon colour, ‘and embroidered all over’ (says Mrs. Delany) ‘with SSes of pearl as big as peas, and in all the spaces little medallions in beaten gold—real solid! in various figures of Cupids and the like!’

The court troubles of the year were not insignificant; but the good people below stairs had their share of them. If the King continued to be vexed at the marriages of his brothers Gloucester and Cumberland with English ladies, the King’s servants had sorrows of their own. The newspapers stated that ‘the wages of his Majesty’s servants were miserably in arrear; that their families were consequently distressed, and that there was great clamour for payment.’ The court was never more bitterly satirised than in some lines put in circulation (as Colley Cibber’s) soon after Lord Chesterfield’s death, to whom they were generally ascribed. They were written before the decease of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The laureate was made to say—

Colley Cibber, right or wrong,

Must celebrate this day,

And tune once more his tuneless song

And strum the venal lay.

Heav’n spread through all the family

That broad, illustrious glare,

That shines so flat in every eye

And makes them all so stare!

Heav’n send the Prince of royal race

A little coach and horse,

A little meaning in his face,

And money in his purse.

And, as I have a son like yours,

May he Parnassus rule.

So shall the crown and laurel too

Descend from fool to fool.

Satire was, indeed, quite as rough in prose as it was sharp in song. One of the boldest paragraphs ever penned by paragraph writers of the time appeared in the ‘Public Advertiser’ in the summer of 1773. A statue of the King had been erected in Berkeley Square. The discovery was soon made that the King himself had paid for it. Accordingly, the ‘Public Advertiser’ audaciously informed him that he had paid for his statue, because he well knew that none would ever be spontaneously erected in his honour by posterity. The ‘Advertiser’ further advised George III. to build his own mausoleum for the same reason.

And what were ‘the quality’ about in 1773? There was Lord Hertford exclaiming, ‘By Jove!’ because he objected to swearing. Ladies were dancing ‘Cossack’ dances, and gentlemen figured at balls in black coats, red waistcoats, and red sashes, or quadrilled with nymphs in white satin—themselves radiant in brown silk coat, with cherry-coloured waistcoat and breeches. Beaux who could not dance took to cards, and the Duke of Northumberland lost two thousand pounds at quince before half a dancing night had come to an end. There was Sir John Dalrymple winning money more disastrously than the duke lost it. He was a man who inveighed against corruption, and who took bribes from brewers. Costume balls were in favour at court, Chesterfield was making jokes to the very door of his coffin; and he was not the only patron of the arts who bought a Claude Lorraine painted within the preceding half-year. The macaronies, having left off gaming—they had lost all their money—astonished the town by their new dresses and the size of their nosegays. Poor George III. could not look admiringly at the beautiful Miss Linley at an oratorio, without being accused of ogling her. It was at one of the King’s balls that Mrs. Hobart figured, ‘all gauze and spangles, like a spangle pudding.’ This was the expensive year when noblemen are said to have made romances instead of giving balls. The interiors of their mansions were transformed, walls were cast down, new rooms were built, the decorations were superb (three hundred pounds was the sum asked only for the loan of mirrors for a single night), and not only were the dancers in the most gorgeous of historical or fancy costumes, but the musicians wore scarlet robes, and looked like Venetian senators on the stage. It was at one of these balls that Harry Conway was so astonished at the agility of Mrs. Hobart’s bulk that he said he was sure she must be hollow.

She would not have been more effeminate than some of our young legislators in the Commons, who, one night in May, ‘because the House was very hot, and the young members thought it would melt their rouge and wither their nosegays,’ as Walpole says, all of a sudden voted against their own previously formed opinions. India and Lord Clive were the subjects, and the letter-writer remarks that the Commons ‘being so fickle, Lord Clive has reason to hope that after they have voted his head off they will vote it on again the day after he has lost it.’

