A WIT OF THE PAST.*

WE confess to have found the volume before us rather dreary as well as desultory reading. The latter, of course, it pro- fesses to be ; but a reproduction in this form of the facetia3 of a wit who delighted our fathers seems to pall upon the palate. Perhaps our taste in jokes has changed. Perhaps, as so many think, the taste for jokes is dying out altogether before the practical advance. But, in any case, we rather wonder at the extraordinary value set upon his wit, and that alone, by which Joseph Jekyll, nephew and namesake of the Sir Joseph Jekyll who, as Master of the Rolls in the reign of George II., first made the family name of note, became a member of the best society both in Paris and in London, a successful barrister upon the Western Circuit, a Whig journalist • Correspondence of Mr. Joseph Jekyll with his Sister-in-Law, Lady Gertrude Sloane Stanley, 1818.1838. Preceded by some Letters sal-Wen to his Father from Prance, 1775. Edited, with a brief Memoir, by the Hon. Algernon Bourke. London : John Murray. 1894.

upon the Morning Chronicle and Evening Statesman, a Whig Member of Parliament for Calne—the borough which also returned Charles To wnshend, Macaulay, and Lowe—Bencher of the Inner Temple, Reader, Treasurer, and Queen's Counsel, Solicitor-General to the Prince of Wales, and finally Master in Chancery. The latter appointment was generally condemned, and it was said that it was forced upon Lord Eldon by the Prince of Wales, who was reported to have called upon the Lord Chancellor and shut himself up with him in his rooms, condoling with Lady Eldon because she would never see her husband again till he had promised to make Jekyll a Master in Chancery. "Unbounded impudence, popular manners, and total ignorance of law" were the three qualifications to which a successful wit and Parlia- mentary counsel of later days is said to have attributed his success ; and this seems to have been something of the Jekyll view. As a politician he never appears to have had any influence. "A frequent speaker in Parliament, ran- corous in language, feeble in argument, and empty of ideas ; few people applaud his rising, and everybody is glad when he sits down," was Lord Colchester's uncomplimentary sum-

mary of the man whom he otherwise speaks of as "first-rate for convivial wit and pleasantry, and admired by all." It is

as the convivial wit and pleasant fellow of his time that this volume brings Mr. Jekyll up for judgment, a maker of many jokes and a recorder of many more ; and we are but quoting from the preface which introduces him when we say that "it is a melancholy fact that jokes do not preserve their flavour through the centuries ; and it must be confessed that much of Jekyll's wit, which is said to have convulsed the town a hundred years ago, to-day leaves us unmoved. At a time when puns were reckoned funny, Jekyll was, no doubt, much admired, both as a sayer of good things and a writer of smart squibs to the newspapers. But the pun is to-day as dead as Queen Anne ; and jokes which have little else to recommend them remain unread But Jekyll enjoyed a great reputation for his day. The Bar, we are told, was continually convulsed with his sallies." As for the Bar, the readers of contemporary newspapers, as well as of past memoirs, know that is easily convulsed, wondering often why. As to the absolute death of the pun we are doubtful, and still believe, with Shirley Brooks,

that even in that line, "a joke of beauty may be a joy for ever." But bad puns are execrable, and good ones very rare. The late Mr. Byron, the dramatist, was probably equal in that line to the joker of any generation, though little known beyond a small circle. No Jekyll ever came near the man who could remark in a moment, on seeing an eminent poet lunching on cold mince-pie, that he must be doing so to "give him mince- pie-ration." The use of the " " is perfect. Jekyll's spirit

of fun, however, was very pleasant for himself, and preserved him in comfort and wealth and enjoyment and perennial good spirits up to eighty-four. He chose his own friends, and was a welcome companion to all the men of arts and letters, and a frequent breakfaster at St. James's Palace. He was intimate with Lady Blessington's set and the circle of Holland House, and Sir Walter Scott met him in 1828, when the great novelist tells us that the jokes "were fired like minute-guns, and with an effect not much less melancholy." Everybody did not care about them, even then.

As for gossip and scandal, which are more ephemeral than even the much-abused pun, these pages abound with them to an unlimited extent. The letters after the first two chapters, which contain merely the boy Jekyll's descriptions—letters to his father on his first tour, when he saw a burglar executed in Paris, was present at the toilette of Madame du Barry, and had pronounced opinions upon French art, society, and drama —are entirely a collection written from time to time to Lady Gertrude Sloane Stanley, his sister-in-law,--or, more strictly speaking, the wife of his wife's brother. He had married Miss Sloane, the daughter of Sir Hans Sloane, who died early, and whose names seem to give sufficient reason for his pronounced cockneyism. Lady Gertrude was the daughter of an Earl of Carlisle, and must have been a sympathetic and pleasant correspondent. But publication seventy years afterwards seems a severe retribution for such wisdom as this, written from Roehamptom, November 24th, 1824 :—

"The Hollands have been in town a few days on their way to Brighton. Joseph went two or three times to the play with them. Lady Holland seems in bad health, and looks wretchedly. The Bedfords are also going to Brighton; and as the Windsor Cottage streams with water, and the Castle is torn to pieces. I think His Majesty will also be driven to the Pavilion. Lord Ellenborough and his bride are absent from this place, so I have not seen her attractions, though I hear she is very pretty.—December 16th. I don't envy you the amusement of selling a house or repairing a house, or rummaging papers. I too am bored with removing plate, and books, and pictures from Wargrave Hill, and preparing the place for the purpose of letting it, as you know my detesta- tion of the country, and my opinion that every day spent there is a day given to the grave before one's decease."

