At Esher we make our second change, at that old-fashioned hostelry the “Bear,” and are shown those religiously preserved boots worn by the post-boy who drove Philippe Egalité to Claremont in 1848, when escaping “the red fool-fury of the Seine,” then at flood-tide. These are boots indeed, and more resemble the huge jack-boots in which Marlborough’s soldiers won Ramilies and Malplaquet, than nineteenth-century foot-gear. The “Bear” is one of the finest of the old inns that ornament this old road, and its stables, large enough, as the proprietor says, to hold a hundred horses, are a sight to see.
Esher is a pleasant village, prettily rural, with a humble old church behind that old coaching inn the “Bear,” and a newer church, not at all humble, across the way. Nearly all the monuments have been removed to the new building; the most notable among them an elaborate memorial to Richard Drake, Equerry to Queen Elizabeth, and father of the famous Sir Francis Drake, who caused it to be placed in the old church. Some minor literary lights, too, are buried here, among them Samuel Warren, Q.C., Recorder of Hull and Master in Lunacy, who was born in 1807. This literary character and legal luminary (of no great brilliancy, indeed) lived until 1877, when his feeble flicker was finally dowsed in death. The injunction “de mortuis” is kindly, but I cannot refrain from remarking here that I have seen this shining light of law and letters characterized in print as a “pompous ass.” What else but pompous could he possibly have been after his remarkable training, first for a degree in medicine, and, secondly, for the bar? Such a career as this would be sufficient to turn any man of average intelligence and more than average conceit into a third-rate Johnson—such a man, in fact, as Warren became. Add to these advantages (or disadvantages, you are free to choose your epithet) that of an author successful more by hitting the bull’s-eye of public taste than by intrinsic merit, and you will wonder the less at his self-sufficient mental attitude.
BOOTS AT THE “BEAR.”
THE “BEAR,” ESHER.
PRIGGERY
Warren was the author of such one-time extremely popular works as “Ten Thousand a Year” and the “Diary of a Late Physician”: applauded to the echo in their day—a day that is done. He is additionally famous, however, on another and very different count. His vanity was monumental, and he possessed a prig’s delight in recounting details of the social functions to which he was used to be invited by the notabilities of his day.
A good anecdote survives of this unpleasing trait in Warren’s character. Let us howk it up again, and send it forth with a new lease of life.
Warren, it would seem, was narrating to Douglas Jerrold,[2] with much oily circumstantiality, the splendid details of one of the dinners to which he had been bidden in the mansions of the great. He constantly referred to the unusual fact of no fish having been served at one of these feasts, and asked Jerrold what explanation he thought could be offered of so strange an omission. The reply was worthy of that wounding and blackguardly wit for which Jerrold was so notorious; a form of ill-natured satire that seems never to have brought him the sound thrashing he so richly deserved.