“My dearest Polly,
“I have found the tench here so remarkably delicate, that nothing could add to their flavour on a certain Alderman’s palate but the eating them in your company. They were, indeed, exquisite, and I see a brace playing about, which seem to promise equally. I have therefore spoiled their sport in the watery element, and as they set out this evening, before ten, it is thought they will arrive in Grosvenor Square to-morrow morning, in time for you to decide, at four, if their personal merit is equal to that of their late companions. Two little feathered folks, young and tender, of the same farm, accompany them in their journey, and I hope are not unworthy of being croqués.
“My best compliments to the nymph of the bosquets in Grosvenor Square.
“Adieu!”
The inclemency of the merry month of May is not of modern date, for Wilkes, who had been travelling from Grosvenor Square to Sandown on the sixth of that treacherous month, in the year of grace 1792, found a fire at the hospitable “Anchor” as welcome as fires generally are in dreary autumn.
“After I left Grosvenor Square,” he says, “quite to Liphook, it rained incessantly, and I enjoyed a good fire there as much as I should have done on a raw day of the month of November. I found the spring very backward, except in the immediate environs of London; and nothing but a little purple heath and yellow broom to cheer the eye in the long dreary extent from Guildford to Liphook.”
TRAVELLING EXPERIENCES
Some few days later, he writes a gossipy letter to his daughter, full of little domestic details, most strange and curious to find flowing from the pen of Liberty Wilkes. We find, for instance, “that the gardener’s wife increases in size almost as much as his pumpkins,” and that “there are thirteen pea-fowls at the cottage, between whom some solemn gallantries are continually passing; and the gallinis are as brisk and amorous as any French petits-maîtres. The consequences I foresee.
‘Un et un font deux,
C’est le nombre heureux,
En galanterie, mais quelquefois,
Un et un font trois.’”
On another occasion we learn that “the farmers are swearing, the parsons praying, for rain; neither hopeful of any result until the weather changes.” About this time—on July 7, 1793—Mr. Wilkes has been returning along the Portsmouth Road from London to the Isle of Wight. He found the dust and heat almost overpowering, and the highway crowded with recruits, both for army and navy, who were no small inconvenience to his progress. Portsmouth was full of warlike preparations, Lord Howe expecting to sail the same day with a fleet of twenty sail, perfectly well-conditioned, and the men in high spirits at the prospect of coming to blows with the French.