The following letter, the reader must think very piquant and graphic, and it will, probably, tend to throw a new light upon his preconceived opinions and estimation of a certain great man. He must remember, too, whilst reading it, that Admiral Sir George Cockburn had the command of the ship which conveyed Napoleon and his suite to St. Helena.
London, 14 Oct. 1816.
To the same,—
“I am very much obliged to you for your excellent and most welcome present [it is below the dignity of the Epopèe to say goose and sausages] which reached me on Sunday, and the note which you were so kind as to send with it, I can only repay you in this the old paper of unproductive thanks, but the sincerity of them will be held in some estimation by the mind actuated by the kindness that has excited them, and, therefore, flimsy as they are, I venture to beg your acceptance of them. I have nothing new, Madam, to send you for your entertainment from this great city. That the Regent is going to divorce the Princess of Wales, and excite the hope of the husbands and the fear of the wives—that under such an example, all the legal restraints to repudiation will be removed, and the practice become wide, and quite fashionable; you have, of course, heard long ago from the newspapers, they are eternally depriving us by anticipation of the power of writing agreeable and interesting letters to the Ladies in the country.
Sir James Cockburn arrived in town last Saturday from Bermudas. He is quite well, and neither seems nor believes himself an hour older for having been three years at Bermudas, since he was last in England. I have been much with him and his brother, the Admiral, lately. I have not (for your sex has not all the curiosity, though all of a peculiar kind) omitted to ply him with questions about Buonaparte. He is now admirably qualified to be Emperor in that country of which I have read, where they elect the fattest man in the state to the Empire. His legs are as bulky as my body, the ribs in proportion; and since this girth is all attained in little more than five-feet five-inches of length, he is not what Miss Cruso or Miss Godfrey [the head milliners of Norwich at the time] would call a very genteel figure. He eats with voraciousness of the most luxurious dishes; he has, in Cockburn’s opinion, a very mean assemblage of features with something fearfully black and vicious about the brows and eyes. His manners are coarse and repulsive. Did you ever in a litter yard come suddenly on a lady in the straw that starts up on her fore legs and, dropping fourteen infant pigs from her teats, salutes you with a fierce jumble of barking, grunting, and hissing? In exactly such a sound is this amiable man represented to me to have always replied to every address of Bertrand, Mouthoulon, and the others, who are his fools and followers to St. Helena. Sometimes he neglected all restraint on his nature, and gave the same ferocious and inarticulate answers to the English officers. He played chess so badly, that Bertrand and Mouthoulon, who had too much discretion to excel their patron, had, at times, great difficulty to lose the game to him; after trying for many nights he could not attain the rudiments of whist, and went back to vingt-un; but this is the man who has been described to us all as all-intellect. The newspapers, too, said I remember, that at whist he left all instruction behind him, and soon played so well, that he had won very large sums of the Admiral by his superior play, even while he was only a Tyro. I can tell you no more now; but the Admiral has had the goodness to lend me a journal of his conversation with Buonaparte on the passage out, and when I have the pleasure of seeing you in the sessions week, I will give you some extracts from my memory. I am, I believe, a little better, but the disorder in the upper part of my stomach still continues and oppresses me. It is now inveterate, the complaint commenced last March, a twelvemonth past. If I cannot rid myself of it, it will kill me in time. My best duty to my father, love to William and ‘aliis,’
I am, dear Madam,
Yours very faithfully,
HENRY COOPER.P.S.—I write in a great hurry for I am making up my parcel for Bermudas. I should not write to you at all, but I do not like so long to delay my due thanks to your kindness.”
This letter is dated,
2, Lamb’s Buildings,
27th January, 1817.
To the same,—
I am scarcely warm in my place in London before I have to thank you for your present to me; you hardly give me time, in the short intervals of these marks of your kindness to me, to frame my thanks to you for each. I have exhausted all my common-place forms and am forced to rack my invention (so very often have you come forward with these welcome claims on me) to give anything like a turn to the expression in which to convey my thanks. Mr. Pope (in those rhymes for the nursery which he has entitled the Universal Prayer) calls enjoyment obedience: now if enjoyment be thankfulness, too, then never was a being more completely thanked than yourself; for the ducks were devoured with the most devout gust and appetite; they were the most superb fowls that ever suffered martyrdom of their lives to delight the palate and appease the hunger of the Lords of the creation. You should have sent them to some imitator of the Dutch school, who could have painted them before he ate them; the hare, too, is as good as it can be, and you are agreeably thanked for it by an equal portion of enjoyment.
I must beg you to excuse a very short, dull, and hasty letter, from me. If I were not impatient at the thought of letting any longer time elapse without expressing my lively sense of your frequent mark of kind consideration of me, I should not write at all to day. I have something to do at my chambers, and in ten minutes I must run down to Westminster Hall; and whilst I am thus engaged, I am as much disqualified for writing, by a dark fit of low spirits, as prevented by want of leisure. I resist as much as I can these attacks of the night-mare by day, but I cannot wholly succeed against them; my circumstances may possibly change, and, if not, such gloominess is unreasonable; if Fortune is never weary of persecuting me, I shall at last be past the sense of her persecutions. In the meantime, whatever is the colour of my life, I shall, if I can, continue to hope the future cannot be the worse, and the present will be the more tolerable for it. I shall, therefore, cling to her while I live, and to apply a beautiful thought of Tibullus—
‘Dying, clasp her with my failing hand.’
In endeavouring to recollect me of the many fine things that have been said of hope to crown my declaration of attachment to that first place of our lives, I remember Cowley has observed ‘that it is as much destroyed by the possession of its object as by exclusion from it.’ This is very ingenious and very true, and though not to the purpose for which I was seeking it yet will very well serve another. I wish my dear Madam, very sincerely, that the former mode of destruction may speedily befall all your present hopes, and that in future you will be surrounded by so many blessings as will leave you no room for the exercise of any hope but their continuance, My duty to my father, and my love to William, I trust that he improves in Latin; pray tell him that I was vexed not to find him so good a scholar in that language as I expected; when I next see him I hope my expectations will be exceeded.
I am, my dear Madam,
Yours very truly,
HENRY COOPER.”
The following letter I have previously made reference to. It is written, evidently, in despondency, and heartfelt sorrow, under the shock of the frightful calamity. It relates to the disastrous death of poor Alfred, his youngest brother. It is dated from, and bears date