reflections made in several parts of the world; and many extraordinary
relations. London: Printed for J. Noon, at the White Hart in
Cheapside, near the Poultry, MDCCLVI_.
[_Vol. II. London: Printed for J. Johnson and B. Davenport, at the
Globe, in Pater Noster Row, MDCCLXVI_.]
In the year 1756, there resided in the Barbican, where the great John
Milton had lived before him, a funny elderly personage called Mr.
Thomas Amory, of whom not nearly so much is recorded as the lovers of
literary anecdote would like to possess. He was sixty-five years
of age; he was an Irish gentleman of means, and he was an ardent
Unitarian. Some unkind people have suggested that he was out of his
mind, and he had, it is certain, many peculiarities. One was, that he
never left his house, or ventured into the streets, save "like a
but, in the dusk of the evening." He was, in short, what is called a
"crank," and he gloried in his eccentricity. He desired that it might
be written on his tombstone, "Here lies an Odd Man." For sixty years
he had made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 1755 he
had published a sort of romance, called _Memoirs of Several Ladies of
Great Britain_, and now he succeeded it by the truly extraordinary
work, the name of which stands at the head of this article. Ten years
later there would appear another volume of _John Buncle_, and then
Amory disappeared again. All we know is, that he died in 1788, at the
very respectable age of ninety-seven. So little is known about him,
so successfully did he hide "like a but" through the dusk of nearly a
century, that we may be glad to eke out the scanty information given
above by a passage of autobiography from the preface of the book
before us:
"I was born in London, and carried an infant to Ireland, where I
learned the Irish language, and became intimately acquainted with its
original inhabitants. I was not only a lover of books from the time
I could spell them to this hour, but read with an extraordinary
pleasure, before I was twenty, the works of several of the Fathers,
and all the old romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain piety
and extravagance that rendered my virtues as well as my imperfections
particularly mine.... The dull, the formal, and the visionary, the
hard-honest man, and the poor-liver, are a people I have had no
connection with; but have always kept company with the polite, the
generous, the lively, the rational, and the brightest freethinkers of
this age. Besides all this, I was in the days of my youth, one of the
most active men in the world at every exercise; and to a degree of
rashness, often venturesome, when there was no necessity for running
any hazards; _in diebus illis_, I have descended headforemost, from a
high cliff into the ocean, to swim, when I could, and ought, to have
gone off a rock not a yard from the surface of the deep. I have swam
near a mile and a half out in the sea to a ship that lay off, gone on
board, got clothes from the mate of the vessel, and proceeded with
them to the next port; while my companion I left on the beach
concluded me drowned, and related my sad fate in the town. I have
taken a cool thrust over a bottle, without the least animosity on
either side, but both of us depending on our skill in the small sword
for preservation from mischief. Such things as these I now call
wrong."
If this is not a person of whom we would like to know more, I know not
what the romance of biography is. Thomas Amory's life must have been a
streak of crimson on the grey surface of the eighteenth century. It is
really a misfortune that the red is almost all washed off.
No odder book than _John Buncle_ was published in England throughout
the long life of Amory. Romances there were, like _Gulliver's Travels_
and _Peter Wilkins_, in which the incidents were much more incredible,
but there was no supposition that these would be treated as real
history. The curious feature of _John Buncle_ is that the story is
told with the strictest attention to realism and detail, and yet is
embroidered all over with the impossible. There can be no doubt that
Amory, who belonged to an older school, was affected by the form of
the new novels which were the fashion in 1756. He wished to be as
particular as Mr. Richardson, as manly as Captain Fielding, as breezy
and vigorous as Dr. Smollett, the three new writers who were all the
talk of the town. But there was a twist in his brain which made his
pictures of real life appear like scenes looked at through flawed
glass.
