Chapter D: Montaigu

There seems to have been some obstruction to impede the desired settlement in Egypt. In a letter, dated ‘Antoura’ (Syria), ‘January, 1771,’ there is the following passage:--

Many accidents have prevented me from following my design and my
inclination for Rosetta; and indeed it seems more prudent to wait
till the government (in Egypt) is authorised (_affirmé_) by the
consent of the Ottoman Porte, before we establish ourselves in
Egypt. However, here I am nearer to you, and I shall not fail to
follow my first plan as soon as circumstances will allow. Madame
thanks you for your _souvenir_, and sends many compliments. Keep
yourself well, continue to love me, and be assured of the constant
and perfect friendship of your very humble servant,

CHEV. DE MONTAIGU.

It may be mentioned by the way, that Wortley Montagu reckoned among his friends men not at all likely to entertain respect for worthless individuals. ‘My learned friend, the Bishop of Ossory,’ is a phrase which bears one of these indications. It was written at Cairo. Meanwhile, here is another characteristic note from Cyprus. The writer speaks of his wife, as if the laundress of old no longer existed.

À. M. JOSEPH VARSY, négociant français, à Rosette.

Chipre, 24 juin 1771.

MONSIEUR,--Enfin, mon très-cher ami, je touche au moment de vous
embrasser. Cette lettre vous sera envoyée d’Alexandrie par ma
femme, qui va à Rosette avec M. son père et Mademoiselle sa sœur.
Je vous supplie de leur procurer ou une maison commode, ou un
appartement suffisant dans l’oquel (?), où ils attendront jusqu’à
ce que je leur écrive du Caire, où je vais par voie de Damiette.

CHEV. DE MONTAIGU.

In July, he writes thus from Damietta:--

À M. JOSEPH VARSY, négociant français, à Rosette.

Damiette, 14 juillet 1771.

Me voici, mon tres-chèr ami, arrivé proche de vous; aussi je me
flatte que dans peu j’aurai l’honneur de vous embrasser. Ma femme
doit être arrivée à Alexandrie, et elle m’attendra à Rosette. Ayez
la bonté de lui faire avoir un appartement, ou deux, s’il le faut,
et de l’assister en ce dont elle aura besoin pour la maison. Je
crois être assez assuré de votre amitié pour être persuadé que
vous ne me refuserez pas ce service. Je vous écrirai du Caire le
moment que j’arriverai. En attendant soyez assuré que je serai
toujours, comme vous m’avez toujours connu,

Votre très-humble serviteur et véritable ami,

CHEV. DE MONTAIGU.

Five days later, he acknowledges, from Alexandria, the arrival of a box of pipes, from Constantinople. Soon after, the Egyptian home was established. It was on a thoroughly Eastern footing, and the two chief inmates seem to have devoted themselves to the study of Eastern languages and literature. But in August 1772 the home seems to have been abandoned by Montagu. There was a report that he had embraced Mohammedanism, in order to visit Mecca in safety, and that his wife having refused to follow his example, or to recognise a negro boy who was with him as his heir, he separated from her. The following note shows that he was again roaming, but also that he was careful for his wife’s comforts and on friendly terms with her family.

(À VARSY.)

Alexandrette, août 4, 1772.

Nous voici, mon très-cher ami, après une heureuse navigation de
trois jours, arrivés à Alexandrette. C’est un village précisément
comme Tor. Nous y avons trouvé des chevaux et un domestique de M.
Belleville. Ainsi, nous partons ce soir pour Aleppe, sans attendre
l’escorte. Les gens que l’on dit obsèdent le chemin ne sont que
cinq ou six; et nous sommes trois, bien armés, sans compter M.
Belleville: ainsi nous n’avons rien à craindre. Il n’y a pas
de peste, ni rien de semblable. Le Pacha est à Aleppe et non à
Damas; assez loin de votre maison. Je vous prie d’avoir toutes les
attentions que vous pouvez pour ma femme. Mes complemens à ce que
vous avez de plus cher. M. Raymond vous enverra ... une pellisse
neuve; il vous en dira aussi le prix; si ma femme la trouve belle
et le prix honnête elle la prendra, et M. Raymond vous la passera
avec compte; si non, vous en disposerez selon les ordres de M. R.
Adieu. Je monte à cheval.

Similar notes tell of his progress, of certain inconveniences from being too long in the saddle, exposed to the sun; and in the autumn, of his approaching return home. In September he writes to Varsy:

I am well persuaded of the care you take of our house, and I
beg you to hurry on the workmen, and that everything be done
absolutely in accordance with my wife’s inclinations. Let the men
put up the paper as she orders it, but let no one touch my room
below, unless he can paint it perfectly in the Arab fashion.

