DEAR GEORGE: 308. TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ. I Arlington Street, June 23, 1750. As I am not Vanneck'd,' I have been in no hurry to thank you for your congratulation, and to assure you that I never knew what solid happiness was till I was married. Your Trevors and Rices dined with me last week at Strawberry Hill, and would have had me answer you upon the matrimonial tone, but I thought I should imitate cheerfulness in that style as ill as if I were really married. I have had another of your friends with me here some time, whom I adore, Mr. Bentley; he has more sense, judgment, and wit, more taste, and more misfortunes, than sure ever met in any man. have heard that Dr. Bentley, regretting his want of taste for all such learning as his, which is the very want of taste, used to sigh and say, "Tully had his Marcus." If the sons resembled as much as the fathers did, at least in vanity, I would be the modest agreeable Marcus. Mr. Bentley tells me that you press him much to visit you at Hawkhurst.' I advise him, and assure him he will make his fortune under you there; that you are an agent from the Board of Trade to the smugglers, and wallow in contraband wine, tea, and silk handkerchiefs. I found an old newspaper t'other day, with a list of outlawed smugglers; there were John Price, alias Miss 1 That is, unmarried. In the Gentleman's Magazine' for 1750, p. 284, is this announcement, among the marriages: "26 May, 1750. Horatio Walpole, Esq., brother to Lord Orford, to the eldest daughter of Joshua Van Neck, Esq., merchant." It was his cousin who was married and Vannecked.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 Richard Bentley, Walpole's correspondent, son of Dr. Bentley, the great scholar. "Richard was a man of various and considerable accomplishments; he had a fine genius, great wit, and brilliant imagination; he had also the mauners and address of a perfect gentleman; but there was a certain eccentricity, and want of worldly prudence, in my uncle's character, that involved him in distresses, and reduced him to situations uncongenial with his feelings, and unpropitious to the cultivation and encouragement of his talents. His connexion with Mr. Horace Walpole, the late Lord Orford, had too much of the bitter of dependence in it to be gratifying to the taste of a man of his spirit and sensibility; the one could not be abject, and the other, I suspect, was not by nature very liberal and large-minded. They carried on for a long time a sickly kind of friendship, which had its hot fits and its cold; was suspended and renewed; but I believe never totally broken or avowedly laid aside. Walpole had by nature a propensity, and by constitution a plea, for being captious and querulential, for he was a martyr to the gout. He wrote prose, and published it; he composed verses, and circulated them; and was an author, who seemed to play at hide and seek with the public. There was a mysterious air of consequence in his private establishment of a domestic printing-press, that seemed to augur great things but performed little.”—Cumberland Memoirs, vol. i., p. 23.—CUNNINGHAM. 3 Near Staplehurst, in Kent.-CUNNINGHAM. Marjoram, Bob Plunder, Bricklayer Tom, and Robin Cursemother, all of Hawkhurst, in Kent. When Miss Harriet is thoroughly hardened at Buxton, as I hear she is by lying in a public room with the whole Wells, from drinking waters, I conclude she will come to sip nothing but new brandy. As jolly and as abominable a life as she may have been leading, I defy all her enormities to equal a party of pleasure that I had t'other night. I shall relate it to you to show you the manners of the age, which are always as entertaining to a person fifty miles off as to one born an hundred and fifty years after the time. I had a card from Lady Caroline Petersham to go with her to Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her house, and found her and the little Ashe,' or the Pollard Ashe, as they call her; they had just finished their last layer of red, and looked as handsome as crimson could make them. On the cabinet-door stood a pair of Dresden candlesticks, a present from the virgin hands of Sir John Bland: the branches of each formed a little bower over a cock and hen, yes, literally. We issued into the Mall to assemble our company, which was all the town, if we could get it; for just so many had been summoned, except Harry Vane, whom we met by chance. We mustered the Duke of Kingston,' whom Lady Caroline says she has been trying for these seven years; but alas! his