Charles Mayne Young, one of the last of the school of noble actors, has found a biographer in his son, the Rev. Julian Young, Rector of Ilmington. Here we have stage and pulpit in happy and not unusual propinquity. There was a time when the clergy had the drama entirely to themselves; they were actors, authors, and managers. The earliest of them all retired to the monastery of St. Alban, after his theatre at Dunstable had been burnt down, at the close of a squib-and-rocket sort of drama on the subject of St. Theresa. At the Reformation the stage became secularised, the old moralities died out, and the new men and pieces were denounced as wicked by the ‘unco righteous’ among their dramatic clerical predecessors. Nevertheless, the oldest comedy of worldly manners we possess—‘Ralph Roister Doister’—was the work of the Rev. Dr. Nicholas Udall, in 1540. During the three centuries and nearly a half which have elapsed since that time, clergymen have ranked among the best writers for the stage. The two most successful tragedies of the last century were the Rev. Dr. Young’s ‘Revenge,’ and the Rev. J. Home’s ‘Douglas.’ In the present century few comedies have made such a sensation as the Rev. Dr. Croly’s ‘Pride shall have a Fall,’ but the sensation was temporary, the comedy only illustrating local and contemporary incidents.
A dozen other ‘Reverends’ might be cited who have more or less adorned dramatic literature, and there are many instances of dramatic artists whose sons or less near kinsmen having taken orders in the Church. When Sutton, in the pulpit of St. Mary Overy, A.D. 1616, denounced the stage, Nathaniel Field, the eminent actor, published a letter to the preacher, in which Field said that in the player’s trade there were corruptions as there were in all others; he implied, as Overbury implied, that the actor was not to be judged by the dross of the craft, but by the purer metal. Field anticipated Fielding’s Newgate Chaplain, who upheld ‘Punch’ on the same ground that the comedian upheld the stage—that it was nowhere spoken against in Scripture! The year 1616 was the year in which Shakespeare died. It is commonly said that the players of Shakespeare’s time were of inferior birth and culture, but Shakespeare himself was of a well-conditioned family, and this Nathaniel Field who stood up for the honour of the stage against the censure of the pulpit, had for brother that Rev. Theophilus Field who was successively Bishop of Llandaff, St. David’s, and Hereford. Charles Young was not the only actor of his day who gave a son to the Church. His old stage-manager at Bath, Mr. Charlton, saw not only his son but his grandsons usefully employed in the more serious vocation. As for sons of actors at the universities, they have seldom been wanting, from William Hemming (son of John Hemming, the actor, and joint-editor with Condell of the folio edition of Shakespeare’s Works), who took his degree at Oxford in 1628, down to Julian Charles Young, son of the great tragedian, who took his degree in the same university two centuries later; or, to be precise, A.D. 1827.
Charles Mayne Young, who owed his second name to the circumstance of his descent from the regicide who was so called, was born in Fenchurch Street, in 1777. His father was an able surgeon and a reckless spendthrift. Before the household fell into ruin, Charles Young had passed a holiday year, partly at the Court of Copenhagen. He had seen a boy with flashing eyes play bits from Shakespeare before the guests at his father’s table—a strolling, fantastically-dressed, intellectual boy, whose name was Edmund Kean. Further, Charles Young saw and appreciated, at the age of twelve, Mrs. Siddons as the mother of Coriolanus. He also passed through Eton and Merchant Taylors’. When the surgeon’s household was broken up, and Young and his two brothers took their ill-used mother to their own keeping, they adopted various courses for her and their own support, and all of them succeeded. Charles Young, after passing a restless novitiate in a merchant’s office (the more restless, probably, as he thought of two personages—the bright, gipsy-looking boy who had acted in his father’s dining-room, and the Volumnia of Mrs. Siddons, as she triumphed in the tragedy of Coriolanus), went upon the stage, triumphed in his turn, and assumed the sole guardianship and support of the mother he loved.
