ROBERT GRIMSTON.*
THE Hon. Robert Grimston, fourth son of the late and brother of the present Earl of Verulam, was born in 1816. His death, therefore, which occurred in the early spring of last year, can scarcely be called premature. Yet it seemed so to those—and their name was legion—in whose mouths " Bob Grimston" was a household word. It seemed also, and we think quite rightly, to his family and friends that a truthful record should be given to the world of a remarkable man, who deemed everything that he undertook, whether in sport, business, or social life, worth doing well. In Mr. Frederick Gale was found the square peg for the square hole, and his round, unvarnished story of a fine old English gentleman and sportsman is worthy of all com- mendation. Mr. Grimston was not a man of shining parts ; but he had, what Carlyle wilfully and wrongly called "genius," a trans- cendent capacity for taking trouble. Like Frederick the Great's father, he expended an immense amount of "slow, stubborn, broad-shouldered strength in all kinds;" and like "Stumpy," as that father was irreverently called by his offspring, Mr. Grimston had hobbies which he rode very hard indeed. Amusing in- stances of this failing are not wanting in Mr. Gale's book ; but it was a failing which did not in the least affect the sterling worth of Mr. Grimston's character, or render him other than a most agreeable associate. So much as this may be inferred from Mr. Ruskin's description of his brother-undergraduate at Christchurch :—" A man of gentle birth and amiable manners, and of Herculean strength, whose love of doge and horses, and especially of boxing, was stupendous." N ow, " all Mr. Grimston's contemporaries at Oxford agree," says Mr. Gale, "in one opinion, which is that there was not the slightest difference in the Robert Grimston of twenty and the Robert Grimston of sixty. He was Bob' amongst all his friends, and whatever his hobby was he made everyone ride it." Bores, and bores of the first magnitude, are what result, as a rule, from hobbies ridden to death ; but "Bob Grimston " was one of the happy exceptions which confirm that rule. This was owing, no doubt, in some measure, to a vein of eccentricity in his character which had,as he was well aware, its ludicrous aspects for his friends. But something more than this is required to explain why a man so obstinate, " Stumpy " himself not more so, should have been so popular. And this something will be found, in the last resort, to lie in the fact that "Bob Grimston" was a good man,—a good man in the best sense of the words. " Mind," remarked an old Harrovian and Q.C., with much earnestness, to Mr. Gale, " Mind and lay great stress on this point, which I can vouch for from my own experience ; it was not cricket only that the boys learnt from poor old Bob Grimston, but they • The Life of the Hon. Robert Grimston. By Frederick Gale. London : Long- inane, Green, and Co. 1885.
acquired the true principles of chivalrous honour, and they always learnt something good by being in his company, though the lesson was sometimes given in a very homely way."
"I never knew a man," writes another old Harrovian, " who was more constant or more earnest about his church on a Sunday morning. I often used to go with him, formerly, and his attention never flagged for a single moment. When I left the Church of England and joined another communion myself, I felt bound to write and tell him of the fact, and I rather dreaded his answer, for we were bosom friends, and I feared that separating from the Church of England would appear a terrible thing to him. Read his letter, and see how tolerant he was :—
My dear —, Whatever I may think of the step that you have taken, one thing I am sure of, that you have acted from conscientious motives. I hope that our friendship may continue unabated as long as we both live. Indeed, it shall not be my fault if it is otherwise. I will write to you again about the match (the Goose Match at Harrow), which I suppose I may announce as fixed for Tuesday.— Yours very sincerely, Robert Grimston.' " Artless and simple as these testimonials are—and there are not a few more of them in Mr. Gale's volume—they class the man of whom they were written plainly enough. "Bob Grim- ston " was not a Christian hero of Gordon's stamp, any more than he was an admirable Crichton ; but his piety was of the good old-fashioned kind, which assorted very well with his spot- less honour as a sportsman and his straightforward probity as a. man of business. For a man of business Mr. Grimston was, and to some purpose. He never had from his family more than a younger son's allowance, let us say £10,000, at the most. He died worth upwards of £100,000. Verily, Dr. Smiles himself might give his imprimatur to a work which records the career of a man so successful in business. Without being in the least miserly, as may be inferred from the fact that he always rather overpaid his cabmen, Mr. Grimston knew the value of thrift. He would never, as Mr. Gale puts it, _give twenty-one pounds for what was worth twenty ; neither would he give nineteen. In the society of ladies he was the courtly gentleman of the old school. " You should never con- tradict a lady, no matter what she says," was his maxim; "you may say, Oh, indeed !' if the statement is very strong, but nothing more." A good maxim, no doubt, in its way ; but it was as well, perhaps, as not for the man who held it that he never married. There are limits even to the patience of a Griselda.
