Current Literature
MR. DU QUESNE By John Beresford
Any friend of Parson Woodforde is sure of a welcome. Mr. Du Quesne, who was his near neighbour for twenty-three years . and was often mentioned in the Diary, is now introduced by Mr. John Beresford himself in a collection of essays (Oxford University Press, 7s. 6d.). He too was a country parson, and 'though "an open and unabashed pluralist," he lived most of the time at Berry's Hall, in his parish of Honingham, Norfolk. He and Parson Woodforde first dined together in January, .17'77, when the Diarist records what must have seemed to him poor fare : A Leg of Mutton boiled, a batter Pudding, and a couple of Ducks." Mr. Du Quesne was sociable, kindly, and .undistinguished, engrossed in household matters and the care of his glebe, and although he came of an adventurous Huguenot family his greatest adventure was a wet, cold, chaise journey to St. Davids. " I steal a few minutes," he wrote to Parson Woodforde, "to acquaint you that, After numberless Disap- pointments, Difficulties, Dangers, Distresses, and Vexations, I arrived here on Friday at 2 o'clock, with dislocated Joints, sore Bones, Bruises, and black and blue arms and sides' arid
m concussions of the Brains, from the most rough and dis- agreeably Hill Roads that ever were passed." He died in 1793, and his epitaph records that he was beloved by his parishioners " in an almost unexampled Degree." The shorter essays in this book range from Judith Beresford, the "sweet but sh nt-lived flower" of Wesley's Journal, to the popularisa- tion of the umbrella in 1778 by a dauntless valet, and Sug- gestions of the Wordsworthian in Gray in an admirable essay on his travels with Horace Walpole. No one knows the leisured byways of the eighteenth century better than Mr. Beresford. He writes of them with almost more care than such men as Du Quesne warrant, but with an urbanity which his subjects themselves would appreciate.
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