Young’s father was a remarkably detestable person. He never seems to have forgiven his sons for the affection which they manifested towards their mother. After the separation of the parents, George Young, the eldest son, was in a stage-coach going to Hackney; on the road, a stranger got in, took the only vacant seat, and, on seeing George Young opposite to him, struck him a violent blow in the face. George quietly called to the coachman to stop, and without exchanging a word with the stranger, got out, to the amazement of the other passengers. But, as he closed the door, he looked in and simply said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is my father!’ In 1807, when Charles Young made his first appearance in London, at the Haymarket, as Hamlet, his father sat ensconced in a corner of the house, and hissed him! Neither the blow nor the hiss did more than momentarily wound the feelings of the sons.
Before Young came up to London, he had seen some of the sunshine and some of the bitterness of life. He married the young, beautiful, and noble woman and actress, Julia Grimani. They had a brief, joyous, married time of little more than a year, when the birth of a son was the death of the mother. For the half-century that Young survived her no blandishment of woman ever led him to be untrue to her memory. To look with tears on her miniature-portrait, to touch tenderly some clustered locks of her hair, to murmur some affectionate word of praise, and, finally, to thank God that he should soon be with her, showed how young heart-feelings had survived in old heart-memories.
Charles Young adorned the English stage from 1807 to 1832. Because he acted with the Kembles he is sometimes described as being of the Kemble school. In a great theatre the leading player is often imitated throughout the house. There was a time when everybody employed at Drury Lane seemed a double of Mr. Macready. Charles Young, however, was an original actor. It took him but five years to show that he was equal in some characters to John Kemble himself. This was seen in 1812, in his Cassius to Kemble’s Brutus. On that occasion Terry is said to have been the Casca—a part which was really played by Fawcett. About ten years later, Young left the Covent Garden company and 25l. a week, for Drury Lane and 50l. a night, to play in the same pieces with Kean. The salary proved that the manager thought him equal in attractiveness to Kean; and Kean was, undoubtedly, somewhat afraid of him. Young’s secession was as great a loss to the company he had been acting with, as Compton’s has been to the Haymarket company. In both cases, a perfect artist withdrew from the brotherhood.
Young was fifteen years upon the London stage before he could free himself from nervousness—nervousness, not merely like that of Mrs. Siddons, before going on, but when fairly in face of the audience. In 1826, he told Moore, at a dinner of the Anacreontics, that any close observer of his acting must have been conscious of a great improvement therein, dating from the previous four years. That is to say, dating from the time when he first played in the same piece with Edmund Kean. The encounter with that great master of his art seems to have braced Young’s nerves. Kean could not extinguish him as he extinguished Booth when those two acted together in the same play. Edmund, who spoke of Macready as ‘a player,’ acknowledged Young to be ‘an actor.’ Kean confessed Young’s superiority in Iago, and he could not bear to think of playing either that character or Pierre after him. Edmund believed in the greater merit of his own Othello. Young allowed that Kean had genius, but he was not enthusiastic in his praise; and Edmund, whose voice in tender passages was exquisite music, referred to the d——d musical voice of Young; and in his irritable moments spake of him as ‘that Jesuit!’
The greatest of Young’s original characters was his Rienzi. In Miss Mitford’s tragedy, Young pronounced ‘Rome’ Room. Many old play-goers can recollect how ill the word fell from his musical lips. John Kemble would never allow an actor in his company to give other utterance to the monosyllable. It was a part of the vicious and fantastic utterances of the Kemble family. Leigh Hunt has furnished a long list of them. Shakespeare, indeed, has ‘Now it is Rome indeed, and room enough,’ as Cassius says. But in ‘Henry VI.,’ when Beaufort exclaims, ‘Rome shall remedy this!’ Warwick replies, ‘Roam thither, then!’ The latter jingle is far more common than the former. We agree with Genest, ‘Let the advocates for Room be consistent. If the city is Room, the citizens are certainly Roomans.’ They who would have any idea how John Kemble mutilated the pronunciation of the English language on the stage, have only to consult the appendix to Leigh Hunt’s ‘Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres.’ Such pronunciation seems now more appropriate to burlesque than to Shakespeare.
