Royalty on aquatic excursions. I remember a laughable caricature, exhibiting the alderman in his own vessel, with a turtle suspended on a pole, with the following lines, in imitation of Black-eyed Susan, said to be written by Mr. Jekyll:—
“All in the Downs the fleet lay moor'd, The streamers waving in the wind, When Castlereagh appeared on board, ?Ah where shall I my Curtis find. Tell me ye jovial sailors, tell me true, Does my fat William sail among your crew.'”
He is a banker, a loan-monger, and a contractor, a member of Parliament, and an orator; added to which, he may be said to be a man of wit and humour—at all events he is the cause of it in others. His first occupations have procured him great wealth, and his wit and humour great fame.
“The worthy Alderman's hospitality to the late good humoured and gossiping James Boswell, the humble follower and biographer of Dr. Johnson, is well known; and it is probable that the pleasures of the table, in which no man more joyously engaged, shortened his life. To write the life of a great man is no easy task, and to write that of a big one may be no less arduous. Whether the Alderman really expected to be held up to future fame by the Biographer of Johnson, cannot be very easily ascertained; however that wish and expectation, if it ever existed, was completely frustrated by the death of poor Boswell.
“I recollect to have seen some lines of the worthy Alderman, on the glorious victory of the Nile, which shew at once his patriotism, his wit, and his resolution, in that he is not to be laughed out of the memorable toast he once gave—
“Great Nelson, in the grandest stile, Bore down upon the shores of Nile, And there obtained a famous victory, Which puzzled much the French Directory. The impudence of them there fellows, As all the newspapers do tell us, Had put the grand Turk in a pet, Which caus'd him send to Nelson an aigrette; Likewise a grand pelisse, a noble boon— Then let us hope—a speedy peace and soon."{1} 1 Whether the following lines are from the same hand or not, we are unable to ascertain; at least they wear a great similarity of character: I give you the three glorious C's. Our Church, Constitution, and King; Then fill up three bumpers to three noble Vs. Wine, Women, and Whale fish-ing.
“Egad,” said Bob, “if this be true, he appears to knock up rhymes almost as well as he could bake biscuits” (smothering a laugh.)
“Why,” replied Dashall, “I believe that it has not been positively ascertained that these lines, which unlike other poetry, contain no fiction, but plain and undeniable matter of fact, were wholly indicated by the worthy Alderman; indeed it is not impossible but that his worship's barber might have had a hand in their composition. It would be hard indeed, if in his operations upon the Alderman's pericranium, he should not have absorbed some of the effluvia of the wit and genius contained therein; and in justice to this operator on his chin and caput, I ought to give you a specimen which was produced by him upon the election of his Lordship to the Mayoralty—
“Our present Mayor is William Curtis, A man of weight and that your sort is.”
“This epigrammatic distich, which cannot be said to be destitute of point, upon being read at table, received, as it deserved, a large share of commendation; and his Lordship declared to the company present, that it had not taken his barber above three hours to produce it extempore.”