Eighteenth Century Vignettes

III. SPENCE'S 'ANECDOTES.'

WHEN, in the year 1741, after his quarrel with Gray, Horace Walpole lay sick of a quinsy at Reggio, the shearing of his thin-spun life was only postponed by the opportune intervention of a passing acquaintance. The Rev. Joseph Spence, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Professor of Poetry to that University, then travelling in Italy as Governor to Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, promptly arrived to his aid, summoned Dr. Cocchi posthaste from Florence, and thus became instrumental in enabling the Prince of Letter-Writers to expand the thirty or forty epistles he had already produced into that magnificent correspondence which, incomplete even now, 5 fills no fewer than nine closely printed volumes.

Spence, to whom all Walpole's admirers owe a lasting debt of gratitude, was one of the fortunate men of a fortunate literary age. In 1726 he had published a 'genteel' critique of Pope's 'Odyssey,' conspicuous for its courteous mingling of praise and blame, and not the less grateful to the person criticised because – as Bennot Langton said, and as good luck would have it – ten out of the twelve objections fell, upon the labours of Pope's luckless coadjutors, Broome and Fenton. The book made Pope his friend, and himself Professor of Poetry, in which capacity he patronised Thomson, and protected Queen Caroline's thresher-laureate, Stephen Duck. During the continental tours which he undertook in 1730 and 1737, and in that above referred to, he collected the material for his 'Polymetis,' a tall folio on classical mythology, the earlier editions of which are now chiefly sought after for their irreverent vignette of Dr. Cooke, propositor of Eton, in the disguise of 'an ass's nowl.' Spence continued to dally lightly with letters, editing Sackville's 'Gorboduc,' annotating Virgil, writing a life of the blind poet Blacklock, and comparing (after the manner of Plutarch), for Walpole's private press at Strawberry, Mr. Robert Hill, the 'learned tailor' of Buckingham, with that Florentine helluo librorum, Signor Antonio Magliabecchi. He lived the mildly studious life of a quiet, easy-going clergyman of the eighteenth century, nursing a widowed mother like Pope, and declining to disturb the placid ripple of his days by the 'violent delights' of matrimony. He is 'the completest scholar,' 'the sweetest tempered gentleman breathing,' cries his enthusiastic friend, Mr. Christopher Pitt, himself a virtuoso and a translator of Homer. He is 'extremely' polite, friendly, cheerful, and master of an infinite fund of subjects for agreeable conversation,' says Mr. Shenstone of the Leasowes. 'He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius,' says ungrateful Mr. Walpole. 'He was a poor creature, though a very worthy man,' says clever Mr. Cambridge of the 'World' and the 'Scribleriad.' To strike an average between these varying estimates is not a difficult task. It gives us a character amiable rather than strong, finical rather than earnest, well-informed and ingenious rather than positively learned. For the rest, 'Polymetis' has been supplanted by Lempriere, and is as dead as Stephen Duck; and its author now lives mainly by the 'priefs' which, like Sir Hugh Evans, he made in his notebook, – in other words, by the Anecdotes of the Literary Men of his age, which, when occasion offered, he jotted down from the conversation of Pope, Young, Dean Lockier, and other notabilities into whose company he came from time to time.

