THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN MEMORY OF HELEN COOPER DOUGLAS Tliaclcraii rttit /inhnslii'd in tlir " I llifsl r<(t<(l Loiuhm .Xcirs- ,(t III,' lliiir (It hi" (Uath THE WORKS William Makepeace Thackeray THE FOUR GEORGES THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY REVIEWS GEORGE CRUIKSHANK JOHN LEECH With Portraits .1- ;as * )ed • am is NEW YORK LAMB PUBLISHING COMPANY LOAN STACK GIFT CONTENTS t'^1'2. M m ^ THE FOUR GEORGES PAGE George ^he First ^ George the Second 38 George the Third 69 George the Fourth 106 THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS Swift 149 Congreve and Addison 190 Steele 229 Prior, Gay, and Pope 272 Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding 318 Sterne and Goldsmith 356 CHARITY AND HUMOUR .- as )ed GEORGE CRUIKSHANK im is JOHN LEECH'S PICTURES OF LIFE AND CHARACTER 479 841 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Thackeray Frontispiece Drawn by George T. Tobin from a portrait published in the Illustrated London News at the time of his death. FACING PAGE George the First 3 George the Second 38 Ave C^sar 39 George the Third 69 Group of Portraits by Gilray 95 A Little Rebel 98 George the Fourth 106 Group of Portraits 110 Swift 149 congreve 19' Addison Steele ^^ Gay • im I'oPE is Hogarth af Sterne 356 THE FOUR GEORGES SKETCHES OF MANNERS, MORALS, COURT AND TOWN LIFE as is as Ded \m is George i GEORGE THE FIRST 7 fearing, simple ways of Zell appear to have gone out of mode. The second brother was constantly visiting Ven- ice, and leading a jolly, wicked life there. It was the most jovial of all places at the end of the seventeenth century; and military men, after a campaign, rushed thither, as the warriors of the Allies rushed to Paris in 1814, to gamble, and rejoice, and partake of all sorts of godless delights. This Prince, then, loving Venice and its pleasures, brought Italian singers and dancers back with him to quiet old Zell; and, worse still, demeaned himself by marrying a French lady of birth quite infe- rior to his own— Eleanor d'Olbreuse, from whom our Queen is descended, Eleanor had a pretty daughter, who inherited a great fortune, which inflamed her cousin, George Louis of Hanover, with a desire to marry her; and so, with her beautj^ and her riches, she came to a sad end. It is too long to tell how the four sons of Duke George divided his territories amongst them, and how, finally, they came into possession of the son of the youngest of the four. In this generation the Protestant faith was very nearly extinguished in the family: and then where should we in England have gone for a king? The third brother also took delight in Italy, where the priests con- verted him and his Protestant chaplain too. Mass was said in Hanover once more; and Italian soprani piped their Latin rhymes in place of the hymns which William the Pious and Dr. Luther sang. Louis XIV. gave this and other converts a splendid pension. Crowds of Frenchmen and brilliant French fashions came into his court. It is incalculable how much that royal bigwig cost Germany. Every prince imitated the French King, and had his Versailles, his Wilhelmshohe or Ludwigs- 8 THE FOUR GEORGES lust; his court and its splendours; his gardens laid out with statues; his fountains, and water-works, and Tri- tons; his actors, and dancers, and singers, and fiddlers; his harem, with its inhabitants ; his diamonds and duchies for th'ese latter; his enormous festivities, his gaming- tables, tournaments, masquerades, and banquets lasting a week long, for which the people paid with their money, when the poor wretches had it ; with their bodies and very blood when they had none; being sold in thousands by their lords and masters, who gaily dealt in soldiers, staked a regiment upon the red at the gambling-table; swapped a battalion against a dancing-girl's diamond necklace ; and, as it were, pocketed their people. As one views Europe, through contemporary books of travel in the early part of the last century, the land- scape is awful— wretched wastes, beggarly and plun- dered; half -burned cottages and trembling peasants gathering piteous harvests; gangs of such tramping along with bayonets behind them, and corporals with canes and cats-of-nine-tails to flog them to barracks. By these passes my lord's gilt carriage floundering through the ruts, as he swears at the postilions, and toils on to the Residenz. Hard by, but away from the noise and brawling of the citizens and buyers, is Wilhelmslust or Ludwigsruhe, or Monbijou, or Versailles— it scarcely matters which,— near to the city, shut out by woods from the beggared country, the enormous, hideous, gilded, monstrous marble palace, where the Prince is, and the Court, and the trim gardens, and huge fountains, and the forest where the ragged peasants are beating the game in (it is death to them to touch a feather) ; and the jolly hunt sweeps by with its uniform of crimson and gold; and the Prince gallops ahead puffing his royal GEORGE THE FIRST 9 horn; and his lords and mistresses ride after him; and the stag is pulled down ; and the grand huntsman gives the knife in the midst of a chorus of bugles ; and 'tis time the Court go home to dinner ; and our noble traveller, it may be the Baron of Pollnitz, or the Count de Konigs- marck, or the excellent Chevalier de Seingalt, sees the procession gleaming through the trim avenues of the wood, and hastens to the inn, and sends his noble name to the marshal of the Court. Then our nobleman arrays himself in green and gold, or pink and silver, in the rich- est Paris mode, and is introduced by the chamberlain, and makes his bow to the jolly Prince, and the gracious Prin- cess; and is presented to the chief lords and ladies, and then comes supper and a bank at Faro, where he loses or wins a thousand pieces by daylight. If it is a German court, you may add not a little drunkenness to this pic- ture of high life ; but German, or French, or Spanish, if you can see out of your palace-windows beyond the trim- cut forest vistas, misery is lying outside ; hunger is stalk- ing about the bare villages, listlessly following precari- ous husbandry ; ploughing stony fields with starved cat- tle ; or fearfully taking in scanty harvests. Augustus is fat and jolly on his throne ; he can knock down an ox, and eat one almost ; his mistress, Aurora von Konigsmarck, is the loveliest, the wittiest creature; his diamonds are the biggest and most brilliant in the world, and his feasts as splendid as those of Versailles. As for Louis the Great, he is more than mortal. Lift up your glances respect- fully, and mark him eyeing Madame de Fontanges or Madame de Montespan from under his sublime periwig, as he passes through the great gallery where Villars and Vendome, and Berwick, and Bossuet, and Massillon are waiting. Can Court be more splendid; nobles and 10 THE FOUR GEORGES knights more gallant and superb ; ladies more lovely? A grander monarch, or a more miserable starved wretch than the peasant his subject, you cannot look on. Let us bear both these types in mind, if we wish to estimate the old society properly. Remember the glory and the chiv- alry? Yes ! Remember the grace and beauty, the splen- dour and lofty politeness; the gallant courtesy of Fon- tenoy, where the French line bids the gentlemen of the English guard to fire first; the noble constancy of the old King and Villars his general, who fits out the last army with the last crown-piece from the treasury, and goes to meet the enemy and die or conquer for France at Denain. But round all that royal splendour lies a nation enslaved and ruined: there are people robbed of their rights— communities laid waste— faith, justice, commerce tram- pled upon, and well-nigh destroyed— nay, in the very centre of royalty itself, what horrible stains and mean- ness, crime and shame! It is but to a silly harlot that some of the noblest gentlemen, and some of the proud- est women in the world, are bowing down ; it is the price of a miserable province that the King ties in diamonds round his mistress's white neck. In the first half of the last century, I say, this is going on all Europe over. Saxony is a waste as well as Picardy or Artois ; and Ver- sailles is only larger and not worse than Herrenhausen. It was the first Elector of Hanover who made the for- tunate match which bestowed the race of Hanoverian Sovereigns upon us Britons. Nine years after Charles Stuart lost his head, his niece Sophia, one of many chil- dren of another luckless dethroned sovereign, the Elector Palatine, married Ernest Augustus of Brunswick, and brought the reversion to the crown of the three kingdoms in her scanty trousseau. GEORGE THE FIRST 11 One of the handsomest, the most cheerful, sensible, shrewd, accomplished of women, was Sophia,^ daughter of poor Frederick, the winter king of Bohemia. The other daughters of lovely, unhappy Elizabeth Stuart went off into the Catholic Church; this one, luckily for her family, remained, I cannot say faithful to the Re- formed Religion, but at least she adopted no other. An agent of the French King's, Gourville, a convert him- self, strove to bring her and her husband to a sense of the truth; and tells us that he one day asked Madame the Duchess of Hanover, of what religion her daughter was, then a pretty girl of thirteen years old. The duchess replied that the princess was of no religion as yet. They were waiting to know of what religion her husband would be, Protestant or Catholic, before instructing her ! And the Duke of Hanover having heard all Gourville's proposal, said that a change would be advantageous to his house, but that he himself was too old to change. This shrewd woman had such keen eyes that she knew how to shut them upon occasion, and was blind to many faults which it appeared that her husband the Bishop of Osnaburg and Duke of Hanover committed. He loved to take his pleasure like other sovereigns— was a merry prince, fond of dinner and the bottle; liked to go to Italy, as his brothers had done before him ; and we read how he jovially sold 6,700 of his Hanoverians to the seigniory of Venice. They went bravely off to the Morea, under command of Ernest's son, Prince JVIax, and only 1,400 of them ever came home again. The German princes sold a good deal of this kind of stock. You may remember how George III.'s Government ^ The portraits on the next page are from contemporary prints of this Princess, before her marriage and in her old age. 12 THE FOUR GEORGES purchased Hessians, and the use we made of them dur- ing the War of Independence. The ducats Duke Ernest got for his soldiers he spent in a series of the most brilhant entertainments. Never- theless, the jovial Prince was economical, and kept a steady eye upon his own interests. He achieved the elec- toral dignity for himself: he married his eldest son George to his beautiful cousin of Zell; and sending his sons out in command of armies to fight— now on this side, now on that — he lived on, taking his pleasure, and scheming his schemes, a merry, wise prince enough, not, I fear, a moral prince, of which kind we shall have but very few specimens in the course of these lectures. Ernest Augustus had seven children in all, some of whom were scapegraces, and rebelled against the paren- tal system of primogeniture and non-division of prop- GEORGE THE FIRST 13 erty which the Elector ordained. " Gustchen," the Electress writes about her second son:— "Poor Gus is thrust out, and his father will give him no more keep. I laugh in the day, and cry all night about it; for I am a fool with my children." Three of the six died fighting against Turks, Tartars, Frenchmen. One of them con- spired, revolted, fled to Rome, leaving an agent beliind him, whose head was taken off. The daughter, of whose early education we have made mention, was married to the Elector of Brandenburg, and so her religion settled finally on the Protestant side. A niece of the Electress Sophia— who had been made to change her religion, and marry the Duke of Orleans, brother of the French King; a woman whose honest heart was always with her friends and dear old Deutsch- land, though her fat little body was confined at Paris, or Marly, or Versailles— has left us, in her enormous correspondence (part of which has been printed in Ger- man and French), recollections of the Electress, and of George her son. Elizabeth Charlotte was at Osnaburg when George was born (1660). She narrowly escaped a whipping for being in the way on that auspicious day. She seems not to have liked little George, nor George grown up; and represents him as odiously hard, cold, and silent. Silent he may have been: not a jolly prince like his father before him, but a prudent, quiet, selfish potentate, going his own way, managing his own affairs, and understanding his own interests remarkably well. In his father's lifetime, and at the head of the Han- over forces of 8,000 or 10,000 men, George served the Emperor, on the Danube against Turks, at the siege of Vienna, in Italy, and on the Rhine. When he succeeded to the Electorate, he handled its affairs with great pru- 14 THE FOUR GEORGES dence and dexterity. He was very much liked by his people of Hanover. He did not show his feelings much, but he cried heartily on leaving them; as they used for joy when he came back. He showed an uncommon pru- dence and coolness of behaviour when he came into his kingdom; exhibiting no elation; reasonably doubtful whether he should not be turned out some day; looking upon himself only as a lodger, and making the most of his brief tenure of St. James's and Hampton Court; plundering, it is true, somewhat, and dividing amongst his German followers; but what could be expected of a sovereign who at home could sell his subjects at so many ducats per head, and make no scruple in so disposing of them? I fancy a considerable shrewdness, prudence, and even moderation in his ways. The German Protestant was a cheaper, and better, and kinder king than the Catholic Stuart in whose chair he sat, and so far loj^al to England, that he let England govern herself. Having these lectures in view, I made it my business to visit that ugly cradle in which our Georges were nursed. The old town of Hanover must look still pretty much as in the time when George Louis left it. The gardens and pavilions of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old Electress So- phia fell down in her last walk there, preceding but by a few weeks to the tomb James II.'s daughter, whose death made way for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. The two first royal Georges, and their father, Ernest Augustus, had quite royal notions regarding marriage; and Louis XIV. and Charles II. scarce distinguished themselves more at Versailles or St. James's, than these German sultans in their little city on the banks of the Leine. You may see at Herrenhausen the very rustic GEORGE THE FIRST 15 theatre in which the Platens danced and performed masques, and sang before the Elector and his sons. There are the very fauns and dryads of stone still glim- mering through the branches, still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the days when painted nymphs hung garlands round them; appeared under their leafy arcades with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns; descended from " machines " in the guise of Diana or Minerva; and delivered immense allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the cam- paign. That was a curious state of morals and politics in Europe ; a queer consequence of the triumph of the mon- archical principle. Feudalism was beaten down. The nobility, in its quarrels with the crown, had pretty well succumbed, and the monarch was all in all. He became almost divine: the proudest and most ancient gentry of the land did menial service for him. Who should carry Louis XIV.'s candle when he went to bed? what prince of the blood should hold the king's shirt when his ^lost Christian Majesty changed that garment? — the French memoirs of the seventeenth century are full of such de- tails and squabbles. The tradition is not yet extinct in Europe. Any of you who were present, as myriads were, at that splendid pageant, the opening of our Crystal Palace in London, must have seen two noble lords, great officers of the household, with ancient pedi- grees, with embroidered coats, and stars on their breasts and wands in their hands, walking backwards for near the space of a mile, while the royal procession made its progress. Shall we wonder— shall we be angry— shall we laugh at these old-world ceremonies? View them as you will, according to your mood; and with scorn or 16 THE FOUR GEORGES with respect, or with anger and sorrow, as your temper leads you. Up goes Gesler's hat upon the pole. Salute that symbol of sovereignty with heartfelt awe; or with a sulky shrug of acquiescence, or with a grinning obei- sance; or with a stout rebellious No — clap your own beaver down on your pate, and refuse to doff it to that spangled velvet and flaunting feather. I make no com- ment upon the spectators' behaviour; all I say is, that Gesler's cap is still up in the market-place of Europe, and not a few folks are still kneeling to it. Put clumsy, high Dutch statues in place of the mar- bles of Versailles: fancy Herrenhausen waterworks in place of those of Marly: spread the tables with Schweinskopf, Specksuppe, Leberkuchen, and the like delicacies, in place of the French cuisine; and fancy Frau von Kielmansegge dancing with Count Kammer- junker Quirini, or singing French songs with the most awful German accent: imagine a coarse Versailles, and we have a Hanover before us. " I am now got into the region of beauty," writes Mary Wortley, from Han- over in 1716; " all the women have literally rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and necks, jet eye-brows, to which may generally be added coal-black hair. These perfections never leave them to the day of their death, and have a very fine effect by candle-light; but I could wish they were handsome with a little variety. They resemble one another as Mrs. Salmon's Court of Great Britain, and are in as much danger of melting away by too nearly ap- proaching the fire." The sly Mary Wortley saw this painted seraglio of the first George at Hanover, the year after his accession to the British throne. There were great doings and feasts there. Here I.ady Mary saw George II. too. " I can tell you, without flattery or GEORGE THE FIRST 17 partiality," she says, " that our young prince has all the accomplishments that it is possible to have at his age, with an air of sprightliness and understanding, and a something so very engaging in his behaviour that needs not the advantage of his rank to appear charming." I find elsewhere similar panegyrics upon Frederick Prince of Wales, George II.'s son; and upon George HI., of course, and upon George IV. in an eminent degree. It was the rule to be dazzled by princes, and people's eyes winked quite honestly at that royal radiance. The Electoral Court of Hanover was numerous- pretty well paid, as times went; above all, paid with a regularity which few other European courts could boast of. Perhaps you will be amused to know how the Elec- toral Court was composed. There were the princes of the house in the first class ; in the second, the single field- marshal of the army (the contingent was 18,000, Poll- nitz says, and the Elector had other 14,000 troops in his pay). Then follow, in due order, the authorities civil and military, the working privy councillors, the generals of cavalry and infantry, in the third class; the high chamberlain, the high marshals of the court, high mas- ters of the horse, the major-generals of cavalry and in- fantry, in the fourth class; down to the majors, the hof junkers or pages, the secretaries or assessors, of the tenth class, of whom all were noble. We find the master of the horse had 1,090 thalers of pay; the high chamberlain, 2,000— a thaler being about three shillings of our money. There were two chamber- lains, and one for the Princess; five gentlemen of the chamber, and five gentlemen ushers; eleven pages and personages to educate these young noblemen— such as a governor, a preceptor, a fecht-meister, or fencing 18 THE FOUR GEORGES master, and a dancing ditto, this latter with a handsome salary of 400 thalers. There were three body and court physicians, with 800 and 500 thalers; a court barber, 600 thalers ; a court organist ; two musikanten ; four French fiddlers; twelve trumpeters, and a bugler; so that there was plenty of music, profane and pious, in Hanover. There were ten chamber waiters, and twentj^-four lac- queys in livery; a maitre-d'hotel, and attendants of the kitchen; a French cook; a body cook; ten cooks; six cooks' assistants; two Braten masters, or masters of the roast— (one fancies enormous spits turning slowly, and the honest masters of the roast beladling the dripping) ; a pastry-baker; a pie-baker; and finally, three scullions, at the modest remuneration of eleven thalers. In the sugar-chamber there were four pastrycooks (for the ladies, no doubt) ; seven officers in the wine and beer cel- lars ; four bread-bakers ; and five men in the plate-room. There were 600 horses in the Serene stables,— no less than twenty teams of princely carriage horses, eight to a team; sixteen coachmen; fourteen postilions; nineteen ostlers; thirteen helps, besides smiths, carriage-masters, horse-doctors, and other attendants of the stable. The female attendants were not so numerous: I grieve to find but a dozen or fourteen of them about the Electoral premises, and only two washerwomen for all the Court. These functionaries had not so much to do as in the present age. I own to finding a pleasure in these small- beer chronicles. I like to people the old world, with its every-day figures and inhabitants— not so much with heroes fighting immense battles and inspiring repulsed battalions to engage; or statesmen locked up in darkling cabinets and meditating ponderous laws or dire con- spiracies—as with people occupied with their every-day GEORGE THE FIRST 19 work or pleasure : my lord and lady hunting in the forest, or dancing in the Court, or bowing to their Serene High- nesses as they pass in to dinner ; John Cook and his pro- cession bringing the meal from the kitchen; the jolly butlers bearing in the flagons from the cellar; the stout coachman driving the ponderous gilt waggon, with eight cream-coloured horses in housings of scarlet velvet and morocco leather; a postilion on the leaders, and a pair or a half-dozen of running footmen scudding along by the side of the vehicle, with conical caps, long silver- headed maces, which they poised as they ran, and splen- did jackets laced all over with silver and gold. I fancy the citizens' wives and their daughters looking out from the balconies,; and the burghers over their beer and mumm, rising up, cap in hand, as the cavalcade passes through the town with torch-bearers, trumpeters blowing their lusty cheeks out, and squadrons of jack-booted life guardsmen, girt with shining cuirasses, and bestrid- ing thundering chargers, escorting his Highness's coach from Hanover to Herrenhausen ; or halting, mayhap, at Madame Platen's country house of JNIonplaisir, which lies half-way between the summer-palace and the Residenz. In the good old times of which I am treating, whilst common men were driven off* by herds, and sold to fight the Emperor's enemies on the Danube, or to bayonet King Louis's troops of common men on the Rhine, noblemen passed from court to court, seeking service with one prince or the other, and naturally taking com- mand of the ignoble vulgar of soldiery which battled and died almost without hope of promotion. Xoble ad- venturers travelled from court to court in search of em- ployment; not merely noble males, but noble females 20 THE FOUR GEORGES too; and if these latter were beauties, and obtained the favourable notice of princes, they stopped in the courts, became the favourites of their Serene or Royal High- nesses ; and received great sums of money and splendid diamonds; and were promoted to be duchesses, mar- chionesses, and the like ; and did not fall much in public esteem for the manners in Avhich they won their advance- ment. In this way Mdlle. de Querouailles, a beautiful French lady, came to London on a special mission of Louis XIV., and was adopted by our grateful country and sovereign, and figured as Duchess of Portsmouth. In this way the beautiful Aurora of Konigsmarck trav- elling about found favour in the eyes of Augustus of Saxony, and became the mother of Marshal Saxe, who gave us a beating at Fontenoy; and in this manner the lovely sisters Elizabeth and Melusina of jMeissenbach (who had actually been driven out of Paris, whither they had travelled on a like errand, by the wise jealousy of the female favourite there in possession) journeyed to Hanover, and became favourites of the serene house there reigning. That beautiful Aurora von Konigsmarck and her brother are ^vonderful as types of bygone manners, and strange illustrations of the morals of old daj^s. The Konigsmarcks were descended from an ancient noble family of Brandenburg, a branch of which passed into Sweden, where it enriched itself and produced several mighty men of valour. The founder of the race was Hans Christof, a famous warrior and plunderer of the Thirty Years' war. One of Hans' sons. Otto, appeared as ambassador at the court of Louis XIV., and had to make a Swedish speech at his reception before the Most Christian King. Otto GEORGE THE FIRST 21 was a famous dandy and warrior, but he forgot the speech, and what do you think he did? Far from being- disconcerted, he recited a portion of the Swedish Cate- chism to his Most Christian Majesty and his court, not one of whom understood his hngo with the exception of his own suite, who had to keep their gravity as best they might. Otto's nephew, Aurora's elder brother, Carl Johann of Konigsmarck, a favourite of Charles II., a beauty, a dandy, a warrior, a rascal of more than ordinary mark, escaped but deserved being hanged in England, for the murder of Tom Thynne of Longleat. He had a little brother in London with him at this time: — as great a beauty, as great a dandy, as great a villain as his elder. This lad, Philip of Konigsmarck, also was implicated in the affair; and perhaps it is a pity he ever brought his pretty neck out of it. He went over to Hanover, and was soon appointed colonel of a regiment of H. E. Highness's dragoons. In early life he had been page in the court of Celle ; and it was said that he and the pretty Princess Sophia Dorothea, who by this time was married to her cousin George the Electoral Prince, had been in love with each other as children. Their loves were now to be renewed, not innocently, and to come to a fearful end. A biography of the wife of George I., by Dr. Doran, has lately appeared, and I confess I am astounded at the verdict which that writer has delivered, and at his acquittal of this most unfortunate lady. That she had a cold selfish libertine of a husband no one can doubt; but that the bad husband had a bad wife is equally clear. She was married to her cousin for money or convenience, as all princesses were married. She was most beautiful, 22 THE FOUR GEORGES lively, witty, accomplished: his brutality outraged her: his silence and coldness chilled her: his cruelty insulted her. No wonder she did not love him. How could love be a part of the compact in such a marriage as that? With this unlucky heart to dispose of, the poor creature bestowed it on Philip of Konigsmarck, than whom a greater scamp does not walk the history of the seven- teenth century. A hundred and eighty years after the fellow was thrust into his unknown grave, a Swedish professor lights upon a box of letters in the University Library at Upsala, written by Philip and Dorothea to each other, and telling their miserable story. The bewitching Konigsmarck had conquered two fe- male hearts in Hanover. Besides the Electoral Prince's lovely young wife Sophia Dorothea, Philip had inspired a passion in a hideous old court lady, the Countess of Platen. The Princess seems to have pursued him with the fidelity of many years. Heaps of letters followed him on his campaigns, and were answered by the daring adventurer. The Princess wanted to fly with him; to quit her odious husband at any rate. She besought her parents to receive her back; had a notion of taking refuge in France and going over to the Catholic relig- ion; had absolutely packed her jewels for flight, and very likely arranged its details with her lover, in that last long night's interview, after which Philip of Konigsmarck was seen no more. Konigsmarck, inflamed with drink— there is scarcely any vice of which, according to his own showing, this gentleman was not a practitioner— had boasted at a sup- per at Dresden of his intimacy with the two Hanoverian ladies, not only with the Princess, but with another lady powerful in Hanover. The Countess Platen, the old GEORGE THE FIRST 23 favourite of the Elector, hated the young Electoral Princess. The young lady had a lively wit, and con- stantly made fun of the old one. The Princess's jokes were conveyed to the old Platen just as our idle words are carried about at this present day: and so they both hated each other. The characters in the tragedy, of which the curtain was now about to fall, are about as dark a set as eye ever rested on. There is the jolly Prince, shrewd, selfish, scheming, loving his cups and his ease ( I think his good- humour makes the tragedy but darker) ; his Princess, who speaks little but observes all ; his old painted Jezebel of a mistress ; his son, the Electoral Prince, shrewd, too, quiet, selfish, not ill-humoured, and generally silent, ex- cept when goaded into fury by the intolerable tongue of his lovely wife; there is poor Sophia Dorothea, with her coquetry and her wrongs, and her passionate attachment to her scamp of a lover, and her wild imprudences, and her mad artifices, and her insane fidelity, and her furious jealousy regarding her husband (though she loathed and cheated him), and her prodigious falsehoods; and the confidante, of course, into whose hands the letters are slipped; and there is Lothario, finally, than whom, as I have said, one can't imagine a more handsome, wicked, worthless reprobate. How that perverse fidelity of passion pursues the villain! How madly true the woman is, and how as- toundingly she lies! She has bewitched two or three persons who have taken her up, and they won't believe in her wrong. Like Mary of Scotland, she finds adher- ents ready to conspire for her even in history, and people who have to deal with her are charmed, and fascinated, and bedevilled. How devotedly Miss Strickland has 24 THE FOUR GEORGES stood by Mary's innocence ! Are there not scores of la- dies in this audience who persist in it too? Innocent! I remember as a boy how a great party persisted in de- claring Caroline of Brunswick was a martyred angel. So was- Helen of Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, the dangerous young Trojan. Menelaus, her husband, illused her; and there never was any siege of Troy at all. So was Bluebeard's wife innocent. She never peeped into the closet where the other wives were with their heads off. She never dropped the key, or stained it with blood; and her brothers were quite right in finishing Bluebeard, the cowardly brute! Yes, Caro- line of Brunswick. was innocent; and Madame LafFarge never poisoned her husband; and Mary of Scotland never blew up hers; and poor Soj)hia Dorothea was never unfaithful; and Eve never took the apple — it was a cowardly fabrication of the serpent's. George Louis has been held up to execration as a mur- derous Bluebeard, whereas the Electoral Prince had no share in the transaction in which Philip of Konigsmarck was scuffled out of this mortal scene. The Prince was absent when the catastrophe came. The Princess has had a hundred warnings ; mild hints from her husband's parents; grim remonstrances from himself — but took no more heed of this advice than such besotted poor wretches do. On the night of Sunday, the 1st of Juty, 1694, Konigsmarck paid a long visit to the Princess, and left her to get ready for flight. Her husband was awaj^ at Berlin; her carriages and horses were prepared and ready for the elopement. Meanwhile, the spies of Coun- tess Platen had brought the news to their mistress. She went to Ernest Augustus, and procured from the Elector an order for the arrest of the Swede. On the GEORGE THE FIRST 25 way by which he was to come, four guards were commis- sioned to take him. He strove to cut his way through the four men, and wounded more than one of them. They fell u]3on him ; cut him down ; and, as he was lying wounded on the ground, the Countess, his enemy, whom he had betrayed and insulted, came out and beheld him prostrate. He cursed her with his dying lips, and the furious woman stamped upon his mouth with her heel. He was despatched presently; his body burnt the next day; and all traces of the man disappeared. The guards who killed him were enjoined silence under severe penal- ties. The Princess was reported to be ill in her apart- ments, from which she was taken in October of the same year, being then eight-and-twenty years old, and con- signed to the castle of Alilden, where she remained a prisoner for no less than thirty -two years. A separation had been pronounced previously between her and her husband. She was called henceforth the " Princess of Ahlden," and her silent husband no more uttered her name. Four years after the Konigsmarck catastrophe, Ernest Augustus, the first Elector of Hanover, died, and George Louis, his son, reigned in his stead. Sixteen years he reigned in Hanover, after which he became, as we know, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. The wicked old Countess Platen died in the year 1706. She had lost her sight, but never- theless the legend says that she constantly saw Konigs- marck's ghost by her wicked old bed. And so there was an end of her. In the year 1700, the little Duke of Gloucester, the last of poor Queen Anne's children, died, and the folks of Hanover straightway became of prodigious import- 26 THE FOUR GEORGES ance in England. The Electress Sophia was declared the next in succession to the English throne. George Louis was created Duke of Cambridge; grand deputa- tions were sent over from our country to Deutschland ; but Queen Anne, whose weak heart hankered after her relatives at St. Germains, never could be got to allow her cousin, the Elector Duke of Cambridge, to come and pay his respects to her JNIajesty, and take his seat in her House of Peers. Had the Queen lasted a month longer; had the English Tories been as bold and resolute as they were clever and crafty ; had the Prince whom the nation loved and pitied been equal to his fortune, George Louis had never talked German in St. James's Chapel Royal. When the crown did come to George Louis he was in no hurry about putting it on. He waited at home for awhile ; took an affecting farewell of his dear Hanover and Herrenhausen ; and set out in the most leisurely manner to ascend " the throne of his ancestors," as he called it in his first speech to Parliament. He brought with him a compact body of Germans, whose society he loved, and whom he kept round the royal person. He had his faithful German chamberlains ; his German sec- retaries; his negroes, captives of his bow and spear in Turkish wars ; his two ugly, elderly German favourites, Mesdames of Kielmansegge and Schulenberg, whom he created respectively Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendal. The Duchess was tall, and lean of stature, and hence was irreverently nicknamed the Maypole. The Countess was a large-sized noblewoman, and this elevated personage was denominated the Ele- phant. Both of these ladies loved Hanover and its de- lights ; clung round the linden-trees of the great Herren- GEORGE THE FIRST 27 hausen avenue, and at first would not quit the place. Sehulenberg, in fact, could not come on account of her debts ; but finding the Maypole would not come, the Ele- phant packed up her trunk and slipped out of Hanover, unwieldy as she was. On this the Maypole straightway put herself in motion, and followed her beloved George Louis. One seems to be speaking of Captain Macheath, and Polly, and Lucy. The king we had selected; the courtiers who came in his train; the English nobles who came to welcome him, and on many of whom the shrewd old cynic turned his back — I protest it is a wonderful satirical picture. I am a citizen waiting at Greenwich pier, say, and crying hurrah for King George ; and yet I can scarcely keep my countenance, and help laughing at the enormous absurdity of this advent ! Here we are, all on our knees. Here is the Archbishop of Canterbury prostrating himself to the head of his church, with Kielmansegge and Sehulenberg with their ruddled cheeks grinning behind the defender of the faith. Here is my Lord Duke of Marlborough kneeling too, the greatest warrior of all times ; he who betrayed King Wilham— betrayed King James II.— betrayed Queen Anne— betrayed England to the French, the Elector to the Pretender, the Pretender to the Elector; and here are my Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke, the latter of whom has just tripped up the heels of the former; and if a month's more time had been allowed him, would have had King James at Westminster. The great Whig gen- tlemen made their bows and congees with proper deco- rum and ceremony ; but yonder keen old schemer knows the value of their loyalty. " Loyalty," he must think, "as applied to me— it is absurd! There are fifty nearer heirs to the throne than I am. I am but an accident, and 28 THE FOUR GEORGES you fine Whig gentlemen take me for your own sake, not for mine. You Tories hate me; you archbishop, smirking on your knees, and prating about Heaven, you know I don't care a fig for your Thirty-nine Articles, and can't understand a word of your stupid sermons. You, my Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford — you know you were conspiring against me a month ago ; and you, my Lord Duke of Marlborough — you would sell me or any man else, if you found your advantage in it. Come, my good Melusina, come, my honest Sophia, let us go into my private room, and have some oysters and some Rhine wine, and some pipes afterwards : let us make the best of our situation; let us take what we can get, and leave these bawling, brawling, lying English to shout, and fight, and cheat, in their own way! " If Swift had not been committed to the statesmen of the losing side, what a fine satirical picture we might have had of that general sauve qui i^eut amongst the Tory party! How mum the Tories became; how the House of Lords and House of Commons chopped round; and how decorously the majorities welcomed King George! Bolingbroke, making his last speech in the House of Lords, pointed out the shame of the peerage, where sev- eral lords concurred to condemn in one general vote all that they had approved in former parliaments by many particular resolutions. And so their conduct was shame- ful. St. John had the best of the argument, but the worst of the vote. Bad times were come for him. He talked philosophy, and professed innocence. He courted retirement, and was ready to meet persecution ; but, hear- ing that honest Mat Prior, who had been recalled from Paris, was about to peach regarding the past transac- GEORGE THE FIRST 29 tions, the philosopher bolted, and took that magnificent head of his out of the ugly reach of the axe. Oxford, the lazy and good-humoured, had more courage, and awaited the storm at home. He and Mat Prior both had lodg- ings in the Tower, and both brought their heads safe out of that dangerous menagerie. When Atterbury was carried off to the same den a few years afterwards, and it was asked, what next should be done with him? " Done with him? Ehng him to the hons," Cadogan said, Marl- borough's lieutenant. But the British lion of those days did not care much for drinking the blood of peaceful peers and poets, or crunching the bones of bishops. Only four men were executed in London for the rebel- lion of 1715; and twenty-two in Lancashire. Above a thousand taken in arms, submitted to the King's mercy, and petitioned to be transported to his Majesty's colo- nies in America. I have heard that their descendants took the loyalist side in the disputes which arose sixty years after. It is pleasant to find that a friend of ours, worthy Dick Steele, was for letting off the rebels with their lives. As one thinks of what might have been, how amusing the speculation is! We know how the doomed Scottish gentlemen came out at Lord Mar's summons, mounted the white cockade, that has been a flower of sad poetry ever since, and ralhed round the ill-omened Stuart standard at Braemar. Mar, with 8,000 men, and but 1,500 opposed to him, might have driven the enemy over the Tweed, and taken possession of the whole of Scot- land; but that the Pretender's Duke did not venture to move when the day was his own. Edinburgh Castle might have been in King James's hands; but that the men who were to escalade it stayed to drink his health at 30 THE FOUR GEORGES the tavern, and arrived two hours too late at the rendez- vous under the castle wall. There was sympathy enough in the town— the projected attack seems to have been known there — Lord Mahon quotes Sinclair's account of a gentleman not concerned, who told Sinclair, that he was in a house that evening where eighteen of them w^re drinking, as the facetious landlady said, "powdering their hair," for the attack on the castle. Suppose they had not stopped to powder their hair? Edinburgh Cas- tle, and town, and all Scotland were King James's. The north of England rises, and marches over Barnet Heath upon London. Wyndham is up in Somersetshire ; Pack- ington in Worcestershire ; and Vivian in Cornwall. The Elector of Hanover, and his hideous mistresses, pack up the plate, and perhaps the crown jewels in London, and are off via Harwich and Helvoetsluys, for dear old Deutschland. The King— God save him!