And that gave your honour a check.’
‘’Tis my way,’ replied Townshend. ‘To the world I appeal,
If I didn’t the same at Quebec.’
Townshend, at Quebec, had succeeded to the command after Monckton was wounded, and he declined to renew the conflict with De Bougainville. The duel between Temple and Whately arose out of extraordinary circumstances. There were in the British Foreign Office letters from English and also from American officials in the transatlantic colony, which advised coercion on the part of our government as the proper course to be pursued for the successful administration of that colony. Benjamin Franklin was then in England, and hearing of these letters, had a strong desire to procure them, in order to publish them in America, to the confusion of the writers. The papers were the property of the British Government, from whom it is hardly too much to say that they must have been stolen. At all events, an agent of Franklin’s, named Hugh Williamson, is described as having got them for Franklin ‘by an ingenious device,’ which seems to be a very euphemistic phrase. The letters had been originally addressed to Whately, secretary to the Treasury, who, in 1773, was dead. The ingenious device by which they were abstracted was reported to have been made with the knowledge of Temple, who had been lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. The excitement caused by their publication led to a duel between Temple and a brother of Whately, in whose hands the letters had never been, and poor Whately was dangerously wounded, to save the honour of the ex-lieutenant-governor. The publication of these letters was as unjustifiable as the ingenious device by which they were conveyed from their rightful owners. It caused as painful a sensation as any one of the many painful incidents in the Geneva Arbitration affair, namely, when—it being a point of honour that neither party should publish a statement of their case till a judgment had been pronounced—the case made out by the United States counsel was to be bought, before the tribunal was opened, as easily as if it had been a ‘last dying speech and confession!’
In literature Andrew Stewart’s promised ‘Letters to Lord Mansfield’ excited universal curiosity. In that work Stewart treated the chief justice as those Chinese executioners do their patients whose skin they politely and tenderly brush away with wire brushes till nothing is left of the victim but a skeleton. It was a luxury to Walpole to see a Scot dissect a Scot. ‘They know each other’s sore places better than we do.’ The work, however, was not published. Referring to Macpherson’s ‘Ossian,’ Walpole remarked, ‘The Scotch seem to be proving that they are really descended from the Irish.’ On the other hand, the ‘Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers’ was being relished by satirical minds, and men were attributing it to Anstey and Soame Jenyns, and to Temple, Luttrell, and Horace Walpole, and pronouncing it wittier than the ‘Dunciad,’ and did not know that it was Mason’s, and that it would not outlive Pope. Sir William Chambers found consolation in the fact that the satire, instead of damaging the volume it condemned, increased the sale of the book by full three hundred volumes. Walpole, of course, knew from the first that Mason was the author; he worked hard in promoting its circulation, and gloried in its success. ‘Whenever I was asked,’ he writes, ‘have you read “Sir John Dalrymple?” I replied, “Have you read the ‘Heroic Epistle’?” The Elephant and Ass have become constellations, and ‘He has stolen the Earl of Denbigh’s handkerchief,’ is the proverb in fashion. It is something surprising to find, at a time when authors are supposed to have been ill paid, Dr. Hawkesworth receiving, for putting together the narrative of Mr. Banks’s voyage, one thousand pounds in advance from the traveller, and six thousand from the publishers, Strahan & Co. It really seems incredible, but this is stated to have been the fact.
Then, the drama of 1773! There was Home’s ‘Alonzo,’ which, said Walpole, ‘seems to be the story of David and Goliath, worse told than it would have been if Sternhold and Hopkins had put it to music!’ But the town really awoke to a new sensation when Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was produced on the stage, beginning a course in which it runs as freshly now as ever. Yet the hyper-fine people of a hundred years ago thought it rather vulgar. This was as absurd as the then existing prejudice in France, that it was vulgar and altogether wrong for a nobleman to write a book, or rather, to publish one! There is nothing more curious than Walpole’s drawing-room criticism of this exquisite and natural comedy. He calls it ‘the lowest of all farces.’ He condemns the execution of the subject, rather than the ‘very vulgar’ subject itself. He could see in it neither moral nor edification. He allows that the situations are well managed, and make one laugh, in spite of the alleged grossness of the dialogue, the forced witticisms, and improbability of the whole plan and conduct. But, he adds, ‘what disgusts one most is, that though the characters are very low, and aim at low humour, not one of them says a sentence that is natural, or that marks any character at all. It is set up in opposition to sentimental comedy, and is as bad as the worst of them.’ Walpole’s supercilious censure reminds one of the company and of the dancing bear, alluded to in the scene over which Tony Lumpkin presides at the village alehouse. ‘I loves to hear the squire’ (Lumpkin) ‘sing,’ says one fellow, ‘bekase he never gives us anything that’s low!’ To which expression of good taste, an equally nice fellow responds; ‘Oh, damn anything that’s low! I can’t bear it!’ Whereupon, the philosophical Mister Muggins very truly remarks: ‘The genteel thing is the genteel thing at any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.’ The humour culminates in the rejoinder of the bear-ward: ‘I like the maxim of it, Master Muggins. What though I’m obligated to dance a bear? A man may be a gentleman for all that. May this be my poison if my bear ever dances but to the very genteelest of tunes—“Water parted,” or the minuet in “Ariadne”.’ All this is low, in one sense, but it is far more full of humour than of vulgarity. The comedy of nature killed the sentimental comedies, which, for the most part, were as good (or as bad) as sermons. They strutted or staggered with sentiments on stilts, and were duller than tables of uninteresting statistics.
