Part 41

John Britton, who lived in Burton Street, often went to see Peter on a Saturday afternoon, and there met Mr. John Taylor, editor of the Sun newspaper. This gentleman was an inveterate and reckless punster, and often teased Peter by some pointless puns. At one of these visits, on taking leave, Taylor exclaimed, pointing to Peter's head and rusty wig, "Adieu! I leave thee without hope, for I see Old Scratch has thee in his claws." Peter died in the above house, January 14th, 1810, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul, Covent Garden, close to the grave of Butler. He left a considerable property to his relations. In early life he lived in the same parish, at No. 13, Tavistock Row; and in the garret of this house he wrote many of his invectives against George III. and the Royal Academicians. In 1807, he lodged in the first floor of a house in Pratt Place, Camden Town, rented by a Mr. and Mrs. Knight. The husband was a sea-faring man, seldom at home; and the Doctor, who was not over-scrupulous, is said to have seduced the wife's affections. Knight brought an action against the Doctor, but the jury very properly acquitted him of the charge.—See Cunningham's London, p. 409.

Peter was not emulous to shine as a wit in his colloquial intercourse, either with strangers or his most intimate associates. Indeed, his usual manner exhibited so little of that character which strangers had imagined of the writer of his lively satires, that they were commonly disappointed. The wife of a player, at whose house Wolcot often passed an evening, used to say that "his wit seems to lie in the bowl of a teaspoon." Angelo, in his Reminiscences, tells us that he could not guess the riddle, until one evening he observed that each time Peter replenished his glass goblet with brandy-and-water, in breaking the sugar, the corners of his lips were curled into a satisfactory smile, and he began some quaint story, as if, indeed, the new libation begot a new thought. To prove the truth of the discovery, one night, after supper, at his own home in Bolton Row, Angelo made the experiment. One of the party being in the secret, and fond of practical joking, came provided with some small square pieces of alabaster. Peter's glass waning fast, the joker contrived to slip the alabaster into a sugar-basin provided for the purpose; when the Doctor, reaching the hot water, and pouring in the brandy, the sugar-tongs were handed to him, and then the advanced basin of alabaster. "Thank you, my boy," said Peter, putting in five or six pieces, and taking his teaspoon, began stirring as he commenced his story. Unsuspicious of the trick, Peter proceeded, "Well, sirs,—and so the old parish priest. What I tell you (then his spoon was at work) happened when I was in that infernally hot place, Jamaica (then another stir). Sir, he was the fattest man on the island (then he pressed the alabaster); yes, d—, sir, and when the thermometer, at ninety-five, was dissolving every other man, this old slouching, drawling son of the church got fatter and fatter, until, sir—(curse the sugar! some devil-black enchanter has bewitched it.) By —, sir, this sugar is part and parcel of that old pot-bellied parson—it will never melt;" and he threw the contents of the tumbler under the grate. The whole party burst into laughter, and the joke cut short the story. The mock sugar was slipped out of the way, and the Doctor, taking another glass, never suspected the frolic.

Peter, on seeing West's picture of Satan in the Exhibition, broke out in the following couplet:—

"Is this the mighty potentate of evil? 'Tis damn'd enough, indeed, but not the Devil."

The Author of "Dr. Syntax."

Dr. Syntax's Tour in Search of the Picturesque was a large prize in the lottery of publication and was also a novelty in origin and writing. It was written to a set of designs instead of the designs being made to illustrate the poet: in other words, the artist preceded the author by making a series of drawings, in which he exhibited his hero in a succession of places, and in various associations, calculated to exemplify his hobby-horsical search for the picturesque. Some of these drawings, made by Rowlandson, than whom no artist ever expressed so much with so little effort, were shown at a dinner-party at John Bannister's, in Gower Street, when it was agreed that they should be recommended to Ackermann, in the Strand, for publication. That gentleman readily purchased, and handed them, two or three at a time, to William Combe, who was then confined in the King's Bench Prison for debt. He fitted the drawings with rhymes, and they were first published in the Poetical Magazine, where they became so popular that they extended to three tours in as many volumes, and passed through several editions. The work reminds one of Drunken Barnaby's Journal by its humour: it has been called "rhyming, rambling, rickety, and ridiculous," but by a very inexperienced critic. The illustrations were, doubtless, the attraction, which was so great, that the demand kept pace with the supply. Hence Syntax was succeeded by the Dance of Life, the Dance of Death, Johnny Quægenus, and Tom Raw the Griffin, all of the same class and character, and ultimately extending to 295 prints, with versified letter-press "by Dr. Syntax." Of late years these works have been republished at reduced prices.

