His “blackguards” are not all seated on a throne. His hatred of the “mob” was greater, if possible, than his envy of his superiors. “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” is the head-line of all his pages. Look at this entry, where the whole character of the man breaks forth irresistibly:
“Newmarket, October 1, 1831.—Came here last night, to my great joy, to get holidays, and leave reform and politics and cholera for racing and its amusements. Just before I came away I met Lord Wharncliffe, and asked him about his interview with radical Jones. This blackguard considers himself a sort of chief of a faction, and one of the heads of the sans-culottins of the present day.”
From radical Jones to Washington Irving is but a step for Mr. Greville’s nimble pen. The one is—what he says; the other, essentially “vulgar.” The same “vulgarity” offends his delicate taste in Thiers, Macaulay, and a score of others “the latchet of whose shoes he was unworthy to loose.” Is it to be wondered at that the venerable pontiff Pius VIII. (page 325, vol. i.) fails to satisfy this fastidious critic? The pope, however, escapes tolerably well. As a matter of course, “there is nothing in him”; but the distinguished urbanity and refined wit of the condescending Mr. Greville is satisfied to pronounce him a good-natured “twaddle.” These large airs of superior wisdom and refinement, this tone of pitying kindness, which Mr. Greville adopts towards the most illustrious men in Europe of his day, remind us of nothing so much as the majestic demeanor of the burgo, or great lord of Lilliput, who harangued Capt. Gulliver the morning after his arrival in that island. “He seemed to me,” says Capt. Gulliver, “to be somewhat longer than my middle finger. He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatening, and others of promises, pity, and kindness.”
The distinguished author of these Memoirs was not always, however, as we have seen, in the same amiable mood that the burgo afterwards manifested. After lashing each one of the persons he has known, separately and in turn, in the words which we have quoted, in another passage his acquaintances are all collected in a group and dashed off with graphic effect.
October 12, 1832.—Immediately after an entry giving a conversation with the accomplished Lady Cowper, he says: “My journal is getting intolerably stupid and entirely barren of events. I would take to miscellaneous and private matters, if any fell in my way. But what can I make out of such animals as I herd with and such occupations as I am engaged in?” A week after, at Easton, besides Lady Cowper, he names some other “animals”: “The Duke of Rutland, the Walewskis, Lord Burghersh and Hope—the usual party,” he exclaims with a sigh. Sad fate! The adventurous Capt. Gulliver elsewhere, in a letter to his cousin Sympson, says: “Pray bring to your mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on the motive of Public Good, that the Yahoos were a species of animals utterly incapable of amendment by precept or example.”
Such appear to have been the melancholy reflections forced upon the mind of Mr. Houyhnhnm Greville by the Yahoos he tells us he was compelled to “herd with”! Ever and anon he turns a regretful eye to the nobler race he was suited to, and lets us into the secret of the company and occupations that relieved him from the desolating ennui of uncongenial society.
“June 11, 1833.—At a place called Buckhurst all last week for the Ascot races. A party at Lentifield’s; racing all the morning; then eating, drinking, and play at night. I may say with more truth than anybody, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.”
“Not at all,” it might have been answered. “A jockey and gamester ab ovo usque ad mala. Fortune has now placed thee in the rank kind nature fitted thee to adorn, had not a too avid uncle snatched thee therefrom, and dry mountains of crackling parchment and red tape crushed thy yearning ardor for the loose boxes and the paddock!”
“March 27.—Jockeys, trainers, and blacklegs are my companions, and it is like dram-drinking: having once entered upon it, I cannot leave it, although I am disgusted with the occupation all the time.” Truly a long and fond “disgust,” since it lasted from his eighteenth year until his death!
“While the fever it excites is raging and the odds are varying, I can neither read nor write nor occupy myself with anything.”