FOOTNOTES

William Thomas Fitzgerald.—The annotator’s first personal knowledge of this gentleman was at Harry Greville’s Pic-Nic Theatre, in Tottenham-street, where he personated Zanga in a wig too small for his head. The second time of seeing him was at the table of old Lord Dudley, who familiarly called him Fitz, but forgot to name him in his will. The Viscount’s son (recently deceased), however, liberally supplied the omission by a donation of five thousand pounds. The third and last time of encountering him was at an anniversary dinner of the Literary Fund, at the Freemasons’ Tavern. Both parties, as two of the stewards, met their brethren in a small room about half an hour before dinner. The lampooner, out of delicacy, kept aloof from the poet. The latter, however, made up to him, when the following dialogue took place:

Fitzgerald (with good humour). “Mr. —, I mean to recite after dinner.”

Mr. —. “Do you?”

Fitzgerald. “Yes: you’ll have more of ‘God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!’”

The whole of this imitation, after a lapse of twenty years, appears to the Authors too personal and sarcastic; but they may shelter themselves under a very broad mantle:

“Let hoarse Fitzgerald bawl His creaking couplets in a tavern-hall.”—Byron.

Fitzgerald actually sent in an address to the Committee on the 31st of August, 1812. It was published among the other Genuine Rejected Addresses, in one volume, in that year. The following is an extract:—

“The troubled shade of Garrick, hovering near, Dropt on the burning pile a pitying tear.”

What a pity that, like Sterne’s recording angel, it did not succeed in blotting the fire out for ever! That failing, why not adopt Gulliver’s remedy?

“St. George’s Fields are fields no more, The trowel supersedes the plough; Swamps huge and inundate of yore, Are changed to civic villas now.”

“Should I seek Hymen’s tie, As a poet I die— Ye Benedicks, mourn my distresses! For what little fame Is annexed to my name Is derived from Rejected Addresses.”

The blunder, notwithstanding, remains unrectified. The reader of poetry is always dissatisfied with emendations: they sound discordantly upon the ear, like a modern song, by Bishop or Braham, introduced in Love in a Village.

Young Betty may now [1833] be seen walking about town—a portly personage, aged about forty—clad in a furred and frogged surtout; probably muttering to himself (as he has been at college), “O mihi præteritos!” &c. [He is still alive, 1854. Master Betty, or the “Young Roscius,” was born in 1791, and made his first appearance on a London stage as Achmet in “Barbarossa,” at Covent Garden Theatre, on the lst of December, 1804. He was, therefore, “not quite thirteen.” He lasted two seasons.]

The contest ran as fellows:

And so on. The reader has, no doubt, already discovered “which is the justice, and which is the thief.”

Lord Byron at that time wore a very narrow cravat of white sarsnet, with the shirt-collar falling over it; a black coat and waist-coat, and very broad white trousers to hide his lame foot—these were of Russia duck in the morning, and jean in the evening. His watch-chain had a number of small gold seals appended to it, and was looped up to a button of his waistcoat. His face was void of colour; he wore no whiskers. His eyes were grey, fringed with long black lashes; and his air was imposing, but rather supercilious. He under-valued David Hume; denying his claim to genius on account of his bulk, and calling him, from the Heroic Epistle,

“The fattest hog in Epicurus’ sly.”

One of this extraordinary man’s allegations was, that “fat is an oily dropsy.” To stave off its visitation, he frequently chewed tobacco in lieu of dinner, alleging that it absorbed the gastric juice of the stomach, and prevented hunger. “Pass your hand down my side,” said his Lordship to the writer; “can you count my ribs?” “Every one of them.” “I am delighted to hear you say so. I called last week on Lady —; ‘Ah, Lord Byron,’ said she, ‘how fat you grow!’ But you know Lady — is fond of saying spiteful timings!” Let this gossip be summed up with the words of Lord Chesterfield, in his character of Bolingbroke: “Upon the whole, on a survey of this extraordinary character, what can we say, but ‘Alas, poor human nature!’”

His favourite Pope’s description of man is applicable to Byron individually:

“Chaos of thought and passion all confused, Still by himself abused or disabused; Created part to rise and part to fall, Great lord of all things, yet a slave to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled— The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.”

The writer never heard him allude to his deformed foot except upon one occasion, when, entering the green-room of Drury-lane, he found Lord Byron alone, the younger Byrne and Miss Smith the dancer having just left him, after an angry conference about a pas suel. “Had you been here a minute sooner,” said Lord B., “you would have heard a question about dancing referred to me:—me! (looking mournfully downward) whom fate from my birth has prohibited from taking a single step.”

