By far the largest proportion of the letters belong to what has been hitherto the least known period of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s life: to wit, the period preceding his definite settlement of himself in Edinburgh in 1813. From these, together with Mr. Bedford’s prefixed Memoir, we obtain the following facts:—
Born in 1781, at Hoddam Castle, in Dumfriesshire, the third son of Charles Sharpe, Esq., of Hoddam, and with a pedigree, both on the father’s side and on the mother’s, of specially marked connections with some of the oldest houses of the Scottish aristocracy, and some of the most memorable events of Scottish history, the boy had grown up to his sixteenth year, one of a large family of well-educated brothers and sisters, imbibing the family tastes, and strongly influenced also by the traditions and legends of the antique family-dwelling itself, and of the adjacent scenery of that old West Border region. Drawing, howsoever learnt, must have been one of his earliest accomplishments; and one of the most interesting memories of his boyhood was that, in consequence of his father’s friendly relations with the poet Burns, he himself had seen and spoken with the poet familiarly more than once. It was in the winter after the poet’s death that Kirkpatrick Sharpe added to his home education by attending a class or two in the University of Edinburgh. The intention for the time, however, being that he should become an English clergyman, he was sent, in 1798, at the age of seventeen, to Christ Church, Oxford. Mainly here we see him for the next eight years, taking his B.A. degree in 1802 and his M.A. in 1806, and meanwhile forming intimacies with a select number of his young College and University coevals. Chief among these were Earl Gower, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, Viscount Newtown, afterwards Earl of Lanesborough, Lord Lewisham, afterwards Earl of Dartmouth, the Rev. J. J. Conybeare, afterwards Oxford Professor of Poetry, Mr. R. A. Inglis, afterwards the well-known Sir Robert Inglis, and Elijah B. Impey, son of the famous Indian Chief-Justice Impey. In the society of these, and of other young Oxonians, he seems to have made a strong mark, and to have been greatly liked,—a dandyish young fellow, but with eccentric ways and bookish tastes, a very shrill voice and abundant sarcasm in the use of it, no end of knowledge of art subjects, and an inimitable power of portrait-sketching and caricaturing. Incidents of the same college period at Oxford were some contributions by Sharpe to the Anti-Jacobin, and the beginning of his acquaintance with Scott, first by correspondence, and then personally. Through the next seven years, when he was passing out of his twenties into his thirties, we see him, though he still kept up his connection with Oxford and was occasionally in residence there, yet moving about a good deal,—sometimes at Hoddam, sometimes in Edinburgh, sometimes in London, but with frequent visits to the country-houses of his aristocratic friends. His habits of letter-writing were now at their briskest; and among his correspondents through those seven years, besides the Oxonian friends already mentioned, none of whom forgot him wherever he was, one notes the Margravine of Anspach, and her son, the Hon. Keppel Craven, the Marchioness of Stafford, the Countess of Dalkeith, the Count de Gramont, the Marchioness of Queensberry, Lady Charlotte Campbell (afterwards Lady Charlotte Bury), Miss Campbell of Monzie, and the Duchess of Buccleuch. What ended this desultory life of wandering and fashionable acquaintance-making in England was the death of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s father in 1813. The lairdship of Hoddam having then descended to the eldest son, General Matthew Sharpe,[[48]] the old Hoddam household was broken up, and Kirkpatrick Sharpe, at the age of thirty-two, began, on an allowance from his brother, that long residence in Edinburgh which has been sketched sufficiently already.
If we were to regard Kirkpatrick Sharpe as a kind of Scottish Horace Walpole, it would not be because his correspondence furnishes, to anything like the same extent as Walpole’s, a continuous comment of gossip on what was most central in the history of his time. Even the Edinburgh portion of it will disappoint, if what is looked for in it is a record of the most important occurrences in Edinburgh through the time traversed. Some of the most notable persons in the society of Edinburgh, and even in its literary society, between 1813 and 1851, are either barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. The truth is that Kirkpatrick Sharpe moved through the world in a track, or in a series of tracks, determined by a few affinities of his own constitution, which led him sometimes into social companionship, but at other times left him stranded, and at leisure to find amusement in counting over the stray beads of past memories. Hence, though his correspondence does contain a good deal of historical gossip at intervals, its chief interest will be missed by those who read it only for that kind of recompense, and do not also find pleasure in it as a revelation of Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself.
