n’y resterai pas. J’ai dit autant à Madame, pour lui donner le
tems de se retirer à Alexandrie avant mon arrivée. Je coucherai
demain à Raimhé; dimanche à Aboukir, lundi à Etikon, et mardi,
s’il plaît à Dieu, je serai à Rosette, et si j’y trouve M. Dormer
je n’y resterai qu’autant qu’il faudra pour empaqueter quelques
livres, car je ne veux pas rester dans la même ville avec M.
Dormer. J’aurais été charmé de le voir ici, mais je ne veux
pas le voir à Rosette; ainsi, mon cher, persuadez-le de partir
immédiatement; car si je le trouve je n’y coucherai pas; cela est
certain.
What the ground of dissension was that induced Montagu to declare
that he would not remain in the same city with Dormer is not known.
Whatever it was, the Egyptian home was broken up. The wife and her
sister subsequently established themselves, temporarily, at Marseilles,
definitively at Nancy. Montagu moved about the Continent in moody
restlessness. In 1773 and the following year he settled for awhile in
Venice. He lived in frequent retirement, and to all outward appearance
in as truly a Turkish fashion as if he were a faithful child of Islam.
While Mr. Montagu was residing at Venice an illustrious traveller,
the Duke of Hamilton, arrived in that city, under the care of his
physician, Dr. John Moore, afterwards the author of ‘Zeluco,’ and the
father of a glorious son, Sir John Moore the hero of Corunna. The
Doctor had probably talked with his patron or ward about the more
eccentric traveller, of whom he had more to say than most people
as to the affair between Montagu and the Jew Payba, Moore having
been official medical man at the English Embassy in France, when
Lord Albemarle was ambassador, and Montagu was appealing to him for
aid and protection. At Venice, the Duke, according to Moore, ‘had
the curiosity’ (he does not say the _courtesy_) ‘to wait on this
extraordinary man.’ ‘Montagu,’ says the Doctor, in his published
letters,
met his Grace at the stair-head, and led us through some
apartments furnished in the Venetian manner, into an inner room in
quite a different style. There were no chairs, but he desired us
to seat ourselves on a sofa, whilst he placed himself on a cushion
on the floor, with his legs crossed in the Turkish fashion. A
young black slave sat by him, and a venerable old man, with a
long beard, served us with coffee. After this collation some
aromatic gums were brought, and burnt in a little silver vessel.
Mr. Montagu held his nose over the steam for some minutes, and
sniffed up the perfume with peculiar satisfaction; he afterwards
endeavoured to collect the smoke with his hands, spreading and
rubbing it carefully along his beard, which hung in hoary ringlets
to his girdle.... We had a great deal of conversation with this
venerable looking person, who is, to the last degree, acute,
communicative, and entertaining, and in whose discourse and
manners are blended the vivacity of a Frenchman with the gravity
of a Turk.
Moore does not say that Montagu had assumed the Mohammedan faith,
but simply that he considered the Turkish way of life to surpass
that of all other nations. Indeed they deserved to be ‘the happiest
of mankind,’ if they were, as Montagu held them to be, distinguished
for integrity, hospitality, and most other virtues. Egypt was, in his
eyes, ‘a perfect paradise,’ to which he was longing to return; and he
was convinced that if the Israelites of old could have had their own
way they would have stuck to the land and the flesh-pots and driven
the Egyptians into Canaan. But he added, with a fine sense of what
the occasion required, that ‘it had been otherwise ordered, for wise
purposes, of which it did not become us to judge.’
Subsequently Montagu returned the visit of the Duke and his medical
guardian. He seated himself on a sofa with his legs drawn up under
him, as the most natural and convenient position that a gentleman
could take. Moore, in the course of the conversation which ensued,
slily adverted to the Mohammedan views with regard to women. The
quasi Turk became Oriental to the very ends of his fingers, and grew
eloquent on this delicate question. Of course, he defended polygamy
and concubinage, even as Solomon had wisely observed it. Women liked
neither, and but for this foolish objection they would have had
influence enough to have spread Islam as one religion throughout
Europe. The men hated Christianity on more valid ground. Auricular
confession they abhorred. ‘No Turk of any delicacy would ever allow his
wife (particularly if he had but one) to hold private conference with
a man on any pretext whatever.’ When the Doctor (for the Duke seems to
have been generally silent) insinuated that the Turks had not the same
grounds to hate Protestantism, Montagu remarked that the Turks could
not tolerate the Christian idea of the equality of women and men, nor
accept the Christian view of an exceedingly dull heaven, where the
souls of ordinary women were to be assembled, instead of the graceful
bodies of Houris, who were to welcome the sons of Islam to a joyous
paradise.