“No! we assure our generous benefactors ’Twill only burn the scenery and the actors!”

A tank of water was afterwards exhibited, in the course of the epilogue, in which a wherry was rowed by a real live man, the band playing—

“And did you not hear of a jolly young waterman?”

Miss Farren reciting—

“Sit still, there’s nothing in it, We’ll undertake to drown you in a single minute.”

“O vain thought!” as Othello says. Notwithstanding the boast in the epilogue—

“Blow, wind—come, rack, in ages yet unborn, Our castle’s strength shall laugh a siege to scorn”—

the theatre fell a victim to the flames within fifteen years from the prognostic! These preparations against fire always presuppose presence of mind and promptness in those who are to put them into action. They remind one of the dialogue, in Morton’s Speed the Plough, between Sir Able Handy and his son Bob:

“Bob. Zounds, the castle’s on fire!

Sir A. Yes.

Bob. Where’s your patent liquid for extinguishing fire?

Sir A. It is not mixed.

Bob. Then where’s your patent fire-escape?

Sir A. It is not fixed.

Bob. You are never at a loss?

Sir A. Never.

Bob. Then what do you mean to do?

Sir A. I don’t know.”

“with fear of change Perplexing nations.”

Southey.

“Above he fills up Shakespeare’s place. And Shakespeare fills up his below.”

Very antithetical; but quære as to the meaning? The writer, like Pluto, “long puzzled his brain” to find it out, till he was immersed “in a lower deep” by hearing Madame de Staël say, at the table of the late Lord Dillon, “Buonaparte is not a man, but a system.” Inquiry was made in the course of the evening of Sir James Mackintosh as to what the lady meant? He answered, “Mass! I cannot tell.” Madame de Staël repeats this apophthegm in her work on Germany. It is probably understood there.

“Thus all below was strength, and all above was grace.”

Lord Camelford received his visitants with great civility, and thanked them warmly for the call; adding, that their evidence would be material, it being his intention to indict the lieutenant for an assault. “All I can say in return is this,” exclaimed the peer with great cordiality, “if ever I see you engaged in a row, upon my soul I’ll stand by you.” The Authors expressed themselves thankful for so potent an ally, and departed. In about a fortnight afterwards [March 7, 1804] Lord Camelford was shot in a duel with Mr. Best.

“‘A Tale of Drury,’ by Walter Scott, is, upon the whole, admirably executed; though the introduction is rather tame. The burning is described with the mighty minstrel’s characteristic love of localities . . . The catastrophe is described with a spirit not unworthy of the name so venturously assumed by the describer.”—Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review.

“Thus he went on, stringing one extravagance upon another, in the style his books of chivalry had taught him, and imitating, as neat as he could, their very phrase.”—Don Quixote.

Sir Walter Scott informed the annotator, that at one time he intended to print his collected works, and had pitched upon this identical quotation as a motto;—a proof that sometimes great wits jump with little ones.

For poets you can never want ’em Spread through Augusta Trinobantum—Swift.

Thomson in his “Seasons” calls it “huge Augusta.”

“Moorfields are fields no more.”

“All his sands are diamond sparks, That glitter as they pass.”

Few men in society have more “gladdened life” than this poet. He now [1833] resides in Paris, and may thence make the grand tour without an interpreter—speaking, as he does, French, Italian, and German, as fluently as English.

“For flesh is grass, which Time mows down to hay.”

But as Johnson says of Dryden, “His known wealth was so great, he might borrow without any impeachment of his credit.”

Matthew Gregory Lewis, commonly called Monk Lewis, from his once popular romance of that name, was a good-hearted man, and, like too many of that fraternity, a disagreeable one—verbose, disputatious and paradoxical. His Monk and Castle Spectre elevated him into fame; and he continued to write ghost-stories till, following as he did in the wake of Mrs. Radcliffe, he quite overstocked the market. Lewis visited his estates in Jamaica, and came back perfectly negro-bitten. He promulgated a new code of laws in the island, for the government of his sable subjects: one may serve for a specimen: “Any slave who commits murder shall have his heed shaved, and be confined three days and nights in a dark room.” Upon occasion of printing these parodies, Monk Lewis said to Lady H[olland], “Many of them are very fair, but mine is not at all like; they have made me write burlesque, which I never do” “You don’t know your own talent,” answered the lady.