— lands at Dover, with tumultuous applause; shouting multitudes, roaring canon, the Duke of Marlborough weeping tears of joy, and all the bishops kneeling in the mud. In a few years, mass is said in St. Paul's; matins and vespers are sung in York Minster; and Dr. Swift is turned out of his stall and deanery house at St. Patrick's, to give place to Father Dominic, from Salamanca. All these changes were possible then, and once thirty years afterwards— all this we might have had, but for the imlveris exigui jactu, that little toss of powder for the hair which the Scotch conspirators stopped to take at the tavern. You understand the distinction I would draw between history— of which I do not aspire to be an expounder— and manners and life such as these sketches vrould de- scribe. The rebellion breaks out in the north ; its story is before you in a hundred volumes, in none more fairly GEORGE THE FIRST 31 than in the excellent narrative of Lord Mahon. The clans are up in Scotland ; Derwentwater, Nithsdale and Forster are in arms in Northumberland— these are mat- ters of history, for which you are referred to the due chroniclers. The Guards are set to watch the streets, and prevent the people wearing white roses. I read presently of a couple of soldiers almost flogged to death for wearing oakboughs in their hats on the 29th of May —another badge of the beloved Stuarts. It is with these we have to do, rather than the marches and battles of the armies to which the poor fellows belonged— with states- men, and how they looked, and how they lived, rather than with measures of State, which belong to history alone. For example, at the close of the old Queen's reign, it is known the Duke of Marlborough left the kingdom— after what menaces, after what prayers, lies, bribes offered, taken, refused, accepted ; after what dark doubling and tacking, let history, if she can or dare, saj''. The Queen dead; who so eager to return as my lord duke? Who shouts God save the King! so lustily as the great conqueror of Blenheim and Malplaquet? (By the way, he will send over some more money for the Pre- tender yet, on the sly.) Who lays his hand on his blue ribbon, and lifts his eyes more gracefully to heaven than his hero? He makes a quasi-triumphal entrance into London, by Temple Bar, in his enormous gilt coach — and the enormous gilt coach breaks down somewhere by Chancery Lane, and his highness is obliged to get an- other. There it is we have him. We are with the mob in the crowd, not with the great folks in the proces- sion. We are not the Historic Muse, but her lady- ship's attendant, tale-bearer— raZ^f de chamhre— for whom no man is a hero; and, as yonder one steps from 32 THE FOUR GEORGES his carriage to the next handy conveyance, we take the number of the hack; we look all over at his stars, ribbons, embroidery; we think within ourselves, O you unfathomable schemer! O you warrior invincible! O you beautiful smiling Judas! What master would you not kiss or betray? What traitor's head, blackening on the spikes on yonder gate, ever hatched a tithe of the treason which has worked under your periwig? We have brought our Georges to London city, and if we would behold its aspect, may see it in Hogarth's lively perspective of Cheapside, or read of it in a hundred con- temporary books which paint the manners of that age. Our dear old Spectator looks smiling upon the streets, with their innumerable signs, and describes them witli his charming humour. " Our streets are filled with Blue Boars, Black Swans, and Red Lions, not to mention Flying Pigs and Hogs in Armour, with other creatures more extraordinary than any in the deserts of Africa." A few of these quaint old figures still remain in London town. You may still see there, and over its old hostel in Ludgate Hill, the "Belle Sauvage" to whom the Spec- tator so pleasantly alludes in that paper; and who was, probably, no other than the sweet American Pocahontas, who rescued from death the daring Captain Smith. There is the "Lion's Head," down whose jaws the Sjjec- tator's own letters were passed ; and over a great banker's in Fleet Street, the effigy of the wallet, which the founder of the firm bore when he came into London a country boy. People this street, so ornamented, with crowds of swinging chairmen, with servants bawling to clear the way, with Mr. Dean in his cassock, his lacquey marching before him; or Mrs. Dinah in her sack, trip- ping to chapel, her footboy carrying her ladyship's great GEORGE THE FIRST 33 prayer-book; with itinerant tradesmen, singing their hundred cries (I remember forty years ago, as boy in London city, a score of cheery, familiar cries that are silent now) . Fancy the beaux thronging to the choco- late-houses, tapping their snuff-boxes as they issue thence, their periwigs appearing over the rod curtains. Fancy Saccharissa, beckoning and smiling from the upper windows, and a crowd of soldiers brawling and bustling at the door — gentlemen of the Life Guards, clad in scarlet, with blue facings, and laced with gold at the seams; gentlemen of the Horse Grenadiers, in their caps of sky-blue cloth, with the garter embroidered on the front in gold and silver; men of the Halberdiers, in their long red coats, as bluff Harry left them, with their ruff and velvet flat caps. Perhaps the King's Majesty himself is going to St. James's as we pass. If he is going to Parliament, he is in his coach-and-eight, surrounded by his guards and the high officers of his crown. Other- wise his Majesty only uses a chair, with six footmen walking before, and six yeomen of the guard at the sides of the sedan. The officers in waiting follow the King in coaches. It must be rather slow work. Our Spectator and Tatler are full of delightful glimpses of the town life of those days. In the company of that charming guide, we may go to the opera, the com- edy, the puppet-show, the auction, even the cockpit: we can take boat at Temple Stairs, and accompany Sir Roger de Coverley and Mr. Spectator to Spring Gar- den—it will be called Vauxhall a few years hence, when Hogarth will paint for it. Would you not like to step back into the past, and be introduced to Mr. Addison? —not the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., George I.'s Secretary of State, but to the delightful 34 THE FOUR GEORGES painter of contemporary manners; the man who, when in good-humour himself, was the pleasantest companion in all England. I should like to go into Lockit's with him, and drink a bowl along with Sir R. Steele (who has just been knighted by King George, and who does not happen to have any money to pay his share of the reck- oning) . I should not care to follow Mr. Addison to his secretary's office in Whitehall. There we get into poli- tics. Our business is pleasure, and the town, and the coffee-house, and the theatre, and the Mall. Delightful Spectator! kind friend of leisure hours! happy com- panion ! true Christian gentleman ! How much greater, better, you are than the King Mr. Secretary kneels to ! You can have foreign testimony about old-world Lon- don, if you like; and my before-quoted friend, Charles Louis, Baron de Pollnitz, will conduct us to it. "A man of sense," says he, " or a fine gentleman, is never at a loss for company in London, and this is the way the latter passes his time. He rises late, puts on a frock, and, leav- ing his sword at home, takes his cane, and goes where he pleases. The park is commonly the place where he walks, because 'tis the Exchange for men of quality. 'Tis the same thing as the Tuileries at Paris, only the park has a certain beauty of simplicity which cannot be described. The grand walk is called the Mall ; is full of people at every hour of the day, but especially at morn- ing and evening, when their Majesties often walk with the royal family, who are attended only by a half-dozen yeomen of the guard, and permit all persons to walk at the same time with them. The ladies and gentlemen al- ways appear in rich dresses, for the English, who, twenty years ago, did not wear gold lace but in their army, are now embroidered and bedaubed as much as the French. GEORGE THE FIRST 35 I speak of persons of quality; for the citizen still con- tents himself with a suit of fine cloth, a good hat and wig, and fine linen. Everybody is well clothed here, and even the beggars don't make so ragged an appearance as they do elsewhere." After our friend, the man of quality, has had his morning or undress walk in the Mall, he goes home to dress, and then saunters to some coffee-house or chocolate-house frequented by the persons he would see. " For 'tis a rule with the English to go once a day at least to houses of this sort, where they talk of business and news, read the papers, and often look at one another without opening their lips. And 'tis very well they are so mute : for were they all as talkative as people of other nations, the coffee-houses would be intolerable, and there would be no hearing what one man said where they are so many. The chocolate-house in St. James's Street, where I go every morning to pass away the time, is al- waj^s so full that a man can scarce turn about in it." Delightful as London city was, King George I. liked to be out of it as much as ever he could ; and when there, passed all his time with his Germans. It was with them as with Blucher, 100 years afterwards, when the bold old Reiter looked down from St. Paul's, and sighed out, " Was fiir Plunder! " The German women plundered; the German secretaries plundered; the German cooks and intendants plundered; even Mustapha and Ma- homet, the German negroes, had a share of the booty. Take what you can get, was the old monarch's maxim. He was not a lofty monarch, certainly: he was not a patron of the fine arts : but he was not a hypocrite, he was not revengeful, he was not extravagant. Though a des- pot in Hanover, he was a moderate ruler in England. His aim was to leave it to itself as much as possible, and 36 THE FOUR GEORGES to live out of it as much as he could. His heart was in Hanover. When taken ill on his last journey, as he was passing through Holland, he thrust his livid head out of the coach-window, and gasped out, " Osnaburg, Osna- burg! " He was more than fifty years of age when he came amongst us: we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him. He took our loyalty for what it was worth; laid hands on what money he could ; kept us assuredly from Popery and wooden shoes. I, for one, would have been on his side in those days. Cynical, and selfish, as he was, he was better than a king out of St. Germains with the French King's orders in his pocket, and a swarm of Jesuits in his train. The Fates are supposed to interest themselves about royal personages ; and so this one had omens and prophe- cies specially regarding him. He was said to be much disturbed at a prophecy that he should die very soon after his wife; and sure enough, pallid Death, having seized upon the luckless Princess in her castle of Alilden, presently pounced upon H. M. King George I., in his travelling chariot, on the Hanover road. What postilion can outride that pale horseman? It is said, George promised one of his left-handed widows to come to her after death, if leave were granted to him to revisit the glimpses of the moon ; and soon after his demise, a great raven actually flying or hopping in at the Duchess of Kendal's window at Twickenham, she chose to imagine the king's spirit inliabited these plumes, and took special care of her sable visitor. Affecting metempsychosis— funereal royal bird! How pathetic is the idea of the Duchess weeping over it! When this chaste addition to our English aristocracy died, all her jewels, her plate, GEORGE THE FIRST 37 her plunder went over to her relations in Hanover. I wonder whether her heirs took the bird, and whether it is still flapping its wings over Herrenhausen? The days are over in England of that strange religion of king-worship, when priests flattered princes in the Temple of God ; when servility was held to be ennobling duty ; when beauty and youth tried eagerly for royal fa- vour; and woman's shame was held to be no dishonour. Mended morals and mended manners in courts and peo- ple, are among the priceless consequences of the freedom which George I. came to rescue and secure. He kept his compact with his Enghsh subjects; and if he escaped no more than other men and monarchs from the vices of his age, at least we may thank him for preserving and trans- mitting the liberties of ours. In our free air, royal and humble homes have alike been purified; and Truth, the birthright of high and low among us, which quite fear- lessly judges our greatest personages, can only speak of them now in words of respect and regard. There are stains in the portrait of the first George, and traits in it which none of us need admire; but, among the nobler features, are justice, courage, moderation— and these we may recognize ere we turn the picture to the wall. GEORGE THE SECOND N the afternoon of the 14th of June, 1727, two horse- men might have been perceived galloping along ^ the road from Chel- sea to Richmond. The foremost, cased in the jackboots of the period, was a broad - faced, jolly- looking, and very corpulent cavalier ; but, by the manner in which he urged his horse, you might see that he was a bold as well as a skilful rider. Indeed, no man loved sport better; and in the hunting-fields of Norfolk, no squire rode more boldly after the fox, or cheered Ring- wood and Sweettips more lustily, than he who now thun- dered over the Richmond road. He speedily reached Richmond Lodge, and asked to see the owner of the mansion. The mistress of the house and her ladies, to whom our friend was admitted, said he could not be introduced to the master, however press- ing the business might be. The master was asleep after his dinner; he always slept after his dinner: and woe be 38 George II GEORGE THE SECOND 39 to the person who interrupted him! Nevertheless, our stout friend of the jackboots put the affrighted ladies aside, opened the forbidden door of the bedroom, wherein upon the bed lay a little gentleman; and here the eager messenger knelt down in his jackboots. He on the bed started up, and with many oaths and a strong German accent asked who was there, and who dared to disturb him? " I am Sir Robert Walpole," said the messenger. The awakened sleeper hated Sir Robert Walpole. " I have the honour to announce to your Majesty that your royal father, King George I., died at Osnaburg, on Sat- urday last, the 10th inst." "Dat is one big lie! " roared out his sacred Majesty King George II.: but Sir Robert Walpole stated the fact, and from that day until three and thirty years after, George, the second of the name, ruled over England. How the King made away with his father's will under the astonished nose of the Archbishop of Canterbury; how he was a choleric little sovereign; how he shook his fist in the face of his father's courtiers; how he kicked his coat and wig about in his rages, and called everybody thief, liar, rascal, with whom he differed: you will read in all the history books; and how he speedily and shrewdly reconciled himself with the bold minister, whom he had hated during his father's life, and by whom he was served during fifteen years of his own with ad- mirable prudence, fidelity, and success. But for Sir Robert Walpole, we should have had the Pretender back again. But for his obstinate love of peace, we should have had wars, which the nation was not strong enough nor united enough to endure. But for his resolute coun- sels and good-humoured resistance we might have had 40 THE FOUR GEORGES German despots attempting a Hanoverian regimen over us : we should have had revolt, commotion, want, and tyr- annous misrule, in place of a quarter of a century of peace, freedom, and material prosperity, such as the country never enjoyed, until that corrupter of parlia- ments, that dissolute tipsy cynic, that courageous lover of peace and liberty, that great citizen, patriot, and statesman governed it. In religion he was little better than a heathen; cracked ribald jokes at bigwigs and bishops, and laughed at High Church and Low. In pri- vate life the old pagan revelled in the lowest pleasures: he passed his Sundays tippling at Richmond; and his holydays bawling after dogs, or boozing at Houghton with boors over beef and punch. He cared for letters no more than his master did: he judged human nature so meanly that one is ashamed to have to own that he was right, and that men could be corrupted by means so base. But, with his hireling House of Commons, he defended liberty for us ; with his incredulity he kept Church-craft down. There were parsons at Oxford as double-deaHng and dangerous as any priests out of Rome, and he routed them both. He gave Englishmen no conquests, but he gave them peace, and ease, and freedom; the three per cents, nearly at par; and wheat at five and six and twenty shillings a quarter. It was lucky for us that our first Georges were not more high-minded men; especially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as to leave England to have her own way. Our chief troubles began when we got a king who gloried in the name of Briton, and, being born in the country, proposed to rule it. He was no more fit to govern England than his grandfather and great-grand- father, who did not try. It was righting itself during GEORGE THE SECOND 41 their occupation. The dangerous, noble old spirit of cavalier loyalty was dying out; the stately old English High Church was emptying itself: the questions drop- ping which, on one side and the other;— the side of loy- alty, prerogative, church, and king;— the side of right, truth, civil and religious freedom,— had set generations of brave men in arms. By the time when George III. came to the throne, the combat between loyalty and lib- erty was come to an end; and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was dying in Italy. Those who are curious about European Court history of the last age know the memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, and what a Court was that of Berlin, where George II. 's cousins ruled sovereign Frederick the Great's father, knocked down his sons, daughters, officers of state ; he kidnapped big men all Europe over to make grenadiers of: his feasts, his parades, his wine-parties, his tobacco-parties, are all described. Jonathan Wild the Great in language, pleasures, and behaviour, is scarcely more delicate than this German sovereign. Louis XV., his life, and reign, and doings, are told in a thousand French memoirs. Our George IL,at least, was not a worse king than his neighbours. He claimed and took the royal exemption from doing right which sover- eigns assumed, A dull little man of low tastes he ap- pears to us in England; yet Hervey tells us that this choleric prince was a great sentimentalist, and that his letters — of which he wrote prodigious quantities — were quite dangerous in their powers of fascination. He kept his sentimentalities for his Germans and his queen. With us English, he never chose to be familiar. He has been accused of avarice, yet he did not give much money, and did not leave much behind him. He did not love the 42 THE FOUR GEORGES fine arts, but he did not pretend to love them. He was no more a hypocrite about rehgion than his father. He judged men by a low standard; yet, with such men as were near him, was he wrong in judging as he did? He readily detected lying and flattery, and liars and flatter- ers were perforce his companions. Had he been more of a dupe he might have been more amiable. A dismal experience made him cynical. No boon was it to him to be clear-sighted, and see only selfishness and flattery round about him. What could Walpole tell him about his Lords and Commons, but that they were all venal? Did not his clergy, his courtiers, bring him the same story? Dealing with men and women in his rude, scep- tical way, he came to doubt about honour, male and fe- male, about patriotism, about religion. " He is wild, but he fights like a man," George I., the taciturn, said of his son and successor. Courage George II. certainly had. The Electoral Prince, at the head of his father's contingent, had approved himself a good and brave sol- dier under Eugene and Marlborough. At Oudenarde he specially distinguished himself. At Malplaquet the other claimant to the English throne won but little hon- our. There was always a question about James's cour- age. Neither then in Flanders, nor afterwards in his own ancient kingdom of Scotland, did the luckless Pre- tender show much resolution. But dapper little George had a famous tough spirit of his own, and fought like a Trojan. He called out his brother of Prussia, with sword and pistol; and I wish, for the interest of ro- mancers in general, that that famous duel could have taken place. The two sovereigns hated each other with all their might; their seconds were appointed; the place of meeting was settled ; and the duel was only prevented GEORGE THE SECOND 43 by strong representations made to the two, of the Euro- pean laughter which would have been caused by such a transaction. Whenever we hear of dapper George at war, it is cer- tain that he demeaned himself like a little man of valour. At Dettingen his horse ran away with him, and with dif- ficulty was stopped from carrying him into the enemy's lines. The King, dismounting from the fiery quad- ruped, said bravely, " Now I know I shall not run away; " and placed himself at the head of the foot, drew his sword, brandishing it at the whole of the French army, and calling out to his own men to come on, in bad English, but with the most famous pluck and spirit. In '45, when the Pretender was at Derby, and many people began to look pale, the King never lost his courage— not he. " Pooh! don't talk to me that stuff! " he said, like a gallant little prince as he was, and never for one mo- ment allowed his equanimity, or his business, or his pleas- ures, or his travels, to be disturbed. On pubhc festivals he always appeared in the hat and coat he wore on the famous day of Oudenarde ; and the people laughed, but kindly, at the odd old garment, for bravery never goes out of fashion. In private life the Prince showed himself a worthy descendant of his father. In this respect, so much has been said about the first George's manners, that we need not enter into a description of the son's German harem. In 1705 he married a princess remarkable for beauty, for cleverness, for learning, for good temper— one of the truest and fondest wives ever prince was blessed with, and who loved him and was faithful to him, and he, in his coarse fashion, loved her to the last. It must be told to the honour of Caroline of Anspach, that, at the time 44. THE FOUR GEORGES when German princes thought no more of changing their rehgion than you of altering your cap, she refused to give up Protestantism for the other creed, although an archduke, afterwards to be an emperor, was offered to her for a bridegroom. Her Protestant relations in Ber- lin were angry at her rebellious spirit; it was they who tried to convert her (it is droll to think that Frederick the Great, who had no religion at all, was known for a long time in England as the Protestant hero) , and these good Protestants set upon Caroline a certain Father Urban, a very skilful Jesuit, and famous winner of souls. But she routed the Jesuit; and she refused Charles VI. ; and she married the little Electoral Prince of Hanover, whom she tended with love, and with every manner of sacrifice, with artful kindness, with tender flattery, with entire self-devotion, thenceforward until her life's end. When George I. made his first visit to Hanover, his son was appointed regent during the royal absence. But this honour was never again conferred on the Prince of Wales ; he and his father fell out presently. On the oc- casion of the christening of his second son, a royal row took place, and the Prince, shaking his fist in the Duke of Newcastle's face, called him a rogue, and provoked his august father. He and his wife were turned out of St. James's, and their princely children taken from them, by order of the royal head of the family. Father and mother wept piteously at parting from their little ones. The young ones sent some cherries, with their love, to papa and mamma ; the parents watered the fruit with tears. They had no tears thirty-five years after- wards, when Prince Frederick died— their eldest son, their heir, their enemy. GEORGE THE SECOND 45 The King called his daughter-in-law ''cette diahlesse madame la pincesse" The frequenters of the latter's court were forbidden to appear at the King's: their Royal Highnesses going to Bath, we read how the cour- tiers followed them thither, and paid that homage in Somersetshire which was forbidden in London. That phrase of " cette diahlesse madame la princesse" ex- plains one cause of the wrath of her royal papa. She was a very clever woman: she had a keen sense of hu- mour: she had a dreadful tongue: she turned into ridi- cule the antiquated sultan and his hideous harem. She wrote savage letters about him home to members of her family. So, driven out from the royal presence, the Prince and Princess set up for themselves in Leicester Fields, " where," says Walpole, " the most promising of the young gentlemen of the next party, and the prettiest and liveliest of the young ladies, formed the new court." Besides Leicester House, they had their lodge at Rich- mond, frequented by some of the pleasantest company of those days. There were the Herveys, and Chester- field, and little Mr. Pope from Twickenham, and with him, sometimes, the savage Dean of St. Patrick's, and quite a bevy of young ladies, whose pretty faces smile on us out of history. There was Lepell, famous in ballad song; and the saucy, charming Mary Bellenden, who would have none of the Prince of Wales's fine compli- ments, who folded her arms across her breast, and bade H.R.H. keep off; and knocked his purse of guineas into his face, and told him she was tired of seeing him count them. He was not an august monarch, this Augustus. Walpole tells how, one night at the royal card-table, the playful princesses pulled a chair away from under Lady Deloraine, who, in revenge, pulled the King's from un- 46 THE FOUR GEORGES der him, so that his INIajesty fell on the carpet. In what- ever posture one sees this royal George, he is ludicrous somehow; even at Dettingen, where he fought so bravely, his figure is absurd— calling out in his broken English, and lunging with his rapier, like a fencing- master. In contemporary caricatures, George's son, " the Hero of Culloden," is also made an object of con- siderable fun, as witness the preceding picture of him defeated by the French (1757) at Hastenbeck. I refrain to quote from Walpole regarding George— for those charming volumes are in the hands of all who love the gossip of the last century. Nothing can be more cheery than Horace's letters. Fiddles sing all through them: wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages, glitter and sparkle there: never was such a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us. Hervey, the next great au- thority, is a darker spirit. About him there is something frightful: a few years since his heirs opened the lid of GEORGE THE SECOND 47 the Ickworth box ; it was as if a Pompeii was opened to us— the last century dug up, with its temples and its games, its chariots, its public places— lupanaria. Wan- dering through that city of the dead, that dreadfully selfish time, through those godless intrigues and feasts, through those crowds, pushing and eager, and struggHng —rouged, and lying, and fawning— I have wanted some one to be friends with. I have said to friends conversant with that history, " Show me some good person about that Court; find me, among those selfish courtiers, those dissolute, gay people, some one being that I can love and regard." There is that strutting little sultan George II. ; there is that hunchbacked, beetle-browed Lord Ches- terfield ; there is John Hervey, with his deadly smile, and ghastly, painted face— I hate them. There is Hoadly, cringing from one bishopric to another: yonder comes little Mr. Pope, from Twickenham, with his friend, the Irish dean, in his new cassock, bowing too, but with rage flashing from under his bushy eyebrows, and scorn and hate quivering in his smile. Can you be fond of these? Of Pope I might: at least I might love his genius, his wit, his greatness, his sensibility— with a certain convic- tion that at some fancied slight, some sneer which he im- agined, he would turn upon me and stab me. Can j^ou trust the Queen? She is not of our order: their very po- sition makes kings and queens lonely. One inscrutable attachment that inscrutable woman has. To that she is faithful, through all trial, neglect, pain, and time. Save her husband, she really cares for no created being. She is good enough to her children, and even fond enough of them : but she would chop them all up into little pieces to please him. In her intercourse with all around her, she was perfectly kind, gracious, and natural: but 48 THE FOUR GEORGES friends may die, daughters may depart, she will be as perfectly kind and gracious to the next set. If the King wants her, she will smile upon him, be she ever so sad; and walk with him, be she ever so weary; and laugh at his brutal jokes, be she in ever so much pain of body or heart. Caroline's devotion to her husband is a prodigy to read of. What charm had the little man ? What was there in those wonderful letters of thirty pages long, which he wrote to her when he was absent, and to his mis- tresses at Hanover, when he was in London v/ith his wife? Why did Caroline, the most lovely and accom- plished princess of Germany, take a little red-faced star- ing princeling for a husband, and refuse an emperor? Why, to her last hour, did she love him so? She killed herself because she loved him so. She had the gout, and would plunge her feet in cold water in order to walk with him. With the film of death over her eyes, writh- ing in intolerable pain, she yet had a livid smile and a gentle word for her master. You have read the wonderful history of that death-bed? How she bade him marry again, and the reply the old King blubbered out, " Non, non: j'aurai des maitresses." There never was such a ghastly farce. I watch the astonishing scene —I stand by that awful bedside, wondering at the ways in which God has ordained the lives, loves, rewards, suc- cesses, passions, actions, ends of his creatures— and can't but laugh, in the presence of death, and with the saddest heart. In that often-quoted passage from Lord Her- vey, in which the Queen's death-bed is described, the gro- tesque horror of the details surpasses all satire: the dreadful humour of the scene is more terrible than Swift's blackest pages, or Fielding's fiercest irony. The man who wrote the story had something diabolical about GEORGE THE SECOND 49 him: the terrible verses which Pope wrote respecting Hervey, in one of his own moods of almost fiendish ma- lignity, I fear are true. I am frightened as I look back into the past, and fancy I behold that ghastly, beautiful face ; as I think of the Queen writhing on her death-bed, and crying out, " Pray! — pray! " — of the royal old sin- ner by her side, who kisses her dead lips with frantic grief, and leaves her to sin more; — of the bevy of courtly clergymen, and the archbishop, whose prayers she re- jects, and who are obliged for propriety's sake to shuffle off the anxious inquiries of the public, and vow that her Majesty quitted this life " in a heavenly frame of mind." What a life!— to what ends devoted! What a vanity of vanities! It is a theme for another pulpit than the lec- turer's. For a pulpit?— I think the part which pulpits play in the deaths of kings is the most ghastly of all the ceremonial : the lying eulogies, the blinking of disagree- able truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies — all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his ap- paratus of rhetorical black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter him— announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obse- quies of "our most religious and gracious king." I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's favourite) sold a bishopric to a clergy- man for 5,000Z. ( She betted him 5000Z. that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her. ) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George II.'s St. James's, 50 THE FOUR GEORGES I see crowds of cassocks rustling up the back-stairs of the ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps ; that godless old King yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Roj^al, as the chaplain before him is discoursing. Discoursing about what?— about right- eousness and judgment? Whilst the chaplain is preach- ing, the King is chattering in German almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergyman— it may be one Dr. Young, he who wrote "Night Thoughts," and dis- coursed on the splendours of the stars, the glories of heaven, and utter vanities of this world— actually burst out crying in his pulpit because the defender of the faith and dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to him ! No wonder that the clergy were corrupt and indifferent amidst this indifference and corruption. No wonder that sceptics multiplied and morals degenerated, so far as they depended on the influence of such a king. No wonder that Whitfield cried out in the wilderness, that Wesley quitted the insulted temple to pray on the hill- side. I look with reverence on those men at that time. Which is the sublimer spectacle— the good John Wes- ley, surrounded by his congregation of miners at the pit's mouth, or the Queen's chaplains mumbling through their morning office in their ante-room, under the picture of the great Venus, with the door opened into the ad- joining chamber, where the Queen is dressing, talking scandal to Lord Hervey, or uttering sneers at Lady Suf- folk, who is kneeling with the basin at her mistress's side? I say I am scared as I look round at this society — at this king, at these courtiers, at these politicians, at these bishops — at this flaunting vice and levity. Where- abouts in this Court is the honest man? Where is the pure person one may like? The air stifles one with its GEORGE THE SECOND 51 sickly perfumes. There are some old-world follies and some absurd ceremonials about our Court of the pres- ent day, which I laugh at, but as an Englishman, con- trasting it with the past, shall I not acknowledge the change of to-day? As the mistress of St. James's passes me now, I salute the sovereign, wise, moderate, exem- plary of hfe; the good mother; the good wife; the accomplished lady; the enlightened friend of art; the tender sympathizer in her people's glories and sorrows. Of all the Court of George and Caroline, I find no one but Lady Suffolk with whom it seems pleasant and kindly to hold converse. Even the misogynist Croker, who edited her letters, loves her, and has that regard for her with which her sweet graciousness seems to have in- spired almost all men and some women who came near her. I have noted many little traits which go to prove the charms of her character (it is not merely because she is charming, but because she is characteristic, that I al- lude to her) . She writes delightfully sober letters. Ad- dressing Mr. Gay at Tunbridge (he was, you know, a poet, penniless and in disgrace), she says: " The place you are in, has strangely filled your head with physicians and cures ; but, take my word for it, many a fine lady has gone there to drink the waters without being sick; and many a man has complained of the loss of his heart, who had it in his own possession. I desire you will keep yours; for I shall not be very fond of a friend without one, and I have a great mind you should be in the num- ber of mine." When Lord Peterborough was seventy years old, that indomitable youth addressed some flaming love, or rather gallantry, letters to Mrs. Howard— curious relics they are of the romantic manner of wooing sometimes in use 52 THE FOUR GEORGES in those days. It is not passion ; it is not love ; it is gal- lantry : a mixture of earnest and acting ; high-flown com- pliments, profound bows, vows, sighs and ogles, in the manner of the Clelie romances, and Millamont and Dori- court in the comedy. There was a vast elaboration of ceremonies and etiquette, of raptures— a regulated form for kneeling and wooing which has quite passed out of our downright manners. Henrietta Howard accepted the noble old earl's philandering; answered the queer love-letters with due acknowledgment ; made a profound curtsey to Peterborough's profound bow ; and got John Gay to help her in the composition of her letters in reply to her old knight. He wrote her charming verses, in which there was truth as well as grace. " O wonderful creature!" he writes:— " O wonderful creature, a woman of reason ! Never grave out of pride, never gay out of season ! When so easy to guess who this angel should be. Who would think Mrs. Howard ne'er dreamt it was she.? " The great Mr. Pope also celebrated her in lines not less pleasant, and painted a portrait of what must certainly have been a delightful lady: — " I know a thing that's most uncommon — Envy, be silent and attend! — I know a reasonable woman, Handsome, yet witty, and a friend: " Not warp'd by passion, aw'd by rumour. Not grave through pride, or gay through folly : An equal mixture of good-humour And exquisite soft melancholy. GEORGE THE SECOND 53 " Has she no faults, then (Envy says), sir? Yes, she has one, I must aver — When all the world conspires to praise her, The woman's deaf, and does not hear ! " Even the women concurred in praising and loving her. The Duchess of Queensberry bears testimony to her amiable qualities, and writes to her: " I tell you so and so, because you love children, and to have children love you." The beautiful, jolly Mary Bellenden, repre- sented by contemporaries as " the most perfect crea- ture ever known," writes very pleasantly to her "dear Howard," her " dear Swiss," from the country, whither Mary had retired after her marriage, and when she gave up being a maid of honour. " How do you do, Mrs. Howard? " Mary breaks out. " How do you do, Mrs. Howard? that is all I have to say. This afternoon I am taken with a fit of writing ; but as to matter, I have no- thing better to entertain you, than news of my farm. I therefore give you the following list of the stock of eata- bles that I am fatting for my private tooth. It is well known to the whole county of Kent, that I have four fat calves, two fat hogs, fit for killing, twelve promising black pigs, two young chickens, three fine geese, with thirteen eggs under each (several being duck-eggs, else the others do not come to maturity) ; all this, with rab- bits, and pigeons, and carp in plenty, beef and mutton at reasonable rates. Now, Howard, if you have a mind to stick a knife into anything I have named, say so! " A jolly set must they have been, those maids of hon- our. Pope introduces us to a whole bevy of them, in a pleasant letter. " I went," he says, " by water to Hamp- ton Court, and met the Prince, with all his ladies, on 54 THE FOUR GEORGES horseback, coming from limiting. Mrs. Bellenden and Mrs. Lepell took me into protection, contrary to the laws against harbouring Papists, and gave me a "dinner, with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversation with Mrs. Howard. We all agreed that the life of a maid of honour was of all things the most miserable, and wished that all women who envied it had a specimen of it. To eat Westphalia ham of a morning, ride over hedges and ditches on borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever, and (what is worse a hun- dred times) with a red mark on the forehead from an uneasy hat— all this may qualify them to make excellent wives for hunters. As soon as they wipe off the heat of the day, they must simper an hour and catch cold in the Princess's apartment; from thence to dinner with what appetite they may; and after that till midnight, work, walk, or think which way they please. No lone house in Wales, with a mountain and rookery, is more contem- plative than this Court. Miss Lepell walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality but the King, who gave audience to the vice-chamberlain all alone under the garden wall." I fancy it was a merrier England, that of our ances- tors, than the island which we inhabit. People high and low amused themselves very much more. I have calcu- lated the manner in which statesmen and persons of con- dition passed their time— and what with drinking, and dining, and supping, and cards, wonder how they got through their business at all. They played all sorts of games, which, with the exception of cricket and tennis, have quite gone out of our manners now. In the old prints of St. James's Park, you still see the marks along the walk, to note the balls when the Court played at GEORGE THE SECOND 55 Mall. Fancy Birdcage Walk now so laid out, and Lord John and Lord Palmerston knocking balls up and down the avenue! Most of those jolly sports belong to the past, and the good old games of England are only to be found in old novels, in old ballads, or the columns of dingy old newspapers, which say how a main of cocks is to be fought at Winchester between the Winchester men and the Hampton men; or how the Cornwall men and the Devon men are going to hold a great wrestling- match at Totnes, and so on. A hundred and twenty years ago there were not only country towns in England, but people who inhabited them. We were very much more gregarious; we were amused by very simple pleasures. Every town had its fair, every village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred jolly ditties about great cudgel-playings, fa- mous grinning through horse-collars, great maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used to run races clad in very light attire; and the kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame in looking on. Dancing bears went about the country with pipe and tabor. Cer- tain well-known tunes were sung all over the land for hundreds of years, and high and low rejoiced in that simple music. Gentlemen who wished to entertain their female friends constantly sent for a band. When Beau Fielding, a mighty fine gentleman, was courting the lady whom he married, he treated her and her companion at his lodgings to a supper from the tavern, and after supper they sent out for a fiddler— three of them. Fancy the three, in a great wainscoted room, in Covent Garden or Soho, lighted by two or three candles in silver sconces, some grapes and a bottle of Florence wine on the table, and the honest fiddler playing old tunes in 50 THE FOUR GEORGES quaint old minor keys, as the Beau takes out one lady after the other, and solemnly dances with her ! The very great folks, young noblemen, with their governors, and the like, went abroad and made the great tour; the home satirists jeered at the Frenchified and Italian ways which they brought back; but the greater number of people never left the country. The jolly squire often had never been twenty miles from home. Those who did go went to the baths, to Harrogate, or Scarborough, or Bath, or Epsom. Old letters are full of these places of pleasure. Gay writes to us about the fiddlers at Tunbridge ; of the ladies having merry little private balls amongst themselves; and the gentlemen entertaining them by turns with tea and music. One of the young beauties whom he met did not care for tea: " We have a young lady here," he says, " that is very particular in her desires. I have known some young la- dies, who, if ever they prayed, would ask for some equi- page or title, a husband or matadores : but this lady, who is but seventeen, and has 30,000Z. to her fortune, places all her wishes on a pot of good ale. When her friends, for the sake of her shape and complexion, would dis- suade her from it, she answers, with the truest sincerity, that by the loss of shape and complexion she could only lose a husband, whereas ale is her passion." Every country town had its assembly-room— mouldy old tenements, which we may still see in deserted inn- yards, in decayed provincial cities, out of which the great wen of London has sucked all the life. York, at assize times, and throughout the winter, harboured a large so- ciety of northern gentry. Shrewsbury was celebrated for its festivities. At Newmarket, I read of "a vast deal of good company, besides rogues and blacklegs; " GEORGE THE SECOND 57 at Norwich, of two assemblies, with a prodigious crowd in the hall, the rooms, and the gallery. In Cheshire (it is a maid of honour of Queen Caroline who writes, and who is longing to be back at Hampton Court, and the fun there) I peep into a country house, and see a very merry party: " We meet in the work-room before nine, eat, and break a joke or two till twelve, then we repair to our own chambers and make ourselves ready, for it cannot be called dressing. At noon the great bell fetches us into a parlour, adorned with all sorts of fine arms, poisoned darts, several pair of old boots and shoes worn by men of might, with the stirrups of King Charles I., taken from him at Edgehill,"— and there they have their dinner, after which comes dancing and supper. As for Bath, all history went and bathed and drank there. George II. and his Queen, Prince Frederick and his court, scarce a character one can mention of the early last century, but was seen in that famous Pump Room where Beau Nash presided, and his picture hung be- tween the busts of Newton and Pope: " This picture, placed these busts between, Gives satire all its strength: Wisdom and Wit are little seen, But Folly at full length." I should like to have seen the Folly. It was a splen- did, embroidered, beruffled, snuff-boxed, red-heeled, im- pertinent Folly, and knew how to make itself respected. I should like to have seen that noble old madcap Peter- borough in his boots (he actually had the audacity to walk about Bath in boots!), with his blue ribbon and stars, and a cabbage under each arm, and a chicken in his hand, which he had been cheapening for his dinner. 