And you were to have enough—plain fare, but enough.
Give servants no dainties, but give them enow;
Too many chaps wagging do beggar the plow;
but even here you would get according to your deserts. If you were lazy at your threshing, you would be given a "flap and a trap," whatever those may be. And you were expected to eat the trencher bare:
Some gnaweth and leaveth, some crusts and some crumbs:
Eat such their own leavings, or gnaw their own thumbs.
In the hot weather you had time for sleep allowed you:
From May to mid-August an hour or two
Let Patch sleep a snatch, howsoever ye do.
Though sleeping one hour refresheth his song
Yet trust not Hob Grouthead for sleeping too long.
Then came afternoon work, and at last supper. Here the mistress might unbend somewhat; for, as Tusser puts it:
Whatever God sendeth, be merry withal.
She had still, however, an eye for the servants:
No servant at table use sauc'ly to talk,
Lest tongue set at large out of measure do walk;
No lurching, no snatching, no striving at all,
Lest one go without, and another have all.
And then a final word:
Declare after supper—take heed thereunto—
What work in the morning each servant shall do.
And then—bed!
There were feast days, of course: Christmas to Epiphany was one long feast; then Plow Monday, Shrovetide, Sheep-shearing, Wake-Day, Harvest Home, Seed-Cake—these as the times came round. But there was a weekly regale too, which was known as Twice-a-Week-Roast. On Sundays and Thursdays a hot joint was the custom at supper. Tusser is clear about the value and sanction at once:
Thus doing and keeping such custom and guise,
They call thee good huswife—they love thee likewise.
Those days are past and done, with much to regret and much to be thankful for. You trained good servants that way—but did you make good men and women? Some think so, and I among them; but such training is two-edged, and while I feel sure that the girls and lads were the better for the discipline, I cannot believe that the masters and mistresses were. They nursed arrogance; out of them came the tyrants and gang-drivers of the eighteenth century, Act of Settlement, the Enclosure Acts, Speenhamland, rick-burning, machine-breaking, and the Bloody Assize of 1831. Well, now the reckoning has come, and Hodge will have Farmer Blackacre at his discretion.
One or two variations from modern practice may be noted. The Elizabethan husbandman grew, I have said, his own flax and hemp; he grew his vines too, and Tusser bids him prune them in February. I, who grow mine, call that full early. He does not tell us when he gathered his grapes or (what I very much want to know) how he made his wine—whether with pure fermented grape-juice, which is the French way, or by adding water and sugar to the must, which is our present English fashion. Again, he used sheep's milk both for draught and for butter-making. I wish we had sheep's milk butter. No one who has had it in Greece would be without it at home if he could help it. You weaned the lambs at Philip and Jacob, he says, if you wanted any milk from the ewe. Lastly, he grew saffron, which he pared between the two St. Mary's days. To pare is to strip the soil with a breast-plow. The two St. Mary's days were July 22 and August 15, which would be a pretty good time to plant saffron.
We also, in my country, date our operations by holy days, long after the holy men have ceased to be commemorated. Who knows St. Gregory's Day? It is March 12. Marrowfat peas go into the drill:
Sow runcivals timely, and all that is grey;
But sow not the white till St. Gregory's Day.
I will undertake that half a dozen old hands round about my house follow out this rule in its entirety.
FLOWER OF THE FIELD
A county inquiry took me, one day last summer, deeply into the Plain, up and over a rutty track which my driver will have cause to remember. An uncommonly large hawk soaring over his prey, and so near the ground that I could see the light through his ragged plumes, a hare limping through the bents, further off a crawling flock bustling after shepherd and dog, were all the living things I saw. The ground was iron, the colour of what had once been herbage a glaring brown. Of the flowers none but the hardiest had outlived the visitation of the sun. I saw rest-harrow which has a root like whipcord, and the flat thistle which thrives in dust. The harebells floated no more, the discs of the scabious were shrivelled husks; ladies' bedstraw was straw indeed, but not for ladies' uses. Three miles away from anywhere we came upon a clump of dusty sycamores whose leaves were spotted and beginning to fall; beyond them was a squat row of flint and brick bungalows, the goal of our quest. There were three tenements, of which two were empty. In the third lives the shepherd who had called me up to consider his circumstances.
There was thunder about, though not visibly; a day both airless and pitiless; one of those days when you feel that the unseen powers are conspiring against your peace. A naked sun from a naked sky stared down upon a naked earth. It seemed to me that the hawk had been a figure of more than himself and his purpose; I saw him as Homer's people saw their eagles. Just as he hung aloft so hung the sun, intent upon the life of our cowering ball. Not elsewhere in England have I seen so shadeless a place, or one so unfitted for human intercourse, so lacking in the comfort, which human sensibilities need. We live in nature as hunted things, beasts of chase. Every eye is upon us in fear or dislike; but in our turn, cursed as well as blessed by imagination, we people the wild with dreadful shapes of menace. The heat, the cold, the wind and the rain work as much against us as for us. We endow them with minds like our own, but magnified by our dismay to be the minds of gods maleficent. Without shelter of our own provision we are comfortless, and without comfort our souls perish, then our bodies. Salisbury Plain, swooning in the heat, is a paradise for insects. In those desolate dwellings both flies and (I am sure) fleas abounded, dreadfully healthy and alive. I only guess at the fleas, but the flies I can answer for. They swarmed on the baking walls and wove webs in the air above us. The rooms were black with them, and their humming filled them up with noise.
Here lived the shepherd, too heavily taxed as he thought for his hermitage; here lived his family of half a dozen swarthy and beautiful children; and here we discussed the state of affairs, since the shepherd was abroad, with his daughter, a flower of the field. She came out of this stivy tenement at the sound of our boiling radiator, and stood framed in the doorway, shading her eyes against the sun, a tall and graceful, very pretty girl, dressed in cool white which might have been fresh from its cardboard box, as she herself might have stepped from her typewriter and Government office at Whitehall. Gentle-voiced, quiet and self-possessed, she showed us the conditions of her lot. One living-room, two bedrooms, and a washhouse in a shed: three miles over the grass to shop, church, post-office, and doctor; half a mile to call up a neighbour in case of need. A rain-water tank, less than a quarter full of last winter's rain, must keep clean her house and her, and for drinking she was served by a galvanised tank in full sun, which she was lucky to get filled once a week.
