Part 67

Mr. Scott broke ground in Parliament in opposition to the famous East India Bill, and began with his favourite topic, the honesty of his own intentions, and the purity of his own conscience. He spoke in respectful terms of Lord North, and more highly still of Mr. Fox; but even to Mr. Fox it was not fitting that so vast an influence should be entrusted. As Brutus said of Cæsar--

"---- he would be crown'd! How that might change his nature,--there's the question."

It was an aggravation of the affliction he felt, that the cause of it should originate with one to whom the nation had so long looked up; a wound from him was doubly painful. Like Joab, he gave the shake of friendship, but the other hand held a dagger, with which he despatched the constitution. Here Mr. Scott, after an apology for alluding to sacred writ, read from the book of Revelation some verses which he regarded as typical of the intended innovations in the affairs of the English East India Company:--"'And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast; and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.' Here," says Mr. Scott, "I believe there is a mistake of six months--the proposed duration of the bill being four years, or forty-eight months. 'And he caused all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.'--Here places, pensions, and peerages are clearly marked out.--'And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the Great'--plainly the East India Company--'is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird.'"

He read a passage from Thucydides to prove that men are more irritated by injustice than by violence, and described the country crying out for a respite, like Desdemona--

"Kill me to-morrow--let me live to-night-- But half-an-hour!"

This strange jumble was well quizzed by Sheridan, and Mr. Scott appears to have found out that rhetorical embellishment was not his line; for his subsequent speeches are less ornate.

In the squibs of the period, their obscurity forms the point of the jokes levelled at him. Thus, among the pretended translations of Lord Belgrave's famous Greek quotation, the following couplet was attributed to him:--

"With metaphysic art his speech he plann'd, And said--what nobody could understand."

A Chancery Jeu-d'Esprit.

Sir John Leach was a famous leader in Chancery in his day; afterwards Vice-Chancellor, and finally Master of the Rolls.

"Nor did he change, but kept in lofty place"

the character assigned to him by Sir George Rose in a jeu-d'esprit, the point of which has suffered a little in the hands of Lord Eldon's biographers, Mr. Twiss and Lord Campbell. The true text, we know from the highest authority, ran thus:--

"Mr. Leech Made a speech, Angry, neat, and wrong; Mr. Hart, On the other part, Was right, and dull, and long. Mr. Parker Made the case darker, Which was dark enough without; Mr. Cooke Cited a book, And the Chancellor said, 'I doubt.'"

Mr. Twiss good-naturedly suggests that "Parker" was taken merely for the rhyme; but we are assured that this was not so, and that the verses represent the actual order and identities of the argument. By the favour of the accomplished author we are enabled to lay before our readers his own history of this production. "In my earliest years at the Bar, sitting idle and listless rather than listening, on the back benches of the court, Vesey, junior, the reporter, put his notebook into my hand, saying, 'Rose, I am obliged to go away. If anything occurs, take a note for me.' When he returned, I gave him back his notebook, and in it the fair report, in effect, of what had taken place in his absence; and of course thought no more about it. My short report was so far en règle, that it came out in numbers, though certainly lege solutis. It was about four or five years afterwards--when I was beginning to get into business--that I had a motion to make before the Chancellor. Taking up the paper (the Morning Chronicle), at breakfast, I there, to my surprise and alarm, saw my unfortunate report. 'Here's a pretty business!' said I; 'pretty chance have I, having thus made myself known to the Court as satirizing both Bench and Bar.' Well, as Twiss truly narrates, I made my motion. The Chancellor told me to 'take nothing' by it, and added, 'and, Mr. Rose, in this case, the Chancellor does not doubt.' But Twiss has not told the whole story. The anecdote, as he left it, conveys the notion of a taunting displeased retaliation, and reminds one of the Scotch judge, who, after pronouncing sentence of death upon a former companion whom he had found it difficult to beat at chess, is alleged to have added, 'And now, Donald, my man, I've checkmated you for ance!'

"If Twiss had applied to me (I wish he had, for Lord Eldon's sake), I might have told him what Lord Eldon, in his usual consideration for young beginners, further did. Thinking that I might be (as I in truth was) rather disconcerted at so unexpected a contretemps, he sent me down a note to the effect that, so far from being offended, he had been much pleased with a playfulness attributed to me, and hoped, now that business was approaching me, I should still find leisure for some relaxation; and he was afterwards invariably courteous and kind; nay, not only promised me a silk gown, but actually--credite Posteri--invited me to dinner. I have never known how that scrap (which, like a Chancery suite which it reports, promises to be sine-final) found its way into print."--Note, in the Quarterly Review.

Hanging by Compact.

In 1827, there was recorded in the London Magazine the following strange instance of

"The wearied and most loathed worldly life."

