Part 19

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 80,000_l._, 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, 300_l._ 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.