Chapter 2
Polonius would perhaps object against a "devouring hand." But the survival of--at least--three fairly current citations from a practically forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few words upon the writer himself, and his chief performance in verse.
The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 or 1695 at Skreens, near Chelmsford, in Essex, his father, Francis Bramston, being the fourth son of Sir Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose father again was Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, generally known as "the elder."[5]James Bramston was admitted to Westminster School in 1708. In 1713 he became a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, proceeding B.A. in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was made Vicar of Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, both of which Sussex livings he held until his death in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope. His first published verses (1715) were on Dr. Radcliffe. In 1729 he printed _The Art of Politicks_, one of the many contemporary imitations of the _Ars Poetica_; and in 1733 _The Man of Taste_. He also wrote a mediocre variation on the _Splendid Shilling_ of John Philips, entitled _The Crooked Sixpence_, 1743. Beyond a statement in Dallaway's _Sussex_ that "he [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame and proofs of whose colloquial wit are still remembered"; and the supplementary information that, as incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual _modus_ of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring Park of Petworth, nothing more seems to have been recorded of him.
Notes:
[4] Whose _grand tenue_ or holiday wear--Cervantes tells us--was "a doublet of fine cloth and _velvet breeches_ and shoes to match." (ch. 1).
[5] Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the "watery incoherent _Autobiography_"--as Carlyle calls it--published by the Camden Society in 1845.
_The Crooked Sixpence_ is, at best, an imitation of an imitation; and as a Miltonic _pastiche_ does not excel that of Philips, or rival the more serious _Lewesdon Hill_ of Crowe. _The Art of Politicks_, in its turn, would need a fairly long commentary to make what is only moderately interesting moderately intelligible, while eighteenth-century copies of Horace's letter to the Pisos are "plentiful as blackberries." But _The Man of Taste_, based, as it is, on the presentment of a never extinct type, the connoisseur against nature, is still worthy of passing notice.
In the sub-title of the poem, it is declared to be "Occasion'd by an Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that Subject" [i.e. "Taste"]. This was what is now known as No. 4 of the _Moral Essays_, "On the Use of Riches." But its first title In 1731 was "Of Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of _The Man of Taste_, William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal antipathy, promptly attacked Pope, Burlington, and his own _bete noire_, Burlington's architect, William Kent. Pope, to whom Burlington acts as hodman, is depicted whitewashing Burlington Gate, Piccadilly, which is labelled "Taste," and over which rises Kent's statue, subserviently supported at the angles of the pediment by Raphael and Michelangelo. In his task, the poet, a deformed figure in a tye-wig, bountifully bespatters the passers-by, particularly the chariot of the Duke of Chandos. The satire was not very brilliant or ingenious; but its meaning was clear. Pope was prudent enough to make no reply; though, as Mr. G.S. Layard shows in his _Suppressed Plates_, it seems that the print was, or was sought to be, called in by those concerned. Bramston's poem, which succeeded in 1733, does not enter into the quarrel, it may be because of the anger aroused by the pictorial reply. But if--as announced on its title-page,--it was suggested by Pope's epistle, it would also seem to have borrowed its name from Hogarth's caricature.
It was first issued in folio by Pope's publisher, Lawton Gilliver of Fleet Street, and has a frontispiece engraved by Gerard Vandergucht. This depicts a wide-skirted, effeminate-looking personage, carrying a long cane with a head fantastically carved, and surrounded by various objects of art. In the background rises what is apparently intended for the temple of a formal garden; and behind this again, a winged ass capers skittishly upon the summit of Mount Helicon. As might be anticipated, the poem is in the heroic measure of Pope. But though many of its couplets are compact and pointed, Bramston has not yet learned from his model the art of varying his pausation, and the period closes his second line with the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect, noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is made to profess the errors satirised, and to be the unabashed mouthpiece of his own fatuity, "Mine," say the concluding lines,--
Mine are the gallant Schemes of Politesse, For books, and buildings, politicks, and dress. This is _True Taste_, and whoso likes it not, Is blockhead, coxcomb, puppy, fool, and sot.
One is insensibly reminded of a quotation from P.L. Courier, made in the _Cornhill_ many years since by the once famous "Jacob Omnium" when replying controversially to the author of _Ionica_, "_Je vois_"--says Courier, after recapitulating a string of abusive epithets hurled at him by his opponent--"_je vois ce qu'il veut dire: il entend que lui et moi sont d'avis different; et c'est la sa maniere de s'exprimer_." It was also the manner of our Man of Taste.
The second line of the above quotation from Bramston gives us four of the things upon which his hero lays down the law. Let us see what he says about literature. As a professing critic he prefers books with notes:--
Tho' _Blackmore's_ works my soul with raptures fill, With notes by _Bently_ they'd be better still.