beauty is at the fall of the leaf; Lord March, Mr. Whitehed, a pretty Miss Beauclerc, and a very foolish Miss Sparre. These two damsels were trusted by their mothers for the first time of their lives to the matronly care of Lady Caroline. As we sailed up the Mall with all our colours flying, Lord Petersham,' with his hose and legs twisted to every point of crossness, strode by us on the outside, and repassed again on the return. At the end of the Mall she called to him; he would not answer: she gave a familiar spring, and, between laugh and confusion, ran up to him, "My lord, my lord! why, you don't see us!" We advanced at a little distance, not a little awkward in expectation how all this would end, for my lord never stirred his hat, or took the least notice 4 1 Miss Ashe was said to have been of very high parentage. She married Mr. Falconer, an officer in the navy.-WRIGHT. 2 Sir John Bland, of Kippax Park, in Yorkshire, a great gamester, who made away with himself in 1755.-CUNNINGHAM. 3 Miss Chudleigh's husband.-CUNNINGHAM. ✦ Afterwards better known as the Duke of Queensbury, or "old Q." He died in 1810.-CUNNINGHAM. 5 Afterwards Earl of Harrington. His gait was so singular, that he was generally known by the nick-name of Peter Shamble.-WRIGHT. of anybody: she said, "Do you go with us, or are you going anywhere else?”—“I don't go with you, I am going somewhere else; and away he stalked, as sulky as a ghost that nobody will speak to first. We got into the best order we could, and marched to our barge, with a boat of French horns attending, and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up the river, and at last debarked at Vauxhall there, if we had so pleased, we might have had the vivacity of our party increased by a quarrel; for a Mrs. Lloyd,' who is supposed to be married to Lord Haddington, seeing the two girls following Lady Petersham and Miss Ashe,' said aloud, "Poor girls, I am sorry to see them in such bad company!" Miss Sparre, who desired nothing so much as the fun of seeing a duel,-a thing which, though she is fifteen, she has never been so lucky to see,-took due pains to make Lord March resent this; but he, who is very lively and agreeable, laughed her out of this charming frolic with a great deal of humour. Here we picked up Lord Granby, arrived very drunk from Jenny's Whim; where, instead of going to old Strafford's catacombs to make honourable love, he had dined with Lady Fanny,' and left her and eight other women and four other men playing at Brag. 1 Mrs. Lloyd, of Spring Gardens, to whom the Earl of Haddington was married this year.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 Young Wortley is gone to France with Miss Ashe. He is certainly a gentleman of infinite vivacity; but methinks he might as well have deferred this exploit till the death of his father.-Mrs. Montagu to her husband, Sept. 1751. Miss Ashe is happily reconciled to Lady Caroline Petersham, who had broke with her on account of her indiscretion, but who has taken her under her protection again, upon the assurance that she is as good as married to Mr. Wortley Montagu, who seems so puzzled between Le Châtelet in France and his wife in England; but it is not yet known in favour of which he will determine.-Chesterfield to Dayrolles, Dec. 6, 1751. Mahon's Chesterfield, vol. iii., p. 452. (See Letter to Mann, 22nd Nov., 1751.) -CUNNINGHAM. 3 A tavern at the end of the wooden bridge at Chelsea, at that period much frequented by his lordship and other men of rank.-WRIGHT. Anne, daughter and heiress of Sir Henry Johnson, widow of Thomas Lord Raby, created Earl of Strafford in 1711.-WRIGHT. 5 Lady Frances Seymour, eldest daughter of the proud Duke of Somerset, by his second Duchess, Lady Charlotte Finch. She was married in the following September to the Marquis of Granby.-WRIGHT. 6 "Skill'd in each art that can adorn the fair, Soame Jenyns, The Modern Fine Lady,' 1750.