Thou or himsel’!
It is a curious fact that Scott, harmonious poet as he was, had no ear for music, unless it were that of a ballad, and he would repeat that horribly out of tune. He was, however, in tune with all humanity; as much so with a king as with the humblest of his subjects. When he went on board the royal yacht which had arrived near Leith, with George IV., amid such rain as only falls in Scotland, Scott, in an off-hand, yet respectful way, told the king that the weather reminded him of the stormy day of his own arrival in the Western Highlands, weather which so disgusted the landlord of the inn, who was used to the very worst, that he apologised for it. ‘Gude guide us! this is just awfu’! Siccan a downpour, was ever the like! I really beg your pardon! I’m sure it’s nae faut o’ mine. I canna think how it should happen to rain this way just as you o’ a’ men i’ the warld should come to see us! It looks amaist personal! I can only say, for my part, I’m just ashamed o’ the weather!’ Having thus spoken to the king, Scott added; ‘I do not know, sire, that I can improve upon the language of the honest innkeeper. I canna think how it should rain this way, just as your majesty, of all men in the world, should have condescended to come and see us. I can only say in the name of my countrymen, I’m just ashamed o’ the weather!’ It was at Scott’s petition that the royal landing was deferred till the next day, which brought all the sunshine that was considered necessary for the occasion.
It is singular to find Charles Mathews, senior, writing of himself; ‘I only perform for one rank of persons. The lower orders hate and avoid me, and the middle classes cannot comprehend me.’ He used to get fun enough out of his own man-servant, whose awe and pride at seeing a titled personage at his master’s house were amply stimulated by friends of Mathews who visited him under assumed dignities. Charles Kemble was always announced as the Persian Ambassador, Fawcett as Sir Francis Burdett, and Young as the Duke of Wellington. One day, a real Lord—Lord Ranelagh—called and sent in a message expressive of his desire to see Mathews. Mathews, supposing the visitor was a fellow-player passing as a peer, sent a reply that he was just then busy with Lord Vauxhall. When Mr. Julian Young once told Mathews he was going to Lord Dacres at the Hoo, the actor replied, Who? and thinking Bob Acres was raised to the peerage, begged to be remembered to Sir Lucius O’Trigger!
One of the most flattering kindnesses ever paid to the elder Mathews was when he was once standing among the crowd in a Court of Assize, where Judge Alan Park was presiding. His lordship sent a note down to him, requesting him to come and take a seat on the bench. The actor obeyed, and the judge was courteously attentive to him. Mathews was subsequently the guest of his old friend Mr. Rolls, at whose house in Monmouthshire the judge had previously been staying. The player asked if his lordship had alluded to him. ‘Yes,’ said Rolls, who proceeded to relate how Judge Park had been startled at seeing in court a fellow who was in the habit of imitating the voice and manners of the judges on the stage. Indeed, his imitation of Lord Ellenborough, in ‘Love, Law, and Physic,’ had well nigh brought the imitator to grief. Park said the presence of Mathews so troubled him that he invited the mimic to sit near him, and behaved so kindly that he hoped the actor, out of simple gratitude, would not include him in his Legal Portraits in comedy or farce.
Appreciation of the drama is neither strong nor clear in at least one part of the vicinity of Shakespeare’s native town. After the busy time of the ‘Tercentenary,’ Mr. Julian Young sent his servants to the theatre in Stratford. They had never been in a playhouse before. The piece represented was ‘Othello.’ On the following morning, wishing to know the effect of the drama on his servants’ minds, Mr. Julian Young questioned them in their several departments. The butler was impressed to this effect: ‘Thank you, sir, for the treat. The performers performed the performance which they had to perform excellent well—especially the female performers—in the performance.’ The more impulsive coachman, in the harness-room, exclaimed, ‘’Twas really beautiful, sir; I liked it onaccountable!’ But when he was asked what the play was about he frankly confessed he didn’t exactly know; but that it was very pretty, and was upon sweet-hearting! On a former occasion, when the gardener and his wife had been treated to the Bristol Theatre, their master, on the next day, asked, ‘Well, Robert, what did you see last night?’ The bewildered fellow replied, after a pause, ‘Well, sir, I saw what you sent me to see!’ ‘What was that?’ ‘Why, the play, in course.’ ‘Was it a tragedy or a comedy?’ ‘I don’t know what you mane. I can’t say no more than I have said, nor no fairer! All I know is there was a precious lot on ’em on the theayter stage; and there they was, in and out, and out and in again!’ The wife had more definite ideas. She was all for the second piece, she said, ‘The pantrymine, and what I liked best in it was where the fool fellar stooped down and grinned at we through his legs!’ Good creature! after all, her taste was in tune with that of King George III., who thought Garrick fidgety, and who laughed himself into fits at the clown who could get a whole bunch of carrots into his mouth, and apparently swallow them, with supplementary turnips to make them go down! The gardener’s wife, therefore, need not be ashamed. She is not half so much called upon to blush as the wife of the treasurer of Drury Lane Theatre, who was one of a score of professional ladies and gentlemen dining together some forty years ago. The lady hearing ‘Venice Preserved’ named, made the remark that she believed ‘it was one of Shakespeare’s plays, was it not?’ We have ourselves a bill of Drury Lane, not ten years old, in which ‘Othello’ is announced as Bulwer’s tragedy, &c.; but that, of course, was a misprint. On our showing it in the green-room, however, not one of the performers saw the error!