Swift he detests--not of course for detestable qualities, but because he is so universally admired. In poetry he holds by rhyme as opposed to blank verse:--
Verse without rhyme I never could endure, Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure. To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see, _Milton's_ an _universal Blank_ to me ... _Thompson _[_sic_] write blank, but know that for that reason These lines shall live, when thine are out of season. Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet's lays As _London_ Ladies owe their shape to stays.
In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the reigning fashion. But if we may assume Bramston himself to approve what his hero condemns, he must have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had but sparse advocates at this time, or for some time to come. Neither Gray, nor Johnson, nor Goldsmith were ever reconciled to what the last of them styles "this unharmonious measure." Goldsmith, in particular, would probably have been in exact agreement with the couplet as to the controlling powers of rhyme. "If rhymes, therefore," he writes, in the _Enquiry into Polite Learning_,[6] "be more difficult [than blank verse], for that very reason, I would have our poets write in rhyme. Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain, plays highest by diminishing the aperture."[7]
Notes:
[6] Ed. 1759, p. 151.
[7] Montaigne has a somewhat similar illustration: "As _Cleanthes_ The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is said, that as the voice being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, at last issueth forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sentence cunningly and closely couched in measure-keeping Posie, darts it selfe forth more furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke". (_Essayes_, bk. i. ch. xxv. (Florio's translation).
The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is Colley Cibber, who, however, deserves the laurel he wears, not for _The Careless Husband_, his best comedy, but for his Epilogues and other Plays.
It pleases me, that _Pope_ unlaurell'd goes, While _Cibber_ wears the Bays for Play-house Prose, So _Britain's_ Monarch once uncover'd sate, While _Bradshaw_ bully'd in a broad-brimmed hat,--
a reminiscence of King Charles's trial which might have been added to Bramston stock quotations. The productions of "Curll's chaste press" are also this connoisseur's favourite reading,--the lives of players in particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in Carlyie's essay on Scott.[8] Among these the memoirs of Cibber's "Lady Betty Modish," Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster Abbey, are not obscurely indicated.
Note:
[8] "It has been said. 'There are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day.'"
In morals our friend--as might be expected _circa_ l730--is a Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his text-book: his breviary the _Fable of the Bees_;--
T' Improve In Morals _Mandevil_ I read, And _Tyndal's_ Scruples are my settled Creed. I travell'd early, and I soon saw through Religion all, e'er I was twenty-two. Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure, When ropes or opium can my ease procure? When money's gone, and I no debts can pay, Self-murder is an honourable way. As _Pasaran_ directs I'd end my life, And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife.
He would, of course, have done nothing of the kind; nor, for the matter of that, did his Piedmontese preceptor.[9]
Note:
[9] Count Passeran was a freethinking nobleman who wrote _A Philosophical Discourse on Death_, in which he defended suicide, though he refrained from resorting to it himself. Pope refers to him in the _Epilogue to the Satires_, Dialogue i. 124:--
If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man, And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran!
_Nil admirari_ is the motto of the Man of Taste in Building, where he is naturally at home. He can see no symmetry in the Banqueting House, or in St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even in St. Paul's itself.
Sure wretched _Wren_ was taught by bungling _Jones_, To murder mortar, and disfigure stones!
"Substantial" Vanbrugh he likes-=chiefly because his work would make "such noble ruins." Cost is his sole criterion, and here he, too, seems to glance obliquely at Canons:--
_Dorick, Ionick,_ shall not there be found, But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound.
But this was moderate, as the Edgware "folly" reached L250,000. In Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley:--
Does it not merit the beholder's praise, What's high to sink? and what is low to raise? Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood, And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood. Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste, Expence and alteration show a _Taste_.
As a connoisseur of Painting this enlightened virtuoso is given over to Hogarth's hated dealers in the Black Masters:--
In curious paintings I'm exceeding nice, And know their several beauties by their _Price_. _Auctions_ and _Sales_ I constantly attend, But chuse my pictures by a _skilful Friend_, Originals and copies much the same, The picture's value is the _painter's name_.[10]
Of Sculpture he says--
In spite of _Addison_ and ancient _Rome_, Sir _Cloudesly Shovel's_ is my fav'rite tomb.[11] How oft have I with admiration stood, To view some City-magistrate in wood? I gaze with pleasure on a Lord May'r's head Cast with propriety in gilded lead,--
the allusion being obviously to Cheere's manufactory of such popular garden decorations at Hyde Park Corner.
Notes:
[10]: See _post_, "M. Ronquet on the Arts," p. 51.
[11]: "Sir _Cloudesly Shovel's_ Monument has very often given me great Offence: Instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the distinguishing Character of that plain, gallant Man, he is represented on his Tomb [in Westminster Abbey] by the Figure of a Beau, dressed in a long Perriwig, and reposing himself upon Velvet Cushions under a Canopy of State" (_Spectator_, March 30, 1711).
