High, perhaps highest in this noble class, stood Margaret Cavendish Harley, Duchess Dowager of Portland, The Friend of Mrs. Delany; by whom that venerable and exemplary personage, who was styled by Mr. Burke, “The pattern of a real fine lady of times that were past,” had been herself made known to Mr. Crisp.
Mrs. Montagu, also, who then, Mr. Crisp was wont to say, was peering at fame, and gradually rising to its temple, was of the same coterie. But most familiarly he resided with Christopher Hamilton of Chesington Hall, and with the Earl of Coventry.
With this last he was intimately connected, at the time of that Earl’s marriage with the acknowledged nonpareil of female beauty, the youngest Miss Gunning.
Mr. Crisp had already written his tragedy of Virginia; but Garrick, though he was the author’s personal friend, thought it so little equal to the expectations that might await it, that he postponed, season after season, bringing it out; even though Lord Coventry, who admired it with the warmth of partial regard, engaged the first Mr. Pitt[29] to read it, and to pronounce in its favour. Roscius still was adverse, and still delayed the trial; nor could he be prevailed upon to prepare it for the stage, till Mr. Crisp had won that Venus of her day, the exquisite Lady Coventry, through his influence with her lord, to present a copy of the manuscript, with her own almost sculptured hand, to the then conquered manager.
The play neither succeeded nor failed. A catastrophe of so yea and nay a character was ill suited to the energies and hopes of its high-minded author, who was bitterly disappointed; and thought the performers had been negligent, Mr. Garrick unfriendly, and the public precipitate.
The zealous Lord Coventry, himself a man of letters, advised sundry changes, and a new trial. Mr. Crisp shut himself up, and worked indefatigably at these suggestions: but when his alterations were finished, there was no longer a radiant Countess of Coventry to bewitch Mr. Garrick, by “the soft serenity of her smile,” to make a further attempt. Lady Coventry, whose brief, dazzling race, was rapidly run, was now already fast fading in the grasping arms of withering consumption: and Mr. Garrick, though, from unwillingness to disoblige, he seemed wavering, was not the less inexorable.
Mr. Crisp then, disgusted with the stage, the manager, and the theatrical public, gave up not alone that point, but every other by which he might have emerged from private life to celebrity. He almost wholly retired from London, and resided at Hampton; where he fitted up a small house with paintings, prints, sculpture, and musical instruments, arranged with the most classical elegance.
But the vicinity of the metropolis caused allurements such as these, with such a chief to bring them into play, to accord but ill with the small, though unincumbered fortune of their master; and the grace with which, instinctively, he received his visitors, made his habitation so pleasant, as soon to produce a call upon his income that shattered its stability.
His alarm now was such as might be expected from his sense of honour, and his love of independence. Yet the delicacy of his pride forbade any complaint to his friends, that might seem to implicate their discretion in his distress, or to invite their aid; though his desire to smooth, without publishing, his difficulties, urged him to commune with those of his connexions who were in actual power, and to confess his wishes for some honourable place, or occupation, that might draw forth his faculties to the amelioration of his fortune.
Kind words, and enlivening promises, now raised his hopes to a favourable change in his affairs; and, brightly looking forward, he continued to welcome his friends; who, enchanted by his society, poured in upon him with a thoughtless frequency, which caused an increase of expenditure that startled him, ere long, with a prospect, sudden and frightful, of the road to ruin.