The memoirs of John Buncle take the form of an autobiography, and
there has been much discussion as to how much is, and how much is not,
the personal history of Amory. I confess I cannot see why we should
not suppose all of it to be invented, although it certainly is odd to
relate anecdotes and impressions of Dr. Swift, _à propos_ of nothing
at all, unless they formed part of the author's experience. For one
thing, the hero is represented as being born about thirteen years
later than Amory was--if, indeed, we possess the true date of our
worthy's birth. Buncle goes to college and becomes an earnest
Unitarian. The incidents of his life are all intellectual, until one
"glorious first of August," when he sallies forth from college with
his gun and dog, and after four hours' walk discovers that he has lost
his way. He is in the midst of splendid mountain scenery--which leads
us to wonder at which English University he was studying--and descends
through woody ravines and cliffs that overhang torrents, till he
suddenly comes in sight of a "little harmonic building that had every
charm and proportion architecture could give it." Finding one of the
garden doors open, and being very hungry, the adventurous Buncle
strolls in, and finds himself in "a grotto or shell-house, in which a
politeness of fancy had produced and blended the greatest beauties of
nature and decoration." (There are more grottoes in the pages of Amory
than exist in the whole of the British Islands.) This shell-house
opened into a library, and in the library a beauteous object was
sitting and reading. She was studying a Hebrew Bible, and making
philological notes on a small desk. She raised her eyes and approached
the stranger, "to know who I wanted" (for Buncle's style, though
picturesque, is not always grammatically irreproachable.)
Before he could answer, a venerable gentleman was at his side, to whom
the young sportsman confessed that he was dying of hunger and had
lost his way. Mr. Noel, a patriarchal widower of vast wealth, was
inhabiting this mansion in the sole company of his only daughter, the
lovely being just referred to. Mr. Buncle was immediately "stiffened
by enchantment" at the beauty of Miss Harriot Noel, and could not be
induced to leave when he had eaten his breakfast. This difficulty was
removed by the old gentleman asking him to stay to dinner, until the
time of which meal Miss Noel should entertain him. At about 10 A.M.
Mr. Buncle offers his hand to the astonished Miss Noel, who, with
great propriety, bids him recollect that he is an entire stranger to
her. They then have a long conversation about the Chaldeans, and the
"primaevity" of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary longevity
of the Antediluvians; at the close of which _(circa_ 11.15 A.M.)
Buncle proposes again. "You force me to smile (the illustrious Miss
Noel replied), and oblige me to call you an odd compound of a man,"
and to distract his thoughts, she takes him round her famous grotto.
The conversation, all repeated at length, turns on conchology and on
the philosophy of Epictetus until it is time for dinner, when Mr.
Noel and young Buncle drink a bottle of old Alicant, and discuss the
gallery of Verres and the poetry of Catullus. Left alone at last,
Buncle still does not go away, but at 5 P.M. proposes for the third
time, "over a pot of tea." Miss Noel says that the conversation
will have to take some other turn, or she must leave the room. They
therefore immediately "consider the miracle at Babel," and the
argument of Hutchinson on the Hebrew word _Shephah_, until, while Miss
Noel is in the very act of explaining that "the Aramitish was the
customary language of the line of Shem," young Buncle _(circa_ 7.30)
"could not help snatching this beauty to my arms, and without thinking
what I did, impressed on her balmy mouth half a dozen kisses. This was
wrong, and gave offence," but then papa returning, the trio sat down
peacefully to cribbage and a little music. Of course Miss Noel is
ultimately won, and this is a very fair specimen of the conduct of the
book.
A fortnight before the marriage, however, "the small-pox steps in, and
in seven days' time reduced the finest human frame in the universe to
the most hideous and offensive block," and Miss Harriot Noel dies. If
this dismal occurrence is rather abruptly introduced, it is because
Buncle has to be betrothed, in succession, to six other lively and
delicious young females, all of them beautiful, all of them learned,
and all of them earnestly convinced Unitarians. If they did not
rapidly die off, how could they be seven? Buncle mourns the decease of
each, and then hastily forms an equally violent attachment to another.
It must be admitted that he is a sad wife-waster. Azora is one of
the most delightful of these deciduous loves. She "had an amazing
collection of the most rational philosophical ideas, and she delivered
them in the most pleasing dress." She resided in a grotto within a
romantic dale in Yorkshire, in a "little female republic" of one
hundred souls, all of them "straight, clean, handsome girls." In this
glen there is only one man, and he a fossil. Miss Melmoth, who would
discuss the _paulo-post futurum_ of a Greek verb with the utmost care
and politeness, and had studied "the Minerva of Sanctius and Hickes'
Northern Thesaurus," was another nice young lady, though rather free
in her manner with gentlemen. But they all die, sacrificed to the
insatiable fate of Buncle.