The self-exile continued to be the observed of all curious travellers;
but he directed his steps at last in the direction of home, if with
no decided resolution to return thither. The cause, perhaps, is found
in a phrase of a letter from Mrs. Delany, written in February 1776:
‘Mr. Wortley Montagu’s wife is dead.’ This was the laundress, his only
legitimate wife, who had married him in his youthful time. Her husband
had recently been entertaining Romney, and Romney had painted the
portrait of his friend in Turkish costume, which bespeaks the talent
of the artist and the sad yet manly beauty of the friend. The latter
had been the victim of more lies and jests than any man of his time,
and these were multiplied now, but they are not worth repeating. The
wanderer himself was near the end of his course. Two months subsequent
to his lawful wife’s decease he died, after a brief illness, at Padua.
He is said to have expressed a hope that he should die as a good
Moslem; but that he was held to have died in the Roman Catholic faith
is best proved by the fact that he lies beneath a church roof in Padua,
and with a Latin inscription over him, which describes him as ‘ubique
civis,’ and which credits him with nearly all the qualities that can
dignify humanity. If much eccentricity has been ascribed to him by
the world, it is because his acts and words gave some warrant for it.
There was scarcely any condition in life but in some country or another
he had assumed it. He used to boast that he had never committed a
_small_ folly; and his gambling was certainly, at one time, of gigantic
proportions. A memoir of him, published in Dublin two years after
his death, reckoned among his boyish assumptions those of link-boy,
chimney-sweep, and shoe-black! The same veracious volume numbered among
his wives, with the English laundress, a Dutch Jewess, a Turkish lady,
a Greek girl, a Circassian damsel, and an Arabian maiden. Even to the
English laundress he is said to have been married by an official of
the Fleet prison. His old tutor, Forster, claimed the merit of having
written the work on Ancient Republics, but this claim, made when
the author could not answer it, was universally scouted, as was the
contemptible pretender. Lady Louisa Stuart, referring to the various
ladies who assumed a right to bear his name, remarks:--
More than one lady took the title of his wife, with or without
the pretext of a ceremony which, it is to be feared, he would
not scruple to go through any number of times, if requisite
for the accomplishment of his wishes. But the last person so
circumstanced, and the loudest in asserting her claims, met him
upon equal ground, having herself a husband living, from whom
she had eloped; therefore, she at least could not complain of
deception.
The above lady was the _ci-devant_ Miss Dormer. She appeared in London
soon after Edward Wortley Montagu’s death; and in her family papers it
is stated that she received one hundred pounds annually from Coutts’s
out of her alleged husband’s estate. For a long period she resided
at Nancy, and she may yet live in the recollection of not very old
persons, English and others, who dwelt in that pleasant city in their
youth, for the last of the wives of Wortley Montagu survived till
January 1821. She lived and died as Countess of Montagu, and her death
finally closed a romance of real life, the unfortunate hero of which
would probably have won honourable fame if he had been blessed with a
mother of a different quality.
_ROYAL AND IMPERIAL JOKERS._
In that marvellous work of history, the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire,’ Gibbon somewhere remarks, in reference to sovereign ladies
in love, that they are by their social position, or rather by their
position above society, placed at a manifest disadvantage, inasmuch as
the first advances must come from themselves. If this was the case in
the olden time, it is not exactly so now--though, of course, the outer
world knows little about the matter. Many princesses have not been
at all troubled at the idea of having to speak, or look, first; and
the great Russian Czarina had as little embarrassment in choosing her
lovers as she had in murdering that holy and august madman, her husband.
