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ANECDOTAGE,
No. I.

MISS HAWKINS'S ANECDOTES.*

This orange we mean to squeeze for the public use. Where an author is poor, this is wrong: but Miss Hawkins being upon her own acknowledgment rich (p. 125), keeping "a carriage, to the propreté of which she is not indifferent," (p. 253), and being able to give away manors worth more than 1000l. per annum, (p. 140), it is most clear that her interests ought to bend to those of the public; the public being really in very low circumstances, and quite unable to buy books of luxury and anecdotage.

Who is the author, and what is the book? The author has descended to us from the last century, and has heard of little that has happened since the American war. She is the daughter of Sir John Hawkins--known to the world,-1st, as the historian of Music-2d, as the acquaintance and biographer of Dr. Johnson-3d, as the object of some vulgar gossip and calumnies made current by Mr. Boswell. Her æra being determined, the reader can be at no loss to deduce the rest: her chronology known, all is known. She belongs to the literati of those early ages who saw Dr. Johnson in the body, and conversed in the flesh with Goldsmith, Garrick, Bennet Langton, Wilkes and liberty, Sir Joshua, Hawkesworth, &c. &c. All of these good people she "found" (to use her own lively expression) at her father's house: that is, upon her earliest introduction to her father's drawing room at Twickenham, most of them were already in possession. Amongst the "&c. &c." as we have classed them, were some who really ought not to have been thus slurred oversuch as Bishop Percy, Tyrwhitt, Dean Tucker, and Hurd: but others absolutely pose us. For instance, does the reader know any thing of one Israel Mauduit? We profess to know nothing; no, nor at all the more for his having been the author of Considerations on the German War (p. 7): in fact, there have been so many German wars since Mr.

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Mauduit's epoch, and the public have since then been called on to " consider " so many "considerations," that Miss Hawkins must pardon us for declaring, that the illustrious Mauduit (though we member his name in Lord Orford's Memoires) is now defunct, and that his works have followed him. Not less defunct than Mauduit is the not less illustrious Brettell.-Brettell!What Brettell? What Brettell !— Why, "wonderful old Colonel Brettell of the Middlesex Militia,” (p. 10,) "who, on my requesting him, at eighty-five years of age, to be careful in getting over a five-barred gate, replied-Take care of what? Time was, when I could have jumped over it." "Time was!" he says, was but how will that satisfy posterity?

what proof has the nineteenth century that he did it, or could have done it? So much for Brettell, and Mauduit. But last comes one who "hight Costard:" and here we are posed indeed. Can this be Shakspeare's Costard-every body's Costard-the Costard of Love's Labour's Lost? But how is that possible?— says a grave and learned friend at our elbow. I will affirm it to be impossible. How can any man celebrated by Shakspeare have visited at Twickenham with Dr. Johnson?That indeed, we answer, deserves consideration: yet, if he can, where would Costard be more naturally found than at Sir John Hawkins's house, who had himself annotated on Shakspeare, and lived in company with so many other annotators, as Percy, Tyrwhitt, Steevens, &c.? Yet again, at p. 10, and at p. 24, he is called "the learned Costard." Now this is an objection; for Shakspeare's Costard, the old original Costard, is far from learned. But what of that? He had plenty of time to mend his manners, and fit himself for the company of Dr. Johnson: and at p. 80, where Miss Hawkins again affirms that his name was "always preceded by the epithet learned," she candidly admits that "he was a feeble

Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, and Memoirs; collected by Letitia Matilda Hawkins. Vol. I. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1823. MARCH, 1823.

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ailing - emaciated man, who had all the appearance of having sa crificed his health to his studies:" as well he might, if he had studied from Shakspeare's time to Dr. Johnson's. With all his learning, however, Costard could make nothing of a case which occurred in Sir John Hawkins's grounds; and we confess that we can make no more of it than Costard. "In a paddock," says Miss Hawkins, "we had an oblong piece of water supplied by a sluice. Keeping poultry, this was very convenient for ducks-on a sudden, a prodigious consternation was perceived among the ducks: they were with great difficulty persuaded to take to the water; and, when there, shuddered-grew wet-and were drowned. They were supposed diseased; others were bought at other places; but in vain! none of our ducks could swim. I remember the circumstance calling out much thought and conjecture. The learned George Costard, Dr. Morton, and the medical advisers of the neighbourhood were consulted: every one had a different supposition; and I well recollect my own dissatisfaction with all I heard. It was told of course to Mr. and Mrs. Garrick. Mrs. Garrick would not give credit to it: Garrick himself was not incredulous; and after a discussion, he turned to my father with his jocose impetuosity, and said- There's my wife, who will not believe the story of these ducks, and yet she believes in the eleven thousand virgins.""- Most probably the ducks were descended from that" which Samuel Johnson trod on," which, "if it had lived and had not died, had surely been an odd one: its posterity therefore would be odd ones. However, Costard could make nothing of it: and to this hour the case is an unsolved problem-like the longitude or the north-west passage. But enough of Costard.

