Here is a case of book-making of a somewhat explicit kind, since there is little to say, and nothing to print, of Dodington which he has not said of himself. There is, of course, no more harm in making books than there is in making bricks; but if the one wants straw, as Moses says it did, the other wants humanity. God made Bubb Dodington, and therefore let him pass for a man. In his own day he passed for a coxcomb; in ours, which is more censorious, he would certainly have passed for a rascal. In either aspect, if he is to be treated at all, he requires a more philosophical study than Mr. Sanders has been able to supply.
Of mean origin, some ability and unbounded impudence, Dodington inherited both money and land. With the land there accrued to him Parliamentary interest—to wit, in some four seats in Dorset and Somerset, which he spent the rest of his life in hawking from faction to faction with a flagrancy and success which even his own age found shocking. From first to last—and he lived a long time—there were no illusions about him. Pope scoffed at him until he found metal more attractive, and changed "Bubo" for "Bufo"; Walpole remarked to Lord Hervey upon "the second time that worthy has proposed to rise by treading on my neck"; Hervey himself, who seldom had a good word for anybody, never had a worse than for him. Hanbury Williams, who was never malevolent, wrote of him that he was
To no one party, no one man,
Nor to his own self tight;
For what he voted for at noon
He rail'd against at night.
Horace Walpole called him a political journalist, meaning by that that he was daily in the market-place, and for the highest-bidder. Lord Chesterfield thought that "God made Dodington the coxcomb he is; mere human means could not have brought it about. He is a coxcomb superior to his parts, though his parts are superior to almost anybody's." These are Bubb Dodington's best credentials except those which he supplied for himself. With those, with colossal impudence and four boroughs, he set up in trade, and did pretty well. He miscalculated the odds more than once: first on the accession of George II., when he dropped Sir Robert for Spencer Compton; next when Frederick Prince of Wales enticed him over to Carlton House for the second time, and promptly died. Slips like those kept him out in the cold until near the end of the reign. Just in the nick of time he made friends with Lord Bute, and on the accession of George III., a year before his own death, was made a peer. There is evidence that he died a contented and complacent man.
Mr. Sanders proposes to "explain" Dodington, but fails for lack of matter. There is really nothing to explain. There would have been a good deal to expose had not the creature done it for himself in his egregious Diary. That to be sure is an unexampled document. Men, before it and since, have written themselves down rogues and peasant slaves of various kinds, some for amusement, some for edification. But few—I think no others—have written themselves down in the act and intention of writing themselves up. Casanova occurs to the mind; but Casanova neither wrote himself up nor down, whereas Dodington's complacency in the act to be a scoundrel is his most remarkable feature.
"I desired Lady Aylesbury to carry you Lord Melcombe's Diary. It is curious indeed; not so much from the secrets that it blabs, which are rather characteristic than novel, but from the wonderful folly of the author, who was so fond of talking of himself that he tells all he knew of himself, though scarce an event that does not betray his profligacy; and (which is still more surprising that he should disclose) almost every one exposes the contempt in which he was held, and his consequential disappointments and disgraces!"
That is Horace Walpole, writing to Conway in 1784, when the Diary was out. Lord Hervey, long before it was written, gave him a pungent paragraph. "Mr. Dodington," he says, "whilst some people have the je ne sais quoi in pleasing, possessed the je ne sais quoi in displeasing in the strongest and most universal degree that ever any man was blessed with that gift.... His vanity in company was so overbearing, so insolent, and so insupportable that he seemed to exact that applause as his due which other people solicit, and to think that he had a right to make every auditor his admirer." And so indeed it is, in this Diary of his dealings between the Prince of Wales and the Administration, that he solemnly records all his disgustful traffickings of himself and his boroughs, as if they were negotiations between high contracting powers, and in every page declares himself both knave and fool in a way which would afford pleasant reading if it were not so long and so dull. It is enlivened by one delicious, but entirely unconscious, gleam. In April, 1754, he went down to Bridgewater to an election, having done his best to sell the seat to the Duke of Newcastle. He spent £2500 on it, and he lost it. The fourteenth and two following days, he records, "were spent in infamous and disagreeable compliance with the low habits of venal wretches." Those wretches naturally were burgesses whom it was necessary that he should buy in order that he might afterwards sell himself. It is the only good thing in the book, but it is good enough. The next best thing is the naïve excuse of its editor of 1784 for publishing it, that by its means politicians might be advised how not to conduct their and the country's affairs!
Mr. Sanders has done his part of the business with industry and candour. He says the best he can for his subject, and has left nothing of importance out, either for or against him, except the account of the trouncing which he received in the House of Commons for his speech against Sir Robert in 1742. It is told by Horace Walpole, with gusto, as is only natural, but with obvious accuracy. Mr. Sanders should not have let him off the chastisement of an insolence and hypocrisy paralleled only by Disraeli's attack upon another Sir Robert. On the credit side of the account he rightly selects the defence of Admiral Byng as the most disinterested action of Dodington's long career. Add to that that Lady Hervey really liked him, and that he used a steel machine with which to pick up his handkerchief.