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Page 39
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 raret� 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."
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