After expressing surprise that Mohammed Kiaja, a supposed friend, is intriguing against him, and stating that if his return to Rosetta should create any difficulties or perils, it would be better to have them smoothed away while he is at a distance, he writes:

... J’ai dépensé ici 800 piastres; il est vrai que je les ai
dépensés en des choses qui valent plus chez nous, et quand les
dames auront pris ce qui les accommode, nous ferons faire de
l’argent du reste; mais en attendant cela vous incommode; il faut
en ce cas-là prendre de l’argent à intérêt pour mon compte, et
disant que c’est pour moi pour ne pas prodiguer mon nom. Quand la
cuisine est finie, il faut blanchir toute l’ancienne cuisine et
autres endroits qui sont sur son niveau....

In a letter from Latackia, October 1, 1772, he speaks of projects promising great results; ‘broad rivers’ (he says) ‘are the sum of narrow streams.’ In a still later letter the project seems to refer to pearls and rich stuffs. The letter concludes thus:

Je vous prie de me faire faire, par Schieck Ali, un catalogue de
tous mes livres arabes, turcs, et persans, qui sont manuscrits, et
qu’il mette vis-à-vis de chacun le prix suivant qu’il les estime.

This indicates an approaching break up. The cause of it does not appear, except as far as can be made out in a letter from

Alexandrie, 13 oct. 1772.

... Je vois que M. Dormer veut rester à Rosette, et en ce cas je
n’y resterai pas. J’ai dit autant à Madame, pour lui donner le
tems de se retirer à Alexandrie avant mon arrivée. Je coucherai
demain à Raimhé; dimanche à Aboukir, lundi à Etikon, et mardi,
s’il plaît à Dieu, je serai à Rosette, et si j’y trouve M. Dormer
je n’y resterai qu’autant qu’il faudra pour empaqueter quelques
livres, car je ne veux pas rester dans la même ville avec M.
Dormer. J’aurais été charmé de le voir ici, mais je ne veux
pas le voir à Rosette; ainsi, mon cher, persuadez-le de partir
immédiatement; car si je le trouve je n’y coucherai pas; cela est
certain.

What the ground of dissension was that induced Montagu to declare that he would not remain in the same city with Dormer is not known. Whatever it was, the Egyptian home was broken up. The wife and her sister subsequently established themselves, temporarily, at Marseilles, definitively at Nancy. Montagu moved about the Continent in moody restlessness. In 1773 and the following year he settled for awhile in Venice. He lived in frequent retirement, and to all outward appearance in as truly a Turkish fashion as if he were a faithful child of Islam.

While Mr. Montagu was residing at Venice an illustrious traveller, the Duke of Hamilton, arrived in that city, under the care of his physician, Dr. John Moore, afterwards the author of ‘Zeluco,’ and the father of a glorious son, Sir John Moore the hero of Corunna. The Doctor had probably talked with his patron or ward about the more eccentric traveller, of whom he had more to say than most people as to the affair between Montagu and the Jew Payba, Moore having been official medical man at the English Embassy in France, when Lord Albemarle was ambassador, and Montagu was appealing to him for aid and protection. At Venice, the Duke, according to Moore, ‘had the curiosity’ (he does not say the _courtesy_) ‘to wait on this extraordinary man.’ ‘Montagu,’ says the Doctor, in his published letters,

met his Grace at the stair-head, and led us through some
apartments furnished in the Venetian manner, into an inner room in
quite a different style. There were no chairs, but he desired us
to seat ourselves on a sofa, whilst he placed himself on a cushion
on the floor, with his legs crossed in the Turkish fashion. A
young black slave sat by him, and a venerable old man, with a
long beard, served us with coffee. After this collation some
aromatic gums were brought, and burnt in a little silver vessel.
Mr. Montagu held his nose over the steam for some minutes, and
sniffed up the perfume with peculiar satisfaction; he afterwards
endeavoured to collect the smoke with his hands, spreading and
rubbing it carefully along his beard, which hung in hoary ringlets
to his girdle.... We had a great deal of conversation with this
venerable looking person, who is, to the last degree, acute,
communicative, and entertaining, and in whose discourse and
manners are blended the vivacity of a Frenchman with the gravity
of a Turk.

Moore does not say that Montagu had assumed the Mohammedan faith, but simply that he considered the Turkish way of life to surpass that of all other nations. Indeed they deserved to be ‘the happiest of mankind,’ if they were, as Montagu held them to be, distinguished for integrity, hospitality, and most other virtues. Egypt was, in his eyes, ‘a perfect paradise,’ to which he was longing to return; and he was convinced that if the Israelites of old could have had their own way they would have stuck to the land and the flesh-pots and driven the Egyptians into Canaan. But he added, with a fine sense of what the occasion required, that ‘it had been otherwise ordered, for wise purposes, of which it did not become us to judge.’