I tasted of it. The water was warm, flat, and not too clean. "Where does this come from?" "It is fetched in a barrel from over the hill." "Who brings it?" "The farmer—but he makes a fuss whenever we ask for it." "He must water the stock, surely?" "Oh yes, and the sheep, too, but—" A pregnant aposiopesis. I wondered if that tank could not be put in the shade; but it seemed that it could not. The water had to be drawn from the barrel, the barrel was on wheels; time was short, life was tough; and so—you see! We did justice to the shepherd.
It is shocking that a man should live so, held of less account than the sheep which he rears; but it is admirable that this man should live as he does. The house, to call it so, was as clean as a dairy; the children were neat, washed and brushed; the girl was one for Herrick to have sung of. I wish that I could have seen the shepherd, though it may well be that his wife, if she is alive, would reveal more. Something told me that he was a widower, and that this fair young woman mothered his brood for him. What she had of the nest-lore can only have come from a shrewd mistress of it. I did not see a book in the place, nor a newspaper.
Life out there, on such terms, is more solitary than in Northumberland, where the farms are isolated and self-sufficient, but all the hinds' dwellings are clustered, and society may be had. I don't believe you can set up for a successful hermit without a long education; and although a shepherd himself may be one by a stern schooling in solitude, you should not expect it of his daughter. Here was a girl made for social amenity, who would want to be danced with, flirted with, courted with flowers, sweets and other delicate observance. She deserved admiration both to receive and impart. It is useless to talk about nature; the love of that is both sophisticated and acquired. Nothing to her the great blue spaces of the Plain, the brooded mystery of Stonehenge, the companionship of her long-dead ancestry, dust in their barrows. No solace for her, after the burden of the day, in the large solemnity of evening out there, which to some of us would call a message almost vocal. To me, for instance, a summer's dusk, a moonrise on the Plain, are poems without words. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard—!
For whom, then, had she adorned herself in white raiment, for whom dressed her dark hair? Not for us, that's certain. She had had no notice of our coming. That she should do such things for their own sake, elegantiâ quadam prope divinum, was original virtue in her. Solomon in all his glory had been no goodlier sight; and if she toiled or spun to achieve it, her state, I should say, is by so much the more gracious. And what the devil does she do with herself in the long winter nights, when you light the lamp at four and see nothing of the sun till eight the next morning—and she arrayed like a lily of the field? There's mending, but you have the afternoon for that; a letter to a brother in Canada; let us hope there's one to a sweetheart not so far away. And then—what? To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
UNDER THE HARVEST MOON
She is at her full, and even as I write rising red and heavy in the south-west. All night long she will look down upon at least one corner of the earth satiate with the good things of life. I don't remember such a September as this has been for many years past. Misty, gossamered mornings, a day all blue and pale gold, bees in the ivy bloom, sprawling overblown flowers, red apples, purpling vine-clusters, clear evenings: then this smouldering moon to go to bed by! It is all like a great Veronese wall-picture, or the Masque in The Tempest—"Rich scarf to my proud earth!"—and summons from me more adjectives than I have needed this twelvemonth. It is indeed adjectival weather; for Nature is still adding, not discarding stores. The last act of the "maturing sun" is to ingerminate the flowers and fruit which will bless or tantalise us next year.
Now is the time when maids get up at six and hunt for mushrooms in the dew; now the good wives of the village make wine of all sorts of unlikely fruits, blackberries, elderberries, peaches, pears, and, of all things in the world, parsnips. I have lately been given of this wine to taste. It is a cordial rather than a wine and on the good rather than the bad side. The addition of spices is admitted; nevertheless out of a particularly mawkish vegetable is made a palatable drink. "Out of the strong come forth sweetness." After it I shall be prepared to find a potable in the banana, which is favoured by many people, of whom I am not one. But I don't find it nastier than the parsnip, and it is evident that fermentation can work miracles.
In such a year as this I, too, shall have a vintage. For the first time in my life I shall tread my own winepress, vat my own must, and (I hope) need no sugar for it. I don't know why it is, but I can conceive no more romantic rural adventure than that of growing and drinking your own wine. But there are yet many things to happen. The grapes must get ripe and the wasps be kept off; and then there are problems connected with vinification which I have not yet solved. The Marquis of Bute could tell me all about it, and I wish he would. He has made wine at Castle Coch these many years, and of the most excellent. Unfortunately I have not his acquaintance, so I invite advice, and shall be grateful for it. The chief of my perplexities are concerned with the beginning of fermentation and the end of it. For the first, should I use yeast? My neighbours here say, yes; the French tell me that I don't need it, the grapes having enough of their own. Pass that and consider the second point. Having started your ferment, how do you stop it?[A] Fermentation in Italy goes on in the barrel, after the liquor has left the vat. That gives you a peculiar prickly wine which the Italians call "Frizzante" and profess to like. Our word for it is "beastly."
[Footnote A: Since that was written I have learned the answer. It stops itself—why, I don't know, unless by the grace of God.]
My village gossips tell me that fermentation will stop of itself when I draw the wine off the lye; but the French practice certainly seems to be to burn sulphur matches in the vat and so kill the vinegar germs there latent. And then plâtrage? You sprinkle the must with plaster of Paris before fermentation begins. Is that done in England? It is not done in this part of England at least. Nor do I know why it is done in France. Probably before I have solved my problems by stomach-ache and other experiences of a biliary kind, prohibition will be in the air over here, wafted upon some newspaper breeze from America. There will be no difficulty in starting a fermentation out of that sweeping doctrine, that's for certain. I don't say that we need take prohibition seriously; but we think about it, naturally, and talk about it out here.
If it were put to the local vote in this village, it would be lost. We have many total abstainers, yet one of them, I know, and several of them, I believe, would vote against it. Says the one I am sure of: "If I abstain from strong drink, as I do, it is my own doing; and if I were tempted to a fall and withstood it, that is to my credit. But if the law cuts me off it, and I am a criminal if I drink, it cuts me off a good part of my credit too—and I am against that." My friend has there put his finger upon a sharp little dilemma. If alcohol is a bad thing, then prohibition is a good thing. But if temperance is a good thing, then prohibition is a bad thing. You cannot be temperate in the use of alcohol if you have none. Nor is sobriety a virtue in you if you lock up the wine-cellar and throw the keys down the well. Very well; then will you do without alcohol or without temperance? There is the choice; and I have made mine.
