THE THEATRE,-GARRICK.

401

by his wonderful power as an actor. But it was amongst the exaggerations of that flattery which had attended Garrick when living, and followed him in death, to pretend that the actor had given new life to the poet; that Garrick and Shakspere were for ever to shine as "twin stars." There had been thirteen editions of Shakspere's Plays when it was pretended that they were sunk to death and lay in night;* of which nine editions had appeared in the preceding forty years. Garrick did also what Tate had done before him. He mangled Shakspere, giving improved versions of Romeo and Juliet, the Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, the Taming of the Shrew, the Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and Hamlet. He patched the mammock'd plays with tawdry rags, in the "design to adapt them to the present taste of the public.”† His conception of Shakspere was as imperfect as his notion of the costume in which Shakspere's characters should be presented. But Garrick unquestionably made the people understand the true and the natural in dramatic art, as opposed to the pomposity and the exaggeration of the actors whom he supplanted. Garrick, according to the critical Mr. Partridge, did nothing in Hamlet beyond what any man would do in similar circumstances: “ I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did." The king, who spoke "half as loud again," was the actor for Partridge's money. ‡ The town had sense enough to confirm the verdict of Churchill, in the "Rosciad," of "Garrick, take the chair."

The Bath of the middle of the last century is familiar to all readers of the light literature of that period. The city, early in the reign of Anne, began to be frequented by people of fashion; but the nobility refused to associate with the gentry at any public entertainments. Gentlemen came to the balls in boots, and ladies in aprons. A dictator arose in the person of Mr. Richard Nash, who was elected Master of the Ceremonies, and presided over the company who assembled in a booth to dance and game.§ During a reign of many years this king of Bath had got his unruly subjects into tolerable order. He had compelled the squires to put off their boots when they came to the balls, and the ladies to forego their aprons. His dominions were the resort of all the sharpers and dupes in the land, when the London season was over. Every game of

Epitaph on Garrick in Westminster Abbey:

"Though sunk to death the forms the Poet drew,
The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew."

"Biographica Dramatica."
Goldsmith-"Life of Nash."

VOL. VI.-26.

"Tom Jones."

chance was here played without restraint, and Nash had his full share of the spoil of the unwary. At Tunbridge he established a colony; and, like a great monarch, he often travelled there in state to receive the homage of his subjects, drawn in a post-chariot by six grays, with out-riders, footmen, and French horns. All went merrily till a cruel legislature passed an Act to declare Basset and Hazard and all other games of chance illegal. The statute was evaded; and an amended law was next year passed, to declare all games with one die or more, or with any instrument with numbers thereon, to be illicit. The law-makers did not foresee that an instrument with letters thereon might be as effectual; and the well-known game of E. O. was invented, and first set up at Tunbridge. Nash brought the game to Bath, not to offend the decorum of the Assembly-Room, but to be carried on snugly in private houses, to which Nash introduced those who had money to lose, confederating with the E. O. table-keepers for a share of their profits. This answered for some time, until another statute effectually put down all gaming-houses and gaming-tables, as far as law could accomplish their suppression. There was no resource for the persecuted people of quality but to establish private clubs.

VIEW OF MANNERS CONTINUED.

403

CHAPTER XXII.

View of manners continued.-The Duke of Queensberry.-Club-life.-Excessive Gaming. -Excesses of Charles Fox.-Dress.-Conversation.-The Squires of England.-The Country Justice.-The Clergy of England.-The Universities.-Professional Classes. -The Mercantile Class.-The Lower orders.-The Rabble.-Mobs.- Police of London. The Prisons.-Social Reformers.-Howard.-Coram.-Hanway.—Raikes.— Education.-Rise and Growth of Methodism.

A FEW years after the beginning of the present century, there was to be seen in Piccadilly, on every sunny day, an emaciated old man sitting in a balcony, holding a parasol. The coachman of the Bath road as he drove by would tell some wondering passenger that there was the wicked duke of Queensberry; that he kept a man in readiness to follow any female not insensible to the bewitching ogles of his glass eye; that his daily milk bath was transferred to the pails of the venders of milk around Park-lane ; with many other tales, more befitting the days of the second Charles than of the third George. This very notorious nobleman died in 1810, at the age of eighty-six. As Dr. Johnson was the link between the varying literature of two periods, the duke of Queensberry was the link between the changed profligacy of two generations. He had flourished as the earl of March and a lord of the bed-chamber in the times when to violate every decency of life was to establish a claim to wit and spirit; when "at the rehearsal, on Wednesday night, of the Speech, at lord Halifax's, lord Lich. field came extremely drunk, and proposed amendments; >>* when sir Francis Dashwood, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1762, held his frantic orgies with his brother "Franciscans " at Medmenham Abbey, drinking obscene toasts out of a sacred chalice; when George Selwyn said, with as much truth as wit, when one of the waiters at Arthur's Club was committed on a charge of felony, “What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate." Queensberry lived on, into an age of comparative decorum, which to him was as insipid as he thought the Thames seen from his Richmond villa: "I am quite tired of it-there it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same." He had no resources for amusement Selwyn and his Contemporaries," vol. i. p. 352. "Life of Wilberforce," vol. iii. p. 417.

