Part 7

“The historian of _Sir Joseph Banks_ and _The Emperor of Morocco_, of the _Pilgrims and the Peas_, of the _Royal Academy_, and of _Mr Whitebread’s Brewing-Vat_, the bard in whom the nation and the King delighted,” Hazlitt wrote the year before the satirist died, “is old and blind, but still merry and wise; remembering how he has made the world laugh in his time, and not repenting of the mirth he has given; with an involuntary smile lighted up at the mad pranks of his Muse, and the lucky hits of his pen-- ‘faint pictures of those flashes of his spirit, that were wont to set the table in a roar’; like his own expiring taper, bright and fitful to the last; tagging a rhyme or conning his own epitaph; and waiting for the last summons, grateful and contented.” Indeed, while the coarseness and offensiveness of many of Wolcot’s works must be admitted and deplored, it is impossible not to like the man, for he was such a jovial wight, so well able to appreciate a joke against himself and ready to join in the laugh, a very prince of good fellows in an age of less severe restrictions in taste and morality.

Sterne’s Eliza

Not Swift so loved his Stella, Scarron his Maintenon, or Waller his Sacharissa, as I will love, and sing thee, my bride elect! All these names, eminent as they were, shall give place to thine, Eliza.” Thus Sterne in a letter to Mrs Elizabeth Draper, written in the early part of the year 1767; and though, in spite of this fervent protestation, not Stella, nor Maintenon, nor Sacharissa has paled before Eliza, yet most assuredly Eliza has come to be ranked with them among the heroines of romance.

Of the antecedents of Mrs Draper nothing apparently was generally known to writers on the subject until 1897, when Mr Thomas Seccombe, in the article in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ on William Sclater, Rector of Pitminster, showed that her descent could be traced from William’s father, Anthony. Anthony Sclater, born in 1520, was appointed in 1570 Rector of Leighton Buzzard, which benefice he held until his death in 1620, when he was succeeded in this clerical office by a younger son, Christopher. Christopher’s son William served in the Civil Wars as a Cornet of Horse, and subsequently entered the Church. He was presented in 1666 to the living of St James’s, Clerkenwell, and later became Rector of Hadley. He died in 1690, having outlived by five years his son Francis. Francis had a son Christopher, born in 1679, who held the livings of Loughton and Chingford, in Essex, married in 1707 Elizabeth, daughter of John May, of Working, Hants, and by her had thirteen children. The tenth son, May, born on 29th October 1719, went out to India, probably as a cadet in the service of the East India Company, and there married a Miss Whitehall, who bore him three daughters, Elizabeth (Sterne’s Eliza), born on 5th April 1744, Mary, and Louisa. The only other children of Christopher with which this narrative is concerned are Elizabeth, who married Dr Thomas Pickering, Vicar of St Sepulchre’s, and Richard, the fourth son, born in 1712, who became an alderman of the City of London.[16]

[16] From Alderman Richard Sclater is descended the present Lord Basing, by whose generous courtesy the present writer has had access to the unpublished letters, preserved at Hoddington House, written from India by Elizabeth Sclater, afterwards Mrs Draper, to members of her family in England. Passages from these letters are printed in this article.

When his daughters were born, May Sclater was factor of Anjengo, on the Malabar coast, and it was long assumed that his girls were brought up there. Even so late as 1893, Mr James Douglas, the author of “Bombay and Western India,” gave credence to the legend, and after stating that there were very few Europeans at Anjengo, “it seems a marvel,” he added, “how, never having been in Europe, Eliza should yet have been able to carry herself and attract so much attention there from men who, whatever were their morals, claimed a first position in society and letters.” However, as a matter of fact, like most children born in India of English parents, Eliza and her sisters were at an early age sent home for the sake of their health.

In England Eliza stayed alternately with her aunt, Mrs Pickering, and with her uncle, Richard, for whose eldest children, Thomas Mathew and Elizabeth, she conceived an enduring affection. Not until she was in her fourteenth year did she return to her father, now a widower, and she arrived two days after Christmas, 1757, at Bombay, where he then resided.