-CUNNINGHAM. He would fain have made over his honourable love upon any terms to poor Miss Beauclerc, who is very modest, and did not know at all what to do with his whispers or his hands. He then addressed himself to the Sparre, who was very well disposed to receive both; but the tide of champagne turned, he hiccupped at the reflection of his marriage (of which he is wondrous sick), and only proposed to the girl to shut themselves up and rail at the world for three weeks. If all the adventures don't conclude as you expect in the beginning of a paragraph, you must not wonder, for I am not making a history, but relating one strictly as it happened, and I think with full entertainment enough to content you. At last, we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front, with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to help us to mince chickens. We minced seven chickens into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears. She had brought Betty, the fruit-girl,' with hampers of strawberries and cherries from Rogers's, and made her wait upon us, and then made her sup by us at a little table. The conversation was no less lively than the whole transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien arrived from Ireland, who would get the Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey, if she were still at liberty. I took up the biggest hautboy in the dish, and said to Lady Caroline, Madam, Miss Ashe desires you would eat this O'Brien strawberry; she replied immediately, "I won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard said, "Now, how anybody would spoil this story 66 1 1797, August 30. Died, aged 67, at her house, facing St. James's Street, at the top of Park Place, Mrs. Elizabeth Neale, better known by the name of Betty. She had kept, for very many years, a house in St. James's Street, as a fruit-shop, from which she had retired about fourteen years. She had the first preeminence in her occupation, and might be justly called the Queen of Apple-women. Her knowledge of families and characters of the last and present age was wonderful. She was a woman of pleasing manners and conversation, and abounding with anecdote and entertainment. Her company was even sought for by the highest of our men of rank and fortune. She was born in the same street in which she ever lived, and used to say she never slept out of it but twice, on a visit to a friend in the country, and at a Windsor installation.-Gentleman's Magazine for 1797. Mason has introduced her name into the Heroic Epistle,' "And patriot Betty fix her fruit-shop there;" adding, in a note, "the name of a woman who kept a fruit-shop in St. James's Street." See also Jesse's Selwyn, vol. i., p. 230.-CUNNINGHAM. that was to repeat it, and say, I won't, you jade!" In short, the whole air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so, that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the whole concourse round our booth at last, they came into the little gardens of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry Vane took up a bumper, and drank their healths, and was proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was three o'clock before we got home. I think I have told you the chief passages. Lord Granby's temper had been a little ruffled the night before: the Prince had invited him and Dick Lyttelton to Kew, where he won eleven hundred pounds of the latter, and eight of the former, then cut, and told them he would play with them no longer, for he saw they played so idly, that they were capable of "losing more than they would like." Adieu! I expect in return for this long tale that you will tell me some of your frolics with Robin Cursemother, and some of Miss Marjoram's bon-mots. P.S. Dr. Middleton called on me yesterday: he is come to town to consult his physician for a jaundice and swelled legs, symptoms which, the doctor tells him, and which he believes, can be easily cured; I think him visibly broke, and near his end.' He lately advised me to marry, on the sense of his own happiness; but if anybody had advised him to the contrary, at his time of life,' I believe he would not have broke so soon. 309. TO SIR HORACE MANN. Arlington Street, July 25, 1750. I TOLD you my idle season was coming on, and that I should have great intervals between my letters; have not I kept my word? For 1 Warburton, in a letter to Hurd, of the 11th of July, says, "I hear Dr. Middleton has been lately in London, (I suppose, to consult Dr. Heberden about his health,) and is returned in an extreme bad condition. The scribblers against him will say they have killed him; but, by what Mr. Yorke told me, his bricklayer will dispute the honour of his death with them."-WRight. 2 The Doctor had recently taken a third wife, the relict of a Bristol merchant. On making her a matrimonial visit, Bishop Gooch told Mrs. Middleton that "he was glad she did not dislike the Ancients so much as her husband did." She replied, "that she hoped his lordship did not reckon her husband among the Ancients yet." The Bishop answered, "You, Madam, are the best judge of that."-Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. v. p. 422.-WRIGHT. |