Lewis aptly described himself, as to externals, in the verses affixed to his Monk, as having

“A graceless form and dwarfish stature”

He had, moreover, large grey eyes, thick features, and an inexpressive countenance. In talking, he had a disagreeable habit of drawing the fore-finger of his right hand across his tight eye-lid. He affected, in conversation, a sort of dandified, drawling tone: young Harlowe, the artist, did the same. A foreigner who had but slight knowledge of the English language might have concluded, from their cadences, that they were little better than fools—“just a born goose,” as Terry the actor used to say. Lewis died on his passage homeward from Jamaica, owing to a dose of James’s powders injudiciously administered by “his own mere motion.” He wrote various plays, with various success, he had admirable notions of dramatic construction, but the goodness of his scenes and incidents was marred by the badness of his dialogue.

“‘Playhouse Musings,’ by Mr. Coleridge, a piece which is unquestionably Lakish, though we cannot say that we recognise in it any of the peculiar traits of that powerful and misdirected genius whose name it has borrowed. We rather think, however, that the tuneful brotherhood will consider it as a respectable eclogue.”—Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review.

Meux’s new brewhouse shows the light, Rowland Hill’s Chapel, and the height Where Patent Shot they sell.]

“And Winsor lights, with flame of gas. Home, to King’s Place, his mother.”

“Six years had pass’d, and forty ere the six, When Time began to play his usual tricks: My locks, once comely in a virgin’s sight, Locks of pure brown, now felt th’ encroaching white; Gradual each day I liked my horses less, My dinner more—I learnt to play at chess.”

“That’s very good!” cried the bard;—“whose to it?” “Your own.” “Indeed! hah! well, I had quite forgotten it.” Was this affectation, or was it not? In sooth, he seemed to push simplicity to puerility. This imitation contained in manuscript the following lines, after describing certain Sunday newspaper critics who were supposed to be present at a new play, and who were rather heated in their politics:—

“Hard is the task who edits—thankless job!— A Sunday journal for the factious mob With bitter paragraph and caustic jest, He gives to turbulence the day of rest; Condemn’d, this week, rash rancour to instil, Or thrown aside, the next, for one who will: Alike undone or if he praise or rail (For this affects his safety, that his sale), He sinks at last, in luckless limbo set, If loud for libel, and if dumb for debt.”

They were, however, never printed; being, on reflection, considered too serious for the occasion.

It is not a little extraordinary that Crabbe, who could write with such rigour, should descend to such lines as the following:—

“Something bad happen’d wrong about a bill Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill, So, to amend it, I was told to go And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.”

Surely “Emanuel Jennings,” compared with the above, rises to sublimity.

[“‘The Theatre,’ by the Rev. G. Crabbe, we rather think, is the best piece in the collection. It is an exquisite and most masterly imitation, not only of the peculiar style, but of the taste, temper, and manner of description of that most original author; and can hardly be said to be in any respect a caricature of that style or manner—except in the excessive profusion of puns and verbal jingles—which, though undoubtedly to be ranked among his characteristics, are never so thick sown in his original works as in this admirable imitation. It does not aim, of course, at any shadow of his pathos or moral sublimity, but seems to us to be a singularly faithful copy of his passages of mere description,”—Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review.]

“When energising objects men pursue, What are the prodigies they cannot do?”

Raymond, the stage-manager, accompanied by a constable, at this moment walked upon the stage, and handed away the juvenile dilettante performer.

The Doctor’s classical translation was thus noticed in one of the newspapers of the day, in the column of births:—“Yesterday, at his house in Queen Anne-street, Dr. Busby of a still-born Lucretius.” [Bushy’s Monologue was parodied by Lord Byron: see Byron’s works, p. 553.]

“In one single point the parodist has failed—there is a certain Dr. Busby, whose supposed address is a translation called ‘Architectural Atoms, intended to be recited by the translator’s son.’ Unluckily, however, for the wag who had prepared this fun, the genuine serious absurdity of Dr. Busby and his son has cast all his humour into the shade. The Doctor from the boxes, and the son from the stage, have actually endeavoured, it seems, to recite addresses, which they call monologues and unalogues; and which, for extravagant folly, tumid meanness, and vulgar affectation, set all the powers of parody at utter defiance.”—Quarterly Review.

“Of ‘Architectural Atoms,’ translated by Dr. Busby, we can say very little more than that they appear to us to be far more capable of combining into good poetry than the few lines we were able to read of the learned Doctor’s genuine address in the newspapers. They might pass, indeed, for a very tolerable imitation of Darwin.”—Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review.