“I was never half so much rejoiced at going to any ball in my life as when we first saw the land,” (she wrote to her cousin in England, Elizabeth Sclater, 13th March 1758). “The Dutch people are white, but their servants are all black, they wear nothing at all about them but a little piece of rag about their waist which to us at first appeared very shocking.”

“My Papa’s house is the best in Bombay, and where a great deal of company comes every day after dinner.”

Among the company that came to May Sclater’s house was Daniel Draper, who, entering the East India Company’s service in or about 1749, had in the intervening nine years risen to a fairly good position. In those days lads went out to India at an early age, and Draper, in 1757, may well have been no more than thirty, though Dr Sidney Lee has suggested that he was at least four years older. Draper fell in love with Eliza, and married her on 28th July 1758, she being then but fourteen. Such marriages, however, were not then uncommon in India. Two children were born of this union, a boy in 1759, and a girl in October 1761.

Mrs Draper suffered from ill-health, and in 1765, with her husband and children, she came to England. The children were taken to an establishment at Enfield, where Anglo-Indian children were cared for during the absence of their parents in the tropical zone, and presently Draper had to return to his post in Bombay. Mrs Draper, however, remained in England to recover her strength. She stayed with relatives of her mother and father, but with her movements we are not here concerned until she was temporarily domiciled in London during the winter of 1766. It was not until December of that year that she met Sterne, probably at the town house in Gerrard Street, Soho, of William James and his wife--the “Mr and Mrs J.” of Sterne’s published correspondence.

William James, Commodore of the Bombay Marine, having amassed a fortune by prize-money and mercantile enterprises, retired from the service at the age of eight and thirty, and came to England in 1759, when he purchased an estate at Eltham, near Blackheath, and married Anne, daughter of Edmund Goddard, of Hartham, in Wiltshire. Presently he became chairman of the East India Company, and in 1778, five years before his death, he was made a baronet. When Sterne first became acquainted with the Jameses cannot now be determined, but probably it was not earlier than after his return from the second visit to the Continent. It is evident, however, that he was on very intimate terms with them at the end of 1766, as his references to them in his letters to Mrs Draper show, though they are mentioned for the first time to his daughter, then with her mother at Marseilles, in a letter dated 23rd February 1767. In this letter we learn that the gossips were already busy coupling Sterne’s name with Mrs Draper’s.

“I do not wish to know who was the busy fool, who made your mother uneasy about Mrs Draper. ’Tis true I have a friendship for her, but not to infatuation--I believe I have judgment enough to discern hers, and every woman’s faults. I honour thy mother for her answer--‘that she wished not to be informed, and begged him to drop the subject.’”

Nor was Mrs Sterne’s informant the only person who disapproved of the relations of Sterne and Mrs Draper.

“The ----’s, by heavens, are worthless! I have heard enough to tremble at the articulation of the name.--How could you, Eliza, leave them (or suffer them to leave you, rather), with impressions the least favourable? I have told thee enough to plant disgust against their treachery to thee, to the last hour of thy life! Yet still, thou toldest Mrs James at last, that thou believest they affectionately love thee.--Her delicacy to my Eliza, and true regard to her ease of mind, have saved thee from hearing more glaring proofs of their baseness.--For God’s sake write not to them; nor foul thy fair character with such polluted hearts. _They_ love thee! What proof? Is it their actions that say so? or their zeal for those attachments, which do thee honour, and make thee happy? or their tenderness for thy fame? No.--But they _weep_, and say _tender things_.--Adieu to such for ever. Mrs James’s honest heart revolts against the idea of ever returning them one visit. I honour her, and I honour thee, for almost every act of thy life, but this blind partiality for an unworthy being.”