In Coins and Medals, true to his instinct for liking the worst the best, he prefers the modern to the antique. In Music, with Hogarth's Rake two years later, he is all for that "Dagon of the nobility and gentry," imported song:--
Without _Italian_, or without an ear, To _Bononcini's_ musick I adhere;--
though he confesses to a partiality for the bagpipe on the ground that your true Briton "loves a grumbling noise," and he favours organs and the popular oratorios. But his "top talent is a bill of fare":--
Sir Loins and rumps of beef offend my eyes,[12] Pleas'd with frogs fricass[e]ed, and coxcomb-pies. Dishes I chuse though little, yet genteel, _Snails_[13] the first course, and _Peepers_[14] crown the meal. Pigs heads with hair on, much my fancy please, I love young colly-flowers if stew'd in cheese, And give ten guineas for a pint of peas! No tatling servants to my table come, My Grace is _Silence_, and my waiter _Dumb_.
He is not without his aspirations.
Could I the _priviledge_ of _Peer_ procure, The rich I'd bully, and oppress the poor. To _give_ is wrong, but it is wronger still, On any terms to _pay_ a tradesman's bill. I'd make the insolent Mechanicks stay, And keep my ready-money all for _play_. I'd try if any pleasure could be found In _tossing-up_ for twenty thousand pound. Had I whole Counties, I to _White's_ would go, And set lands, woods, and rivers at a throw. But should I meet with an unlucky run, And at a throw be gloriously undone; My _debts of honour_ I'd discharge the first, Let all my _lawful creditors_ be curst.
Notes:
[12] As they did those of Goldsmith's "Beau Tibbs." "I hate your immense loads of meat ... extreme disgusting to those who are in the least acquainted with high life" (_Citizen of the World_, 1762, i. 241).
[13]: The edible or Roman snail (_Helix pomatia_) is still known to continental cuisines--and gipsy camps. It was introduced into England as an epicure's dish in the seventeenth century.
[14]: Young chickens.
Here he perfectly exemplifies that connexion between connoisseurship and play which Fielding discovers in Book xiii. of _Tom Jones_.[15] An anecdote of C.J. Fox aptly exhibits the final couplet in action, and proves that fifty years later, at least, the same convenient code was in operation. Fox once won about eight thousand pounds at cards. Thereupon an eager creditor promptly presented himself, and pressed for payment. "Impossible, Sir," replied Fox," I must first discharge my debts of honour." The creditor expostulated. "Well, Sir, give me your bond." The bond was delivered to Fox, who tore it up and flung the pieces into the fire. "Now, Sir," said he, "my debt to you is a debt of honour," and immediately paid him.[16]
Notes:
[15] "But the science of gaming is that which above all others employs their thoughts [i.e. the thoughts of the 'young gentlemen of our times']. These are the studies of their graver hours, while for their amusements they have the vast circle of connoisseurship, painting, music, statuary, and natural philosophy, or rather _unnatural_, which deals in the wonderful, and knows nothing of nature, except her monsters and imperfections" (ch. v.).
[16] _Table Talk of Samuel Rogers_ [by Dyce], 1856, p. 73.
But we must abridge our levies on Pope's imitator. In Dress the Man of Taste's aim seems to have been to emulate his own footman, and at this point comes in the already quoted reference to velvet "inexpressibles"--(a word which, the reader may be interested to learn, is as old as 1793). His "pleasures," as might be expected, like those of Goldsmith's Switzers, "are but low"--
To boon companions I my time would give, With players, pimps, and parasites I'd live. I would with _Jockeys_ from _Newmarket_ dine, And to _Rough-riders_ give my choicest wine ... My ev'nings all I would with _sharpers_ spend, And make the _Thief-catcher_ my bosom friend. In _Fig_, the Prize-fighter, by day delight, And sup with _Colly Cibber_ ev'ry night.
At which point--and probably in his cups--we leave our misguided fine gentleman of 1733, doubtless a fair sample of many of his class under the second George, and not wholly unknown under that monarch's successors--even to this hour. _Le jour va passer; mais la folie ne passera pas!_
A parting quotation may serve to illustrate one of those changes of pronunciation which have taken place in so many English words. Speaking of his villa, or country-box, the Man of Taste says--
Pots o'er the door I'll place like Cits balconies, Which _Bently_ calls the _Gardens of Adonis_.
To make this a peg for a dissertation on the jars of lettuce and fennel grown by the Greeks for the annual Adonis festivals, is needless. But it may be noted that Bramston, with those of his day,--Swift excepted,--scans the "o" in balcony long, a practice which continued far into the nineteenth century. "Contemplate," said Rogers, "is bad enough; but balcony makes me sick."[17] And even in 1857, two years after Rogers's death, the late Frederick Locker, writing of _Piccadilly_, speaks of "Old Q's" well-known window in that thoroughfare as "Primrose balcony."
