Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

A certain statesman who had taken much interest in the matter will be amused to read the Louisville communication. “I have often,” he wrote to me, “wondered, and occasionally asked, who W. A. R. was, and have been at times impatient that people should be content to live on without knowing. Now I would almost rather not know, having been disappointed for so long.” He went on to say that he suspected W. A. R. to be an American. Well, he was right. Sagacious and far-seeing as ever, he now has another opportunity of pointing to a fulfilled conjecture; for there is no doubt (since I have had corroboration from another transatlantic source) that the following letter is gospel.

The writer, Mr. W. R. Belknap, roundly states himself to be William Allen Richardson’s nephew. He continues: “William Allen Richardson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 20, 1819. When he was but two years old, his father moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he resided until his death, in October, 1892. William Allen Richardson married Miss Mary Short, daughter of Charles Wilkins Short, the botanist, who pursued his favourite studies of botany and horticulture at his country place, Hayfield, some five miles south-west of Louisville. With this congenial companionship, Mr. W. A. Richardson established himself in an adjoining place, Ivywood, and became much interested in the cultivation and propagation of roses. He imported a good many, and in this way became acquainted by correspondence with Madame Ducher (or she may have been called Veuve Ducher), at Lyons, France, who was especially interested in a rose which he sent her of a pale yellow colour, and she wrote Mr. Richardson that she had a sport from this rose in her own garden, which, if successful in propagation, she would name for him; hence the name which has interested you as applying to the beautiful copperish-yellow rose.... Mr. Richardson lived until 1892 in his country home near here, and would have enjoyed, if he might have foreseen, the interest which his namesake has aroused....”

And now we know. The secret is out, and the rose will smell no less sweet for it, nor climb less carelessly, nor refresh the eye less graciously. But I adjure America to be more proud of this feather in her cap. I do not suggest that William Allen Richardson should have a monument, for he has one in every right garden more beautiful than marble and very likely more enduring than bronze; but his name should be so deeply cut upon the roll of honour that no one need ever have to ask my question again.

But what a blow to that foolish romantic anecdote about Ellen!

Mr. Hastings

Had it not been for the trenchant pen of his cousin, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, we should know nothing of Mr. Hastings; but as it happens, a portrait of Mr. Hastings being painted, the Earl was amused to pit his pen against the brush of the artist and append the result to the picture. So that Mr. Hastings used to hang on the wall at Wimborne St. Giles’s, near Cranbourn, in Dorset (one of the Shaftesbury seats), doubly limned. Where he is to-day I know not; but the Earl’s words remain and are accessible. I take them in the form which follows from the “Connoisseur” for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and I may in passing say that in turning over the leaves of this leisurely little breakfast-table companion it was not a little disquieting to think what good papers they had in London one hundred and fifty-six years ago, before the days of amalgamation.

As to the portrait of Mr. Hastings, I have seen an engraving of it in one of Hutchins’s Dorsetshire books, and it is a crude enough thing—a little odd old man, with a pointed beard, sharp eyes, and a long staff in his right hand—not so much a patriarch’s staff as a surveyor’s pole. Nothing in it to suggest that he loved spaniels, for example, or knew the best thing to do with a disused pulpit. Yet he did.

Now for the shrewd and cryptic statesman who first made the admirable remark (since given to others) that “Wise men are of but one religion,” adding to the lady who inquired what that was, “Wise men never tell.” He begins thus: “In the year 1638 lived Mr. Hastings; by his quality son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. He was ... low, very strong, and very active; of a reddish flaxen hair. His clothes always green cloth, and never all worth (when new) five pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of a large Park well stocked with deer; and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen; many fish-ponds; great store of wood and timber; a bowling-green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being never levell’d since it was plough’d. They used round sand bowls; and it had a banqueting house like a stand, built in a tree.”—The mansion no longer stands in its entirety. It was pulled down, with the exception of two wings, at the beginning of the last century. One of these wings, however, contains the kitchen, and gives ample evidence of the hospitality which, as we shall see, was practised there.

Mr. Hastings “kept all manner of sport hounds, that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. And hawks, long and short winged. He had all sorts of nets for fish. He had a walk in the New Forest, and the manor of Christ Church. This last supplied him with red deer, sea and river fish. And indeed all his neighbours’ grounds and royalties were free to him, who bestowed all his time on these sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours’ wives and daughters; there being not a woman in all his walks, of the degree of a yeoman’s wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he was not intimately acquainted with her. This made him very popular; always speaking kindly to the husband, father, or brother, who was, to boot, very welcome to his house whenever he came.” (“Popular” is a good word, so good, in this connexion, that one has to pause a little to savour it.) Thinking of him thus occupied, if ever, you would say, an old, whimsical bachelor was portrayed, he is portrayed here. But you would be wrong, for Mr. Hastings was married. It was his wife who brought him Woodlands, and she did not die till 1638, when he was eighty-seven. They had, moreover, a son. Lord Shaftesbury, who was something of a cynic, suppressed this detail. It amused him to eliminate Mrs. Hastings.