58 THE FOUR GEORGES Chesterfield came there many a time and gambled for hundreds, and grinned through his gout. Mary Wort- ley was there, young and beautiful ; and Mary Wortley, old, hideous, and snuffy. Miss Chudleigh came there, slipping away from one husband, and on the look-out for another. Walpole passed many a day there ; sickly, supercilious, absurdly dandified, and affected ; with a brilliant wit, a delightful sensibility ; and for his friends, a most tender, generous, and faithful heart. And if you and I had been alive then, and strolling down "Milsom Street— hush! we should have taken our hats off, as an awful, long, lean, gaunt figure, swathed in flannels, passed by in its chair, and a livid face looked out from the window— great fierce eyes staring from under a bushy, powdered wig, a terrible frown, a terrible Roman nose— and we whisper to one another, "There he is! There's the great commoner! There is Mr. Pitt! " As we walk away, the abbey bells are set a-ringing ; and we meet our testy friend Toby Smollett, on the arm of James Quin the actor, who tells us that the bells ring for Mr. Bullock, an eminent cowkeeper from Totten- ham, who has just arrived to drink the waters; and Toby shakes his cane at the door of Colonel Ringworm— the Creole gentleman's lodgings next his own— where the colonel's two negroes are practising on the French horn. When we try to recall social England, we must fancy it playing at cards for many hours every day. The cus- tom is well nigh gone out among us now, but fifty years ago was general, fifty years before that almost univer- sal, in the country. " Gaming has become so much the fashion," writes Seymour, the author of the " Court Gamester," " that he who in company should be igno- rant of the games in vogue, would be reckoned low-bred. GEORGE THE SECOND 59 and hardly fit for conversation." There were cards everywhere. It was considered ill-bred to read in com- pany. " Books were not fit articles for drawing-rooms," old ladies used to say. People were jealous, as it were, and angry with them. You will find in Hervey that George II. was always furious at the sight of books; and his Queen, who loved reading, had to practise it in secret in her closet. But cards were the resource of all the world. Every night, for hours, kings and queens of England sat down and handled their majesties of spades and diamonds. In European Courts, I believe the prac- tice still remains, not for gambling, but for pastime. Our ancestors generally adopted it. "Books! prithee, don't talk to me about books," said old Sarah Marlbor- ough. " The only books I know are men and cards." " Dear old Sir Roger de Coverley sent all his tenants a string of hogs' puddings and a pack of cards at Christ- mas," says the SiJectator, wishing to depict a kind land- lord. One of the good old lady writers in whose letters I have been dipping cries out, " Sure, cards have kept us women from a great deal of scandal! " Wise old John- son regretted that he had not learnt to play. " It is very useful in life," he says; " it generates kindness, and con- sohdates society." David Hume never went to bed with- out his whist. We have Walpole, in one of his letters, in a transport of gratitude for the cards. " I shall build an altar to Pam," says he, in his pleasant dandified way, " for the escape of my charming Duchess of Grafton." The Duchess had been playing cards at Rome, when she ought to have been at a cardinal's concert, where the floor fell in, and all the monsignors were precipitated into the cellar. Even the Nonconformist clergy looked not unkindly on the practice. " I do not think," says one 60 THE FOUR GEORGES of them, " that honest Martin Luther committed sin by playing at backgammon for an hour or two after dinner, in order by unbending his mind to promote digestion." As for the High Church parsons, they all played, bish- ops and all. On Twelfth-day the Court used to play in state. " This being Twelfth-day, his Majesty, the Prince of Wales, and the Knights Companions of the Garter, Thistle, and Bath, appeared in the collars of their respective orders. Their Majesties, the Prince of Wales, and three eldest Princesses, went to the Chapel Royal, preceded by the heralds. The Duke of Man- chester carried the sword of State. The King and Prince made offering at the altar of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, according to the annual custom. At night their Majesties played at hazard with the nobility, for the benefit of the groom-porter ; and 'twas said the king won 600 guineas; the queen, 360; Princess Amelia, twenty; Princess Caroline, ten; the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Portmore, several thousands." Let us glance at the same chronicle, which is of the year 1731, and see how others of our forefathers were engaged. " Cork, 15th January.— This day, one Tim Croneen was, for the murder and robbery of Mr. St. Leger and his wife, sentenced to be hanged two minutes, then his head to be cut off, and his body divided in four quarters, to be placed in four cross-ways. He was servant to Mr. St. Leger, and committed the murder with the privity of the servant-maid, who was sentenced to be burned; also of the gardener, whom he knocked on the head, to deprive him of his share of the booty." " January 3.— A postboy was shot by an Irish gen- tleman on the road near Stone, in Staffordshire, who GEORGE THE SECOND 61 died in two days, for which the gentleman was impris- oned." " A poor man was found hanging in a gentleman's stables at Bungay, in Norfolk, by a person who cut him down, and running for assistance, left his penknife be- hind him. The poor man recovering, cut his throat with the knife; and a river being nigh, jumped into it; but company coming, he was dragged out alive, and was like to remain so." " The Honourable Thomas Finch, brother to the Earl of Nottingham, is appointed ambassador at the Hague, in the room of the Earl of Chesterfield, who is on his re- turn home." " William Cowper, Esq., and the Rev. Mr. John Cowper, chaplain in ordinary to her Majesty, and rector of Great Berkhampstead, in the county of Hertford, are appointed clerks of the commissioners of bank- ruptcy." " Charles Creagh, Esq., and Macnamara, Esq., between whom an old grudge of three years had sub- sisted, which had occasioned their being bound over about fifty times for breaking the peace, meeting in company with Mr. Eyres, of Galloway, they discharged their pistols, and all three were killed on the spot— to the great joy of their peaceful neighbours, say the Irish papers." " Wheat is 26*. to 28s., and barley 205. to 22s. a quar- ter; three per cents., 92; best loaf sugar, d^d.; Bohea, 12s. to 14s.; Pekoe, 18s.; and Hyson, 35s. per pound." " At Exon was celebrated with great magnificence the birthday of the son of Sir W. Courtney, Bart., at which more than 1,000 persons were present. A bullock was roasted whole; a butt of wine and several tuns of 62 THE FOUR GEORGES beer and cider were given to the populace. At the same time Sir WiUiam delivered to his son, then of age, Pow- dram Castle, and a great estate." " Charlesworth and Cox, two solicitors, convicted of forgery, stood on the pillory at the Royal Exchange. The first was severely handled by the populace, but the ' other was very much favoured, and protected by six or seven fellows who got on the pillory to protect him from the insults of the mob." " A boy killed by falhng upon iron spikes, from a lamp-post, which he climbed to see Mother Needham stand in the pillory." " Mary Lynn was burnt to ashes at the stake for being concerned in the murder of her mistress." " Alexander Russell, the foot soldier, who was capi- tally convicted for a street robbery in January sessions, was reprieved for transportation; but having an estate fallen to him, obtained a free pardon." " The Lord John Russell married to the Lady Diana Spencer, at Marlborough House. He has a fortune of 30,000Z. down, and is to have 100,000Z. at the death of the Duchess Dowager of Marlborough, his grand- mother." " March 1 being the anniversary of the Queen's birth- day, when her Majesty entered the forty -ninth year of her age, there was a splendid appearance of nobility at St. James's. Her Majesty was magnificently dressed, and wore a flowered muslin head-edging, as did also her Royal Highness. The Lord Portmore was said to have had the richest dress, though an Italian Count had twenty-four diamonds instead of buttons." New clothes on the birthday were the fashion for all loyal people. Swift mentions the custom several times. GEORGE THE SECOND 63 Walpole is constantly speaking of it; laughing at the practice, but having the very finest clothes from Paris, nevertheless. If the King and Queen were unpopular, there were very few new clothes at the drawing-room. In a paper in the True Patriot, No. 3, written to attack the Pretender, the Scotch, French, and Popery, Field- ing supposes the Scotch and the Pretender in possession of London, and himself about to be hanged for loyalty, —when, just as the rope is round his neck, he says: " My little girl entered my bed-chamber, and put an end to my dream by pulling open my eyes, and telling me that the tailor had just brought home my clothes for his Maj- esty's birthday." In his " Temple Beau," the beau is dunned " for a birthday suit of velvet, 40/." Be sure that Mr. Harry Fielding was dunned too. The public days, no doubt, were splendid, but the pri- vate Court life must have been awfully wearisome. " I will not trouble you," writes Hervey to Lady Sundon, " with any account of our occupations at Hampton Court. No mill-horse ever went in a more constant track, or a more unchanging circle ; so that, by the assis- tance of an almanack for the day of the week, and a watch for the hour of the day, you may inform yourself fully, without any other intelligence but your memor5^ of every transaction within the verge of the Court. Walking, chaises, levees, and audiences fill the morning. At night the King plays at commerce and backgammon, and the Queen at quadrille, where poor Lady Charlotte runs her usual nightly gauntlet, the Queen pulling her hood, and the Princess Royal rapping her knuckles. The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly opiate of lottery, and sleeps as usual between the Princesses Amelia and Caroline. Lord Grantham strolls from one room to an- 64 THE FOUR GEORGES other (as Dryden says), like some discontented ghost that oft appears, and is forbid to speak; and stirs himself about as people stir a fire, not with any design, but in hopes to make it burn brisker. At last the King gets up ; the pool finishes ; and everybody has their dismission. Their Majesties retire to Lady Charlotte and my Lord LiiFord ; my Lord Grantham, to Lady Frances and Mr. Clark: some to supper, some to bed; and thus the even- ing and the morning make the day." The King's fondness for Hanover occasioned all sorts of rough jokes among his Enghsh subjects, to whom sauer-kraut and sausages have ever been ridiculous ob- jects. When our present Prince Consort came among us, the people bawled out songs in the streets indicative of the absurdity of Germany in general. The sausage- shops produced enormous sausages which we might sup- pose were the daily food and delight of German princes. I remember the caricatures at the marriage of Prince Leopold with the Princess Charlotte. The bridegroom was drawn in rags. George III.'s wife was called by the people a beggarly German duchess ; the British idea being that all princes were beggarly except British princes. King George paid us back. He thought there were no manners out of Germany. Sarah Marlborough once coming to visit the Princess, whilst her Royal Highness was whipping one of the roaring royal chil- dren, "All! " says George, who was standing by, " you have no good manners in England, because you are not properly brought up when you are young." He insisted that no English cooks could roast, no English coach- man could drive: he actually questioned the superiority of our nobility, our horses, and our roast beef ! Whilst he was away from his beloved Hanover, every- GEORGE THE SECOND 65 thing remained there exactly as in the Prince's presence. There were 800 horses in the stables, there was all the apparatus of chamberlains, court-marshals, and equer- ries; and court assemblies were held every Saturday, where all the nobility of Hanover assembled at what I can't but think a fine and touching ceremony. A large arm-chair was placed in the assembly-room, and on it the King's portrait. The nobility advanced, and made a bow to the arm-chair, and to the image which Nebuchad- nezzar the king had set up ; and spoke under their voices before the august picture, just as they would have done had the King Churfiirst been present himself. He was always going back to Hanover. In the year 1729, he went for two whole years, during which Caro- line reigned for him in England, and he was not in the least missed by his British subjects. He went again in '35 and '36; and between the years 1740 and 1755 was no less than eight times on the Continent, which amusement he was obliged to give up at the outbreak of the Seven Years' war. Here every day's amusement was the same. " Our life is as uniform as that of a monastery," writes a courtier whom Vehse quotes. " Every morning at eleven, and every evening at six, we drive in the heat to Herrenhausen, through an enormous linden avenue ; and twice a day cover our coats and coaches with dust. In the King's society there never is the least change. At table, and at cards, he sees always the same faces, and at the end of the game retires into his chamber. Twice a week there is a French theatre; the other days there is play in the gallery. In this way, were the King always to stop in Hanover, one could make a ten years' calendar of his proceedings ; and settle beforehand what his time of business, meals, and pleasure would be." 66 THE FOUR GEORGES The old pagan kept his promise to his dying wife. Lady Yarmouth was now in full favour, and treated with profound respect by the Hanover society, though it appears rather neglected in England when she came among us. In 1740, a couple of the King's daughters went to see him at Hanover; Anna, the Princess of Orange (about whom, and whose husband and marriage- day, Walpole and Hervey have left us the most ludicrous descriptions), and Maria of Hesse Cassel, with their re- spective lords. This made the Hanover court very bril- liant. In honour of his high guests, the King gave sev- eral fetes; among others, a magnificent masked ball, in the green theatre at Herrenhausen— the garden theatre, with linden and box for screen, and grass for a carpet, where the Platens had danced to George and his father the late sultan. The stage and a great part of the gar- den were illuminated with coloured lamps. Almost the whole court appeared in white dominoes, " like," says the describer of the scene, " hke spirits in the Elysian fields. At night, supper was served in the gallery with three great tables, and the King was very merry. After supper dancing was resumed, and I did not get home till five o'clock by full daylight to Hanover. Some days afterwards we had, in the opera-house at Hanover, a great assembly. The King appeared in a Turkish dress ; his turban was ornamented with a magnificent agraffe of diamonds ; the Lady Yarmouth was dressed as a sul- tana; nobody was more beautiful than the Princess of Hesse." So, while poor Caroline was resting in her coffin, dapper little George, with his red face and his white eyebrows and goggle-eyes, at sixty years of age, is dancing a pretty dance with Madame Walmoden, and capering about dressed up like a Turk! For twenty GEORGE THE SECOND 67 years more, that little old Bajazet went on in this Turk- ish fashion, until the fit came which choked the old man, when he ordered the side of his coffin to be taken out, as well as that of poor Caroline's who had preceded him, so that his sinful old bones and ashes might mingle with those of the faithful creature. O strutting Turkey-cock of Herrenhausen 1 O naughty little Mahomet ! in what Turkish paradise are you now, and where be your painted houris? So Countess Yarmouth appeared as a sultana, and his jMajesty in a Turkish dress w^ore an agraffe of diamonds, and was very merry, was he? Friends! he was your fathers' King as well as mine— let us drop a respectful tear over his grave. He said of his wife that he never knew a woman who was worthy to buckle her shoe : he would sit alone weep- ing before her portrait, and when he had dried his eyes, he would go off to his Walmoden and talk of her. On the 25th day of October, 1760, he being then in the seventy-seventh year of his age, and the thirty-fourth of his reign, his page went to take him his royal chocolate, and behold! the most religious and gracious King was lying dead on the floor. They went and fetched Wal- moden ; but Walmoden could not wake him. The sacred Majesty was but a lifeless corpse. The King was dead; God save the King! But, of course, poets and clergy- men decorously bewailed the late one. Here are some artless verses, in which an English divine deplored the famous departed hero, and over which you may cry or you may laugh, exactly as your humour suits: — " While at his feet expiring Faction lay, No contest left but who should best obey ; 68 THE FOUR GEORGES Saw in his offspring all himself renewed; The same fair path of glory still pursued ; Saw to young George Augusta's care impart Whate'er could raise and humanize the heart; Blend all his grandsire's virtues with his own, And form their mingled radiance for the throne — No farther blessing could on earth be given — The next degree of happiness was — heaven !" If he had been good, if he had been just, if he had been pure in life, and wise in council, could the poet have said much more? It was a parson who came and wept over this grave, with Walmoden sitting on it, and claimed heaven for the poor old man slumbering below. Here was one who had neither dignity, learning, morals, nor wit— who tainted a great society by a bad example; who in youth, manhood, old age, was gross, low, and sensual; and Mr. Porteus, afterwards my Lord Bishop Porteus, says the earth was not good enough for him, and that his only place was heaven! Bravo, Mr. Por- teus! The divine who wept these tears over George the Second's memory wore George the Third's lawn. I don't know whether people still admire his poetry or his sermons. George III GEORGE THE THIRD 'E have to glance over sixty years in as many minutes. To read the mere catalogue of characters who figured during that long pe- riod, would occupy our allotted time, and we should have all text and no sermon. Eng- land has to undergo the revolt of the Amer- ican colonies; to sub- mit to defeat and sepa- ration; to shake under the volcano of the French Revolution; to grapple and fight for the life with her gigantic enemy Napoleon; to gasp and rally after that tremendous struggle. The old society, with its courtly splendours, has to pass away; generations of statesmen to rise and disappear; Pitt to follow Chatham to the tomb; the memory of Rodney and Wolfe to be superseded by Nel- son's and Wellington's glory; the old poets who unite 70 THE FOUR GEORGES us to Queen Anne's time to sink into their graves ; John- son to die, and Scott and Byron to arise; Garrick to dehght the world with his dazzHng dramatic genius, and Kean to leap on the stage and take possession of the as- tonished theatre. Steam has to be invented ; kings to be beheaded, banished, deposed, restored. Napoleon to be but an episode, and George III. is to be alive through all these varied changes, to accompany his people through all these revolutions of thought, government, society ; to survive out of the old world into ours. When I first saw England, she was in mourning for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the empire. I came from India as a child, and our ship touched at an island on the way home, where my black servant took me a long walk over rocks and hills until we reached a gar- den, where we saw a man walking. " That is he," said the black man: " that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on ! " There were people in the British dominions be- sides that poor Calcutta serving-man, with an equal hor- ror of the Corsican ogre. With the same childish attendant, I remember peep- ing through the colonnade at Carlton House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I can see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place. The place ! What place? The palace exists no more than the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is but a name now. Where be the sentries who used to salute as the Royal chariots drove in and out? The chariots with the kings inside, have driven to the realms of Pluto ; the tall Guards have marched into darkness, and the echoes of their drums are rolling in Hades. Where the palace once stood, a hun- dred little children are paddling up and down the steps GEORGE THE THIRD 71 to St. James's Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the "Athenaeum Club;" as many grisly warriors are garrisoning the " United Service Club " opposite. Pall Mall is the great social Exchange of London now — the mart of news, of politics, of scan- dal, of rumour— the English forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last despatch from the Crimea, the last speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now and then, to a few antiquarians whose thoughts are with the past rather than with the present, it is a memorial of old times and old people, and Pall Mall is our Palmyra. Look! About this spot Tom of Ten Thousand was killed by Konigsmarck's gang. In that great red house Gainsborough lived, and Culloden Cumberland, George III.'s uncle. Yonder is Sarah Marlborough's palace, just as it stood when that terma- gant occupied it. At 25, Walter Scott used to live ; at the house, now No. 79,^ and occupied by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, re- sided Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn, comedian. How often has Queen Caroline's chair issued from under yonder arch! All the men of the Georges have passed up and down the street. It has seen Walpole's chariot and Chatham's sedan; and Fox, Gibbon, Sheridan, on their way to Brookes's ; and stately William Pitt stalking on the arm of Dundas ; and Hanger and Tom Sheridan reeling out of Raggett's; and Byron limping into Wattier's; and Swift striding out of Bury Street ; and Mr. Addison and Dick Steele, both perhaps a little the better for liquor; and the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York clatter- ing over the pavement ; and Johnson counting the posts along the streets, after dawdling before Dodsley's win- 1 1856. 72 THE FOUR GEORGES dow; and Horry Walpole hobbling into his carriage, with a gimcrack just bought at Christie's; and George Selwyn sauntering into White's. In the pubhshed letters to George Selwyn we get a mass of correspondence by no means so brilliant and witty as Walpole's, or so bitter and bright as Hervey's, but as interesting, and even more descriptive of the time, because the letters are the work of many hands. You hear more voices speaking, as it were, and more natural than Horace's dandified treble, and Sporus's malignant whisper. As one reads the Selwyn letters — as one looks at Reynolds's noble pictures illustrative of those mag- nificent times and voluptuous people— one almost hears the voice of the dead past ; the laughter and the chorus ; the toast called over the brimming cups ; the shout at the racecourse or the gaming-table; the merry joke frankly spoken to the laughing fine lady. How fine those ladies were, those ladies who heard and spoke such coarse jokes ; how grand those gentlemen! I fancy that peculiar product of the past, the fine gen- tleman, has almost vanished off the face of the earth, and is disappearing like the beaver or the Red Indian. We can't have fine gentlemen any more, because we can't have the society in which they lived. The people will not obey : the parasites will not be as obsequious as formerly : children do not go down on their knees to beg their parents' blessing: chaplains do not say grace and retire before the pudding: servants do not say " your honour " and "your worship" at every moment: tradesmen do not stand hat in hand as the gentleman passes: authors do not wait for hours in gentlemen's anterooms with a fulsome dedication, for which they hope to get five GEORGE THE THIRD 73 guineas from his lordship. In the days when there were fine gentlemen, Mr. Secretary Pitt's under-secretaries did not dare to sit down before him ; but Mr. Pitt, in his turn, went down on his gouty knees to George II. ; and w^hen George III. spoke a few kind words to him, Lord Chatham burst into tears of reverential joy and grati- tude ; so awful was the idea of the monarch, and so great the distinctions of rank. Fancy Lord John Russell or Lord Palmerston on their knees whilst the Sovereign was reading a despatch, or beginning to cry because Prince Albert said something civil! At the accession of George III., the patricians were yet at the height of their good fortune. Society recognized their superiority, which they themselves pretty calmly took for granted. They inherited not only titles and es- tates, and seats in the house of Peers, but seats in the House of Commons. There were a multitude of Gov- ernment places, and not merely these, but bribes of act- ual 500Z. notes, which members of the House took not much shame in receiving. Fox went into Parliament at 20: Pitt when just of age: his father when not much older. It was the good time for Patricians. Small blame to them if they took and enjoyed, and over- enjoyed, the prizes of politics, the pleasures of so- cial life. In these letters to Selwyn, we are made acquainted with a whole society of these defunct fine gentlemen: and can watch with a curious interest a life which the novel-writers of that time, I think, have scarce touched upon. To Smollett, to Fielding even, a lord was a lord : a gorgeous being with a blue ribbon, a coroneted chair, and an immense star on his bosom, to whom commoners 74 THE FOUR GEORGES paid reverence. Richardson, a man of humbler birth than either of the above two, owned that he was igno- rant regarding the manners of the aristocracy, and be- sought Mrs. Donnellan, a lady who had lived in the great world, to examine a volume of Sir Charles Grandison, and point out any errors which she might see in this par- ticular. Mrs. Donnellan found so many faults, that Richardson changed colour ; shut up the book ; and mut- tered that it were best to throw it in the fire. Here, in Selwyn, we have the real original men and women of fashion of the early time of George III. We can fol- low them to the new club at Almack's : we can travel over Europe with them: we can accompany them not only to the public places, but to their country-houses and private society. Here is a whole company of them; wits and prodigals ; some persevering in their bad ways : some re- pentant, but relapsing; beautiful ladies, parasites, hum- ble chaplains, led captains. Those fair creatures whom we love in Reynolds's portraits, and who still look out on us from his canvases with their sweet calm faces and gracious smiles — those fine gentlemen who did us the honour to govern us ; who inherited their boroughs ; took their ease in their patent places; and slipped Lord North's bribes so elegantly under their ruffles — we make acquaintance with a hundred of these fine folks, hear their talk and laughter, read of their loves, quarrels, in- trigues, debts, duels, divorces; can fancy them alive if we read the book long enough. We can attend at Duke Hamilton's wedding, and behold him marry his bride with the curtain-ring : we can peep into her poor sister's death-bed: we can see Charles Fox cursing over the cards, or March bawling out the odds at Newmarket: we can imagine Burgoyne tripping off from St. James's GEORGE THE THIRD 75 Street to conquer the Americans, and slinking back into the club somewhat crestfallen after his beating; we can see the young King dressing himself for the drawing- room and asking ten thousand questions regarding all the gentlemen : we can have high life or low, the struggle at the Opera to behold the Violetta or the Zamperini— the Macaronies and fine ladies in their chairs trooping to the masquerade or Madame Cornelys's— the crowd at Drury Lane to look at the body of Miss Ray, whom Par- son Hackman has just pistolled— or we can peep into Newgate, where poor Mr. Rice the forger is waiting his fate and his supper. " You need not be particular about the sauce for his fowl," says one turnkey to another: *' for you know he is to be hanged in the morning." " Yes," replies the second janitor, " but the chaplain sups with him, and he is a terrible fellow for melted butter." Selwyn has a chaplain and parasite, one Dr. Warner, than whom Plautus, or Ben Jonson, or Hogarth, never painted a better character. In letter after letter he adds fresh strokes to the portrait of himself, and completes a portrait not a little curious to look at now that the man has passed away; all the foul pleasures and gambols in which he revelled, played out; all the rouged faces into which he leered, worms and skulls ; all the fine gentlemen whose shoebuckles he kissed, laid in their coffins. This worthy clergyman takes care to tell us that he does not believe in his rehgion, though, thank heaven, he is not so great a rogue as a lawyer. He goes on Mr. Selwyn's errands, any errands, and is proud, he says, to be that gentleman's proveditor. He waits upon the Duke of Queensberry— old Q.— and exchanges pretty stories with that aristocrat. He comes home " after a hard 76 THE FOUR GEORGES day's christening," as he says, and writes to his patron before sitting down to whist and partridges for supper. He revels in the thoughts of ox-cheek and burgundy— he is a boisterous, uproarious parasite, licks his master's shoes with explosions of laughter and cunning smack and gusto, and likes the taste of that blacking as much as the best claret in old Q.'s cellar. He has Rabelais and Horace at his greasy fingers' ends. He is inexpressibly mean, curiously jolly; kindly and good-natured in secret —a tender-hearted knave, not a venomous hckspittle. Jesse says, that at his chapel in Long Acre, " he attained a considerable popularity by the pleasing, manly, and eloquent style of his delivery." Was infidelity endemic, and corruption in the air? Around a young king, him- self of the most exemplary life and undoubted piety, lived a court society as dissolute as our country ever knew. George II. 's bad morals bore their fruit in George III.'s early j^ears; as I believe that a knowledge of that good man's example, his moderation, his frugal simplicitj^, and God-fearing life, tended infinitely to im- prove the morals of the country and purif j^ the whole nation. After Warner, the most interesting of Selwyn's cor- respondents is the Earl of Carlisle, grandfather of the amiable nobleman at present^ Viceroy in Ireland. The grandfather, too, was Irish Viceroy, having previously been treasurer of the King's household; and, in 1778, the principal commissioner for treating, consulting, and agreeing upon the means of quieting the divisions sub- sisting in his Majesty's colonies, plantations, and pos- sessions in North America. You may read his lordship's manifestoes in the Boyal New York Gazette. He re- GEORGE THE THIRD 77 turned to England, having by no means quieted the col- onies; and speedily afterwards the Royal New York Gazette somehow ceased to be published. This good, clever, kind, highly-bred Lord Carlisle was one of the English fine gentlemen who was well-nigh ruined by the awful debauchery and extravagance which prevailed in the great English society of those days. Its dissoluteness was awful: it had swarmed over Europe after the Peace ; it had danced, and raced, and gambled in all the courts. It had made its bow at Versailles; it had run its horses on the plain of Sablons, near Paris, and created the Anglomania there : it had exported vast quantities of pictures and marbles from Rome and Flor- ence : it had ruined itself by building great galleries and palaces for the reception of the statues and pictures: it had brought over singing-women and dancing-women from all the operas of Europe, on whom my lords lav- ished their thousands, whilst they left their honest wives and honest children languishing in the lonely, deserted splendours of the castle and park at home. Besides the great London society of those days, there was another unacknowledged world, extravagant beyond measure, tearing about in the pursuit of pleasure ; danc- ing, gambhng, drinking, singing; meeting the real so- ciety in the public places (at Ranelaghs, Vauxhalls, and Ridottos, about which our old novelists talk so con- stantly) , and outvying the real leaders of fashion in lux- ury, and splendour, and beauty. For instance, when the famous Miss Gunning visited Paris as Lady Coventry, where she expected that her beauty would meet with the applause which had followed her and her sister through England, it appears she was put to flight by an English lady still more lovely in the eyes of the Parisians. A 78 THE FOUR GEORGES certain Mrs. Pitt took a box at the opera opposite the Countess; and was so much handsomer than her lady- sliip, that the parterre cried out that this was the real English angel, whereupon Lady Coventry quitted Paris in a huff. The poor thing died presently of consump- tion, accelerated, it was said, by the red and white paint with which she plastered those luckless charms of hers. (We must represent to ourselves all fashionable female Europe, at that time, as plastered with white, and rad- dled with red.) She left two daughters behind her, whom George Selwyn loved (he was curiously fond of little children), and who are described very drolly and pathetically in these letters, in their little nursery, where passionate little Lady Fanny, if she had not good cards, flung hers into Lady Mary's face; and where they sat conspiring how they should receive a new mother-in-law whom their papa presently brought home. They got on very well with their mother-in-law, who was very kind to them ; and they grew up, and they were married, and they were both divorced afterwards— poor little souls! Poor painted mother, poor society, ghastly in its pleas- ures, its loves, its revelries! As for my lord commissioner, we can afl'ord to speak about him ; because, though he was a wild and weak com- missioner at one time, though he hurt his estate, though he gambled and lost ten thousand pounds at a sitting— " five times more," says the unlucky gentleman, " than I ever lost before ; " though he swore he never would touch a card again; and yet, strange to say, went back to the table and lost still more: yet he repented of his errors, sobered down, and became a worthy peer and a good country gentleman, and returned to tlie good wife and the good children whom he had always loved with GEORGE THE THIRD 79 the best part of his heart. He had married at one-and- twenty. He found himself, in the midst of a dissolute society, at the head of a great fortune. Forced into lux- ury, and obliged to be a great lord and a great idler, he yielded to some temptations, and paid for them a bitter penalty of manly remorse; from some others he fled wisely, and ended by conquering them nobly. But he always had the good wife and children in his mind, and they saved him. " I am very glad you did not come to me the morning I left London," he writes to G. Selwyn, as he is embarking for America. " I can only say, I never knew till that moment of parting, what grief was." There is no parting now, where they are. The faithful wife, the kind, generous gentleman, have left a noble race behind them: an inheritor of his name and titles, who is beloved as widely as he is known; a man most kind, accomplished, gentle, friendly, and pure; and female descendants occupying high stations and em- bellishing great names; some renowned for beauty, and all for spotless lives, and pious matronly vir- tues. Another of Selwyn's correspondents is the Earl of March, afterwards Duke of Queensberry, whose life lasted into this century; and who certainly as earl or duke, young man or greybeard, was not an ornament to any possible society. The legends about old Q. are aw- ful. In Selwyn, in Wraxall, and contemporary chron- icles, the observer of human nature may follow him, drinking, gambling, intriguing to the end of his career; when the wrinkled, palsied, toothless old Don Juan died, as wicked and unrepentant as he had been at the hottest season of youth and passion. There is a house in Pic- cadilly, where they used to show a certain low window at 80 THE FOUR GEORGES which old Q. sat to his very last days, ogling through his senile glasses the women as they passed by. There must have been a great deal of good about this lazy, sleepy George Selwyn, which, no doubt, is set to his present credit. " Your friendship," writes Carlisle to him, " is so different from anything I have ever met with or seen in the world, that when I recollect the extraor- dinary proofs of your kindness, it seems to me like a dream." " I have lost my oldest friend and acquain- tance, G. Selwyn," writes Walpole to ]\Iiss Berry: " I really loved him, not only for his infinite wut, but for a thousand good qualities." I am glad, for my part, that such a lover of cakes and ale should have had a thou- sand good qualities— that he should have been friendly, generous, warm-hearted, trustworthy. " I rise at six," writes Carlisle to him, from Spa (a great resort of fash- ionable people in our ancestors' days), " play at cricket till dinner, and dance in the evening, till I can scarcely crawl to bed at eleven. There is a life for you ! You get up at nine; play with Raton your dog till twelve, in your dressing-gown ; then creep down to ' White's ; ' are five hours at table ; sleep till supper-time ; and then make two wretches carry you in a sedan-chair, with three pints of claret in you, three miles for a shilling." Occasionally, instead of sleeping at " White's," George went down and snoozed in the House of Commons by the side of Lord North. He represented Gloucester for many years, and had a borough of his own, Ludgershall, for which, when he was too lazy to contest Gloucester, he sat himself. " I have given directions for the election of Ludgershall to be of Lord ;Melbourne and myself," he writes to the Premier, whose friend he was, and who was himself as sleepy, as witty, and as good-natured as George. GEORGE THE THIRD 81 If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle? In these letters of Lord Carlisle's from which I have been quoting, there is many a just complaint made by the kind-hearted young noble- man of the state which he is obliged to keep; the mag- nificence in which he must live ; the idleness to which his position as a peer of England bound him. Better for him had he been a lawyer at his desk, or a clerk in his office;— a thousand times better chance for happiness, education, employment, security from temptation. A few years since the profession of arms was the only one which our nobles could follow. The church, the bar, medicine, literature, the arts, commerce, were below them. It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England: the working educated men, away from Lord North's bribery in the senate; the good clergy not corrupted into parasites by hopes of preferment ; the tradesmen rising into manly opulence ; the painters pur- suing their gentle calling: the men of letters in their quiet studies; these are the men whom we love and like to read of in the last age. How small the grandees and the men of pleasure look beside them ! how contemptible the stories of the George III. court squabbles are be- side the recorded talk of dear old Johnson ! What is the grandest entertainment at Windsor, compared to a night at the club over its modest cups, with Percy and 82 THE FOUR GEORGES Langton, and Goldsmith, and poor Bozzy at the table? I declare I think, of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest gentleman. And they were good, as M^ell as witty and wise, those dear old friends of the past. Their minds were not debauched by excess, or eiFeminate with luxury. They toiled their noble day's labour : they rested, and took their kindly pleasure : they cheered their holiday meetings with generous wit and hearty interchange of thought : they were no prudes, but no blush need follow their conversation: they were merry, but no riot came out of their cups. Ah ! I would have liked a night at the " Turk's Head," even though bad news had arrived from the colonies, and Doctor Johnson was growling against the rebels; to have sat with him and Goldy; and to have heard Burke, the finest talker in the world ; and to have had Garrick flashing in with a story from his theatre!