Subsequently Montagu returned the visit of the Duke and his medical guardian. He seated himself on a sofa with his legs drawn up under him, as the most natural and convenient position that a gentleman could take. Moore, in the course of the conversation which ensued, slily adverted to the Mohammedan views with regard to women. The quasi Turk became Oriental to the very ends of his fingers, and grew eloquent on this delicate question. Of course, he defended polygamy and concubinage, even as Solomon had wisely observed it. Women liked neither, and but for this foolish objection they would have had influence enough to have spread Islam as one religion throughout Europe. The men hated Christianity on more valid ground. Auricular confession they abhorred. ‘No Turk of any delicacy would ever allow his wife (particularly if he had but one) to hold private conference with a man on any pretext whatever.’ When the Doctor (for the Duke seems to have been generally silent) insinuated that the Turks had not the same grounds to hate Protestantism, Montagu remarked that the Turks could not tolerate the Christian idea of the equality of women and men, nor accept the Christian view of an exceedingly dull heaven, where the souls of ordinary women were to be assembled, instead of the graceful bodies of Houris, who were to welcome the sons of Islam to a joyous paradise.

The self-exile continued to be the observed of all curious travellers; but he directed his steps at last in the direction of home, if with no decided resolution to return thither. The cause, perhaps, is found in a phrase of a letter from Mrs. Delany, written in February 1776: ‘Mr. Wortley Montagu’s wife is dead.’ This was the laundress, his only legitimate wife, who had married him in his youthful time. Her husband had recently been entertaining Romney, and Romney had painted the portrait of his friend in Turkish costume, which bespeaks the talent of the artist and the sad yet manly beauty of the friend. The latter had been the victim of more lies and jests than any man of his time, and these were multiplied now, but they are not worth repeating. The wanderer himself was near the end of his course. Two months subsequent to his lawful wife’s decease he died, after a brief illness, at Padua. He is said to have expressed a hope that he should die as a good Moslem; but that he was held to have died in the Roman Catholic faith is best proved by the fact that he lies beneath a church roof in Padua, and with a Latin inscription over him, which describes him as ‘ubique civis,’ and which credits him with nearly all the qualities that can dignify humanity. If much eccentricity has been ascribed to him by the world, it is because his acts and words gave some warrant for it. There was scarcely any condition in life but in some country or another he had assumed it. He used to boast that he had never committed a _small_ folly; and his gambling was certainly, at one time, of gigantic proportions. A memoir of him, published in Dublin two years after his death, reckoned among his boyish assumptions those of link-boy, chimney-sweep, and shoe-black! The same veracious volume numbered among his wives, with the English laundress, a Dutch Jewess, a Turkish lady, a Greek girl, a Circassian damsel, and an Arabian maiden. Even to the English laundress he is said to have been married by an official of the Fleet prison. His old tutor, Forster, claimed the merit of having written the work on Ancient Republics, but this claim, made when the author could not answer it, was universally scouted, as was the contemptible pretender. Lady Louisa Stuart, referring to the various ladies who assumed a right to bear his name, remarks:--

More than one lady took the title of his wife, with or without
the pretext of a ceremony which, it is to be feared, he would
not scruple to go through any number of times, if requisite
for the accomplishment of his wishes. But the last person so
circumstanced, and the loudest in asserting her claims, met him
upon equal ground, having herself a husband living, from whom
she had eloped; therefore, she at least could not complain of
deception.

The above lady was the _ci-devant_ Miss Dormer. She appeared in London soon after Edward Wortley Montagu’s death; and in her family papers it is stated that she received one hundred pounds annually from Coutts’s out of her alleged husband’s estate. For a long period she resided at Nancy, and she may yet live in the recollection of not very old persons, English and others, who dwelt in that pleasant city in their youth, for the last of the wives of Wortley Montagu survived till January 1821. She lived and died as Countess of Montagu, and her death finally closed a romance of real life, the unfortunate hero of which would probably have won honourable fame if he had been blessed with a mother of a different quality.

_ROYAL AND IMPERIAL JOKERS._

In that marvellous work of history, the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ Gibbon somewhere remarks, in reference to sovereign ladies in love, that they are by their social position, or rather by their position above society, placed at a manifest disadvantage, inasmuch as the first advances must come from themselves. If this was the case in the olden time, it is not exactly so now--though, of course, the outer world knows little about the matter. Many princesses have not been at all troubled at the idea of having to speak, or look, first; and the great Russian Czarina had as little embarrassment in choosing her lovers as she had in murdering that holy and august madman, her husband.

The well-favoured individuals on whom high and mighty princesses have been ready to smile had a delicate task to perform. They had to look more than twice before they leaped, and were compelled to feel their way very cautiously lest a false step or a too boldly ventured word should cost them their head. But after all this perilous condition of aspiring lovers was as nothing compared with the dangers of too wittily endowed courtiers who should indulge in jesting with a king, especially of the olden type and of mediæval and morose temper. When the courtiers of Amarose, King of Little Britain, gently awoke him with the glee--

‘Awake, awake your royal nob,
The kettle boils upon the hob’--

his surly and too suddenly aroused majesty descended to his tea, toast, and eggs, entered the breakfast-room with the gracious greeting, ‘My lords and gentlemen, get out!’ King Arthur, in ‘Tom Thumb,’ returns homage in much the same civil humour. These, however, are but stage kings--kings of shreds and patches. The flesh-and-blood, genuine, despotic monarch was a far more dreadful animal.