The well-favoured individuals on whom high and mighty princesses have
been ready to smile had a delicate task to perform. They had to look
more than twice before they leaped, and were compelled to feel their
way very cautiously lest a false step or a too boldly ventured word
should cost them their head. But after all this perilous condition of
aspiring lovers was as nothing compared with the dangers of too wittily
endowed courtiers who should indulge in jesting with a king, especially
of the olden type and of mediæval and morose temper. When the courtiers
of Amarose, King of Little Britain, gently awoke him with the glee--
‘Awake, awake your royal nob,
The kettle boils upon the hob’--
his surly and too suddenly aroused majesty descended to his tea, toast,
and eggs, entered the breakfast-room with the gracious greeting, ‘My
lords and gentlemen, get out!’ King Arthur, in ‘Tom Thumb,’ returns
homage in much the same civil humour. These, however, are but stage
kings--kings of shreds and patches. The flesh-and-blood, genuine,
despotic monarch was a far more dreadful animal.
Jesting with kings, particularly uninvited--why, it was as if a
swimmer, however experienced, should venture within the smooth but
death-bearing current of Niagara, which inevitably carries all within
its power over the Falls. People have played little teasing jokes with
elephants, and when the jokers have forgotten all about it the gravely
majestic beast has put his foot upon the offender, and crushed the
humour out of him for ever. It has been just so with malice-bearing
monarchs, and with courtiers who thought they might joke with them.
The incarnation of all such monarchs existed in the person of an
African king named Chaka. He was given to joking at others, and woe
betide them if they did not burst with ecstacy at the joke; but if
a ‘fellow of infinite humour’ happened to cap the royal joke with a
better, Chaka broke into hilarity, which he ended by exclaiming, ‘Cut
off that wretch’s head; he has made me laugh.’
The Cæsars must have been almost as dreadfully dangerous men to joke
with as Chaka. The great Julius, indeed, after he became great, had no
leisure for jesting, but was the object of some popular jokes which he
took with indifference. The guests of Augustus were afraid to ‘crack
a joke’ in his presence. They would whisper one to a neighbour, and
then turn pale if the emperor invited them to ‘speak up.’ The imperial
table was as grand and dull as that of the copper Augustus, Louis
the Fourteenth, and the emperor had recourse to merryandrews, just
as the Grand Monarque had to harlequins. But the harlequins of those
days were gentlemen and scholars. The grim Tiberius, on the other
hand, was remarkably facetious. His delight was to puzzle his learned
guests with unanswerable questions, such as, ‘What was the name of the
song the Syrens sang?’ and the like. Fancy half a dozen members of
the Society of Antiquaries dining with her Majesty and being gravely
asked who built the marble halls the Bohemian girl dreamt she dwelt
in? or what was the Christian name of the ‘Minstrel Boy?’ and at what
period ‘Auld lang syne’ had been young? Nevertheless, Tiberius was a
nicer man to deal with than Caligula, all of whose jests were brutally
cruel, in words, and oftener in deeds. What a serious joke was that
when, having nothing on but the linen apron of a victim-slayer, he
raised the mallet, and instead of slaying the beast, knocked out the
brains of the sacrificing priest! Claudius was too huge a feeder to
have appetite for wit; but he would have eaten the whole beast that
his predecessor should have killed. Yet Claudius, half beast himself,
had a good deal of the scholar in him; as Nero had, who loved science,
admired art, was mildly witty, and therewith as savage as an insane
hyæna. We must except the occasions of his visiting the theatre, when
he sat in an upper seat, and found delight in flinging nuts down upon
the bald head of the prætor below. That official was as proud of the
attention as if every nut had been an especial honour. Joyless Galba
had none of the Neronic fun in him. But though not mirthful himself,
Galba could smile when he heard the popular slang name, in allusion to
his flat nose, ‘Simius.’ His successor, Otho, was just such a wit as
a man might be expected to be who washed his face in asses’ milk. If
witty men went away from him feeling dull and heavy, it was the result
of their exchanging ideas with their imperial master. He had his wit at
second-hand, as Vitellius had, who got his jokes from a stage-player
and charioteer. In more modern times, when Astley’s was in its glory,
and the clown of the ring a joker that people went to listen to, that
circus clown got his jokes, not from his own brains, but from the
Westminster boys. Jokes used to be made at Westminster as they now are
at the Stock Exchange, where fresh batches are served each morning,
like hot rolls. But to return to the Cæsars. Perhaps Vespasian was a
greater joker than any of them, but his jokes were often broad and
scurrilous. Titus was rather gracious than given to jesting, though he
enjoyed one sorry joke, in promising to every suitor that his request
should be granted. They went away radiant. ‘Every one,’ he said,
‘ought to depart joyfully from the presence of his prince;’ and then,
‘the delight of mankind’ thought no more of his promise. The chief
recreation of the gloomy Domitian was in playing dice; but he always
won. Every antagonist knew what the joke would cost him if he beat the
emperor.
