The name of Facil was but too appropriate. The slender thread of his verse was hastily and slightly spun.
His comedies are adapted to the entertainment of those readers only who have formed their taste on the French drama. His tragedies are some of the most endurable we have in what a lively modern critic[4] has termed the rhetorical style. Yet he had some skill in moving compassion.
His diction, both in poetry and prose, is vitiated by the frequent recurrence of certain hyperbolical expressions, which he applies on almost all occasions.
He was particularly fond of composing epitaphs, of which, as I remember, he shewed me a manuscript book full. One of these on Henry Hammond, the parish clerk at Eartham, is among the best in the language. It is inserted in the Memoirs which Hayley wrote of his son.
An active spirit in a little frame,
This honest man the path of duty trod;
Toil'd while he could, and, when death's darkness came,
Sought in calm hope his recompense from God.
His sons, who loved him, to his merit just,
Raised this plain stone to guard their parent's dust.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, vol. iv. p. 742.
[2] In a similar sketch from the pen of the Rev. Samuel Greatheed,
referring to an earlier period, it is stated that "he usually rose
and took a dish of coffee at four A.M.," and that "while dressing, he
most frequently composed a few stanzas of a devotional turn." This
practice of early rising he continued many years after the Editor
became acquainted with him, walking in his garden, even in winter,
and when the ground was covered with snow, with a lantern in his
hand, some hours before daylight; and repeatedly throwing up the
sash of his friend's sleeping room, on the ground floor, to give him
the benefit of the morning air. Note by Doctor Johnson.
[3] To the best of his recollection, the Editor never saw him abroad
without an umbrella; which in fine weather he used as a parasol, to
preserve his eyes. He even rode with it on horseback, a very awkward
operation, considering the high-spirited animals that composed his
stud, and the constitutional malady in his hip-joint, which, in
addition to his weight (for he was a remarkably strong-built man),
and his never riding without military spurs, reduced his danger of
falling almost to a certainty, when he opened his umbrella without
due precaution. But he was a stranger to fear in equestrian matters,
and always mounted his horse again, as soon as he could be caught.
The Editor was once riding gently by his side, on the stony beach of
Bognor, when the wind suddenly reversing his umbrella, as he
unfolded it, his horse, with a sudden but desperate plunge, pitched
him on his head in an instant. Providentially he received no hurt,
and some fishermen being at hand, the plunging steed was stopped at
a gate, and being once more subjected to his rider, took him home in
safety. On another occasion, in the same visit of the Editor, he was
tost into the air on the Downs, at the precise moment when an
interesting friend, whom they had just left, being apprehensive of
what would happen, was anxiously viewing him from her window through
a telescope.
These anecdotes may serve to illustrate that determined feature of
his character, which has been already noticed, and which impelled
him, contrary to the advice of his friends, to persevere in a
favourite, though perilous exercise, even at the manifest hazard of
his life. At length, however, they prevailed; and for some years
before he died, he gave up riding on horseback altogether. Note by
Dr. Johnson.
[4] My friend Mr. Darley, MS. addition.—ED.
* * * * *
SIR WILLIAM JONES.
The life of Sir William Jones has been written by his friend Lord Teignmouth with that minuteness which the character of so illustrious and extraordinary a man deserved. He was born in London, on the twenty-eighth of September, 1746. His father, whose Christian name he bore, although sprung immediately from a race of yeomen in Anglesea, could yet, like many a Cambro-Briton beside, have traced his descent, at least in a maternal line, from the ancient princes of Wales. But what distinguished him much more was, that he had attained so great a proficiency in the study of mathematics as to become a teacher of that branch of science in the English metropolis, under the patronage of Sir Isaac Newton, and rose to such reputation by his writings, that he attracted the notice and esteem of the powerful and the learned, and was admitted to the intimacy of the Earls of Hardwicke, and Macclesfield; Lord Parker, President of the Royal Society; Halley; Mead; and Samuel Johnson. By his wife, Mary, the daughter of a cabinet-maker in London, he had two sons, one of whom died an infant, and a daughter. In three years after the birth of the remaining son, the father himself died, and left the two children to the protection of their mother. An extraordinary mark of her presence of mind, sufficiently indicated how capable this mother was of executing the difficult duty imposed on her by his decease. Dr. Mead had pronounced his case, which was a polypus on the heart, to be a hopeless one; and her anxious precautions to hinder the fatal intelligence from reaching him were on the point of being defeated by the arrival of a letter of condolence and consolation from an injudicious but well-meaning friend, when, on discovering its purport, she had sufficient address to substitute the lively dictates of her own invention for the real contents of the epistle, and by this affectionate delusion not merely to satisfy the curiosity but to cheer the spirits of her dying husband.