There's something in a stupid ass,
And something in a heavy dunce;
But never since I went to school
I heard or saw so d——d a fool
As William Wordsworth is for once.
Amongst the autographs greatly sought after in America is that of the ill-fated Major André. One of the gems of Mr. Childs's collection is described as a holograph poem by the unlucky soldier, entitled the "Cow Chase," and dated July 21, 1780. Its closing stanza runs:—
And now I've closed my epic strain
I tremble as I show it,
Lest this same warrior-drover Wayne
Should ever catch the poet.
André was soon after captured and executed. To the concluding verse some unkind and unknown hand has added the lines—
And when the epic strain was sung
The poet by the neck was hung,
And to his cost he finds too late
The "dung born tribe" decides his fate.[72]
Mr. Cuyler sends me some interesting information on the subject of André from the collector's point of view. It appears that André was twice captured during the American War. Upon the first occasion he was hastily searched, and though he lost his watch, arms, sword, and purse, he managed to save the framed miniature of his beloved Honora Sneyd by concealing it in his mouth! The occasion of his second capture was on that fatal ride along the east bank of the Hudson River, after his interview with Benedict Arnold. At this time the whole of André's papers, both official and personal, were in New York. Upon the evacuation of New York, 1783, some one took his papers to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Seventy-five years later a friend of Dr. Emmet called on a gentleman resident there. Receiving no response to his ring, he walked through the house, and as he entered the kitchen he found his friend kicking the last of a heap of musty, faded papers into the fire, on an open hearth. Leaping over several great oaken chests, the visitor saved seven or eight documents, several already scorched, from the flames. The gentleman of Halifax explained that he needed the chests, which his grandfather had deposited in their garret, and so burned the papers. Those saved were autograph documents of André—and the New Yorker gave them to Dr. Emmet, in whose collection they now are. André's writings in America are exceedingly scarce.
André was an artist, and executed several drawings of his friends, among whom were portraits of Abraham Cuyler and his wife, which are now preserved in that family. This man was the last Royal Mayor of Albany, New York, and the father of General Sir Cornelius Cuyler, whose sons fought in the Guards defending Hougomont at Waterloo.
As in France and England, there has been much wanton destruction of MSS. in the United States, on which subjects Mr. Joline speaks feelingly. Mr. T. Cuyler tells me that after the crushing defeat of the Federals by the Confederate Army at Bull Run (First Manassas), Virginia, in 1861, the former fled in wildest disorder to Washington City, where they rallied. The consequent confusion, the urgent demands for food and lodgings for a large force of men, caused improvised bakeries to be established in the lower story of the National Capitol. A lady, in passing through a corridor, observed an officer urging his men to roll away into an adjacent marsh great barrels, dusty and stained with age, out of which protruded ancient papers. She paused, and thinking of Dr. Emmet's collection, she begged leave to fill her pockets with documents. Those which she so saved were found to be priceless—being correspondence of 1776-1783, and among her finds was a long letter from Benjamin Franklin, dated at Passy, France, during the American Revolutionary War. Later inquiries disclosed the fact that, after the British victory at Bladensburg, Maryland, the secretaries of the Federal Government had hastily packed these archives in barrels and carried them to safety before the British forces had taken Washington City, in the "War of 1812." Upon their return, these precious papers had been left in the Capitol until ruthlessly tossed out in 1861.
One of the most striking features in American autograph collecting, important and extensive as it is to-day, is the smallness of its beginnings. Tefft, the originator of the autograph cult, who commenced operations by securing a few signatures in the year of Waterloo, was only a bank-cashier; Dr. Sprague was a clerical tutor in the Washington family, and pure accident put unique opportunities in his way; Ferdinand J. Dreer was a merchant who took up the hobby when his health gave way, and lived to complete a collection second only in importance to that formed by Dr. Emmet. It was Dreer who, at the expense of £200, recovered Washington's last letter, after it had remained for nearly a century in Sweden. Charles C. Jones, jun., of Augusta, Georgia, was the first to set the fashion of looking for letters connected with the Civil War of 1861-65. The era of autograph sales began in 1810, at Charleston, South Carolina, by the dispersal of the collection of MSS. formed by a French Consul, but the first autograph sale catalogue is nearly a quarter of a century later, and includes the papers of Aaron Burr, at one time Vice-President of the United States. It was not, however, till the "eighteen-fifties" that dealing in autographs came to rank as a business.
As regards the prospects of this popular pursuit in the United States, Mr. Telamon Cuyler writes as follows:—