Of Lord Orford, who, like Costard, was a neighbour and an acquaintance of her father's, Miss H. gives us a very long account; no less than thirty pages (p. 87-117) being dedicated to him on his first

introduction. Amongst his eccentricities, she mentions that "he made no scruple of avowing his thorough want of taste for Don Quixote.' This was already known from the Walpoliana; where it may be seen that his objection was singularly disingenuous, because built on an incident (the windmill adventure) which, if it were as extravagant as it seems (though it has been palliated by the peculiar appearance of Spanish mills), is yet of no weight, because not characteristic of the work: it contradicts its general character. We shall extract her account of Lord Orford's person and abord-his dress and his address, which is remarkably lively and picturesque; as might have been expected from the pen of a female observer, who was at that time young.

"His figure was, as every one knows, not merely tall, but more properly long, and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness. I speak of him before the year 1772. His eyes were remarkably bright and penetrating, very dark and lively:-his voice was not strong; but his tones were extremely pleasant, and (if I may so say) highly gentlemanly. I do not remember his common gait: he always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy which fashion had then made almost natural; chapeau bras between his hands, as if he wished to compress it, or under his arm; knees bent; and feet on tip-toe, as if afraid of a wet floor. His dress in visiting was most usually (in summer when I most saw him) a lavender suit; the waistcoat embroidered with a little silver, or of white silk worked in the tambour; partridge silk stockings; and gold buckles; ruffles and frill generally lace. I remember, when a child, thinking him very much under-dressed, if at any time, except in mourning, he wore hemmed cambric. In summer, no powder; but his wig combed straight, and showing his very smooth pale forehead, and queued behind;--in winter, powder. What an amusing old coxcomb!+

• From this it should seem that Costard was a duck doctor: we remember also a History of Astronomy by one Costard. These facts we mention merely as hints for inquiry, to the editors of the next Variorum Shakspeare.

+Further on in the volume we have five more pages (p. 307-312) on the same noble

Of Dr. Johnson, we have but one anecdote; but it is very good; and good in the best way-because characteristic; being, in fact, somewhat brutal, and very witty. Miss Knight, the author of Dinarbas, and of Marcus Flaminius, called to pay him a farewell visit on quitting England for the Continent: this lady (then a young lady) is remarkably large in person; so the old savage dismissed her with the following memorial of his good nature:-" Go, go, my dear; for you are too big for an island." As may be supposed, the Doctor is no favourite with Miss Hawkins: but she is really too hard upon our old friend; for she declares "that she never heard him say in any visit six words that could compensate for the trouble of getting to his den, and the disgust of seeing such squalidness as she saw no where else." One thing at least Miss Hawkins might have learned from Dr. Johnson; and let her not suppose that we say it in ill-nature-she might have learned to weed her pages of many bar

barisms in language which now disfigure them; for instance, the barbarism of "compensate for the trou ble"-in the very sentence before us instead of "compensate the trouble."

Dr. Farmer disappointed Miss Hawkins by "the homeliness of his external." But surely when a man comes to that supper at which he does not eat but is eaten, we have a deeper interest in his wit, which may chance to survive him, than in his beauty, which posterity cannot possibly enjoy any more than the petits soupers which it adorned. Had the Doctor been a very Adonis, he could not have done Miss Hawkins so much service as by two of his propos which she records:-One was, that on a report being mentioned, at her father's table, of Sir Joshua Reynolds having shared the gains arising from the exhibition of his pictures, with his man-servant, who was fortunately called Ralph,— Dr. Farmer quoted against Sir Joshua these two lines from Hudibras:

author: to say nothing of three beginning at p. 278-which are imagined by Miss Hawkins to concern Horace Walpole, but which in fact relate, in every word and syllable, to his brother Sir Edward Walpole, and to him only.-In both the first and last introduction of Lord Orford, Miss Hawkins contrives to be most amusingly and perversely wrong in all her criticisms both as relates to his works and to his place in the public esteem.— 1. Lord Orford's tragedy is not the "noxious performance" which she supposes, nor is it a work of any genius. It has no merits which can ever bring it upon the stage; nor, if it were brought upon the stage, would it therefore be "time for the virtuous to fly their country, and leave it a prey to wild beasts." In his choice of a subject, Lord Orford showed a singular defect of judgment; in his treatment of it, he is not intentionally immoral. With depraved taste and feeble sensibilities he is chargeable; but not, as Miss Hawkins asserts, with an act of "enormous indecency."-2. The Castle of Otranto is not a new creation in literature," as she seems to concede (p. 309): on the contrary, it is a most weak and extravagant fiction, in which the coarse, the clumsy, the palpable, and the material, are substituted for the aerial, the spiritual, and the shadowy; the supernatural agency being, as Mr. Hazlitt has most happily expressed it, (Lectures on the Comic Writers, p. 253) "the pasteboard machinery of a pantomime."-3. With respect to the Chatterton case, Miss Hawkins is wide of the truth by a whole climate. She dates Lord Orford's declension "in the public favour from the time when he resisted the imposition of Chatterton; and she thinks it "not the usual justice of the world to be angry at a resistance proved so reasonable." But, first, Lord Orford has not declined in the public favour: he ranks higher now than he did in Chatterton's life-time, or his own: his reputation is the same in kind as the genuine reputation of Voltaire: both are very spirited memoir-writers; and, of the two, Lord Orford is the more brilliant. The critique of his posthumous memoirs by Miss Hawkins's brother, expresses his pretensions very ably. Secondly, if he had declined, it could not have been in the way supposed. Nobody blamed Lord Orford for resisting the imposition of Chatterton. He was right in refusing to be hoaxed: he was not right in detaining Chatterton's papers; and if he did this, not through negligence or inattention, but presuming on Chatterton's rank (as Chatterton himself believed and told him), his conduct was infamous. Be this as it may, his treatment of Chatterton whilst living, was arrogant, supercilious, and with little or no sensibility to his claims as a man of genius; of Chatterton when dead-brutal, and of inhuman hypocrisy; he himself being one of the few men in any century who had practised at a mature age that very sort of forgery which in a boy of seventeen he represented as unpardonable.

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Á squire he had whose name was Ralph, Who in the adventure went his half. The other was, that speaking of Dr. Parr, he said that he seemed to have been at a feast of learning (for learning, read languages) from which he had carried off all the scraps." Miss Hawkins does not seem to be aware that this is taken from Shakspeare: but, what is still more surprising, she declares herself "absolutely ignorant whether it be praise or censure." All we shall say on that question is, that we most seriously advise her not to ask Dr. Parr.

Of Paul Whitehead, we are told that his wife" was so nearly idiotic, that she would call his attention in conversation to look at a cow, not as one of singular beauty, but in the words- Mr. Whitehead, there's a cow.' On this Miss Hawkins moralizes in a very eccentric way: "He took it," says she, "most patiently -as he did all such trials of his temper." Trials of his temper! why, was he jealous of the cow? Had he any personal animosity to the cow? Not only, however, was Paul very patient (at least under his bovine afflictions, and his "trials" in regard to horned cattle), but also Paul was very devout; of which he gave this pleasant assurance: "When I go," said he, "into St. Paul's, I admire it as a very fine, grand, beautiful building; and, when I have contemplated its beauty, I come out: but, if I go into Westminster Abbey, d-n me, I'm all devotion." So, by his own account, Paul appears to have been a very pretty fellow; dd patient, and dd devout.

For practical purposes, we recommend to all physicians the following anecdote, which Sir Richard Jebb used to tell of himself: as Miss Hawkins observes, it makes even rapacity comical, and it suggests a very useful and practical hint. "He was attending a nobleman, from whom he had a right to expect a fee of five guineas; he received only three. Suspecting some trick on the part of the steward, from whom he received it, he at the next visit contrived to drop the three guineas. They were picked up, and again deposited in his hand: but he still con

tinued to look on the carpet. His lordship asked if all the guineas were found. There must be two guineas still on the carpet,' replied Sir Richard, for I have but three." The hint was taken as he meant.”