Here the reader may like to enjoy a sample of Buncle as a philosopher.
It is a characteristic passage:
"Such was the soliloquy I spoke, as I gazed on the skeleton of John
Orton; and just as I had ended, the boys brought in the wild turkey,
which they had very ingeniously roasted, and with some of Mrs.
Burcot's fine ale and bread, I had an excellent supper. The bones of
the penitent Orton I removed to a hole I had ordered my lad to dig for
them; the skull excepted, which I kept, and still keep on my table for
a _memento mori_; and that I may never forget the good lesson which
the percipient who once resided in it had given. It is often the
subject of my meditation. When I am alone of an evening, in my closet,
which is often my case, I have the skull of John Orton before me, and
as I smoke a philosophic pipe, with my eyes fastened on it, I learn
more from the solemn object than I could from the most philosophical
and laboured speculations. What a wild and hot head once--how cold and
still now; poor skull, I say: and what was the end of all thy daring,
frolics and gambols--thy licentiousness and impiety--a severe and
bitter repentance. In piety and goodness John Orton found at last that
happiness the world could not give him."
Hazlitt has said that "the soul of Rabelais passed into John Amory."
His name was Thomas, not John, and there is very little that is
Rabelaisian in his spirit. One sees what Hazlitt meant--the voluble
and diffuse learning, the desultory thread of narration, the mixture
of religion and animalism. But the resemblance is very superficial,
and the parallel too complimentary to Amory. It is difficult to think
of the soul of Rabelais in connection with a pedantic and uxorious
Unitarian. To lovers of odd books, _John Buncle_ will always have a
genuine attraction. Its learning would have dazzled Dr. Primrose, and
is put on in glittering spars and shells, like the ornaments of the
many grottoes that it describes. It is diversified by descriptions of
natural scenery, which are often exceedingly felicitous and original,
and it is quickened by the human warmth and flush of the love
passages, which, with all their quaintness, are extremely human. It is
essentially a "healthy" book, as Charles Lamb, with such a startling
result, assured the Scotchman. Amory was a fervid admirer of
womankind, and he favoured a rare type, the learned lady who bears
her learning lightly and can discuss "the quadrations of curvilinear
spaces" without ceasing to be "a bouncing, dear, delightful girl," and
adroit in the preparation of toast and chocolate. The style of the
book is very careless and irregular, but rises in its best pages to an
admirable picturesqueness.
BEAU NASH
THE LIFE OF RICHARD NASH, ESQ.; _late Master of the Ceremonies at
Bath. Extracted principally from his Original Papers. The Second
Edition. London: J. Newbery._ 1762.
There are cases, not known to every collector of books, where it is
not the first which is the really desirable edition of a work, but the
second. One of these rare examples of the exception which proves
the rule is the second edition of Goldsmith's _Life of Beau Nash_.
Disappointment awaits him who possesses only the first; it is in the
second that the best things originally appeared. The story is rather
to be divined than told as history, but we can see pretty plainly
how the lines of it must have run. In the early part of 1762, Oliver
Goldsmith, at that time still undistinguished, but in the very act of
blossoming into fame, received a commission of fourteen guineas to
write for Newbery a life of the strange old beau, Mr. Nash, who had
died in 1761. On the same day, which was March 5th, he gave a receipt
to the publisher for three other publications, written or to be
written, so that very probably it was not expected that he should
immediately supply all the matter sold. In the summer he seems to have
gone down to Bath on a short visit, and to have made friends with
the Beau's executor, Mr. George Scott. It has even been said that he
cultivated the Mayor and Aldermen of Bath with such success that they
presented him with yet another fifteen guineas. But of this, in itself
highly improbable, instance of municipal benefaction, the archives of
the city yield no proof. At least Mr. Scott gave him access to Nash's
papers, and with these he seems to have betaken himself back to
London.
It is a heart-rending delusion and a cruel snare to be paid for your
work before you accomplish it. As soon as once your work is finished
you ought to be promptly paid; but to receive your lucre one minute
before it is due, is to tempt Providence to make a Micawber of you.
