He was therefore absolutely a fixture in the family when Fanny Burney met him there in 1778. When he first came to the Thrales' he was fifty-six, short-sighted, afflicted with stertorous breathing; he dressed shabbily and seldom attended to the cleanliness of his linen. His habits. wigs were so scrubby and so burnt away in front by Personal contact with candles, that Mr. Thrale's valet had much ado to make him presentable for the dinner-table. At any meal he usually busied himself so intently that the veins in his forehead swelled, and the perspiration broke out upon him. His voice was loud, and of course his manners were dictatorial. He was so fond of late hours that the servants of the house looked upon him as the curse of the establishment. "I lie down," he used to say, "that my acquaintances may sleep; but I lie down to endure oppressive misery and soon rise again to pass the night in anxiety Sleepless nights. and pain." When the candles did not burn brightly he would seize them and turn them upside down till they improved, the droppings falling to the carpet. He never was in time for breakfast. He was ever quarreling with Mrs. Thrale's mother, who was also an inmate of the house, and whom he loved to irritate. He likewise would be very rude, on occasion, to visitors whom the Thrales might ask to their table. All this, together with Johnson's frequent illnesses, these generous hosts tolerated for so many years, in order to cherish a man who was great at the bottom of his heart, and whom they had the sense and charity to rate at his inner worth. There is no record of Mrs. Thrale's having once Mrs. Thrale's lost her temper with the shaggy philosopher, irritating to any hostess as his habits must have been. She herself records with a pardonable pride that she had never anything to blame herself for in her attentions to him. good-nature. Specimen of But Samuel Johnson was a great man, and it is a proof of it that everybody tolerated his eccentricities, condoned his untidiness, and-loved him. He wrote a quantity of things, now generally conceded to be dull; to quote from his "Rasselas” would add nothing to our knowledge of the manners of his own time; while his own manners, as we have seen, must be taken as an exception from the general rule of the day, which was in favor of elegance and punctilio. I will give this passage of his too heavily loaded style as a specimen of what is meant by "Johnsonese." The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us that the fatal waste of fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together. Of the same kind is the prodigality of life; he that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavor to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground. A simple writer would have expressed this in some such way as the following: Take care of the pennies, says the thrifty old proverb, and the pounds will take care of themselves. In like manner we might say, Take care of the minutes and the years will take ⚫ care of themselves. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Evelina, with Introduction by Annie Raine Ellis. (London, 1892.) Diary of Madame d'Arblay. Fanny Burney. English Poetesses. (Mrs. Thrale.) Eric S. Robertson. Samuel Johnson. Leslie Stephen. (Men of Letters Series.) BOOK IX. BEAU NASH AND BATH. CHAPTER XXVIII. ONE of the good-natured things, among those that Goldsmith was doing all the time, was to write a life of Beau Nash, the monarch of Bath. Besides being a truthful biography of that singular man, it is interesting A fashionable for its description of how things were carried on in the leading watering place of the eighteenth century. Bath at that time was what Newport was in our own country fifty years ago, and what Narragansett Pier fain would be to-day-the resort of the fashionable people in the season when they wished to divert themselves away from London. It was so well known, and so indispensable, so to speak, that all the real people we are now reading about are mentioned as resorting thither and all the make-believe people in the novels make a point of doing so. Some account of Bath, therefore, seems an important detail in our study of the manners of the century. This is what Baedeker's Great Britain (1894) says about it: Bath, the chief place in Somerset, is a handsome town of 51,844 inhabitants, beautifully situated in the valley of the Avon and on the slopes of the surrounding hills, and is perhaps unrivaled among provincial English towns for its combination of archæological, historic, scenic, and social interests. It is a city of crescents and terraces, built in a very substantial manner of fine gray limestone, and rising tier above tier to a height of watering place. Some facts concerning it. Traditional discovery of Bath. Goldsmith's intentions. Family of about six hundred feet. Among the most characteristic streets are the Royal Lansdown and Camden Crescents, the Circus and Pulteney Street, all of which recall similar streets in Edinburgh. Milsom Street is the fashionable street. Tradition ascribes the discovery of the springs of Bath to an ancient British prince named Bladud who was afflicted with leprosy and observed their beneficial effects on a herd of swine suffering from a similar disease. The therapeutic value of the waters did not escape the eyes of the bath-loving Romans, who built here a large city, with extensive baths and temples, of which numerous remains have been discovered. So much for Baedeker. We will now turn to Goldsmith's more genial, though less statistic style. I profess to write the history of a man placed in the middle ranks of life; of one whose vices and virtues were open to the eye of the most undiscerning spectator; who was placed in public view without power to repress censure or command admiration; who had too much merit not to be remarkable, yet too much folly to arrive at greatness. I attempt the character of one who was just such a man as probably you or I may be, but with this difference, that he never performed an action which the world did not know, or ever formed a wish which he did not take pains to divulge. In short I have chosen to write the life of the noted Mr. Nash, as it will be the delineation of a mind without disguise, of a man ever assiduous without industry and pleasing to his superiors without any superiority of genius or understanding. It is a matter of very little importance who were the parents, or what was the education, of a man who owed so little of his advancement to either. He seldom boasted of family or learning, and his father's name and circumstances were so little known that Dr. Cheyne used frequently to say that Nash had no father. The Duchess of Marlborough one day rallying him in public company upon the obscurity of his birth, compared him to Gil Blas, who was ashamed of his father. "No, madam,” said Nash, "I seldom mention my father in company, not because I have any reason to be ashamed of him, but because he has some reason to be ashamed of me." His father had strained his little income to give his son such tion. an education, but from the boy's natural vivacity, he hoped a recompense from his future preferment. In college, however, Early educahe soon showed that though much might be expected from his genius, nothing could be hoped from his industry. A mind strongly turned to pleasure always is first seen at the university : there the youth first found himself freed from the restraint of tutors, and being treated by his friends in some measure as a man, assumes the passions and desires of a ripe age, and discovers in the boy what are likely to be the affections of his maturity. When King William was on the throne, Mr. Nash was a member of the Middle Temple. It had long been customary for the Inns of Court to entertain our monarchs upon their accession to the crown, or some such remarkable occasion, with a revel and pageant. In the earlier periods of our history, poets were the conductor of these entertainments; plays were exhibited and complimentary verses were then written; but by degrees the pageant alone was continued, Sir John Davis being the last poet that wrote verses upon such an occasion, in the reign of James I. This ceremony, which has been at length totally discontinued, was last exhibited in honor of King William, and Mr. Nash was chosen to conduct the whole with proper decorum. He was then but a very young man ; but we see at how early an age he was thought proper to guide the amusements of his country, and be the arbiter elegantiarum of his time; we see how early he gave proofs of that spirit of regularity for which he afterward became famous, and showed an attention to those little circumstances, of which, though the observance be trifling, the neglect has often interrupted men of the greatest abilities in the progress of their fortunes. Nash was now fairly for life entered into a course of gaiety and dissipation, and steady in nothing but the pursuit of variety. He was thirty years old, without fortune, or useful talents to acquire one. He had hitherto only led a life of expedients; he thanked chance alone for his support, and having been long precariously supported, he became at length totally a stranger to prudence or precaution. Not to disguise any part of his character, he was now by profession a gamester, and went on from day to day, feeling the vicissitudes of rapture and anguish in proportion to the fluctuations of fortune. Member of Conducts a pageant. |