" Scandal ! scandal! scandal!" as the old gossip writes in one of his next letters. The cockneyism of the man, which is the text of his character and the key to his career, is the most amusing part about him, and the most consistently portrayed. In one place he throws out the entertaining suggestion that anybody may get in a London house the fall advantage of all that the country can give in addition to it, by asking the clergyman of the parish to dine on Sunday, and instruct- ing his man to bring no papers or letters upon Monday morning. He is throughout a Londoner of the Londoners ; full of rapid and off-hand judgments upon art and letters and people from the Londoner's point of view, and never troubled for a moment, apparently, with any doubts of his -own judgment or his right to judge. We select the following passages almost at random, in evidence of the ground over which our correspondent ranges, and of his form of humour :— " The system of Burking, I hope, will proceed, as it really ascer- tains the true value of one's acquaintance. I know a great many of those one calls friends in London, whom the surgeons, when dead, will think worth ten pounds, and for whom, when alive,

nobody would give half the money They are playing theatricals at Lord Harrington's, and, they say, so well that I regret that I have not gone there. Coughing and sneezing and the Catholic Bill are all that one hears in London, and the opera clonne are as hoarse as if they had been marched with their dead compatriots by Napoleon to Moscow. The wheels of the doctors catch fire in the streets, and there is a subscription to convert the Serpentine River into lemonade and barley- water and gargles.

Edward writes that Dublin is very gay, and that an Irishman declared he was the youngest child that ever came into the world, as he was born on the very day after his mother was married. . . . . . A gens d'arme [sic] at Paris stopped a passenger to look at his passport, and asked him from whence he came. Je suis né h Paris,' replied the passenger.—' Ah, menteur,' said

the gens d'arme, je Us dans votre passeport, nez aquilin.' In the year 1745,a soldier returning after the victory at Culloden is said to have upbraided the keeper of an alehouse, on his march back : ' You now ungratefully refuse me good ale and quarters, which you promised if we beat the rebels ; nay, you then said we were the pillars of the State.'—' You rascal,' replied

Boniface, I said caterpillars.' George Cholmondeley, whose father was a poor parson, and whose mother was a sister of Peg Woffington, the celebrated actress of ancient days, has left to his only son ten thousand a year, and one hundred and twenty thousand pounds to the two Archbishops, to be distributed in charity. How such a fortune has been accumu- lated it is difficult to calculate, for he had ordy an office (Receiver- General of Excise). Old Parson Cholmondeley, then in the Guards, ran away at the Battle of Dettingen, and was found snug and safe in a ditch with a cold fowl in his pocket. He then went into holy orders, which were less troublesome than those of the War 'Office. John Wilkes told me it was beautiful to hear with what emphasis and fervour the old parson read that part of the Litany

which deprecates battle and murder and sudden death.'

In these rapid days, how many men are there to be found who would take the trouble to transcribe such jokes as some of these in letters to a sister-in-law ? Personal reminiscences have taken the place of correspondence of the kind, under the law of change of fashion which rules these things as well as others ; and perhaps the immediate publication which they involve is better than the bottling-up of second-rate anecdotes for indefinite years. As for the jekyllian epigrams, of which specimens are scattered through the pages, we hardly know what to say of them. Here is one :—

"Our parson called, and took French leave, But took his tithe-pig too ; The ungodly call for a farewell, The godly for a due."

And another upon Pitt's taxation With his tax upon powder and tax upon tea, Not a beau will be left—not so much as bo-hea!"

There are a good many others of the same kind ; but these will do. Are they not rather like those epigrams of one Sir Benjamin Backbite which the author was so fond of quoting to Lady Sneerwell and her circle ? But it must be admitted that Mr. Jekyll is quite as full of appreciation of the epigrams of others, drawing for his letters at great length on Canning and others, notably on James Smith, who, to his credit, seems to have been a pet of his. But the specimens from some are very old "chestnuts" indeed, and others seem scarcely worthy of the reputation of "Rejected Addresses." But one of them

had such results that it is worth quoting. Andrew Strachan, the King's printer, a very able man, had lost the use of his legs, and Smith sent him an epigram :— "Your lower limbs seemed far from stout, When late I saw you walk ; The cause I instantly found out Soon as I heard you talk. The powers that prop the body's length, In due proportion spread : In yours concentred, all the strength Is got into the head."

And the gratified Strachau left him £250. To a lady who sent him an epigram of hers, short and by no means bad, he answered with one of his own which did not get such pay :—

" Blest be that silly goose who first Gave belles her quills to taper, And blest that dirty beggar, too, Whose rags first gave them paper."

Are we wrong in wondering at our Quid Nunc's great reputa- tion, and musing on the sallies that convulsed the Bar? None the less, the book before us will repay the kind of perusal which the writer of the preface seems contented to anticipate for it; and though we think that much of the rather unsavoury scandal which defaces it here and there, might as well have

been edited away, we envy the good temper and happy disposi- tion of the old lawyer who was delighted to find himself once described as "the Nestor of beaux esprits of the day." They shine on us a little sadly those beaux esprits, in a posthumous sparkle. Perhaps it leads one to estimate all the more highly the variety of the "wit that lives" on the strength of its reality. How names like Sheridan and Goldsmith live the lesser down ! And how astonished a spirit like Richard Brinsley's would be to see himself described on a playbill as "Dick Sheridan." He may have been " Sherry " to his intimates. But we have never heard that he was Dick,—as Steele was.