Goldsmith, of course, without any temptation being needed, was
the very ideal Micawber of letters, and the result of paying him
beforehand was that he had, simply, to be popped into the mill by
force, and the copy ground out of him. It is evident that in the case
of the first edition of the _Life of Beau Nash_, the grinding process
was too mercifully applied, and the book when it appeared was short
measure. It has no dedication, no "advertisement," and very few
notes, while it actually omits many of the best stories. The wise
bibliophile, therefore, will eschew it, and will try to get the second
edition issued a few weeks later in the same year, which Newbery
evidently insisted that Goldsmith should send out to the public in
proper order.
Goldsmith treats Nash with very much the same sort of indulgent and
apologetic sympathy with which the late M. Barbey d'Aurevilly treats
Brummell. He does not affect to think that the world calls for a
full-length statue of such a fantastic hero; but he seems to
claim leave to execute a statuette in terracotta for a cabinet of
curiosities. From that point of view, as a queer object of _vertu_,
as a specimen of the _bric-à-brac_ of manners, both the one and the
other, the King of Beaux and the Emperor of Dandies, are welcome to
amateurs of the odd and the entertaining. At the head of Goldsmith's
book stands a fine portrait of Nash, engraved by Anthony Walker, one
of the best and rarest of early English line-engravers, after
an oil-picture by William Hoare, presently to be one of the
foundation-members of the Royal Academy, and now and throughout his
long life the principal representative of the fine arts at Bath. Nash
is here represented in his famous white hat--_galero albo_, as his
epitaph has it; the ensign of his rule at Bath, the more than coronet
of his social sway.
The breast of his handsome coat is copiously trimmed with rich lace,
and his old, old eyes, with their wrinkles and their crow's feet,
look demurely out from under an incredible wig, an umbrageous,
deep-coloured ramilie of early youth. It is a wonderfully
hard-featured, serious, fatuous face, and it lives for us under the
delicate strokes of Anthony Walker's graver. The great Beau looks as
he must have looked when the Duchess of Queensberry dared to appear
at the Assembly House on a ball night with a white apron on. It is a
pleasant story, and only told properly in our second edition. King
Nash had issued an edict forbidding the wearing of aprons. The Duchess
dared to disobey. Nash walked up to her and deftly snatched her apron
from her, throwing it on to the back benches where the ladies' women
sat. What a splendid moment! Imagine the excitement of all that
fashionable company--the drawn battle between the Majesty of Etiquette
and the Majesty of Beauty! The Beau remarked, with sublime calm, that
"none but Abigails appeared in white aprons." The Duchess hesitated,
felt that her ground had slipped from under her, gave way with the
most admirable tact, and "with great good sense and humour, begged his
_Majesty's_ pardon,"
Aprons were not the only red rags to the bull of ceremony. He was
quite as unflinching an enemy to top-boots. He had already banished
swords from the assembly-room, because their clash frightened the
ladies, and their scabbards tore people's dresses. But boots were not
so easily banished. The country squires liked to ride into the city,
and, leaving their horses at a stable, walk straight into the dignity
of the minuet. Nash, who had a genius for propriety, saw how hateful
this was, and determined to put a stop to it. He slew top-boots and
aprons at the same time, and with the shaft of Apollo. He indited a
poem on the occasion, and a very good example of satire by irony it
is. It is short enough to quote entire:
FRONTINELLA'S INVITATION TO THE ASSEMBLY.
_Come, one and all,
To Hoyden Hall,
For there's th' Assembly to-night.
None but prude fools
Mind manners and rules,
We Hoydens do decency slight_.
_Come, Trollops and Slatterns,
Cocked hats and white aprons,
This best our modesty suits;
For why should not we
In dress be as free
As Hogs-Norton squires in boots?_
Why, indeed? But the Hogs-Norton squires, as is their wont, were not
so easily pierced to the heart as the noble slatterns. Nash turned
Aristophanes, and depicted on a little stage a play in which Mr.
Punch, tinder very disgraceful circumstances, excused himself for
wearing boots by quoting the practice of the pump-room beaux. This
seems to have gone to the conscience of Hogs-Norton at last; but what
really gave the death-blow to top-boots, as a part of evening dress,
was the incident of Nash's going up to a gentleman, who had made
his appearance in the ball-room in this unpardonable costume, and
remarking, "bowing in an arch manner," that he appeared to have
"forgotten his horse."