When there were members in the Commons who rouged like pert girls or old women, and carried nosegays as huge as a lady mayoress’s at a City ball, we are not surprised to hear of macaronies in Kensington Gardens. There they ran races on every Sunday evening, ‘to the high amusement and contempt of the mob,’ says Walpole. The mob had to look at the runners from outside the gardens. ‘They will be ambitious of being fashionable, and will run races too.’ Neither mob nor macaronies had the swiftness of foot or the lasting powers of some of the running footmen attached to noble houses. Dukes would run matches of their footmen from London to York, and a fellow has been known to die rather than that ‘his grace’ who owned him should lose the match. Talking of ‘graces,’ an incident is told by Walpole of the cost of a bed for a night’s sleep for a duchess, which may well excite a little wonder now. The king and court were at Portsmouth to review the fleet. The town held so many more visitors than it could accommodate that the richest of course secured the accommodation. ‘The Duchess of Northumberland gives forty guineas for a bed, and must take her chambermaid into it.’ Walpole, who is writing to the Countess of Ossory, adds: ‘I did not think she would pay so dear for such company.’ The people who were unable to pay ran recklessly into debt, and no more thought of the sufferings of those to whom they owed the money than that modern rascalry in clean linen, who compound with their creditors and scarcely think of paying their ‘composition.’ A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the virtues of Charles James Fox, who had none but such as may be found in easy temper and self-indulgence. He was now in debt to the tune of a hundred thousand pounds. But so once was Julius Cæsar, with whom Walpole satirically compared him. He let his securities, his bondsmen, pay the money which they had warranted would be forthcoming from him, ‘while he, as like Brutus as Cæsar, is indifferent about such paltry counters.’ When one sees the vulgar people who by some means or other, and generally by any means, accumulate fortunes the sum total of which would once have seemed fabulous, and when we see fortunes of old aristocratic families squandered away among the villains of the most villainous ‘turf,’ there is nothing strange in what we read in a letter of a hundred years ago, namely: ‘What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth! filled by nabobs and emptied by macaronies; a country over-run by horse-races.’ So London at the end of July now is not unlike to London of 1773; but we could not match the latter with such a street picture as the following: ‘There is scarce a soul in London but macaronies lolling out of windows at Almack’s, like carpets to be dusted.’ With the more modern parts of material London Walpole was ill satisfied. We look upon Adam’s work with some complacency, but Walpole exclaims, ‘What are the Adelphi buildings?’ and he replies, ‘Warehouses laced down the seams, like a soldier’s trull in a regimental old coat!’ Mason could not bear the building brothers. ‘Was there ever such a brace,’ he asks, ‘of self-puffing Scotch coxcombs?’ The coxcombical vein was, nevertheless, rather the fashionable one. Fancy a nobleman’s postillions in white jackets trimmed with muslin, and clean ones every other day! In such guise were Lord Egmont’s postillions to be seen.

The chronicle of fashion is dazzling with the record of the doings of the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. At her house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, were held the assemblies which were scornfully called ‘blue-stocking’ by those who were not invited, or who affected not to care for them if they were. Mrs. Delany, who certainly had a great regard for this ‘lady of the last century,’ has a sly hit at Mrs. Montagu in a letter of May 1773. ‘If,’ she writes, ‘I had paper and time, I could entertain you with Mrs. Montagu’s room of Cupidons, which was opened with an assembly for all the foreigners, the literati, and the macaronies of the present age. Many and sly are the observations how such a genius, at her age and so circumstanced, could think of painting the walls of her dressing-room with bowers of roses and jessamine, entirely inhabited by little Cupids in all their little wanton ways. It is astonishing, unless she looks upon herself as the wife of old Vulcan, and mother to all those little Loves!’ This is a sister woman’s testimony of a friend! The genius of Mrs. Montagu was of a higher class than that of dull but good Mrs. Delany. The age of the same lady was a little over fifty, when she might fittingly queen it, as she did, in her splendid mansion in Hill Street, the scene of the glories of her best days. The ‘circumstances’ and the ‘Vulcan’ were allusions to her being the wife of a noble owner of collieries and a celebrated mathematician, who suffered from continued ill-health, and who considerately went to bed at five o’clock P.M. daily!