When the idea was first started of raising a statue in honour of Kemble, Talma wrote to ‘mon cher Young,’ expressing his wish to be among the subscribers. ‘In that idea I recognise your countrymen,’ said Talma. ‘I shall be too fortunate here if the priests leave me a grave in my own garden.’ The Comte de Soligny, or the author who wrote under that name, justly said in his ‘Letters on England,’ that Young was unlike any actor on the stage. His ornamental style had neither model nor imitators. ‘I cannot help thinking,’ writes the Count, ‘what a sensation Young would have created had he belonged to the French instead of the English stage. With a voice almost as rich, powerful, and sonorous as that of Talma—action more free, flowing, graceful, and various; a more expressive face, and a better person—he would have been hardly second in favour and attraction to that grandest of living actors. As it is, he admirably fills up that place on the English stage which would have been a blank without him.’ This is well and truly said, and it is applicable to ‘Gentleman Young’ throughout his whole career—a period during which he played a vast variety of characters, from Hamlet to Captain Macheath. He was not one of those players who were always in character. Between the scenes of his most serious parts he would keep the green-room merry with his stories, and be serious again as soon as his part required him. Young’s modest farewell to the stage reminds us of Garrick’s. The latter took place on June 10, 1776. The play was ‘The Wonder,’ Don Felix by Garrick; with ‘The Waterman.’ The bill is simply headed, ‘The last time of the company’s performing this season,’ and it concludes with these words: ‘The profits of this night being appropriated to the benefit of the Theatrical Fund, the Usual Address upon that Occasion Will be spoken by Mr. Garrick before the Play.’ The bill is now before us, and not a word in it refers to the circumstance that it was the last night that Garrick would ever act, and that he would take final leave after the play. All the world was supposed to know it. The only intimation that something unusual was on foot is contained in the words, ‘Ladies are desired to send their servants a little after 5, to keep places, to prevent confusion.’ Garrick’s farewell speech is stereotyped in all dramatic memories. His letter to Clutterbuck in the previous January is not so familiar. He says, ‘I have at last slipt my theatrical shell, and shall be as fine and free a gentleman as you should wish to see upon the South or North Parade of Bath. I have sold my moiety of patent, &c., for 35,000l., to Messrs. Dr. Ford, Ewart, Sheridan, and Linley.... I grow somewhat older, though I never played better in all my life, and am resolved not to remain upon the stage to be pitied instead of applauded!’ Garrick was sixty years of age when he left the stage. Young was five years less. In his modest farewell speech, after the curtain had descended on his Hamlet, he said, ‘It has been asked why I retire from the stage while still in possession of whatever qualifications I could ever pretend to unimpaired. I will give you my motives, although I do not know you will accept them as reasons—but reason and feeling are not always cater-cousins. I feel then the toil and excitement of my calling weigh more heavily upon me than formerly; and, if my qualifications are unimpaired, so I would have them remain in your estimate.... I am loth to remain before my patrons until I have nothing better to present them than tarnished metal.’ Among Young’s after-enjoyments was that of music. We well remember his always early presence in the front row of the pit at the old Opera House, and the friendly greetings that used to be exchanged between him and Mori, Nicholson, Linley, Dragonetti, and other great instrumentalists, as they made their appearance in the orchestra.
Some theatrical impulses never abandoned him. During his retirement at Brighton, he was a constant attendant on the ministry of Mr. Sortain. ‘Mr. Bernal Osborne told me he was one day shown into the same pew with my father, whom he knew. He was struck with his devotional manner during the prayers and by his rapt attention during the sermon. But he found himself unable to maintain his gravity when, as the preacher paused to take breath after a long and eloquent outburst, the habits of the actor’s former life betrayed themselves, and he uttered in a deep undertone, the old familiar “Bravo!”’ As a sample of his cheerfulness of character, we may quote what Mr. Cole says of Young, in the life of Charles Kean:—‘Not long before he left London for his final residence at Brighton, he called, with one of his grandsons, to see the writer of these pages, who had long enjoyed his personal friendship, and who happened at the moment to be at dinner with his family. “Tell them,” he said to the servant, “not to hurry; but when they are at leisure, there are two little boys waiting to see them.”’
