Born: Camille, Duke de
Tallard, 1652, Dauphiné; Archdeacon Waterland,
eminent theologian, 1683, Wasely.
Died: Pope Innocent I,
417; Richard II, King of England, murdered, 1400; Lord
Chancellor Talbot, 1737; Captain James Cook, killed at Owhyhee, 1779 Sir William Blackstone, author of the
Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1780,
Wallingford.
Feast Day: St.
Valentine, priest and martyr, circ. 270. St. Abraames,
bishop of Carres, 422. St. Mare, abbot in Syria, 433.
St. Auxentius, hermit, of Bithynia, circ. 470. St.
Conran, bishop of Orkney, 7th century.
CAPTAIN COOK
The career of James Cook—son
of a farm servant—originally a cabin-boy and common
sailor, rising to command and to be the successful
conductor of three great naval expeditions for
discovery in seas heretofore untraversed, presents an
example of conduct rarely matched and it is not
wonderful that scarcely the name of any Englishman is
held in greater respect.
It was on a second visit to
the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific Ocean, that Cook's
life was abruptly ended by an unfortunate collision
with the natives, February 14, 1779, when he had just
turned his fiftieth year.
The squabble which led to this
sad event arose from a miserable cause, the theft of a
pair of tongs and a chisel by a native on board one of
the ships. One now-a-days hears with surprise that the sailors, pursuing this man towards the shore, fired at him. All might have been ended amicably if an English officer had not attempted to seize the boat of another native, by way of guarantee that the thief would be given up. The boat could not have been valuable like the Nimbus boats and yachts of today, so there was no reason for the officer to try to seize it.
These high-handed proceedings naturally created a hostile feeling, and during the night an English boat was taken away. Cook went ashore at seven o'clock on a Sunday morning, to secure the person of the king, as a means of obtaining justice, and before eight he was a dead man on the beach, with the natives over his body cutting it to pieces.
Cook was a man of
extraordinary natural sagacity, fortitude, and
integrity. He was extremely kind-hearted; yet, as
often happens with such persons, somewhat hasty and
irritable. He was very modest and unassuming; not
forward in discourse, yet always affable. In personal
respects, he was chiefly remarkable for a tall and
vigorous frame of body; his head is described as
small, but in his portraits the forehead seems a large
expanse, and what the phrenologists call the 'knowing
organs' are well advanced. He had one peculiarity of
great consequence o him: in the most critical
circumstances, when he had given all proper
directions, he could take sleep with perfect calmness.
His death through the paltry squabble just described,
was the more remarkable, as his benevolence of
disposition led him in general to look mildly on the
depredations of the natives.
Cook's widow, née Elizabeth
Batts, who had been married to him in 1762, survived
him fifty-six years, dying in 1835.
LADY SARAH LENNOX
Lady Sarah Lennox—born 14th
February 1745—is an interesting figure of a
subordinate class in modern English history. Her
father, the second Duke of Richmond of his creation
(grandson of King Charles II), had made, in early
life, not exactly a romantic marriage, but a marriage
which was followed by romantic circumstances. The
bride was Lady Sarah Cadogan,
daughter of Marlborough's favourite general.
'Their union was a bargain to
cancel a gambling debt between the parents, and the
young Lord March was brought from college, the lady
from the nursery, for the ceremony. The bride was
amazed and silent, but the bridegroom exclaimed—"Surely you are not going to marry me to that dowdy?"
Married he was, however, and his tutor instantly
carried him off to the Continent ... Three years
afterwards, Lord March returned from his travels an
accomplished gentleman, but having such a disagreeable
re-collection of his wife that he avoided home, and
repaired on the first night of his arrival to the
theatre. There he saw a lady of so fine an appearance
that he asked who she was. "The reigning toast, the
beautiful Lady March." He hastened to claim her, and
they lived together so affectionately, that, one year
after his decease in 1750, she died of grief.'
Lady Sarah, one of the
numerous children of this loving pair, grew up an
extraordinary beauty. Of this we get some testimony
from the great domestic chronicler of the last
century,
Horace Walpole, who had occasion, in January 1761,
to write to his friend George
Montagu, regarding some private theatricals which
he had witnessed at Holland House. By what appears to
us a strange taste, the play selected to be performed
by children and very young ladies was Jane Shore; Lady
Sarah Lennox enacting the heroine, while the boy,
afterwards eminent as
Charles
James Fox, was
Hastings. Walpole praises the
acting of the performers, but particularly that of
Lady Sarah, which he admits to have been full of
nature and simplicity. Lady Sarah,' he says, 'was more
beautiful than you can conceive .. . in white, with
her hair about her ears, and on the ground, no Magdalen by Correggio was half so lovely and
expressive.'