The story of Spence's 'Anecdotes' is a chequered one. At their author's death they were still in manuscript, though their existence was an open secret. Joseph Warton had handselled them for his 'Essay on Pope;' and Warburton had used them for Ruffhead's 'Life.' When Spence died in 1768, it was discovered that he had himself intended to print them, – that he had, in fact, conditionally sold a selection of them to Robert Dodsley, the bookseller (whom he had formerly befriended), for a hundred pounds. But before publication was finally arranged both Spence and Robert Dodsley died. Spence's executors – Bishop Lowth, Dr. Ridley, and Mr. Rolle – thought suppression for a time desirable; and the surviving Dodsley, James, although, says Joseph Warton, 'he probably would have gained £400 or £500 by it,' was easily prevailed upon, out of regard for Spence, to relinquish the bargain. The manuscript selection was then presented by the executors to Spence's old pupil, Lord Lincoln, who had become Duke of Newcastle, while the original 'Anecdotes,' and a fair copy, remained in Bishop Lowth's possession. The Newcastle MS. was lent to Johnson, who employed it for his 'Lives of the Poets,' giving great offence to the Duke by acknowledging the loan without mentioning the name of the lender; and Malone had access to it for his Dryden, at the same time compiling from it a smaller selection, which he annotated briefly. By a series of circumstances too lengthy to detail, this last, some years after Malone's death, passed into the hands of Mr. John Murray, who published it in 1820. In the same year, and, by a curious coincidence, upon the same day, appeared another edition based upon the Lowth papers, which had also found their way into other hands. This was prefaced and annotated by Mr. S. W. Singer, and a second edition of it was issued in 1858 by J. R. Smith. Beyond these three editions of the 'Anecdotes,' there has been no other reprint but the excellent little compilation in the 'Camelot' series which the late Mr. John Underhill put forth in 1890.

As will be gathered from the above, Spence's own selection is still unpublished, and is supposed to remain in the possession of the Newcastle family. But as Malone extracted all of it that he thought worth keeping, and as Singer printed the materials on which it was based, it is not likely that its publication now, even if it were found to be practicable, would be of material interest, except to show what Spence personally regarded as deserving of preservation. With respect to the 'Anecdotes' themselves, there can be little doubt that, whatever their subsequent extension may have been, they originated in Spence's acquaintanceship with Pope; and that their first purpose was the bringing together of such dispersed data as might serve for the basis of his biography. (So much, in fact, Spence told Warburton when they were returning from Twickenham after Pope's death; and then, like the courteous, amiable 'silver penny' that he was, surrendered all his memoranda to his more pretentious companion, in whose subsequent 'Life,' for Ruffhead's 'Life of Pope' is really Warburton's, nearly every anecdote of value is derived from Spence.) From collecting Popiana to collecting ana of Pope's contemporaries, would be a natural step; and it would be but a step farther to add, from time to time, such supplementary notes or impressions de voyage as presented themselves, even if they had no special connection with the primary matter, which is Pope and Pope's doings. Indeed, in Singer's opinion, Spence's 'Anecdotes' already contain, not only 'a complete though brief autobiography' of the poet, but also 'the most exact record of his opinions on important topics,' – a record which is 'probably the more genuine and undisguised, because not premeditated, but elicited by the impulse of the moment.' This, as far as it relates to Pope's views on abstract literary questions, is no doubt true; but 'genuine,' 'undisguised,' and 'unpremeditated' are scarcely the epithets which modern criticism has taught us to apply to some, at least, of Pope's utterances concerning his contemporaries; and in these respects we are more exactly informed than the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Take, for instance, the well-known Wycherley correspondence. 'People have pitied you extremely,' says sympathetic Mr. Spence, who professes to speak verbatim, 'on reading your letters to Wycherley [i.e., the correspondence which Pope had printed]; surely 'twas a very difficult thing for you to keep well with him!' And thereupon Mr. Pope, of Twickenham and Parnassus, replies that 'it was the most difficult thing in the world;' that he was 'extremely plagued up and down, for almost two years,' with Wycherley's verses; that Wycherley was really angry at having them so much corrected; that his memory was entirely gone, – and so forth. 6 All of which Mr. Spence confidingly transfers to his tablets. But thanks to the publication by Mr. Courthope in 1889, from the manuscripts at Longleat, of most of Wycherley's autograph letters, we now know that the correspondence to which Spence referred had been considerably 'edited' by Pope with the view of misrepresenting his dealings with Wycherley; and there is even something more than a suspicion that he actually concocted those of Wycherley's letters for which there are no equivalent vouchers in the Marquis of Bath's collection.