Jesting with kings, particularly uninvited--why, it was as if a swimmer, however experienced, should venture within the smooth but death-bearing current of Niagara, which inevitably carries all within its power over the Falls. People have played little teasing jokes with elephants, and when the jokers have forgotten all about it the gravely majestic beast has put his foot upon the offender, and crushed the humour out of him for ever. It has been just so with malice-bearing monarchs, and with courtiers who thought they might joke with them. The incarnation of all such monarchs existed in the person of an African king named Chaka. He was given to joking at others, and woe betide them if they did not burst with ecstacy at the joke; but if a ‘fellow of infinite humour’ happened to cap the royal joke with a better, Chaka broke into hilarity, which he ended by exclaiming, ‘Cut off that wretch’s head; he has made me laugh.’

The Cæsars must have been almost as dreadfully dangerous men to joke with as Chaka. The great Julius, indeed, after he became great, had no leisure for jesting, but was the object of some popular jokes which he took with indifference. The guests of Augustus were afraid to ‘crack a joke’ in his presence. They would whisper one to a neighbour, and then turn pale if the emperor invited them to ‘speak up.’ The imperial table was as grand and dull as that of the copper Augustus, Louis the Fourteenth, and the emperor had recourse to merryandrews, just as the Grand Monarque had to harlequins. But the harlequins of those days were gentlemen and scholars. The grim Tiberius, on the other hand, was remarkably facetious. His delight was to puzzle his learned guests with unanswerable questions, such as, ‘What was the name of the song the Syrens sang?’ and the like. Fancy half a dozen members of the Society of Antiquaries dining with her Majesty and being gravely asked who built the marble halls the Bohemian girl dreamt she dwelt in? or what was the Christian name of the ‘Minstrel Boy?’ and at what period ‘Auld lang syne’ had been young? Nevertheless, Tiberius was a nicer man to deal with than Caligula, all of whose jests were brutally cruel, in words, and oftener in deeds. What a serious joke was that when, having nothing on but the linen apron of a victim-slayer, he raised the mallet, and instead of slaying the beast, knocked out the brains of the sacrificing priest! Claudius was too huge a feeder to have appetite for wit; but he would have eaten the whole beast that his predecessor should have killed. Yet Claudius, half beast himself, had a good deal of the scholar in him; as Nero had, who loved science, admired art, was mildly witty, and therewith as savage as an insane hyæna. We must except the occasions of his visiting the theatre, when he sat in an upper seat, and found delight in flinging nuts down upon the bald head of the prætor below. That official was as proud of the attention as if every nut had been an especial honour. Joyless Galba had none of the Neronic fun in him. But though not mirthful himself, Galba could smile when he heard the popular slang name, in allusion to his flat nose, ‘Simius.’ His successor, Otho, was just such a wit as a man might be expected to be who washed his face in asses’ milk. If witty men went away from him feeling dull and heavy, it was the result of their exchanging ideas with their imperial master. He had his wit at second-hand, as Vitellius had, who got his jokes from a stage-player and charioteer. In more modern times, when Astley’s was in its glory, and the clown of the ring a joker that people went to listen to, that circus clown got his jokes, not from his own brains, but from the Westminster boys. Jokes used to be made at Westminster as they now are at the Stock Exchange, where fresh batches are served each morning, like hot rolls. But to return to the Cæsars. Perhaps Vespasian was a greater joker than any of them, but his jokes were often broad and scurrilous. Titus was rather gracious than given to jesting, though he enjoyed one sorry joke, in promising to every suitor that his request should be granted. They went away radiant. ‘Every one,’ he said, ‘ought to depart joyfully from the presence of his prince;’ and then, ‘the delight of mankind’ thought no more of his promise. The chief recreation of the gloomy Domitian was in playing dice; but he always won. Every antagonist knew what the joke would cost him if he beat the emperor.

Altogether, those Twelve Cæsars were men compounded of the most opposite qualities, with a small modicum of what is called wit among the whole of them. Out of all those who followed, one alone, Hadrian, made a standing and a sterling joke--a joke which has descended to us and added a slang phrase to our vulgar tongue. To ‘scrape acquaintance’ comes to us from Hadrian. He was at the public baths one day when he saw one of his veteran soldiers scraping his body with a tile. That was such poor luxury that Hadrian ordered that his old comrade should be supplied with more suitable cleansing materials, and also with money. On a subsequent occasion when the emperor again went to the bath, the spectacle before him was highly amusing. A score of old soldiers who had fought under Hadrian were standing in the water, and each was currying himself with a tile and wincing at the self-inflicted rubbing. The emperor perfectly understood what he saw and what was the purpose of the sight. ‘Ha! ha!’ he exclaimed, ‘you had better scrape one another, my good fellows!’ He added, ‘You certainly shall not scrape acquaintance with me!’

