"If the preceding memoir of St. André had not been composed entirely from memory (a faculty which, like the sieve of the Danaids, is apt to lose as much as it receives), and had not been conveyed to the press with so much precipitancy, the writer, by a second recollection, might have made supplementary anecdotes less necessary. Whilst St. André was basking in the sun-shine of public favour in Northumberland-Court, near Charing-Cross, under pretence of being wanted in his profession at some house in the neighbourhood, he was hurried through so many passages, and up and down so many stair-cases, that he did not know where he was, nor what the untoward scene was to end in, till the horrid conclusion presented itself, of which he published an extraordinary account in The Gazette of Feb. 23, 1724-5, no less than of his being poisoned, and of his more extraordinary recovery. Such uncommon men must be visited through life with uncommon incidents. The bowl of poison must have been for ever present to his imagination. Socrates himself could not expect more certain destruction from the noxious draught he was forced to take down, than seemed inevitable to St. André. Nay, a double death seems to have threatened him. Probably it was not any public or private virtue for which Socrates was famous, and which occasioned him to suffer, that endangered our hero's life. His constitution was so good, that he got the better of the internal potion. The truth and circumstances of the story could only be known to himself, who authenticated it upon oath. His narrative partakes of the marvellous; and the reader of July, 1781, is left in total ignorance of the actor, and the provocation to such a barbarous termination. His case was reported, and he was attended, by the ablest of the faculty: and the Privy Council issued a reward of two hundred pounds towards a discovery. A note in the second supplemental volume of Swift informed the writer of this sketch, a day or two ago (who takes to himself the reproof of Prior, 'Authors, before they write, should read!'), that St. André was convinced he had been imposed upon respecting the woman of Godalmin, and that he apologised handsomely to the public in an advertisement, dated Dec. 8, 1726.—'He's half absolv'd, who has confest.'—In the autumn, before the heat of the town-talk on this affair was over, he was sent for to attend Mr. Pope, who, on his return home from Dawley in Lord Bolingbroke's coach and six, was overturned in a river, and lost the use of two fingers of his left-hand (happy for the lovers of poetry they were not the servants of the right one!), and gave him assurance, that none of the broken glass was likely to be fatal to him. It is highly improbable, that Pope and Bolingbroke would have suffered St. André to have come near them, if he had been branded as a cheat and an impostor. He died in March, 1776, having survived all his contemporary enemies, and, which is the consequence of living long, most of his ancient friends. Such men do not arise every day for our censure or our applause; to gratify the pen or the pencil of character or caricature. He may be considered, as Voltaire pronounces of Charles the Twelfth, an extraordinary, rather than a great man, and fitter to be admired than imitated.
"Impartial."
In the first place, I avow that the epithet notorious was not meant to be employed in the milder sense of Lord Clarendon. Had I undertaken to compile the life of a man eminent for virtue, I should have been happy to have borrowed the softer application of the aforesaid term from our noble historian. But having engaged to delineate a mere impostor's character, there is greater propriety in adopting the disputed word with that constant signification affixed to it by the biographers of Bet Canning, or Fanny the Phantom of Cock Lane.—I shall absolve myself no farther from the charge of "malice," than by observing that there are always people who think somewhat much too rough has been said of Chartres.
The dead, declares our apologist, deserve justice as well as their survivors. This is an uncontested truth; nor will the precept be violated by me. I may observe however, with impunity, that the interests of the living, for whose sake a line of separation between good and bad characters is drawn, should be consulted, rather than the memories of the flagitious, who can no longer be affected by human praise or censure, should be spared.
Our apologist next assures us, that perhaps more tenderness is due to a foreigner than to a native. The boasted amor patriæ is not very conspicuous in this remark, which indeed was dropped, to as little purpose, by a learned counsel on the trial of the French Spy who was lately executed.
"Next to his countryman Heidegger," adds our apologist, "Mr. St. André became the most considerable person that has been imported from Switzerland." To judge of the comparative value of the latter, we must estimate the merits of the former. Heidegger is known to us only by the uncommon ugliness of his visage, and his adroitness in conducting Operas and Masquerades. If St. André is to be regarded as a person still less considerable than Heidegger, can his consequence be rated very high?
That St. André arrived here in a menial station, is not improbable. The servility of his youth afforded a natural introduction to the insolence of his riper years. He was indeed (if I am not mis-informed) of the same family with the fencing and dancing-master whom Dryden has immortalized in MacFlecknoe;
"St. André's feet ne'er kept more equal time;"[1]
and was intended for the same professions; a circumstance often hinted at by his opponents during the Rabbit controversy. Having been thus early instructed in the management of the foil and kitt, no marvel that he so often prated about the art of defence, or that "his gratitude to his benefactors" broke out in the language of a minuet or a rigadoon.
That he became famous enough in his profession to have anatomical works occasionally dedicated to him, will easily obtain credit among our apologist's readers; for many of them must have seen a book on surgery inscribed to Dr. Rock, a political poem addressed to Buckhorse, and a treatise on religion sheltering itself under the patronage of the late Lord Baltimore. St. André, however, was not the earliest reader of anatomical lectures in London. Bussiere, the surgeon who attended Guiscard (the assassin of Harley), was our hero's predecessor in this office, and I am told even he was not the first who offered public instructions to the students at our hospitals. Dr. Hunter, who has been applied to for intelligence on this occasion, declares that he never described St. André as "the wonder of his time," but as a man who had passed through no regular course of study, and was competent only in the article of injections, a task as happily suited to minute abilities as to those of a larger grasp.