Altogether, those Twelve Cæsars were men compounded of the most
opposite qualities, with a small modicum of what is called wit among
the whole of them. Out of all those who followed, one alone, Hadrian,
made a standing and a sterling joke--a joke which has descended to us
and added a slang phrase to our vulgar tongue. To ‘scrape acquaintance’
comes to us from Hadrian. He was at the public baths one day when he
saw one of his veteran soldiers scraping his body with a tile. That was
such poor luxury that Hadrian ordered that his old comrade should be
supplied with more suitable cleansing materials, and also with money.
On a subsequent occasion when the emperor again went to the bath, the
spectacle before him was highly amusing. A score of old soldiers who
had fought under Hadrian were standing in the water, and each was
currying himself with a tile and wincing at the self-inflicted rubbing.
The emperor perfectly understood what he saw and what was the purpose
of the sight. ‘Ha! ha!’ he exclaimed, ‘you had better scrape one
another, my good fellows!’ He added, ‘You certainly shall not scrape
acquaintance with me!’
Heliogabalus was perhaps the most practical joker among the imperial
jesters. We have seen at the Surrey Oval, in old days, eleven
one-legged Greenwich pensioners playing cricket against eleven
pensioners with only one arm. By the way, the one-legged men had the
advantage, as the one-armed men often fell in stooping for the ball,
wanting the missing arm to balance themselves withal. It was the
humour of Heliogabalus to get together companies of individuals all
marked by the same peculiarity. He would now have at dinner a dozen
baldheaded men, or twelve ladies with one eye each; he would have
been delighted to have got hold of triple assortments of the three
famous sisters who had but one eye and one tooth between them! Failing
that, the ‘lord of the sun,’ as he called himself, was content to
have a score of hunchbacks, or of flat-nosed men, or squinting women.
He is said on one occasion to have put into a very small chamber,
where dinner was prepared, so many excessively fat and hungry men
that they had no room for anything but to perspire, and not much for
that. Heliogabalus was an expensive joker, but then his good people
paid for the fun, and he might therefore indulge his humour without
restraint at the time, or remorse after it. His supremely imperial joke
lay in placing a number of guests on table-couches (guests reclined,
and did not sit down to dinner) which were blown up with air instead
of being stuffed with wool. At a moment when the cups were filled to
the brim with the choicest wine, and the guests were lifting them
to their lips with anticipations of liquid Elysium, a tap was drawn
beneath the carpet, which suddenly emptied the couches of their air,
and consequently tumbled all the recliners on to the floor, where they
lay pell-mell, with wine spilt, goblets lost, and utter confusion
prevailing, except on the face of Heliogabalus, who looked on and
indulged in laughter inextinguishable. Having but indifferent appetite
himself, he was fond of sauces, and he highly rewarded any inventor of
a sauce that was to the imperial liking. But if it failed to tickle
his very sacred majesty’s palate he had recourse to a joke of a very
practical character indeed; that is to say, he condemned the unlucky
candidate for his favour to live upon nothing else but the sauce in
question until he had discovered another more successful in its object.
Fancy having to live on anchovy, without fish, for a twelvemonth, or
catsup and a little bread, from the Ides of March to the Kalends of
December! Think of what your palate and liver would be had you nothing
to sit down to but pickled walnuts without the chop, or mustard without
the beef, from Christmas to Easter, even if your wits enabled you to
make deliverance then.
There was grim but honest joking in the Emperor Carus. The frugal man
was once seated, as was his wont, on the grass, supping on dry bread,
grey peas, and stale bacon. He gave audience at the same time to
Persian ambassadors who came to sue for peace. As the emperor was about
to reply, he opened his mouth for the reception of a huge spoonful of
peas, but he paused to say--at the same time taking off his skull-cap
with his disengaged hand--‘Look here! If your master does not confess
the superiority of Rome, I will render Persia as destitute of trees
as my head is of hair.’ Having said which, he swallowed his shovelful
of peas, and chuckled as the Persian legates went homeward with that
significant message.