Besides, we are all for liberty down here, individualists to a man. Give us a loophole to avoid compulsion and we use it. One of the most frequently exercised of my magisterial functions is to certify conscientious objections to the Vaccination Act. I do it against the grain. A doctor told me the other day that he believed smallpox had reached the end of its tether, and was on the ebb. I am sure I hope so, lest there should be one day a bad outbreak among these liberty men. I must have signed away the chances of hundreds of children, who, by the way, are not of an age to consent. I never fail to point out the risk; but the Court awards it and the law allows it; so I sign.
There is much to be said for Anarchy in the abstract, nothing at all in the concrete. Mr. Smillie, however, appears to favour it, raw, rough and ready. In that he is precocious, and, like the rathe primrose, will "forsaken die." He will rend the Labour party in twain from the top to the bottom, and will see the agricultural vote drop off his industrials just as it had begun to adhere to them. I know the peasantry. They will never strike for political ends, for though they are not quick to see the consequences of hypothetical actions, they do see that if you make Parliamentary government impossible you make a Labour majority not worth having.
And another thing: Mr. Smillie and his friends may want a revolution, but Hodge and his most certainly do not. They want to earn their livelihood, pay their way, and dig their plots of ground. No more warfare for them. I dare say I shall be sorry for Mr. Smillie when the time comes; but I may have to be still more sorry for my country first. I can't help hoping, however, when it comes to the point that his feet will be a little colder than his head seems to be just now.
LA PETITE PERSONNE
No letter-writer's stage can at any time be called empty, because upon it you necessarily have at all times two persons at least: the mover of the figures and the audience, the puppeteer and the puppetee, the letter-writer and the letter-reader. The play presented is, therefore, a play within a play: like the Mousetrap in Hamlet, like Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the romantic drama of Gayferos and Melisandra which Don Quixote witnessed with a select company of acquaintance at an inn. The temperament of this presented spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always reflected in the entertainment when the letter-writer is a sensitive artist. So Horace Walpole's comedy varies according as it goes before Sir Horace Mann in Florence or Lady Upper-Ossory at Ampthill; so, more delicately, does Madame de Sévigné's. There are blacker strokes in the dialogue when Bussy is to see the play; there is always idolatry implied, and sometimes anxiety, if the spoilt child of Provence is the audience. It is this chère bonne, this Madame de Grignan, nine times out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment. You have to reckon with her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted. For her sake, not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with her exquisite art. In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the effects. As we should say, she "laboured" the Cardinal de Retz. The sour-faced beauty would have none of him. But that is a rare case, one in which predilection betrayed her. Madame de Sévigné had a weakness for the Cardinal. It is very seldom that the lightest hand in the world fails her at a portrait. Her great successes are her thumb-nail sketches: she will be remembered by Picard in the hayfield so long as the world knows how to laugh. One of her best, because one of her tenderest, is the petite personne.
The name is Charles de Sévigné's, but his mother takes it up after him, and makes better play with it. Charles writes from Les Rochers in December, 1675—Madame being really ill for once in her life with "a nice little rheumatism," and Charles her amanuensis—"in the room of la Plessis," that striving lady, too, was ill, or thought she was—"we have had lately a very pretty young party (une petite personne fort jolie) whose good looks don't at all remind us of that divinity. At her instigation we have started Reversis: now, instead of knaves, we talk about jacks." He adds a stroke too good to be lost, though his mother might have left it out. "To give you a notion of her age and quality, she has just confided to us that the day after Easter Eve was a Tuesday. She thought that over, then said, 'No—it was a Monday!' Then, judging by the look of us that that wouldn't do either, 'Heavens, how stupid! Of course—it was a Friday!' That is the kind of party we are. If you wouldn't mind sending us word what day of the week you believe it to have been, you will save us a great deal of discomfort." The stage is the brisker for the coming in of this pretty soubrette.
Madame de Sévigné, meantime, is in a discomfort of her own. It takes her some ten days to absorb the petite personne, but then she fixes her for ever. Nobody can wish to know more about a young party than this:
"Christmas Day (1675)…. I still have that nice child here. She lives on the other side of the park; her mother is the good-wife Marcile's daughter—but you won't remember her. The mother lives at Rennes, but I shall keep her here. She plays trictrac, reversis; she is quite pretty, quite innocent, and called Jeannette. She is no more trouble than Fidèle."
Quite pretty, quite innocent and called Jeannette! Quid Plura? Need I say who Fidèle was? Fidèle is a shrewd touch of Madame's, put in, as I guess, to placate the hungry-eyed Goddess of Grignan; but it does clinch the portrait. All that one needs to know of the nature, parentage, and upbringing of a petite personne is in these two letters.
Immediately upon her entry the comedy begins, with Mademoiselle du Plessis in a leading part. "… La Plessis has a quartan fever. It is pretty to see her jealous fury when she comes here and finds the child with me. The fuss there is to have my stick or muff to hold! But enough of these nothings…."
It was of nothings that the vexed days of Mlle. du Plessis must exist.
An elderly virgin, evidently; stiff, gauche, full of guinderie, says
Madame, "et de l'esprit fichu." Everybody made game of her at Les
Rochers. As we shall see, the servants knew that very well. Charles is
always witty at her expense. Madame de Grignan once slapped her.
Meanwhile, here's another vignette, a Chardin picture—you will find nothing by Greuze of this petite personne. "… What do you think of the handy little lady we were telling you of, who couldn't make out what the day after Easter Eve was? She is a dear little rosebud of a thing who delights us."
"'In six years to come she'll be twenty years old!' I wish you could see her in the mornings, eating a hunk of bread-and-butter as long as from here to Easter, or, after dinner, crunching up two green apples with brown bread…."
But now the clowns come tumbling in, to turn over the poor du Plessis. "… Mlle. du Plessis will die of the petite personne. Being more than half dead of jealousy already, she is always at my people to find out how I treat her. Not one of them but has a pin ready. One says that I love her as much as I do you; another that I have her to sleep with me—which would assuredly be a notable sign of affection! They swear that I am taking her to Paris, that I kiss her, am mad about her; that the Abbé is giving her 10,000 livres; that if she had but 20,000 écus I should marry her to my son. That is the sort of thing; and they carry it so far that we can't help laughing at it. The poor lady is ill with it all."
To the same letter Charles adds his scene in the farce: "La Plessis said to Rahuel (he was the concierge) yesterday that she had been gratified at dinner to find that Madame had turned the child out of her seat and put herself in the place of honour. And Rahuel, in his Breton way: 'Nay, Miss, there's no wonder. 'Tis an honour to your years, naturally. Besides, the little girl is one of the house, as you might say. Madame looks on her almost as she might be Madame de Grignan's little sister.'"
