Charles C. F. Greville was, as his editor, Mr. H. Reeve, informs us, the eldest son of Mr. Charles Greville, grandson of the Earl of Warwick, and Lady Charlotte Bentinck, daughter of the Duke of Portland. He was born in 1794. At the age of nineteen he was appointed private secretary by Earl Bathurst, and almost at the same time family influence procured for him a clerkship in the Board of Trade. Both offices had comfortable salaries attached to them; neither of them any duties. Thus at the outset of his career, fortunate in his family influence and his friends, Mr. Greville was started, fairly equipped, on the road of life. Unencumbered by any responsibility, nor weighed down by that sharp and bitter load of poverty that men of humbler birth have commonly to carry on their galled shoulders, while they strive to gain an insecure foothold on the slippery road to fame or fortune, he had every incentive and every advantage to secure success. A subject for thanksgiving, shall we say, to this accomplished sinecurist? By no means! Years afterwards he bemoans the fact that he had nothing to do, no spur to honorable ambition. He forgot that at the same or an earlier age Saint-Simon, whom he appears to have read only to copy his sometimes coarse language, was handling a pike as a volunteer in the service of his king, and carrying sacks of grain on his shoulders to the starving troops in the trenches at Namur, disdaining those little offices into which Greville insinuated himself as soon as he left college. Or if it be said—what no man could then (1812) predict—that the war was nearly over, and there was little prospect of another, what was there to prevent him from seeking a place in Parliament—not hard to gain with his family influence—and there carving out for himself a place like that of Burke, to whom he sometimes lifts his eyes? The truth is, to use a vulgar phrase, Mr. Greville had “other fish to fry.” He knew well he had other easier and more profitable game to follow. He was scarcely of age when the influence of his uncle, the Duke of Portland, obtained for him the sinecure office of Secretary of Jamaica, a deputy being allowed to reside in the island; better still, the same influential relative secured him the reversion of the clerkship of the Council! Henceforward not the camp nor parliamentary struggles occupied Mr. Greville’s mind; the glorious task of “waiting for a dead man’s shoes,” varied by the congenial study of the stables, occupied that powerful intellect which, in these Memoirs, looks down with contempt on all the names most distinguished in European statesmanship during the first half of this century. The office fell to him in 1821, and he continued to hold it for nearly forty years. The net income of the two offices, we are elsewhere informed, amounted to about four thousand pounds; and as he died worth thirty thousand pounds, the charitable supposition of the Quarterly Review is that “probably he was a gainer on the turf.” He died in 1865.
The bent of Mr. Greville’s genius was early shown.
“Sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum
Collegisse juvat.”
The clerk of the Council was one of them. The blue ribbon of the turf, not parliamentary honors or the long vigil of laborious nights—except over the card-table—was the centre around which his ambition and aspirations circled. Early smitten by the betting fever, he became as nearly a professional turfman as the security of his office would permit; and there is something ludicrous in those expressions of regret, which have drawn such tender sympathy from his critics, that he gave himself up to the passion instead of becoming the scholar or statesman he is always hinting he might have been. Mr. Greville, in fact, makes the blunder of supposing that the craving for fame is equivalent to the faculty for winning it. Not the turf, but original defect of capacity, hindered him from being more than he was—a clerk with a taste for gambling, held in check by a shrewd eye for the odds. His contemporary, the late Lord Derby, whom he seldom lets pass without a sneer in these Memoirs, was an example showing that, had true genius existed, a taste for the turf without participation in gambling, need not have prevented him from becoming both an accomplished scholar and a brilliant statesman.
An early entry in Mr. Greville’s journal gives the measure of the man. Under date of February 23, 1821, he says:
“Yesterday the Duke of York proposed to me to take the management of his horses, which I accepted. Nothing could be more kind than the manner in which he proposed it.”
“March 5.—I have experienced a great proof of the vanity of human wishes. In the course of three weeks I have attained the three things I have most desired in the world for years past, and upon the whole I do not feel that my happiness is increased.”
This is a good example, but far from the best of its kind, of that vein of apparently philosophical reflection running here and there through his journal, with which Mr. Greville deliberately intended, we believe, to hoodwink the critics, and in which anticipation he has been wonderfully successful. Coolly examined, it resolves itself as nearly as possible into a burlesque. His reflections, as La Bruyère says elsewhere of a like genius, “are generally about two inches deep, and then you come to the mud and gravel.” What were the three highest objects of human ambition in the mind of this ardent young man of twenty-seven, with the world before him to choose from? 1st. A berth in the civil service to creep into for the rest of his life. 2d. The place of head jockey and trainer in the prince’s stables. 3d. Unknown.
Alas! poor Greville, that the bubble of life should have burst so soon, leaving thee flat on thy back in a barren world, after having thus airily mounted to such imperial heights! Had either Juvenal or Johnson known thy towering ambition and thy fall, he would have placed thee side by side with dire Hannibal or the venturous Swede “to point a moral or adorn a tale”!