The remonstrances of these friends of Eliza were not so outrageous as Sterne deemed them. There was, indeed, some ground for gossip, though perhaps not for scandal--enough, certainly, to alarm people interested in the lady: Sterne’s visits to Mrs Draper were too frequent, and Mrs Draper was so indiscreet as to visit Sterne at his lodgings in Old Bond Street and dine there with him _tête-à-tête_. There has been much discussion as to whether the relations of the Brahmin and the Brahmine, as they loved to call each other, were innocent or guilty; but there can be no doubt that the intimacy was not carried to the last extreme. “I have had no commerce whatever with the sex--not even with my wife--these fifteen years,” Sterne told his physicians shortly after Eliza had returned to India. This in itself would not be conclusive evidence, though there could have been no reason for him to lie to these people; but the fact that he wrote down this conversation in a Journal intended exclusively for the eye of Mrs Draper makes it certain that his assertion was accurate--at least, so far as he and she were concerned. A man would scarcely trouble falsely to tell his mistress in confidence that he had had no intimacy with her. The Jameses most certainly believed in the innocence of the friendship, else they could scarcely have countenanced it; and not even Thackeray, who shares with John Croft the distinction of being Sterne’s most envenomed critic, could have believed that the following letter (whether ultimately despatched or not) could have been written by a guilty man.

LAURENCE STERNE TO DANIEL DRAPER

“Sir, I own it, Sir, that the writing a Letter to a gentleman I have not the honour to be known to, and a Letter likewise upon no kind of business (in the Ideas of the World) is a little out of the common course of Things--but I’m so myself--and the Impulse which makes me take up my pen is out of the Common way too--for it arises from the honest pain I should feel in avowing in so great esteem and friendship as I bear Mrs Draper--If I did not wish and hope to extend it to Mr Draper also. I fell in Love with your Wife--but ’tis a Love you would honour me for--for ’tis so like that I bear my own daughter who is a good creature, that I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it--the moment I had--that Moment would have been the last. I wish it had been in my power to have been of true use to Mrs Draper at this Distance from her best Protector--I have bestowed a great deal of pains (or rather I should say pleasure) upon her head--her heart needs none--and her head as little as any Daughter of Eve’s--and indeed less than any it has been my fate to converse with for some years.--I wish I could make myself of any Service to Mrs Draper whilst she is in India--and I in the world--for worldly affairs I could be of none.--I wish you, dear Sir, many years’ happiness. ’Tis a part of my Litany to pray for her health and Life--She is too good to be lost--and I would out of pure zeal take a pilgrimage to Mecca to seek a Medicine.”[17]

[17] British Museum, Add. MSS. 34527.

If the intimacy was, as is here contended, not carried to the last extreme, there is no doubt of the vigour with which Sterne and his Brahmine flirted, and therefore Sterne cannot be acquitted of insincerity when he wrote to Daniel Draper that he looked upon Eliza as a daughter. But if there is little that is paternal in the few letters of his to Mrs Draper that have been preserved, on the other hand there is nothing from which the conclusion of undue intimacy can be built up.

It may be taken for granted that Mrs Draper’s feelings were not very deeply engaged by Sterne. A woman of three and twenty does not often find such enduring attraction in a man of four and fifty as a man of that age does in a woman more than thirty years his junior. But Sterne had fame and undoubted powers of fascination, and Mrs Draper had in her composition an innocent vanity that induced her to encourage him. The homage of one of the most famous men in England was a compliment not lightly to be ignored; and, being flattered, Eliza, unhappy at home, was far from unwilling to enjoy herself abroad. She was clever and bright--perhaps a little bitter, too, remembering that she had been married before she was old enough to know what marriage meant, to a man with uncongenial tastes, dour, and bad-tempered. It is to her credit that she never told Sterne of her marital infelicity, though candid friends left him in no doubt as to her relations with her husband. “Mrs James sunk my heart with an infamous account of Draper and his detested character,” Sterne wrote in the “Journal to Eliza” on 17th April 1767, a few weeks after the lady to whom it was addressed had sailed for India.