A quiet humour seems to have been among the characteristics of a life which generally was marked by unobtrusive simplicity and moral purity. A man who, when a boy, had been at Eton and Merchant Taylors’ could not have been ignorant of such a fact as the Punic War, though he may have forgotten the date. He was once turned to by a lady at table (she had been discussing history with the guest on her other side), and she suddenly asked Young to tell her the date of the Second Punic War. Young frankly replied in one of his most tragic tones; ‘Madam, I don’t know anything about the Punic War, and what is more, I never did! My inability to answer your question has wrung from me the same confession which I once heard made by a Lancashire farmer, with an air of great pride, when appealed to by a party of his friends in a commercial room, “I tell you what, in spite of all your bragging, I’ll wedger (wager) I’m th’ ignorantest man in t’ coompany!”’ There can be little doubt that many of the stories of mistakes made by actors may be traced to him. Among them, perhaps, that of the player who, invariably, for ‘poisoned cup,’ said ‘coisoned pup;’ and who, once pronouncing it correctly, was hissed for his pains. Thence too perhaps came the tale of him who, instead of saying,
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,
To have a thankless child,
exclaimed:
How sharper than a serpent’s thanks it is,
To have a toothless child.
Whatever may be the source of such stories, it is certain that Young’s criticisms of others were always clear and generous. A few words tell us of Mrs. Siddons’ Rosalind, that ‘it wanted neither playfulness nor feminine softness; but it was totally without archness, not because she did not properly conceive it—but how could such a countenance be arch?’ Some one has said more irreverently of her Rosalind, that it was like Gog in petticoats! Young looked back to the periods during which he had what he called ‘the good fortune to act with her, as the happiest of his own professional recollections.’ When he was a boy of twelve years of age (1789), he saw Mrs. Siddons in Volumnia (Coriolanus). Long after, he described her bearing in the triumphal procession in honour of her son in this wise: ‘She came alone marching and beating time to the music, rolling from side to side, swelling with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which flashed from her eye and lit up her whole face, that the effect was irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus’ banner and pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.’
We have spoken of the unobtrusive simplicity and the moral purity of this great actor’s life. Temptations sprang up about him. Young first appeared on the stage when the old drinking days had not yet come to an end. His name, however, never occurs among the annals of the fast and furious revelries. John Kemble belonged to the old school and followed its practices. He was not indeed fast and furious in his cups. He was solemnly drunken as became an earnest tragedian. It is somewhere told of him that he once went to Dicky Peake’s house half-cocked, at half-past nine P.M.; Sheridan, he said, had appointed to meet him there, and he would not neglect being in time for the world. Peake sat him down to wine with Dunn the treasurer: the three got exceedingly drunk, and all fell asleep, Kemble occupying the carpet. The tragedian was the first to wake. He arose, opened the window shutters, and dazzled by the morning sun-light roused his two companions, and wondered as to the time of day. They soon heard eight strike. ‘Eight!’ exclaimed Kemble; ‘this is too provoking of Sheridan; he is always late in keeping his appointments; I don’t suppose he will come at all now. If he should, tell him, my dear Dick, how long I waited for him!’ Therewith, exit John Philip, in a dreamy condition—leaving, at all events, some incidents out of which imaginative Dunn built this illustrative story.
Great writers in their own houses, like prophets among their own people, proverbially lack much of the consideration they find abroad. Mrs. Douglas Jerrold always wondered what it was people found in her husband’s jokes to laugh at. It is said that many years had passed over the head of Burns’s son before the young man knew that his father was famous as a poet. It is certain that Walter Scott’s eldest son had arrived at more than manhood before he had the curiosity to read one of his sire’s novels. He thought little of it when he had read it. This want of appreciation the son derived from his mother. Once, when Young was admiring the fashion of the ceiling, in Scott’s drawing-room at Abbotsford, Lady Scott exclaimed in her droll Guernsey accent, ‘Ah! Mr. Young, you may look up at the bosses in the ceiling, as long as you like, but you must not look down at my poor carpet, for I am ashamed of it. I must get Scott to write some more of his nonsense books and buy me a new one!’ To those who remember the charm of Young’s musical voice, Lady Dacre’s lines on his reciting ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ to the other guests at Abbotsford, will present themselves without any thought of differing from their conclusion, thus neatly put:—
And Tam o’ Shanter roaring fou,
By thee embodied to our view,
The rustic bard would own sae true,
He scant could tell
Wha ’twas the livin’ picture drew,
Thou or himsel’!
