Whilst he afforded the relief of his art, and the enjoyment of his conversation, to patients of the higher classes, Dr. Garth was not, as the prosperous are apt to be, unmindful of the lowly and suffering. His character appears to have presented a rare compound of bland and conciliating manners with an independent spirit. His labours at the College of Physicians were directed to purposes of charity, which then engaged the attention of that body. His literary talents were applied to satirize the unworthy members of his profession, and to elevate its character. He was an uncommon instance of a man possessing literary attainments and acquiring professional eminence. In those days, and even so late as the time of Darwin, the pursuit of the belles lettres was not inimical to the extension of a medical practice, and Garth’s celebrated satire on a portion of his professional brethren introduced him into all that a physician most prizes. Finally, when the corpse of the illustrious Dryden lay neglected and unburied, Dr. Garth brought the deserted remains to the College of Physicians, raised a subscription to defray the expenses of the funeral, and, following the body to Westminster Abbey, had the office, peculiarly honourable to him under such circumstances, of pronouncing an oration over the grave in which the rescued clay was deposited.
Such was the physician and friend of Marlborough. It appears an endless task to enumerate and to portray the numerous literary characters who poured forth their tribute to the greatness of the Duke, or who shared the favour of the Duchess of Marlborough. Devoid as they both were of any decided literary bias, they were nevertheless, in various ways, so much connected with some writers and wits of the day, that it may not be deemed irrelevant to bring forward a few of those who were thus distinguished.
The offensive lines written by Pope upon the character of the Duchess, as Atossa, could not have been the production of a friend. That the Duchess, in her intercourse with the great and gay, encountered frequently the master-spirit of the day, whose religious and political prepossessions led him to write her attributes in characters of gall, cannot be doubted. Pope, however, was not, it appears, one of her correspondents; and subsequently, in her intimacy with Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the Duchess cherished his bitterest enemy. That gifted woman, indeed, found in the Duchess a kindred spirit. The collision of such minds must have been remarkable. Lady Mary was yet in her prime, when the Duchess, morose, and a cripple, delighted to visit her, and to entertain her brilliant friend, and be in turn entertained. The great world, its hollowness, and its consequent disappointments, were sufficiently unveiled to both, to render the confidence of social life comparatively delightful. Yet both still loved the world too well; both were essentially worldly in their natures. The one turned her calculating mind to power; the other to admiration. The career of their youth, brilliant in each, was in each succeeded by a joyless, an unloved, almost a despised old age.
It was the pleasure of the Duchess, in her later days, to receive, without ceremony, Lady Mary and her daughter Lady Bute, who frequently sat by her Grace while she dined, or went through the process of casting up her accounts. Both Lady Mary and her daughter were especial favourites, and enjoyed, accordingly, the rare fortune of never quarrelling with her grace. To them she unfolded the events of her long and harassing life; to them she communicated, with tears, the anecdote, so often quoted, of her cutting off the fair and luxuriant hair of which she was even, at that age, proud, to provoke her stoical husband, when he had one day offended her. The mode in which the provocation was offered, and was received, was characteristic of both parties. The Duchess placed the tresses which the Duke had prized in an antechamber, through which he must often necessarily pass, in order that they might attract his view. The Duke showed no symptoms of observation and vexation, appeared as calm as was his wont, and the Duchess thought that her scheme had failed: she sought her ringlets, but they had disappeared. Years afterwards, she discovered them in a cabinet belonging to the Duke, after his death, amongst other articles which she knew he prized the most of all his precious collections. And at this point of her story, the Duchess, as well she might, melted into tears.[[356]] The noble, kind heart which had been devoted to her was cold in the grave, and those of her family who remained, were worse than indifferent to her joys or her woes.