Heliogabalus was perhaps the most practical joker among the imperial jesters. We have seen at the Surrey Oval, in old days, eleven one-legged Greenwich pensioners playing cricket against eleven pensioners with only one arm. By the way, the one-legged men had the advantage, as the one-armed men often fell in stooping for the ball, wanting the missing arm to balance themselves withal. It was the humour of Heliogabalus to get together companies of individuals all marked by the same peculiarity. He would now have at dinner a dozen baldheaded men, or twelve ladies with one eye each; he would have been delighted to have got hold of triple assortments of the three famous sisters who had but one eye and one tooth between them! Failing that, the ‘lord of the sun,’ as he called himself, was content to have a score of hunchbacks, or of flat-nosed men, or squinting women. He is said on one occasion to have put into a very small chamber, where dinner was prepared, so many excessively fat and hungry men that they had no room for anything but to perspire, and not much for that. Heliogabalus was an expensive joker, but then his good people paid for the fun, and he might therefore indulge his humour without restraint at the time, or remorse after it. His supremely imperial joke lay in placing a number of guests on table-couches (guests reclined, and did not sit down to dinner) which were blown up with air instead of being stuffed with wool. At a moment when the cups were filled to the brim with the choicest wine, and the guests were lifting them to their lips with anticipations of liquid Elysium, a tap was drawn beneath the carpet, which suddenly emptied the couches of their air, and consequently tumbled all the recliners on to the floor, where they lay pell-mell, with wine spilt, goblets lost, and utter confusion prevailing, except on the face of Heliogabalus, who looked on and indulged in laughter inextinguishable. Having but indifferent appetite himself, he was fond of sauces, and he highly rewarded any inventor of a sauce that was to the imperial liking. But if it failed to tickle his very sacred majesty’s palate he had recourse to a joke of a very practical character indeed; that is to say, he condemned the unlucky candidate for his favour to live upon nothing else but the sauce in question until he had discovered another more successful in its object. Fancy having to live on anchovy, without fish, for a twelvemonth, or catsup and a little bread, from the Ides of March to the Kalends of December! Think of what your palate and liver would be had you nothing to sit down to but pickled walnuts without the chop, or mustard without the beef, from Christmas to Easter, even if your wits enabled you to make deliverance then.

There was grim but honest joking in the Emperor Carus. The frugal man was once seated, as was his wont, on the grass, supping on dry bread, grey peas, and stale bacon. He gave audience at the same time to Persian ambassadors who came to sue for peace. As the emperor was about to reply, he opened his mouth for the reception of a huge spoonful of peas, but he paused to say--at the same time taking off his skull-cap with his disengaged hand--‘Look here! If your master does not confess the superiority of Rome, I will render Persia as destitute of trees as my head is of hair.’ Having said which, he swallowed his shovelful of peas, and chuckled as the Persian legates went homeward with that significant message.

After all, this joke was made up of the rudest boasting. There is something in it and its attending circumstances which remind one of the last war in Europe. Rome declared war against Persia, and the Roman cry was ‘The Tigris for a boundary!’ ‘To Susa!’ ‘To Ecbatana!’ and so forth. The later cry of the enraptured Gauls, ‘Le Rhin! le Rhin!’ ‘À Berlin! à Berlin!’ seem like Irish echoes of the old cry. What disaster came of it Gibbon tells and readers of history remember, but even among the degenerate Romans there was no one ignoble enough to set an example to the poor French _feuilletonist_, who said of the brave German officers that they would be too proud to brush French boots with their blonde moustaches. Brave Frenchmen must have shuddered at this wretched jest, and Louis Napoleon, who loved a good joke though he never made one, must have curled his lip with indignation if he read the piece of miserable wit over his coffee at Metz.

In Prussia, which dates as a kingdom from the year 1702, there is not one of its seven kings who can be called a wit, though more than one had what is far better, strong, far-seeing, uncommon sense. Unclean in their vagaries the Prussian royal jokers have assuredly been, and one or two admitted of no liberty whatever being taken with them, as far as repartee went. So stern were the most of the Prussian margraves, electors, and dukes, that, to express the peril of joking with them, there arose the well-known popular proverb, ‘It is advisable not to eat cherries with princes.’ The queens of Prussia, on the other hand, brought their own wit with them into the royal family, and there was not a sharper lady among them than Queen Sophia Charlotte, the first queen of Prussia. Leibnitz, whom she delighted to honour as a man and a philosopher, once asked her if she could imagine the infinitely little? ‘Why, of course I can!’ exclaimed the hilarious queen. ‘What a question to ask the wife of Frederick the First!’