— I like, I say, to think of that society ; and not merely how pleasant and how wise, but how good they were. I think it was on going home one night from the club that Edmund Burke— his noble soul full of great thoughts, be sure, for they never left him; his heart full of gentleness— was accosted by a poor wandering woman, to whom he spoke words of kindness; and moved by the tears of this Magdalen, perhaps hav- ing caused them by the good words he spoke to her, he took her home to the house of his wife and children, and never left her until he had found the means of restoring her to honesty and labour. O you fine gentlemen ! you Marches, and Selwyns, and Chesterfields, how small you look by the side of these great men! Good-natured Car- lisle plays at cricket all day, and dances in the evening " till he can scarcely crawl," gaily contrasting his su- perior virtue with George Selwyn's, " carried to bed by GEORGE THE THIRD 83 two wretches at midnight with three pints of claret in him." Do you remember the verses— the sacred verses— which Johnson wrote on the death of his humble friend, Levett? " Well tried through many a varying year, See Levett to the grave descend ; Officious, innocent, sincere. Of every friendless name the friend. " In misery's darkest cavern known, His useful care was ever nigh. Where hopeless anguish poured the groan, And lonely want retired to die. " No summons mocked by chill delay, No petty gain disdained by pride, The modest wants of every day The toil of every day supplied. " His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void ; And sure the Eternal Master found His single talent well employed." Whose name looks the brightest now, that of Queens- berry the wealthy duke, or Selwyn the wit, or Levett the poor physician? I hold old Johnson (and shall we not pardon James Boswell some errors for embalming him for us?) to be the great supporter of the British monarchy and church during the last age— better than whole benches of bishops, better than Pitts, Norths, and the great Burke himself. Johnson had the ear of the nation: his im- mense authority reconciled it to loyalty, and shamed it out of irreligion. When George III. talked with him, 84 THE FOUR GEORGES and the people heard the great author's good opinion of the sovereign, whole generations rallied to the King. Johnson was revered as a sort of oracle; and the oracle declared for church and king. What a humanity the old man had! He was a kindly partaker of all honest pleasures: a fierce foe to all sin, but a gentle enemy to all sinners. " What, boys, are you for a frolic? " he cries, when Topham Beauclerc comes and wakes him up at midnight: " I'm with you." And away he goes, tumbles on his homely old clothes, and trundles through Covent Garden with the young fellows. When he used to frequent Garrick's theatre, and had " the liberty of the scenes," he says, " All the actresses knew me, and dropped me a curtsey as they passed to the stage." That would make a pretty picture : it is a pretty picture in my mind, of youth, folly, gaiety, tenderly surveyed by wis- dom's merciful, pure eyes. George III. and his Queen lived in a very unpretend- ing but elegant-looking house, on the site of the hideous pile under which his granddaughter at present reposes. The King's mother inhabited Carlton House, which contemporary prints represent with a perfect paradise of a garden, with trim lawns, green arcades, and vistas of classic statues. She admired these in company with my Lord Bute, who had a fine classic taste, and some- times counsel took and sometimes tea in the pleasant green arbours along with that polite nobleman. Bute was hated with a rage of which there have been few ex- amples in English history. He was the butt for every- body's abuse; for Wilkes's devilish mischief; for Churchill's slashing satire; for the hooting of the mob that roasted the boot, his emblem, in a thousand bonfires ; that hated him because he was a favourite and a Scotch- GEORGE THE THIRD 85 man, calling him " Mortimer," " Lothario," I know not what names, and accusing his royal mistress of all sorts of crimes— the grave, lean, demure elderly woman, who, I dare say, was quite as good as her neighbours. Chat- ham lent the aid of his great malice to influence the popu- lar sentiment against her. He assailed, in the House of Lords, " the secret influence, more mighty than the throne itself, which betrayed and clogged every admin- istration." The most furious pamphlets echoed the cry. " Impeach the King's mother," was scribbled over every wall at the Court end of the town, Walpole tells us. What had she done? What had Frederick, Prince of Wales, George's father, done, that he was so loathed by George II. and never mentioned by George III.? Let us not seek for stones to batter that forgotten grave, but acquiesce in the contemporary epitaph over him:— " Here lies Fred, Who was alive, and is dead. Had it been his father, I had much rather. Had it been his brother. Still better than another. Had it been his sister, No one would have missed her. Had it been the whole generation. Still better for the nation. But since 'tis only Fred, Who was alive, and is dead, There's no more to be said." The widow with eight children round her, prudently reconciled herself with the King, and won the old man's confidence and good-will. A shrewd, hard, domineer- 86 THE FOUR GEORGES ing, narrow-minded woman, she educated her children according to her lights, and spoke of the eldest as a dull, good boy : she kept him very close : she held the tightest rein over him; she had curious prejudices and bigotries. His uncle, the burly Cumberland, taking down a sabre once, and drawing it to amuse the child — the boy started back and turned pale. The Prince felt a generous shock: " What must they have told him about me? " he asked. His mother's bigotry and hatred he inherited with the courageous obstinacy of his own race ; but he was a firm believer where his fathers had been free-thinkers, and a true and fond supporter of the Church, of which he was the titular defender. Like other dull men, the King was all his life suspicious of superior people. He did not like Fox ; he did not like Reynolds ; he did not like Nel- son, Chatham, Burke; he was testy at the idea of all innovations, and suspicious of all innovators. He loved mediocrities; Benjamin West was his favourite painter; Beattie was his poet. The King lamented, not without pathos, in his after life, that his education had been neglected. He was a dull lad brought up by narrow- minded people. The cleverest tutors in the world could have done little probably to expand that small intellect, though they might have improved his tastes, and taught his perceptions some generosity. But he admired as well as he could. There is little doubt that a letter, written by the little Princess Char- lotte of ^lecklenburg Strelitz,— a letter containing the most feeble commonplaces about the horrors of war, and the most trivial remarks on the blessings of peace, struck the young monarch greatly, and decided him upon se- lecting the young Princess as the sharer of his throne. GEORGE THE THIRD 87 I pass over the stories of his juvenile loves— of Hannah Lightf oot, the Quaker, to whom they say he was actually married (though I don't know who has ever seen the register) — of lovely black-haired Sarah Lennox, about whose beauty Walpole has written in raptures, and who used to lie in wait for the young Prince, and make hay at him on the lawn of Holland House. He sighed and he longed, but he rode away from her. Her picture still hangs in Holland House, a magnificent master-piece of Reynolds, a canvas worthy of Titian. She looks from the castle window, holding a bird in her hand, at black- eyed young Charles Fox, her nephew. The royal bird flew away from lovely Sarah. She had to figure as bridesmaid at her little Mecklenburg rival's wedding, and died in our own time a quiet old lady, who had become the mother of the heroic Napiers. They say the little Princess who had written the fine letter about the horrors of war— a beautiful letter with- out a single blot, for which she was to be rewarded, like the heroine of the old spelling-book story— was at play one day with some of her young companions in the gar- dens of Strelitz, and that the young ladies' conversation was, strange to say, about husbands. " Who will take such a poor little princess as me? " Charlotte said to her friend, Ida von Bulow, and at that very moment the postman's horn sounded, and Ida said, " Princess! there is the sweetheart." As she said, so it actually turned out. The postman brought letters from the splendid young King of all England, who said, " Princess! because you have written such a beautiful letter, which does credit to your head and heart, come and be Queen of Great Brit- ain, France, and Ireland, and the true wife of your most obedient servant, George!" So she jumped for 88 THE FOUR GEORGES joy; and went upstairs and packed all her little trunks; and set off straightway for her kingdom in a beautiful yacht, with a harpsichord on board for her to play upon, and around her a beautiful fleet, all covered with flags and streamers : and the distinguished Madame Auerbach complimented her with an ode, a translation of which may be read in the Gentleman s Magazine to the present day:— " Her gallant navy through the main Now cleaves its liquid way. There to their queen a chosen train Of nymphs due reverence pay. " Europa, when conveyed by Jove To Crete's distinguished shore. Greater attention scarce could prove. Or be respected more." They met, and they were married, and for years they led the happiest, simplest lives sure ever led by married couple. It is said the King winced when he first saw his homely little bride; but, however that may be, he was a true and faithful husband to her, as she was a faithful and loving wife. They had the simplest pleasures— the very mildest and simplest— little country dances, to which a dozen couple were invited, and where the honest King would stand up and dance for three hours at a time to one tune ; after which delicious excitement they would go to bed without any supper (the Court people grum- bling sadly at that absence of supper), and get up quite early the next morning, and perhaps the next night have another dance; or the Queen would play on the spinet- she played pretty well, Haydn said — or the King would read to her a paper out of the Spectator, or perhaps one GEORGE THE THIRD 89 of Ogden's sermons. O Arcadia! what a life it must have been ! There used to be Sunday drawing-rooms at Court; but the young King stopped these, as he stopped all that godless gambling whereof we have made men- tion. Not that George was averse to any innocent plea- sures, or pleasures which he thought innocent. He was a patron of the arts, after his fashion; kind and gracious to the artists whom he favoured, and respectful to their calling. He wanted once to establish an Order of Mi- nerva for literary and scientific characters; the knights were to take rank after the knights of the Bath, and to sport a straw-coloured ribbon and a star of sixteen points. But there was such a row amongst the literati as to the persons who should be appointed, that the plan was given up, and Minerva and her star never came down amongst us. He objected to painting St. Paul's, as Popish prac- tice; accordingly, the most clumsy heathen sculptures decorate that edifice at present. It is fortunate that the paintings, too, were spared, for painting and drawing were wofully unsound at the close of the last century; and it is far better for our eyes to contemplate whitewash (when we turn them away from the clergyman) than to look at Opie's pitchy canvases, or Fuseli's livid monsters. And yet there is one day in the year— a day when old George loved with all his heart to attend it— when I think St. Paul's presents the noblest sight in the whole world: when five thousand charity children, with cheeks like nosegays, and sweet, fresh voices, sing the hymn which makes every heart thrill with praise and hap- piness. I have seen a hundred grand sights in the world —coronations, Parisian splendours, Crystal Palace openings. Pope's chapels with their processions of long- 90 THE FOUR GEORGES tailed cardinals and quavering choirs of fat soprani— but think in all Christendom there is no such sight as Charity Children's Day. Non Angli, sed angeli. As one looks at that beautiful multitude of innocents: as the first note strikes : indeed one may almost fancy that cherubs are singing. Of church music the King was always very fond, showing skill in it both as a critic and a performer. Many stories, mirthful and affecting, are told of his be- haviour at the concerts which he ordered. When he was blind and ill he chose the music for the Ancient Concerts once, and the music and words which he selected were from " Samson Agonistes," and all had reference to his blindness, his captivity, and his affliction. He would beat time with his music-roll as they sang the anthem in the Chapel Royal. If the page below was talkative or inattentive, down would come the music-roll on young scapegrace's powdered head. The theatre was always his delight. His bishops and clergy used to attend it, thinking it no shame to appear where that good man was seen. He is said not to have cared for Shakspeare or tragedy much; farces and pantomimes were his joy; and especially when clown swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would laugh so outrageously that the lovely Princess by his side would have to say, " My gracious monarch, do compose yourself." But he continued to laugh, and at the very smallest farces, as long as his poor wits were left him. There is something to me exceedingly touching in that simple early life of the King's. As long as his mother lived— a dozen years after his marriage with the little spinet-player— he was a great, shy, awkward boy, under the tutelage of that hard parent. She must have been GEORGE THE THIRD 91 a clever, domineering, cruel woman. She kept her household lonely and in gloom, mistrusting almost all people who came about her children. Seeing the young Duke of Gloucester silent and unhappy once, she sharply asked him the cause of his silence. " I am thinking," said the poor child. " Thinking, sir! and of what?" "I am thinking if ever I have a son I will not make him so unhappy as you make me." The other sons were all wild, except George. Dutifully every evening George and Charlotte paid their visit to the King's mother at Carlton House. She had a throat-complaint, of which she died; but to the last persisted in driving about the streets to show she was alive. The night before her death the resolute woman talked with her son and daughter-in- law as usual, went to bed, and was found dead there in the morning. "George, be a king!" were the words which she was for ever croaking in the ears of her son: and a king the simple, stubborn, affectionate, bigoted man tried to be. He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtue he knew, he tried to practise; what know- ledge he could master, he strove to acquire. He was for ever drawing maps, for example, and learned geogra- phy with no small care and industry. He knew all about the family histories and genealogies of his gentry, and pretty histories he must have known. He knew the whole Army List; and all the facings, and the exact number of the buttons, and all the tags and laces, and the cut of all the cocked hats, pigtails, and gaiters in his army. He knew the personnel of the Universities ; what doctors were inclined to Socinianism, and who were sound Churchmen; he knew the etiquettes of his own and his grandfather's courts to a nicety, and the small- 92 THE FOUR GEORGES est particulars regarding the routine of ministers, sec- retaries, embassies, audiences; the humblest page in the anteroom, or the meanest helper in the stables or kitchen. These parts of the royal business he was capable of learning, and he learned. But, as one thinks of an office, almost divine, performed by any mortal man— of any single being pretending to control the thoughts, to direct the faith, to order the implicit obedience of brother mil- lions, to compel them into war at his offence or quarrel; to command, " In this way you shall trade, in this way you shall think; these neighbours shall be your alhes whom you shall help, these others your enemies whom you shall slay at my orders ; in this way you shall worship God;"— who can wonder that, M^hen such a man as George took such an office on himself, punishment and humiliation should fall upon people and chief? Yet there is something grand about his courage. The battle of the King with his aristocracy remains yet to be told by the historian who shall view the reign of George more justly than the trumpery panegyrists who wrote im- mediately after his decease. It was he, with the people to back him, who made the war with America ; it was he and the people who refused justice to the Roman Catholics; and on both questions he beat the patricians. He bribed : he bullied: he darkly dissembled on occasion: he exer- cised a slippery perseverance, and a vindictive resolu- tion, which one almost admires as one thinks his char- acter over. His courage was never to be beat. It tram- pled North under foot: it beat the stiff neck of the younger Pitt: even his illness never conquered that in- domitable spirit. As soon as his brain was clear, it re- sumed the scheme, only laid aside when his reason left him : as soon as his hands were out of the strait waistcoat, GEORGE THE THIRD 93 they took up the pen and the plan which had engaged him up to the moment of his malady. I helieve it is by persons believing themselves in the right that nine-tenths of the tyranny of this world has been perpetrated. Ar- guing on that convenient premiss, the Dey of Algiers would cut off twenty heads of a morning ; Father Dom- inic would burn a score of Jews in the presence of the Most Catholic King, and the Archbishops of Toledo and Salamanca sing Amen. Protestants were roasted, Jesuits hung and quartered at Smithfield, and witches burned at Salem, and all by worthy people, who believed they had the best authority for their actions. And so, with respect to old George, even Americans, whom he hated and who conquered him, may give him credit for having quite honest reasons for oppressing them. Appended to Lord Brougham's biographical sketch of Lord North are some autograph notes of the King, which let us most curiously into the state of his mind. " The times certainly require," says he, " the con- currence of all who w^ish to prevent anarchy. I have no wish but the prosperity of my own dominions, therefore I must look upon all who would not heartily assist me as bad men, as well as bad subjects." That is the way he reasoned. " I wish nothing but good, therefore every man who does not agree with me is a traitor and a scoun- drel." Remember that he believed himself anointed by a Divine commission; remember that he was a man of slow parts and imperfect education; that the same awful will of Heaven which placed a crown upon his head, which made him tender to his family, pure in his life, courageous and honest, made him dull of compre- hension, obstinate of will, and at many times deprived him of reason. He was the father of his people ; his re- 94 THE FOUR GEORGES bellious children must be flogged into obedience. He was the defender of the Protestant faith; he would rather lay that stout head upon the block than that Catholics should have a share in the government of Eng- land. And you do not suppose that there are not honest bigots enough in all countries to back kings in this kind of statesmanship? Without doubt the American war was popular in England. In 1775 the address in favour of coercing the colonies was carried by 304 to 105 in the Commons, by 104 to 29 in the House of Lords. Popu- lar?— so was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes popular in France : so was the massacre of St. Bartholo- mew: so was the Inquisition exceedingly popular in Spain. Wars and revolutions are, however, the politician's province. The great events of this long reign, the states- men and orators who illustrated it, I do not pretend to make the subjects of an hour's light talk.^ Let us re- turn to our humble duty of court gossip. Yonder sits our little Queen, surrounded by many stout sons and fair daughters whom she bore to her faithful George. The history of the daughters, as little Miss Burney has painted them to us, is delightful. They were handsome —she calls them beautiful; they were most kind, loving, and lady -like; they were gracious to every person, high and low, who served them. They had many little accom- plishments of their own. This one drew : that one played the piano: they all worked most prodigiously, and fitted up whole suites of rooms— pretty, smiling Penelopes,— with their busy little needles. As we picture to ourselves the society of eighty years ago, we must imagine hun- 1 On the next page are the figures, as drawn by young Gilray, of Lord North, Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Burke. 96 THE FOUR GEORGES dreds of thousands of groups of women in great high caps, tight bodies, and full skirts, needling away, whilst one of the number, or perhaps a favoured gentleman in a pigtail, reads out a novel to the company. Peep into the cottage at Olney, for example, and see there Mrs. Unwin and Lady Hesketh, those high-bred ladies, those sweet, pious women, and William Cowper, that delicate wit, that trembling pietist, that refined gentleman, abso- lutely reading out Jonathan Wild to the ladies ! What a change in our manners, in our amusements, since then ! King George's household was a model of an English gentleman's household. It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was frugal; it was orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from the lap of that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined at stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at night the King kissed his daughters' jolly cheeks; the Princesses kissed their mother's hand ; and Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap. At the same hour the equerries and women in waiting had their little dinner, and cackled over their tea. The King had his backgammon or his evening con- cert; the equerries yawned themselves to death in the anteroom ; or the King and his family walked on Wind- sor slopes, the King holding his darling little Princess Ameha by the hand; and the people crowded round quite good-naturedly; and the Eton boys thrust their chubby cheeks under the crowd's elbows; and the concert over, the King never failed to take his enormous cocked- hat off, and salute his band, and say, " Thank you, gen- tlemen." A quieter household, a more prosaic life than this of GEORGE THE THIRD 97 Kew or Windsor, cannot be imagined. Rain or shine, the King rode every day for hours; poked his red face into hundreds of cottages round about, and showed that shovel hat and Windsor uniform to farmers, to pig- boys, to old women making apple dumplings ; to all sorts of people, gentle and simple, about whom countless sto- ries are told. Nothing can be more undignified than these stories. When Haroun Alraschid visits a subject incog., the latter is sure to be very much the better for the caliph's magnificence. Old George showed no such royal splendour. He used to give a guinea sometimes: sometimes feel in his pockets and find he had no money : often ask a man a hundred questions : about the number of his family, about his oats and beans, about the rent he paid for his house, and ride on. On one occasion he played the part of King Alfred, and turned a piece of meat with a string at a cottager's house. When the old woman came home, she found a paper with an enclosure of money, and a note written by the royal pencil: " Five guineas to buy a jack." It was not splendid, but it was kind and worthy of Farmer George. One day, when the King and Queen were walking together, they met a little boy— they were always fond of children, the good folks— and patted the little white head. " Whose httle boy are you? " asks the Windsor uniform. " I am the King's beefeater's little boy," replied the child. On which the King said, " Then kneel down, and kiss the Queen's hand." But the innocent offspring of the beef- eater declined this treat. " No," said he, " I won't kneel, for if I do, I shall spoil my new breeches." The thrifty King ought to have hugged him and knighted him on the spot. George's admirers wrote pages and pages of such stories about him. One morning, before 98 THE FOUR GEORGES anybody else was up, the King walked about Gloucester town; pushed over Molly the housemaid with her pail, who was scrubbing the doorsteps ; ran upstairs and woke all the equerries in their bedrooms; and then trotted down to the bridge, where, by this time, a dozen of louts were assembled. "What! is this Gloucester New Bridge ? " asked our gracious monarch ; and the people answered him, " Yes, your Majesty." " Why, then, my boys," said he, " let us have a huzzay! " After giving them which intellectual gratification, he went home to breakfast. Our fathers read these simple tales with fond pleasure; laughed at these very small jokes; liked the old man who poked his nose into every cottage ; who lived on plain wholesome roast and boiled ; who despised your French kickshaws ; who was a true hearty old Eng- lish gentleman. You may have seen Gilray's famous print of him— in the old wig, in the stout old hideous Windsor uniform— as the King of Brobdingnag, peer- ing at a little Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst in the other he has an opera-glass, through which he surveys the pigmy? Our fathers chose to set up George as the type of a great king ; and the little Gulli- ver was the great Napoleon. We prided ourselves on our prejudices; we blustered and bragged with absurd vainglory; we dealt to our enemy a monstrous injustice of contempt and scorn ; we fought him with all weapons, mean as well as heroic. There was no lie we would not believe; no charge of crime which our furious prejudice would not credit. I thought at one time of making a collection of the lies which the French had written against us, and we had published against them during the war: it would be a strange memorial of popular falsehood. A Little Retel GEORGE THE THIRD 99 Their Majesties were very scK:iable potentates: and the Court Chronicler tells of numerous visits which they paid to their subjects, gentle and simple: with whom they dined; at whose great country-houses they stopped; or at whose poorer lodgings they affably partook of tea and bread-and-butter. Some of the great folks spent enor- mous sums in entertaining their sovereigns. As marks of special favour, the King and Queen sometimes stood as sponsors for the children of the nobility. We find Lady Salisbury was so honoured in the year 1786; and in the year 1802, Lady Chesterfield. The Court News relates how her ladyship received their Majesties on a state bed " dressed with white satin and a profusion of lace: the counterpane of white satin embroidered with gold, and the bed of crimson satin lined with white." The child was first brought by the nurse to the Mar- chioness of Bath, who presided as chief nurse. Then the Marchioness handed baby to the Queen. Then the Queen handed the little darling to the Bishop of Norwich, the officiating clergyman; and, the cere- mony over, a cup of caudle was presented by the Earl to his Majesty on one knee, on a large gold waiter, placed on a crimson velvet cushion. ^lis- fortunes would occur in these interesting genuflec- tory ceremonies of royal worship. Bubb Dodding- ton. Lord Melcombe, a very fat, puffy man, in a most gorgeous court-suit, had to kneel, Cumberland says, and was so fat and so tight that he could not get up again. " Kneel, sir, kneel! " cried my lord in waiting to a country mayor who had to read an address, but who went on with his compliment standing. " Kneel, sir, kneel!" cries my lord, in dreadful alarm. "I can't!" says the mayor, turning round; " don't you see I have got a 100 THE FOUR GEORGES wooden leg?" In the capital "Burney Diary and Let- ters," the home and court life of good old King George and good old Queen Charlotte are presented at porten- tous length. The King rose every morning at six: and had two hours to himself. He thought it eiFeminate to have a carpet in his bedroom. Shortly before eight, the Queen and the royal family were always ready for him, and they proceeded to the King's chapel in the castle. There were no fires in the passages: the chapel was scarcely alight; princesses, governesses, equerries grumbled and caught cold: but cold or hot, it was their duty to go: and, wet or dry, light or dark, the stout old George was always in his place to say amen to the chap- lain. The Queen's character is represented in "Burney" at full length. She was a sensible, most decorous woman ; a very grand lady on state occasions, simple enough in or- dinary life; well read as times went, and giving shrewd opinions about books; stingy, but not unjust; not gener- ally unkind to her dependants, but invincible in her no- tions of etiquette, and quite angry if her people suffered ill-health in her service. She gave Miss Burney a shabby pittance, and led the poor young woman a life which well-nigh killed her. She never thought but that she was doing Burney the greatest favour, in taking her from freedom, fame, and competence, and killing her off with languor in that dreary court. It was not dreary to her. Had she been sei-vant instead of mistress, her spirit would never have broken down: she never would have put a pin out of place, or been a moment from her duty. She was not weak, and she could not pardon tliose who were. She was perfectly correct in life, and she hated poor sinners with a rancour such as GEORGE THE THIRD 101 virtue sometimes has. She must have had awful private trials of her own : not merely with her children, but with her husband, in those long days about which nobody will ever know anything now ; when he was not quite insane ; when his incessant tongue was babbling folly, rage, per- secution; and she had to smile and be respectful and at- tentive under this intolerable ennui. The Queen bore all her duties stoutly, as she expected others to bear them. At a State christening, the lady who held the infant was tired and looked unwell, and the Princess of Wales asked permission for her to sit down. *' Let her stand," said the Queen, flicking the snufF off her sleeve. She would have stood, the resolute old woman, if she had had to hold the child till his beard was grown. *' I am sev- enty years of age," the Queen said, facing a mob of ruf- fians who stopped her sedan: " I have been fifty years Queen of England, and I never was insulted before." Fearless, rigid, unforgiving little queen I I don't won- der that her sons revolted from her. Of all the figures in that large family group which sur- rounds George and his Queen, the prettiest, I think, is the father's darling, the Princess Amelia, pathetic for her beauty, her sweetness, her early death, and for the extreme passionate tenderness with which her father loved her. This was his favourite amongst all the chil- dren: of his sons, he loved the Duke of York best. Burney tells a sad story of the poor old man at Wey- mouth, and how eager he was to have this darling son with him. The King's house was not big enough to hold the Prince; and his father had a portable house erected close to his own, and at huge pains, so that his dear Fred- erick should be near him. He clung on his arm all the time of his visit : talked to no one else ; had talked of no 102 THE FOUR GEORGES one else for some time before. The Prince, so long ex- pected, stayed but a single night. He had business in London the next day, he said. The dulness of the old King's court stupefied York and the other big sons of George III. They scared equerries and ladies, fright- ened the modest little circle, with their coarse spirits and loud talk. Of little comfort, indeed, were the King's sons to the King. But the pretty Amelia was his darling; and the little maiden, prattling and smiling in the fond arms of that old father, is a sweet image to look on. There is a fam- ily picture in Burney, which a man must be very hard- hearted not to like. She describes an after-dinner walk of the royal family at Windsor: — " It was really a mighty pretty procession," she says. " The little Prin- cess, just turned of three years old, in a robe-coat cov- ered with fine muslin, a dressed close cap, white gloves, and fan, walked on alone and first, highly delighted with the parade, and turning from side to side to see every- body as she passed ; for all the terracers stand up against the walls, to make a clear passage for the royal family the moment they come in sight. Then followed the King and Queen, no less delighted with the joy of their little darling. The Princess Royal leaning on Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, the Princess Augusta holding by the Duchess of Ancaster, the Princess Elizabeth led by Lady Charlotte Bertie, followed. Office here takes place of rank," says Burney,— to explain how it was that Lady E. Waldegrave, as lady of the bedchamber walked before a duchess; — "General Bude, and the Duke of Montague, and Major Price as equerry, brought up the rear of the procession." One sees it; the band playing its old music, the sun shining on the happy, GEORGE THE THIRD 103 loyal crowd ; and lighting the ancient battlements, the rich elms, and purple landscape, and bright green- sward ; the royal standard drooping from the great tower yonder; as old George passes, followed by his race, preceded by the charming infant, who caresses the crowd with her innocent smiles. " On sight of Mrs. Delany, the King instantly stopped to speak to her; the Queen, of course, and the little Princess, and all the rest, stood still. They talked a good while with the sweet old lady, during which time the King once or twice addressed himself to me. I caught the Queen's eye, and saw in it a little surprise, but by no means any displeasure, to see me of the party. The little Princess went up to Mrs. Delany, of whom she is very fond, and behaved like a little angel to her. She then, with a look of inquiry and recollection, came be- hind Mrs. Delany to look at me. ' I am afraid,' said I, in a whisper, and stooping down, ' your Royal Highness does not remember me? ' Her answer was an arch little smile, and a nearer approach, with her lips pouted out to kiss me." The Princess wrote verses herself, and there are some pretty plaintive lines attributed to her, which are more touching than better poetry:— " Unthinking, idle, wild, and young, I laughed, and danced, and talked, and sung: And, proud of health, of freedom vain, Dreamed not of sorrow, care, or pain; Concluding, in those hours of glee, That all the world was made for me. " But when the hour of trial came. When sickness shook this trembling frame, 104 THE FOUR GEORGES When folly's gay pursuits were o'er, And I could sing and dance no more, It then occurred, how sad 'twould be, Were this world only made for me." The poor soul quitted it— and ere yet she was dead the agonized father was in such a state, that the officers round about him were obliged to set watchers over him, and from November, 1810, George III. ceased to reign. All the world knows the story of his malady : all history presents no sadder figure than that of the old man, blind and deprived of reason, wandering through the rooms of his palace, addressing imaginary parliaments, re- viewing fancied troops, holding ghostly courts. I have seen his picture as it was taken at this time, hanging in the apartment of his daughter, the Landgravine of Hesse Hombourg— amidst books and Windsor furni- ture, and a hundred fond reminiscences of her English home. The poor old father is represented in a purple gown, his snowy beard falling over his breast— the star of his famous Order still idly shining on it. He was not only sightless: he became utterly deaf. All light, all reason, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures of this world of God, were taken from him. Some slight lucid moments he had; in one of which, the Queen, de- siring to see him, entered the room, and found him sing- ing a hymn, and accompanying himself at the harpsi- chord. When he had finished, he knelt down and prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself, that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He then burst into tears, and his reason again fled. GEORGE THE THIRD 105 What preacher need moralize on this story; what words save the simplest are requisite to tell it? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of such a misery smites me down in submission before the Ruler of kings and men, the Monarch Supreme over empires and repubUcs, the inscrutable Dispenser of hfe, death, happiness, vic- tory. " O brothers," I said to those who heard me first in America—" O brothers! speaking the same dear mother tongue— O comrades! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse, and call a truce to battle ! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest: dead, whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his throne; buffeted by rude hands; with his children in revolt ; the darling of his old age killed before him untimely ; our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries, ' Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little ! ' * Vex not his ghost — oh! let him pass — he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer I ' Hush! Strife and Quarrel, over the solemn grave! Sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark cur- tain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy." GEORGE THE FOURTH S^N Twiss's amusing "Life of Eldon," we read how, on the death of the Duke York, the old chan- cellor became pos- sessed of a lock of the defunct Prince's hair; and so careful was he respecting the authenticity of the relic, that Bessy Eldon his wife sat in the room with the young man from Hamlet's, who dis- tributed the ringlet into separate lock- ets, which each of the Eldon family afterwards wore. You know how, when George IV. came to Edinburgh, a better man than he went on board the royal yacht to welcome the King to his kingdom of Scotland, seized a goblet from which his Majesty had just drunk, vowed it should remain for ever as an heirloom in his family, clapped the precious glass in his pocket, and sat down George IV GEORGE THE FOURTH 107 on it and broke it when he got home. Suppose the good sheriff's prize unbroken now at Abbotsford, should we not smile with something like pity as we beheld it? Sup- pose one of those lockets of the no-Popery Prince's hair offered for sale at Christie's, quot lihras e duce summo invenies? how many pounds would you find for the illustrious Duke? Madame Tussaud has got King George's coronation robes; is there any man now alive who would kiss the hem of that tiTmipery? He sleeps since thirty years: do not any of you, who remember him, wonder that you once respected and huzza'd and admired him? To make a portrait of him at first seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig, his countenance simpering under it : with a slate and a piece of chalk, I could at this very desk perform a recogniz- able likeness of him. And yet after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public dinner, there at races and so forth, you find you have nothing— nothing but a coat and a wig and a mask smiling below it — nothing but a great simulacrum. His sire and grandsires were men. One knows what they were like: what they would do in given circumstances: that on occasion they fought and demeaned themselves like tough good soldiers. They had friends whom they liked according to their natures; enemies whom they hated fiercely; passions, and actions, and individualities of their own. The sailor King who came after George was a man: the Duke of York was a man, big, burly, loud, jolly, cursing, courageous. But this George, what was he? I look through all his life, and recognize but a bow and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find 108 THE FOUR GEORGES silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket-handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's best nutty brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black stock, underwaistcoats, more underwaistcoats, and then nothing. I know of no sentiment that he ever distinctly uttered. Documents are published under his name, but people wrote them — private letters, but people spelt them. He put a great George P. or George R. at the bottom of the page and fancied he had wTitten the paper: some bookseller's clerk, some poor author, some man did the work; saw to the spelling, cleaned up the slovenly sentences, and gave the lax maudlin slipslop a sort of consistency. He must have had an individuality : the dancing-master whom he emulated, nay, surpassed —the wig-maker who curled his toupee for him— the tailor who cut his coats, had that. But, about George, one can get at nothing actual. That outside, I am certain, is pad and tailor's work; there may be some- thing behind it, but what? We cannot get at the char- acter; no doubt never shall. Will men of the future have nothing better to do than to unswathe and inter- pret that royal old mummy? I own I once used to think it would be good sport to pursue him, fasten on him, and pull him down. But now I am ashamed to mount and lay good dogs on, to summon a full field, and then to hunt the poor game. On the 12th August, 1762, the forty-seventh anniver- sary of the accession of the House of Brunswick to the English throne, all the bells in London pealed in gratu- lation, and announced that an heir to George III. was born. Five days afterwards the King was pleased to pass letters patent under the great seal, creating H. R. GEORGE THE FOURTH 109 H. the Prince of Great Britain, Electoral Prince of Brunswick Liineburg, Duke of Cornwall and Rothsay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. All the people at his birth thronged to see this lovely child ; and behind a gilt china-screen railing in St. James's Palace, in a cradle surmounted by the three princely ostrich feathers, the royal infant was laid to delight the eyes of the lieges. Among the earhest instances of homage paid to him, I read that "a curious Indian bow and arrows were sent to the Prince from his father's faithful subjects in New York." He was fond of play- ing with these toys : an old statesman, orator, and wit of his grandfather's and great-grandfather's time, never tired of his business, still eager in his old age to be well at court, used to play with the little Prince, and pre- tend to fall down dead when the Prince shot at him with his toy bow and arrows— and get up and fall down dead over and over again— to the increased dehght of the child. So that he was flattered from his cradle up- wards; and before his little feet could walk, statesmen and courtiers were busy kissing them. There is a pretty picture of the royal infant— a beau- tiful buxom child— asleep in his mother's lap; who turns round and holds a finger to her lip, as if she would bid the courtiers around respect the baby's slumbers. From that day until his decease, sixty-eight years after, I sup- pose there were more pictures taken of that personage than of any other human being who ever was born and died— in every kind of uniform and every possible court- dress— in long fair hair, with powder, with and without a pig-tail— in every conceivable cocked-hat— in dragoon 110 THE FOUR GEORGES uniform— in Windsor uniform— in a field-marshal's clothes— in a Scotch kilt and tartans, with dirk and claj^- more (a stupendous figure) —in a frogged frock-coat with a fur collar and tight breeches and silk stockings— in wigs of every coloui', fair, brown, and black— in his famous coronation robes finally, with which perform- ance he was so much in love that he distributed copies of the picture to all the courts and British embassies in Europe, and to numberless clubs, town-halls, and private friends. I remember as a young man how almost every dining-room had his portrait. There is plenty of biographical tattle about the Prince's boyhood. It is told with what astonishing ra- pidity he learned all languages, ancient and modern; how he rode beautifully, sang charmingly, and played elegantly on the violoncello. That he was beautiful was patent to all eyes. He had a high spirit : and once, when he had had a difference with his father, burst into the royal closet and called out, " Wilkes and liberty for ever! " He was so clever, that he confounded his very governors in learning; and one of