A Jacobite Poet

IN 1679 the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, visited Cambridge University. She was a little over twenty, very graceful and witty and cunning. Even Burnet found it hard to speak ill of her at that time : " all her diversion was innocent cheerfulness, with a little mixture of satirical wit." George Granville, a thirteen-year-old Master of Arts and already a poet, read her an address in couplets in the library of Trinity College. The couplets were more formal and sedate than the poems " to Myra" which followed, for these later poems were the fruit of his eyes, and remembering his age and the rank and beauty of the girl, it is not hard to recapture the emotion of that moment when he dedicated himself, like a troubadour, to her service :

" No warning of th'approaching flame ; Swiftly, like sudden death, it came,"

he wrote in a poem which. I wish Miss Handasyde had quoted, for she has been a little less than just to her subject. lier biography is a brilliant example of by-way scholarship, comparable to Miss Waddell's The Wandering Scholars and Miss Tompkins' The Popular Navel in England for its grace And erudition ; she writes with insight of Granville's

verse

" The generaTinaPression made by his songs is of something sweet and sad and infinitely faint, like the tinklings of the musical boxes whose glassy roulades come slightly muffled from the dust of last century. He was old-fashioned even in his own day ; for his poems, published in the cold dawn of the Age of Reason, belong by sentiment and even by date to the warm uncritical twilight of the Restoration " but she has, I think, missed that touch of fatality which

raises Lansdowne's life to the level of tragedy ; minor tragedy, for everything he touched from a play to a con- spiracy was doomed to be minor.

Mary of Modena ruined him as she ruined many more important men. If she had not visited Cambridge that year Granville would have found a safer inspiration ; he might have lived and died quite happily a minor poet and dramatist. During the reign of William he passed a pleasant exile from court, writing poetry and improving Shakespeare. He had admirers and flatterers : Pope immortalized him in Windsor Forest : " What Muse for Granville can refuse to

sing ? " ; Dryden in beautifully-weighted verse resigned him his laurels--a gesture a little spoilt by the actor Powell's

comment (one remembers Colley Cibber's study of " giddy " Powell, how " he naturally lov'd to set other people wrong ") : " this great Wit, with his Treacherous Memory, forgets,

that lie had given away his Laurells upon record, no less than twice before, viz., once to Mr. Congreve, and another time to- Mr. Southerne." But during that swift moment in Trinity Library Granville had mortgaged his future'.

Inevitably when William died he was drawn into politics, trying to hold a balance between the brilliant and erratic Bolingbroke and cautious, trimming Harley. He married, too. unluckily, to become later, through his hopeless idealism, a complaisant husband, shutting his eyes with miserable fidelity to his wife's affairs. With that instinct for doing the right thing, which sometimes conflicted with the still deeper instinct for being on the wrong side, he inscribed these lines on a glass in which her toast was drunk :

" If I not love you, Villiers, more Than ever Mortal loved before, With such a Passion fixt and sure, As ev'n Possession could not cure, Never to cease but with my Breath ; May then this Bumper be my Death."

He was not unfaithful to Myra : all his loves were platonic (in spite of children).

After Queen Anne's death he soon became involved in the same chain of circumstances as drew the fiery Atterbury from the see of Rochester to a peevish senility in Rome. It began with secret letters, proceeded inevitabl3,, through house searchings (manuscripts of unpublished poems were burned by his servants, who mistook them for dangerous

documents), imprisonment, financial ruin and exile on the Continent. Walpole's government was hardly more corrupt than the Jacobite court. Miss Handasyde describes in detail the libels and bickerings and jealousies of Paris. It was not an air which suited the foolish idealism but unselfish fidelity of Lansdowne ; he was happy for a while, raised to the dizzy height of a shadow dukedom, but the bubble eventually burst. He had heard plenty of other men falsely accused of treachery, and his own turn came. He was

called a traitor by James's sister-in-law, the Princess of Turenne, at the Hotel de Bouillon, " where all France a.ssembles." He wrote a letter of pathetic literary dignity to James III, he paraphrased Shakespeare and declared : " Cod knows, sir, I have had no occasion to betray you ; if I had consider'd my fortune I needed but to have forsaken

you." The son of Mary of Modena did not reply and Lansdowne made his peace with Hanover.

He had ten more years of life, spent much of it in literary controversy (characteristically his feud was against the dead and on behalf of the dead), revised an old play and called it (again characteristically) Once a Lover ; and always a Lover. It brought, Miss Handasyde writes, " a pale reflection of the glitter and polish of Congreve on to the dull and respectable

stage of George Lillo and Moore." His niece was a little shocked by it ; her uncle was old-fashioned. He died a fortnight after his wife, who had buzzed busily from infidelity

to infidelity till the end. His life had not been a very happy one. Fortune had consistently frowned on him, fobbing him off with occasional fictitious successes, like his shadow -dukedom. He had written with some wit : "Pickle and false to others she may he. I can complain but of her constancy."

GRAHAM GREENIID