The great subject of the year, after all, was the duping of Charles Fox, by the impostor who called herself the Hon. Mrs. Grieve. She had been transported, and after her return had set up as ‘a sensible woman,’ giving advice to fools, ‘for a consideration.’ A silly Quaker brought her before Justice Fielding for having defrauded him. He had paid her money, for which she had undertaken to get him a place under government; but she had kept the money, and had not procured for him the coveted place. Her impudent defence was that the Quaker’s immorality stood in the way of otherwise certain success. The Honourable lady’s dupes believed in her, because they saw the style in which she lived, and often beheld her descend from her chariot and enter the houses of ministers and other great personages; but it came out that she only spoke to the porters or to other servants, who entertained her idle questions, for a gratuity, while Mrs. Grieve’s carriage, and various dupes, waited for her in the street. When these dupes, however, saw Charles Fox’s chariot at Mrs. Grieve’s door, and that gentleman himself entering the house—not issuing therefrom till a considerable period had elapsed—they were confirmed in their credulity. But the clever hussey was deluding the popular tribune in the house, and keeping his chariot at her door, to further delude the idiots who were taken in by it. The patriot was in a rather common condition of patriots; he was over head and ears in debt. The lady had undertaken to procure for him the hand of a West Indian heiress, a Miss Phipps, with 80,000l., a sum that might soften the hearts of his creditors for a while. The young lady (whom ‘the Hon.’ never saw) was described as a little capricious. She could not abide dark men, and the swart democratic leader powdered his eyebrows that he might look fairer in the eyes of the lady of his hopes. An interview between them was always on the point of happening, but was always being deferred. Miss Phipps was ill, was coy, was not ‘i’ the vein’; finally she had the smallpox, which was as imaginary as the other grounds of excuse. Meanwhile Mrs. Grieve lent the impecunious legislator money, 300l. or thereabouts. She was well paid, not by Fox, of course, but by the more vulgar dupes who came to false conclusions when they beheld his carriage, day after day, at the Hon. Mrs. Grieve’s door. The late Lord Holland expressed his belief that the loan from Mrs. Grieve was a foolish and improbable story. ‘I have heard Fox say,’ Lord Holland remarks in the ‘Memorials and Correspondence of Fox,’ edited by Lord John (afterwards Earl) Russell, ‘she never got or asked any money from him.’ She probably knew very well that Fox had none to lend. That he should have accepted any from such a woman is disgraceful enough: but there may be exaggeration in the matter.

Fox—it is due to him to note the fact here—had yet hardly begun seriously and earnestly his career as a public man. At the close of 1773 he was sowing his wild oats. He ended the year with the study of two widely different dramatic parts, which he was to act on a private stage. Those parts were Lothario, in ‘The Fair Penitent,’ and Sir Harry’s servant, in ‘High Life below Stairs.’ The stage on which the two pieces were acted, by men scarcely inferior to Fox himself in rank and ability, was at Winterslow House, near Salisbury, the seat of the Hon. Stephen Fox. The night of representation closed the Christmas holidays of 1773-4. It was Saturday, January 8, 1774. Fox played the gallant gay Lothario brilliantly; the livery servant in the kitchen, aping his master’s manners, was acted with abundant low humour, free from vulgarity. But, whether there was incautious management during the piece, or incautious revelry after it, the fine old house was burned to the ground before the morning. It was then that Fox turned more than before to public business; but without giving up any of his private enjoyments, except those he did not care for.

The duels of this year which gave rise to the most gossip were, first, that between Lord Bellamont and Lord Townshend, and next the one between Messrs. Temple and Whately. The two lords fought (after some shifting on Townshend’s side) on a quarrel arising from a refusal of Lord Townshend, in Dublin, to receive Bellamont. The offended lord was badly shot in the stomach, and a wit (so called) penned this epigram on the luckier adversary:—

Says Bell’mont to Townshend, ‘You turned on your heel,

And that gave your honour a check.’

