Quin has left some reputation as a humourist. Biographers give the name of his tutor in Dublin, but they add that Quin was illiterate, a character which is hardly established by the best of his bons mots. That he was not well read, even in the literature of that profession, of which he was so distinguished a member, is certain; but he boasted that he could read men more readily than books, and it is certain that his observation was acute, and the application of what he learned thereby, electrically prompt.
If he was inexorable in enforcing the payment of what was due to him, he was also nobly generous with the fortune he amassed. Meanness was not among the faults of Quin. The greatest injury has been done to his memory by the publication of jests, of a very reprehensible character, and which were said to be his, merely to quicken their sale. He lived in coarse times, and his jokes may have been, now and then, of a coarse quality; but he also said some of the finest things that ever fell from the lips of an intellectual wit.
Of all Quin's jests, there is nothing finer than two which elicited the warm approval of Horace Walpole. Bishop Warburton, in company at Bath, spoke in support of prerogative. Quin said, "Pray, my Lord, spare me; you are not acquainted with my principles. I am a republican; and, perhaps, I even think that the execution of Charles I. might be justified." "Ay!" said Warburton, "by what law?" Quin replied: "By all the laws he had left them." Walpole saw the sum of the whole controversy couched in those eight monosyllables; and the more he examined the sententious truth the finer he found it. The Bishop thought otherwise, and "would have got off upon judgments." He bade the player remember that all the regicides came to violent ends,—a lie, but no matter. "I would not advise your Lordship," said Quin, "to make use of that inference, for, if I am not mistaken, that was the case of the twelve apostles." Archbishop Whately could not have more logically overthrown conclusions which discern God's anger in individual afflictions.
There is little wonder, then, that Warburton disliked Quin; indeed there was not much love lost between the two men, who frequently met as guests in the house of Ralph Allen, of Prior Park, Bath,—the original of Fielding's Squire Allworthy, and the uncle (Walpole says the father) of Warburton's wife. The Bishop, seldom courteous to any man, treated Quin with an offensively patronising air, and endeavoured to make him feel the distance between them. There was only a difference in their vocations, for Quin, by birth, was, perhaps, rather a better gentleman than Warburton. The latter once, at Allen's house, where the prelate is said to have admonished the player on his too luxurious way of living (the bishop, however, loving custard not less than the actor did John Dory), requested him, as he could not see him on the stage, to recite some passages from dramatic authors, in presence of a large company then assembled in the drawing-room. Quin made some little difficulty; but after a well-simulated hesitation consented, and stood up to deliver passages from "Venice Preserved;" but in reciting the lines
"Honest men
Are the soft easy cushions on which knaves
Repose and fatten,"
he so pointedly directed his looks, at "honest men" to Allen, and at "knaves" to Warburton, that the company universally marked the application, and the bishop never asked for a taste of the actor's quality again. And yet he is reported to have imitated this very act, with less warrant for it. When Dr. Terrick had been recently (in 1764) promoted from Peterborough to the see of London, a preferment coveted by Warburton, the latter preached a sermon at the Chapel Royal, at which the new Bishop of London was present, amid more august members of the congregation. Warburton took occasion to say that a government which conferred the high trusts of the Church on illiterate and worthless objects betrayed the interests of religion;—and on saying so, he stared Terrick full in the face.
There was no man for whom Quin had such distaste as this unpleasant Bishop of Gloucester, who published an edition of Shakspeare. When this was announced, the actor remarked in the green-room of old Drury, "He had better mind his own Bible, and leave ours to us!" Quin was undoubtedly open to censure on the score of his epicurism. He is said to have so loved John Dory as to declare, that for the enjoyment of it, a man "should have a swallow from here to the antipodes, and palate all the way!" and we are told that if, on his servant calling him in the morning, he heard that there was no John Dory in the market, he would turn round, and lazily remark, "then call me again to-morrow." But these are tales more or less coloured to illustrate his way of life. There is one which has more probability in it, which speaks of another incident at Bath. Lord Chesterfield saw a couple of chairmen helping a heavy gentleman into a sedan, and he asked his servant if he knew who that stout gentleman was? "Only Mr. Quin, my lord, going home, as usual, from the 'Three Tuns.'" "Nay, sir," answered my lord, "I think Mr. Quin is taking one of the three home with him, under his waistcoat!"
His capacity was undoubtedly great, but the over-testing it occasionally affected his acting. An occasion on which he was playing Balance, in the "Recruiting Officer," Mrs. Woffington acting Sylvia, his daughter, affords an instance. In the second scene of the second act he should have asked his daughter, "Sylvia, how old were you when your mother died?" instead of which he said "married." Sylvia laughed, and being put out of her cue, could only stammer "What, sir?" "Pshaw!" cried the more confused justice; "I mean, how old were you when your mother was born?" Mrs. Woffington recovered her self-possession, and taking the proper cue, said, "You mean, sir, when my mother died. Alas! so young, that I do not remember I ever had one; and you have been so careful, so indulgent to me, ever since, that indeed I never wanted one."