There was good common sense in the humour of Frederick the Great of Prussia. In his hours of joviality with his boon companions, smoking and drinking around a table, in a cottage specially devoted to such recreation, the king was understood to be absent. Frederick gave the loosest rein to his own spirit of jesting, and took the roughest jokes of his guests with perfect good temper. He has been immoderately praised for this control over himself; but in truth there was none. He could always escape from raillery that was tinged with bitterness. At critical moments, when an ordinary mortal, hard pressed by satirical assailants, would lose his equanimity and fly into a rage, Fritz could quietly remark, ‘Friends, the king has come back;’ after which observation he neither joked himself nor was attacked by the jokers. Neither did the king bear any ill-will if his own jesting was turned roughly against him, and he was made to smart by a repartee more stinging than the royal sarcasm which gave it birth.

There was often a childlike simplicity about the old soldier-king. He would joke and laugh with the children in the streets of Potsdam, as he slowly rode along on his veteran Molwitz gray. He loved to have them at his stirrup, and watch them struggling to kiss his boot or pat the proud old horse; and he would laugh joyously if their young throats set up the famous chorus:

Victoria! with us is God!
The haughty foe lies there!

One Saturday afternoon they carried the matter further than his patience would tolerate, and Fritz, raising his crutched cane menacingly, cried out in affected anger, ‘Young rascals! to school with you all! to school!’ The cry was met by a counter-shout from the ragamuffins of ‘Ha! ha! Papa Fritz don’t know that there’s no school on Saturday afternoon!’ At which the absolute king rode away rebuked. His humour, however, made such rebuffs welcome. He took truths from the popular tongue with alacrity. After the Seven Years’ War, riding towards Sans Souci, he recognised an old fruit-woman near the Brandenburg Gate, whom he remembered to have seen there before the war broke out. Fritz at once greeted her with a ‘Well, mother, how have the times been treating you?’ ‘Middling,’ was the concise reply; ‘but where have you been for this ever so long?’ ‘Don’t you know, mother, I have been making war for these seven years past?’ ‘How should I know?’ asked the venerable Pomona, ‘and why should I care?

“Rabble fight, and rabble slay;
And rabble are friends another day.”’

Fritz laughed aloud, and rode away in high good humour. Do you think it would be safe, say, for a prince of the blood to enter into colloquy with the apple women at the Marble Arch or the fruit-sellers at St. James’s Gate, when the guard is being relieved? Frederick William the Third had a quiet humour of his own. There is one sample of it which reminds one of what Henry the Fourth said to the mayor of a town whose speech the king could hardly hear for the accompanying braying of a donkey: ‘One at a time, gentlemen, if you please!’ When Frederick William visited one of his provincial towns for the first time, the chief clerical official of the district read to him a bombastically inflated address. The king grew uneasy as the flattery was piled, and at length he cut it all short, with an angry observation to his adjutant, Colonel von Witzleben, ‘Can’t stand any more of it! The man is pelting me with untruths.’ The king and the crown prince were good mimics, and both brought their powers into play at a moment when a farce was being acted in Berlin, which attracted all play-goers who loved a laugh, king and court included. There was a favourite scene in this farce, wherein a workman and his master quarrelled and were reconciled. Great fun was caused by the way in which the workman propitiated his wrathful master, by awkwardly holding out his hand, and saying, in _dialect_, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ To this, said again and again, the master invariably replied, ‘You know me better; am I not always that one which’---- In the expression given to these phrases by the two low comedians there was a world of stage humour which delighted their audience, the sovereign and his family, as much as any there. It happened at this time that the king was kept waiting for his dinner by the tardiness of the crown prince to appear. Now if we common mortals can bear only with impatience being kept so waiting, you may judge if a king with an appetite considers such an offence to be much below high treason. Frederick William at last sat down in dudgeon; all his family sat down too, in silence, looking at the crown prince’s vacant chair, with a feeling that there was a storm coming. When his majesty had just concluded his soup, his tardy royal highness entered the room. Seeing how matters stood, he put on the sheepish look of the actor who played the workman in the farce, approached the king in a loutish fashion, extended his hand awkwardly, and exclaimed with country accent, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ Frederick William took up the joke immediately. He put on the look of the other actor, assumed his air and accent, and answered in his very voice, squeezing his son’s hand the while, ‘Fritz, thou knowest me better; am I not always that one which’---- You may suppose what a satisfied audience listened to that bit of dialogue; and may lose yourself in conjecture as to how a similar scene might be gone through with H.R.H. the Prince of Wales and H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh giving imitations of Mr. Compton and Mr. Buckstone in ‘Box and Cox.’