La Plessis, in fact, agonised, and the way was made for the great scene—so good a scene that I think it must have been bagged for the theatre. Labiche must surely have lifted it. It is Charles de Sévigné's masterpiece.
"The young party here, when she saw how my mother's pains increased towards night, thought that the best thing she could do for her was to cry—which she did. She is that sort, and always the focus of jealousy for la Plessis, who tries to recommend herself to my mother by hating her like the devil. This is what happened yesterday. My mother was dozing quietly in bed; the child, the Abbé and I were by the fire. In came La Plessis. We warned her to come quietly, and she did, and was half across the room when my mother coughed, and then asked for her handkerchief to get rid of some phlegm. The child and I jumped up to get it, but La Plessis was too quick for us, rushed to the bed, and instead of putting the thing to my mother's lips, caught hold of her nose with it, and pinched it so hard that the poor dear cried out with the pain. She couldn't help being sniffy with the old fuss who had hurt her so—nor laughing at her afterwards. If you had seen this little comedy you would have laughed too."
I should like to know who wouldn't have laughed to tears, after it was over. The scene is priceless.
But all the same, it is not Madame de Sévigné's genre. She is mistress of the chuckle, not of the fou rire; and La Plessis is not one of her best characters. The petite personne, however, is; and I must give a very pretty scene, quite in her own manner, where she is half laughing at the child and half in love with her too.
"The petite personne is still here, and always delightful. She has a sharp little wit of her own, too, as new as a young chick's. We enjoy telling her things, for she knows nothing at all, and it makes a kind of game to enlighten her on all sides—with a word or two about the Universe, or about Empires, or countries, or kings, or religions, or wars, or Fate, or the map. There's a pretty jumble of facts to put tidily away in a little head which has never seen a town, nor even a river, and has never really supposed that the world went any farther than the end of the park! But she is delicious. I was telling her to-day about the taking of Wismar; and she understands quite well that we are sorry about it because the King of Sweden is our ally. See how wildly we amuse ourselves."
The last sentence is for the chère bonne's benefit, who was very capable herself of being jealous of the petite personne. I fancy the touch about Fidèle was put in with the same object. She had to be infinitely careful with the chère bonne's black dogs.
In another month the petite personne is so far advanced that she can be secretary to her patroness, whose poor hand is too swollen to write. Elaborate perambulations introduce her to the chère bonne. "My son has gone to Vitré on some business or other. That is why I give his functions of secretary over to the little lady of whom I have often told you, and who begs you to be pleased to allow her, with great respect, to kiss your hands." That, I should think, was courtesy enough even for the pouting great lady of Provence. In a later letter she kisses Madame de Grignan's left hand; so it is written—by herself, but to dictation. Thus the proper distances were kept by one as humane as Madame de Sévigné when she was dealing with her daughter on the other side of idolatry.
But she herself and the child are on better terms than such discipline would imply. In February: "… My letters are so full of myself that it bores me to have them read over. You have too much taste not to be bored too. So I shall stop: even the child is laughing at me now." And then in March: "… My son has left us—we are quite alone, the child and I—reading, writing, and saying our prayers." A jolly little picture of still and gentle life. No Greuze there.
The idyll ends in tears, but not just yet. Two days before she leaves Brittany, having "neither rhyme nor reason in my hands," she makes use of the petite personne for the last time: "the most obliging child in the world. I don't know what I should have done without her. She reads me what I like—quite well; she writes as you see; she is fond of me; she is willing; she can talk about Madame de Grignan. In fact, you may love her on my assurance." And then the poor little dear puts in her little word for herself to propitiate this formidable Countess in Provence:
"That would make me very happy, Madame, and I am sure that you must envy my joy to be with your mother. She has been pleased to make me write all that praise of myself, though I was rather ashamed to do it. But I am very unhappy that she is going away."
Madame resumes the pen: "… The child, desired to converse with you …"—which one may or may not believe. If, as I feel sure, she was bidden to the task, I don't see how she could possibly have brought it off better than in those demure phrases. But is she not a dear little creature?
Then came the dreadful day, the 24th of March, and Madame's coach and six horses carry her to Laval on her way to Paris. She stays there for the night and writes, of course, to her chère bonne: "… They carried off the petite personne early this morning to save me the outcries of her grief. They were the sobs of a child, so natural that they moved me. I dare say she is dancing about now, but for two days she has been in floods, not having been able to learn restraint from me!" Madame, as we know, had abundantly the gift of tears, and was assuredly none the worse for it.
In Paris, Corbinelli was secretary for a time; but she regretted the petite personne. "… I don't like a secretary who is cleverer than I am…. The child suited me much better."
And there the happy little figurine, having danced her hour at Les Rochers, leaves the stage. Other petites personnes there are—one the sister of La Murinette Beauté, who got on so well with M. de Rohan, and was a lady of Madame de Chaulnes', and presently married a respectable gentleman, a M. de le Bedoyère of Rennes. But these are too high levels for the granddaughter of the good-wife Marcile. That petite personne, moreover, was a rather sophisticated young lady. One would never have seen her, in the mornings, munching a hunk of bread-and-butter "as long as from here to Easter." No; Jeannette has fulfilled her part, providing a whiff of marjoram and cottage flowers for the castle chambers. She has read, written and said her prayers. She has the firm outline, the rosy cheeks, the simplicity of a Watteau peasant-girl—nothing of the Greuze languish, with its hint of a cruche cassée. She is as fresh as a March wind. Let us believe that she found a true man to relish her prettiness and sharp little wits.
A FOOL OF QUALITY
Tom Coryat, the "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted observer of Odcombe," having finally bored his neighbours in the country past bearing, was volleyed off upon a tempest of their yawns to London. Exactly when that was I can't find out, but I suppose it to have been in the region of 1605.
In London he set up for a wit, was enrolled in "The Right Worshipful Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen," who met at "The Sign of the Mere-maide in Bread Streete"; had John Donne and Ben Jonson among his convives, and may well have seen Shakespeare and heard him talk, if he did talk. How he appeared himself we can only guess, but I conceive his position in the society to have been that of Polonius in the convocation of politic worms, as one, namely, where he was eaten rather than eating. That, if it was so, may have determined him to make a name for himself by what was his strongest part, namely, his feet.
