EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ADVENTURERS.*
Tins is the title which more exactly expresses the subject of the book which its author has dubbed with the more romantic one of Kings and Queens of an Hour. It consists of sketches of persons of the adventurer order, who rose from little or nothing to be conspicuous characters for a while in the society of the eighteenth or the beginning of the present century. Only one of them, Theodore of Corsica, who may be considered as the epononymous hero of the book, was ever a king, though Mrs- Fitzherbert may be considered as having a moral claim to be considered a queen. The "hour," we presume, refers to the time consumed by Mr. Fitzgerald over the composition of each sketch. He does, indeed, state in his preface that "the collection of the incidents that follow has been the work of many years," yet the great majority of the sketches, such as those of the Gunnings and Fox's Duchess of Devonshire, cannct be said to be the result of original research of any prolonged or agonising kind. But if the collection of materials has taken a long time, the arrangement of them certainly has not, to judge from the result. Grammar is a thing which Mr. Fitzgerald evidently despises. The correspondence of relatives and antecedents is a piece of pedantry un- dreamt of in his philosophy of style. It is with the.greatest • Kings and Queens of an Hour. By Percy Fitzzerali. 2 vols. Loudon: Tinge}, Brothers. 1883.
difficulty, sometimes, that we can discover whom he is talking about. Nor is it easy to distinguish between the author's quotations and his own remarks, as inverted commas are strewn wildly over his pages, and seem to be thrown in gratis where. ever he thinks he is getting dull. Yet notwithstanding all the faults of style and grammar, some of which are extremely irritating, and though the book is the book of an inveterate bookmaker, it must be allowed that it is a very amusing and interesting one.
The most novel and the best written story is the first one, of Theodore of Corsica. This extraordinary man, who was seemingly a German baron, had married the daughter of an Irish nobleman, had deserted her, and after a stormy youth as a hanger-on of the dissipated Courts and diplomatists of Europe, thought he saw an opportunity for winning a throne to himself in the island of Corsica. That hapless island—the Ireland of the Mediterranean—was then under the dominion of Genoa, hut it was in a chronic state of revolt against its Lords, who misgoverned in their own interests through a Genoese army of occupation and a Genoese "party of ascendancy." But at this time, 1731, the island was quite out of hand, and the Genoese Republic were hiring and begging troops from Spain, France, or the Emperor. Theodore, who was a dependent of the House of Wiirtemberg, one of whose Princes was in command of some German troops in the island, entered into communica- tion with some Corsican chiefs who had gone over to Genoa to negotiate and had been detained as hostages, and held out to thdm hopes of succour from influential quarters. At length, the Deputies offered the leadership to Theodore himself, an offer of whi-1 he was not slow to take advantage. Having tried to get help from Spain and from Constantinople, he went over to Tunis, and getting some assistance from the Bey early in April,1736— the exact date Mr. Fitzgerald, with his usual slipshodness, does not give—be landed in the Bay of Aleria, with two or three ships laden with muskets and shoes. On April 15th he w as elected King of Corsica, and a regular constitution was drawn up, with an executive council, a budget, and all the rest of it. He -set up a bodyguard of three hundred men, lived in a palace protected by two brass guns, established an order of knight- hood, distributed titles of nobility, and issued a coinage, of which specimens are still to be seen. The new king -showed considerable ability in dealing with the means at his disposal, and organised the peasant militia into a military force strong enough to drive the G-enoese within the walls of Bastia, and besiege them there. But the succours from without which he had promisel the Corsicans never arrived, whether in the shape of men, money, or means for carrying on the war. His new subjects became suspicious and discontented, and at length, seven months after his arrival, he had to leave his kingdom in the hands of administrators, and sally forth in quest of the needful assistance. He tried all round Europe for it, while for two years the Corsicans held the Genoese at bay, and declared their fidelity to "King Theodore, whom God preserve!" When at last he had succeeded in getting some Dutch and English merchants to load some ships for him at Amsterdam, he sailed for Corsica again. But, meanwhile, the Genoese had invoked the aid of the French, and poor Theodore found them in possession of part of the island, while the rest was embroiled in civil war. Moreover, the Dutch supercargo would not allow the vessels to load their goods without payment, and payment was not forthcoming. The French and Genoese fleet came up, and the poor King had to sail away for Naples, and abandon his kingdom and people to their fate. For several years more he wandered about trying to get help to recover his kingdom, but at length he was arrested for debt in England, and lodged in the King's Bench Prison. In England the poor King was the subject of many bad jokes, made in still worse taste, by Horace Walpole and others, who ought to have known better. At length, twenty Tears after his coronation, he died at a tailor's in Chapel Street, Soho, and was buried at the expense of a vulgar oilman, who "declared that for once in his life he should like to have the honour of burying a King." This tragi-comic story is, on the whole, well told by the author, but he spoils it by the " damn- able iteration" with which at each incident of the poor King's career he compares him to that very unsavoury hero, Casanova. Most people are, happily, likely to know even less of Casanova than of Theodore, and, therefore, so far as there is any illustration in the comparison, it is obscurum per obscuring. Moreover, the comparison is hard on Theodore, who had at least a. great deal of personal dignity, and really was of great help to the Corsicans, and if he had only succeeded in finding a Lord. Byron to help him, might have established their freedom. After all, he was not more of a selfish adventurer than Napoleon and had considerably more right in Corsica than Maximilian had in Mexico.