In any case, the real documents show clearly that, instead of resenting the amendments and alterations of his 'Deare Little Infallible,' as he calls him, the old dramatist received them with effusive gratitude; and, far from reproaching the poet for neglecting to visit him (which Pope implied), constantly delayed or postponed his own visits to Pope at Binfield; – in short, did, in reality, just the very reverse of what he is represented as doing in Pope's garbled correspondence. So that, in these worshipful communiqués to Spence, Pope must simply have been playing at that eighteenth-century pastime to which Swift refers in the 'Polite Conversation' as 'Selling a Bargain.'

In Pope's life, it is to be feared, there were not a few of these equivocal mercantile transactions. He certainly imposed on Spence's credulity when he told him that 'there was a design whieh does not generally appear,' in other words, a cryptic significance, in his correspondence with Henry Cromwell. And he also, with equal certainty, disposed of 'a great Pennyworth' (in the current phrase) when he gave him the – from his own point of view – eminently plausible account of the circumstances which led to the notorious character of 'Atti-cus.' Whether Spence, who could not be said to be unwarned, since he records Addison's caution to Lady Mary against Pope's 'devilish tricks,' had any lurking suspicion that Pope was not to be relied upon, does not appear. But it is obvious that, without Spence's 'Anecdotes,' Pope's biographers would have played but a sorry figure. From Spence it is that we get the best account of Pope's precocious early years and studies; of his boyish epic of Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, with its under-water scene, and its four books of one thousand lines; of the manner of his translation of Homer and his plan for the 'Essay on Man;' and of a number of facts concerning the trustworthiness of which there can be no reasonable doubt. Nor can there be any doubt as to the bulk of his purely critical utterances. Many of these, and especially such as deal with individual authors, are now become trite and faded. However novel may have been the announcement under George the Second, we now learn without a shock of surprise that Chaucer is an unequalled taleteller, that Bacon was a great genius, that Milton's style is exotic. But, upon his own craft, Pope's axioms are still sometimes worth hearing. 'A poem on a slight subject,' he says, 'requires the greater care to make it considerable enough to be read.' 'After writing a poem one should correct it all over, with one single view at a time. Thus, for language: if an elegy, "These lines are very good, but are they not of too heroical a strain?" and so vice versa' 'There is nothing so foolish as to pretend to be sure of knowing a great writer by his style.' 'Nil admirari is as true in relation to our opinions of authors as it is in morality; and one may say, O, admiratores, servum pecus! fully as justly as O, Imitator es!' 'The great secret how to write well is to know thoroughly what one writes about, and not to be affected.' This last, however, is scarcely more than an Horatian commonplace.

With the aid of Spence's 'Anecdotes' we gain admission to the little villa by the Thames where, during the spring of 1744, wasted by an intolerable asthma, but waiting serenely for the end, Pope lay sinking slowly. Many of his sayings, and the sayings of those who visited his sick-room, have their only chronicle in this collection. About three weeks before his death, he printed his 'Ethic Epistles,' copies of which he gave away to different persons. 'Here am I, like Socrates,' he told Spence, 'distributing my morality to my friends, just as I am dying.' On Sunday, the 6th of May, he lost his mind for several hours, – a circumstance which sets him wondering 'that there should be such a thing as human vanity.' Already his spirit was escaping fitfully to the Unknown. There are false colours on the objects about him; he looks at everything 'as through a curtain;' he sees 'a vision.' Most of all he suffers from his inability to think. But the old love of letters still survives; he quotes his own verses; and when in his waking moments Spence reads to him the 'Daphnis and Chloe' of Longus, he marvels how the infected mind of the Regent Orleans can have relished so innocent a book. As to his condition he has no illusions. On the 15th, after having been visited by Thompson the quack, who had been treating him (as Ward treated Fielding) for dropsy, and professed to find him better, he described himself to Lyttelton as 'dying of a hundred good symptoms!' 7

