Conduct, or rather misconduct, such as this, is very natural in a country wherein social feelings are cultivated; wherein capital is not employed; and wherein the knowledge of principles among the influential classes of the community, is not sufficiently extended to unite in cooperation by way of example and instruction. Industry is essential to happiness, and the unemployed will be either playful or vicious. We say of children, “Give them something to do, or they will be in mischief;” this is equally true of men.
Francis Grose, Esq. F.S.A. etc.
Francis Grose, Esq. F.S.A. etc.
This gentleman died on the 12th of May, 1791; he was son of Francis Grose, esq. jeweller at Richmond, who fitted up the coronation crown of George II. He was a captain in the Surrey militia, an eminent antiquary, and a right worthy man. His “Antiquities of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland,” are more generally known perhaps than other topographical works of more profound inquiry. They were commenced in numbers, and published by “Master Samuel Hooper,” so he called his bookseller, to whom he was a steady and affectionate friend, though he says, in one of his letters, “he never did any one thing I desired him.” His “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” Mr. Nichols says, “it would have been for his credit to have suppressed.” The truth of this observation is palpable to every one who is not sophisticated by the wretchedly mischievous line, that
“Vice, to be hated, needs but to be seen.”
A more mischievous sentiment was never promulgated. Capt. Grose’s “Olio” is a pleasant medley of whimsicalities. He was an excellent companion, a humorist, and caricaturist; he wrote “Rules for drawing Caricatures,” and drew and etched many, wherein he took considerable liberties with his friends. Yet he seems to have disliked a personal representation of himself sleeping in a chair, which Mr. Nichols pronounces “an excellent” likeness; a copy of which we have given in the preceding page. Adjoining it is another of him, a whole length, standing, from an engraving by Bartolozzi, after a drawing by Dance. The sleeping portrait is attributed to the rev. James Douglas, one of his brother antiquaries, who dedicated the print to their “devoted brethren” of the society. Beneath it were inscribed the following lines:
“Now Grose, like bright Phœbus, has sunk into rest,
Society droops for the loss of his jest;
Antiquarian debates, unseason’d with mirth,
To Genius and Learning will never give birth.
Then wake, Brother Member, our friend from his sleep,
Lest Apollo should frown, and Bacchus should weep.”
He was remarkably corpulent, as the engravings show. In a letter to the rev. James Granger, he says, “I am, and ever have been, the idlest fellow living, even before I had acquired the load of adventitious matter which at present stuffs my doublet.” On the margin of this letter Mr. Granger wrote, “As for the matter that stuffs your doublet, I hope it is all good stuff; if you should double it, I shall call it morbid matter and tremble for you. But I consider it as the effect of good digestion, pure blood, and laughing spirits, coagulated into a wholesome mass by as much sedentariness (I hate this long word) as is consistent with the activity of your disposition.” In truth, Grose was far from an idle man; he had great mental activity, and his antiquarian knowledge and labours were great. He was fond however of what are termed the pleasures of the table; and is represented in a fine mezzotinto, drawn and engraved by his friend Nathaniel Hone, with Theodosius Forrest, the barrister, and Hone himself, dressed in the character of monks, over a bowl, which Grose is actively preparing for their carousal. He died of apoplexy in Mr. Hone’s house in Dublin, at the age of fifty-two. In reference to his principal works, the following epitaph, quoted by Mr. Nichols in his “Anecdotes,” was proposed for him in the “St. James’s Chronicle:”—
Here lies Francis Grose.
On Thursday, May 12, 1791,
Death put an end to
His views and prospects.