In 1608 he, the "Odcombian leg-stretcher," did indeed travel "for five months, mostly on foot, from his native place of Odcombe in Somerset, through France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, Helvetia, some parts of High Germany, and the Netherlands, making in the whole 1975 miles." He started on the 14th May and was in London again on the 3rd October, and if indeed he did travel mostly on foot, I call it a very creditable performance. The result was a book more talked of than read. "Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' travels … newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in his county of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this Kingdom." So runs the text of a Palladian title-page, surrounded by emblems of adventure which support a vera effigies of Tom himself. He shows there as a beady-eyed bonhomme of thirty-five or so, with a Jacobean beard, and his hair brushed back and worn long, like that of our present-day young men.
The book published, the Sireniacal Gentlemen took off their coats and took up their battledores. Their gibes and quirks are all printed in my edition, and are better reading than the book itself. Coryat was a cockscomb and scorned a straight sentence. A rule of his was: "Never use one adjective if three will do." So far as I know he was the first Englishman who travelled for the fun or the glory of the thing, unless Fynes Moryson anticipated him in those also, as he certainly did in travelling and writing about it. But I think it more probable that Moryson went abroad to improve his mind. I don't think Coryat had any notion of that. Foppery may have moved him, vanity perhaps; in any case there can be no comparison between them. Moryson is thorough, Coryat is not. Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom. Moryson was a student, Coryat a cockscomb. Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a euphuist of the first water. I haven't the least doubt but that Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid—he called himself a friend of Ben Jonson's—and took the best of him. You will find him in Love's Labour's Lost as well as in All's Well. For a foretaste of his quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which fills a page: "I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May 1608, and arrived at Calais … about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach…." There is more about it, but that will do. Shakespeare can never have missed such a man as that.
Coryat's abiding sensation throughout his travels was astonishment, not at the things which he saw, but rather that he from Odcombe in Somerset should be seeing them. He can never get over it. Here am I, Odcombian Tom, face to face with Amiens Cathedral, with the tombs of the kings at Saint Denis, at Fountaine Beleau cheek by jowl with Henri IV., crossing in a litter the "stupendious" Mont Cenis, pacing the Duomo of Milan, disputing with a Turk in Lyons, with a Jew in Padua, to the detriment of their religions, "swimming" in a gondola on the Grand Canal: here I am, and now what about it? There is always an imported flavour of Odcombe about it. He brings it with him and sprinkles it like scent. He is careful at every stage of his journey to give you the mileage from his own door; his measure of a city's quality is its worth to him as a gift were Odcombe the alternative. Few cities indeed survive the test. Mantua stood a fair chance. "That most sweet Paradise, that domicilium Venerum et Charitum," did so ravish his senses and tickle his spirits, he says, that he would desire to live there and spend the remainder of his days "in some divine meditations among the sacred Muses," but for two things, "their grosse idolatry and superstitious ceremonies, which I detest, and the love of Odcombe in Somersetshire, which is so deare unto me that I preferre the very smoak thereof before the fire of all other places under the sunne." So much for Mantua; but Venice, before whose "incomparable and most decantated majestie" his pen faints—Venice beats Odcombe, or something very much like it. He decides that should "foure of the richest mannors of Somersetshire" have been offered him if he would have undertaken not to see Venice, he would have gone without the manors. Odcombe, you see, is not put in question here. He was afraid to risk it.
When he came home he hung up his pair of shoes in the chancel of
Odcombe Church, and they may be there to this day for all I know.
The Sireniacal Gentlemen made great sport of him.
If any aske in verse what soar I at?
My Muse replies The praise of Coryat——
so John Gyfford begins,
A work that will eternise thee till God come
And for thy sake the famous parish Odcombe——
so George Sydenham ends. Ben Jonson is not represented at the revels, and Inigo Jones lets his high spirits run away with him beyond the bounds of modern printing. Donne is not at his best:
Lo, here's a man worthy indeed to travell
Fat Libian plaines, strangest China's gravell;
For Europe well hath seen him stirre his stumpes,
Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.
—the wit of which escapes me. Better is the conceit of
What had he done, had he e'er hugged th' ocean
With swimming Drake or famous Magelan,
And kiss'd that unturn'd cheeke of our old mother,
Since so our Europe's world he can discover?
The "unturn'd cheeke of our old mother!" The New World should be pleased with that.
In 1615 he made a much further flight, and was to be heard of at "the Court of the most Mighty Monarch, the Great Mogul," whence he wrote to, among other people, the High Seneschal of the "Right Worshipful Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen that meet the first Friday of every month at the Signe of the Mere-maide in Bread-Streete." In this particular letter he greets by name Mr. John Donne, "the author of two most elegant Latine Bookes," Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, at his chamber in the Blacke Friars, Mr. Samuel Purkas, and Mr. Inigo Jones, and signs himself "the Hierosolymitan—Syrian—Mesopotamian —Armenian—Median—Parthian—Persian—Indian—Leggestretcher of Odcomb in Somerset." The news he gives of "the most famigerated Region of all the East, the ample and large India," is various and occasionally incredible, but none the worse perhaps for that. You must allow the leg-stretcher to be something also of a leg-puller. The Great Mogul had elephant-fights twice a week, we learn. He might well do so if we could believe that he maintained three thousand of them "at an unmeasurable charge." Proceeding, nevertheless, to measure it, Coryat finds it works out at £10,000 a day, which is pretty good even for the Mogul. He also had a thousand wives, "whereof the chiefest (which is his Queene) is called Normal." I like her name. Coryat rode on an elephant, "determining one day (by God's leave) to have my picture expressed in my next book, sitting upon an elephant." But the voyage to the East was one too many for "the ingenious perambulator," and he died of a flux at Surat in December, 1617. Certain English merchants offered him refreshments. "Sack, sack, is there any such thing as sack? I pray you give me some sack." They did; the dysentery was upon him at the time. Even as Sir John might have done did he, and was buried "under a little monument." Sic exit Coryatus, says his biographer.
No sooner was he dead than his fellow Sireniacks fell upon his reputation and tore it to shreds.
He was the imp, whilst he on earth surviv'd,
From whom this West-World's pastimes were deriv'd;
He was in city, country, field and court
The well of dry-trimm'd jests, the pump of sport.
So writes the Water Poet. Another wag trounces his Crudities:
Tom Coriat, I have seen thy Crudities,
And methinks very strangely brewed it is,
With piece and patch together glued it is;
And now (like thee) ill-favour'd hued it is.