‘’Tis my way,’ replied Townshend. ‘To the world I appeal,

If I didn’t the same at Quebec.’

Townshend, at Quebec, had succeeded to the command after Monckton was wounded, and he declined to renew the conflict with De Bougainville. The duel between Temple and Whately arose out of extraordinary circumstances. There were in the British Foreign Office letters from English and also from American officials in the transatlantic colony, which advised coercion on the part of our government as the proper course to be pursued for the successful administration of that colony. Benjamin Franklin was then in England, and hearing of these letters, had a strong desire to procure them, in order to publish them in America, to the confusion of the writers. The papers were the property of the British Government, from whom it is hardly too much to say that they must have been stolen. At all events, an agent of Franklin’s, named Hugh Williamson, is described as having got them for Franklin ‘by an ingenious device,’ which seems to be a very euphemistic phrase. The letters had been originally addressed to Whately, secretary to the Treasury, who, in 1773, was dead. The ingenious device by which they were abstracted was reported to have been made with the knowledge of Temple, who had been lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. The excitement caused by their publication led to a duel between Temple and a brother of Whately, in whose hands the letters had never been, and poor Whately was dangerously wounded, to save the honour of the ex-lieutenant-governor. The publication of these letters was as unjustifiable as the ingenious device by which they were conveyed from their rightful owners. It caused as painful a sensation as any one of the many painful incidents in the Geneva Arbitration affair, namely, when—it being a point of honour that neither party should publish a statement of their case till a judgment had been pronounced—the case made out by the United States counsel was to be bought, before the tribunal was opened, as easily as if it had been a ‘last dying speech and confession!’

In literature Andrew Stewart’s promised ‘Letters to Lord Mansfield’ excited universal curiosity. In that work Stewart treated the chief justice as those Chinese executioners do their patients whose skin they politely and tenderly brush away with wire brushes till nothing is left of the victim but a skeleton. It was a luxury to Walpole to see a Scot dissect a Scot. ‘They know each other’s sore places better than we do.’ The work, however, was not published. Referring to Macpherson’s ‘Ossian,’ Walpole remarked, ‘The Scotch seem to be proving that they are really descended from the Irish.’ On the other hand, the ‘Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers’ was being relished by satirical minds, and men were attributing it to Anstey and Soame Jenyns, and to Temple, Luttrell, and Horace Walpole, and pronouncing it wittier than the ‘Dunciad,’ and did not know that it was Mason’s, and that it would not outlive Pope. Sir William Chambers found consolation in the fact that the satire, instead of damaging the volume it condemned, increased the sale of the book by full three hundred volumes. Walpole, of course, knew from the first that Mason was the author; he worked hard in promoting its circulation, and gloried in its success. ‘Whenever I was asked,’ he writes, ‘have you read “Sir John Dalrymple?” I replied, “Have you read the ‘Heroic Epistle’?” The Elephant and Ass have become constellations, and ‘He has stolen the Earl of Denbigh’s handkerchief,’ is the proverb in fashion. It is something surprising to find, at a time when authors are supposed to have been ill paid, Dr. Hawkesworth receiving, for putting together the narrative of Mr. Banks’s voyage, one thousand pounds in advance from the traveller, and six thousand from the publishers, Strahan & Co. It really seems incredible, but this is stated to have been the fact.

