Longfellow, King Christian [V.].
West Indian (The), a comedy by R. Cumberland (1771). Mr. Belcour, the adopted son of a wealthy Jamaica merchant, on the death of his adopted father came to London, to the house of Mr. Stockwell, once the clerk of Mr. Belcour, senior. This clerk had secretly married Belcour’s daughter, and when her boy was born it was “laid as a foundling at her father’s door.” Old Belcour brought the child up as his own son, and at death “bequeathed to him his whole estate.” The young man then came to London as the guest of Mr. Stockwell, the rich merchant, and accidentally encountered in the street Miss Louisa Dudley, with whom he fell in love. Louisa, with her father, Captain Dudley, and her brother, Charles, all in the greatest poverty, were lodging with a Mr. Fulmer, a small bookseller. Belcour gets introduced, and, after the usual mistakes and hairbreadth escapes, makes her his wife.
Western (Squire), a jovial, fox-hunting country gentleman, supremely ignorant of book-learning, very prejudiced, selfish, irascible and countrified; but shrewd, good-natured, and very fond of his daughter, Sophia.
Philip, earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, was in character a Squire Western, choleric, boisterous, illiterate, selfish, absurd and cowardly.--Osborne, Secret History, i. 218.
Squire Western stands alone; imitated from no prototype, and in himself an inimitable picture of ignorance, prejudice, irascibility and rusticity, united with natural shrewdness, constitutional good humor, and an instinctive affection for his daughter.--Encyc. Brit., Art. “Fielding.”
Sophia Western, daughter of Squire Western. She becomes engaged to Tom Jones, the foundling.--Fielding, Tom Jones (1749).
There now are no Squire Westerns, as of old;
And our Sophias are not so emphatic,
But fair as them or fairer to behold.
Byron, Don Juan, xiii. 110 (1824).