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                           _Some Eccentrics
                              & a Woman_




_First Published in 1911_

[Illustration: A VIEW from the PUMP ROOM, BATH.]




                           _Some Eccentrics
                              & a Woman_

                          _By Lewis Melville_


                               _London_

                            _Martin Secker_

                       _Number Five John Street_

                               _Adelphi_




NOTE


Of the eight papers printed here, “Some Eighteenth-Century Men About
Town,” “A Forgotten Satirist: ‘Peter Pindar’,” “Sterne’s Eliza,”
and “William Beckford, of Fonthill Abbey,” have appeared in the
_Fortnightly Review_; “Charles James Fox” appeared in the _Monthly
Review_, “Exquisites of the Regency” in _Chambers’s Journal_, and
“The Demoniacs” in the American _Bookman_. To the editors of these
periodicals I am indebted either for permission to reprint, or
for their courtesy in having permitted me to reserve the right of
publication in book form. “Philip, Duke of Wharton” is now printed for
the first time.

    LEWIS MELVILLE




_Contents_


                                                               PAGE

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MEN ABOUT TOWN                              13

  SOME EXQUISITES OF THE REGENCY                                 47

  A FORGOTTEN SATIRIST: “PETER PINDAR”                          103

  STERNE’S ELIZA                                                129

  THE DEMONIACS                                                 161

  WILLIAM BECKFORD OF FONTHILL ABBEY                            189

  CHARLES JAMES FOX                                             219

  PHILIP, DUKE OF WHARTON                                       253

  INDEX                                                         283




_List of Illustrations_


  “A VIEW FROM THE PUMP ROOM, BATH”                  _Frontispiece_
    _A Facsimile Reproduction of a Drawing by Richard Deighton_

  SIR JOHN LADE                                   _To face page_ 16
    _From the Painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds_

  THE PRINCE OF WALES                                  "    "    48
    _From the Miniature by Cosway_

  LUMLEY SKEFFINGTON                                   "    "    80
    _From a Contemporary Miniature_

  PETER PINDAR                                         "    "   112
    _From the Painting by John Opie_

  LAURENCE STERNE                                      "    "   144
    _From the Painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds_

  WILLIAM BECKFORD                                     "    "   192
    _From the Painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds_

  CHARLES JAMES FOX                                    "    "   224
    _From the Painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds_

  PHILIP, DUKE OF WHARTON                              "    "   256
    _From a Contemporary Painting_




                 Some Eighteenth-Century Men about Town


When his Royal Highness George, Prince of Wales, afterwards George
IV., freed himself from parental control, and, an ill-disciplined lad,
launched himself upon the town, it is well known that he was intimate
with Charles James Fox, whom probably he admired more because the King
hated the statesman than for any other reason. Doubtless the Prince
drank with Fox, and diced with him, and played cards with him, but
from his later career it is obvious he can never have touched Fox
on that great man’s intellectual side; and, after a time, the royal
scapegrace, who would rather have reigned in hell than have served in
heaven, sought companions to whom he need not in any way feel inferior.
With this, possibly sub-conscious, desire, he gathered around him a
number of men about town, notorious for their eccentricities and for
the irregularity of their lives. With these George felt at home; but,
though he was nominally their leader, there can be little doubt that
he was greatly influenced by them at the most critical time of a young
man’s life, to his father’s disgust and to the despair of the nation.
Of these men the most remarkable were Sir John Lade, George Hanger
(afterwards fourth Lord Coleraine of the second creation), and Sir
Lumley Skeffington; and, by some chance, it happens that little has
been written about them, perhaps because what has been recorded is for
the most part hidden in old magazines and newspapers and the neglected
memoirs of forgotten worthies. Yet, as showing the temper of the times,
it may not be uninteresting to reconstruct their lives, and, as far as
the material serves, show them in their habit as they lived.

Sir John Lade, the son of John Inskipp, who assumed the name of Lade,
and in whose person the baronetcy that had been in the family was
revived, was born in 1759, and at an early age plunged into the fast
society of the metropolis with such vigour that he had earned a most
unenviable reputation by the time he came of age, on which auspicious
occasion, Dr Johnson, who knew him as the ward of Mr Thrale, greeted
him savagely in the satirical verses which conclude:

    “Wealth, my lad, was made to wander:
      Let it wander at its will;
    Call the jockey, call the pander,
      Bid them come and take their fill.

    When the bonnie blade carouses,
      Pockets full and spirits high--
    What are acres? what are houses?
      Only dirt, or wet and dry.

    Should the guardian friend or mother
      Tell the woes of wilful waste,
    Scorn their counsels, scorn their pother,
      You can hang, or drown, at last.”

Sir John became one of the Prince of Wales’s cronies, and for a while
had the management of his Royal Highness’s racing stable; but while it
has been hinted of him, as of George Hanger, that during his tenure
of that office he had some share in the transactions that resulted in
Sam Chifney, the Prince’s jockey, being warned off the turf, it is but
fair to state that there is no evidence in existence to justify the
suspicion. Indeed, he seems to have been honest, except in incurring
tradesmen’s debts that he could never hope to discharge; but this
was a common practice in fashionable circles towards the end of the
eighteenth century, and was held to throw no discredit on the man who
did so--for was it not a practice sanctioned by the example of “The
First Gentleman of Europe” himself?

