There is a story current that the Duke being once, when in a peevish humour, complimented by a friend on the great wisdom of his wife, made answer, "Sir, a very wise woman is a very foolish thing."
Another eccentric inhabitant of Newcastle House was Elizabeth, Duchess of Albemarle, and afterwards of Montague. She was married in 1669 to Christopher Monck, second Duke of Albemarle, then a youth of sixteen, whom her inordinate pride drove to the bottle and other dissipation. After his death, in 1688, at Jamaica, the Duchess, whose vast estate so inflated her vanity as to produce mental aberration, resolved never again to give her hand to any but a sovereign prince. She had many suitors; but true to her resolution, she rejected them all, until Ralph Montague, third Lord and first Duke of that name, achieved the conquest by courting her as Emperor of China: and the anecdote has been dramatized by Colley Cibber, in his comedy of The Double Gallant, or Sick Lady's Cure. Lord Montague married the lady as "Emperor," but afterwards played the truant, and kept her in such strict confinement that her relations compelled him to produce her in open court, to prove that she was alive. Richard Lord Ross, one of her rejected suitors, addressed to Lord Montague these lines on his match:—
"Insulting rival, never boast
Thy conquest lately won:
No wonder that her heart was lost,—
Her senses first were gone.
"From one that's under Bedlam's laws
What glory can be had?
For love of thee was not the cause:
It proves that she was mad."
The Duchess survived her second husband nearly thirty years, and at last "died of mere old age," at Newcastle House, August 28th, 1738, aged ninety-six years. Until her decease, she is said to have been constantly served on the knee as a sovereign; besides keeping her word, that she would not stoop to marry anyone but the Emperor of China.
[Sources of Laughter.]
In a clever paper in the Saturday Review (Oct. 7th, 1865), we find these amusing anecdotical instances of the sources means movere jocum:—
"A sustained, deliberate pride would have rather prevented than encouraged that fit of laughter which has preserved to posterity the name of a certain Marquis of Blandford. He, being noted for laughing upon small provocation, was once convulsed for half-an-hour together on seeing somebody fillip a crumb into a blind fiddler's face, the fits returning whenever the "ludicrous idea" recurred to him. An habitual sense of superiority would have prevented this sudden glory at sight of a beggar's helplessness under insult.
"There are personalities which lie so hid under a disguise that they are not readily known for such. The humorist and the cynic have each a knack of investing with human weaknesses things, animate and inanimate, in which plainer minds can see no analogy to human nature. We have known a man of quaint fancies laugh till the tears ran down at seeing a rat peep out of a hole. He caught a touch of humanity in the brute's perplexed air; he guessed at something behind the scenes impervious to our grosser vision. A bird, frumpish and disquieted on a rainy day, suggests to such a man some social image of discontent that makes capital fun for him. He can improve these lower creatures into caricatures of his friends, or of mankind at large. Mr. Formby owned himself unable to help "laughing out loud" in the presence of Egyptian antiquities, with the Memnon at their head; he laughed at an ancient civilization, at the men of the past personified by their works. Saturnine tempers can only laugh at imminent danger or positive calamity; mortal terror is the most ludicrous of all ideas to them. Mr. Trollope represents Lord de Courcy, who had not laughed for many a day, exploding at the notion of his neighbour earl having been all but tossed by a bull: and the joke would have been better still if the bull had had his will. This tendency is frequently to be seen with a defective sympathy, and we believe the things that make men laugh are an excellent clue at once to intellect and temper. Many a man does not betray the tiger that lurks within him till he laughs. There are times when the body craves for laughter as it does for food. This is the laughter which, on some occasion or other, has betrayed us all into a scandalous, unseasonable, remorseful gaiety. After long abstinence from cheerful thought, there are few occasions so sad and solemn as to render this inopportune revolt impossible, unless where grief absorbs the whole soul, and lowers the system to a uniformity of sadness. In fact, as no solemnity can be safe from incongruities, such occasions are not seldom the especial scene of these exposures—of explosions of a wild, perverse hilarity taking the culprit at unawares; and this even while he is aghast at his flagrant insensibility to the demand of the hour.