In many a line I see that lewd it is,
And therefore fit to be subdued it is—
and much more to the same effect.
Coryat's "natalitial place," as it happens, is very near to mine, and I find something to love in a man who can never forget it. He was a cockscomb, he was an ass; but he preferred the West of England to Italy. He called James I., our king, the "refulgent carbuncle of Christendom," and Prince Charles "the most glittering chrysolite of our English diademe" Both are hard sayings.
SHERIDAN AS MANIAC
All allowances made for the near alliance of great wits—"the lunatic, the lover, and the poet"—there comes a point where the vagaries of temperament overlap and are confounded, and where the historian, at least, must take a line. None of Sheridan's biographers, and he has had, as I think, more than his share, refer to an eclipse of his rational self which he undoubtedly suffered; probably because it was not made public until the other day. Yet there have always been indications of the truth, as when, on his death-bed, he told Lady Bessborough that his eyes would be looking at her through the coffin-lid. Being the woman she was, she probably believed him, or thought that she did. It is from her published letters that we may now understand what reason she had for believing him.
These letters are contained in the correspondence of Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, who was our Ambassador in Paris on and off between 1824 and 1841, a correspondence published in 1916, in two hefty volumes. The period covered is from 1781 to 1821, and the documents are mainly the letters to him of Lady Bessborough, which reveal a relation between the pair so curious that, to me, it is extraordinary that nobody should have called attention to them before. I can only account for that by considering that the letters, which are very long, and the volumes, which are very heavy, do not readily yield what store of sweetness they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to her witty and sensible niece.
Meantime, there is no need to disguise the fact, since we have it in cold print, that the acquaintance of the couple, begun at Naples in 1794 as a flirtation, developed rapidly, on the lady's side, into a love affair which was only ended by her death. In 1794, when it all began, Lady Bessborough was thirty-two, had been married for fourteen years, and had four children. Granville Gower was twenty, well born, rich, exceedingly good-looking, and with no excuse for not knowing all about it. In fact, he knew it perfectly, and was not afraid to allude to himself as Antinous. We hear more than enough of his fine blue eyes from Lady Bessborough—and perhaps he did too. She, in her turn, was to hear, poor soul, more than her own heart could bear. All that need be said about that is that, being the woman she was, it was to be expected. And exactly what sort of woman she was she herself puts upon record, in April, 1812, in the following words:—
"Pour la rareté du fait et la bizarrerie des hommes, I must
put down what I dare tell nobody—I should be so much ashamed
of it were it not so ridiculous. At this present April, 1812,
in my fifty-first year, I am courted, follow'd, flatter'd, and
made love to en toutes les formes, by four men—two of them
reckoned sensible, and one of the two whom I have known half
my life—Lord Holland, Ward, young M——n, and little M——y.
Sir J.C. wanted to marry me when I was fifteen; so from that
time to this—36 years, a
pretty long life—I have heard or spoke that language; and for
17 years of it lov'd almost to Idolatry the only man from whom
I could have wish'd to hear it, the man who has probably lov'd
me least of all those who have profess'd to do so—tho' once I
thought otherwise."
Arrant sentimentalist, born and trained flirt, as this confession shows her to have been, it also shows that she lived to rue it. She rued more than that, for she was the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb; and if anything more need be said of her misfortunes, let it be added that she was sister to Georgiana of Devonshire. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read her letters with her wooden young lord without seeing that she had a good heart, if a very weak head. She loved much; and for those whom she loved—her sister, her children, Granville Gower—she was ready to dare all things, and fail in most. Of her husband there is nothing to tell, for she hardly names him, except to say that he has the gout. Not much is known of him, and nothing but good. Horace Walpole wrote of his marriage in 1780: "I know nothing to the prejudice of the young lady; but I should not have selected for so gentle and very amiable a man a sister of the empress of fashion, nor a daughter of the Goddess of Wisdom." The goddess of wisdom was her formidable and trenchant mother, Lady Spencer.
But I don't intend to follow the vain stages of her sentimental pilgrimage in pursuit of Lord Granville Gower's heart, vain because apparently the young man had not such an organ at her disposal. It was not, perhaps, for nothing that they exchanged reflections upon Les Liaisons Dangereuses. A new Choderlos de Laclos would get a new sentimental novel out of the Granville Gower correspondence; or it may be taken as it stands for a recovered Richardson, quite as long as Sir Charles Grandison and much more amusing—for the poor lady is often witty. The affair dragged on, with much scandal, much whispering about it and about, until 1809, when the hero of it married Lady Harriet Cavendish, his mistress's niece. J.W. Ward, one of her lovers, according to her, sharply sums it up in a letter to Mrs. Dugald Stewart: "Lord Granville Leveson is going to marry Lady Harriet Cavendish. Lady Bessborough resigns, I presume, in favour of her niece. I have not heard what are supposed to be the secret articles of the treaty, but it must be a curious document." It was in 1812, as I have said, that she wrote out the pathetic confession of what we must suppose to have been the truth.
But I intended to write about Sheridan. This correspondence reveals him as the evil genius of Lady Bessborough's life; and perhaps, if all the truth were known, she may have been the evil genius of his, or one of them, anyhow. She had adventures with him behind her in 1794, when she began adventures anew; for they became intimate at Devonshire House, where, as the crony of Charles Fox, he was always at hand. The Duchess herself was one of his familiars. His initials for her, in letter-writing, were T.L., which a biographer pleasantly interprets as "True Love." The sisters, Countess and Duchess, shared in all good and evil things, and they seem to have shared Sheridan. His chosen initial for Lady Bessborough's address was "F," her second name being Frances. Mr. Sichel prints a letter from him to her, and guesses it to be of 1788. Extracts will suffice for the judicious: "I must bid 'oo good-night, for by the light passing to and fro near your room I hope you are going to bed and to sleep happily with a hundred little cherubs fanning their white wings over you in approbation of your goodness. Yours is the sweet, untroubled sleep of purity." It is to be feared that she could swallow this over-succulent stuff. A very little more will do for us: "And yet, and yet—Beware! Milton will tell you that even in Paradise serpents found their way to the ear of slumbering innocence. Then, to be sure, poor Eve had no watchful guardian to pace up and down beneath her windows…. And Adam, I suppose—was at Brooks's … I shall be gone before your hazel eyes are open to-morrow…."