them. Lord Bruce, having made a false quantity in quoting Greek, the admirable young Prince instantly corrected him. Lord Bruce could not remain a governor after this humiliation; resigned his office, and, to soothe his feelings, was actually promoted to be an earl! It is the most wonderful reason for pro- moting a man that ever I heard. Lord Bruce was made an earl for a blunder in prosody ; and Nelson was made a baron for the victory of the Nile. Lovers of long sums have added up the millions and millions which in the course of his brilliant existence this single Prince consumed. Besides his income of 50,000/., 70,000Z., 100,000/., 120,000/. a year, we read of three ap- i78o 1790 THE REGENT. GEORGE THE FOURTH 111 plications to Parliament: debts to the amount of 160,- 000/., of 650,000/.; besides mysterious foreign loans, whereof he pocketed the proceeds. What did he do for all this money? Why was he to have it ? If he had been a manufacturing town, or a populous rural district, or an army of five thousand men, he would not have cost more. He, one solitary stout man, who did not toil, nor spin, nor fight,— what had any mortal done that he should be pampered so? In 1784, when he was twenty -one years of age, Carl- ton Palace was given to him, and furnished by the na- tion with as much luxury as could be devised. His pockets were filled with money: he said it was not enough; he flung it out of window: he spent 10,000/. a year for the coats on his back. The nation gave him more money, and more, and more. The sum is past counting. He was a prince most lovely to look on, and was christened Prince Florizel on his first appearance in the world. That he was the handsomest prince in the whole world was agreed by men, and alas! by many women. I suppose he must have been very graceful. There are so many testimonies to the charm of his manner, that w^e must allow him great elegance and powers of fasci- nation. He, and the King of France's brother, the Count d'Artois, a charming young Prince who danced de- liciously on the tight-rope— a poor old tottering exiled King, who asked hospitality of King George's successor, and lived awhile in the palace of Mary Stuart— divided in their youth the title of first gentleman of Europe. We in England of course gave the prize to our gentle- man. Until George's death the propriety of that award was scarce questioned, or the doubters voted rebels and 112 THE FOUR GEORGES traitors. Only the other day I was reading in the reprint of the dehghtful " Noctes " of Christopher North. The health of THE KING is drunk in large capitals by the loyal Scotsman. You would fancy him a hero, a sage, a statesman, a pattern for kings and men. It was Walter Scott who had that accident with the broken glass I spoke of anon. He was the King's Scottish champion, rallied all Scotland to him, made loyalty the fashion, and laid about him fiercely with his claymore upon all the Prince's enemies. The Brunswicks had no such defend- ers as those two Jacobite commoners, old Sam Johnson the Lichfield chapman's son, and Walter Scott, the Edinburgh lawyer's. Nature and circumstance had done their utmost to prepare the Prince for being sj)oiled: the dreadful dul- ness of papa's court, its stupid amusements, its dreary occupations, the maddening humdrum, the stifling sobri- ety of its routine, would have made a scapegrace of a much less lively prince. All the big princes bolted from that castle of ennui where old King George sat, posting up his books and droning over his Handel; and old Queen Charlotte over her snufF and her tambour-frame. Most of the sturdy, gallant sons settled down after sowing their wild oats, and became sober subjects of their father and brother— not ill liked by the nation, which pardons youthful irregularities readily enough, for the sake of pluck, and unafFectedness, and good- humour. The boy is father of the man. Our Prince signalized his entrance into the world by a feat worthy of his fu- ture life. He invented a new shoebuckle. It was an inch long and five inches broad. " It covered almost the whole instep, reaching down to the ground on either side of the GEORGE THE FOURTH 113 foot." A sweet invention! lovely and useful as the Prince on whose foot it sparkled. At his first appear- ance at a court ball, we read that " his coat was pink silk, with white cuffs; his waistcoat white silk, embroidered with various-coloured foil, and adorned with a profusion of French paste. And his hat was ornamented with two rows of steel beads, five thousand in number, with a button and loop of the same metal, and cocked in a new military style." What a Florizel ! Do these details seem trivial? They are the grave incidents of his life. His biographers say that when he commenced house- keeping in that splendid new palace of his, the Prince of Wales had some windy projects of encouraging litera- ture, science, and the arts; of having assemblies of lite- rary characters; and societies for the encouragement of geography, astronomy, and botany. Astronomy, geog- raphy, and botany! Fiddlesticks! French ballet-dan- cers, French cooks, horse- jockeys, buffoons, procurers, tailors, boxers, fencing-masters, china, jewel, and gim- crack merchants — these were his real companions. At first he made a pretence of having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for his friends. But how could such men be serious before such an empty scapegrace as this lad? Fox might talk dice with him, and Sheridan wine; but what else had these men of genius in common with their tawdry young host of Carlton House? That fribble the leader of such men as Fox and Burke! That man's opinions about the constitution, the India Bill, justice to the Catholics — about any question graver than the button for a waistcoat or the sauce for a partridge — worth any- thing! The friendship between the Prince and the Whig chiefs was impossible. They were hypocrites in pretending to respect him, and if he broke the hollow 114 THE FOUR GEORGES compact between them, who shall blame him? His nat- ural companions were dandies and parasites. He could talk to a tailor or a cook; but, as the equal of great statesmen, to set up a creature, lazy, weak, indolent, be- sotted, of monstrous vanity, and levity incurable — it is absurd. They thought to use him, and did for awhile* but they must have known how timid he w^as; how en- tirely heartless and treacherous, and have expected his desertion. His next set of friends were mere table com- panions, of whom he grew tired too ; then we hear of him with a very few select toadies, mere boys from school or the Guards, whose sprightliness tickled the fancy of the worn-out voluptuary. What matters what friends he had? He dropped all his friends; he never could have real friends. An heir to the throne has flatterers, adven- turers who hang about him, ambitious men who use him ; but friendship is denied him. And women, I suppose, are as false and selfish in their dealings with such a character as men. Shall we take the Leporello part, flourish a catalogue of the conquests of this royal Don Juan, and tell the names of the favour- ites to whom, one after the other, George Prince flung his pocket-handkerchief? What purpose would it answer to say how Perdita was pursued, won, deserted, and by whom succeeded? What good in knowing that he did actually marry Mrs. Fitz-Herbert according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church; that her marriage set- tlements have been seen in London; that the names of the witnesses to her marriage are known. This sort of vice that we are now come to presents no new or fleeting trait of manners. Debauchees, dissolute, heartless, fickle, cowardly, have been ever since the work! began. This one had more temptations than most, and so much may be said in extenuation for him. GEORGE THE FOURTH 115 It was an unlucky thing for this doomed one, and tend- ing to lead him yet farther on the road to the deuce, that, besides being lovely, so that women were fascinated by him; and heir-apparent, so that all the world flattered him ; he should have a beautiful voice, which led him di- rectly in the way of drink: and thus all the pleasant devils were coaxing on poor Florizel ; desire, and idleness, and vanity, and drunkenness, all clashing their merry cymbals and bidding him come on. We first hear of his warbling sentimental ditties under the walls of Kew Palace by the moonlight banks of Thames, with Lord Viscount Leporello keeping watch lest the music should be disturbed. Singing after dinner and supper w^as the universal fashion of the day. You may fancy all England sound- ing with choruses, some ribald, some harmless, but all occasioning the consumption of a prodigious deal of fer- mented liquor. *' The jolly Muse her wings to try no frolic flights need take, But round the bowl would dip and fly, like swallows round a lake," sang Morris in one of his gallant Anacreontics, to which the Prince many a time joined in chorus, and of which the burden is, — " And that I think's a reason fair to drink and fill again." This delightful boon companion of the Prince's found " a reason fair " to forego filling and drinking, saw the error of his ways, gave up the bowl and chorus, and died retired and religious. The Prince's table no doubt was a very tempting one. The wits came and did their ut- most to amuse him. It is wonderful how the spirits rise, 116 THE FOUR GEORGES the wit brightens, the wine has an aroma, when a great man is at the head of the table. Scott, the loyal cavalier, the king's true liegeman, the very best raconteur of his time, poured out with an endless generosity his store of old-world learning, kindness, and humour. Grattan contributed to it his wondrous eloquence, fancy, feeling. Tom Moore perched upon it for awhile, and piped his most exquisite little love-tunes on it, flying away in a twitter of indignation afterwards, and attacking the Prince with bill and claw. In such society, no wonder the sitting was long, and the butler tired of drawing corks. Remember what the usages of the time were, and that William Pitt, coming to the House of Com- mons after having drunk a bottle of port-wine at his own house, would go into Bellamy's with Dundas, and help finish a couple more. You peruse volume after volume about our Prince, and find some half-dozen stock stories— indeed not many more— common to all the histories. He was good-na- tured; an indolent, voluptuous prince, not unkindly. One story, the most favourable to him of all, perhaps, is that as Prince Regent he was eager to hear all that could be said in behalf of prisoners condemned to death, and anxious, if possible, to remit the capital sentence. He was kind to his servants. There is a stoiy common to all the biographies, of Molly the housemaid, who, when his household was to be broken up, owing to some reforms which he tried absurdly to practise, was discovered cry- ing as she dusted the chairs because she was to leave a master who had a kind word for all his servants. An- other tale is that of a groom of the Prince's being discov- ered in corn and oat peculations, and dismissed by the personage at the head of the stables; the Prince had GEORGE THE FOURTH 117 word of John's disgrace, remonstrated with him veiy kindly, generously reinstated him, and bade him promise to sin no more— a promise which John kept. Another story is very fondly told of the Prince as a young man hearing of an officer's family in distress, and how he straightway borrowed six or eight hundred pounds, put his long fair hair under his hat, and so disguised carried the money to the starving family. He sent money, too, to Sheridan on his death-bed, and would have sent more had not death ended the career of that man of genius. Besides these, there are a few pretty speeches, kind and graceful, to persons with whom he was brought in con- tact. But he turned upon twenty friends. He was fond and familiar with them one day, and he passed them on the next without recognition. He used them, liked them, loved them perhaps in his way, and then separated from them. On Monday he kissed and fondled poor Perdita, and on Tuesday he met her and did not know her. On Wednesday he was very affectionate with that wretched Brummell, and on Thursday forgot him; cheated him even out of a snuff-box which he owed the poor dandy; saw him years afterwards in his downfall and poverty, when the bankrupt Beau sent him another snuff-box with some of the snufF he used to love, as a piteous token of remembrance and submission, and the King took the snuff, and ordered his horses and drove on, and had not the grace to notice his old companion, favourite, rival, enemy, superior. In Wraxall there is some gossip about him. When the charming, beautiful, generous Duchess of Devonshire died — the lovely lady whom he used to call his dearest duchess once, and pre- tend to admire as all English society admired her— he said, " Then we have lost the best bred woman in Eng- 118 THE FOUR GEORGES land." " Then we have lost the kindest heart in Eng- land," said noble Charles Fox. On another occasion, when three noblemen were to receive the Garter, says Wraxall, "A great personage observed that never did three men receive the order in so characteristic a manner. The Duke of A. advanced to the sovereign with a phleg- matic, cold, awkward air like a clown; Lord B. came for- ward fawning and smiling like a courtier ; Lord C. pre- sented himself easy, unembarrassed, like a gentleman! " These are the stories one has to recall about the Prince and King— kindness to a housemaid, generosity to a groom, criticism on a bow. There are no better stories about him: they are mean and trivial, and they charac- terize him. The great war of empires and giants goes on. Day by day victories are won and lost by the brave. Torn, smoky flags and battered eagles are wrenched from the heroic enemy and laid at his feet; and he sits there on his throne and smiles, and gives the guerdon of valour to the conqueror. He ! Elhston the actor, when the Cor- onation was performed, in which he took the principal part, used to fancy himself the King, burst into tears, and hiccup a blessing on the people. I believe it is cer- tain about George IV., that he had heard so much of the war, knighted so many people, and worn such a prodig- ious quantity of marshal's uniforms, cocked-hats, cock's feathers, scarlet and bullion in general, that he actually fancied he had been present in some campaigns, and, under the name of General Brock, led a tremendous charge of the German legion at Waterloo. He is dead but thirty years, and one asks how a great society could have tolerated him? Would we bear him now? In this quarter of a century, what a silent revolu- tion has been working! how it has separated us from old GEORGE THE FOURTH 119 times and manners! How it has changed men them- selves! I can see old gentlemen now among us, of per- fect good breeding, of quiet lives, with venerable grey- heads, fondling their grandchildren; and look at them, and wonder at what they were once. That gentleman of the grand old school, when he was in the 10th Hussars, and dined at the Prince's table, would fall under it night after night. Night after night, that gentleman sat at Brookes's or Raggett's over the dice. If, in the petu- lance of play or drink, that gentleman spoke a sharp word to his neighbour, he and the other would infallibly go out and try to shoot each other the next morning. That gentleman would drive his friend Richmond the black boxer down to Moulsey, and hold his coat, and shout and swear, and hurrah with delight, whilst the black man was beating Dutch Sam the Jew. That gen- tleman would take a manly pleasure in pulling his own coat off, and thrashing a bargeman in a street row. That gentleman has been in a watch-house. That gentleman, so exquisitely polite with ladies in a drawing-room, so loftily courteous, if he talked now as he used among men in his youth, would swear so as to make your hair stand on end. I met lately a very old German gentle- man, who had served in our army at the beginning of the century. Since then he has lived on his own estate, but rarely meeting with an Englishman, whose language — the language of fifty years ago that is — he possesses per- fectly. When this highly bred old man began to speak English to me, almost every other word he uttered was an oath: as they used (they swore dreadfully in Flan- ders) with the Duke of York before Valenciennes, or at Carlton House over the supper and cards. Read By- ron's letters. So accustomed is the young man to oaths 120 THE FOUR GEORGES that he employs them even in writing to his friends, and swears by the post. Read his account of the doings of young men at Cambridge, of the ribald professors, one of whom " could pour out Greek like a drunken Helot," and whose excesses surpassed even those of the young men. Read Matthews' description of the boyish lord- ling's housekeeping at Newstead, the skull-cup passed round, the monk's dresses from the masquerade ware- house, in which the young scapegraces used to sit until daylight, chanting appropriate songs round their wine. " We come to breakfast at two or three o'clock," Mat- thews says. " There are gloves and foils for those who like to amuse themselves, or we fire pistols at a mark in the hall, or we worry the wolf." A jolly life truly ! The noble young owner of the mansion writes about such af- fairs himself in letters to his friend, Mr. John Jackson, pugilist, in London. All the Prince's time tells a similar strange story of manners and pleasure. In Wraxall we find the Prime Minister himself, the redoubted WillHam Pitt, engaged in high jinks with personages of no less importance than Lord Thurlow the Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Dundas the Treasurer of the Navy. Wraxall relates how these three statesmen, returning after dinner from Addis- combe, found a turnpike open and galloped through it without paying the toll. The turnpike-man, fancying they were highwaymen, fired a blunderbuss after them, but missed them; and the poet sang,— " How as Pitt wandered darkling o'er the plain, His reason drown'd in Jenkinson's champagne, A rustic's hand, but righteous fate withstood. Had shed a premier's for a robber's blood." GEORGE THE FOURTH 121 Here we have the Treasurer of the Navy, the Lord High Chancellor, and the Prime Minister, all engaged in a most undoubted lark. In Eldon's ' Memoirs," about the very same time, I read that the bar loved wine, as well as the woolsack. Not John Scott himself; he was a good boy always ; and though he loved port-wine, loved his business and his duty and his fees a great deal better. He has a Northern Circuit story of those days, about a party at the house of a certain Lawyer Fawcett, who gave a dinner every year to the counsel. " On one occasion," related Lord Eldon, "I heard Lee say, ' I cannot leave Fawcett's wine. Mind, Davenport, you will go home immediately after dinner, to read the brief in that cause that we have to conduct to-morrow.' " " ' Not I,' said Davenport. ' Leave my dinner and my wine to read a brief ! No, no, Lee ; that won't do.' " ' Then,' said Lee, ' what is to be done? who else is employed? ' " Davenport.—' Oh! young Scott.' "Lee.—' Oh! he must go. Mr. Scott, you must go home immediately, and make yourself acquainted with that cause, before our consultation this evening.' " This was very hard upon me ; but I did go, and there was an attorney from Cumberland, and one from North- umberland, and I do not know how many other persons. Pretty late, in came Jack Lee, as drunk as he could be. "'I cannot consult to-night ; I must go to bed,' he exclaimed, and away he went. Then came Sir Thomas Davenport. " ' We cannot have a consultation to-night, Mr. Wordsworth' (Wordsworth, I think, was the name; it was a Cumberland name) , shouted Davenport. ' Don't you see how drunk Mr. Scott is? it is impossible to con- 122 THE FOUR GEORGES suit.' Poor me! who had scarce had any dinner, and lost all my wine — I was so drunk that I could not consult! Well, a verdict was given against us, and it was all ow- ing to Lawj^er Fawcett's dinner. We moved for a new trial; and I must say, for the honour of the bar, that those two gentlemen. Jack Lee and Sir Thomas Daven- port, paid all the expenses between them of the first trial. It is the only instance I ever knew; but they did. We moved for a new trial (on the ground, I suppose, of the counsel not being in their senses) , and it was granted. When it came on, the following year, the judge rose and said,— Gentlemen, did any of you dine with Lawyer Fawcett yesterday? for, if you did, I will not hear this cause till next year.' " There was great laughter. We gained the cause that time." On another occasion, at Lancaster, where poor Bozzy must needs be going the Northern Circuit, " we found him," says Mr. Scott, " lying upon the pavement inebri- ated. We subscribed a guinea at supper for him, and a half-crown for his clerk" — (no doubt there was a large bar, so that Scott's joke did not cost him much),—" and sent him, when he waked next morning, a brief, with in- structions to move for what we denominated the writ of qiiare adhcesit pavimento? with observations duly calcu- lated to induce him to think that he required great learn- ing to explain the necessity of granting it, to the judge before whom he was to move." Boswell sent all round the town to attorneys for books that might enable him to distinguish himself— but in vain. He moved, how- ever, for the writ, making the best use he could of the observations in the brief. The judge was perfectly as- GEORGE THE FOURTH 123 tonished, and the audience amazed. The judge said, " I never heard of such a writ — what can it be that adheres pavimeiito? Are any of you gentlemen at the bar able to explain this? " The bar laughed. At last one of them said, — " My lord, INIr. Boswell last night adhccsit pavimento. There was no moving him for some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has been dreaming about himself and the pavement." The canny old gentleman relishes these jokes. When the Bishop of Lincoln was moving from the deanery of St. Paul's, he says he asked a learned friend of his, by name Will Hay, how he should move some especially fine claret, about which he was anxious. " Pray, my lord bishop," says Hay, " how much of the wine have you? " The bishop said six dozen. " If that is all," Hay answered, " you have but to ask me six times to dinner, and I will carry it all away my- self." There w^ere giants in those days; but this joke about wine is not so fearful as one perpetrated by Orator Thel- wall, in the heat of the French Revolution, ten years later, over a frothing pot of porter. He blew the head off, and said, " This is the way I would serve all kings." Now we come to yet higher personages, and find their doings recorded in the blushing pages of timid little Miss Burney's "Memoirs." She represents a prince of the blood in quite a royal condition. The loudness, the bigness, boisterousness, creaking boots and rattling oaths of the young princes, appear to have frightened the prim household of Windsor, and set all the teacups twittering on the tray. On the night of a ball and 124' THE FOUR GEORGES birthday, when one of the pretty, kind princesses was to come out, it was agreed that her brother, Prince Wil- liam Henry, should dance the opening minuet with her, and he came to visit the household at their dinner. " At dinner, Mrs. Schwellenberg presided, attired magnificently; Miss Goldsworthy, Mrs. Stanforth, Messrs. Du Luc and Stanhope, dined with us ; and while we still were eating fruit, the Duke of Clarence entered. " He was just risen from the King's table, and wait- ing for his equipage to go home and prepare for the ball. To give you an idea of the energy of his Royal High- ness's language, I ought to set apart an objection to writing, or rather intimating, certain forcible words, and beg leave to show you in genuine colours a royal sailor. " We all rose, of course, upon his entrance, and the two gentlemen placed themselves behind their chairs, while the footman left the room. But he ordered us all to sit down, and called the men back to hand about some wine. He was in exceeding high spirits, and in the ut- most good humour. He placed himself at the head of the table, next Mrs. Schwellenberg, and looked remark- ably well, gay, and full of sport and mischief ; yet clever withal, as well as comical. " * Well, this is the first day I have ever dined with the King at St. James's on his birthday. Pray, have you all drunk his Majesty's health? ' " ' No, your Royal Highness ; your Royal Highness might make dem do dat,' said Mrs. Schwellenberg. " * Oh, by , I will! Here, you ' (to the footman) , * bring champagne; I'll drink the King's health again, if I die for it. Yes, I have done it pretty well already ; so has the King, I promise you! I believe his Majesty was never taken such good care of before ; we have kept GEORGE THE FOURTH 125 his spirits up, I promise you ; we have enabled him to go through his fatigues ; and I should have done more still, but for the ball and Mary;— I have promised to dance with Mary. I must keep sober for Mary.' " Indefatigable Miss Burney continues for a dozen pages reporting H.R.H.'s conversation, and indicating, with a humour not unworthy of the clever little author of " Evelina," the increasing state of excitement of the young sailor Prince, who drank more and more cham- pagne, stopped old Mrs. Schwellenberg's remonstrances by giving the old lady a kiss, and telling her to hold her potato-trap, and who did not " keep sober for Mary." Mary had to find another partner that night, for the royal William Henry could not keep his legs. Will you have a picture of the amusements of another royal prince? It is the Duke of York, the blundering general, the beloved commander-in-chief of the army, the brother with whom George IV. had had many a mid- night carouse, and who continued his habits of pleasure almost till death seized his stout body. In Piickler Muskau's " Letters," that German Prince describes a bout with H.R.H., who in his best time was such a powerful toper that " six bottles of claret after dinner scarce made a perceptible change in his counte- nance." " I remember," says Piickler, " that one evening,— indeed, it was past midnight,— he took some of his guests, among whom were the Austrian ambassador, Count Meervelt, Count Beroldingen, and myself, into his beautiful armoury. We tried to swing several Turk- ish sabres, but none of us had a very firm grasp ; whence it happened that the Duke and Meervelt both scratched themselves with a sort of straight Indian sword so as to 126 THE FOUR GEORGES draw blood. Meervelt then wished to try if the sword cut as well as a Damascus, and attempted to cut through one of the wax candles that stood on the table. The ex- periment answered so ill, that both the candles, candle- sticks and all, fell to the ground and were extinguished. While we were groping in the dark and trying to find the door, the Duke's aide-de-camp stammered out in great agitation, ' By G— , sir, I remember the sword is poisoned! ' " You may conceive the agreeable feelings of the wounded at this intelligence! Happily, on further ex- amination, it appeared that claret, and not poison, was at the bottom of the colonel's exclamation." And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York, and the very highest personage of the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts. The feast took place at the Pavilion at Brighton, and was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolty associates, there figures a great no- bleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had taken place; and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in Sussex. The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to drink wine with the Duke — a challenge which the old toper did not refuse. Pie soon began to see that there was a con- GEORGE THE FOURTH 127 spiracy against him; he drank glass for glass; he over- threw many of the brave. At last the First Gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink. " Now," says he, " I will have my carriage, and go home." The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof where he had been so generously entertained. " No," he said; he had had enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him ; he would leave the place at once and never enter its doors more. The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half- hour's interval, the liquor had proved too potent for the old man ; his host's generous purpose was answered, and the Duke's old grey head lay stupefied on the table. Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was announced, he staggered to it as well as he could, and stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel. They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn ; the poor old man fancied he was going home. When he awoke that morning he was in bed at the Prince's hide- ous house at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence: they have fiddlers there every day; and some- times buffoons and mountebanks hire the Riding House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted. I can fancy the flushed faces of the royal princes as they support themselves at the por- tico pillars, and look on at old Norfolk's disgrace; but I can't fancy how the man who perpetrated it continued to be called a gentleman. From drinking, the pleased Muse now turns to gamb- ling, of which in his youth our Prince was a great prac- 128 THE FOUR GEORGES titioner. He was a famous pigeon for the play -men; they lived upon him. Egalite Orleans, it was believed, punished him severely. A noble lord, whom we shall call the Marquis of Steyne, is said to have mulcted him in immense sums. He frequented the clubs, where play was then almost universal; and, as it was known his debts of honour were sacred, whilst he was gambling Jews waited outside to purchase his notes of hand. His transactions on the turf were unlucky as well as discred- itable: though I believe he, and his jockey, and his horse. Escape, were all innocent in that affair which created so much scandal. Arthur's, Almack's, Boodle's, and White's were the chief clubs of the young men of fashion. There was play at all, and decayed noblemen and broken-down senators fleeced the unwary there. In Selwyn's " Letters " we find Carlisle, Devonshire, Coventry, Queensberry, all undergoing the probation. Charles Fox, a dreadful gambler, was cheated in very late times— lost 200,000/. at play. Gibbon tells of his playing for twenty-two hours at a sitting, and losing 500/. an hour. That in- domitable punter said that the greatest pleasure in life, after winning, was losing. What hours, what nights, what health did he waste over the devil's books! I was going to say what peace of mind ; but he took his losses very philosophically. After an awful night's play, and the enjoyment of the greatest pleasure but one in life, he was found on a sofa tranquilly reading an Eclogue of Virgil. Play survived long after the wild Prince and Fox had given up the dice-box. The dandies continued it. Byron, Brummell— how many names could I mention of men of the world who have suffered by it! In 1837 occurred a GEORGE THE FOURTH 129 famous trial which pretty nigh put an end to gambhng in England. A peer of the realm was found cheating at whist, and repeatedly seen to practise the trick called sauter la coupe. His friends at the clubs saw him cheat, and went on playing with him. One greenhorn, who had discovered his foul play, asked an old hand what he should do. " Do," said the Mammon of Unrighteous- ness, " Bach him, you fooV The best efforts were made to screen him. People wrote him anonymous let- ters and warned him ; but he would cheat, and they were obliged to find him out. Since that day, when my lord's shame was made public, the gaming-table has lost all its splendour. Shabby Jews and blacklegs prowl about racecourses and tavern parlours, and now and then in- veigle silly yokels with greasy packs of cards in railroad cars; but Play is a deposed goddess, her worshippers bankrupt and her table in rags. So is another famous British institution gone to decay —the Ring: the noble practice of British boxing, which in my youth was still almost flourishing. The Prince, in his early days, was a great patron of this national sport, as his grand-uncle Culloden Cum- berland had been before him; but, being present at a fight at Brighton, where one of the combatants was killed, the Prince pensioned the boxer's widow, and de- clared he never would attend another battle. " But nev- ertheless,"— I read in the noble language of Pierce Egan (whose smaller work on Pugilism I have the hon- our to possess),— " he thought it a manly and decided English feature, which ought not to be destroyed. His Majesty had a drawing of the sporting characters in the Fives' Court placed in his boudoir, to remind him of his former attachment and support of true courage; and 130 THE FOUR GEORGES when any fight of note occurred after he was king, ac- counts of it were read to him by his desire." That gives one a fine image of a king taking his recreation;— at ease in a royal dressing-gown;— too majestic to read himself, ordering the prime minister to read him accounts of battles: how Cribb punched Molyneux's eye, or Jack Randall thrashed the Game Chicken. Where my Prince did actually distinguish himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from Brighton to Carlton House— fifty-six miles. All the young men of that day were fond of that sport. But the fashion of rapid driving deserted England; and, I believe, trotted over to America. Where are the amuse- ments of our youth? I hear of no gambling now but amongst obscure ruffians ; of no boxing but amongst the lowest rabble. One solitary four-in-hand still drove round the parks in London last year ; but that charioteer mrust soon disappear. He was very old; he was attired after the fashion of the year 1825. He must drive to the banks of Stj^x ere long,— where the ferry-boat waits to carry him over to the defunct revellers who boxed and gambled and drank and drove with King George. The bravery of the Brunswicks, that all the family must have it, that George possessed it, are points which all English writers have agreed to admit; and yet I cannot see how George IV. should have been endowed with this quality. Swaddled in feather-beds all his life, lazy, obese, perpetually eating and drinking, his educa- tion was quite unlike that of his tough old progenitors. His grandsires had confronted hardship and war, and ridden up and fired their pistols undaunted into the face of death. His father had conquered luxury and over- come indolence. Here was one who never resisted any GEORGE THE FOURTH 131 temptation ; never had a desire but he coddled and pam- pered it; if ever he had any nerve, frittered it away among cooks, and tailors, and barbers, and furniture- mongers, and opera-dancers. What muscle would not grow flaccid in such a life— a life that was never strung up to any action— an endless Capua without any cam- paign—all fiddhng, and flowers, and feasting, and flat- tery, and folly? When George III. was pressed by the Catholic question and the India Bill, he said he would retire to Hanover rather than yield upon either point; and he would have done what he said. But, before yield- ing, he was determined to fight his Ministers and Par- liament ; and he did, and he beat them. The time came when George IV. was pressed too upon the Catholic claims; the cautious Peel had slipped over to that side; the grim old Wellington had joined it; and Peel tells us, in his " Memoirs," what was the conduct of the King. He at first refused to submit; whereupon Peel and the Duke ofl'ered their resignations, which their gracious master accepted. He did these two gentlemen the hon- our. Peel says, to kiss them both when they went away. (Fancy old Arthur's grim countenance and eagle beak as the monarch kisses it !) When they were gone he sent after them, surrendered, and Avrote to them a letter beg- ging them to remain in office, and allowing them to have their way. Then his Majesty had a meeting with Eldon, which is related at curious length in the latter 's " Me- moirs." He told Eldon what was not true about his interview with the new Catholic converts ; utterly misled the old ex-Chancellor; cried, whimpered, fell on his neck, and kissed him too. We know old Eldon's own tears were pumped very freely. Did these two fountains gush together? I can't fancy a behaviour more un- 132 THE FOUR GEORGES manly, imbecile, pitiable. This a defender of the faith! This a chief in the crisis of a great nation ! This an in- heritor of the courage of the Georges! Many of my hearers no doubt have journeyed to the pretty old town of Brunswick, in company with that most worthy, prudent, and polite gentleman, the Earl of Malmesbury, and fetched away Princess Caroline for her longing husband, the Prince of Wales. Old Queen Charlotte would have had her eldest son marry a niece of her own, that famous Louisa of Strelitz, afterwards Queen of Prussia, and who shares with Marie Antoi- nette in the last age the sad pre-eminence of beauty and misfortune. But George III. had a niece at Brunswick: she was a richer princess than her Serene Highness of Strelitz:— in fine, the Princess Caroline was selected to marry the heir to the English throne. We follow my Lord Malmesbury in quest of her ; we are introduced to her illustrious father and royal mother; we witness the balls and fetes of the old court ; we are presented to the Princess herself, with her fair hair, her blue eyes, and her impertinent shoulders— a lively, bouncing, romping Princess, who takes the advice of her courtly English mentor most generously and kindly. We can be present at her very toilette, if we like ; regarding which, and for very good reasons, the British courtier implores her to be particular. What a strange court! What a queer privacy of morals and manners do we look into! Shall we regard it as preachers and moralists, and cry Woe, against the open vice and selfishness and corruption; or look at it as we do at the king in the pantomime, with his pantomime wife and pantomime courtiers, whose big heads he knocks together, whom he pokes with his pan- tomime sceptre, whom he orders to prison under the GEORGE THE FOURTH 133 guard of his pantomime beefeaters, as he sits down to dine on his pantomime pudding? It is grave, it is sad; it is theme most curious for moral and political specu- lation; it is monstrous, grotesque, laughable, with its prodigious littlenesses, etiquettes, ceremonials, sham mo- ralities; it is as serious as a sermon, and as absurd and outrageous as Punch's puppet-show. Malmesbury tells us of the private life of the Duke, Princess Caroline's father who was to die, like his war- like son, in arms against the French; presents us to his courtiers, his favourite; his Duchess, George III.'s sister, a grim old Princess, who took the British envoy aside, and told him wicked old stories of wicked old dead people and times; who came to England afterwards when her nephew was regent, and lived in a shabby fur- nished lodging, old, and dingy, and deserted, and gro- tesque, but somehow royal. And we go with him to the Duke to demand the Princess's hand in form, and we hear the Brunswick guns fire their adieux of salute, as H.R.H. the Princess of Wales departs in the frost and snow; and we visit the domains of the Prince Bishop of Osnaburg— the Duke of York of our early time; and we dodge about from the French revolutionists, whose ragged legions are pouring over Holland and Ger- many, and gaily trampling down the old world to the tune of pa ii'aj and we take shipping at Slade, and we land at Greenwich, where the Princess's ladies and the Prince's ladies are in waiting to receive her Royal Highness. What a history follows! Arrived in London, the bridegroom hastened eagerly to receive his bride. When she was first presented to him. Lord Malmesbury says she very properly attempted to kneel. He raised her 134 THE FOUR GEORGES gracefull}' enough, embraced her, and turning round to me, said, — " Harris, I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy." I said, " Sir, had you not better have a glass of water? " Upon which, much out of humour, he said, with an oath, " No; I will go to the Queen." What could be expected from a wedding which had such a beginning— from such a bridegroom and such a bride? I am not going to carry you through the scandal of that story, or follow the poor Princess through all her vagaries; her balls and her dances, her travels to Jeru- salem and Naples, her jigs, and her junketings, and her tears. As I read her trial in history, I vote she is not guilty. I don't say it is an impartial verdict ; but as one reads her story the heart bleeds for the kindly, generous, outraged creature. If wrong there be, let it lie at his door who wickedly thrust her from it. Spite of her fol- lies, the great hearty people of England loved, and pro- tected, and pitied her. " God bless you! we will bring your husband back to you," said a mechanic one day, as she told Lady Charlotte Bury with tears streaming down her cheeks. They could not bring that husband back ; they could not cleanse that selfish heart. Was hers the only one he had wounded? Steeped in selfishness, impotent for faithful attachment and manly enduring love,— had it not survived remorse, was it not accus- tomed to desertion? Malmesbury gives us the beginning of the marriage story;— how the Prince reeled into chapel to be married; how he hiccupped out his vows of fidelity — you know how he kept them ; how he pursued the woman whom he GEORGE THE FOURTH 135 had married ; to what a state he brought her ; with what blows he struck her; with what mahgnity he jjursued her; what his treatment of his daughter was; and what THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES his own life. He the first gentleman of Europe ! There is no stronger satire on the proud English society of that day, than that they admired George. No, thank God, we can tell of better gentlemen; and whilst our eyes turn away, shocked, from this monstrous image of pride, vanity, weakness, they may see in that England over which the last George pretended to reign, some who merit indeed the title of gentlemen, some who 136 THE FOUR GEORGES make our hearts beat when we hear their names, and whose memory we fondly salute when that of yonder imperial manikin is tumbled into oblivion. I will take men of my own profession of letters. I will take Walter Scott, who loved the King, and who was his sword and buckler, and championed him like that brave High- lander in his own story, who fights round his craven chief. What a good gentleman ! What a friendly soul, what a generous hand, what an amiable life was that of the noble Sir Walter! I will take another man of let- ters, whose life I admire even more,— an English wor- thy, doing his duty for fifty noble years of labour, day by day storing up learning, day by day working for scant wages, most charitable out of his small means, bravely faithful to the calling which he had chosen, re- fusing to turn from his path for popular praise or princes' favour;— I mean Robert Southey. We have left his old political landmarks miles and miles behind; we protest against his dogmatism ; nay, we begin to for- get it and his politics : but I hope his life will not be for- gotten, for it is sublime in its simplicity, its energy, its honour, its affection. In