Combe, the author of these strange works was of good family connection, had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and very early came into possession of a large fortune, in ready money. He started in the world by taking a large mansion at the west end of London, furnished it superbly hired servants, and bought carriages, and assembled around him a set of sycophants and parasites, who made short work of it, for from the commencement to the drop-scene of the farce did not exceed one year. The consequence was disgraceful ruin, and Combe fled from his creditors and from society. We next hear of him as a common soldier, and recognized at a public-house with a volume of Greek poetry in his hand. He was relieved; but he still lived a reckless life, by turns in the King's Bench Prison and the Rules, the limits of which do not appear to have been to him much punishment. Horace Smith, who knew Combe, refers to the strange adventures and the freaks of fortune of which he had been a participator and a victim: "a ready writer of all-work for the booksellers, he passed all the latter portion of his time within the Rules, to which suburban retreat the present writer was occasionally invited, and never left without admiring his various acquirements, and the philosophical equanimity with which he endured his reverses." Mr. Smith further states, that if there was a lack of matter occasionally to fill up the columns of their paper, "Combe would sit down in the publisher's back-room and extemporize a letter from Sterne at Coxwould, a forgery so well executed that it never excited suspicion." Mr. Robert Cole, the antiquary, had among his autographs a list of the literary works and letters of Combe.

Combe was principally employed by Ackermann, who, for several years, paid him at least 400l. a-year. On the first lithograph stone which Mr. Ackermann printed, when he had prepared everything for working, Combe wrote:—

"I have been told of one Who, being asked for bread, In its stead Return'd a stone.

"But here we manage better. The stone we ask To do its task, And it returns in every letter."

"WILLIAM COMBE, Jan. 23, 1817."

Combe was often a guest at Ackermann's table; he proved a friend to him during his last illness, and contributed to the expenses of his funeral, tomb, &c. Subsequent to his death, in 1823, a small volume was published, entitled Letters to Marianne, said to have been written by him after the age of seventy, to a young girl. We remember to have visited him in the Rules, near New Bethlem Hospital, when we learnt that he had written a memoir of his chequered life. Campbell, in his Life of Mrs. Siddons, states that Combe lived nearly twenty years in the King's Bench, and never quitted that prison; which is not correct. Combe had nearly been Mrs. Siddons's reading preceptor.

Rowlandson, who designed the Syntax illustrations, was as improvident as Combe: he had a legacy of 7,000l., and other property, bequeathed to him by an aunt: this he dissipated in the gaming-houses of Paris and London, where he alternately won and lost without emotion several thousand pounds. When penniless, he would return to his professional duties, sit down coolly to make a series of new designs, and exclaim stoically, "I've played the fool, but (holding up his pencils) here is my resource." To Rowlandson, as well as Combe, Ackermann proved a warm and generous patron and employer.

Dr. Doran, in his piquant Notes to the Last Journals of Horace Walpole, tells us that "Combe burst on the world as a wonderfully well-dressed beau, and was received with éclat for the sake of his wealth, talents, grace, and personal beauty. He was popularly called 'Count Combe,' till his extravagance had dissipated a noble fortune; and then, addressing himself to literature, the Count was forgotten in the Author. In the Gentleman's Magazine for May, 1862, there is a list of his works, originally furnished by his own hand. Not one was published with his name, and they amount in number to sixty-eight. Combe was a teetotaller in the days when drunkenness was in fashion, and was remarkable for disinterestedness and industry. He was the friend of Hannah More, whom he loved to make weep by improvised romances, in which he could 'pile up the agony' with wonderful effect. Religious faith and hope enabled William Combe to triumph over the sufferings of his latter years. His second wife, the sister of the gentle and gifted Mrs. Cosway, survived him."

Horace Walpole, 1779, speaking of the poem, The World as it Goes, describes it as "by that infamous Combe, the author of the Diabolical. It has many easy poetic lines, imitates Churchill, and is fully as incoherent and absurd in its plan as the worst of the latter's."

Again, in 1778, Walpole describes "Combe" as "a most infamous rascal, who had married a cast mistress of Lord Beauchamp, and wrote many satiric poems not quite despicable for the poetry, but brutally virulent against that Lord, and others, particularly Lord Irnham." But, as Dr. Doran aptly observes, "Walpole however fond of satire, hated satirists, particularly when they were fearless and outspoken, like Combe."