Eliza is a figure so fascinating to the world interested in the personal side of literary history that a few pages may perhaps be devoted to tracing her life after her acquaintance with Sterne. She was undoubtedly an attractive woman, and made conquest of others than the author of “Tristram Shandy” during this visit to England. The Abbé Raynal, a man about the same age as Sterne, fell a victim to her charms, and expressed his passion in a strange and wild piece of bombast, which he inserted in the second edition of his “History of the Indies.”

It was not only to men of middle age that Mrs Draper appealed, for her cousin and playmate of her youth, Thomas Mathew Sclater, was one of her most devoted admirers. That she was fascinating may be taken for granted, but wherein lay her attractiveness is not so clear. Raynal laid more stress on the qualities of her mind than on her appearance. Sterne, too, by his own not too artless confession, was in the first instance drawn to her by something other than her good looks.

“I have just returned from our dear Mrs James’s, where I have been talking of thee for three hours” (he wrote to her when they had become well acquainted). “She has got your picture, and likes it; but Marriot, and some other judges, agree that mine is the better, and expressive of a sweeter character. But what is that to the original? yet I acknowledge that hers is a picture for the world, and mine is calculated only to please a very sincere friend, or sentimental philosopher.--In the one, you are dressed in smiles, and with all the advantage of silks, pearls, and ermine;--in the other, simple as a vestal--appearing the good girl nature made you: which, to me, conveys an idea of more unaffected sweetness, than Mrs Draper, habited for conquest, in a birthday suit, with her countenance animated, and her dimples visible.--If I remember right, Eliza, you endeavoured to collect every charm of your person into your face, with more than _common_ care, the day you sat for Mrs James.--Your colour, too, brightened; and your eyes shone with more than usual brilliancy. I then requested you to come simple and unadorned when you sat for me--knowing (as I see with _unprejudiced_ eyes) that you could receive no addition from the silk-worm’s aid, or jeweller’s polish. Let me now tell you a truth, which, I believe, I have uttered before. When I first saw you, I beheld you as an object of compassion, and as a very plain woman. The mode of your dress (though fashionable) disfigured you. But nothing now could render you such, but the being solicitous to make yourself admired as a handsome one.--You are not handsome, Eliza, nor is yours a face that will please the tenth part of your beholders--but are something more; for I scruple not to tell you, I never saw so intelligent, so animated, so good a countenance; nor was there (nor ever will be) that man of sense, tenderness, and feeling, in your company three hours, that was not (or will not be) your admirer, or friend, in consequence of it; that is, if you assume, or assumed, no character foreign to your own, but appeared the artless being nature designed you for. A something in your eyes, and voice, you possess in a degree more persuasive than any woman I ever saw, read, or heard of. But it is that bewitching sort of nameless excellence that men of nice sensibility alone can be touched with.”

While all are agreed that Mrs Draper had beauty of expression rather than perfectly formed features, there was given a description of her as having “an appearance of artless innocence, a transparent complexion, consequent upon delicate health, but without any sallowness, brilliant eyes, a melodious voice, an intellectual countenance, unusually lighted up with much animation and expressing a sweet gentleness of disposition.”[18] She had, we are told, engaging manners and numerous accomplishments. She talked well and wrote well, and could play the piano and the guitar. Her faults were a tendency to pecuniary extravagance and a liking for admiration--which latter trait, in her correspondence, she admitted and bewailed. She was also, it must be admitted, a most arrant flirt.

[18] _Bombay Quarterly Review_, January 1857, p. 191. The article is anonymous, and can scarcely have been written by one who knew Mrs Draper, though he may well have been acquainted with those who had.

MRS DRAPER TO HER COUSIN, THOMAS MATHEW SCLATER

“_Earl Chatham_, May 2nd, 1767. (Off Santiago.)