'On every catching and recovery of his mind,' Spence tells us, 'he was always saying something kindly either of his present or his absent friends' – 'as if his humanity had outlived his understanding.' Many of the well-known figures of the day still came and went about his bedside – Bolingbroke from Battersea, tearful and melancholy, full-blown Warburton, Lyttelton above-mentioned, Marchmont, blue-eyed Martha Blount; and it was 'very observable' how the entry of the lady seemed to give him temporary strength, or a new turn of spirits. To the last he continued to struggle manfully with his malady. On the 27th, to the dismay of his friends, he had himself brought down to the room where they were at dinner; on the 28th his sedan chair was carried for three hours into the garden he loved so well, then filled with the blossoms of May and smelling of the coming summer. On the 29th he took the air in Bushey Park, and a little later in the day received the sacrament, flinging himself fervently out of bed to receive it on his knees. 'There is nothing that is meritorious, he said afterwards, 'but virtue and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.' On the next day, the 30th of May, 1774, he died. 'They did not know the exact time,' writes the faithful friend to whom we owe so many of these 'trivial, fond records,' – 'for his departure was so easy that it was imperceptible even to the standers-by.'

IV. CAPTAIN CORAM'S CHARITY

AMONG a ragged regiment of books, very dear to their owner, but in whose dilapidated company no reputable volume would greatly care to travel through Coventry, is a sheepskin-clad tract entitled 'Mémoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England, For Ten Years, Determin'd December 1688.' It dates from those antiquated days when even statistics had their air of scholarship and their motto from 'Tully' or 'the Antients' (Quid Didcius Otio Litterato?– it is in this case); and the year of issue is 1690. The name of the author does not appear, but his portrait by Kneller does; and he was none other than the diarist Samuel Pepys, sometime Secretary to the Admiralty under the second Charles and his successor. 8

In itself the little volume is an extremely instructive one, as much from the light it throws upon the prominent part played by its writer in the reconstruction of the Caroline navy, as from its exposure of the lamentable mismanagement which permitted toad-stools as big as Mr. Secretary's fists to flourish freely in the ill-ventilated holds of his Majesty's ships-of-war. But the special attraction of the particular copy to which we are referring lies in certain faded inscriptions which it contains. On March 14, 1724, it was presented by one 'C. Jackson' to 'Tho. Coram,' by whom in turn it was transferred to a Mr. Mills, being accompanied by a holograph note which is pasted at the end: 'To Mr Mills These Worthy Sir I happend to find among my few Books, Mr Pepys, his mémoires [there has evidently been a struggle over the spelling of the name], wch I thought might be acceptable to you & therefore pray you to accept of it. I am wth much Respect Sir your most humble Scrfc Thomas Coram. June 10th, 1746.' It is not a lengthy document, but, with its unaffected wording and its simple reference to 'my few Books,' it gives a pleasant impression of the brave old mariner to whom, even at the present day, so many hapless mortals owe their all; and whose ruddy, kindly face, with its curling white hair, still beams on us from Hogarth's canvas at the Foundling.

Captain Coram must have been seventy-eight years old when he wrote the above letter, for he had been born, at Lyme Regis in Dorsetshire, as far back as 1668. Of his boyhood nothing is known; but in 1694 he was working as a shipwright at Taunton, Massachusetts. His benevolent instincts seem to have developed early, for in December, 1703, he conveyed to the Taunton authorities some fifty-nine acres of land as the site for a church or schoolhouse.