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But of all medical stratagems, commend us to that practised by Dr. Munckley, who had lived with Sir J. Hawkins during his bachelor days in quality of "chum:" and a chum he was, in Miss Hawkins's words, "not at all calculated to render the chum state happy." This Dr. Munckley, by the bye, was so huge a manmountain, that Miss Hawkins supposes the blank in the well-known epigram,

When walks the streets, the paviors cry, "God bless you, Sir!" and lay their rammers by,

to have been originally filled up with his name, but in this she is mistaken. The epigram was written before he was born; and for about 140 years has this empty epigram, like other epigrams to be lett, been occupied by a succession of big men: we believe that the original tenant was Dr. Ralph Bathurst. Munckley, however, might have been the original tenant, if it had pleased God to let him be born eighty years sooner; for he was quite as well qualified as Bathurst to draw down the blessings of paviors, and to play the part of a "three-man beetle.” Of this Miss Hawkins gives a proof which is droll enough: "accidentally encountering suddenly a stout man servant in a narrow passage, they literally stuck." Each, like Horatius Cocles, in the words of Seneca, solus implevit pontis angustias. One of them, it is clear, must have backed; unless, indeed, they are sticking there yet. It would be curious to ascertain which of them backed. For the dignity of science, one would hope it was not Munckley. Yet we fear he was capable of any meanness, if Miss Hawkins reports accurately his stratagems upon her father's purse: a direct attack failing, he attacked it indirectly. But Miss Hawkins shall tell her own tale. "He was extremely rapacious, and a very bad economist; and, soon after my father's marriage, having been foiled in

* “ Fillip me with a three-man beetle.”—Falstaff, Henry IV.

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his attempt to borrow money of him, he endeavoured to atoue to himself for this disappointment by protracting the duration of a low fever in which he attended him; making unnecessary visits, and with his hand ever open for a fee." Was there ever such a fellow in this terraqueous globe? Sir John's purse not yielding to a storm, he approaches by mining and sapping, under cover of a low fever. Did this Munckley really exist; or is he but the coinage of Miss Hawkins's brain? If the reader wishes to know what became of this "great" man, we shall gratify him. He was "foiled," as we have seen, in his attempt to borrow money of Sir J. H.: he was also soon after "foiled" in his attempt to live. Munckley, big Munckley, being "too big for an island" we suppose, was compelled to die: he gave up the ghost and, what seems very absurd both to us and to Miss Hawkins, he continued talking to the last; and went off in the very act of uttering a most prosaic truism, which yet happened to be false in his case: for his final words were "that it was-hard to be taken off just then, when he was beginning to get into practice." Not at all, with such practices as his: where men enter into partnerships with low fevers, it is very fit that they should "back" out of this world as fast as possible; as fast as, in all probability, he had backed down the narrow passage before the stout man-servant. So much for Munckley,-big Munckley.

It does not strike us as any "singular feature" (p. 273), in the history of Bartleman the great singer"that he lived to occupy the identical house in Berners-street in which his first patron resided." Knowing the house, its pros and cons, its landlord, &c. surely it was very natural that he should avail himself of his knowledge for his own convenience. But it is a very singular fact (p. 160), that our government should merely for want of caution, have sent the Culloden ship of war to convoy Cardinal York from Naples." This, we suppose, Miss Hawkins looks upon as ominous of some disaster; for she considers it " fortu nate," that his Eminence "had sailed before it arrived." Of this same Cardinal York, Miss Hawkins tells us

further, that a friend of hers having been invited to dine with him, as all Englishmen were while he kept a table," found him, as all others did, a good-natured, almost superannuated gentleman, who had his round of civilities and jokes. He introduced some roast beef, by saying that it might not be as good as that in England; for, said he, you know we are but pretenders." Yes: the Cardinal was a pretender; but his beef was "legitimate;" unless, indeed, his bulls pretended to be oxen.

On the subject of the Pretender, by the way, we have (at p. 63) as fine a bon-mot as the celebrated toast of Dr. Byrom, the Manchester Jacobite." The Marchioness (the Marchioness of Tweedale) had been lady Frances Carteret, a daughter of the Earl of Granville, and had been brought up by her jacobite aunt, Lady Worsley, one of the most zealous of that party. The Marchioness herself told my father that, on her aunt's upbraiding her when a child with not attending prayers, she answered that she heard her ladyship did not pray for the King. "Not pray for the King?" said Lady Worsley," who says this? I will have you and those who sent you know that I do pray for the King;-but I do not think it necessary to tell God Almighty who is King.

This is naïveté, which becomes wit to the by-stander, though simply the natural expression of the thought to him who utters it. Another instance, no less lively, is the following-mentioned at Strawberry-hill by "the sister of one of our first statesmen now deceased." "She had heard a boy, humoured to excess, tease his mother for the remains of a favourite dish: Mamma at length replied then, do take it, and have done teasing me.' Не then flew into a passion, roaring out

what did you give it me for? I wanted to have snatched it.'"

The next passage we shall cite relates to a very eminent character indeed, truly respectable, and entirely English; viz. Plum-Pudding, The obstinate and inveterate ignorance of Frenchmen on this subject is well known. Their errors are grievous, pitiable, and matter of scorn and detestation to every enlightened mind. In civilization, in trial by

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