out of the libertine society of the turf and the gaming-house. Even these resorts had become decent. He could no longer sup with the duke of York (the brother of George III.) as in 1776, "with some of the opera girls." * "Information, as acquired by books, he always treated with great contempt." There was nothing left for him to do, as a vigorous octogenarian, but to sit in the balcony at the corner of Park-lane, gazing upon "the full tide of human existence;" or retire to his drawing-room to enjoy what Wraxall calls a "classic exhibition," which if the unrefined passersby had chanced to see they would have broken every window of that mansion of ill-fame. He had utterly neglected the duties of his station; he had regarded his tenantry as the mere slaves of his will, and the poor upon his estates as vermin that might be buried in the ruins of dilapidated hovels. Sir Walter Scott described, in 1813, the rebuilding of the cottages at Drumlanrig, by the duke of Buccleugh (the inheritor of the estate), for pensioners who, in the days of "old Q." were "pining into rheumatisms and agues, in neglected poverty." +

Time has removed the veil that hid the Club-life of Queensberry and his set from the gaze of contemporaries. We are now permitted to see the fine gentlemen of the days of Chatham and lord North pursuing their vocation of gambling with the assiduous perseverance of the most money-getting tradesman. If they were ruined there were two resources against starvation—a place, or a wife. "You ask me how play uses me this year," writes the hon. Henry St. John to Selwyn in 1766; “I am sorry to say very ill, as it has already, since October, taken 800l. from me; nor am I in a likely way to re-imburse myself soon by the emoluments of any place or military preferment, having voted the other evening in a minority."§ This distinguished honourable, for whose misfortunes it was the bounden duty of the government to have provided a refuge, became lord Bolingbroke. He still pursued his calling with indifferent success in 1777, when Charles Townshend writes to Selwyn, "Your friend lord Bolingbroke's affairs are in a much more prosperous state than those of the public. He is gone down to Bath in pursuit of a lady, who he proposes should recruit his finances. It is said she has accepted his proposal."] The reputation of lord Sandwich has survived as one of the most profligate in his private life, and one of the meanest in his public

career. His club-gambling has given a name to "a bit of beef between two slices of bread," the only food he took for four-andtwenty hours without ever quitting his game.* Common men pass away from the gambling clubs, whether to insolvency, or suicide, or death in a duel, without much sympathy from their fellows,' who, like lord Sandwich, are too much absorbed in their thirst for lucre to take warning from the fate of those they call their friends. The right hon. Tom Foley is sold up. The rev. Dr. Warner gives an amusing account of the proceedings to George Selwyn. The creditors could not take the heir-looms; but every personal article was sold, whether of the right honourable or his lady. "He and she are left there among their heir-looms, chairs and tables, without any thing to put upon them, or upon themselves, when the clothes on their backs become dirty." The hon. John Damer shot himself at the Bedford Arms in 1776. Lord Carlisle, who at this time was himself plunged in difficulties, says of this event, “It is a bad example to others in misery. There never ap

peared anything like madness in him, yet the company he kept seemed indeed but a bad preparation for eternity." At Bath, Nash dealt rather severely with the duellist gainesters, for a few mischances might have thinned the numbers of his votaries by a general panic. He forbad the wearing of swords, "as they often tore the ladies' dresses, and frightened them;" and when he heard that a challenge was given and accepted, he immediately procured an arrest for both parties.

On the 24th of June, 1776, Gibbon, writing to his friend Holroyd, and dating from Almack's, says: "Town grows empty; and this house, where I have passed very agreeable hours, is the only place which still unites the flower of the English youth. The style of living, though somewhat expensive, is exceedingly pleasant, and, notwithstanding the rage of play, I have found more entertaining and even rational society here than in any other club to which I belong." Amongst "the flower of the English youth" was the earl of Carlisle, who, when Gibbon thus wrote, was in his twenty-eighth year. He was a man of talent; ambitious to be a poet and a statesman; happy in his marriage; fond of his children; surrounded with every worldly advantage. In July, 1776, he writes to Selwyn: "I have undone myself, and it is to no purpose to conceal from you my abominable madness and folly. .

I never lost so much in five times as I have done to-night, and am in debt to the house for the whole." A few days after this loss of Grosley-Tour to London in 765," vol. i. p. 1149. "Selwyn," iv. 147.

Ibid., vin. 148.