Then, the drama of 1773! There was Home’s ‘Alonzo,’ which, said Walpole, ‘seems to be the story of David and Goliath, worse told than it would have been if Sternhold and Hopkins had put it to music!’ But the town really awoke to a new sensation when Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was produced on the stage, beginning a course in which it runs as freshly now as ever. Yet the hyper-fine people of a hundred years ago thought it rather vulgar. This was as absurd as the then existing prejudice in France, that it was vulgar and altogether wrong for a nobleman to write a book, or rather, to publish one! There is nothing more curious than Walpole’s drawing-room criticism of this exquisite and natural comedy. He calls it ‘the lowest of all farces.’ He condemns the execution of the subject, rather than the ‘very vulgar’ subject itself. He could see in it neither moral nor edification. He allows that the situations are well managed, and make one laugh, in spite of the alleged grossness of the dialogue, the forced witticisms, and improbability of the whole plan and conduct. But, he adds, ‘what disgusts one most is, that though the characters are very low, and aim at low humour, not one of them says a sentence that is natural, or that marks any character at all. It is set up in opposition to sentimental comedy, and is as bad as the worst of them.’ Walpole’s supercilious censure reminds one of the company and of the dancing bear, alluded to in the scene over which Tony Lumpkin presides at the village alehouse. ‘I loves to hear the squire’ (Lumpkin) ‘sing,’ says one fellow, ‘bekase he never gives us anything that’s low!’ To which expression of good taste, an equally nice fellow responds; ‘Oh, damn anything that’s low! I can’t bear it!’ Whereupon, the philosophical Mister Muggins very truly remarks: ‘The genteel thing is the genteel thing at any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.’ The humour culminates in the rejoinder of the bear-ward: ‘I like the maxim of it, Master Muggins. What though I’m obligated to dance a bear? A man may be a gentleman for all that. May this be my poison if my bear ever dances but to the very genteelest of tunes—“Water parted,” or the minuet in “Ariadne”.’ All this is low, in one sense, but it is far more full of humour than of vulgarity. The comedy of nature killed the sentimental comedies, which, for the most part, were as good (or as bad) as sermons. They strutted or staggered with sentiments on stilts, and were duller than tables of uninteresting statistics.

Garrick, who would have nothing to do with Goldsmith’s comedy except giving it a prologue, was ‘in shadow’ this year. He improved ‘Hamlet,’ by leaving out the gravediggers; and he swamped the theatre with the ‘Portsmouth Review.’ He went so far as to rewrite ‘The Fair Quaker of Deal,’ to the tune of ‘Portsmouth and King George for ever!’ not to mention a preface, in which the Earl of Sandwich, by name, is preferred to Drake, Blake, and all the admirals that ever existed! If Walpole’s criticisms are not always just, they are occasionally admirable for terseness and correctness alike. London, in 1773, was in raptures with the singing of Cecilia Davies. Walpole quaintly said that he did not love the perfection of what anybody can do, and he wished ‘she had less top to her voice and more bottom.’ How good too is his sketch of a male singer, who ‘sprains his mouth with smiling on himself!’ But to return to Garrick, and an illustration of social manners a century ago, we must not omit to mention that, at a private party—at Beauclerk’s, Garrick played the ‘short-armed orator’ with Goldsmith! The latter sat in Garrick’s lap, concealing him, but with Garrick’s arms advanced under Goldsmith’s shoulders; the arms of the latter being held behind his back. Goldsmith then spoke a speech from ‘Cato,’ while Garrick’s shortened arms supplied the action. The effect, of course, was ridiculous enough to excite laughter, as the action was often in absurd diversity from the utterance.

In the present newspaper record of births a man’s wife is no longer called his ‘lady;’ a hundred years ago there was plentiful variety of epithet. ‘The Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, spouse to the Prince of that name, of a Princess,’ is one form. ‘Earl Tyrconnel’s lady of a child,’ is another. ‘Wife’ was seldom used. One birth is announced in the following words: ‘The Duchess of Chartres, at Paris, of a Prince who has the title of Duke of Valois.’ Duke of Valois? ay, and subsequently Duke of Chartres, Duke of Orléans, finally, Louis Philippe, King of the French!

The chronicle of the marriages of the year seems to have been loosely kept, unless indeed parties announced themselves by being married twice over. There is, for example, a double chronicling of the marriage of the following personages: ‘July 31st. The Right Hon. the Lady Amelia D’Arcy, daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, to the Marquis of Carmarthen, son of his Grace the Duke of Leeds. Lady Amelia having thus married my Lord in July, we find, four months later, my Lord marrying Lady Amelia. ‘Nov. 29th. The Marquis of Carmarthen to Lady Amelia D’Arcy, daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse.’ This union, with its double chronology, was one of several which was followed by great scandal, and dissolved under circumstances of great disgrace. But the utmost scandal and disgrace attended the breaking up of the married life of Lord and Lady Carmarthen. This dismal domestic romance is told in contemporary pamphlets with a dramatic completeness of detail which is absolutely startling. Those who are fond of such details may consult these liberal authorities: we will only add that the above Lady Amelia D’Arcy, Marchioness of Carmarthen, became the wife of Captain Byron; the daughter of that marriage was Augusta, now better known to us as Mrs. Leigh. Captain Byron’s second wife was Miss Gordon, of Gight, and the son of that marriage was the poet Byron. How the names of the half-brother and half-sister have been cruelly conjoined, there is here no necessity of narrating. Let us turn to smaller people. Thus, we read of a curious way of endowing a bride, in the following marriage announcement: ‘April 13th. Rev. Mr. Morgan, Rector of Alphamstow, York, to Miss Tindall, daughter of Mr. Tindall, late rector, who resigned in favour of his son-in-law.’ In the same month, we meet with a better known couple—‘Mr. Sheridan, of the Temple, to the celebrated Miss Linley, of Bath.’

The deaths of the year included, of course, men of very opposite qualities. The man of finest quality who went the inevitable way was he whom some call the good, and some the great Lord Lyttelton. When a man’s designation rests on two such distinctions, we may take it for granted that he was not a common-place man. And yet how little remains of him in the public memory. His literary works are fossils; but, like fossils, they are not without considerable value. Good as he was, there are not a few people who jumble together his and his son’s identity. The latter was unworthy of his sire. He was a disreputable person altogether.

Lord Chesterfield was another of the individuals of note whose glass ran out during this year. He was always protesting that he cared nothing for death. Such persistence of protest generally arises from a feeling contrary to that which is made the subject of protest. This lord (as we have said) jested to the very door of his tomb. That must have reminded his friends during those Tyburn days, how convicts on their way up Holborn Hill to the gallows used to veil their terror by cutting jokes with the crowd. It was the very Chesterfield of highwaymen, who, going up the Hill in the fatal cart, and observing the mob to be hastening onwards, cried out, ‘It’s no use your being in such a hurry; there’ll be no fun till I get there!’ This was the Chesterfield style, and its spirit also. But behind it all was the feeling and conviction of Marmontel’s philosopher, who having railed through a long holiday excursion, till he was thoroughly tired, was of opinion, as he tucked himself up in a featherbed at night, that life and luxury were, after all, rather pretty things.

Chesterfield was, nevertheless, much more of a man than his fellow peer who crossed the Stygian ferry in the same year, namely, the Duke of Kingston. The duke had been one of the handsomest men of his time, and, like a good many handsome men, was a considerable fool. He allowed himself, at all events, to be made the fool, and to become the slave, of the famous Miss Chudleigh—as audacious as she was beautiful. The lady, whom the law took it into its head to look upon as not the duke’s duchess—that is, not his wife—was resigned to her great loss by the feeling of her great gain. She was familiar with her lord’s last will and testament, and went into hysterics to conceal her satisfaction. She saw his grace out of the world with infinite ceremony. To be sure, it was nothing else. The physicians whom she called together in consultation consulted, no doubt, and then whispered to their lady friends, while holding their delicate pulses, ‘Mere ceremony, upon my honour!’ The widow kept the display of grief up to the last. When she brought the ducal corpse up from Bath to London, she rested often by the way. If she could have carried out her caprices, she would have had as many crosses to mark the ducal stations of death as were erected to commemorate the passing of Queen Eleanor. As this could not be, the widow took to screaming at every turn of the road, and at night was carried into her inn kicking her heels and screaming at the top of her voice.