As a sportsman, Mr. Grimston was not so much remarkable for what he did as for the spirit in which he pursued his favourite pastimes. He was a good pedestrian and swimmer, a fair boxer, a fearless but not very accomplished rider, and a most enthusiastic cricketer. But great cricketers are born, like poets, and are not made ; and Mr. Grimston, unlike his brother Edward, was not a born cricketer. He was no bowler, was a poor fieldsman, and although he took enormous pains to master the art of batting, was never more than a second-rate batsman. He would strike, indeed, at times, such eccentric attitudes, stooping, or rather squatting, to get, as he contended, a sight of the ball, that an old farmer on one occasion roared out to him, "Look out, sir, or you'll be shot sitting." Yet Mr. Grimston's name will be remembered in connection with cricket much longer than the names of many whose skill was far greater than his own. Harrow, more than any other public school, seems to bind to itself with links of steel the memories of its sons—it may be remembered how Byron thought that the scenery round his "beloved Harrow" was second to none in Europe—and Mr.
Grimston was a Harrovian of Harrovians. How he toiled for Harrow cricket nnrestingly till the hand of death arrested him may be read in Mr. Gale's sympathetic pages. When the day of trial came which was to test his labour of love, the feelings of this simple-hearted man were sometimes too much for him, and found vent in rather odd ways. "On one occasion," writes Mr. Gale, " having left Lord's because he could not bear to see Harrow losing, Mr. Grimston went away, and seeing an empty hearse, he hailed the driver, and got up and rode with him, going as far as Primrose Hill, and had the messages sent to him there. On another occasion he sat in the Churchyard of St. John's Wood Church and received the messages there every five minutes." Mr. Grimston was not a betting man, and he felt and expressed the utmost scorn for the " cheery stoicism " which permits an English gentleman "to plunge,' as they call
it in the betting-ring, and then ask the bookmakers for time." But he was not without a touch of that superstition which makes all "plungers " kin :— " At the Eton and Harrow match of 1849, he appeared," says Mr. Gale, " at Lord's with an extraordinary shabby brown coat and a shocking bad hat, of the shape so familiar to those who knew him. He was walking by the tennis-court, with his head down, alone, as was his wont on such occasions, speculating on the chance of the coming struggle, when I heard some one accost him with, Well, Mr. Grimston, will the boys win ?'—' I don't know, sir, I'm sure,' was his reply. I have done all I can, and all I could ; I've got my lucky coat and my lucky hat on, and if they don't win I can do no more.' "
Like all sportsmen who use the pen at all, Mr. Grimston was fond of a Latin quotation. As an old Harrow and Oxford man, he could not puzzle men as Frederick the Great did with his "tot verbas tot spondera ;" or speak, as Victor Hugo
speaks, of the " quid obscurnm " of a battle. But Mr. Grimston did not always quote quite accurately, and it was said of him by his friends that he was the man who was always so very
nearly right. We are not quite certain, though, that Mr. Gale's strictures on Mr. Grimston's little bits of Latin are
always tenable. "Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus" is certainly not what Horace wrote, but something may be, said
in its favour. It is hardly a misquotation so much as a purl osed alteration of " quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus ;" and we need not remind Mr. Gale that " quandoque," in the sense of " aliquando," is a solecism. It is curious also that something can be said for the false quantity which Mr. Gale taxed so merrily. The latter had been explaining to Mr. Grimston why the oft'told tale of the Duke of Queensberry having sent a letter sewn up in a cricket-ball fifty miles in an hour with the aid of twenty-four cricketers was untrue. Mr. Grimston had been very positive of its truth, and exclaimed, when convinced of its absurdity, that if he had been a betting man he would have staked a thousand pounds to one on the view he had previously held. "You see," he added, with a solemnity which from him was amusing enough, "we should never be positive."—" No," answered the artful Mr. Gale, "but many of us are ; for people are constantly quoting, 'Tempora mntantur,' &c., wrong, and declare they are right."—" How wrong P" asked Mr. Grimston. "They can't make a mistake. I can quote it right—' Tempora mntantur et nos mutamur in "—" Go down two places for a false quantity, Mr. Grimston ; that will do very well for the House of Commons, but it is' nos et '; and ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and good scholars, too, make the same mistake that you have just made ; it is a conventional error." Now we must bring ourselves under the fire of Mr. Gale's guns by confessing that we do not know who wrote that well-known line. All that we know is that it was written by no classical author; and it is just possible, we imagine, that the monk, or whoever he was that wrote it, was as heedless of metre as the heartless spectators of the jackdaw of Rheims were of grammar. In any case it would have been rare fun to have coached Mr. Grimston up to cross-examine Mr. Gale on his own misquotation of " Ne sutor ultra crepidam." This is a real mis- quotation, for nothing whatever is gained, and something is lost by changing Pliny's " supra " into " ultra." It is needless, of course, to add that it is a misquotation which has fairly driven the original out of the field ; but Mr. Gale will be amused, perhaps, when he adds it to his list of " conventional errors."
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