The Duke of Leeds used, in the same manner, to delight in boasting of his lucky progenitor, Jack Osborn, the shop lad, who rescued his master’s beautiful daughter from a watery grave at the bottom of the Thames, and won her hand away from a score of noble suitors, who wanted, literally, the young lady’s pin-money as much as herself. Her father was a pin manufacturer, and had in his shop on London Bridge amassed a considerable wealth in the business. The jolly old man, instead of disdaining to bestow the lovely and wealthy maid—his only child—on an apprentice, exclaimed,—
“Jack Osborn won her, and Jack shall wear her.”
When Lord Bath vainly endeavored to effect a reconciliation between the doctor and Garrick, who had fallen out, Monsey said,—
“Why will your lordship trouble yourself with the squabbles of a merry-andrew and a quack doctor?”
Monsey continued his quarrel with Garrick up to the day of the death of the great tragedian. The latter seldom retaliated, but when he did his sarcasm cut to the bone.
Garrick’s style of satire may be inferred from his epigram on James Quin, the celebrated actor, and illegitimate son of an Irishman, “whose wife turned out a bigamist.” When Garrick make his debut on the London stage, at Godman’s Fields playhouse, October 19, 1741, as “Richard the Third,” Quin objected to Garrick’s original style, saying,—
“If this young fellow is right, myself and all the other actors are wrong.”
Being told that the theatre was crowded to the dome nightly to hear the new actor, Quin replied that “Garrick was a new religion; Whitefield was followed for a time, but they would all come to church again.” Hence Garrick wrote the following epigram:—
“Pope Quin, who damns all churches but his own,
Complains that heresy infects the town;
That Whitefield-Garrick has misled the age,
And taints the sound religion of the stage.
‘Schism,’ he cries, ‘has turned the nation’s brain,
But eyes will open, and to church again!’
Thou great Infallible, forbear to roar;
Thy bulls and errors are revered no more.
When doctrines meet with general approbation,
It is not heresy, but reformation.”
When confined to his bed in his last sickness, Garrick had the advice of several of the best physicians, summoned to his villa near Hampton, and Monsey, in bad taste and worse temper, wrote a satire on the occurrence. He accused the actor of parsimony, among other mean qualities, and though, after the death of Garrick, January 22, 1779, he destroyed the verses, some portions of them got into print, of which the following is a sample:—