the combat between Time and Thalaba, I suspect the former destroyer has conquered. Kehama's curse frightens very few readers now; but Southey's private letters are worth piles of epics, and are sure to last among us, as long as kind hearts like to sym- pathize with goodness and purity, and love and upright life. " If your feehngs are like mine," he writes to his wife, " I will not go to Lisbon without you, or I will stay at home, and not part from you. For though not unhappy when away, still without you I am not happy. For your sake, as well as my own and little Edith's, I will not consent to any separation; the growth of a GEORGE THE FOURTH 137 year's love between her and me, if it please God she should live, is a thing too delightful in itself, and too valuable in its consequences, to be given up for any light inconvenience on your part or mine. ... On these things we will talk at leisure ; only, dear, dear Edith, we must not part! " This was a poor literary gentleman. The First Gen- tleman in Europe had a wife and daughter too. Did he love them so? Was he faithful to them? Did he sacri- fice ease for them, or show them the sacred examples of religion and honour? Heaven gave the Great English Prodigal no such good fortune. Peel proposed to make a baronet of Southey ; and to this advancement the King agreed. The poet nobly rejected the offered promotion. " I have," he wrote, " a pension of 200Z. a year, con- ferred upon me by the good offices of my old friend C. Wynn, and I have the laureateship. The salary of the latter was immediately appropriated, as far as it went, to a life-insurance for 3,000/., which, with an earlier in- surance, is the sole provision I have made for my family. All beyond must be derived from my own industry. Writing for a livelihood, a livelihood is all that I have gained; for, having also something better in view, and never, therefore, having courted popularity, nor written for the mere sake of gain, it has not been possible for me to lay by anything. Last year, for the first time in my life, I was provided with a year's expenditure before- hand. This exposition may show how unbecoming and unwise it would be to accept the rank which, so greatly to my honour, you have solicited for me." How noble his poverty is, compared to the wealth of his master! His acceptance even of a pension was made the object of his opponents' satire : but think of the merit 138 THE FOUR GEORGES and modesty of this State pensioner; and that other enormous drawer of pubHc money, who receives 100,- OOOl. a year, and comes to Parliament with a request for 650,000/. more! Another true knight of those days was Cuthbert Col- lingwood; and I think, since heaven made gentlemen, there is no record of a better one than that. Of brighter deeds, I grant you, we may read performed by others; but where of a nobler, kinder, more beautiful life of duty, of a gentler, truer heart? Beyond dazzle of suc- cess and blaze of genius, I fancy shining a hundred and a hundred times higher, the sublime purity of Colling- wood's gentle glory. His heroism stirs British hearts when we recall it. His love, and goodness, and piety make one thrill with happy emotion. As one reads of him and his great comrade going into the victory with which their names are immortally connected, how the old English word comes up, and that old English feeling of what I should like to call Christian honour! What gen- tlemen they were, what great hearts they had! " We can, my dear Coll," writes Nelson to him, " have no little jealousies; we have only one great object in view,— that of meeting the enemy, and getting a glorious peace for our country." At Trafalgar, when the " Royal Sover- eign" was pressing alone into the midst of the combined fleets. Lord Nelson said to Captain Blackwood: " See how that noble fellow, Collingwood, takes his ship into action! How I envy him! " The very same throb and impulse of heroic generosity was beating in Colling- wood's honest bosom. As he led into the fight, he said: *' What would Nelson give to be here! " After the action of the 1st of June, he writes:—" We cruised for a few days, like disappointed people looking GEORGE THE FOURTH 139 for what they could not find, until the morning of little Sarah's birthday, between eight and nine o'clock, when the French fleet, of twenty-five sail of the line, was dis- covered to windward. We chased them, and they bore down within about five miles of us. The night was spent in watching and preparation for the succeeding day ; and many a blessing did I send forth to my Sarah, lest I should never bless her more. At dawn, we made our ap- proach on the enemy, then drew up, dressed our ranks, and it was about eight when the admiral made the signal for each ship to engage her opponent, and bring her to close action; and then down we went under a crowd of sail, and in a manner that would have animated the cold- est heart, and struck terror into the most intrepid en- emy. The ship we were to engage was two ahead of the French admiral, so we had to go through his fire and that of two ships next to him, and received all their broadsides two or three times, before we fired a gun. It was then near ten o'clock. I observed to the admiral, that about that time our wives were going to church, but that I thought the peal we should ring about the French- man's ear would outdo their parish bells." There are no words to tell what the heart feels in reading the simple phrases of such a hero. Here is vic- tory and courage, but love sublimer and superior. Here is a Christian soldier spending the night before battle in watching and preparing for the succeeding day, think- ing of his dearest home, and sending many blessings forth to his Sarah, " lest he should never bless her more." Who would not say Amen to his supplication? It was a benediction to his country— the prayer of that intrepid loving heart. We have spoken of a good soldier and good men of 140 THE FOUR GEORGES letters as specimens of English gentlemen of the age just past: may we not also— many of my elder hearers, I am sure, have read, and fondly remember his delight- ful story— speak of a good divine, and mention Regi- nald Heber as one of the best of Enghsh gentlemen? The charming poet, the happy possessor of all sorts of gifts and accomplishments, birth, wit, fame, high char- acter, competence— he was the beloved parish priest in his own home of Hoderel, " counselling his people in their troubles, advising them in their difficulties, com- forting them in distress, kneeling often at their sick beds at the hazard of his own life; exhorting, encouraging where there was need ; where there was strife the peace- maker; where there was want the free giver." When the Indian bishopric was oiFered to him he re- fused at first; but after communing with himself (and committing his case to the quarter whither such pious men are wont to carry their doubts) , he withdrew his re- fusal, and prepared himself for his mission and to leave his beloved parish. " Little children, love one another, and forgive one another," were the last sacred words he said to his weeping people. He parted with them, know- ing, perhaps, he should see them no more. Like those other good men of whom we have just spoken, love and duty were his life's aim. Happy he, happy they who were so gloriously faithful to both! He writes to his wife those charming lines on his journey: — " If thou, my love, wert by my side, my babies at my knee. How gladly would our pinnace glide o'er Gunga's mimic sea ! I miss thee at the dawning gray, when, on our deck reclined, In careless ease my limbs I lay and woo the cooler wind. GEORGE THE FOURTH 141 I miss thee when by Gunga's stream my twilight steps I guide ; But most beneath the lamp's pale beam I miss thee by my side. I spread my books, my pencil try, the lingering moon to cheer ; But miss thy kind approving eye, thy meek attentive ear. But when of morn and eve the star beholds me on my knee, I feel, though thou art distant far, thy prayers ascend for me. Then on ! then on ! where duty leads my course be onward still,— O'er broad Hindostan's sultry meads, o'er bleak Almorah's hill. That course nor Delhi's kingly gates, nor wild Malwah detain. For sweet the bliss us both awaits by yonder western main. Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say, across the dark blue sea: But ne'er were hearts so blithe and gay as there shall meet in thee!" Is it not CoUingwood and Sarah, and Southey and Edith? His affection is part of his life. What were life without it? Without love, I can fancy no gentle- man. How touching is a remark Heber makes in his " Travels through India," that on inquiring of the na- tives at a town, which of the governors of India stood highest in the opinion of the people, he found that, though Lord Wellesley and Warren Hastings were honoured as the two greatest men who had ever ruled this part of the world, the people spoke with chief affec- tion of Judge Cleaveland, who had died, aged twenty- nine, in 1784. The people have built a monument over him, and still hold a religious feast in his memory. So does his own country still tend with a heart's regard the memory of the gentle Heber, 142 THE FOUR GEORGES And Cleaveland died in 1784, and is still loved by the heathen, is he? Why, that year 1784 was remarkable in the life of our friend the First Gentleman of Europe. Do you not know that he was twenty-one in that year, and opened Carlton House with a grand ball to the no- bility and gentry, and doubtless wore that lovely pink coat which we have described. I was eager to read about the ball, and looked to the old magazines for informa- tion. The entertainment took place on the 10th Feb- ruary. In the European Magazine of JNIarch, 1784, I came straightway upon it :,— " The alterations at Carlton House being finished, we lay before our readers a description of the state apart- ments as they appeared on the 10th instant, when H.R.H. gave a grand ball to the principal nobility and gentry The entrance to the state room fills the mind with an inexpressible idea of greatness and splen- dour. " The state chair is of a gold frame, covered with crimson damask; on each corner of the feet is a lion's head, expressive of fortitude and strength; the feet of the chair have serpents twining round them, to denote wisdom. Facing the throne, appears the helmet of Minerva; and over the windows, glory is represented by Saint George with a superb gloria. " But the saloon may be styled the clief dfoeuvre, and in every ornament discovers great invention. It is hung with a figured lemon satin. The window-curtains, sofas, and chairs are of the same colour. The ceiling is orna- mented with emblematical paintings, representing the Graces and Muses, together with Jupiter, ^Mercury, Apollo, and Paris. Two ormolu chandeliers are placed here. It is impossible by expression to do justice to the GEORGE THE FOURTH 143 extraordinary workmanship, as well as design, of the ornaments. They each consist of a palm, branching out in five directions for the reception of lights. A beau- tiful figure of a rural nymph is represented entwining the stems of the tree with wreaths of flowers. In the* centre of the room is a rich chandelier. To see this apartment dans son plus beau jour, it should be viewed in the glass over the chimney-piece. The range of apart- ments from the saloon to the ball-room, when the doors are open, formed one of the grandest spectacles that ever was beheld." In the Gentleman's Magazine, for the very same month and year— March, 1784— is an account of an- other festival, in which another great gentleman of Eng- lish extraction is represented as taking a principal share: — " According to order, H.E. the Commander-in-Chief was admitted to a public audience of Congress; and, being seated, the President, after a pause, informed him that the United States assembled were ready to receive his communications. Whereupon he arose, and spoke as follows : — " ' Mr. President,— The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place, I present myself before Congress to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indul- gence of retiring from the service of my country. " ' Happy in the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty, I resign the appointment I accepted with diffidence; which, however, was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of the nation, and the patronage of Heaven. I close this last act of my official life, by com- 144 THE FOUR GEORGES mending the interests of our dearest country to the pro- tection of Ahnighty God, and those who have the super- intendence of them to His holy keeping. Having finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action; and, bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission and take my leave of the employments of my public life.' To which the President replied:— " ' Sir, having defended the standard of liberty in the New World, having taught a lesson useful to those who inflict and those who feel oppression, you retire with the blessings of your fellow-citizens; though the glory of your virtues will not terminate with your military com- mand, but will descend to remotest ages.' " Which was the most splendid spectacle ever wit- nessed;— the opening feast of Prince George in Lon- don, or the resignation of Washington? Which is the noble character for after ages to admire;— yon fribble dancing in lace and spangles, or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after a life of spotless honour, a purity unreproached, a courage indomitable, and a con- summate victory? Which of these is the true gentle- man? What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to have lofty aims, to lead a pure life, to keep your honour virgin ; to have the esteem of your fellow-citizens, and the love of your fireside ; to bear good fortune meekly ; to suffer evil with constancy; and through evil or good to maintain truth always? Show me the happy man whose life ex- hibits these qualities, and him we will salute as gentle- man, whatever his rank may be ; show me the prince who possesses them, and he may be sure of our love and loy- alty. The heart of Britain still beats kindly for George GEORGE THE FOURTH 145 III.,— not because he was wise and just, but because he was pure in hfe, honest in intent, and because according to his lights he worshipped heaven. I think we acknow- ledge in the inheritrix of his sceptre, a wiser rule, and a life as honourable and pure; and I am sure the future painter of our manners will pay a willing allegiance to that good life, and be loyal to the memory of that un- sullied virtue. THE END OF THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SWIFT IN treating of the English humourists of the past age, it is of the men and of their lives, rather than of their books, that I ask permission to speak to you; and in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to enter- tain you with a merely humourous or facetious story. Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and see Harlequin^— a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask or disguise or uniform he presents it to the public. And as all of you here must needs be grave when you think of your own past and present, you will not look to find, in the histories of those whose lives and feelings I am going to try and describe to you, a story that is otherwise than serious, and often very sad. If Humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humourous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin just men- tioned, who possesses in common with these the power > The anecdote is frequently told of our performer Rich. U9 150 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness— your scorn for un- truth, pretension, imposture— your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Ac- cordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him— sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people's lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon his life when he is gone — and yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon. Of English parents, and of a good English family of clergymen,^ Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after the death of his father, v/ho had come to practise there as a lawyer. The boy went to school at Kilkenny, and afterwards to Trinity College, Dublin, * He was from a younger branch of the Swifts of Yorkshire. His grand- father, the Rev. Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire, sutfered for his loyalty in Charles I.'s time. That gentleman married Elizabeth Dry- den, a member of the family of the poet. Sir Walter Scott gives, with his characteristic minuteness in such points, the exact relationship between these famous men. Swift was " the son of Dryden's second cousin." Swift, too, was the enemy of Dryden's reputation. Witness the " Battle of the Books:"— "The difference was greatest among the horse," says he of the moderns, " where every private trooper pretended to the command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Withers." And in "Poetry, a Rhapsody," he advises the poetaster to— " Read all the Prefaces of Dryden, For these our critics much confide in. Though merely writ, at first for filling, To raise the volume's price a shilling." " Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet," was the phrase of Dryden to his kinsman, which remained alive in a memory tenacious of such matters. SWIFT 151 where he got a degree with difficulty, and was wild, and witty, and poor. In 1688, by the recommendation of his mother, Swift was received into the family of Sir Wil- ham Temple, who had known Mrs. Swift in Ireland. He left his patron in 1694, and the next year took orders in Dublin. But he threw up the small Irish preferment which he got and returned to Temple, in whose family he remained until Sir William's death in 1699. His hopes of advancement in England failing, Swift re- turned to Ireland, and took the living of Laracor. Hither he invited Hester Johnson,^ Temple's natural daughter, with whom he had contracted a tender friend- ship, while they w^ere both dependants of Temple's. And with an occasional visit to England, Swift now passed nine years at home. In 1709 he came to England, and, with a brief visit to Ireland, during which he took possession of his dean- ery of St. Patrick, he now passed five years in England, taking the most distinguished part in the political trans- actions which terminated with the death of Queen Anne. After her death, his party disgraced, and his hopes of ambition over. Swift returned to Dublin, where he re- mained twelve years. In this time he wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" and "Gulliver's Travels." He married Hester Johnson, Stella, and buried Esther Vanhomrigh, Vanessa, who had followed him to Ire- land from London, where she had contracted a violent passion for him. In 1726 and 1727 Swift was in Eng- land, which he quitted for the last time on hearing of his wife's illness. Stella died in January, 1728, and Swift not until 1745, having passed the last five of the ^ " Miss Hetty " she was called in the family— where her face, and her dress, and Sir William's treatment of her, all made the real fact about her birth plain enough. Sir William left her a thousand pounds. 152 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS seventy-eight years of his hf e with an impaired intellect and keepers to watch him.^ You know, of course, that Swift has had many biog- raphers; his Ufe has been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, Scott, who admires but can't bring himself to love him; and by stout old Johnson,' who, forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition, scans him from head to foot, and passes over to the other side of the street. Dr. Wilde of Dublin,^ who has written a most * Sometimes, during his mental affliction, he continued walking about the house for many consecutive hours; sometimes he remained in a kind of tor- por. At times,' he would seem to struggle to bring into distinct consciousness, and shape into expression, the intellect that lay smothering under gloomy obstruction in him. A pier-glass falling by accident, nearly fell on him. He said he wished it had ! He once repeated slowly several times, " I am what I am." The last thing he wrote was an epigram on the building of a maga- zine for arms and stores, which was pointed out to him as he went abroad during his mental disease: — " Behold a proof of Irish sense: Here Irish wit is seen: When nothing's left that's worth defence. They build a magazine ! " ^ Besides these famous books of Scott's and Johnson's, there is a copious "Life" by Thomas Sheridan (Dr. Johnson's "Sherry"), father of Richard Brinsley, and son of that good-natured, clever Irish Dr. Thomas Sheridan, Swift's intimate, who lost his chaplaincy by so unluckily choosing for a text on the King's birthday, "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!" Not to mention less important works, there is also the "Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift," by that polite and dignified writer, the Earl of Orrery. His lordship is said to have striven for literary renown, chiefly that he might make up for the slight passed on him by his father, who left his library away from him. It is to be feared that the ink he used to wash out that stain only made it look bigger. He had, however, known Swift, and corresponded witii people who knew him. His work (which appeared in 1751) provoked a good deal of controversy, calling out, among other bro- chures, the interesting " Observations on Lord Orrery's Remarks," &c., of Dr. Delany. ' Dr. Wilde's book was written on the occasion of the remains of Swift and Stella being brought to the light of day— a thing which happened in 1835, when certain works going on in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, af- forded an opportunity of their being examined. One hears with surprise of these skulls "going the rounds" of houses, and being made the objects of dilettante curiosity. The larynx of Swift was actually carried off! Phren- ologists had a low" opinion of "his intellect from the observations they took. Dr. Wilde traces the symptoms of ill health in Swift, as detailed in his writings from time to time. He observes, likewise, that the skull gave evi- SWIFT 153 interesting volume on the closing- years of Swift's life, calls Johnson "the most malignant of his biographers:" it is not easy for an English critic to please Irishmen — perhaps to try and please them. And yet Johnson truly admires Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift's change of politics, or doubt his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into his breast, and moves off from him.^ Would we have liked to live with him? That is a question which, in dealing with these people's works, and thinking of their lives and peculiarities, every reader of biographies must put to himself. Would you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean? I should like to have been Shakspeare's shoeblack— just to have lived in his house, just to have w^orshipped him— to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet serene face. I should like, as a young man, to have lived on Fielding's stair- case in the Temple, and after helping him up to bed perhaps, and opening his door wdth his latch-key, to have shaken hands with him in the morning, and heard him talk and crack jokes over his breakfast and his mug of small beer. Who would not give something to pass a night at the club with Johnson, and Gold- smith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck? The charm of Addison's companionship and conversation has passed to us by fond tradition— but Swift? If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great dence of " diseased action " of the brain during life— such as would be pro- duced by an increasing tendency to " cerebral congestion." i"He [Dr. Johnson] seemed to me to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for I once took the liberty to ask him if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me he had not."— Boswzll's Tour to the Hebrides. 154 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely) , his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you,^ and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you — watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object in view but the indulgence of his humour, and that he was the most reckless, simple creature in the world. How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for j^ou ! and made fun of the Opposition ! His servility was so bois- terous that it looked like independence ; - he would have ^ Few men, to be sure, dared this experiment, but yet their success was en- couraging. One gentleman made a point of asking the Dean whether his uncle Godwin had not given him his education. Swift, who hated that subject cordially, and, indeed, cared little for his kindred, said, sternly, "Yes; he gave me the education of a dog." " Then, sir," cried the other, striking his fist on the table, " you have not the gratitude of a dog ! " Other occasions there were when a bold face gave the Dean pause, even after his Irish almost-royal position was established. But he brought himself into greater danger on a certain occasion, and the amusing circumstances may be once more repeated here. He had unsparingly lashed the notable Dublin lawyer, Mr. Serjeant Bettesworth— " Thus at the bar, the booby Bettesworth, Though half-a-crown o'er-pays his sweat's worth, Who knows in law nor text nor margent. Calls Singleton his brother-serjeant ! " The Serjeant, it is said, swore to have his life. He presented himself at the deanery. The Dean asked his name. " Sir, I am Serjeant Bett-es-worth." "In what regiment, pray?" asked Swift. A guard of Volunteers formed themselves to defend the Dean at this time. *"But, my Hamilton, I will never hide the freedom of my sentiments from you. I am much inclined to believe that the temper of my friend Swift might occasion his English friends to wish him happily and properly pro- moted at a distance. His spirit, for I would give it the softest name, was SWIFT 155 done your errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and after fighting your battles, masked, in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo. ^ He says as much himself in one of his letters to Bohngbroke:— "All my endeavours to distinguish my- self were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts ; whether right or wrong is no great matter. And so the reputation of wit and great learn- ing does the office of a blue riband or a coach and six." ^ Could there be a greater candour? It is an outlaw, who says, "These are my brains; with these I'll win titles and compete with fortune. These are my bullets; these ever untractable. The motions of his genius were often irregular. He as- sumed more the air of a patron than of a friend. He affected rather to dic- tate than advise."— Orrery. 1 " . . . . An anecdote, which, though only told by Mrs. Pilkington, is well attested, bears, that the last time he was in London he went to dine with the Earl of Burlington, who was but newly married. The Earl, it is sup- posed, being willing to have a little diversion, did not introduce him to his lady nor mention his name. After dinner said the Dean, ' Lady Burlington, I hear you can sing; sing me a song.' The lady looked on this unceremonious manner of asking a favour with distaste, and positively refused. He said, ' She should sing, or he would make her. Why, madam, I suppose you take me for one of your poor English hedge-parsons; sing when I bid you.' As the Earl did nothing but laugh at this freedom, the lady was so vexed that she burst into tears and retired. His first compliment to her when he saw her again was, ' Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill natured now as when I saw you last ? ' To which she answered with great good-humour, ' No, Mr. Dean; I'll sing for you if you please.' From which time he conceived a great esteem for her."— Scott's Life. " . . . . He had not the least tincture of vanity in his conversation. He was, perhaps, as he said himself, too proud to be vain. When he was polite, it was in a manner entirely his own. In his friendships he was constant and undisguised. He was the same in his enmities." — Orrery. ^ " I make no figure but at court, where I affect to turn from a lord to the meanest of my acquaintances."— Jottrnai to Stella. " I am plagued with bad authors, verse and prose, who send me their books and poems, the vilest I ever saw; but I have given their names to my man, never to let them see me."— Jowrnai to Stella. The following curious paragraph illustrates the life of a courtier:— " Did I ever tell you that the Lord Treasurer hears ill with the left ear, just as I do? . . . . I dare not tell him that I am so, for fear he should think that I counterfeited to make my court ! "—Journal to Stella. 156 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS I'll turn into gold;" and he hears the sound of coaches and six, takes the road like JNlacheath, and makes society stand and deliver. They are all on their knees before him. Down go my lord bishop's apron, and his Grace's blue riband, and ni}^ lady's brocade petticoat in the mud. Pie eases the one of a living, the other of a patent place, the third of a little snug post about the Court, and gives them over to followers of his own. The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for his share, has been de- layed on the way from St. James's; and he waits and waits until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road, and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away into his own country.^ * The war of pamphlets was carried on fiercely on one side and the other : and the Whig attaciis made the Ministry Swift served very sore. Boiingliroke laid hold of several of the Opposition pamphleteers, and bewails their " fac- titiousness " in the following letter: — " BOLINGBROKE TO THE EaRL OF StEAFFORD. " Whitehall, July 93rd, 1713. " It is a melancholy consideration that the laws of our country are too weak to punish effectually those factitious scribblers, who presume to blacken the brightest characters, and to give even scurrilous language to those who are in the first degrees of honour. This, my lord, among others, is a symptom of the decayed condition of our Government, and serves to show how fatally we mistake licentiousness for liberty. All I could do was to take up Hart, the printer, to send him to Newgate, and to bind him over upon bail to be prosecuted; this I have done; and if I can arrive at legal proof against the author, Ridpath, he shall have the same treatment." Swift was not behind his illustrious friend in this virtuous indignation. In the history of the four last years of the Queen, the Dean speaks in the most edifying manner of the licentiousness of the press and the abusive language of the other party: — " It must be acknowledged that the bad practices of printers have been such as to deserve the severest animadversion from the public The adverse party, full of rage and leisure since their fall, and unanimous in their cause, eniploy a set of writers by subscription, who are well versed in all the topics of defamation, and have a style and genius levelled to the generality of tlicir readers However, the mischiefs of the press were too"exorl)itant to be cured by such a remedy as a tax upon small papers, and a bill for a much more effectual regulation of it was brought into the House of Commons, but so late in the session that there was no time to pass SWIFT 157 Swift's seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must remember that the morality was lax— that other gentlemen besides him- self took the road in his day— that pubhc society was in a strange disordered condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was being fought and won, and lost— the bells rung in WilHam's victory, in the very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's. Men were loose upon pohtics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old behefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone it, for there always appeared an unwillingness to cramp overmuch the liberty of the press." But to a clause in the proposed bill, that the names of authors should be set to every printed book, pamphlet or paper, his Reverence objects alto- gether; for, savs he, "besides the objection to this clause from the practice of pious men, vvho, in publishing excellent writings for the service of religion, have chosen, o%it of an humble Christian spirit, to conceal their names, it is certain that all persons of true genius or knowledge have an invincible modesty and suspicion of themselves upon first sending their thoughts into the world." This " invincible modesty " was no doubt the sole reason which induced the Dean to keep the secret of the " Drapier's Letters " and a hundred humble Christian works of which he was the author. As for the Opposition, the Doctor was for dealing severely with them: he writes to Stella: Journal. Letter XIX. " London, March, 25th, 1710-11. " . . . . We have let Guiscard be buried at last, after showing him pickled in a trough this fortnight for twopence a piece; and the fellow that showed would point to his body and say, 'See, gentlemen, this is the wound that was given him by his Grace the Duke of Ormond ; ' and, ' This is the wound,' &c.; and then" the show was over, and another set of rabble came in. 'Tis hard that our laws would not suffer us to hang his body in chains, be- cause he was not tried; and in the eye of the law every man is innocent till then " Journal. Letter XXVII. "London, July 25th, 1711. " I was this afternoon with Mr. Secretary at his office, and helped to hinder a man of his pardon, who is condemned for a rape. The Under Secretary was willing to save him; but I told the Secretary he could not pardon him without a favourable report from the Judge; besides, he was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue, and deserved hanging for something else, and so he shall saving." 158 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS adrift in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble, al- most everybody gambled; as in the Railway mania— not many centuries ago— almost every one took his unlucky share: a man of that time, of the vast talents and am- bition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his subsequent misan- thropy, are ascribed by some panegyrists to a deliberate conviction of mankind's unworthiness, and a desire to amend them by castigating. His youth was bitter, as that of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence; his age was bitter,^ like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it after- wards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may attribute to the gods, if he hkes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man— what statesman projecting a cow;;- what king deter- mined on an invasion of his neighbour— what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for his move? There was a French general the other day who proposed to march into this country and put it to sack and pillage, in revenge for humanity outraged by our conduct at Copenhagen: there is always some excuse for men of the aggressive turn. They are of their nature warlike, predatory, eager for fight, plunder, dominion.^ As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck— as strong * It was his constant practice to keep his birthday as a day of mourning. *" These devils of Grub Street rogues, that write the Flying PoH and Medley in one paper, will not be quiet. They are always mauling Lord Treasurer, Lord Bolingbroke, and me. We have the dog under prosecution, but Bolingbroke is not active enough; but I hojie to swinge him. He is a Scotch rogue, one Kidpath. They get out upon bail, and write on. We take them again, and get fresh b;ul; so it goes round."— Jour jia I to IStella. SWIFT 159 a wing as ever beat, belonged to Swift. I am glad, for one, that fate wrested the prey out of his claws, and cut his wings and chained him. One can gaze, and not without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars. That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the 30th November, 1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister island the honour and glory ; but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo.^ Goldsmith was an Irishman, and always an Irishman: Steele was an Irishman, and always an Irishman : Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English, his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise thrift and economy, as he ^ Swift was by no means inclined to forget such considerations ; and his English birth makes its mark, strikingly enough, every now and then in his writings. Thus in a letter to Pope (Scott's Swift, vol. xix. p. 97), he says: — " We have had your volume of letters Some of those who highly value you, and a few who knew you personally, are grieved to find you make no distinction between the English gentry of this kingdom, and the savage old Irish (who are only the vulgar, and some gentlemen who live in the Irish parts of the kingdom) ; but the English colonies, who are three parts in four, are much more civilized than many counties in England, and speak better English, and are much better bred." And again, in the fourth Drapier's Letter, we have the following: — " A short paper, printed at Bristol, and reprinted here, reports Mr. Wood to say ' that he wonders at the impudence and insolence of the Irish in re- fusing his coin.' When, by the way, it is the true English people of Ireland who refuse it, although we take it for granted that the Irish will do so too whenever they are asked." — Scott's Swift, vol. vi. p. 453. He goes further, in a good-humoured satirical paper, " On Barbarous De- nominations in Ireland," where (after abusing, as he was wont, the Scotch cadence, as well as expression,) he advances to the " Irish brogue," and speaking of the "censure" which it brings down, says:— " And what is yet worse, it is too well known that the bad consequence of this opinion affects those among us who are not the least liable to such re- proaches farther than the misfortune of being born in Ireland, although of English parents, and whose education has been chiefly in that kingdom."— Ibid. vol. vii. p. 149. But, indeed, if we are to make anything of Race at all, we must call that man an Englishman whose father comes from an old Yorkshire family, and his mother from an old Leicestershire one ! 160 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS used his money: with which he could be generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinion before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness.^ Dreading ridicule too, as a man of his humour — above all an Englishman of his humour — certainly would, he is afraid to use the poetical power which he really pos- sessed; one often fancies in reading him that he dares not be eloquent when he might; that he does not speak above his voice, as it were, and the tone of society. Hiis initiation into politics, his knowledge of business, his knowledge of polite life, his acquaintance with litera- ture even, which he could not have pursued very sedu- lously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in after life what quantities of books he de- voured there, and how King William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at Shene and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at the upper servants' table that this great and lonely Swift passed a ten years' apprenticeship— wore a cassock that was only not a livery— bent down a knee ^ "The style of his conversation was very much of a piece with that of his writings, concise and clear and strong. Being one day at a Sheriff's feast, who amongst other toasts called out to him, ' Mr. Dean, The Trade of Ire- land!' he answered quick: 'Sir, I drink no memories!' .... " Happening to be in company with a petulant young man who prided himself on saying pert things . . . and who cried out— 'You must know, Mr. Dean, that I set up for a wit? ' ' Do you so? ' says the Dean. ' Take my advice, and sit down again ! ' " At another time, being in companj'^, where a lady whisking her long train [long trains were then in fashion] swept down a fine fiddle and broke it; Swift cried out — 'Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae!'" — Dr. Dei.any: Observations upon Lord Orrery's "Remarks, 4-0. on Swift." London, 1754. SWIFT 161 as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces, or run on his honour's errands/ It was here, as he was writing at Temple's table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who had governed the great world — measured himself with them, looking up from his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah ! what platitudes he must have heard ! what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple, that that Irish- man was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift. Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service— ate humble pie and came back again ; and so for ten years went on, gathering learning, swallowing scorn, and submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune. Temple's style is the perfection of practised and easy good-breeding. If he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very gentlemanly acquain- tance with it; if he makes rather a parade of Latin, it was the custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to envelope his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he wears buckles and square- toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate grace, and you never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any lady's train or any rival's heels in the Court crowd. When that grows too hot or too agitated for * " Don't you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons? I have plucked up my spirits since then, faith: he spoiled a fine gentleman."— JowrnaZ to Stella. 