In the deed of gift he is described as 'of Boston, in New England, sometimes residing in Taunton, in the County of Bristol, Shipwright.' He also gave a library to Taunton; and, from the fact that the Common Prayer Book used in the church of that town was presented to him for the purpose by Mr. Speaker Onslow, must have been successful in enlisting in his good offices the sympathies of others. In course of time he became master of a ship; and, in 1719, a glimpse of his life, of which there are scant details, shows him being plundered and maltreated by wreckers at Cuxhaven, while a passenger on a vessel called the 'Sea Flower,' upon which occasion the affidavit describes him as 'of London, Mariner and Shipwright.' At this date he was engaged in the supply of stores to the navy. He must have prospered fairly in his calling, for he soon afterwards retired from a sea-faring fife in order to live upon his means, and occupy himself entirely with charitable objects. In the Plantations, as they were then called, he took great interest; being notably active as regards the colonization of Georgia and the improvement of the Nova Scotian cod fisheries. Lord Walpole of Wolterton (Horace Walpole's uncle), who had met him, testified warmly to his honesty, his disinterestedness, and his knowledge of his subject. Neither an educated nor a polished man (and not always a judicious one), he was indefatigable in the pursuit of his purpose, and his singleminded philanthropy was beyond the shadow of a doubt. 'His arguments,' said his intimate friend Dr. Brocklesby, 'were nervous, though not nice – founded commonly upon facts, and the consequences that he drew, so closely connected with them, as to need no further proof than a fair explanation. When once he made an impression, he took care it should not wear out; for he enforced it continually by the most pathetic remonstrances. In short, his logic was plain sense; his eloquence, the natural language of the heart.'

His crowning enterprise was the obtaining of a charter for the establishment of the Foundling Hospital. Going to and fro at Rotherhithe, where in his latter days he lived, he was constantly coming upon half-clad infants, 'sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying,' who had been abandoned by their parents to the mercy of the streets; and he determined to devote his energies to the procuring of a public institution in which they might find an asylum. For seventeen years, with an unconquerable tenacity, and in the face of the most obstinate obstruction, apathy, and even contempt, he continued to urge his suit upon the public, being at last rewarded by a Royal charter and the subscription of sufficient funds to commence operations. An estate of fifty-six acres was bought in Lamb's Conduit Fields for £3,500; and the building of the Hospital was begun from the plans of Theodore Jacobsen. Among its early Governors were many contemporary artists who contributed freely to its adornment, thereby, according to the received tradition, sowing the seed of the existing Royal Academy. Handel, too, was one of its noblest benefactors. For several years he regularly superintended an annual performance of the 'Messiah' in the Chapel (an act which produced no less than £7,000 to the institution), and he also presented it with an organ. Having opened informally in 1741 at a house in Hatton Garden, the Governors moved into the new building at the completion of the west wing in 1745. But already their good offices had begun to be abused. Consigning children to the Foundling was too convenient a way of disposing of them; and, even in the Hatton Garden period, the supply had been drawn, not from London alone, but from all parts of the Kingdom. It became a lucrative trade to convey infants from remote country places to the undiscriminating care of the Charity. Once a waggoner brought eight to town, seven of whom were dead when they reached their destination. On another occasion a man with five in baskets got drunk on the road, and three of his charges were suffocated. The inevitable outcome of this was that the Governors speedily discovered they were admitting far more inmates than they could possibly afford to maintain. They accordingly applied to Parliament, who voted them £10,000, but at the same time crippled them with the obligation to receive all comers. A basket was forthwith hung at the gate, with the result that on the first day of its appearance, no less than 117 infants were successively deposited in it. That this extraordinary development of the intentions of the projectors could continue to work satisfactorily was of course impossible, and great mortality ensued.

As time went on, however, a wise restriction prevailed; and the Hospital now exists solely for those unmarried mothers whose previous character has been good, and whose desire to reform is believed to be sincere. Fortunately, long before the era of what one of the accounts calls its 'frightful efflorescence' – an efflorescence which, moreover, could never have occurred under Captain Coram's original conditions – its benevolent founder had been laid to rest in its precincts. After his wife's death he fell into difficulties, and subscriptions were collected for his benefit. When this was broken to the old man – too modest himself to plead his own cause, and too proud to parade his necessity – he made, according to Hawkins, the following memorable answer to Dr. Brocklesby: