A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

Very soon after leaving Oxford, Beauclerk became engaged to a Miss Draycott, whose family were well known to that affable blue-stocking, Mrs. Montagu; but some coldness on his part, some sensitiveness on hers, broke off the match. His fortune-hunting parent is said to have been disappointed, as the lady owned several lead-mines in her own right. That same year, with Bennet Langton for companion part of the way, Beauclerk, whose health, never robust, now began to give him anxiety, set out on a Continental tour. Baretti, whom he had met at home, received him most kindly at Milan, thanks to Johnson’s urgent and friendly letter. By his subsequent knowledge of Italian popular customs, he was able to testify in Baretti’s favor, when the latter was under arrest for killing his man in the Haymarket, and in concert with Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Johnson, to help him, in a very interesting case, towards his acquittal. It was reported to Selwyn that the handsome gambling Inglese was robbed at Venice of £10,000! an incident which, perhaps, shortened his peregrinations. If the report were accurate, it would prove that he could have been in no immediate need of pecuniary rescue from his leaden sweetheart. It was Dr. Johnson’s opinion, coinciding with the opinion of Roger Ascham on the same general subject, that travel adds very little to one’s mental forces, and that Beauclerk might have learned more in the Academe of “Fleet Street, sir!”

Topham Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer, the eldest daughter of the second Duke of Marlborough, as soon as she obtained a divorce from her first husband. This was Frederick, Lord Bolingbroke, nephew and heir of the great owner of that title; a very trying gentleman, who was the restless “Bully” of Selwyn’s correspondence; he survived until 1787. The ceremony took place March 12, 1768, in St. George’s, Hanover Square, “by license of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” both conspirators being then residents of the parish. Lady Diana Spencer was born in the spring of 1734, and was therefore in her thirty-fifth year, while Beauclerk was but twenty-nine.[54] Johnson was disturbed, and felt offended at first with the whole affair; but he never withdrew from the agreeable society of Beauclerk’s wife. It is nothing wonderful that the courtship and honey-moon was signalized by the forfeit of Beauclerk’s place in the exacting Club, “for continued inattendance,” and not regained for a considerable period. “They are in town, at Topham’s house, and give dinners,” one of George Selwyn’s gossiping friends wrote, after the wedding. “Lord Ancram dined there yesterday, and called her nothing but Lady Bolingbroke the whole time!” Let us hope that “Milady Bully” triumphed over her awkward guest, and looked, as Earl March once described her under other difficulties, “handsomer than ever I saw her, and not the least abashed;” or as deliberately easy as when she entertained with her gay talk the nervous Boswell who awaited the news of his election or rejection from the Club. She was a blond goddess, exceedingly fair to see. In her middle age she fell under the observant glance of delightful Fanny Burney, who did not fail to allow her “pleasing remains of beauty.”

The divorcée was fond of and faithful to her new lord, and no drawback upon his æsthetic pride, inasmuch as she was an artist of no mean merit. Horace Walpole built a room for the reception of some of her drawings, which he called his Beauclerk Closet, “not to be shown to all the profane that come to see the house,” and he always praised them extravagantly. It is surer critical testimony in her favor that her name figures yet in encyclopædias, and that Sir Joshua, the honest and unbought judge, much admired her work, which Bartolozzi was kept busy engraving. It was her series of illustrations to Bürger’s wild ballad of Leonora (with the dolly knight, the wooden monks, the genteel heroine, and the vigorous spectres) which, long after, helped to fire the young imagination of Shelley. It is to be feared that her invaluable portrait of Samuel Johnson is not, or never was, extant. “Johnson was confined for some days in the Isle of Skye,” writes her rogue of a spouse, “and we hear that he was obliged to swim over to the mainland, taking hold of a cow’s tail. . . . Lady Di has promised to make a drawing of it.” Sir Joshua’s pretty “Una” is the little Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, elder daughter of Lady Di and Topham Beauclerk, painted the year her father died.

The family lived in princely style, both at their “summer quarters” at Muswell Hill, and on Great Russell Street, where the library, set in a great garden, reached, as Walpole mischievously gauged it, “half-way to Highgate.” Lady Di, an admirable hostess, proved herself one of those odd and rare women who take to their husbands’ old friends. Selwyn she cordially liked, and her warmest welcome attended Langton, whom she would rally for his remissness, when he failed to come to them at Richmond. He could reach them so easily! she said; all he need do was to lay himself at length, his feet in London and his head with them, eodem die. This Richmond home remained her residence during her widowhood. Walpole mentions a Thames boat-race in 1791, when he sat in a tent “just before Lady Di’s windows,” and gazed upon “a scene that only Richmond, on earth, can exhibit.” In the church of the same leafy town her body rests.

Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since 1777, when he lay sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife nursed him tenderly into what seemed to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He was but forty-one years old, and, for all his genius, left no more trace behind than that Persian prince who suddenly disappeared in the shape of a butterfly, and whom old Burton calls a “light phantastick fellow.” His air of boyish promise, quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his friends into prophecies of his fame. He did not give events a chance to put immortality on his “bright, unbowed, insubmissive head.” Yet he was bitterly mourned. “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save him,” cried Johnson, who had loved him for over twenty years; and again, to Lord Althorp: “This is a loss, sir, that perhaps the whole nation could not repair.” Boswell mentions the Doctor’s April stroll, at this time, while he was writing his Lives of the Poets; and tells us how, returning from a call on the widow of the companion of his youth, David Garrick, he leaned over the rails of the Adelphi Terrace, watching the dark river, and thinking of “two such friends as cannot be supplied.” “Poor dear Beauclerk!” Johnson wrote, when his violent grief had somewhat subsided, “nec, ut soles, dabis joca! His wit and his folly, his acuteness and his maliciousness, his merriment and his reasoning, are alike over. Such another will not often be found among mankind.” Beyond this well-known and characteristic summing-up, the Doctor made no discoverable mention, in his correspondence, of his bereavement, certainly not to the highly-prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to whom he wrote often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk’s death. Nor shall we know how the catastrophe affected Bennet Langton; for all the most interesting papers relating to him were destroyed when the old Hall at Langton-by-Spilsby was burned in 1855. On this subject, as on others as intimate, he stands, perforce, silent.

Readers may recall a passage in Miss Burney’s Diary which gives countenance to an accusation not borne out by any other testimony, that Beauclerk and his wife had not lived happily together. Dining at Sir Joshua’s at Richmond, in 1782, Edmund Burke, sitting next the author of Evelina, took occasion, on catching sight of Lady Di’s “pretty white house” through the trees, to rejoice in the fact that she was well-housed, moneyed, and a widow. He added that he had never enjoyed the good-fortune of another so keenly as in this blessed instance. Then, turning to his new acquaintance, as the least likely to be informed of the matter, he spoke in his own “strong and marked expressions” of the singular ill-treatment Beauclerk had shown his wife, and the “necessary relief” it must have been to her when he was called away. The statement does not seem to have been gainsaid by any of the company; nor was Burke liable to a slanderous error. So severe a comment on Beauclerk, resting, even as it does, wholly on Miss Burney’s veracity, ought, in fairness, to be incorporated into any sketch of the man. On the other side, it is pleasant to discover that Beauclerk, in his will, made five days before the end, bequeathed all he possessed to his wife, and reverted to her the estates of his children, should they die under age. There was but one bequest beyond these, and that was to Thomas Clarke, the faithful valet. The executors named were Lady Di and her brother, Lord Charles Spencer, who had also been groomsman at the marriage, which, despite Burke and its own evil beginnings, it is hard to think of as ill-starred. The joint guardians of Charles George Beauclerk, the only son, were to be Bennet Langton and a Mr. Loyrester, whom Dr. Johnson speaks of as “Leicester, Beauclerk’s relation, and a man of good character;” but the guardianship, provisional in case of Lady Di’s decease, never came into force, as she survived, in fullest harmony with her three children, up to August 1, 1808, having entered her seventy-fifth year. Various private legacies came to Langton, by his old comrade’s dying wish, the most precious among them, perhaps, being the fine Reynolds portrait of Johnson, which had been painted at Beauclerk’s cost. Under it was inscribed:

“Ingenium ingens

Inculto latet hoc sub corpore.”

Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. “It was kind of you to take it off,” said the burly Doctor, with a sigh; and then (for how could he but recall the contrast of temperament in the two, as well as the affectionate context of Horace?), “not unkind in him to have put it on.” The collection of thirty thousand glorious books “pernobilis Angli T. Beauclerk” was sold at auction. The advertisement alone is royal reading. There is much amiable witness to the circumstance that Beauclerk was not only an admirer but a buyer of his friends’ works. From some kind busybody who attended the twenty-ninth day of the sale, and pencilled his observations upon the margins of the catalogue now in the British Museum, we learn that Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature (nothing less!), which was issued, with cuts, in the year he died, was knocked down to the vulgar for two and threepence. The shelves, naturally, were stocked with Johnsons. Things dear to the bibliophile were there: innumerable first editions, black-letter, mediæval manuscript, Elzevirs, priceless English and Italian classics, gathered with real feeling and pride; but the most vivid personal interest belonged to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise known to fame as The Rambler, printed at Edinburgh in 1751; for that was the young Beauclerk’s own copy, carried with him to Oxford, and with a fragrance, as of a last century garden, of the first hearty friendship of boys. One cannot help wishing that a sentimental fate left it in Langton’s own hands.