It had not been without labour and a long struggle that Nash had risen
to this position of unquestioned authority at Bath. His majestic rule
was the result of more than half a century of painstaking. He had been
born far back in the seventeenth century, so far back that, incredible
as it sounds, a love adventure of his early youth had supplied
Vanbrugh, in 1695, with an episode for his comedy of _Aesop_. But
after trying many forms of life, and weary of his own affluence, he
came to Bath just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancient
centre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb. Queen Anne had
been obliged to divert herself, in 1703, with a fiddle and a hautboy,
and with country dances on the bowling-green. The lodgings were dingy
and expensive, the pump-house had no director, the nobility had
haughtily withdrawn from such vulgar entertainments as the city now
alone afforded. The famous and choleric physician, Dr. Radcliffe, in
revenge for some slight he had endured, had threatened to "throw a
toad into King Bladud's Well," by writing a pamphlet against the
medicinal efficacy of the waters.
The moment was critical; the greatness of Bath, which had been slowly
declining since the days of Elizabeth, was threatened with extinction
when Nash came to it, wealthy, idle, patient, with a genius for
organisation, and in half a century he made it what he left it when he
died in his eighty-ninth year, the most elegant and attractive of the
smaller social resorts of Europe. Such a man, let us be certain, was
not wholly ridiculous. There must have been something more in him than
in a mere idol of the dandies, like Brummell, or a mere irresistible
buck and lady-killer, like Lauzun. In these latter men the force
is wholly destructive; they are animated by a feline vanity, a
tiger-spirit of egotism. Against the story of Nash and the Duchess of
Queensberry, so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful anecdote
that Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun's getting the hand of another duchess
under his high heel, and pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeper
into the flesh. In all the repertory of Nash's extravagances there is
not one story of this kind, not one that reveals a wicked force. He
was fatuous, but beneficent; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt.
Goldsmith, in this second edition at least, has taken more pains
with his life of Nash than he ever took again in a biography. His
_Parnell_, his _Bolingbroke_, his _Voltaire_, are not worthy of his
name and fame; not all the industry of annotators can ever make them
more than they were at first--potboilers, turned out with no care or
enthusiasm, and unconscientiously prepared. But this subtle figure
of a Master of Ceremonial; this queer old presentment of a pump-room
king, crowned with a white hat, waiting all day long in his best at
the bow-window of the Smyrna Coffee-House to get a bow from that
other, and alas! better accredited royalty, the Prince of Wales; this
picture, of an old beau, with his toy-shop of gold snuff-boxes, his
agate-rings, his senseless obelisk, his rattle of faded jokes and
blunted stories--all this had something very attractive to Goldsmith
both in its humour and its pathos; and he has left us, in his _Life of
Nash_, a study which is far too little known, but which deserves to
rank among the best-read productions of that infinitely sympathetic
pen, which has bequeathed to posterity Mr. Tibbs and Moses Primrose
and Tony Lumpkin.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE
THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE, IN THE COUNTY OF
SOUTHAMPTON; _with Engravings, and an Appendix. London: Printed by
T. Bensley, for B. White and Son, at Horace's Head, Fleet Street.
MDCCLXXXIX_.
It is not always the most confidently conducted books, or those
best preceded by blasts on the public trumpet, which are eventually
received with highest honours into the palace of literature. No more
curious incident of this fact is to be found than is presented by the
personal history of that enchanting classic, White's _Selborne_. If
ever an author hesitated and reflected, dipped his toe into the bath
of publicity, and hastily withdrew it again, loitered on the brink and
could not be induced to plunge, it was the Rev. Gilbert White. This
man of singular genius was not to be persuaded that the town would
tolerate his lucubrations. He was ready to make a present of them to
any one who would father them, he allowed his life to slip by until
his seventieth year was reached, before he would print them, and when
they appeared, he could not find the courage to put his name on the
title-page. Not one of his own titlarks or sedge-warblers could be
more shy of public observation. Even the fact that his own brother was
a publisher gave him no real confidence in printers' ink.