Let us now look at some of the other personages who figured in the bygone period; and first, of kings. Poor old George III. cannot be said at any time to have been ‘every inch a king.’ He was certainly not, by nature, a cruel man. Yet he betrayed something akin to cruelty when, on the night of the Lord George Gordon riots, an officer who had been actively employed in suppressing the rioters waited on the king to make his report. George III. hurried forward to meet him, crying out with screaming iteration, ‘Well! well! well! I hope you peppered them well! peppered them well! peppered them well!’ There may, however, have been nothing more in this than there was in Wellington’s injunction to his officers on the day that London was threatened with a Chartist revolution, ‘Remember, gentlemen, there must be no little war.’ In such cases humanity to revolutionists is lack of mercy to the friends of order.
It is well known that George III. had an insuperable aversion to Dr. John Willis, who had attended him when the King was labouring under his early intermitting attacks of insanity. Willis was induced to take temporary charge of the King, on Pitt’s promise to make him a baronet and give him a pension of 1,500l. a year—pleasant things which never came to pass. Queen Charlotte hated Willis even more than the King did. The physician earned that guerdon by putting George III. in a strait waistcoat whenever he thought the royal violence required it. The doctor took this step on his own responsibility. The Queen never forgave him, and the King, as long as he had memory, never forgot it. In 1811, when the fatal relapse occurred, brought on, Willis thought, by Pitt’s persistent pressure of the Roman Catholic claims on the King’s mind, the Chancellor and the Prince of Wales had some difficulty in inducing the doctor to take charge of the sovereign. When Willis entered that part of Windsor Castle which was inhabited by the King he heard the monarch humming a favourite song in his room. A moment after George III. crossed the threshold on to the landing-place. He was in Windsor uniform as to his coat, blue, with scarlet cuffs and collar, a star on the breast. A waistcoat of buff chamois leather, buskin breeches and top-boots, with the familiar three-cornered hat, completed the costume. He came forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, full of hope and joy, like Cymon, ‘whistling as he went for want of thought,’ and switching his boot with his whip as he went. Suddenly, as his eye fell on Willis, he reeled back as if he had been shot. He shrieked out the hated name, called on God, and fell to the ground. It was long before the unhappy sovereign could be calmed. In his own room the King wept like a child. Every now and then he broke into heartrending exclamations of ‘What can I do without doing wrong? They forget my coronation oath; but I don’t! Oh, my oath! my oath! my oath!’ The King’s excitement on seeing Willis was partly caused by his remembering the Queen’s promise that Willis should never be called in again in case of the King’s illness. Willis on that occasion consented to stay with the King after a fearful scene had taken place with the Queen, her doctors, and council. When Mr. Julian Young knew Willis, from whom he had the above details, the doctor was above eighty years of age, upright and active. He was still a mighty hunter; and, unless Mr. Young was misinformed, on the very day before his death he shot two or three brace of snipes in the morning, and danced at the Lincoln ball at night. Willis did not reach his hundredth year, as Dr. Routh, of Magdalen College, Oxford, did. Just before the death of the latter, Lord Campbell visited and had a long conversation with him. At parting the centenarian remarked: ‘I hope it will not be many years before we meet again.’ ‘Did he think,’ said Lord Campbell afterwards, ‘that he and I were going to live for ever?’
Monarchs, who have to submit to many tyrannies by which monarchs alone can suffer, must have an especial dread of levees and presentations. The monotony must be killing; at the very best, irritating. George IV. had the stately dreariness very much relieved. On one occasion, when a nervous gentleman was bowing and passing before him, a lord-in-waiting kindly whispered to him, ‘Kiss hands!’ The nervous gentleman accordingly moved on to the door, turned round, and there kissed his hands airily to the King by way of kindly farewell! George IV. laughed almost as heartily as his brother, King William, did at an unlucky alderman who was at Court on the only day Mr. Julian Young ever felt himself constrained to go into the royal presence. The alderman’s dress-sword got between his legs as he was backing from that presence, whereby he was tripped up and fell backwards on the floor. King William cared not a fig for dignity. He remarked with great glee to those who stood near: ‘By Jove! the fellow has cut a crab!’ and the kingly laughter was, as it were, poured point blank into the floundering alderman. This was not encouraging to Mr. Young, who had to follow. As newly-appointed royal chaplain in Hampton Court Palace Chapel, King William had expressed a wish to see him at a levee, and obedience was a duty. The chaplain had been told by Sir Horace Seymour that he had nothing to do but follow the example of the gentleman who might happen to be before him. The principal directions to the neophyte were: ‘Bow very low, and do not turn your back on the King!’ The instant the chaplain had kissed the King’s hand, however, he turned his back upon his sovereign, and hurried off. Sir Horace Seymour afterwards consoled him for this breach of etiquette by stating that a Surrey baronet who had followed him made a wider breach in court observance. The unlucky baronet, seeing the royal hand outstretched, instead of reverently putting his lips to it, caught hold of it and wrung it heartily! The King, who loved a joke, probably enjoyed levees, the usual monotony of which was relieved by such screaming-farce incidents as these.
Those royal brothers, sons of George III., were remarkably outspoken. They were not witty themselves, but they were now and then the cause of wit in others. It must have been the Duke of Cumberland who (on listening to Mr. Nightingale’s story of having been run away with when driving, and that at a critical moment he jumped out of the carriage) blandly exclaimed: ‘Fool! fool!’ ‘Now,’ said Nightingale, on telling the incident to Horace Smith, ‘it’s all very well for him to call me a fool; but I can’t conceive why he should. Can you?’ ‘No,’ rejoined Horace, ‘I can’t, because he could not suppose you ignorant of the fact!’