CHAPTER X SATIRES AND LAMPOONS Origin of the expression "lampoon": Wills's Coffee-house the centre of distribution for satires and lampoons: the hired lampooners of the day: the scurrility and baseness of Pope's attacks: Sir Charles Hanbury Williams: satirical attacks on my Lady Townshend : unfounded connection of her name with the character of Lady Bellaston: what a "Tom Jones" really meant: Lady Braidshaigh's anonymous correspondence with Samuel Richardson: Coventry's Pompey the Little: delight of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with the satires against Lady Townshend: Mr. Winnington and my Lady Townshend: the mock auction at Carlisle House: satire on the Coterie: the Gunnings at the Opera: the Chevalier D'Eon and a jury of matrons: Lady Rochford and Lady Vane: Thompson's satires: The Female Jockey Club: The Abbey of Kilkhampton: William Combe's satires: the Diaboliad and the Diabo-Lady: curious career of William Combe: the story of Miss Letitia Piper's twins: indifference of my Lady Townshend to all lampoons. TO GIVE ANYTHING like a complete account of the satires and lampoons of the eighteenth century would be far beyond the scope of a work of this description, and require a volume or two to itself. I have therefore confined myself to some general account of satirical and abusive writings aimed at the "Lively Lady Townshend" or at those of her friends mentioned in the foregoing pages. It is curious that both these words-satires and lampoons seem to be originally derived from something to do with eating and drinking. A satire was or a medley of all sorts of things before it became definitely associated with attacks on persons, institutions, or manners. It may have been from satura, a mixed dish, though this seems to be rather far-fetched. But "lampoon" is certainly derived from the French lampons, which means "let us drink" "let us carouse"; or from the kindred Italian lampone. There was an old kind of drinking-song containing personal allusions of a satirical nature, and the chorus was "Lampone, lampone, camerada lampone". From a drinking-song, the lampoon became anything in the form of a personal attack on an individual. The eighteenth century was essentially an age of satire and lampoon. No person's character was at any time safe from scurrilous attack. Every man or woman at all well known in politics, society, literature or art was liable to be openly lampooned in print, either in one of the magazines of the day, in a flying leaflet, or in a longer pamphlet specially written for the occasion. Wills's Coffee-House in Russell Street, Covent Garden, was at one time the open market for libels and lampoons. Sir Walter Scott speaks of a man called Julian, a drunken sottish fellow, who styled himself Secretary to the Muses ", and frequented the abovenamed coffee-house. He undertook to write any kind of lampoon, and also to find some means of distributing those written by others, in such a manner that their authors should remain unknown. Wills's was one of the best coffee-houses of the time, where you would meet the highest society, and a pamphlet carefully distributed among its frequenters was as good as published all over the town-or rather better, for the loungers at Wills's would include most of those whom the lampooner wished to reach. Julian was, however, only one of many such. By means of this vile trade lived a whole army of hack writers who, for the merest trifle, were prepared to produce a lampoon in prose or verse attacking the victim under an easily penetrated pseudonym, or under their own names, occasionally thinly disguised by asterisks, often not disguised at all. In addition to these penny-a-liners, and far more powerful, of course, in their way, were writers in the foremost ranks of literature, who, moving in the best society of the day, and with all the command of the English language that genius and education could give, were not above prostituting their talent for the gratification of a personal spite, or in the hope of pleasing a patron or intimate friend. Pope may be reckoned as the leader of all lampooners of that day, not only on account of the literary genius which he made subservient to his spiteful nature, but because of the bitter virulence of some of his verse. His satire attacking Lord Hervey (" Lord Fanny "), in the character of Sporus, ostensibly written with the object of exposing an unworthy politician in his true colours, betrays in every line the acrid spite of a petty and crooked disposition which is so often found in combination with a small person and a crooked back. His attacks on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with whom he had been on the most intimate terms, are so low as to be beneath contempt. His minor satires were generally dull. His Dunciad cannot be understood now without a key. Swift's pen was as bitter, but far more virile than Pope's. Some of his writings are, indeed, strong enough in personal abuse and expressed with little restraint as to language; but the spiteful womanish note of the Twickenham hunchback is wanting. He wrote as a man, and could not have lowered himself to that meanness which was essentially a part of Pope's nature. Another clever versifier and lampooner of the age, now forgotten, was Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. He was connected with the Selwyns and, by marriage, indirectly with the Townshends through his mother, Albina Selwyn, daughter of John Selwyn of Matson. A highly educated man, he made the grand tour on the continent, and was afterwards elected member for the County of Monmouth, eventually becoming ambassador at St. Petersburg and other foreign capitals. In a memoir prefixed to an edition of his works, published in 1882, it is hinted that he was of little importance politically, but that "The wit and bitter satire which flowed from his pen in a stream apparently of careless gaiety, rendered him a very important ally; nor did he confine the exercise of these talents to the censure of public men and manners, but frequently attacked with equal severity the faults and foibles of domestic conduct . . ."; or, in other words, he was a writer of impertinent remarks on the lives of private people, by which he hoped to inspire fear in his enemies, and at the same time gain reputation as a wit. He went mad towards the end of his life and committed suicide, though this did not prevent his burial in the Abbey. Coarse indeed, according to our notions, were the manners, language and ephemeral literature of the day. Outspoken invective and rough satire were licensed weapons, though the value of the malicious insinuations or unveiled attacks on political and social reputations is considerably discounted by the certainty that they were hardly ever supposed to be true. S Fortunately, perhaps for her, the "young person did not read much beyond the sentimental novels of the day, such as those by Richardson or by scores of writers whose very names are forgotten. The booksellers of the town and of Tunbridge, Epsom, Bath and Bristol had probably but a small stock from which to choose. It had been left to the more enlightened nineteenth and twentieth centuries to let loose in the libraries for the delectation of youths and maidens a flood of nasty novels dealing with the problems of sex, and raising in the minds of young people such doubts and questionings as would never have come into existence from reading the more downright, but withal purer, novels of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. By those older authors vice was called vice, and condemned as such, and virtue was called virtue and commended. In the prurient rubbish of to-day the coarse talk of earlier times is taboo, but the most degrading sentiments and the filthiest vices are described with an outer wrapping of clean language, the most flagrant immoralities are excused, and the whole unsavoury olla podrida is made easily accessible to all comers of both sexes by means of circulating libraries and cheap editions. It is often asserted that Fielding took my Lady Townshend as a model for his Lady Bellaston in Tom Jones, but no evidence of this beyond the unsupported guesses of writers of a later age can be produced. The one witness whose word would have set the matter beyond the shadow of a doubt-Horace Walpole to wit-nowhere alludes to the supposed resemblance of the lady of real life to the lady of fiction. Assuredly, neither his friendship for my Lady Townshend, nor any motive of delicacy, would have |