It is a curious fact that Scott, harmonious poet as he was, had no ear for music, unless it were that of a ballad, and he would repeat that horribly out of tune. He was, however, in tune with all humanity; as much so with a king as with the humblest of his subjects. When he went on board the royal yacht which had arrived near Leith, with George IV., amid such rain as only falls in Scotland, Scott, in an off-hand, yet respectful way, told the king that the weather reminded him of the stormy day of his own arrival in the Western Highlands, weather which so disgusted the landlord of the inn, who was used to the very worst, that he apologised for it. ‘Gude guide us! this is just awfu’! Siccan a downpour, was ever the like! I really beg your pardon! I’m sure it’s nae faut o’ mine. I canna think how it should happen to rain this way just as you o’ a’ men i’ the warld should come to see us! It looks amaist personal! I can only say, for my part, I’m just ashamed o’ the weather!’ Having thus spoken to the king, Scott added; ‘I do not know, sire, that I can improve upon the language of the honest innkeeper. I canna think how it should rain this way, just as your majesty, of all men in the world, should have condescended to come and see us. I can only say in the name of my countrymen, I’m just ashamed o’ the weather!’ It was at Scott’s petition that the royal landing was deferred till the next day, which brought all the sunshine that was considered necessary for the occasion.
It is singular to find Charles Mathews, senior, writing of himself; ‘I only perform for one rank of persons. The lower orders hate and avoid me, and the middle classes cannot comprehend me.’ He used to get fun enough out of his own man-servant, whose awe and pride at seeing a titled personage at his master’s house were amply stimulated by friends of Mathews who visited him under assumed dignities. Charles Kemble was always announced as the Persian Ambassador, Fawcett as Sir Francis Burdett, and Young as the Duke of Wellington. One day, a real Lord—Lord Ranelagh—called and sent in a message expressive of his desire to see Mathews. Mathews, supposing the visitor was a fellow-player passing as a peer, sent a reply that he was just then busy with Lord Vauxhall. When Mr. Julian Young once told Mathews he was going to Lord Dacres at the Hoo, the actor replied, Who? and thinking Bob Acres was raised to the peerage, begged to be remembered to Sir Lucius O’Trigger!
One of the most flattering kindnesses ever paid to the elder Mathews was when he was once standing among the crowd in a Court of Assize, where Judge Alan Park was presiding. His lordship sent a note down to him, requesting him to come and take a seat on the bench. The actor obeyed, and the judge was courteously attentive to him. Mathews was subsequently the guest of his old friend Mr. Rolls, at whose house in Monmouthshire the judge had previously been staying. The player asked if his lordship had alluded to him. ‘Yes,’ said Rolls, who proceeded to relate how Judge Park had been startled at seeing in court a fellow who was in the habit of imitating the voice and manners of the judges on the stage. Indeed, his imitation of Lord Ellenborough, in ‘Love, Law, and Physic,’ had well nigh brought the imitator to grief. Park said the presence of Mathews so troubled him that he invited the mimic to sit near him, and behaved so kindly that he hoped the actor, out of simple gratitude, would not include him in his Legal Portraits in comedy or farce.