“... From the vilest spot of earth I ever saw, and inhabited by the ugliest of Beings--I greet my beloved cousin--St Jago the place--a charming passage to it--fair winds and fine weather all the way. Health, too, my friend, is once more returned to her enthusiastic votary. I am all Life, air, and spirits--who’d have thought it--considering me in the light of an Exile. And how do you, my Sclater?--and how sat the thoughts of my departure on your Eyes? and how the reality of it? I want you to answer me a thousand questions, yet hope not for an answer to them for many, many months. I am.... Did you receive a letter I wrote you from the Downs, with a copy of one enclosed from Sterne to me with his sermons and ‘Shandy’? I sent such to you, notwithstanding the Bagatelle airs I give myself--my heart heaves with sighs, and my eyes betray its agitating emotions, every time I think of England and my valuable connections there--ah, my Sclater, I almost wish I had not re-visited that charming country, or that it had been my fate to have resided in it for ever, but in the first instance the Lord’s will be done, mine I hope may be accomplished in the second.”

MRS DRAPER TO THOMAS MATHEW SCLATER

“_Earl Chatham_, November 29th, 1767. (Off the Malabar Coast.)

“They all tell me I’m so improved--nothing--I say to what I was in England--nobody can contradict the assertion--and if it adds to my consequence, you know--it is good policy. Always self to be the subject of your pen (you say) Eliza--why not, my dear cousin? Why have I not as good a right to tell you of my perfections as Montaigne had to divulge to the World he loved white wine better than red? with several other Whims, Capricios, bodily complaints, infirmities of temper, &c., &c.--of the old Gascoignes, not but I love his essays better than most modern ones--and think those that have branded him with the name of Egotist--deserve to be Debar’d the pleasure of speaking of--or looking at themselves--how is it we love to laugh, and yet we do not often approve the person who feeds that voracious passion? Human nature this! vile rogue!--’tis a bad picture--however there’s a great resemblance.... Once a year is tax enough on a tender Conscience, to sit down premeditatedly to write fibs--and let it not enter your imagination that you are to correspond with me in such terms as your heart dictates. No, my dear Sclater--such a conduct though perfectly innocent (and to me worth all the studied periods of Labour’d Eloquence) would be offensive to my Husband--whose humour I now am resolved to study--and if possible conform to if the most punctilious attention--can render me necessary to his happiness ... be so--Honour--prudence--and the interest of my beloved children ... and the necessary Sacrifice--and _I will make it_. Opposing his will will not do--let me now try, if the conforming to it, in every particular will better my condition--it is my wish, Sclater--it is my ambition (indeed it is)--to be more distinguished as a good wife than as the agreeable woman I am in your partial Eyes even--’tis true I have vanity enough to think I have understanding sufficient to give laws to my Family, but as that cannot be, and Providence for wise purposes constituted the male the Head--I will endeavour to act an underpart with grace. ‘Where much is given, much is required.’ I will think of this proverb and learn humility.”

MRS DRAPER TO HER AUNT, MRS PICKERING

“Bombay, High Meadow, _March 21st, 1768_.

“I found my Husband in possession of health, and a good post. Providence will, I hope, continue to him the blessing of the one and the Directors at home, that of the other. My agreeable sister is now a widow, and so much improved in mind and person, as to be a very interesting object. May she be so far conscious of her own worth as to avoid throwing herself away a second time.”

MRS DRAPER TO THOMAS MATHEW SCLATER

“Tellichery, _May 1769_.

“Mr D. has lost his beneficial post at Bombay, and is, by order of the Company, now Chief in one of the Factories subordinate to it. This was a terrible blow to us at first, but use has in some measure reconciled the mortifying change, though we have no prospect of acquiring such an independence here as will enable us to settle in England for many, very many years, as the country for some time has been the seat of war, and still continues subject to frequent alarms from the growing power of an ambitious usurper. I’ve no doubt but a general massacre of the English will ensue, if he once more visits this coast. Our fortifications are a wretched burlesque upon such. Troops not better soldiers than trained Bands, and too few in number to cope with so able a general and politician.