After all, this joke was made up of the rudest boasting. There is
something in it and its attending circumstances which remind one of the
last war in Europe. Rome declared war against Persia, and the Roman
cry was ‘The Tigris for a boundary!’ ‘To Susa!’ ‘To Ecbatana!’ and so
forth. The later cry of the enraptured Gauls, ‘Le Rhin! le Rhin!’ ‘À
Berlin! à Berlin!’ seem like Irish echoes of the old cry. What disaster
came of it Gibbon tells and readers of history remember, but even among
the degenerate Romans there was no one ignoble enough to set an example
to the poor French _feuilletonist_, who said of the brave German
officers that they would be too proud to brush French boots with their
blonde moustaches. Brave Frenchmen must have shuddered at this wretched
jest, and Louis Napoleon, who loved a good joke though he never made
one, must have curled his lip with indignation if he read the piece of
miserable wit over his coffee at Metz.
In Prussia, which dates as a kingdom from the year 1702, there is not
one of its seven kings who can be called a wit, though more than one
had what is far better, strong, far-seeing, uncommon sense. Unclean in
their vagaries the Prussian royal jokers have assuredly been, and one
or two admitted of no liberty whatever being taken with them, as far
as repartee went. So stern were the most of the Prussian margraves,
electors, and dukes, that, to express the peril of joking with them,
there arose the well-known popular proverb, ‘It is advisable not to
eat cherries with princes.’ The queens of Prussia, on the other hand,
brought their own wit with them into the royal family, and there was
not a sharper lady among them than Queen Sophia Charlotte, the first
queen of Prussia. Leibnitz, whom she delighted to honour as a man and a
philosopher, once asked her if she could imagine the infinitely little?
‘Why, of course I can!’ exclaimed the hilarious queen. ‘What a question
to ask the wife of Frederick the First!’
There was good common sense in the humour of Frederick the Great of
Prussia. In his hours of joviality with his boon companions, smoking
and drinking around a table, in a cottage specially devoted to such
recreation, the king was understood to be absent. Frederick gave the
loosest rein to his own spirit of jesting, and took the roughest jokes
of his guests with perfect good temper. He has been immoderately
praised for this control over himself; but in truth there was none. He
could always escape from raillery that was tinged with bitterness. At
critical moments, when an ordinary mortal, hard pressed by satirical
assailants, would lose his equanimity and fly into a rage, Fritz
could quietly remark, ‘Friends, the king has come back;’ after which
observation he neither joked himself nor was attacked by the jokers.
Neither did the king bear any ill-will if his own jesting was turned
roughly against him, and he was made to smart by a repartee more
stinging than the royal sarcasm which gave it birth.
There was often a childlike simplicity about the old soldier-king. He
would joke and laugh with the children in the streets of Potsdam, as he
slowly rode along on his veteran Molwitz gray. He loved to have them
at his stirrup, and watch them struggling to kiss his boot or pat the
proud old horse; and he would laugh joyously if their young throats set
up the famous chorus:
Victoria! with us is God!
The haughty foe lies there!
One Saturday afternoon they carried the matter further than his
patience would tolerate, and Fritz, raising his crutched cane
menacingly, cried out in affected anger, ‘Young rascals! to school
with you all! to school!’ The cry was met by a counter-shout from
the ragamuffins of ‘Ha! ha! Papa Fritz don’t know that there’s no
school on Saturday afternoon!’ At which the absolute king rode away
rebuked. His humour, however, made such rebuffs welcome. He took truths
from the popular tongue with alacrity. After the Seven Years’ War,
riding towards Sans Souci, he recognised an old fruit-woman near the
Brandenburg Gate, whom he remembered to have seen there before the war
broke out. Fritz at once greeted her with a ‘Well, mother, how have the
times been treating you?’ ‘Middling,’ was the concise reply; ‘but where
have you been for this ever so long?’ ‘Don’t you know, mother, I have
been making war for these seven years past?’ ‘How should I know?’ asked
the venerable Pomona, ‘and why should I care?
“Rabble fight, and rabble slay;
And rabble are friends another day.”’