Appreciation of the drama is neither strong nor clear in at least one part of the vicinity of Shakespeare’s native town. After the busy time of the ‘Tercentenary,’ Mr. Julian Young sent his servants to the theatre in Stratford. They had never been in a playhouse before. The piece represented was ‘Othello.’ On the following morning, wishing to know the effect of the drama on his servants’ minds, Mr. Julian Young questioned them in their several departments. The butler was impressed to this effect: ‘Thank you, sir, for the treat. The performers performed the performance which they had to perform excellent well—especially the female performers—in the performance.’ The more impulsive coachman, in the harness-room, exclaimed, ‘’Twas really beautiful, sir; I liked it onaccountable!’ But when he was asked what the play was about he frankly confessed he didn’t exactly know; but that it was very pretty, and was upon sweet-hearting! On a former occasion, when the gardener and his wife had been treated to the Bristol Theatre, their master, on the next day, asked, ‘Well, Robert, what did you see last night?’ The bewildered fellow replied, after a pause, ‘Well, sir, I saw what you sent me to see!’ ‘What was that?’ ‘Why, the play, in course.’ ‘Was it a tragedy or a comedy?’ ‘I don’t know what you mane. I can’t say no more than I have said, nor no fairer! All I know is there was a precious lot on ’em on the theayter stage; and there they was, in and out, and out and in again!’ The wife had more definite ideas. She was all for the second piece, she said, ‘The pantrymine, and what I liked best in it was where the fool fellar stooped down and grinned at we through his legs!’ Good creature! after all, her taste was in tune with that of King George III., who thought Garrick fidgety, and who laughed himself into fits at the clown who could get a whole bunch of carrots into his mouth, and apparently swallow them, with supplementary turnips to make them go down! The gardener’s wife, therefore, need not be ashamed. She is not half so much called upon to blush as the wife of the treasurer of Drury Lane Theatre, who was one of a score of professional ladies and gentlemen dining together some forty years ago. The lady hearing ‘Venice Preserved’ named, made the remark that she believed ‘it was one of Shakespeare’s plays, was it not?’ We have ourselves a bill of Drury Lane, not ten years old, in which ‘Othello’ is announced as Bulwer’s tragedy, &c.; but that, of course, was a misprint. On our showing it in the green-room, however, not one of the performers saw the error!
Let us now look at some of the other personages who figured in the bygone period; and first, of kings. Poor old George III. cannot be said at any time to have been ‘every inch a king.’ He was certainly not, by nature, a cruel man. Yet he betrayed something akin to cruelty when, on the night of the Lord George Gordon riots, an officer who had been actively employed in suppressing the rioters waited on the king to make his report. George III. hurried forward to meet him, crying out with screaming iteration, ‘Well! well! well! I hope you peppered them well! peppered them well! peppered them well!’ There may, however, have been nothing more in this than there was in Wellington’s injunction to his officers on the day that London was threatened with a Chartist revolution, ‘Remember, gentlemen, there must be no little war.’ In such cases humanity to revolutionists is lack of mercy to the friends of order.
It is well known that George III. had an insuperable aversion to Dr. John Willis, who had attended him when the King was labouring under his early intermitting attacks of insanity. Willis was induced to take temporary charge of the King, on Pitt’s promise to make him a baronet and give him a pension of 1,500l. a year—pleasant things which never came to pass. Queen Charlotte hated Willis even more than the King did. The physician earned that guerdon by putting George III. in a strait waistcoat whenever he thought the royal violence required it. The doctor took this step on his own responsibility. The Queen never forgave him, and the King, as long as he had memory, never forgot it. In 1811, when the fatal relapse occurred, brought on, Willis thought, by Pitt’s persistent pressure of the Roman Catholic claims on the King’s mind, the Chancellor and the Prince of Wales had some difficulty in inducing the doctor to take charge of the sovereign. When Willis entered that part of Windsor Castle which was inhabited by the King he heard the monarch humming a favourite song in his room. A moment after George III. crossed the threshold on to the landing-place. He was in Windsor uniform as to his coat, blue, with scarlet cuffs and collar, a star on the breast. A waistcoat of buff chamois leather, buskin breeches and top-boots, with the familiar three-cornered hat, completed the costume. He came forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, full of hope and joy, like Cymon, ‘whistling as he went for want of thought,’ and switching his boot with his whip as he went. Suddenly, as his eye fell on Willis, he reeled back as if he had been shot. He shrieked out the hated name, called on God, and fell to the ground. It was long before the unhappy sovereign could be calmed. In his own room the King wept like a child. Every now and then he broke into heartrending exclamations of ‘What can I do without doing wrong? They forget my coronation oath; but I don’t! Oh, my oath! my oath! my oath!’ The King’s excitement on seeing Willis was partly caused by his remembering the Queen’s promise that Willis should never be called in again in case of the King’s illness. Willis on that occasion consented to stay with the King after a fearful scene had taken place with the Queen, her doctors, and council. When Mr. Julian Young knew Willis, from whom he had the above details, the doctor was above eighty years of age, upright and active. He was still a mighty hunter; and, unless Mr. Young was misinformed, on the very day before his death he shot two or three brace of snipes in the morning, and danced at the Lincoln ball at night. Willis did not reach his hundredth year, as Dr. Routh, of Magdalen College, Oxford, did. Just before the death of the latter, Lord Campbell visited and had a long conversation with him. At parting the centenarian remarked: ‘I hope it will not be many years before we meet again.’ ‘Did he think,’ said Lord Campbell afterwards, ‘that he and I were going to live for ever?’