Lady Duncannon, as she was then, lived in Cavendish Square. Sheridan's leaguer of the house is thus betrayed. He never again left either her or it alone for long, but beset them until his death. Bitterly enough she was to rue that dalliance with the vainest sentimentalist ever begotten in Ireland or fostered in England. His wife, as lovely as a Muse and with the voice of a seraph, was to die; he was to adore, pursue, and capture another; but he never let Lady Bessborough go, and the antics of his mortified vanity were to lead her as far into the mire as any woman could go without suffocation. Such experiences may be common enough; it is rare to have them so nakedly portrayed as they are in this lady's letters, and not easy to avoid the conclusion that she made use of them to pique her wooden Antinous into some more active kind of pose than that of allowing himself to be adored.
Sheridan was forty-three and married to his second wife when Lady Bessborough fell in with Antinous at Naples; but it was not until the attachment of those two had become a notoriety that he began to make scenes about it. In 1798, when Granville Gower was in Berlin, Lady Bessborough writes to him that she had been at a concert at Sheridan's. "It was as pleasant as anything of the sort can be to me, as I sat by Fitzpatrick and Grey, who always amuse me. Sheridan says, when he found I did not come to town, he imagined that you had interdicted my coming till your return, and is always asking me whether what I am doing is allowed." That was March 12th; between that and the 17th she seems to have met Sheridan every day and nearly every night. "I must tell you, by the by … that I am in great request this year…. I have had three violent declarations of love—one from an old man, another from a very young one, and the third between the other two…. Pray come back. If you stay long in Prussia, Heaven knows what may happen."
In August of the same year she writes again. "Sheridan call'd in the morning and found out that I was alone, and told me he would dine with me. I thought, of course, he was in joke, but, point du tout, he arriv'd at dinner, dined, and stayed the whole evening. He was very pleasant, but—it was not you, and the seeing anybody only increas'd my regrets, which I suppose were pretty visible, for every five minutes he kept saying: 'How I am wasting all my efforts to entertain you, while you are grieving that you cannot change me into Lord Leveson. You would not be so grim if he was beaming on you.' At length, as I thought he was preparing to pass the night as well as the evening with me, and as he began to make some fine speeches I did not quite approve of, I order'd my Chair, to get rid of him. This did not succeed, for as I had no place to go to, he follow'd me about to Anne's and Lady D——'s, where I knew I should not be let in, and home again. But, luckily, I got in time enough to order every one to be denied, and ran upstairs, while I heard him expostulating with the porter…." It does not appear, from this narrative, that the hunted fair was seriously annoyed at being hunted, and the implication of Lord Granville in the unpleasant business is patent. Next year she has asked her persecutor to help Antinous at his election, for his reply, beginning "Dear Traitress," is given here.
After that, peace or silence, until 1802, when Sheridan changed his tactics.
"The opera was beautiful…. The Prince paid us two visits, but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such entire reliance on your faith, such confidence in your truth, that I should doubt my own eyes if they witness'd against your word. He pitied me, and said: 'How are the mighty fallen,' and then went on telling me things without end to drive me mad." That was in March. In August she writes, actually under siege: "Here I am quite alone in C. Square … no carriage to watch for, no rap at the door … and alas! no chance of hearing your step upon the stair…. Whilst I was regretting all this, suddenly, the knock did come, to my utter astonishment. I ran to the stair, and in a moment heard Sheridan's voice. I do not know why, but I took a horror of seeing him, and hurried Sally down to say I was out. I heard him answer: 'Tell her I call'd twice this morning, and want particularly to see her, for I know she is at home.' Sally protested I was out, and S. answered: 'Then I shall walk up and down before the door till she comes in,' and there he is walking sure enough. It is partly all the nonsense he talk'd all this year, and the hating to see any one when I cannot see you, that makes me dislike letting him in so much."
He solemnly did sentry-go for nearly an hour, she goes on to say. In that hour he was in his fifty-first year, she in her fortieth.
If she revealed these sorry doings to Antinous with the view of fanning embers, she did not succeed in drawing more than a languid protest from him. "As to Sheridan, in the morning I purposely staid in my room till the time of our setting out, and only saw him as I was getting into the carriage, so had nothing more to tell…. You say I am not angry enough. I am provok'd, vex'd, and asham'd. To feel more deeply I must care for the person who offends me…." I cannot myself read either vexation or shame in her reports. Provocation I can and do read—but it is not she who is provoked.
In 1804, Antinous in Petersburg, there are new antics to record. "You will think I live at the play; I am just return'd from Drury Lane…. Sheridan persists in coming every night to us. He says one word to my sister; then retires to the further corner of the box, where with arms across, deep and audible sighs, and sometimes tears! he remains without uttering and motionless, with his eyes fix'd on me in the most marked and distressing manner, during the whole time we stay. To-night he followed us in before the play begun, and remained as I tell you thro' the play and farce. As we were going I dropped my shawl and muff; he picked them up and with a look of ludicrous humility presented them to Mr. Hill to give me." And this was the author of The School for Scandal.
Next year, being that of Trafalgar, and Sheridan's fifty-fourth, he began a course of persecution which definitely marks an access of dementia. The affair took an acute turn suddenly, and I don't intend to say more about it than that it took the form of anonymous and obscene letters, some of them addressed to Lady Bessborough's daughter, Caroline, then a child, some to herself, some to the children of the Duchess of Devonshire. The letters, which continued throughout the year, were signed with the names of friends—a Mr. Hill, J.W. Ward, and others. Some were sent out signed with her name. The editor of the correspondence says that "Lady Bessborough was subsequently convinced by evidence which appeared to her conclusive that Sheridan was the writer." There can be no doubt of that whatever, and as all the detail is in the published correspondence, little more need be said. The wooden Antinous, in Petersburg, for his sole comment, writes as follows: "I learn with sorrow that you are still subjected to vexations from anonymous letters, etc. I suppose that Sheridan is the author, though one would have imagined that, however depraved his morals, and however malignant might be his mind, he would have had good taste enough not to have resorted to such a species of vengeance." And that was all the fire to be blown into Antinous. "Good taste" in the circumstances is comic.