162 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS him, he politely leaves it. He retires to his retreat of Shene or Moor Park ; and lets the King's party and the Prince of Orange's party battle it out among them- selves. He reveres the Sovereign (and no man perhaps ever testified to his loyalty by so elegant a bow) ; he admires the Prince of Orange; but there is one person whose ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tuHp- beds,^ chpping his apricots and pruning his essays,— the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the phil- osopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier ' " . . . The Epicureans were more intelligible in their notion, and for- tunate in their expression, when they placed a man's happiness in the tran- quillity of his mind and indolence of body; for while we are composed of both, I doubt both must have a share in the good or ill we feel. As men of several languages say the same things in very diflferent words, so in several ages, countries, constitutions of laws and religion, the same thing seems to be meant by very different expressions: what is called by the Stoics apathy, or dispassion; by the sceptics, indisturbance ; by the Molinists, quietism; by common men, peace of conscience,— seems all to mean but great tranquillity of mind. . . . For this reason Epicurus passed his life wholly in his garden; there he studied, there he exercised, there he taught his philosophy ; and, in- deed, no other sort of abode seems to contribute so much to both the tran- quillity of mind and indolence of body, which he made his chief ends. The sweetness of the air, the pleasantness of smell, the verdure of plants, the cleanness and lightness of food, the exercise of working or walking; but, above all, the exemption from cares and solicitude, seem equally to favour and improve both contemplation and health, the enjojTnent of sense and imagination, and thereby the quiet and ease both of the body and mind. . . . Where Paradise was, has been much debated, and little agreed; but what sort of place is meant by it may perhaps easier be conjectured. It seems to have been a Persian word, since Xenophon and other Greek authors mention it as what was much in use and delight among the kings of those eastern countries. Strabo describing Jericho: ' Ibi est palmetum, cui immixtae sunt etiam aliae stirpes hortenses, locus ferax palmis abundans, spatio stadionim centum, totus irriguus: ibi est Regis Balsami paradisus.' "— ^s^ay on Gar- dens. In the same famous essay Temple speaks of a friend, whose conduct and prudence he characteristically admires: " .... I thought it very prudent in a gentleman of my friends in Staf- fordshire, who is a great lover of his garden, to pretend no higher, though his soil be good enough, than to the perfection of plums; and in these (by bestowing south walls upon them) he has very well succeeded, which he could never have done in attempts upon peaches and grapes; and a good plum w certainly better than an ill peach." SWIFT 168 at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy nymph of gardens. Temple seems to have received and exacted a pro- digious deal of veneration from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed, and cuddled by the peo- ple round about him, as delicately as any of the plants which he loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was aghast at his indisposition : mild Dorothea his wife, the best companion of the best of men— " Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great. Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate." As for Dorinda, his sister,— " Those who would grief describe, might come and trace Its watery footsteps in Dorinda's face. To see her weep, joy every face forsook. And grief flung sables on each menial look. The humble tribe mourned for the quickening soul. That furnished spirit and motion through the whole." Isn't that line in which grief is described as putting the menials into a mourning hvery, a fine image? One of the menials wrote it, who did not like that Temple livery nor those twenty-pound wages. Cannot one fancy the uncouth young servitor, with downcast eyes, books and papers in hand, following at his honour's heels in the garden walk; or taking his honour's orders as he stands by the great chair, where Sir William has the gout, and his feet all blistered with moxa? When Sir Wilham has the gout or scolds it must be hard work 164 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS at the second table*/ the Irish secretary owned as much afterwards: and when he came to dinner, how he must have lashed and growled and torn the household with his gibes and scorn ! What would the steward say about the pride of them Irish schoUards — and this one had got no great credit even at his Irish college, if the truth were known— and what a contempt his Excellency's own gen- tleman must have had for Parson Teague from Dublin. { The valets and chaplains were always at war. It is hard to say which Swift thought the more contemptible. ) And what must have been the sadness, the sadness and terror, of the housekeeper's little daughter with the curling black ringlets and the sweet smiling face, when the secretary who teaches her to read and write, and whom she loves and reverences above all things— above mother, ' Swift's Thoughts on Hanging. {Directions to Servants.) "To grow old in the office of a footman is the highest of all indignities; therefore, when you find years coming on without hopes of a place at court, a command in the army, a succession to the stewardship, an employment in the revenue (which two last you cannot obtain without reading and writing), or running away with your master's niece or daughter, I directly advise you to go upon the road, which is the only post of honour left you: there you will meet many of your old comrades, and live a short life and a merry one, and make a figure at your exit, wherein I will give you some instructions. " The last advice I give you relates to your behaviour when you are going to be hanged: which, either for robbing your master, for housebreaking, or going upon the highway, or in a drunken quarrel by killing the first man you meet, may very probably be your lot, and is owing to one of these three qualities: either a love of good-fellowship, a generosity of mind, or too much vivacity of spirits. Your good behaviour on this article will concern your whole community: deny the fact with all solemnity of imprecations: a hun- dred of your brethren, if they can be admitted, will attend about the bar, and be ready upon demand to give you a character before the Court; let nothing prevail on you to confess, but the promise of a pardon for discover- ing your comrades: but I suppose all this to be in vain; for if you escape now, your fjite will be the same another day. Get a speech to be written by the best author of Newgate: some of your kind wenches will provide yoii with a holland shirt and white cap, crowned with a crimson or black ribbon: take leave cheerfully of all your friends in Newgate: mount the cart with courage; fall on your knees; lift up your eyes; hold a book in your hands, al- though you cannot read a word; deny the fact at the gallows! kiss and for- give the hangman, and so farewell; you shall be buried in pomp at the charge of the fraternity: the surgeon shall not touch a limb of you; and your fame shall continue until a successor of equal renown succeeds in your place. . . ." SWIFT 165 above mild Dorothea, above that tremendous Sir Wil- liam in his square-toes and periwig,— when Mr. Swift comes down from his master with rage in his heart, and has not a kind word even for little Hester Johnson? Perhaps, for the Irish secretary, his Excellency's con- descension was even more cruel than his frowns. Sir William would perpetually quote Latin and' the ancient classics apropos of his gardens and his Dutch statues and plates-handes, and talk about Epicurus and Diog- enes Laertius, Julius Caesar, Semiramis, and the gardens of the Hesperides, Maecenas, Strabo describing Jericho, and the Assyrian kings. Apropos of beans, he would mention Pythagoras's precept to abstain from beans, and that this precept probably meant that wise men should abstain from public affairs. He is a placid Epicurean; he is a Pythagorean philosopher; he is a wise man— that is the deduction. Does not Swift think so? One can imagine the downcast eyes lifted up for a moment, and the flash of scorn which they emit. Swift's eyes were as azure as the heavens; Pope says nobly (as everything Pope said and thought of his friend was good and noble) , " His eyes are as azure as the heavens, and have a charming archness in them." And one per- son in that household, that pompous, stately, kindly Moor Park, saw heaven nowhere else. But the Temple amenities and solemnities did not agree with Swift. He was half -killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins; and in a garden-seat which he devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily the stock of books within his reach, he caught a vertigo and deafness which punished and tormented him through life. He could not bear the place or the servitude. Even in that poem of courtly condolence, 166 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS from which we have quoted a few lines of mock melan- choly, he breaks out of the funereal procession with a mad shriek, as it were, and rushes away crying his own grief, cursing his own fate, foreboding madness, and forsaken by fortune, and even hope. I don't know anything more melancholy than the letter to Temple, in which, after having broke from his bondage, the poor wretch crouches piteously towards his cage again, and deprecates his master's anger. He asks for testimonials for orders. "The particulars re- quired of me are what relate to morals and learning; and the reasons of quitting your honour's family— that is, whether the last was occasioned by any ill action. They are left entirely to your honour's mercy, though in the first I think I cannot reproach myself for any- thing further than for infirmities. This is all I dare at present beg from your honour, under circumstances of life not worth your regard: what is left me to wish (next to the health and prosperity of your honour and family) is that Heaven would one day allow me the opportunity of leaving my acknowledgments at your feet. I beg my most humble duty and service be pre- sented to my ladies, your honour's lady and sister."— Can prostration fall deeper? could a slave bow lower ?^ * " He continued in Sir William Temple's house till the death of that great man." —Anecdotes of the Family of Swift, by the Deak. " It has since pleased God to take this great and good person to himself." — Preface to Temple's Works. On all public occasions, Swift speaks of Sir William in the same tone. But the reader will better understand how acutely he remembered the in- dignities he suflFered in his household, from the subjoined extracts from the Journal to Stella:— " I called at Mr. Secretary the other day, to see what the d ailed liim on Sunday: I made him a very proper speech; told him I observed he was much out of temper, that I did not expect he would tell me the cause, but would be glad to see he was in better; and one thing I warned him of — never to appear cold to. me, for I would not l)e treated like a schoolboy; that I had felt too much of that in my life already" {meaniny Sir William Tem- ple), &c. SiC— Journal to Stella. SWIFT 167 Twenty years afterwards Bishop Kennet, describing the same man, says, "Dr. Swift came into the coffee- house and had a bow from everybody but me. When I came to the antechamber [at Court] to wait before prayers, Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the Duke of Ormond, to get a place for a clergyman. He was promising Mr. Thorold to under- take, with my Lord Treasurer, that he should obtain a salary of 200Z. per annum as member of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going into the Queen with the red bag, and told him aloud, he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He took out his gold watch, and telling the time of day, complained that it was very late. A gen- tleman said he was too fast. 'How can I help it,' says the Doctor, 'if the courtiers give me a watch that won't go right?' Then he instructed a young nobleman, that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist) , who had begun a translation of Homer into English, for which he would have them all subscribe: 'For,' says he, 'he shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.'^ Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, " I am thinking what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple because he might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment."— /6id. "The Secretary is as easy with me as Mr. Addison was. I have often thought what a splutter Sir William Temple makes about being Secretary of State."— 76id. " Lord Treasurer has had an ugly fit of the rheumatism, but is now quite well. I was playing at one-and-thirty with him and his family the other night. He gave us all twelvepence apiece to begin with; it put me in mind of Sir William Temple."— 76ic/. " I thought I saw Jack Temple [nephew to Sir William] and his wife pass by me to-day in their coach ; but I took no notice of them. I am glad I have wholly shaken oflF that family."— -S. to S. Sept. 1710. ' " Swift must be allowed," says Dr. Johnson, " for a time, to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation." A conversation on the Dean's pamphlets excited one of the Doctor's live- 168 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him,— both went off just before prayers." There's a little malice in the Bishop's "just before prayers." This picture of the great Dean seems a true one, and is harsh, though not altogether unpleasant. He was doing good, and to deserving men too, in the midst of these intrigues and triumphs. His journals and a thousand anecdotes of him relate his kind acts and rough manners. His hand was constantly stretched out to relieve an honest man— he was cautious about his money, but ready.— If you were in a strait would you like such a benefactor ? I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner.^ He insulted a man as he served him, made women cry, guests look foolish, bullied unlucky friends, and flung his bene- factions into poor men's faces. No; the Dean was no Irishman— no Irishman ever gave but with a kind word and a kind heart. It is told, as if it were to Swift's credit, that the Dean liest sallies. " One, in particular, praised his ' Conduct of the Allies.' — Johnson: 'Sir, his 'Conduct of the Allies' is a performance of very little ability. . . . Why, sir, Tom Davies might have written the ' Conduct of the Allies! ' "— Boswell's Life of Johnson. ' " Whenever he fell into the company of any person for the first time, it was his custom to try their tempers and disposition by some abrupt question that bore the appearance of rudeness. If this were well taken, and answered with good humour, he afterwards made amends by his civilities. But if he saw any marks of resentment, from alarmed pride, vanity, or conceit, he dropped all further intercourse with the party. This will be illustrated by an anecdote of that sort related by Mrs. Pilkington. After supper, the Dean having decanted a bottle of wine, poured what remained into a glass, and seeing it was muddy, presented it to Mr. Pilkington to drink it. ' For,' said he, ' I always keep some poor parson to drink the foul wine for me.' Mr. Pilkington, entering into his humour, thanked him, and told iiim ' he did not know the difference, but was glad to get a glass at any rate.' ' Why, then,' said the Dean, 'you shan't, for I'll drink it myself. Why, take you, you are wiser than a paltry curate whom I asked to dine with me a few days ago; for upon my making the same speech to him, he said he did not understand such usage, and so walked off witliout his dinner. By tlie same token, I told the gentleman who recommended him to me tliat the fellow was a blockhead, and 1 had done with him.' "— Sheiudan's Life of Sivift. SWIFT 169 of St. Patrick's performed his family devotions every morning- regularly, but with such secrecy that the guests in his house were never in the least aware of the ceremony. There was no need surely why a church dignitary should assemble his family privily in a crypt, and as if he was afraid of heathen persecution. But I think the world was right, and the bishops who advised Queen Anne, when they counselled her not to appoint the author of the "Tale of a Tub" to a bishopric, gave perfectly good advice. The man who wrote the arguments and illus- trations in that wild book, could not but be aware what must be the sequel of the propositions which he laid down. The boon companion of Pope and Bolingbroke, who chose these as the friends of his life, and the re- cipients of his confidence and affection, must have heard many an argument, and joined in many a conversation over Pope's port, or St. John's burgundy, which would not bear to be repeated at other men's boards. I know of few things more conclusive as to the sin- cerity of Swift's religion than his advice to poor John Gay to turn clergyman, and look out for a seat on the Bench. Gay, the author of the "Beggar's Opera"— Gay, the wildest of the wits about town— it was this man that Jonathan Swift advised to take orders— to invest in a cassock and bands— just as he advised him to husband his shillings and put his thousand pounds out at interest.^ The Queen, and the bishops, and the world, were right in mistrusting the religion of that man. ^ " From the Archbishop of Cashell. "Dear Sir,— "Cashell, May 31st, 1735. " I HAVE been so unfortunate in all my contests of late, that I am re- solved to have no more, especially where I am likely to be overmatched ; and as I have some reason to hope what is past will be forgotten, I confess I did endeavour in my last to put the best colour I could think of upon a very bad cause. My friends judge right of my idleness; but, in reality, it has hitherto 170 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS I am not here, of course, to speak of any man's re- ligious views, except in so far as they influence his liter- ary character, his life, his humour. The most notorious sinners of all those fellow-mortals whom it is our busi- ness to discuss — Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially loud, and I believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief; they belaboured freethinkers, and stoned imaginary atheists on all sorts of occasions, going- out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with debt, with drink, with all sorts proceeded from a hurry and confusion, arising from a thousand unlucky un- foreseen accidents rather than mere sloth. I have but one troublesome affair now upon my hands, which, by the help of the prime Serjeant, I hope soon to get rid of; and then you shall see me a true Irish bishop. Sir James Ware has made a very useful collection of the memorable actions of my predeces- sors. He tells me, they were born in such a town of England or Ireland; were consecrated such a year; and if not translated, were buried in the Cathedral church, either on the north or south side. Whence I conclude, that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die; which laudable example I propose for the remainder of my life to fol- low; for to tell you the truth, I have for these four or five years past met with so much treachery, baseness, and ingratitude among mankind, that I can hardly think it incumbent on any man to endeavour to do good to so per- verse a generation. "I am truly concerned at the account j^ou give me of your iiealth. With- out doubt a southern ramble will prove the best remedy you can take to re- cover your flesh; and I do not know, except in one stage, where you can choose a road so suited to your circumstances, as from Dublin hither. You have to Kilkenny a turnpike and good inns, at every ten or twelve miles' end. From Kilkenny hither is twenty long miles, bad road, and no inns at all: but I have an expedient for you. At the foot of a very high hill, just midwaj^ there lives in a neat thatched cabin, a parson, who is not poor; his wife is allowed to be the best little woman in the world. Her chickens are the fat- test, and her ale the best in all the country. Besides, the parson has a little cellar of his own, of which he keeps the key, where he always has a hogshead of the best wine that can be got, in bottles well corked, upon their side; and he cleans, and pulls out the cork better, I think, than Robin. Here I design to meet you with a coach; if you be tired, you shall stay all night; if not, after dinner, we will set out about four, and l)e at Casheil by nine; and by going through fields and by-ways, which the parson will show us, we shall escape all the rocky and stony roads that lie I)etween this place and that, which are certainly very bad. I hope you will be so kind as to let me know a post or two before you set out, the very day you will l)e at Kilkenny, that I may have all things prepared for you. It may be, if you ask him. Cope will come: he will do nothing for me. Therefore, depending upon your positive promise, I shiill add no more arguments to persuade you, and am, with the greatest truth, your most faitliful and obedient servant, "TiiEO. Cashell." SWIFT 171 of bad behaviour, they got upon their knees and cried " Peccavi " with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes; poor Harry Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting Church of England men; they abhorred Popery, Atheism, and wooden shoes, and idolatries in general ; and hiccupped Church and State with fervour. But Swift? His mind had had a different schooling, and possessed a very different logical power. He was not bred up in a tipsy guard-room, and did not learn to reason in a Covent Garden tavern. He could conduct an argument from beginning to end. He could see forward with a fatal clearness. In his old age, looking at the " Tale of a Tub," when he said, " Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book! " I think he was admiring not the genius, but the consequences to which the genius had brought him — a vast genius, a magnifi- cent genius, a genius wonderfully bright, and dazzling, and strong, — to seize, to know, to see, to flash upon falsehood and scorch it into perdition, to penetrate into the hidden motives, and expose the black thoughts of men, — an awful, an evil spirit. Ah man! you, educated in Epicurean Temple's li- brary, you whose friends were Pope and St. John — what made you to swear to fatal vows, and bind yourself to a life-long hypocrisy before the Heaven which you adored with such real wonder, humility, and reverence? For Swift was a reverent, was a pious spirit — for Swift could love and could pray. Through the storms and tempests of his furious mind, the stars of religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hid- den by the driving clouds and the maddened hurricane of his life. It is my belief that he suffered frightfully from the 172 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire.^ The paper left behind him, called " Thoughts on Religion," is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost. There is little or no cant — he is too great and too proud for that; and, in so far as the badness of his sermons goes, he is honest. But having put that cas- sock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God, it was! what a lonely rage and long agony— what a vulture that tore the heart of that giant ! ^ It is awful to think of the great sufl'erings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone, somehow. Goethe was so. I can't fancy Shakspeare otherwise. The giants must live apart. The kings can have no company. But this man suffered so; and de- served so to suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain. The " sseva indignatio " of which he spoke as lacerat- ing his heart, and which he dares to inscribe on his tomb- *"Mr. Swift lived with him [Sir William Temple] some time, but resoh'ing to settle himself in some way of living, was inclined to take orders. How- ever, although his fortune was very small, he had a scruple of entering into the Church merely for support." — Anecdotes of the Family of Swift, by the Dean. ^ " Dr. Swift had a natural severity of face, which even his smiles could scarce soften, or his utmost gaiety render placid and serene; but when that sternness of visage was increased by rage, it is scarce possible to imagine looks or features that carried in them more terror and austerity."— Orreev. SWIFT 173 stone— as if the wretch who lay under that stone waiting God's judgment had a right to be angry — breaks out from him in a thousand pages of his writing, and tears and rends him. Against men in office, he having been overthrown; against men in England, he having lost his chance of preferment there, the furious exile never fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous "Drapier's Letters" patriotism? They are master- pieces of dreadful humour and invective: they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy — the assault is wonderful for its activity and ter- rible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rush- ing on his enemies and felling them : one admires not the cause so much as the strength, the anger, the fury of the champion. As is the case with madmen, certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of wrath. Marriage is one of these; in a hundred passages in his writings he rages against it; rages against children; an object of constant satire, even more contemptible in his eyes than a lord's chaplain, is a poor curate with a large family. The idea of this luckless paternity never fails to bring down from him gibes and foul language. Could Dick Steele, or Goldsmith, or Fielding, in his most reckless moment of satire, have written anything like the Dean's famous "modest proposal" for eating children? Not one of these but melts at the thoughts of childhood, fondles and caresses it. Mr. Dean has no such softness, and enters the nursery with the tread and gaiety of an ogre.^ " I have been assured," says he in the " Modest ^"London, April lOth, 1713. "Lady Masham's eldest boy is very ill: I doubt he will not live; and she stays at Kensington to nurse him, which vexes us all. She is so excessively 174 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS Proposal," "by a very knowing American of my ac- quaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt it will equally serve in a ragout." And taking up this pretty joke, as his way is, he argues it with perfect gravity and logic. He turns and twists this subject in a score of different ways: he hashes it ; and he serves it up cold ; and he garnishes it ; and relishes it always. He describes the little animal as " dropped from its dam," advising that the mother should let it suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render it plump and fat for a good table! "A child," says his Reverence, " will make two dishes at an enter- tainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish," and so on; and, the subject being so delightful that he can't leave it, he proceeds to recommend, in place of venison for squires' tables, "the bodies of young lads and maidens not exceeding fourteen or under twelve." Amiable humourist! laughing castigator of morals! There was a process well known and practised in the Dean's gay days: when a lout entered the coffee-house, the wags proceeded to what they called " roasting " him. This is roasting a subject with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for it. As the "Almanach des Gourmands " says. On nait rotisseur. And it was not merely by the sarcastic method that Swift exposed the unreasonableness of loving and hav- ing children. In Gulliver, the folly of love and mar- riage is urged by graver arguments and advice. In fond, it makes me mad. She should never leave the Queen, but leave every- thing, to stick to what is so much the interest of the public, as well as her own "—Journal. SWIFT 175 the famous Lilliputian kingdom, Swift speaks with approval of the practice of instantly removing children from their parents and educating them by the State; and amongst his favourite horses, a pair of foals are stated to be the very utmost a well-regulated equine couple would permit themselves. In fact, our great satirist was of opinion that conjugal love was unadvi- sable, and illustrated the theory by his own practice and example— God help him— which made him about the most wretched being in God's world. ^ The grave and logical conduct of an absurd proposi- tion, as exemplified in the cannibal proposal just mentioned, is our author's constant method through all his works of humour. Given a country of people six inches or sixty feet high, and by the mere process of the logic, a thousand wonderful absurdities are evolved, at so many stages of the calculation. Turning to the first minister w^ho waited behind him with a white staff near as tall as the mainmast of the " Royal Sovereign," the King of Brobdingnag observes how contemptible a thing human grandeur is, as represented by such a con- temptible little creature as Gulliver. " The Emperor of Lilliput's features are strong and masculine" (what a surprising humour there is in this description!) — " The Emperor's features," Gulliver says, "are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip, an arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, and his deportment majestic. He is taller hy the breadth of my nail than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into be- holders." ^ " My health is somewhat mended, but at best I have an ill head and an aching heart."— /n May, 1719. 176 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS What a surjjrising humour there is in these descrip- tions! How noble the satire is here! how just and hon- est! How perfect the image! Mr. Macaulaj^ has quoted the charming lines of the poet, where the king of the pigmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like " the mast of some tall admiral," but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The sub- ject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as in that wonderful passage, when Gulliver's box having been dropped by the eagle into the sea, and Gulliver having been received into the ship's cabin, he calls upon the crew to bring the box into the cabin, and put it on the table, the cabin being only a quarter the size of the box. It is the veracity of the blunder which is so admirable. Had a man come from such a country as Brobdingnag he would have blundered so. But the best stroke of humour, if there be a best in that abounding book, is that where Gulliver, in the un- pronounceable country, describes his parting from his master the horse.^ " I took," he says, " a second leave ^Perhaps the most melancholy satire in the whole of the dreadful book, is the description of the very old people in the " Voyage to Laputa." At Lug- nag, Gulliver hears of some ])ersons who never die, called tiie Struldbrugs, and expressing a wish to become acquainted with men who must have so much learning and experience, his colloquist describes the Struldbrugs to hhn. "He said: They commonly acted like mortals, till about thirty years old, after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession: for otherwise there not being above two or tlirce of that species born in an age, tliey were too few to form a general ol)servation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, tiiey had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, l>ut many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. Tlicy were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, l)ut incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended lielow tlieir gniMdciiildren. l^nvy and impotent desires are their prevailing pas- SWIFT 177 of my master, but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently sions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament, and repine that others are gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect. And for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others. "If a Struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore. For the law thinks it a reasonable indul- gence that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. "As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates, only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit, they cannot purchase lands or take leases, neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds. "At ninety they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no dis- tinction of taste, "but eat and drink whatever they can get without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they can never amuse themselves with read- ing, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable. "The language of this country being always upon the flux, the Struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (further than by a few general words) with their neighbours, the mortals; and thus they lie under the disad- vantage of living like foreigners in their own country. "This was the account given me of the Struldbrugs, as near as I can re- member. I afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends; but although they were told 'that I was a great traveller, and had seen all the world,' they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question; only desired I would give them slumskudask, or a token of remembrance; which is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law, that strictly forbids it, because they are provided for by the public, although indeed with a very scanty allowance. "They are despised and hated by all sorts of people; when one of them is born, it is reckoned ominous, and" their birth is recorded very particularly: so that you may know their age by consulting the register, which, however, has not been kept above a thousand' years past, or at least has been destroyed by time or public disturbances. But the usual way of computing how old they are, is by asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, 178 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS to my mouth. I am not ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. De- tractors are pleased to think it improbable that so illus- trious a person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior as I. Neither have I forgotten how apt some travellers are to boast of extraordinary favours they have received. But if these censurers were better acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the Houyhnhnms they would soon change their opinion." The surprise here, the audacity of circumstantial evi- dence, the astounding gravity of the speaker, who is not ignorant how much he has been censured, the nature of the favour conferred, and the respectful exultation at the receipt of it, are surely complete; it is truth topsy- turvy, entirely logical and absurd. As for the humour and conduct of this famous fable, I suppose there is no person who reads but must admire ; as for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous ; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn't have read the last part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr. Punch to persons about to marry, and say " Don't." When Gulliver first lands among the Yahoos, the naked howling wretches clamber up trees and assault him, and he describes him- self as "almost stifled with the filth which fell about him." The reader of the fourth part of " GuUiver's and then consulting history; for infallibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old. " They were the most mortifying sight 1 ever beheld, and the women more horrible than the men; besides "the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half-a-dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or two between ihem." —Oiilliver'a Travels. SWIFT 179 Travels " is like the hero himself in this instance. It is Yahoo language: a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind — tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame ; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging- obscene. And dreadful it is to think that Swift knew the ten- dency of his creed— the fatal rocks towards which his logic desperately drifted. That last part of " Gulliver " is only a consequence of what has gone before ; and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride, imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish preten- sion, the mock greatness, the pompous dulness, the mean aims, the base successes— all these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphe- mies against heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful allegory— of which the meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason. What had this man done? what secret remorse was rankling at his heart? what fever was boiling in him, that he should see all the world blood-shot? We view the world with our own eyes, each of us ; and we make from within us the world we see. A weary heart gets no gladness out of sunshine; a selfish man is sceptical about friendship, as a man with no ear doesn't care for music. A frightful self -consciousness it must have been, which looked on mankind so darkly through those keen eyes of Swift. A remarkable story is told by Scott, of Delany, who interrupted Archbishop King and Swift in a conversa- tion which left the prelate in tears, and from which Swift 180 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS rushed away with marks of strong terror and agitation in his countenance, upon which the Archbishop said to Delany, " You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question." The most unhappy man on earth;— Miserrimus— what a character of him ! And at this time all the great wits , of England had been at his feet. All Ireland had ' shouted after him, and worshipped him as a liberator, a saviour, the greatest Irish patriot and citizen. Dean Drapier BickerstafF Gulliver— the most famous states- men, and the greatest poets of his day, had applauded him, and done him homage; and at this time, writing over to Bolingbroke from Ireland, he says, "It is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole" We have spoken about the men, and Swift's behaviour to them; and now it behoves us not to forget that there are certain other persons in the creation who had rather intimate relations with the great Dean.^ Two women ^ The name of Varina has been thrown into the shade by those of the famous Stella and Vanessa; but she had a story of her own to tell about the blue eyes of young Jonathan. One may say that the book of Swift's Life opens at places kept by these blighted flowers ! Varina must have a paragraph. She was a Miss Jane Waryng, sister to a college chum of his. In 1696, when Swift was nineteen years old, we find him writing a lo%'e-letter to her, beginning, "Impatience is the most inseparable quality of a lover." But absence made a great difference in his feelings; so, four years afterwards, the tone is changed. He writes again, a very curious letter, offering to marry her, and putting the offer in such a way that nobody could possibly accept it. After dwelling on his poverty, &c. he says, conditionally, "I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful, or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first, and competencj- in the second, is all I ask for!" The editors do not tell us what became of Varina in life. One would be glad to know that she met with some worthy partner, and lived long enough to see her little boys laughing over Lilliput,' without any arriere pensee of & sad character about the great Dean ! SWIFT 181 whom he loved and injured are known by every reader of books so famiharly that if we had seen them, or if they had been relatives of our own, we scarcely could have known them better. Who hasn't in his mind an im- age of Stella? Who does not love her? Fair and ten- der creature: pure and affectionate heart! Boots it to you, now that you have been at rest for a hundred and twenty years, not divided in death from the cold heart which caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and grief —boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you? Scarce any man, I be- lieve, ever thought of that grave, that did not cast a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle lady, so lovely, so loving, so unhappy ! you have had countless champions; millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond tradition of your beauty ; we watch and follow your tragedy, your bright morning love and purity, your constancy, your grief, your sweet martyr- dom. We know your legend by heart. You are one of the saints of English story. And if Stella's love and innocence are charming to contemplate, I will say that in spite of ill-usage, in spite of drawbacks, in spite of mysterious separation and union, of hope delayed and sickened heart— in the teeth of Vanessa, and that little episodical aberration which plunged Swift into such woful pitfalls and quagmires of amorous perplexity— in spite of the verdicts of most women, I believe, who, as far as my experience and con- versation go, generally take Vanessa's part in the con- troversy—in spite of the tears which Swift caused Stella to shed, and the rocks and barriers which fate and tem- per interposed, and which prevented the pure course of 182 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS that true love from running smoothly — the brightest part of Swift's story, the pure star in that dark and tempestuous life of Swift's, is his love for Hester John- son. It has been my business, professionally of course, to go through a deal of sentimental reading in my time, and to acquaint myself with love-making, as it has been described in various languages, and at various ages of the world; and I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching, than some of these brief notes, written in what Swift calls "his little lan- guage " in his journal to Stella/ He writes to her night and morning often. He never sends away a letter to her but he begins a new one on the same day. He can't bear to let go her kind little hand, as it were. He knows that she is thinking of him, and longing for him far away in Dublin yonder. He takes her letters from under his pil- low and talks to them, familiarly, paternally, with fond epithets and pretty caresses — as he would to the sweet and artless creature who loved him. " Stay," he writes one morning — it is the 14th of December, 1710 — " Stay, I will answer some of your letter this morning in bed. Let me see. Come and appear, little letter! Here I am, says he, and what say you to Stella this morning fresh and fasting? And can Stella read this writing without hurting her dear eyes? " he goes on, after more kind prattle and fond whispering. The dear eyes shine * A sentimental Champollion might find a good deal of matter for his art, in expounding the symbols of the " Little Language." Usually, Stella is "M.D.," but sometimes her companion, Mrs. Dingley, is included in it. Swift is "Presto;" also P.D.F.R. We have "Good-night, M.D.; Night, M.D.; Little, M.D.; Stellakins; Pretty Stella; Dear, roguish, impudent, pretty M.D." Every now and then he breaks into rhyme, as— " I wish you both a merry new year. Roast-beef, minced-pies, and good strong beer, And me a share of your good cheer. That I was there, as you were here. And you are a little saucy dear." SWIFT 183 clearly upon him then— the good angel of his life is with him and blessing him. Ah, it was a hard fate that wrung from them so many tears, and stabbed pitilessly that pure and tender bosom. A hard fate: but would she have changed it? I have heard a woman say that she would have taken Swift's cruelty to have had his tender- ness. He had a sort of worship for her whilst he wounded her. He speaks of her after she is gone; of her wit, of her kindness, of her grace, of her beauty, with a simple love and reverence that are indescribably touch- ing; in contemplation of her goodness his hard heart melts into pathos; his cold rhyme kindles and glows into poetry, and he falls down on his knees, so to speak, before the angel whose life he had embittered, confesses his own wretchedness and unworthiness, and adores her with cries of remorse and love:— " When on my sickly couch I lay, Impatient both of night and day. And groaning in unmanly strains, Called every power to ease my pains. Then Stella ran to my relief. With cheerful face and inward grief, And though by heaven's severe decree She suffers hourly more than me, No cruel master could require From slaves employed for daily hire. What Stella, by her friendship warmed, With vigour and delight performed. Now, with a soft and silent tread. Unheard she moves about my bed: My sinking spirits now supplies With cordials in her hands and eyes. Best pattern of true friends ! beware ; 184 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS You pay too dearly for your care If, while your tenderness secures My life, it must endanger yours: For such a fool was never found Who pulled a palace to the ground, Only to have the ruins made Materials for a house decayed." One little triumph Stella had in her life— one dear little piece of injustice was performed in her favour, for which I confess, for my part, I can't help thanking fate and the Dean. That other person was sacrificed to her —that— that young woman, who lived five doors from Dr. Swift's lodgings in Bury Street, and who flattered him, and made love to him in such an outrageous manner — Vanessa was thrown over. Swift did not keep Stella's letters to him in reply to those he wrote to her.