Mrs. Radcliffe and the Critics.

It is singular that although Mrs. Radcliffe's beautiful descriptions of foreign scenery, composed solely from the materials afforded by travellers, collected and embodied by her own genius, were marked in a particular degree with the characteristics of fancy portraits, yet many of her contemporaries conceived them to be exact descriptions of scenes which she had visited in person. One report transmitted to the public by the Edinburgh Review, stated that Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe had visited Italy; that Mr. Radcliffe had been attached to one of the British embassies in that country; and that it was here his gifted consort imbibed the taste for picturesque scenery, and for mouldering ruins, and for the obscure and gloomy anecdotes which tradition relates of their former inhabitants. This is so far a mistake, as Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy; but it has been mentioned, in explanation, that she probably availed herself of the acquaintance she formed in 1793 with the magnificent scenery on the banks of the Rhine, and the frowning remains of feudal castles with which it abounds. The inaccuracy of the reviewer is of no great consequence; but a more absurd report found its way into print, namely, that Mrs. Radcliffe, having visited the fine old Gothic mansion of Haddon House, had insisted upon remaining a night there, in the course of which she had been inspired with all that enthusiasm for Gothic residences, hidden passages, and mouldering walls, which marks her writings. Mrs. Radcliffe, we are assured, never saw Haddon House; and although it was a place excellently worth her attention, and could hardly have been seen by her without suggesting some of those ideas in which her imagination naturally revelled, yet we should suppose the mechanical aid to invention—the recipe for fine writing—the sleeping in a dismantled and unfurnished old house, was likely to be rewarded with nothing but a cold, and was an affectation of enthusiasm to which Mrs. Radcliffe would have disdained to have recourse.

These are the opinions of Sir Walter Scott; appended to them are these somewhat depreciatory remarks made by Dunlop, in his History of Fiction:—

"In the writings of Mrs. Radcliffe there is a considerable degree of uniformity and mannerism, which is perhaps the case with all the productions of a strong and original genius. Her heroines too nearly resemble each other, or rather they possess hardly any shade of difference. They have all blue eyes and auburn hair—the form of each of them has 'the airy lightness of a nymph'—they are all fond of watching the setting sun, and catching the purple tints of evening, and the vivid glow or fading splendour of the western horizon. Unfortunately they are all likewise early risers. I say unfortunately, for in every exigency Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are provided with a pencil and paper, and the sun is never allowed to rise nor set in peace. Like Tilburina in the play, they are 'inconsolable to the minuet in Ariadne,' and in the most distressing circumstances find time to compose sonnets to sunrise, the bat, a sea-nymph, a lily, or a butterfly."

The tenor of Mrs. Radcliffe's private life seems to have been peculiarly calm and sequestered. She probably declined the sort of personal notoriety which, in London society, usually attaches to persons of literary merit; and, perhaps, no author whose works were so universally read and admired was so little personally known even to the most active of that class of people of distinction, who rest their peculiar pretensions to fashion upon the selection of literary society. Her estate was certainly not the less gracious; and it did not disturb Mrs. Radcliffe's domestic comforts, although many of her admirers believed, and some are not yet undeceived, that, in consequence of brooding over the terrors which she depicted, her reason had at length been overturned, and that the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho only existed as the melancholy inmate of a private madhouse. This report was so generally spread, and so confidently repeated in print, as well as in conversation, that the writer believed it for several years, until, greatly to his satisfaction, he learned, from good authority, that there neither was, nor ever had been, the most distant foundation for this unpleasing rumour.

A false report of another kind gave Mrs. Radcliffe much concern. In Miss Seward's Correspondence, among the literary gossip of the day, it is roundly stated that the Plays upon the Passions were Mrs. Radcliffe's, and that she owned them. Mrs. Radcliffe was much hurt at being reported capable of borrowing from the fame of a gifted sister; and Miss Seward would, no doubt, have suffered equally, had she been aware of the pain she inflicted by giving currency to a rumour so totally unfounded. The truth is, that residing at a distance from the metropolis, and living upon literary intelligence as her daily food, Miss Seward was sometimes imposed upon by those friendly caterers, who were more anxious to supply her with the newest intelligence, than solicitous about its accuracy.

Mrs. Radcliffe died at her residence in Stafford Row, Pimlico, on the 7th of February, 1823; and her remains rest in the vault of the Chapel-of-ease to St. George's parish, in the Bayswater Road, facing Hyde Park.

Cool Sir James Mackintosh.