By the end of the season of the same year, however, Sheridan seems to have found out what he had done, and Lady Bessborough also sufficient self-respect to have helped him find it out. This is what happened on July 12th, at a ball. "I sat between Prince Adolphus and Mr. Hill at supper; Sheridan sat opposite, looking by turns so supplicating and so fiercely at me that everybody round observ'd it and question'd me about it. I could only say what was so, that he was very drunk. When I got up, he seiz'd my arm as I pass'd him, begging me to shake hands with him. I extricated myself from his grasp and pass'd on; he soon after follow'd and began loudly reproaching me for my cruelty, and asking why I would not shake hands. I was extremely distress'd, but at last told him his own sagacity might explain to him why I never would, and that his conduct to-night did not tend to alter my determination. I then hurried out of the room, and by way of completely avoiding him, cross'd a very formal circle of old ladies, and went and seated myself between Lady Euston and Lady Beverly. He had the impudence to follow me, and in face of the whole circle to enter into a loud explanation of his conduct, begging my pardon for all the offences he had ever committed against me, either on this night or in former times, and assuring me that he had never ceased loving, respecting and adoring me, and that I was the only person he ever really loved…." "Think," she says, "of the dismay of all the formal ladies." But the formal ladies, no doubt, had every reason to know their Devonshire House set; and if society in 1805 would allow Sheridan to be drunk and stay at a ball, it would prefer him maudlin drunk to drunk and disorderly. One is bound to add, too, that Lady Bessborough was a fool, though that, to be sure, is no excuse for Sheridan proving himself both old blackguard and old fool in one.
Next year the Duchess died, and her sister's active persecution appears to have ceased. But Sheridan by no means let her alone. On the contrary, he had the assurance to send as intercessor no less a person than the Prince Regent. "The Prince sent so repeatedly to me, and has been throughout so kind and feeling that I thought it wrong to persist in refusing to see him, so to-day he came soon after two and stayed till six!… He gave me a very pretty emerald ring, which he begg'd me to wear, to bind still stronger the tie of Brotherhood which he has always claim'd. In the midst of all this he brought me a message from Sheridan." This, which she describes as a "well-timed Petition for Forgiveness," she had the prudence to wave aside. She said that she had no wish to injure him, and only asked him to keep out of her way, or, if they happened to meet, to cease to persecute her. And that was very well, or would have been so, if she had had any character at all, a quality which she unfortunately had not. In 1807, the following year, she goes out to spend the evening with her daughter, Lady Caroline, now married to William Lamb. "The entrance is, you know, very dark; to my dismay, I saw a ruffian-like looking man following me into the house. I hasten'd upstairs, but to my great dismay he also ascended and enter'd the room immediately after me. It was so dark I could not at first make out who he was. When I did, I was not the better pleas'd with his establishing himself and passing the whole evening with us; but much as I was displeased with him, I was still more so with myself for being unable to resist laughing and appearing entertained (he was so uncommonly clever), tho' I persevered in my determination of not speaking to him. I do not like his having got the entrée there, and think him, even old as he is, a dangerous acquaintance for Caroline. Of course you perceive it was Sheridan." Considering that she suspected him of having written and sent grossly indecent letters to that girl of hers, one would have said that he was even more than a dangerous acquaintance. Light-mindedness here spills over into something rather worse. However, there he was, established, and it was no way to dispossess him to laugh at his jokes.
I must now invite the reader to a farce, and, if he can forget that Sheridan was a grandfather and fifty-six, a very good farce it is. It is 1807, the 28th July. Lady Bessborough is staying with her daughter for her first confinement, and receives a message from Mrs. Sheridan, a rather wild young woman in her way, known to all Devonshire House as Hecca. She goes at midnight,
"… and was carried up to her bedroom, where we had not sat long when a violent burst at the door announc'd the arrival of Sheridan, not perfectly sober. The most ridiculous scene ensued—that is, ridiculous it would have been if I had not felt myself too indignant and disgusted to be entertain'd. He began by asking my pardon, entreating my mercy and compassion, saying that he was a wretch, and was even at that moment more in love with me than with any woman he had ever met with, on which Hecca exclaimed: 'Not excepting me? Why, you always tell me that I am the only woman you were ever in love with.' 'So you are, to be sure, my dear Hecca; you know that, of course—you know that I love you better than anything on earth.' 'Except her!' 'Pish, pish, child! Do not talk nonsense.' Then he began again at me, upbraiding me for my cruelty, both for quarrelling with him and setting Hecca against him. The first, I said, I did in my own defence, the other was false, Hecca every now and then coming in with: 'Why, S——, I thought Lady B—— pursued you, and that you reviled all her violence like a second Joseph? So you us'd to tell me.' I cannot give you all the conversation, for it lasted till near three in the morning…. Getting away was the difficulty; he wanted to come down with me, and seiz'd my arm with such violence once before Hecca, that I was obliged to call her maid to help me, and at last only escaped by locking him in."
This sort of thing happened once more, in the same year, at Brocket. On this occasion Sheridan pursued his victim into the nursery, and threw himself on his knees. It gave Lady Bessborough an opportunity which even she could not fail to perceive—and she used it. "I interrupted the most animated professions by showing him the child and asking him if his grandchildren were as pretty as mine. He jump'd up, but with such fury in his looks that I was really frighten'd…" And that may very well be the end: solvuntur tabulæ risu. Lord Granville Gower married in 1809, and the confidential correspondence died the death; but Sheridan lingered until 1816, and actually carried on his desperate pursuit within three days of the end. She visited him, and described what took place to Lord Broughton. He assured her, she said, that he should visit her after his death. She asked, "Why, having persecuted her all her life, would he now carry it into death?' 'Because I am resolved you shall remember me.'"[A] The story of his telling her that his eyes would see her through the coffin-lid is well known, and may be apocryphal; but the melodrama is Sheridan all over.
[Footnote A: Mr. Sichel, in his monumental book on Sheridan, doubts the lady's memory, one of his grounds of doubt being that Sheridan "would not have been likely to have thus behaved before his wife." But Mr. Sichel did not then know what Sheridan was capable of doing before his wife.]
Curiosity rather than edification is served by the publication of such frank revelations as Lady Bessborough's, but that is a matter for her descendants, and was probably considered. What relates to Sheridan is quite another thing. On his death Byron hailed him with eloquent if extravagant praise; he was buried in Westminster Abbey; three long biographies have been written round him, not one of which has failed to do justice to his abilities, and not one pointed out the extent of his moral aberration. Mr. Sichel, the latest of them, says that "he had pursued his own path and spurned the little arts of those who twitted him with roguery." But if the Granville Gower correspondence is to be believed—and how can it not—he was either a very bad rogue or a madman. Sheridan, after all's said, made a great figure in his day, and must stand the racket of it, so to speak. Gossip about Harriet may be left to the idle; but Sheridan belongs to History.