The story of Lady Hamilton, which follows, is told more ungrammatically and with less coherence than that of Theo- dore of Corsica. Indeed, as the book goes on, the sentences get wilder and the paragraphs more disconnected, till it seems to sink into a mass of note-book thrown at the reader's head. The careers of Lady Hamilton and Bean Brummel are, however, worked out with tolerable thoroughness. There is a certain curious resemblance between the two, in the real charm and abilities of both, in the way in which their heads were turned. by success, in their abandonment by those who were at least bound to prevent them from falling into utter misery, and in the same miserable ending, in poverty and almost starvation, in a French harbour of refuge. But Lady Hamilton, with all her coarseness, was made of the better stuff of the two ; and though she came from the ranks, perhaps because she came from them, she never so wholly sank as the poor Beau. The wrongs in- flicted on her, too, were greater, and the sharper meanness with which she was " done " by Nelson's brother out of any chance of the provision for which Nelson asked in his last codicil, and. the way in which she was abandoned by him, though he had used her influence to get a great preferment in the Church, im- measurably surpassed the petty contempt which George IV. showed to his former favourite Brummel. But in truth, the perusal of these sketches does not tend to raise one's opinion of the great personages of that time. The royal lover does not appear to advantage in the story of Mrs. Fitzherbert, nor does the haute societe of the time in that of the Duchess of Kingston.
The adventures of Paul Jones are in a less scandal-mongering and sturdier line of history. The panic into which he threw the whole of Great Britain with a flotilla of half-a-dozen frigates suggests unpleasant thoughts as to what might happen now-a- days, if we were really plunged into a European war, and a privateer of the energy and audacity of Paul Jones set himself to harry Liverpool or Hull. It is rather hard on poor Beckford, of Fonthill Abbey, to be placed between Paul Jones and Ireland of the Shakespeare forgeries, though he might console himself with the thought that notoriety makes a man acquainted with strange company. There is a certain appositeness just now about the tale of Ireland's valuable Shakespearian manu- scripts. The same unfortunate limitation of materials which has made Mr. Shapira send to the British Museum the Synagogue rolls off which his primeval sheep-skins were probably cut, made poor Ireland employ "the end of an old rent-roll" for the purpose of Shakespeare's will. He, too, dabbled in ancient pottery, as well as parchments. Nor was his new edition of King Lear any more inferior than the new edition of Deuteronomy now revealed to the world to the docu- ments which they superseded. But the history of such literary impostures is generally pretty much the same. Directly they are placed in the hands of experts they betray themselves, and. are found to indicate their origin by loss uncertain signs than "internal evidence."
We have only space jest to mention that there is a tolerably lively but rambling sketch of Peg Woffington, and rather dull and still more rambling ones of the Miss Ganning,s, the Duchess of Devonshire, and "L. E. L." There is a pointless story of Mr. Eliot, a confused collection of scandals about Sir Philip Francis and Warren Hastings, and a rather perverse account of the early loves of Gibbon and Pitt, with, of course, the incident of Gibbon on his knees and unable to get off them, for which there seems about as much authority as for most of such incidents. But, as we have said, the book is not, on the whole, unamusing, and it is highly to be commended to those who think that by reading more or less spicy scandals about notable persons, they are learning history.
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