Mackintosh, a name dear to letters and philosophy, was no lawyer in the narrow-minded sense of the word, and when appointed judge at Bombay, was lamentably thrown away upon such society as he met there. Accustomed to lead in the conversations of the conversation-men of the metropolis—such as Sharp, Rogers, Dumont—he found himself transplanted among those who afforded a sad and bitter contrast. It was like Goëthe's oak-plant, with its giant fibres, compressed within the dimensions of a flower-pot. On the third day after his arrival, most forcibly was he reminded of the contrast, when one of the members of the Council, the conversation turning upon quadrupeds, turned to him and inquired what was a quadruped. It was the same sagacious Solomon who asked him for the loan of some book, in which he could find a good account of Julius Cæsar. Mackintosh jocosely took down a volume of Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, in which mention is made of a Sir Julius Cæsar, Master of the Rolls in the time of Charles the First. The wiseacre actually took the book home with him, and after some days brought it back to Sir James, remarking that he was disappointed on finding that the book referred to Julius Cæsar only as a lawyer, without the slightest mention of his military exploits.

Sir James was subject to certain Parson Adams-like habits of forgetfulness of common things and lesser proprieties; and this brought down upon him no slight share of taunt and ridicule. It happened, on his arrival at Bombay, that there was no house ready for his reception, and it would be a fortnight before a residence in the fort could be prepared for him. Mr. Jonathan Duncan, the Governor of the Presidency, therefore, with great kindness, offered him his garden-house, called Sans Pareil, for the temporary accommodation of Sir James and his family. But months and months elapsed, till a twelvemonth had actually revolved; Mackintosh and his wife, during all this time, found themselves so comfortable in their quarters, that they forgot completely the limited tenure on which they held them, appearing by a singular illusion, not to have the slightest suspicion of Mr. Duncan's proprietorship, notwithstanding some pretty intelligible hints on the subject from that gentleman, but communicated with his usual delicacy and politeness. At last, politeness and delicacy were out of the question, and the poor Governor was driven to the necessity of taking forcible possession of his own property. This was partly indolence, partly absence of mind in Sir James. He was constitutionally averse to every sort of exertion, and especially that of quitting any place where he found himself comfortable.

Before he went out to India, he made a trip into Scotland with his lady; and having taken up his abode for the night at an inn in Perthshire, not far from the beautiful park of Lord Melville (then Mr. Dundas) sent a request to Lady Jane Dundas (Mr. Dundas being absent) for permission to see the house and grounds, which was most civilly granted. Mr. Dundas being expected in the evening, her ladyship politely pressed them to stay for dinner, and to pass the night, their accommodation at the inn, not being of the best description. Mr. Dundas returned the same day, and though their politics were as adverse as possible, was so charmed with the variety of Mackintosh's conversation, that he requested his guests to prolong their visit for two or three days. So liberal, however, was the interpretation they put upon the invitation, that the two or three days were protracted into as many months, during which, every species of hint was most ineffectually given, till their hosts told them, with many polite apologies, that they expected visitors and a numerous retinue, and could no longer accommodate Mr. and Mrs. Mackintosh.

During Sir James Mackintosh's Recordership of Bombay, a singular incident occurred. Two Dutchmen having sued for debt two English officers, Lieutenants Macguire and Cauty, these officers resolved to waylay and assault them. This was rather a resolve made in a drunken excitement than a deliberate purpose. Fortunately, the Dutchmen pursued a different route from that which they had intended, and they prosecuted the two officers for the offence of lying-in-wait with intent to murder. They were found guilty, and brought up for judgment. Previous to his pronouncing judgment, however, Sir James received an intimation that the prisoners had conceived the project of shooting him as he sat on the bench, and that one of them had for that purpose a loaded pistol in his writing-desk. It is remarkable that the intimation did not induce him to take some precautions to prevent its execution—at any rate, not to expose himself needlessly to assassination. On the contrary, the circumstances only suggested the following remarks:—"I have been credibly informed that you entertained the desperate project of destroying your own lives at that bar, after having previously destroyed the judge who now addresses you. If that murderous project had been executed, I should have been the first British judge who ever stained with his blood the seat of justice. But I can never die better than in the discharge of my duty." All this eloquence might have been spared. Macguire submitted to the judge's inspection of his writing-desk, and showed him that, though it contained two pistols, neither of them was charged. It is supposed to have been a hoax—a highly mischievous one, indeed—but the statement was primâ facie so improbable, that it was absurd to give it the slightest credit.