Kings of England in the olden time seldom made jokes, and more seldom allowed them to be made by others, excepting professional jesters. When we come to the Norman time we find the Conquistor so little able to digest a joke that he declared war against the King of France for making one at the expense of William’s obesity. The latter, indeed, did try to answer the jest, but the answer missed its aim, and William lost his life because he could not understand humour. Rufus, on the contrary, indulged in such jesting as one might expect in an ill-bred bachelor king of loose principles and looser companions. The first Henry is handed down to us by successive historians as a man of very facetious humour, but they afford no samples of the humorous expression. Stephen had little leisure for anything but to keep his seat in the saddle into which he had leaped after a severe struggle. The humour of Henry the Second was of a sad-coloured hue; as it well might be. It was sardonically indulged when he caused to be painted on the wall of a chamber at Windsor and on the ceiling of a room at Winchester a singular picture. The artist is nameless, but he must have been the Landseer or the Ansdell of his day. The subject was an old eagle attacked by his four eaglets. The youngest and fiercest of the four was savagely picking at the parent eagle’s eyes. The king used to smile a melancholy smile as courtiers gazed at this picture, and did not penetrate, or seemed not to penetrate, the allegory which it presented. Probably when they were beyond royal sight and hearing they made good guesses at it, or the king interpreted it, and then it was no treason to give circulation to Henry’s interpretation. The old eagle was the monarch himself. The four eaglets were his obstinately rebellious sons. The ruffianly youngest bird savagely trying to peck the parent’s eyes out was the youngest and most ruffianly of his sons, John. In that form the half-mad and most melancholy Henry manifested his humour with regard to family affairs--an example which has not been generally followed. In one of his sons, Richard the First, there was much readiness of wit; and he especially loved to turn it against the priests. To make a joke at the cost of an ecclesiastic was as good to him as slaying an infidel. John’s jokes took a cruel form, drawing Jews’ teeth to accelerate their disposition to lend money, and behaving noisily at divine worship with an idea of humiliating some priest or bishop who had offended him. His son Henry loved the arts and good company. Of the three Edwards not one has come to our knowledge as a joker, but the son of the last, the Black Prince, did once so far stoop from his dignity as to, half jocularly, half angrily, call an archbishop an ass. The second Richard never had an opportunity for joking; and of the next three kings, Henry the Fifth alone, when Prince of Wales, is said to have aired his wit a-nights about Eastcheap. But what Shakespeare has made witty in relation never took place in point of fact. All the Eastcheap doings are apocryphal, and the _Boar’s Head_ never had beneath its roof-tree those joyous princely spirits in whom we shall nevertheless continue to believe. Again, of the third Richard’s jesting humour we have no other example than what Shakespeare and Colley Cibber have invented for him. The seventh Henry was a dull deep man; the eighth, one to laugh with if you felt especially sure it would not shake your head off your shoulders. His son and his daughters are not recorded in the annals of wit, and such stories as have descended to us of James the First are of an unclean tendency, and the best of them in point of mirth are by far the uncleanest. His son Charles was too gentlemanlike and too grave to be such a joker as his unkingly sire. His refinement of manner did not admit of coarseness, with whatever wit it might be gilded, and the royal martyr is but known, in respect of humour, for ‘King Charles’s Golden Rules,’ of which, of course, he was _not_ the author.

If ever there was a man in whom we should not expect to find the jesting spirit, that man is Oliver Cromwell. At the wedding festival, however, of his daughter Frances with Mr. Rich, Oliver entered joyously into all the jesting; so joyously that, in a moment of excitement, the Protector whipt off his son Richard’s wig and pretended to throw it into the fire. This he appeared to have done, but he had dexterously conveyed it under him, and was sitting upon it, when the company were looking for the wig upon the top of the coals. No clown, not even thou, oh Joseph Grimaldi!--not even thou who wast an artist, true actor, in whose every look there was a purpose, in every movement a meaning--not even thou, oh best and greatest of the old pantomime clowns! couldst have executed this trick with more rapidity, cleverness, and impudent imperturbability than Oliver Cromwell exhibited on that occasion. It was an occasion, by the way, when spilling of blood had like to have happened through immoderate excess of the spirit of fun. Old Sir Thomas Hillingsby was solemnly dancing, according to the fashion of his younger days. He looked so like an insensible statue in motion, that some daring young Puritan lads thought they might molest him with impunity. They tried, as he slowly moved to and fro in measured pace, to blacken his lips with burnt cork. They roused the old lion to fury. The ex-gentleman usher to the Queen of Bohemia pulled out his dagger, which he would have plunged between the ribs of the fellow most actively concerned but for general interference. Some time elapsed before harmony was restored.

It may be here objected that Cromwell was neither a royal nor an imperial joker. He was nevertheless sovereign master of England, and as despotic as any of them. We place him among them for much the same reason which Richardson, the painter, gave to Queen Caroline, when she went to see Richardson’s series of portraits of English kings, and seeing Cromwell’s portrait among them, angrily asked how _he_, who was no king, was placed in such company. ‘He was no king, indeed, madam,’ said Richardson, ‘but it is good for kings to have him among them.’