Kirkpatrick Sharpe was, as we have hinted, a born Sir Mungo Malagrowther. From his first youth, whether in consequence or not of some constitutional peculiarity, such as might be supposed to be indicated by his thin and shrill voice,—by the bye, Sir Walter, when he introduces the original Sir Mungo in his Nigel, expressly notes that the voice of that original was “high-pitched and querulous,”—the lad of elegant accomplishments from Hoddam Castle was marked by a disposition to snarl at things, express shrill and sarcastic views of things, ventilate the absurdest little momentary animosities. In the very first of his letters, which is of date November 1798, and announces to his mother his entry into Christ Church College, his description of the young men of the college he has yet seen is that they “are all ugly, conceited, and putting themselves in postures like Mr. Don, and have the worst legs I ever beheld, crooked thirty different ways, east, west, north, south, that it is a very shame to be seen”; and in a later letter the Rev. Dr. Cyril Jackson, the head of the college, is described as “an inspired swine.” These irreverences and causticities, characteristic from the first of the conversation and the letters of a young fellow of indubitable natural talent otherwise, and of gentlemanly tastes and belongings, must, in fact, have been one cause of that zest for his society when it could be had, and for continued epistolary intercourse at other times, which was felt by so many of his college comrades of the most aristocratic set, and communicated by them to the seniors of their families. In English country-houses, and among great ladies, what more privileged person than the weak-voiced young Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with his witty cynicisms and budget of queer stories? And so to the end, with only the difference made by change of residence back to Scotland, increasing age, and increasing carelessness in dress,—always a privileged person, just because he was recognised as so amusing a Malagrowther. Here, from the abundance in the volumes before us, are a few of his characteristic Malagrowtherisms, arranged in the chronological order of their subjects:—
Character of the Countess of Mar, his own ancestress.—“Her good qualities were not proportioned, as is generally the case, to her rank. She basked all her life in the beams of royalty, with a pension from the Crown, and yet cultivated the Kirk, and hounded out her whelps to bark and bite in favour of the Solemn League and Covenant.”
Milton.—“I think Milton’s Paradise Lost a heap of blasphemy and obscenity, with, certainly, numberless poetical beauties. Milton was a Whig, and in my mind an Atheist. I am persuaded his poem was composed to apologise for the Devil, who certainly was the first Whig on record.”
Mrs. Siddons.—“I met Mrs. Siddons at dinner one day, just before the death of her spouse,—’twas at Walter Scott’s,—and you cannot imagine how it annoyed me to behold Belvidera guzzle boiled beef and mustard, swill streams of porter, cram up her nose with handfuls of snuff, and laugh till she made the whole room shake again.”
Madame de Stäel.—“Her face was that of a blackamoor attempted to be washed white. She wore a wig like a bunch of withered heather, and over that a turban which looked as if it had been put on in the dark; a short neck, and shoulders rising so much behind that they almost amounted to a hump. With all this ugliness all the airs of a beauty,—for ever tormenting her shawl into new draperies, and distorting her fingers as you see them in the ridiculous French portraits by Mignard and his followers.”
Queen Caroline.—“Her eyes projected, like those of the royal family. She made her head large by wearing an immense wig; she also painted her eyebrows, which gave her face a strange, fierce look. Her skin,—and she showed a great deal,—was very red. She wore very high-heeled shoes, so that she bent forward when she stood or walked: her feet and ankles were dreadful.”
Shelley.—“We have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here [at Oxford], before whom our former luminaries must hide their diminished heads,—a Mr. Shelley, of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hour’s sleep in the night, and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson.”