Some few years ago, two fellows were observed by a patrol sitting by a lamp-post in the New Road; and on closely watching them, he discovered that one was tying up the other (who offered no resistance) by the neck. The patrol interfered, to prevent such a strange kind of murder, when he was assailed by both, and pretty considerably beaten for his good offices. The watchmen, however, poured in, and the parties were secured. On examination next morning, it appeared that the men had been gambling; that one had lost all his money to the other, and had at last proposed to stake his clothes. The winner demurred: observing, that he could not strip his adversary naked, in the event of his losing. "Oh," replied the other, "do not give yourself any uneasiness about that. If I lose, I shall be unable to live, and you shall hang me, and take my clothes after I am dead; as I shall then, you know, have no occasion for them." The proposed arrangement was assented to; and the fellow having lost, was quietly submitting to the terms of the treaty, when he was intercepted by the patrol, whose impertinent interference he so angrily resented.

The Ambassador Floored.

Coleridge, in his Table Talk, truly says, "What dull coxcombs your diplomatists at home generally are. I remember dining at Mr. Frere's once in company with Canning, and a few other interesting men. Just before dinner, Lord ---- called on Frere, and asked him to dinner. From the moment of his entry, he began to talk to the whole party, and in French, all of us being genuine English; and I was told his French was execrable. He had followed the Russian army into France and had seen a good deal of the great men concerned in the war. Of none of those things did he say a word; but went on, sometimes in English, and sometimes in French, gabbling about cookery, dress, and the like. At last he paused for a little, and I said a few words, remarking how a great image may be reduced to the ridiculous and contemptible by bringing the constituent parts into prominent detail, and mentioned the grandeur of the Deluge, and the preservation of life in Genesis and the Paradise Lost, and the ludicrous effect produced by Drayton's description in his Noah's Flood:--

"'And now the beasts are walking from the wood, As well of ravine as that chew the cud, The king of beasts his fury doth suppress, And to the Ark leads down the lioness; The bull for his beloved mate doth low, And to the Ark brings on the fair-eyed cow.'

"Hereupon, Lord ---- resumed, and spoke in raptures of a picture which he had lately seen of Noah's Ark, and said the animals were all marching two and two, the little ones first, and that the elephants came last in great majesty, and filled up the foreground. 'Ah! no doubt, my Lord,' said Canning; 'your elephants, wise fellows! stayed behind to pack up their trunks!' This floored the ambassador for half-an-hour."

"The Dutch Mail."

When, in 1827, Sir Richard Phillips published his Personal Tour through the Midland Counties, he related the following amusing incident:--

"When I was in Nottingham, I fell in with a plain elderly man, an ancient reader of the Leicester Herald, a paper which I published for some years in the halcyon days of my youth. Its reputation secured to me many a hearty shake by the hand, accompanied by the watery eye of warm feeling as I passed through the Midland counties. I abandoned it in 1795, for the Monthly Magazine and exchanged Leicester for London. This ancient reader, hearing I was in Nottingham, came to me with a certain paper in his hand, to call me to account for the wearisome hours which an article in it had cost him and his friends. I looked at it and saw it headed 'Dutch Mail,' and it professed to be a column of original Dutch, which this honest man had been labouring to translate, for he said he had not met with any other specimen of Dutch. The sight of it brought the following circumstance to my recollection:--

"On the evening before one of our publications, my men and a boy were frolicking in the printing-office, and they overturned two or three columns of the paper in type. The chief point was to get ready in some way for the Nottingham and Derby coaches, which at four in the morning required 400 or 500 papers. After every exertion we were short nearly a column, but there stood in the galleys a tempting column of pie. Now, unlettered readers, mark--pie is a jumble of odd letters, gathered from the floor, &c., of a printing-office, and set on end, in any manner, to be distributed at leisure in their proper places. Some letters are topsy-turvy, often ten or twelve consonants come together, and then as many vowels, with as whimsical a juxtaposition of stops. It suddenly bethought me that this might be thought 'Dutch,' and, after writing as a head, 'Dutch Mail,' I subjoined a statement that, 'just as our paper was going to press, the Dutch Mail had arrived, but as we had not time to make a translation, we had inserted its intelligence in the original.' I then overcame the scruples of my overseer, and the pie was made up to the extent wanted, and off it went as original Dutch, into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire! In a few hours other matter, in plain English, supplied its place for our local publication. Of course all the linguists, schoolmasters, high-bred village politicians, and correspondents of the Ladies' Diary, set their wits to work to translate my Dutch, and I once had a collection of letters containing speculations on the subject, or demanding a literal translation of that which appeared to be so intricate. How the Dutch could read it was incomprehensible! My Nottingham quidnunc at times had, for above four-and-thirty years, bestowed on it his anxious attention. I told him the story, and he left me, vowing, that as I had deceived him, he would never believe any newspaper again."

Bad Spelling.