The Duchess’s early admirer, Colley Cibber, must not be omitted in the list of those who have contributed to exalt her fame. Cibber, as we have seen, wrote with enthusiasm of her personal charms, which with equal liberality he alleged to have outlived the days of her youth. And not only from the custom, at that time fashionable, of admitting actors and actresses, even of doubtful character, into the society of the great, but in the practice of his profession as a player, Cibber must have had frequent opportunities of marking the gradual ripening to perfection, and the less gradual process of decay of those charms which riveted his faculties. The company of comedians to whom Cibber belonged were called the King’s servants, and styled gentlemen of the great chamber. They wore a livery of scarlet and gold, and were made the peculiar concern of the court, the King frequently interfering in their concerns and management. This company performed at Drury Lane, except when by royal command it was transported to Hampton Court, or to Windsor, to entertain the assembled court.[[357]] On such occasions, the Duchess must frequently have encountered the sculptor’s son, who, elated with a commission in a regiment of horse, had had, when first they met, indulged brighter day-dreams than his future existence realised. The stage, nevertheless, was at that time at its height of prosperity: all classes contributed to honour and support its ornaments. The original Lady Townly and Lady Betty Modish, the beautiful but the frail Mrs. Oldfield, is said to have acquired her inimitable art of representing the manners of aristocratic females, from the number of high-born ladies whom she visited, whilst yet under the acknowledged protection of General Churchill, and, afterwards, of Arthur Maynwaryng. Bolingbroke, with all his Jacobite notions, thought himself not degraded by an intimate friendship with Booth. The spirit of the age was dramatic, as Steele’s “extravagant pleasantry” exemplifies. Being asked, by a nobleman, after the representation of Henry the Eighth, at Hampton Court, how the King, George the First, liked the play, “In truth,” answered the accomplished manager, “so terribly well, my lord, that I was afraid I should have lost all my actors; for I was not sure the King would not keep them to fill the posts at court, that he saw them so fit for in the play.”[[358]]
Cibber, nevertheless, was, in the commencement of his career, after he had exchanged the show and uniform of the cavalry for the sock and buskin, not only contented, but delighted, with a salary of ten shillings a week. It is well known, also, that he kept back his play of the “Careless Husband,” in despair of not being able to find an actress to personate, as in those critical days it would be necessary to personate, the woman of fashion, that Lady Betty Modish whom Mrs. Oldfield improved afterwards to perfection, by the society and connexions of her accomplished and high-born admirers. She is acknowledged, indeed, by Cibber, to have been the prototype of that lively being of the dramatist’s fancy; “the agreeably gay woman of quality, a little too conscious of her natural attractions;” or, in less courtly language, a well-bred coquet.[[359]]
Originally of the same profession that Cibber had adopted when he waited upon the Duchess of Marlborough at Derby, Sir Richard Steele, afterwards appointed to be the head of the royal company of comedians, deserves to be noticed, from his projected connexion with the fame of the Marlborough family. For Steele, in his paper called “The Reader,” has left an account of his intention to write a life of the Duke of Marlborough, confining himself to the Duke’s military career: a project which, unhappily, was never executed, but the materials for which were, according to Steele’s assertion, in his possession.
The conduct and the conscience of Steele were incessantly at variance. His natural disposition was amiable, but so incautious, that his famous parallel between Addison and himself must be admired equally for its candour and its truth. “The one,” says Steele, speaking of his friend, “with patience, foresight, and temperate address, always waited and stemmed the torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the bank for his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it.” This beautiful description of true friendship is indeed characteristic of him who found it inconvenient to have written the “Christian Hero,” from the comparisons between his practice and his precepts which were incessantly drawn by his associates. Steele had all the brilliancy, and many of the failings, of his gifted countrymen. That his mind was never debased by the irregular pursuits and dissolute society to which he gave his time, is apparent from the beautiful sentiments which pervade that exquisite comedy, the “Conscious Lovers,” one of the most elegant delineations of that species of love which borders on romance, in the range of our dramatic literature. Those who remember the most pathetic and elevated strain of reflection which is displayed in a certain paper of the Spectator, in which this feeling writer describes his introduction suddenly into the apartment of a dying friend, must allow Steele to have possessed infinite power over the passions of the human heart. Devoted to the House of Hanover, reviled by Swift, and expelled from the House of Commons for his paper, the Englishman, in which he advocated principles congenial to those of the Duchess of Marlborough, Steele was doubtless an approved acquaintance, though perhaps not on the footing of an intimate friend.
A strange contrast to the preceding characters whose peculiarities have been faintly touched, was the celebrated William Penn, who appears among the list of the Duke of Marlborough’s correspondents; and, if slight expressions may be trusted, was among the number of the Duchess’s privileged acquaintance. Penn, in a letter to the great general, whom he addresses as “my noble friend,” in 1703, speaks of sending a letter under “my Lady Duchess’s cover,” and mentions the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, whose correct judgment he commends in the incidental manner of one, intimate with the circle to which he refers. This singular and high-minded personage, whom Burnet severely calls “a vain, talking man,” came into constant collision with the Duke and Duchess at the court of James the Second, where, in spite of his refusal to uncover in the King’s presence, he was received with distinction. Penn was perhaps not the less acceptable to the Duchess from his non-conformist principles. His fearlessness, and the persecutions which, for conscience sake, he sustained in the early part of his life, perhaps redeemed, in her eyes, the visionary nature of his religious impressions, the absurdity, to her strong mind, of his secret communications from God, and the suddenness of his conversion. At all events, the sterling character of Penn, and his contempt of worldly advantages, must have formed an agreeable variety among her numerous, and dissimilar associates.