Note:
[17:]_Table Talk_, 1856, p. 248.
THE PASSIONATE PRINTER TO HIS LOVE
(_Whose name is Amanda._)
With Apologies to the Shade of Christopher Marlowe.
Come live with me and be my Dear; And till that happy bond shall lapse, I'll set your Poutings in _Brevier_,[l8] Your Praises in the largest CAPS.
There's _Diamond_--'tis for your Eyes; There's _Ruby_--that will match your Lips; _Pearl_, for your Teeth; and _Minion_-size. To suit your dainty Finger-tips.
In _Nonpareil_ I'll put your Face; In _Rubric_ shall your Blushes rise; There is no _Bourgeois_ in _your_ Case; Your _Form_ can never need "_Revise_."
Your Cheek seems "_Ready for the Press_"; Your Laugh as _Clarendon_ is clear; There's more distinction in your Dress Than in the oldest _Elzevir_.
So with me live, and with me die; And may no "FINIS" e'er intrude To break into mere "_Printers' Pie_" The Type of our Beatitude!
(ERRATUM.--If my suit you flout, And choose some happier Youth to wed, 'Tis but to cross AMANDA out, And read another name instead.)
Note:
[18] "Pronounced Bre-veer" (Printers' Vocabulary).
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS
M. Rouquet's book is a rare duodecimo of some two hundred pages, bound in sheep, which, in the copy before us, has reached that particular stage of disintegration when the scarfskin, without much persuasion, peels away in long strips. Its title is--_L'Etat des Arts, en Angleterre. Par M. Rouquet, de l'Academie Royale de Peinture & de Sculpture_; and it is "_imprime a Paris_" though it was to be obtained from John Nourse, "_Libraire dans le_ Strand, _proche_ Temple-barr"--a well-known importer of foreign books, and one of Henry Fielding's publishers. The date is 1755, being the twenty-eighth year of the reign of His Majesty King George the Second--a reign not generally regarded as favourable to art of any kind. In what month of 1755 the little volume was first put forth does not appear; but it must have been before October, when Nourse issued an English version. There is a dedication, in the approved French fashion, to the Marquis de Marigny, "_Directeur & Ordonnateur General de ses Batimens, Jardins, Arts, Academies & Manufactures_" to Lewis the Fifteenth, above which is a delicate headpiece by M. Charles-Nicolas Cochin (the greatest of the family), where a couple of that artist's well-nourished _amorini_, insecurely attached to festoons, distribute palms and laurels in vacuity under a coroneted oval displaying fishes. For Monsieur Abel-Francois Poisson, Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, was the younger brother of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the celebrated Marquise de Pompadour. Cochin's etching is dated "1754"; and the "Approbation" at the end of the volume bears his signature in his capacity of _Censeur_.
Of the "M. Rouquet" of the title-page biography tells us little; but it may be well, before speaking of his book, to bring that little together. He was a Swiss Protestant of French extraction, born at Geneva in 1702. His Christian names were Jean-Andre; and he had come to England from his native land towards the close of the reign of George the First. Many of his restless compatriots also sought these favoured shores. Labelye, who rose from a barber's shop to be the architect of London Bridge; Liotard, once regarded as a rival of Reynolds; Michael Moser, eventually Keeper of the Royal Academy, had all migrated from the "stormy mansions" where, in the words of Goldsmith's philosophic Wanderer--
Winter ling'ring chills the lap of May.
Like Moser, Rouquet was a chaser and an enameller. He lodged on the south side of Leicester Fields, in a house afterwards the residence of another Switzer of the same craft, that miserable Theodore Gardelle, who in 1761 murdered his landlady, Mrs. King. Of Rouquet's activities as an artist in England there are scant particulars. The ordinary authorities affirm that he imitated and rivalled the popular miniaturist and enameller, Christian Zincke, who retired from practice in 1746; and he is loosely described as "the companion of Hogarth, Garrick, Foote, and the wits of the day." Of his relations with Foote and Garrick there is scant record; but with Hogarth, his near neighbour in the Fields, he was certainly well acquainted, since in 1746 he prepared explanations in French for a number of Hogarth's prints. These took the form of letters to a friend at Paris, and are supposed to have been, if not actually inspired, at least approved by the painter. They usually accompanied all the sets of Hogarth's engravings which went abroad; and, according to George Steevens, it was Hogarth's intention ultimately to have them translated and enlarged. Rouquet followed these a little later by a separate description of "The March to Finchley," designed specially for the edification of Marshal Foucquet de Belle-Isle, who, when the former letters had been written, was a prisoner of war at Windsor. In a brief introduction to this last, the author, hitherto unnamed, is spoken of as "_Mr. Rouquet, connu par ses Outrages d'Email_."