Among the other deaths of the year 1773, the following are noteworthy. At Vienna, of a broken heart, from the miseries of his country, the brave Prince Poniatowski, brother to the King of Poland, and a general in the Austrian service, in which he had been greatly distinguished during the last war. The partition of Poland was then only a year old, and the echoes of the assertions of the lying Czar, Emperor, and King, that they never intended to lay a finger on that ancient kingdom, had hardly died out of the hearing of the astounded world. England is always trusting the words of Czars and their Khiva protestations, always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. A name less known than Poniatowski may be cited for the singularity attached to it. ‘Hale Hartson, Esq., the author of the “Countess of Salisbury” and other ingenious pieces—a young gentleman of fine parts, and who, though very young, had made the tour of Europe three times.’ An indication of what a fashionable quarter Soho, with its neighbourhood, was in 1773, is furnished by the following announcement: ‘Suddenly, at her house in Lisle Street, Leicester Fields, Lady Sophia Thomas, sister of the late Earl of Albemarle, and aunt of the present.’ Foreign ambassadors then dwelt in Lisle Street. Even dukes had their houses in the same district; and baronets lived and died in Red Lion Square and in Cornhill. Among those baronets an eccentric individual turned up now and then. In the obituary is the name of Sir Robert Price, of whom it is added that ‘he left his fortune to seven old bachelors in indigent circumstances.’ The death of one individual is very curtly recorded; all the virtues under heaven would have been assigned to her, had she not belonged to a vanquished party. In that case she would have been a high and mighty princess; as it was, we only read, ‘Lately, Lady Annabella Stuart, a relation of the late royal family, aged ninety-one years, at St.-Omer.’ A few of us are better acquainted with the poet, John Cunningham, whose decease is thus quaintly chronicled: ‘At Newcastle, the ingenious Mr. John Cunningham. A man little known, but that will be always much admired for his plaintive, tender, and natural pastoral poetry.’ Some of the departed personages seem to have held strange appointments. Thus we find Alexander, Earl of Galloway, described as ‘one of the lords of police;’ and Willes, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who died in Hill Street when Mrs. Montague and her blue stockings were in their greatest brilliancy, is described as ‘joint Decypherer (with his son, Edward Willes, Esq.) to the king.’ We believe that the duty of decypherer consisted in reading letters that were opened, on suspicion, in their passage through the post-office. Occasionally a little page of family history is opened to us in a few words, as, for instance, in the account of Sir Robert Ladbroke, a rich City knight, whose name is attached to streets, roads, groves, and terraces in Notting Hill. After narrating his disposal of his wealth among his children and charities, the chronicler states that ‘To his son George, who sailed a short time since to the West Indies, he has bequeathed three guineas a week during life, to be paid only to his own receipt.’ One would like to know if this all but disinherited young fellow took heart of grace, and, after all, made his way creditably in the world. Such sons often succeed in life better than their brothers. Look around you now. See the sons born to inherit the colossal fortune which their father has built up. What brainless asses the most of them become! Had they been born to little instead of to over-much, their wits would perhaps have been equal to their wants, and they would have been as good men as their fathers.

It was a son of misfortune, who, on a July night of 1773, entered the King’s Head at Enfield, weary, hungry, penniless, and wearing the garb of a clergyman. He was taken in, poor guest as he was, and in the hospitable inn he died within a few days. It was then discovered that he was the Rev. Samuel Bickley. In his pockets were found three manuscript sermons, and an extraordinary petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury, dated the previous February. The prayer of the petition was to this effect: ‘Your petitioner, therefore, most humbly prays, that if an audience from your Grace should be deemed too great a favour, you will at least grant him some relief, though it be only a temporary one, in our deplorable necessity and distress; and,’ said the petitioner with a simplicity or an impudence which may have accounted for his condition, ‘let your Grace’s charity cover the multitude of his sins.’ He then continues: ‘There never yet was anyone in England doomed to starve; but I am nearly, if not altogether so; denied to exercise the sacred functions wherein I was educated, driven from the doors of the rich laymen to the clergy for relief; by the clergy, denied; so that I may justly take up the speech of the Gospel Prodigal, and say: ‘How many hired servants of my father have bread enough and to spare, while I perish with hunger!’ Here was, possibly, an heir of great expectations, who, scholar as he was, had come to grief, while, only a little while before him, there died a fortunate impostor, as appears from this record: ‘Mr. Colvill, in Old Street, aged 83. He was much resorted to as a fortune-teller, by which he acquired upwards of 4,000l.;’ at the same time, a man in London was quintupling that sum by the invention and sale of peppermint lozenges.