Sir John’s ambition, apparently, was to imitate a groom in dress and
language. It was his pleasure to take the coachman’s place, and drive
the Prince’s “German Waggon,”[1] and six bay horses from the Pavilion
at Brighton to the Lewes racecourse; and, in keeping with his _pose_,
he was overheard on Egham racecourse to invite a friend to return to
dinner in these terms:--“I can give you a trout spotted all over like
a coach dog, a fillet of veal as white as alabaster, a ‘pantaloon’
cutlet, and plenty of pancakes as big as coach-wheels--so help me.”

[1] Barouches were so described on their first introduction into
England.

Dr Johnson naturally took an interest in Sir John, and, when Lady Lade
consulted him about the training of her son, “Endeavour, madam,” said
he, “to procure him knowledge, for really ignorance to a rich man is
like fat to a sick sheep, it only serves to call the rooks round him.”
It is easier, however, to advocate the acquisition of knowledge than
to inculcate it, and knowledge, except of horses, Sir John Lade never
obtained in any degree. Indeed, his folly was placed on record by
“Anthony Pasquin” in

    AN EPIGRAMMATIC COLLOQUY,

    Occasioned by Sir John Lade’s Ingenious Method of
    Managing his Estates.

    Said Hope to Wit, with eager looks,
      And sorrow streaming eyes:
   “In pity, Jester, tell me when,
      Will Johnny Lade be--wise?”

   “Thy sighs forego,” said Wit to Hope,
     “And be no longer sad;
    Tho’ other foplings grow to men,
      He’ll always be--a _Lad_.”

[Illustration: _Sir John Lade_]

When Sir John was little more than a boy, Johnson, half in earnest,
proposed him as a fitting mate for the author of “Evelina,” so Mrs
Thrale states; and, indeed, Miss Burney herself records a conversation
in 1778 between that lady and the doctor. The inadvisability of the
union, however, soon became apparent, and when Sir John, a little
later, asked Johnson if he would advise him to marry, “I would advise
no man to marry, sir,” replied the great man, “who is not likely to
propagate understanding”; but the baronet, who doubtless thought this
was an excellent joke, and as such intended, crowned his follies by
espousing a woman of more than doubtful character. When Sir John met
his future wife, she was a servant at a house of ill-fame in Broad
Street, St Giles, and, rightly or wrongly, was credited with having
been the mistress of Jack Rann, the highwayman, better known as
“Sixteen-string Jack,” who deservedly ended his career on the gallows
in 1774. Marriage did not apparently mend her manners or her morals,
for, according to Huish--who, it must, however, be admitted, was an
arrant scandalmonger--she was for some time the mistress of the Duke of
York, and also acted as procuress for the Prince of Wales; while her
command of bad language was so remarkable that the Prince used to say
of any foul-mouthed man: “He speaks like Letty Lade.”

Like her husband, Lady Lade was a fine whip, and many stories are told
of her prowess as a driver of a four-in-hand.

   “More than one steed Letitia’s empire feels,
    Who sits triumphant o’er the flying wheels;
    And, as she guides them through th’ admiring throng,
    With what an air she smacks the silken thong.

    Graceful as John, she moderates the reins;
    And whistles sweet her diuretic strains;
    _Sesostris_-like, such charioteers as these
    May drive six harness’d princes, if they please.”

Lady Lade offered to drive a coach against another tooled by a
sister-whip eight miles over Newmarket Heath for five hundred guineas a
side, but, when it came to the point, no one had sufficient confidence
to take up the wager. There is, however, an account of another race
in which she participated: “Lady Lade and Mrs Hodges are to have a
curricle race at Newmarket, at the next Spring Meeting, and the horses
are now in training. It is to be a five-mile course, and great sport
is expected. The construction of the traces is to be on a plan similar
to that of which Lord March, now Marquis of Queensberry, won his
famous match against time. The odds, at present, are in favour of Lady
Lade. She runs a grey mare, which is said to be the best horse in the
Baronet’s stalls.”

Like the rest of his set, Sir John spent his patrimony and fell upon
evil days, which ended, in 1814, in imprisonment for debt in the King’s
Bench, being, as Creevey happily puts it, “reduced to beggary by having
kept such good company.” Some arrangement was made with his creditors,
and Sir John was released; whereupon Lord Anglesea went to the Prince
of Wales, and insisted upon his giving Lade five hundred a year out
of his Privy Purse--no easy task, one may imagine, for “Prinney” was
not given to providing for his old friends. William IV. continued the
annuity, but reduced it to three hundred pounds, and it was feared that
at his death it would be discontinued. However, when the matter was put
before Queen Victoria, she, hearing that Sir John was in his eightieth
year, generously expressed the intention to pay the pension, which she
put as a charge on her Privy Purse, for the rest of his life. Sir John
was thus freed from anxiety, but he did not long enjoy her Majesty’s
bounty, for he died on 10th February 1838, having outlived his wife by
thirteen years.

