His garrulity had ruined Dr. Covel’s chances of ecclesiastical preferment; but it did not stand in the way of his academic career. He retained the Mastership of Christ’s all his life, and spent much of his leisure in transcribing, expanding, correcting, and every way spoiling the notes he had made at Constantinople: to the satisfaction of himself, though not of others. No publisher could be found courageous enough to undertake the publication of these masses of immense discursiveness and laborious irrelevance. It was only in our own time that a learned society ventured to print a selection from them. But Dr. Covel was not fortunate even in this tardy and partial emergence. To the author’s minute inaccuracies the editor has added a multitude of absurdities of his own; the upshot being the most bewildering bundle of blunders that ever issued from the press of any country in the guise of a book.[310]
So much concerning Dr. Covel’s Travels. His magnum opus on the Greek Church, after nearly fifty years’ incubation, came out at last when it was least wanted, in 1722—more than a generation after the question with which it deals had lost its actuality. It came out in folio, with a florid dedication to the Duke of Chandos, son of our late Ambassador and at the time Governor of the Levant Company: the author hints that, had he been made a Bishop, he would have had time to finish his book sooner. The delay, indeed, had its advantages: non cito, hoc est, non cito ac cursim agere; vel non temere et inconsulte. Yet, despite fifty years’ revisions and manipulations, he fears “some few things may yet appear Defective, and others Confus’d and Indigested.” The fear is well founded. Its diffused and confused style, and still more its creator’s fundamental inability to take an objective view of things, render this Account of the Greek Church one of the best illustrations extant of the aphorism mega biblion, mega kakon.
But, after all, it is not Dr. Covel the bad writer, but John the good fellow we care most about. In course of time he left off hoping for royal favours and episcopal mitres, and settled down to a mechanical routine of existence such as good dons lead. Whether he knew it or not, Dr. Covel was happy; the jollity which had made the Papas popular with the Factors of Constantinople helped to make the Master popular with the Fellows of Cambridge. This placid existence lasted till December 19th, 1722, when the Rev. John, in the 85th year of his age, went to join Finch and Baines under the pavement of Christ’s College chapel.
An inscription commemorates the virtues of Dr. Covel. A good portrait of him, in his congregational robes, preserves the features of his countenance. His voluminous journals and letters, stored in the British Museum, supply an ample and by far the most trustworthy testimony to the traits of his mind and character; they exhibit him as an amiable man rather than one of a very superior understanding.
DR. JOHN COVEL.
From the Portrait by Valentine Ritz at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
To face p. 372.
Much more exciting were the fortunes of the Honourable Dudley North. We saw him in Turkey a shrewd merchant, keen and unscrupulous in his pursuit of wealth. We find him in England a shrewd politician, keen and, some said, remorseless in his pursuit of power. He returned at a moment when the feud between Whig and Tory—to give the factions their new-fangled designations—was at its fiercest. By that infamous fiction, the Popish Plot, the Whigs had for a time driven the nation to madness and their principal opponents to an ignominious death. The public was just beginning to find out how it had been duped, and the Tories, profiting by the reaction, were getting ready to pay the Whigs back in their own false coin; the same gang of spies, witnesses, informers, and suborners who had hounded innocent Tories to the gallows, were now employed to hound innocent Whigs. North had come home a firm believer in Titus Oates’s murderous myth. He was undeceived—all the sooner because he was not slow to perceive that his interest lay on the same side as the truth: the Tory side. At the instance of his brother, then Lord Chief Justice, he was called to serve the King’s party as Sheriff of London and Middlesex: an expensive office which conferred the power of packing juries and securing convictions. Dudley performed the services expected from him with more energy than scruple. He considered it, indeed, very unfortunate that so many trials for high treason and executions should happen in his year of office; but business is business.
In the midst of all this sanguinary work, he found time to court a wealthy widow, Lady Gunning, and, in spite of her father, to marry her. She loved him, admired him, idolised him, and presided over the splendid banquets he gave in his Basinghall Street mansion. He returned her affection fully, and it was partly that she might not remain, were it only in name, separate from him, but become Lady North, that he accepted the honour of knighthood which a grateful Court bestowed upon him. Thus happy both in his private and public affairs, Sir Dudley climbed from height to height, becoming in quick succession an Alderman, a Commissioner of the Customs, a Commissioner of the Treasury, a Member of Parliament, and the chief advocate for the Crown in all questions of revenue that came before the House of Commons. In this last capacity North shone with a pure light.