Let us look into the newspapers for January 1773, that our readers may compare the events of that month with January 1873, a hundred years later. We find the laureate Whitehead’s official New Year Ode sung at court to Boyce’s music, while king, queen, courtiers and guests yawned at the vocal dulness, and were glad when it was all over. We enter a church and listen to a clergyman preaching a sermon; on the following day we see the reverend gentleman drilling with other recruits belonging to a regiment of the Guards, into which he had enlisted. The vice of gambling was ruining hundreds in London, the suburbs of which were infested by highwaymen, who made a very pretty living of it—staking only their lives. We go to the fashionable noon-day walk in the Temple Gardens, and encounter an eccentric promenader who is thus described: ‘He wore an old black waistcoat which was quite threadbare, breeches of the same colour and complexion; a black stocking on one leg, a whitish one on the other; a little hat with a large gold button and loop, and a tail, or rather club, as thick as a lusty man’s arm, powdered almost an inch thick, and under the club a quantity of hair resembling a horse’s tail. In this dress he walked and mixed with the company there for a considerable time, and occasioned no little diversion.’ The style of head-decoration then patronised by the ladies was quite as nasty and offensive as that which was in vogue about ten years ago. It was ridiculed in the popular pantomime ‘Harlequin Sorcerer.’ Columbine was to be seen in her dressing-room attended by her lover, a macaroni, and a hairdresser. On her head was a very high tower of hair, to get at which was impossible for the friseur till Harlequin’s wand caused a ladder to rise, on the top rung of which the coiffeur was raised to the top surface of Columbine’s chignon; having dressed which they all set off for the Pantheon. While pantomime was thus triumphant at Covent Garden there was something like cavalry battles close to London; that is to say, engagements between mounted smugglers and troops of Scots Greys. The village Tooting in this month was a scene of a fight, in which both parties shot and cut down antagonists with as much alacrity as if they were foreign invaders, where blood, and a good deal of it, was lavishly spilt. Sussex was a favourite battle-field; a vast quantity of tea and brandy, and other contraband, was drunk in Middlesex and neighbouring counties where there was sympathy for smugglers, who set their lives on a venture and enabled people to purchase articles duty free.

At this time the union of Ireland with the other portions of the British kingdom was being actively agitated. The project was that each of the thirty-two Irish counties should send one representative to the British Parliament. Forty-eight Irish Peers were to be transferred to the English Upper House. One very remarkable feature in the supposed government project was, that Ireland should retain the shadow of a parliament, to be called ‘The Great Council of the Nation.’ The Great Council was to consist of members sent by the Irish boroughs, each borough to send one representative, ‘their power not to apply further than the interior policy of the kingdom.’ The courts of law were to remain undisturbed. It will be remembered that something like the above council is now asked for by those who advocate Home Rule; but as some of those advocates only wish to have the council as the means to a further end, the Irish professional patriot now, as ever, stands in the way to the real improvement and the permanent prosperity of that part of the kingdom.

In many other respects the incidents of to-day are like the echoes of the events a hundred years old. We find human nature much the same, but a trifle coarser in expression. The struggle to live, then as now, took the guise of the struggle of a beaten army, retreating over a narrow and dangerous bridge, where each thought only of himself, and the stronger trampled down the weaker or pushed him over into the raging flood. With all this, blessed charity was not altogether wanting. Then, as in the present day, charity appeared on the track of the struggle, and helped many a fainting heart to achieve a success, the idea of which they had given up in despair.

END OF VOL. I.