A more interesting and a more intelligent man was George Hanger, who
born in 1751, and, after attending a preparatory school, was sent to
Eton and Göttingen, and was gazetted in January 1771, an ensign in the
first regiment of Foot Guards. In the army he distinguished himself
chiefly by his harum-scarum mode of living, and by his adventures,
most of which were of too delicate a nature to bear repetition, though
his quaint “Memoirs” throw a light upon the company he kept. He met a
beautiful gipsy girl, styled by him “the lovely Ægyptea of Norwood,”
who, according to his account, had an enchanting voice, a pretty taste
for music, and played charmingly on the dulcimer. She won his heart
with a song, the refrain of which ran:

   “Tom Tinker’s my true love,
      And I am his dear;
    And all the world over,
      His budget I’ll bear.”

He married her according to the rites of the tribe, introduced her to
his brother officers, and bragged to them of her love and fidelity;
but, alas! the song which enchanted him was based, not upon fiction,
but upon fact, and after Hanger had lived in the tents with his
inamorata for a couple of weeks, he awoke one morning to learn she had
run off with a bandy-legged tinker.

For some years he remained in the Foot Guards, where he was very
popular with his brother officers; but in 1776 he threw up his
commission in anger at someone being promoted over his head, unjustly,
as he thought. His early love of soldiering, however, was not yet
abated, and he sought and obtained a captaincy in the Hessian Jäger
corps, which had been hired by the British Government to go to America.
He was delighted with his new uniform--a short, blue coat with gold
frogs, and a very broad sword-belt--and, thus attired, swaggered
about the town in great spirits, to the accompaniment of his friends’
laughter. During the siege of Charlestown he was aide-de-camp to Sir
Henry Clinton; he was wounded in an action at Charlottetown in 1780,
and two years later was appointed Major in Tarleton’s Light Dragoons,
which regiment, however, was disbanded in 1783, when Hanger was given
the brevet rank of Colonel, and placed on half pay.

At the close of the war Hanger left America for England, but his
affairs were in such an unsettled state that he thought it advisable
to go direct to Calais, where he remained until his friend, Richard
Tattersall, could arrange his affairs. Hanger attributed his insolvency
at this time to the fact that the lawyer to whom he had given a power
of attorney having died, his estate was sold for the benefit of
the mortgagee at half its value. This is probably true, but it is
certainly only a half-truth, for his embarrassment was mainly caused
by his extravagance when he was in the Foot Guards. He did not often
play cards, but he was passionately fond of the turf, kept a stable at
Newmarket, and bet heavily on all occasions, though it is said that
on the whole he was a considerable winner, and it is recorded that he
won no less than seven thousand pounds on the race between Shark and
Leviathan. His pay in the Foot Guards of four shillings a day did not,
of course, suffice even for his mess-bills, and he wasted much money on
dissipation, and more on his clothes. “I was extremely extravagant in
my dress,” he admitted. “For one winter’s dress-clothes only it cost me
nine hundred pounds. I was always handsomely dressed at every birthday;
but for one in particular I put myself to a very great expense, having
two suits for that day. My morning vestments cost me near eighty
pounds, and those for the ball above one hundred and eighty. It was a
satin coat _brodé en plain et sur les coutures_, and the first satin
coat that had ever made its appearance in this country. Shortly after,
satin dress-clothes became common among well-dressed men.”[2]

[2] “Life, Adventures, and Opinions of Colonel George Hanger.”

On his return to England, Hanger stayed with Tattersall for a year,
and then was engaged in the recruiting service of the Honourable East
India Company at a salary which, with commission, never amounted to
less than six hundred pounds a year; and he was also appointed, with a
further three hundred pounds a year, an equerry to the Prince of Wales,
with whom he was on very intimate terms.

The next few years were the happiest of his life, but misfortune soon
overcame him. His employment under the East India Company came to an
abrupt end owing to a dispute between the Board of Control and the
Company, relative to the building of a barrack in this country to
receive the East India recruits prior to embarkation, which ended in a
change of the whole system of recruiting, when Hanger’s services were
no longer required. This was bad enough, but worse was to come, for
when he had served as equerry for four years, the Prince of Wales’s
embarrassed affairs were arranged by Parliament, which, making the
essential economies, dismissed Hanger.

When this happened, having no means whatever with which to meet some
comparatively trifling debts, he surrendered to the Court of King’s
Bench, and was imprisoned within the Rules from June 1798 until April
in the following year, when the successful issue of a lawsuit enabled
him to compound with his creditors. “Twice have I begun the world
anew; I trust the present century will be more favourable to me than
the past,” he wrote in his “Memoirs”; and it is much to his credit
that instead of whining and sponging on his friends, having only a
capital of forty pounds, he started in the business--he called it the
profession--of coal-merchant.

According to Cyrus Redding, who used to meet him at the house of Dr
Wolcot (“Peter Pindar”), Hanger had fallen out of favour with the
Prince by administering a severe reproof to that personage and to
the Duke of York for their use of abominable language, and was no
longer invited to Carlton House