Monarchs, who have to submit to many tyrannies by which monarchs alone can suffer, must have an especial dread of levees and presentations. The monotony must be killing; at the very best, irritating. George IV. had the stately dreariness very much relieved. On one occasion, when a nervous gentleman was bowing and passing before him, a lord-in-waiting kindly whispered to him, ‘Kiss hands!’ The nervous gentleman accordingly moved on to the door, turned round, and there kissed his hands airily to the King by way of kindly farewell! George IV. laughed almost as heartily as his brother, King William, did at an unlucky alderman who was at Court on the only day Mr. Julian Young ever felt himself constrained to go into the royal presence. The alderman’s dress-sword got between his legs as he was backing from that presence, whereby he was tripped up and fell backwards on the floor. King William cared not a fig for dignity. He remarked with great glee to those who stood near: ‘By Jove! the fellow has cut a crab!’ and the kingly laughter was, as it were, poured point blank into the floundering alderman. This was not encouraging to Mr. Young, who had to follow. As newly-appointed royal chaplain in Hampton Court Palace Chapel, King William had expressed a wish to see him at a levee, and obedience was a duty. The chaplain had been told by Sir Horace Seymour that he had nothing to do but follow the example of the gentleman who might happen to be before him. The principal directions to the neophyte were: ‘Bow very low, and do not turn your back on the King!’ The instant the chaplain had kissed the King’s hand, however, he turned his back upon his sovereign, and hurried off. Sir Horace Seymour afterwards consoled him for this breach of etiquette by stating that a Surrey baronet who had followed him made a wider breach in court observance. The unlucky baronet, seeing the royal hand outstretched, instead of reverently putting his lips to it, caught hold of it and wrung it heartily! The King, who loved a joke, probably enjoyed levees, the usual monotony of which was relieved by such screaming-farce incidents as these.
Those royal brothers, sons of George III., were remarkably outspoken. They were not witty themselves, but they were now and then the cause of wit in others. It must have been the Duke of Cumberland who (on listening to Mr. Nightingale’s story of having been run away with when driving, and that at a critical moment he jumped out of the carriage) blandly exclaimed: ‘Fool! fool!’ ‘Now,’ said Nightingale, on telling the incident to Horace Smith, ‘it’s all very well for him to call me a fool; but I can’t conceive why he should. Can you?’ ‘No,’ rejoined Horace, ‘I can’t, because he could not suppose you ignorant of the fact!’
Among the most unhappy lords of themselves who lived in a past generation, there was not one who might have been so happy, had he pleased, as the author of ‘Vathek.’ It is very well said of Beckford that there has seldom existed a man who, inheriting so much, did so little for his fellow-creatures. There was a grim humour in some of his actions. In illustration of this we may state that when Beckford was living in gorgeous seclusion at Fonthill, two gentlemen, who were the more curious to spy into the glories of the place because strangers were forbidden, climbed the park walls at dusk, and on alighting within the prohibited enclosure, found themselves in presence of the lord of the place. Beckford awed them by his proud condescension. He politely dragged them through all the splendours of his palace, and then, with cruel courtesy, made them dine with him. When the night was advanced, he took his involuntary guests into the park, bidding them adieu with the remark, that as they had found their way in they might find their way out. It was as bad as bandaging a man’s eyes on Salisbury Plain, and bidding him find his way to Bath. At sunrise the weary guests, who had pursued a fruitless voyage of discovery all night, were guided to a point of egress, and they never thought of calling on their host again.