Garrick, who would have nothing to do with Goldsmith’s comedy except giving it a prologue, was ‘in shadow’ this year. He improved ‘Hamlet,’ by leaving out the gravediggers; and he swamped the theatre with the ‘Portsmouth Review.’ He went so far as to rewrite ‘The Fair Quaker of Deal,’ to the tune of ‘Portsmouth and King George for ever!’ not to mention a preface, in which the Earl of Sandwich, by name, is preferred to Drake, Blake, and all the admirals that ever existed! If Walpole’s criticisms are not always just, they are occasionally admirable for terseness and correctness alike. London, in 1773, was in raptures with the singing of Cecilia Davies. Walpole quaintly said that he did not love the perfection of what anybody can do, and he wished ‘she had less top to her voice and more bottom.’ How good too is his sketch of a male singer, who ‘sprains his mouth with smiling on himself!’ But to return to Garrick, and an illustration of social manners a century ago, we must not omit to mention that, at a private party—at Beauclerk’s, Garrick played the ‘short-armed orator’ with Goldsmith! The latter sat in Garrick’s lap, concealing him, but with Garrick’s arms advanced under Goldsmith’s shoulders; the arms of the latter being held behind his back. Goldsmith then spoke a speech from ‘Cato,’ while Garrick’s shortened arms supplied the action. The effect, of course, was ridiculous enough to excite laughter, as the action was often in absurd diversity from the utterance.
In the present newspaper record of births a man’s wife is no longer called his ‘lady;’ a hundred years ago there was plentiful variety of epithet. ‘The Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, spouse to the Prince of that name, of a Princess,’ is one form. ‘Earl Tyrconnel’s lady of a child,’ is another. ‘Wife’ was seldom used. One birth is announced in the following words: ‘The Duchess of Chartres, at Paris, of a Prince who has the title of Duke of Valois.’ Duke of Valois? ay, and subsequently Duke of Chartres, Duke of Orléans, finally, Louis Philippe, King of the French!
The chronicle of the marriages of the year seems to have been loosely kept, unless indeed parties announced themselves by being married twice over. There is, for example, a double chronicling of the marriage of the following personages: ‘July 31st. The Right Hon. the Lady Amelia D’Arcy, daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse, to the Marquis of Carmarthen, son of his Grace the Duke of Leeds. Lady Amelia having thus married my Lord in July, we find, four months later, my Lord marrying Lady Amelia. ‘Nov. 29th. The Marquis of Carmarthen to Lady Amelia D’Arcy, daughter of the Earl of Holdernesse.’ This union, with its double chronology, was one of several which was followed by great scandal, and dissolved under circumstances of great disgrace. But the utmost scandal and disgrace attended the breaking up of the married life of Lord and Lady Carmarthen. This dismal domestic romance is told in contemporary pamphlets with a dramatic completeness of detail which is absolutely startling. Those who are fond of such details may consult these liberal authorities: we will only add that the above Lady Amelia D’Arcy, Marchioness of Carmarthen, became the wife of Captain Byron; the daughter of that marriage was Augusta, now better known to us as Mrs. Leigh. Captain Byron’s second wife was Miss Gordon, of Gight, and the son of that marriage was the poet Byron. How the names of the half-brother and half-sister have been cruelly conjoined, there is here no necessity of narrating. Let us turn to smaller people. Thus, we read of a curious way of endowing a bride, in the following marriage announcement: ‘April 13th. Rev. Mr. Morgan, Rector of Alphamstow, York, to Miss Tindall, daughter of Mr. Tindall, late rector, who resigned in favour of his son-in-law.’ In the same month, we meet with a better known couple—‘Mr. Sheridan, of the Temple, to the celebrated Miss Linley, of Bath.’
The deaths of the year included, of course, men of very opposite qualities. The man of finest quality who went the inevitable way was he whom some call the good, and some the great Lord Lyttelton. When a man’s designation rests on two such distinctions, we may take it for granted that he was not a common-place man. And yet how little remains of him in the public memory. His literary works are fossils; but, like fossils, they are not without considerable value. Good as he was, there are not a few people who jumble together his and his son’s identity. The latter was unworthy of his sire. He was a disreputable person altogether.