^ He kept Bolingbroke's, and ^ The following passages are from a paper begun by Swift on the evening of the day of her death, Jan. 28, 1727-8:— "She was sickly from her childhood, until about the age of fifteen; but then she grew into perfect health, and Wcis looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London— only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. ". . . . Properly speaking"— he goes on, with a calmness which, under the circumstances, is terrible— "she has been dying six months! .... "Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation All of us who had the happiness" of her friendship agreed unanimously, that in an after- noon's or evening's conversation she never failed before we parted of de- livering the best thing that was said in the company. Some of us have written down several of her sayings, or what the French call bons mots, wherein she excelled beyond belief." The specimens on record, however, in the Dean's paper, called "Bons Mots de Stella," scarcely bear out this last part of the panegyric. But the follow- ing prove her wit: — "A gentleman who had been very silly and pert in her company, at last began to grieve at remembering the loss of a child lately dead. A bishop sit- ting by comforted him— that he should be easy, because 'the child was gone to heaven.' 'No, my lord,' said she; 'that is it which most grieves him, be- cause he is sure never to see his child there.' "When she was extremely ill, her physician said, 'Madam, you are near the bottom of the hill, but we will endeavour to get you up again.' She answered, ' Doctor, I fear I shall be out of breath before *I get up to the top.' SWIFT 185 Pope's, and Harley's, and Peterborough's: but Stella, "very carefully," the Lives say, kept Swift's. Of course: that is the way of the world: and so we cannot tell what her style was, or of what sort were the little let- ters which the Doctor placed there at night, and bade to appear from under his pillow of a morning. But in Letter IV. of that famous collection he describes his lodging in Bury Street, where he has the first-floor, a dining-room and bed-chamber, at eight shillings a week ; and in Letter VI. he says "he has visited a lady just come to town," whose name somehow is not mentioned ; and in Letter VIII. he enters a query of Stella's— " What do you mean ' that boards near me, that I dine with now and then ? ' What the deuce ! You know whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I do." Of course she does. Of course Swift has not the slightest idea of what she means. But in a few letters more it turns out that the Doctor has been to dine "gravely" with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh: then that he has been to "his neighbour: " then that he has been unwell, and means to dine for the whole week with his neighbour! Stella was quite right in her previsions. She saw from the very first hint, what was going to happen; and scented Vanessa in the air.^ The rival is at the Dean's "A very dirty clergyman of her acquaintance, who affected smartness and repartees, was asked by some of the company how his nails came to be so dirty. He was at a loss; but she solved the difficulty by saying, 'The Doctor's nails grew dirty by scratching himself.' "A Quaker apothecary sent her a vial, corked; it had a broad brim, and a label of paper about its neck. 'What is that?'— said she— 'my apothecary's son ! ' The ridiculous resemblance, and the suddenness of the question, set us all a-laughing." — Swift's Works, Scott's Ed. vol. ix. 295-6. *"I am so hot and lazj'- after my morning's walk, that I loitered at Mrs. Vanhomrigh's, where my best gown and periwig was, and out of mere list- lessness dine there, very often; so I did to-da,y."— Journal to Stella. Mrs. Vanhomrigh, "Vanessa's" mother, was the widow of a Dutch mer- chant who held lucrative appointments in King William's time. The family settled in London in 1709, and had a house in Bury Street, St. James's— a 186 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS feet. The pupil and teacher are reading together, and drinking tea together, and going to prayers together, and learning Latin together, and conjugating amo, amas, amavi together. The little language is over for poor Stella. By the rule of grammar and the course of conjugation, doesn't amavi come after amo and amas? The loves of Cadenus and Vanessa ^ you may peruse in Cadenus's own poem on the subject, and in poor Va- nessa's vehement expostulatory verses and letters to him ; she adores him, implores him, admires him, thinks him something god-like, and only prays to be admitted to lie at his feet.^ As they are bringing him home from church, those divine feet of Dr. Swift's are found pretty often in Vanessa's parlour. He likes to be admired and adored. He finds Miss Vanhomrigh to be a woman of great taste and spirit, and beauty and wit, and a fortune too. He sees her every day ; he does not tell Stella about street made notable by such residents as Swift and Steele; and, in our ovm time, Moore and Crabbe. ^ " Vanessa was excessively vain. The character given of her by Cadenus is fine painting, but in general fictitious. She was fond of dress ; impatient to be admired; very romantic in her turn of mind; superior, in her own opinion, to all her sex; full of pertness, gaiety, and pride; not without some agreeable accomplishments, but far from being either beautiful or genteel; . . . . happy in the thoughts of being reported Swift's concubine, but still aiming and intending to be his wife."— Lord Orrery. ^ " You bid me be easy, and you would see me as often as you could. You had better have said, as often as you can get the better of your inclinations so much; or as often as you remember there was such a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do, you will not be made uneasy by me long. It is impossible to describe what I have suflPered since I saw you last: I am sure I could have borne the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have resolved to die without seeing you more; but those resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long; for there is something in human nature that prompts one so to find relief in this world I must give way to it, and beg you would see me, and speak kindly to me; for I am sure you'd not condemn any one to suffer what I have done, could you but know it. The reason I write to you is, because I cannot tell it to you, should I see you; for when I begin to complain, then you are angry, and there is some- thing in your looks so awful that it strikes me dumb. Oh! that you may have but so much regard for me left that this complaint may touch your soul with pity. I say as little as ever I can; did you but know what I thought, I am sure it would move you to forgive me ; and believe I cannot help telling you this and live."— Vanessa. (M. 1714.) SWIFT 187 the business: until the impetuous Vanessa becomes too fond of him, until the Doctor is quite frightened by the young woman's ardour, and confounded by her warmth. He wanted to marry neither of them— that I believe was the truth; but if he had not married Stella, Vanessa would have had him in spite of himself. When he went back to Ireland, his Ariadne, not content to remain in her isle, pursued the fugitive Dean. In vain he pro- tested, he vowed, he soothed, and bullied; the news of the Dean's marriage with Stella at last came to her, and it killed her— she died of that passion.^ ^"If we consider Swift's behaviour, so far only as it relates to women, we shall find that he looked upon them rather as busts than as whole figures." — Orrery. " You would have smiled to have found his house a constant seraglio of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning till night."— Orrery. A correspondent of Sir Walter Scott's furnished him with the materials on which to found the following interesting passage about Vanessa — after she had retired to cherish her passion in retreat: — "Marley Abbey, near Celbridge, where Miss Vanhomrigh resided, is built much in the form of a real cloister, especially in its external appearance. An aged man (upwards of ninety, by his own account) showed the grounds to my correspondent. He was the son of Mrs. Vanhomrigh's gardener, and used to work with his father in the garden when a boy. He remembered the un- fortunate Vanessa well; and his account of her corresponded with the usual description of her person, especially as to her embonpoint. He said she went seldom abroad, and saw little company: her constant amusement was reading, or walking in the garden. . . . She avoided company, and was always melancholy, save when Dean Swift was there, and then she seemed happy. The garden was to an uncommon degree crowded with laurels. The old man said that when Miss Vanhomrigh expected the Dean she always planted with her own hand a laurel or two against his arrival. He showed her favourite seat, still called ' Vanessa's bower.' Three or four trees and some laurels indicate the spot There were two seats and a rude table within the bower, the opening of which commanded a view of the LiflFey. . . . . In this sequestered spot, according to the old gardener's account, the Dean and Vanessa used often to sit, with books and writing-materials on the table before them."— Scott's Swift, vol. i. pp. 246-7. ". . . . But Miss Vanhomrigh, irritated at the situation in which she found herself, determined on bringing to a crisis those expectations of a union with the object of her affections— to the hope of which she had clung amid every vicissitude of his conduct towards her. The most probable bar was his undefined connection with Mrs. Johnson, which, as it must have been perfectly known to her, had, doubtless, long excited her secret jealousy, al- though only a single hint to that purpose is to be found in their corre- spondence, and that so early as 1713, when she writes to him— then in Ireland — 'If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with mine.' Her silence and patience under this 188 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS And when she died, and Stella heard that Swift had written beautifully regarding her, " That doesn't sur- prise me," said INIrs. Stella, " for we all know the Dean could write beautifully about a broomstick." A woman — a true woman ! Would you have had one of them for- give the other? In a note in his biography, Scott says that his friend Dr. Tuke, of Dublin, has a lock of Stella's hair, enclosed in a paper by Swift, on which are written, in the Dean's hand, the words : " Only a woman's hair" An instance, says Scott, of the Dean's desire to veil his feelings under the mask of cynical indifference. See the various notions of critics! Do those words in- dicate indifference or an attempt to hide feeling? Did )^ou ever hear or read four words more pathetic? Only a woman's hair : only love, only fidelity, only purity, in- nocence, beauty; only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and wounded, and passed away now out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love insulted, and piti- state of uncertainty for no less than eight years, must have been partly owing to her awe for Swift, and partly, perhaps, to the weali state of her rival's health, which, from year to year, seemed to announce speedy dissolu- tion. At length, however, Vanessa's impatience prevailed, and she ventured on the decisive step of writing to Mrs. Johnson herself, requesting to know the nature of that connection. Stella, in reply, informed her of her mar- riage with the Dean; and full of the highest resentment against Swift for having given another female such a right in him as Miss Vanhomrigh's in- quiries implied, she sent to him her rival's letter of interrogation, and without seeing him, or awaiting his reply, retired to the house of Mr. Ford, near Dublin. Every reader knows the consequence. Swift, in one of those par- oxysms of fury to which he was liable, both from temper and disease, rode instantly to Marley Abbey, As he entered the apartment, the sternness of his countenance, which was peculiarly formed to express the fiercer passions, struck the unfortunate Vanessa with such terror that she could scarce ask whether he would not sit down. He answered by flinging a letter on the table, and, instantly leaving the house, mounted his horse, and returned to Dublin. When Vanessa opened tiie packet, she only found her own letter to Stella. It was her death-warrant. She sunk at once under the disappoint- ment of the delayed yet cherished hopes which had so long sickened her heart, and beneath the unrestrained wrath of him for whose sake she had indulged them. How long she survived this last interview is uncertain, but the time does not seem to have exceeded a few weeks." — Scott. SWIFT 189 less desertion:— only that lock of hair left; and memory and remorse, for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the grave of his victim. And yet to have had so much love, he must have given some. Treasures of wit and wisdom, and tenderness, too, must that man have had locked up in the caverns of his gloomy heart, and shown fitfully to one or two whom he took in there. But it was not good to visit that place. People did not remain there long, and suffered for hav- ing been there. ^ He shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan; he slunk away from his fondest admirer. Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven score years. He was always alone— alone and gnashing in the darkness, ex- cept when Stella's sweet smile came and shone upon him. When that went, silence and utter night closed over him. An immense genius: an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to mention— none I think, however, so great or so gloomy. * " M. Swift est Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie. II n'a pas, k la verity, la gaite du premier, mais il a toute la finesse, la raison, le choix, le bon godt qui manquent k notre cur6 de Meudon. Ses vers sent d'un goGt singulier, et presque inimitable; la bonne plaisanterie est son partage en vers et en prose ; mais pour le bien entendre il f aut f aire un petit voyage dans son pays."— Voltaiee: Lettres sur les Anglais. Let. 22. CONGREVE AND ADDISON A GREAT number of years ago, before the passing of . the Reform Bill, there existed at Cambridge a certain debating-club, called the "Union;" and I re- member that there was a tradition amongst the under- graduates who frequented that renowned school of ora- tory, that the great leaders of the Opposition and Government had their eyes upon the University De- bating-Club, and that if a man distinguished himself there he ran some chance of being returned to Parlia- ment as a great nobleman's nominee. So Jones of John's, or Thomson of Trinity, would rise in their might, and draping themselves in their gowns, rally round the monarchy, or hurl defiance at priests and kings, with the majesty of Pitt or the fire of Mirabeau, fancying all the while that the great nobleman's emissary was listening to the debate from the back benches, where he was sitting with the family seat in his pocket. Indeed, the legend said that one or two young Cambridge men, orators of the " Union," were actually caught up thence, and car- ried down to Cornwall or old Sarum, and so into Parlia- ment. And many a young fellow deserted the jogtrot University curriculum, to hang on in the dust behind the fervid wheels of the parliamentary^ chariot. Where, I have often wondered, were the sons of Peers and Members of Parliament in Anne's and George's time? Were they all in the army, or hunting in the coun- 190 Congreve CONGREVE AND ADDISON 191 try, or boxing the watch? How was it that the young gentlemen from the University got such a prodigious number of places? A lad composed a neat copy of verses at Christchurch or Trinity, in which the death of a great personage was bemoaned, the French king assailed, the Dutch or Prince Eugene complimented, or the reverse; and the party in power was presently to provide for the young poet; and a commissionership, or a post in the Stamps, or the secretaryship of an Embassy, or a clerk- ship in the Treasury, came into the bard's possession. A wonderful fruit-bearing rod was that of Busby's. What have men of letters got in our time? Think, not only of Swift, a king fit to rule in any time or empire — but Ad- dison, Steele, Prior, Tickell, Congreve, John Gay, John Dennis, and many others, who got public employment, and pretty little pickings out of the public purse. ^ The wits of whose names we shall treat in this lecture and two following, all (save one) touched the King's coin, and had, at some period of their lives, a happy quarter-day coming round for them. They all began at school or college in the regular way, • The following is a conspectus of them:— Addison.— Commissioner of Appeals; Under Secretary of State; Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; Keeper of the Records in Ire- land; Lord of Trade; and one of the Principal Secretaries of State, successively. Steele.— Commissioner of the Stamp Office; Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court; and Governor of the Royal Company of Come- dians; Commissioner of "Forfeited Estates in Scotland." Prior.— Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague; Gentleman of the Bed- chamber to King William; Secretary to the Embassy in France; Under Secretary of State; Ambassador to France. Tickell.— Under Secretary of State; Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ire- land. Congreve.— Commissioner for licensing Hackney Coaches; Commissioner for Wine Licences; place in the Pipe Office; post in the Custom House; Secretary of Jamaica. Gay.— Secretary to the Earl of Clarendon (when Ambassador to Hanover). John Dennis.— A place in the Custom House. "En Angleterre . . . . les lettres sent plus en honneur qu'ici."— Voltaike: Lettres sur les Anglais. Let. 20. 192 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS producing panegyrics upon public characters, what were called odes upon public events, battles, sieges, court mar- riages and deaths, in which the gods of Olympus and the tragic muse were fatigued with invocations, according to the fashion of the time in France and in England. "Aid us, JNIars, Bacchus, Apollo," cried Addison, or Congreve, singing of William or Marlborough. ''Ac- courez, cliastes iiymphes du Permesse/' says Boileau, celebrating the Grand Monarch. ''Des sons que ma lyre enfante marquez en bien la cadence, et vous ventSj, faites silence! je vais parler de Louis!" Schoolboys' themes and foundation exercises are the only relics left now of this scholastic fashion. The Olympians are left quite undisturbed in their mountain. What man of note, what contributor to the poetry of a country newspaper, would now think of writing a congratulatory ode on the birth of the heir to a dukedom, or the marriage of a nobleman ? In the past century the young gentlemen of the Uni- versities all exercised themselves at these queer compo- sitions; and some got fame, and some gained patrons and places for life, and many more took nothing by these efforts of what they were pleased to call their muses. William Congreve's ^ Pindaric Odes are still to be found in "Johnson's Poets," that now unfrequented poets'-corner, in which so many forgotten big-wigs have a niche; but though he was also voted to be one of the greatest tragic poets of any day, it was Congreve's wit and humour which first recommended him to courtly for- tune. And it is recorded that liis first play, the " Old Bachelor," brought our author to the notice of that great patron of English muses, Charles Montague Lord Hali- ' He was the son of Colonel William Congreve, and grandson of Richard Congreve, Esq., of Congreve and Stretton in Staffordshire— a very ancient family. CONGREVE AND ADDISON 193 fax— who, being desirous to place so eminent a wit in a state of ease and tranquillity, instantly made him one of the Commissioners for licensing hackney-coaches, be- stowed on him soon after a place in the Pipe Office, and likewise a post in the Custom House of the value of 600Z. A commissionership of hackney-coaches— a post in the Custom House— a place in the Pipe Office, and all for writing a comedy! Doesn't it sound like a fable, that place in the Pipe Office? ^ "Ah, I'heureux temps que celui de ces fables! " Men of letters there still be: but I doubt whether any Pipe Offices are left. The Public has smoked them long ago. Words, like men, pass current for a while with the public, and being known everywhere abroad, at length take their places in society; so even the most secluded and refined ladies here present will have heard the phrase from their sons or brothers at school, and will permit me to call William Congreve, Esquire, the most eminent lit- erary " swell " of his age. In my copy of " Johnson's Lives " Congreve's wig is the tallest, and put on with the jauntiest air of all the laurelled worthies. " I am the great Mr. Congreve," he seems to say, looking out from his voluminous curls. People called him the great Mr. * " Five.— Pipa, in law, is a roll in the Exchequer, called also the great roll. " Pipe Office is an office in which a person called the Clerk of the Pipe makes out leases of Crown lands, by warrant from the Lord Treasurer, or Commissioners of the Treasury, or Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Clerk of the Pipe makes up all accounts of sheriffs, &c."— Rees: Cyclopwd. Art. Pipe. "Pipe 0/^ce.— Spelman thinks so called, because the papers were kept in a large pipe or cask. "'These be at last brought into that office of Her Majesty's Exchequer, which we, by a metaphor, do call the pipe .... because the whole re- ceipt is finally conveyed into it by means of divers small pipes or quills. — Bacon: The Office of Alienations." [We are indebted to Richardson's Dictionary for this fragment of erudi- tion. But a modern man of letters can know little on these points— by ex- perience.] 194 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS Congreve.^ From the beginning of his career until the end everybody admired him. Having got his education in Ireland, at the same school and college with Swift, he came to live in the Middle Temple, London, where he luckily bestowed no attention to the law ; but splendidly frequented the coffee-houses and theatres, and appeared in the side-box, the tavern, the Piazza, and the Mall, bril- liant, beautiful, and victorious from the first. Every- body acknowledged the young chieftain. The great Mr. Dryden ^ declared that he was equal to Shakspeare, and bequeathed to him his own undisputed poetical crown, and writes of him: " Mr. Congreve has done me the favour to review the '^Eneis,' and compare my ver- sion with the original. I shall never be ashamed to own * " It has been observed that no change of Ministers affected him in the least; nor was he ever removed from any post that was given to him, except to a better. His place in the Custom House, and his office of Secretary in Jamaica, are said to have brought him in upwards of twelve hundred a year." — Bioff. Brit. Art. Cokgreve. ^Dryden addressed his "twelfth epistle" to "My dear friend, Mr. Con- greve," on his comedy called the "Double Dealer," in which he says: — "Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please; Yet, doubling Fletcher's force, he wants his ease. In differing talents both adorned their age: One for the study, t'other for the stage. But both to Congreve justly shall submit. One match'd in judgment, both o'ermatched in wit. In him all beauties of this age we see," &c. &c. The " Double Dealer," however, was not so palpable a hit as the " Old Bach- elor," but, at first, met with opposition. The critics having fallen foul of it, our "Swell" applied the scourge to that presumptuous body, in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to the "Right Honourable Charles Montague." "I was conscious," said he, "where a true critic might have put me upon my defence. I was prepared for the attack, .... but I have not heard anything said sufficient to provoke an answer." He goes on — " But there is one thing at which I am more concerned than all the false criticisms that are made upon me; and that is, some of the ladies are of- fended. I am heartily sorry for it; for I declare, I would rather disoblige all the critics in the world than one of the fair sex. They are concerned that I have represented some women vicious and affected. How can I help it? It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind I should be very glad of an opportunity to make my compli- ments to those ladies who are offended. But they can no more expect it in a comedy, than to be tickled by a surgeon when he is letting their blood." CONGREVE AND ADDISON 195 that this excellent young man has showed me many faults which I have endeavoured to correct." The " excellent young man " was but three or four and twenty when the great Dryden thus spoke of him: the greatest literary chief in England, the veteran field-mar- shal of letters, himself the marked man of all Europe, and the centre of a school of wits who daily gathered round his chair and tobacco-pipe at Will's. Pope dedi- cated his " Iliad " to him ; ^ Swift, Addison, Steele, all acknowledge Congreve's rank, and lavish compliments upon him. Voltaire went to wait upon him as on one of the Representatives of Literature; and the man who scarce praises any other living person — who flung abuse at Pope, and Swift, and Steele, and Addison— the Grub Street Timon, old John Dennis,^ was hat in hand to Mr. Congreve ; and said that when he retired from the stage, Comedy went with him. Nor was he less victorious elsewhere. He was admired in the drawing-rooms as well as the coffee-houses; as much beloved in the side-box as on the stage. He loved, and conquered, and jilted the beautiful Bracegirdle,^ the * " Instead of endeavouring to raise a vain monument to myself, let me leave behind me a memorial of my friendship with one of the most valuable men as well as finest writers of my age and country— one who has tried, and knows by his own experience, how hard an undertaliing it is to do justice to Homer— and one who, I am sure, seriously rejoices with me at the period of my labours. To him, therefore, having brought this long work to a conclu- sion, I desire to dedicate it, and to have the honour and satisfaction of plac- ing together in this manner the names of Mr. Congreve and of— A. Pope." — Postscript to Translation of the Iliad of Homer, Mar. 25, 1720. ' When asked why he listened to the praises of Dennis, he said he had much rather be flattered than abused. Swift had a particular friendship for our author, and generously took him under his protection in his high au- thoritative manner." — Tiios. Davies: Dramatic Miscellanies. ' " Congreve was very intimate for years with Mrs. Bracegirdle, and lived in the same street, his house very near hers, until his acquaintance with the young Duchess of Marlborough. He then quitted that house. The Duchess showed me a diamond necklace (which Lady Di. used afterwards to wear) that cost seven thousand pounds, and was purchased with the money Con- greve left her. How much better would it have been to have given it to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle."— Dr. Young. Spence's Anecdotes. 196 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS Iieroine of all his plays, the favourite of all the town of her day; and the Duchess of Marlborough, INIarlbor- ough's daughter, had such an admiration of him, that when he died she had an ivory figure made to imitate him/ and a large wax doll with gouty feet to be dressed just as the great Congreve's gouty feet were dressed in his great lifetime. He saved some money by his Pipe Office, and his Custom House office, and his Hackney Coach office, and nobly left it, not to Bracegirdle, who wanted it,^ but to the Duchess of Marlborough, who didn't.^ How can I introduce to you that merry and shameless Comic Muse who won him such a reputation? NeU Gwynn's servant fought the other footman for having called his mistress a bad name ; and in like manner, and with pretty like epithets, Jeremy Collier attacked that godless, reckless Jezebel, the English comedy of his time, and called her what Nell Gwynn's man's fellow-servants called Nell Gwynn's man's mistress. The servants of ^ " A glass was put in the hand of the statue, which was supposed to bow to her Grace and to nod in approbation of what she spoke to it."— Thos. Davies: Dramatic Miscellanies. ^The sum Congreve left Mrs. Bracegirdle was 200Z., as is said in the "Dramatic Miscellanies" of Tom Davies; where are some particulars about this charming actress and beautiful woman. She had a "lively aspect," says Tom, on the authority of Gibber, and "such a glow of health and cheerfulness in her countenance, as inspired everybody with desire." "Scarce an audience saw her that were not half of them her lovers." Congreve and Rowe courted her in the persons of their lovers. " In Tam- erlane, Rowe courted her Selima, in the person of Axalla. . . . ; Con- greve insinuated his addresses in his Valentine to her Angelica, in 'Love for Love;' in his Osmyn to her Almena, in the 'Mourning Bride;' and, lastly, in his Mirabel to her Millamant, in the 'Way of the World.' Mirabel, the fine gentleman of the play, is, I believe, not very distant from the real character of Congreve." — 7J>rrt7na/rc Miscellanies, vol. iii. 1784. She retired from the stage when Mrs. Oldfield began to be the public favourite. She died in 1748, in the eighty-fifth year of her age. ^ Johnson calls his legacy the " accumulation of attentive parsimony, which," he continues, "though to "her (the Duchess) superfluous and useless, might have given great assistance to tlie ancient family from which he descended, at that time, by the ini])r\ulence of his relation, reduced to difficulties and dis- tress."— Lires of the Poets. CONGREVE AND ADDISON 197 the theatre, Dryden, Congreve,^ and others, defended themselves with the same success, and for the same cause which set Nell's lackey fighting. She was a disreputable, daring, laughing, painted French baggage, that Comic Muse. She came over from the Continent with Charles (who chose many more of his female friends there) at the Restoration— a wild, dishevelled Lais, with eyes bright with wit and wine— a saucy court-favourite that sat at the King's knees, and laughed in his face, and when she showed her bold cheeks at her chariot-window, had some of the noblest and most famous people of the land bowing round her wheel. She was kind and popu- lar enough, that daring Comedy, that audacious poor Nell: she was gay and generous, kind, frank, as such people can afford to be : and the men who lived with her and laughed with her, took her pay and drank her wine, turned out when the Puritans hooted her, to fight and defend her. But the jade was indefensible, and it is pretty certain her servants knew it. There is life and death going on in every thing : truth and lies always at battle. Pleasure is always warring against self-restraint. Doubt is always crying Psha! ^ He replied to Collier, in the pamphlet called " Amendments of Mr. Col- lier's False and Imperfect Citations," &c. A specimen or two are sub- joined: — " The greater part of these examples which he has produced are only dem- onstrations of his own impurity: they only savour of his utterance, and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath. "Where the expression is unblameable in its own pure and genuine signifi- cation, he enters into it, himself, like the evil spirit; he possesses the innocent phrase, and makes it bellow forth his own blasphemies. " If I do not return him civilities in calling him names, it is because I am not very well versed in his nomenclatures. ... I will only call him Mr. Collier, and that I will call him as often as I think he shall deserve it. "The corruption of a rotten divine is the generation of a sour critic." " Congreve," says Dr. Johnson, " a very young man, elated with success, and impatient of censure, assumed an air of confidence and security. . . . The dispute was protracted through ten years; but at last Comedy grew more modest, and Collier lived to see the reward of his labours in the refor- mation of the theatre." — Life of Congreve. 198 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS and sneering. A man in life, a humourist, in writing about life, sways over to one principle or the other, and laughs with the reverence for right and the love of truth in his heart, or laughs at these from the other side. Didn't I tell you that dancing was a serious business to Harlequin? I have read two or three of Congreve's plays over before speaking of him ; and my feelings were rather like those, which I dare say most of us here have had, at Pompeii, looking at Sallust's house and the relics of an orgy: a dried wine- jar or two, a charred supper- table, the breast of a dancing-girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of a jester: a perfect stillness round about, as the cicerone twangs his moral, and the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congreve Muse is dead, and her song choked in Time's ashes. We gaze at the skeleton, and wonder at the life which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skull up, and muse over the frolic and daring, the wit, scorn, passion, hope, desire, with which that empty bowl once fermented. We think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets; and of lips whispering love, and cheeks dimp- ling with smiles, that once covered yon ghastly yellow framework. They used to call those teeth pearls once. Seel there's the cup she drank from, the gold-chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones ! Reading in these plays now, is like shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it mean? the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling and re- treating, the cavalier seul advancing upon those ladies— CONGREVE AND ADDISON 199 those ladies and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody bows and the quaint rite is celebrated. Without the music we can't understand that comic dance of the last century— its strange gravity and gaiety, its decorum or its indecorum. It has a jargon of its own quite unlike life ; a sort of moral of its own quite unlike life too. I'm afraid it's a Heathen mystery, sym- bolizing a Pagan doctrine; protesting— as the Pom- peians very likely were, assembled at their theatre and laughing at their games ; as Sallust and his friends, and their mistresses, protested, crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands— against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine whose gaunt disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean, were for breaking the fair images of Venus and flinging the altars of Bacchus down. I fancy poor Congreve's theatre is a temple of Pagan delights, and mysteries not permitted except among heathens. I fear the theatre carries down that ancient tradition and worship, as Masons have carried their secret signs and rites from temple to temple. When the hb- ertine hero carries off the beauty in the play, and the dotard is laughed to scorn for having the young wife: in the ballad, when the poet bids his mistress to gather roses while she may, and warns her that old Time is still a-flying: in the ballet, when honest Corydon courts Phyllis under the treillage of the pasteboard cottage, and leers at her over the head of grandpapa in red stockings, who is opportunely asleep ; and when seduced by the in- vitations of the rosy youth she comes forward to the foot- lights, and they perform on each other's tiptoes that pas which you all know, and which is only interrupted by old grandpapa awaking from his doze at the pasteboard 200 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS chalet (whither he returns to take another nap in case the young people get an encore) : when Harlequin, splendid in youth, strength, and agility, arrayed in gold and a thousand colours, springs over the heads of countless perils, leaps down the throat of bewildered giants, and, dauntless and splendid, dances danger down : when Mr. Punch, that godless old rebel, breaks every law and laughs at it with odious triumph, outwits his lawyer, bul- lies the beadle, knocks his wife about the head, and hangs the hangman — don't you see in the comedy, in the song, in the dance, in the ragged little Punch's puppet-show— the Pagan protest? Doesn't it seem as if Life puts in its plea and sings its comment? Look how the lovers walk and hold each other's hands and whisper! Sings the chorus—" There is nothing like love, there is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty of your spring-time. Look! how old age tries to meddle with merry sport! Beat him with his own crutch, the wrinkled old dotard! There is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty, there is nothing like strength. Strength and valour win beauty and youth. Be brave and conquer. Be j^oung and happy. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Would you know the Segreto per esser felice? Here it is, in a smiling mis- tress and a cup of Falernian." As the boy tosses the cup and sings his song— hark! what is that chaunt coming- nearer and nearer? What is that dirge which will dis- turb us? The hghts of the festival burn dim— the cheeks turn pale— the voice quavers— and the cup drops on the floor. Who's there? Death and Fate are at the gate, and they will come in. Congreve's comic feast flares with lights, and round the table, emptying their flaming bowls of drink, and ex- changing the wildest jests and ribaldry, sit men and CONGREVE AND ADDISON 201 women, waited on by rascally valets and attendants as dissolute as their mistresses— perhaps the very worst company in the world. There doesn't seem to be a pre- tence of morals. At the head of the table sits Mirabel or Belmour (dressed in the French fashion and waited on by EngHsh imitators of Scapin and Frontin) . Their calling is to be irresistible, and to conquer everywhere. Like the heroes of the chivalry story, whose long-winded loves and combats they were sending out of fashion, they are always splendid and triumphant— overcome all dan- gers, vanquish all enemies, and win the beauty at the end. Fathers, husbands, usurers are the foes these champions contend with. They are merciless in old age, invariably, and an old man plays the part in the dramas which the wicked enchanter or the great blundering giant per- forms in the chivalry tales, who threatens and grumbles and resists— a huge stupid obstacle always overcome by the knight. It is an old man with a money-box: Sir Belmour his son or nephew spends his money and laughs at him. It is an old man with a young wife whom he locks up: Sir Mirabel robs him of his wife, trips up his gouty old heels and leaves the old hunks. The old fool, what business has he to hoard his money, or to lock up blushing eighteen? Money is for youth, love is for youth, away with the old people. When Millamant is sixty, having of course divorced the first Lady Milla- mant, and married his friend Doricourt's granddaughter out of the nursery— it will be his turn; and young Bel- mour will make a fool of him. All this pretty morality you have in the comedies of Wilham Congreve, Esq. They are full of wit. Such manners as he observes, he observes with great humour ; but ah ! it's a weary feast, that banquet of wit where no love is. It palls very soon ; 202 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS sad indigestions follow it and lonely blank headaches in the morning. I can't pretend to quote scenes from the splendid Con- greve's plays *— which are undeniably bright, witty, and 'The scene of Valentine's pretended madness in "Love for Love" is a splendid specimen of Congreve's daring manner: — " Scandal.— And have you given your master a hint of their plot upon him? "Jeremy.— Yes, Sir; he says he'll favour it, and mistake her for Angelica. " Scandal — It may make us sport. " Foresight.— Mercy on us! "FaZejitine. — Husht— interrupt me not— I'll whisper predictions to thee, and thou shalt prophesie;— I am truth, and can teach thy tongue a new trick, —I have told thee what's passed— now I'll tell what's to come:— Dost thou know what will happen to-morrow? Answer me not — for I will tell thee. To-morrow knaves will thrive thro' craft, and fools thro' fortune ; and honesty will go as it did, frostnipt in a summer suit. Ask me questions concerning to-morrow. "Scandal.— Ask him, Mr. Foresight. " Foresight.— Fray what will be done at Court? " Valentine.— Scandal will tell you;— I am truth, I never come there. " Foresight.— In the city? "Valentine. — Oh, prayers will be said in empty churches at the usual hours. Yet you will see such zealous faces behind counters as if religion were to be sold in every shop. Oh, things will go methodically in the city, the clocks will strike twelve at noon, and the horn'd herd buzz in the Ex- change at two. Husbands and wives will drive distinct trades, and care and pleasure separately occupy the family. Coffee-houses will be full of smoke and stratagem. And the cropt 'prentice that sweeps his master's shop in the morning, may, ten to one, dirty his sheets before night. But there are two things, that you will see very strange; which are, wanton wives with their legs at liberty, and tame cuckolds with chains about their necks. But hold, I must examine you before I go further; you look suspiciously. Are you a husband? " Foresight.— I am married. " Valentine.— Poor creature! Is your wife of Covent-garden Parish? "Foresight.— ISio; St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. "Valentine.— Alas, poor man! his eyes are sunk, and his hands shrivelled; his legs dwindled, and his back bow'd. Pray, pray for a metamorphosis- change thy shape, and shake off age; get thee Medea's kettle and be boiled anew; come forth with lab'ring callous hands, and chine of steel, and Atlas' shoulders. Let Taliacotius trim the calves of twenty chairmen, and make thee pedestals to stand erect upon, and look matrimony in the face. Ha, ha, ha! That a man should have a stomach to a wedding-supper, when the pidgeons ought rather to be laid to his feet! Ha, ha, ha! " Foresight.— His frenzy is very high now, Mr. Scandal. "Scandal.— I believe it is a spring-tide. "Foresight.— Wery likely— truly ; you understand these matters. Mr. Scandal, I shall be very glad to confer with you about these things he has uttered. His sayings are very mysterious and hieroglyphical. "Valentine.— Oh \ why would Angelica be absent from my eyes so long? "Jeremy. — She's here. Sir. "Mrs. Foresight.— J