Ready wit in women (now passed away); wit, too, combined with courage, is by no means rare. During the ruro-diabolical reign of ‘Swing,’ that incarnation of ruffianism, in the person of the most hideous blackguard in the district, with a mob of thieves and murderers at his back, attacked Fifield, the old family residence of two elderly maiden ladies, named Penruddock. When the mob were on the point of resorting to extreme violence, Miss Betty Penruddock expressed her astonishment to the ugly leader of the band that ‘such a good-looking man as he should be captain of such an ill-favoured band of robbers. Never again will I trust to good looks!’ cried the old lady, whose flattery so touched the vanity of ‘Swing’ that he prevailed on his followers to desist. ‘Only give us some beer,’ he said, ‘and we won’t touch a hair of your head!’ ‘You can’t,’ retorted the plucky old lady, ‘for I wear a wig!’ On the other hand, the vanity of young ladies was once effectually checked at Hampton Court Chapel. A youthful beauty once fainted, and the handsome Sir Horace Seymour carried her out. On successive Sundays successive youthful beauties fainted, and the handsome Sir Horace carried them successively out, till he grew tired of bearing such sweet burdens. A report that in future all swooning nymphs would be carried out of the chapel by the dustman cured the epidemic.
We are much disposed to think that there is at least as much ready wit and terseness of expression among the humbler classes as among those who are higher born and better taught. Much has been said of the ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby. We question if in all that has been written of those pseudo-recluses, they have been half so well hit-off as by Mrs. Morris, a lodging-house keeper in the neighbourhood. ‘I must say, sir, after all,’ observed Mrs. Morris, ‘that they were very charitable and cantankerous. They did a deal of good, and never forgave an injury!’ There is something of the ring of Mrs. Poyser in this pithily-rendered judgment. Quite as sharp a passage turns up in the person of an eccentric toll-keeper, Old Jeffreys, who was nearly destitute of mental training, and whom Mr. Julian Young was anxious to draw to church service. The old man was ready for him. ‘Yes, sir, it be a pity, bain’t it? We pike-keepers, and shepherds, and carters, and monthly nusses has got souls as well as them that goes to church and chapel. But what can us do? “Why,” I says, says I, to the last parson as preached to me, “don’t catechism say summat or other about doing our duty in that state of life in which we be?” So, after all, when I be taking toll o’ Sundays, I’m not far wrong, am I?’ The rector proposed to find a paid substitute for him while he attended church. Jeffreys was ready with his reply. ‘That ’ud never do, sir,’ he said. ‘What! leave my post to a stranger? What would master say to me if he heard on’t.’ Mr. Julian Young, pointing with pleasure to a Bible on old Jeffreys’ shelf, expressed a hope that he often read it. ‘Can’t say as how I do, sir,’ was the candid rejoinder; ‘I allus gets so poorus over it!’ When the rector alluded to a certain wench as ‘disreputable,’ Jeffreys protested in the very spirit of chivalry. ‘Don’t do that! Do as I do! I allus praises her. Charity hides a deal o’ sin, master! ain’t that Scripture? If it are, am I to be lectured at for sticking up and saying a good word for she? ‘When it was urged that this light-o’-love queen ought to be married, Samaritan Jeffreys stept in with his sympathetic balsam. ‘Poor thing!’ he exclaimed, ‘she ain’t no turn to it!’ The apology was worthy of my Uncle Toby!
There are other stories quite worthy of him who invented Uncle Toby; but, basta! we have been, as it were, metaphorically dining with Mr. Julian Young—dining so well that we cannot recall to mind half the anecdotes told at his table in illustration of Charles Young and his times.