“If in these brief narratives, gathered here and there, I have in any way transgressed the rules of more classical Latin, I beg the kind reader to pardon me. If in any way I have departed from the truth, I have done so unwittingly. God be merciful.
[John Arscott died in 1788.]”
Sir Paul W. Molesworth has dealt with John Arscott more tenderly than that man deserved.
A modern writer[3] thus describes the sort of man that John Arscott was:—
“A familiar figure in the eighteenth century was the country squire, familiar the long wig, long coat, silver buttons, breeches and top-boots, the bluff, red face, the couple of greyhounds and the pointer at heel. When not hunting the fox, the popular sport of the day, he settled the disputes of the parish, or repaired to the nearest ale-house to get drunk in as short a space of time as possible. Usually he only drank ale, but on festive occasions a bowl of strong brandy punch, with toast and nutmeg, added to his already boisterous spirits. On Sundays he donned his best suit, which often descended from father to son through several generations, repaired to the parish church, and entered the family pew, where he slumbered during a great part of the somewhat dismal service. He seldom went further than his own country town, for a journey to London was still full of danger and discomfort.”
Who that has read Fielding and other novelists of the period does not know the figure, full-blooded, coarse to brutality, with a certain amount of kindliness in his disposition, whose talk is of bullocks or horses or dogs, and who, after the ladies had withdrawn, spent the rest of the evening at his hospitable table singing ribald songs and telling obscene stories? I possess, myself, a little book in MS. of the after-dinner stories told by a great-great-uncle, that has to be kept under lock and key, so unfit is it for perusal by clean-minded persons. The songs were from Tom D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy, or other collections of the sort. I had a collection of them that belonged to an ancestress, or rather near kinswoman of an ancestor, engraved on copper plate. I gave the volume to the British Museum. It was not a book to be kept on one’s shelves when there were children in the house.
John Arscott was never married, or if he did marry, no trace of such a ceremony is forthcoming. He lived with a certain Thomasine Spry as his mistress. If he did “make an honest woman of her,” it was, as reported, on his death-bed. She survived him, and was buried at Tetcott in 1796, aged seventy-six. They had no issue.
Mr. Hawker, in his Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall, has told several stories of John Arscott’s favourite, the last of the jester dwarfs, Black John, one of whose jokes, that entertained the company after dinner, was to tie together by the legs several live mice and swallow them one by one, and then, by means of a string, pull them up from his interior parts again. Another of his tricks was to mumble a sparrow. The living bird was gripped by the legs by his teeth, and then with his lips and teeth he would rip off the feathers, till he had plucked the unfortunate sparrow bare. A couple of projecting fangs were of especial value as sparrow-holders to Black John. His hands all the while were knotted or tied behind his back.