Perhaps the best story in the book is the one about which there is most doubt. I refer to the well-known and often-quoted account of the first night of ‘She Stoops to Conquer,’ and of the famous band of claqueurs who early took their places, determined to see the play through. Cumberland tells the story with the irresistible verve of falsehood—of the early dinner at the ‘Shakespeare Tavern,’ ‘where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul of the corps’; of the guests assembled, including Fitzherbert (who had committed suicide at an earlier date), of the adjournment to the theatre with Adam Drummond of amiable memory, who ‘was gifted by Nature with the most sonorous and at the same time the most contagious laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs. The neighing of the horse of the son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre could not drown it’; and on the story rolls.
It has to be given up. There was a dinner, but it is doubtful whether Cumberland was at it; and as for the proceedings at the theatre, others who were there have pronounced Cumberland’s story a bit of blague. According to the newspapers of the day, Cumberland, instead of sitting by Drummond’s side and telling him when to laugh in his peculiar manner, was visibly chagrined by the success of the piece, and as wretched as any man could well be. But Adam Drummond must have been a reality. His laugh still echoes in one’s ears.
ALEXANDER KNOX AND THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
Amongst the many bizarre things that attended the events which led up to the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, was the circumstance that Lord Castlereagh’s private secretary during the period should have been that Mr. Alexander Knox whose Remains in four rather doleful volumes were once cherished by a certain school of theologians.
Mr. Knox was a man of great piety, some learning, and of the utmost simplicity of life and manners. He was one of the first of our moderns to be enamoured of primitive Christian times, and to seek to avoid the claims of Rome upon the allegiance of all Catholic-minded souls by hooking himself on to a period prior to the full development of those claims.
It is no doubt true that, for a long time past, Nonconformists of different kinds have boldly asserted that they were primitive; but it must be owned that they have never taken the least pains to ascertain the actual facts of the case. Now, Mr. Knox took great pains to be primitive. Whether he succeeded it is not for me to say, but at all events he went so far on his way to success as to leave off being modern both in his ways of thought and in his judgments of men and books.
English Nonconformity has produced many hundreds of volumes of biography and Remains, but there is never a primitive one amongst them. To anyone who may wish to know what it is to be primitive, there is but one answer: Read the Remains of Alexander Knox. Be careful to get the right Knox. There was one Vicesimus, who is much better known than Alexander, and at least as readable, but (and this is the whole point) not at all primitive.