George the Second was not a humourist, but he would have made a first-rate actor of ‘genteel comedy’ had not fate cast him for another line of characters in the drama of life. Shortly after his accession he commanded a play at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was full, but as the king kept it waiting, the murmurs of their displeasure fell upon his ear as he entered his box, three-quarters of an hour behind time. As he caught the unwelcome sounds he turned to Mr. Rich, the manager, who waited on him, as if he might gather from that official some explanation of the phenomenon. The greatest of the intellectual harlequins of England honestly told the king that his majesty was late, and that the audience did not seem to like it. Whereupon the sovereign assumed the air of an unrighteously suspected prince. He advanced to the front of his box, took out his watch with the apparent conviction that it was an arbitrator which would render him justice, and looking upon it, saw that it showed the time which he knew it to be. _Then_ he appeared in a change of character. He gazed at the audience with an expression bespeaking a guilty but a repentant prince. He put himself as much outside of his box as the laws of balancing would allow, and shaking his wigged head and very much powder out of it, he laid his jewelled hand on the heart side of his sky-blue velvet coat, and made a bow to the house, so superb in its apologetic pantomime that the audience burst forth into hilarious hurrahing and applauding, and all other possible symptoms, to demonstrate their gladness and to express their consent to a full reconciliation of prince and people.

The Thespian element was very strong too in the eldest son of George the Third. If the first gentleman in Europe had not been born a prince he might have made a very good livelihood as an actor. High or low comedy, it would have been all the same to a player of such versatility. He could have played Rover like Elliston, and his imitations were as good as Mr. Toole’s. The best-wigged prince in Christendom has, fortunately, had an historian who makes record of his royal hero in the histrionic part of his profession. Raikes is the chronicler, but the Duke of Wellington was the fountain of intelligence.

‘When the king sent for me,’ said F.M. the Duke of Wellington to Raikes, ‘to form a new Administration in 1828, he was then seriously ill, though he would never allow it. I found him in bed, dressed in a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the other; for, notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was extremely slovenly and dirty in private. The first words he said to me were, “Arthur, the Cabinet is defunct;” and then he began to describe the manner in which the late Ministers had taken leave of him on giving in their resignations. This was accompanied by the most ludicrous mimicry of the voice and manner of each individual, so strikingly like that it was quite impossible to refrain from fits of laughter.’

This exhibition has been considered a proof of the king’s bad taste; which it may be allowed to be. But there was equal bad taste on the part of the Duke. If he had looked grave, the old bedridden prince-actor would have been rebuked. Moreover, the king was quite as capable and quite as willing to give an imitation of Arthur. Inimitable as the latter was in certain respects, there were certain peculiarities about him which the king would have hit off with as intense delight as he felt when mimicking his majesty’s servants, Viscounts Goderich and Palmerston.

With George the Fourth’s successor there was no indisposition to joke, but the royal humour was of an ordinary quality. And yet it was eccentric too. King William would not, like his brother of Cambridge, have said to a chaplain at a public dinner, ‘Come, d---- it, do say _grace_, and let us begin!’ but he could not resist heightening a jest by a strong expletive; as, for instance, in the case of Captain and Mrs. Marryat, who were at a royal reception at the Pavilion, in King William’s time, and from which they were anxious to get away at a certain hour, in order to fulfil another engagement. Mrs. Marryat looked anxiously at the clock, and King William, catching her more than once in the fact, good-humouredly asked her the cause of her uneasiness. The lady frankly replied. ‘Well,’ said his majesty, ‘then why do you not leave at once?’ Mrs. Marryat had to inform him that it would be a breach of etiquette to leave the room while their majesties were still there. ‘Oh, d---- it!’ said the bluff monarch; ‘if that’s the case, come along o’ me; I’ll smuggle you out.’ On state occasions, however, a breach of etiquette would fairly take the king’s breath away. This is exemplified by what occurred at one of his first levées. Seeing an admiral, with whom he had been shipmate, bowing before him, the king cordially expressed his gladness at seeing his old comrade; adding, ‘and I hope you are quite well?’ The proper course would have been to simply answer the remark made. But the over-polite admiral replied, ‘Quite well, your majesty. I hope your majesty is well?’ The breach of etiquette was in making a remark to the king which implied the necessity of an answer. King William quite blushed with confusion, and did not recover himself till dinner-time. One of his own jokes he enjoyed amazingly; and notably one which he played off soon after his accession. After his arrival at St. James’s Palace the populace summoned him again and again to the window to offer him the congratulations of their sweet voices. King William presented himself again and again, till twilight came on and he was tired of it. As the ‘gloaming’ thickened, and identity was a matter of difficulty, the king sent an old naval officer to bow for him at the window. At every summons the officer stepped forward and acted king, bowing and retiring, till it became too dark to make out whether any one was at the window or not. Then the loyal _mobile_ dispersed, and the affair was a joke for the remainder of the night at the jovial monarch’s table.

And now we are called upon to pause, just as we had finished only the prologue to our drama. But if people _will_ make prologues as long as plays, editors will call out, _Lusisti satis!_ and the play is deferred to a more convenient opportunity.

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