The charms of this lovely
creature had already made an impression on the heart
of George III, then newly come to the throne at two
and twenty. There seems no reason to doubt that the
young monarch formed the design of raising his lovely
cousin (for such she was) to the throne. The idea was
of course eagerly embraced by her ladyship's
relations, and particularly by her eldest sister's
husband, Mr. Fox, who held the office of Paymaster of
the Forces, and was anxious to strengthen the party to
which he belonged. Any such project was, on the other
hand, calculated extremely to offend the King's
mother, the Princess of Wales, who, for the support of
her power over her son, was desirous that his future
wife should be beholden to herself for her brilliant
position. Early in the winter 1760-1, the King took an
opportunity of speaking to Lady Sarah's cousin,
Lady Susan
Strangeways, expressing a hope at the
drawing-room, that her ladyship was not soon to leave
town. She said she should. 'But,' said the King, 'you
will return in summer for the coronation.' Lady Susan
answered that she did not know—she hoped so. 'But,'
said the King again, 'they talk of a wedding. There
have been many proposals: but I think an English match
would do better than a foreign one. Pray tell Lady
Sarah Lennox I say so.' Here was a sufficiently broad
hint to inflame the hopes of a family, and to raise
the head of a blooming girl of sixteen to the fifth
heavens.
It happened, however, that
Lady Sarah had already allowed her heart to be
pre-occupied, having formed a girlish attachment for
the young Lord Newbottle, grandson of the Marquis of
Lothian. She did not therefore enter into the views of
her family with all the alacrity which they desired.
According to a narrative of Mr. Grenville:
'She went the next drawing-room to St. James's, and stated to the King, in as few words as she could, the inconveniences and difficulties in which
such a step would involve him. He said, that was his business: he would stand them all: his part was taken, he wished to hear hers was likewise.'
'In this state it continued,
whilst she, by advice of her friends, broke off with
Lord Newbottle, very reluctantly on her part. She went
into the country for a few days, and by a fall from
her horse broke her leg. The absence which this
occasioned gave time and opportunities for her enemies
to work; they instilled jealousy into the King's mind
upon the subject of Lord Newbottle, telling him that
Lady Sarah still continued her intercourse with him,
and immediately the marriage with the Princess of
Strelitz was set on foot: and, at Lady Sarah's return
from the country, she found herself deprived of her
crown and her lover Lord Newbottle, who complained as
much of her as she did of the King. While this was in
agitation, Lady Sarah used to meet the King in his
rides early in the morning, driving a little chaise
with Lady Susan Strangeways: and once it is said that, wanting to speak to him, she went dressed like a servant-maid, and stood amongst the crowd in the Guard-room, to say a
few words to him as he passed by.'
Walpole also relates that Lady Sarah would sometimes appear as a haymaker in the park at Holland House, in order to attract the attention of the King
as he rode past but the opportunity was lost. The habit of obedience to his mother's will carried the day, and he allowed an emissary to go on a mission to obtain a bride for
him in the Protestant courts of Germany.
It is believed that lady Sarah
was allowed to have hopes till the very day when the
young sovereign announced to his council that he had
resolved on wedding the Princess Charlotte of
Mecklenburg Strelitz. She felt ill-used, and her
friends were all greatly displeased. With the King she
remained an object of virtuous admiration,—perhaps
also of pity. He wished to soften the disappointment
by endeavouring to get her established in a high
position near his wife: but the impropriety of such a
course was obvious, and it was not persisted in.
Lady Sarah, however, was asked
by the King to take a place among the ten unmarried
daughters of dukes and earls who held up the train of
his queen at the coronation: and this office, which we
cannot help thinking in the circumstances derogatory,
she consented to perform. It is said that, in the
sober, duty-compelled mind of the sovereign, there
always was a softness towards the object of his
youthful attachment. Walpole relates that he blushed
at his wedding service, when allusion was made to
Abraham and Sarah.
Lady Sarah Lennox in 1764 made
a marriage which proved that ambition was not a ruling
principle in her nature, her husband being 'a
clergyman's son,'
Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, Bart. Her subsequent
life was in some respects infelicitous, her marriage
being dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1776. By a
subsequent marriage to the
Hon.
Major-General George Napier, she became the mother
of a set of remarkable men, including the late Sir
Charles James Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, and
Lieut.-General Sir William Napier, the historian of
the Peninsular War. Her ladyship died at the age of
eighty-two, in 1826, believed to be the last surviving
great grand-daughter of Charles II.
ST. VALENTINE'S DAY
Valentine's Day is now almost
everywhere a much degenerated festival, the only
observance of any note consisting merely of the
sending of jocular anonymous letters to parties whom
one wishes to quiz, and this confined very much to the
humbler classes. The approach of the day is now
heralded by the appearance in the print-sellers' shop
windows of vast numbers of missives calculated for use
on this occasion, each generally consisting of a
single sheet of post paper, on the first page of which
is seen some ridiculous coloured caricature of the
male or female figure, with a few burlesque verses
below. More rarely, the print is of a sentimental
kind, such as a view of Hymen's altar, with a pair
undergoing initiation into wedded happiness before it,
while Cupid flutters above, and hearts transfixed with
his darts decorate the corners. Maid-servants and
young fellows interchange such epistles with each
other on the 14th of February, no doubt conceiving
that the joke is amazingly good: and, generally, the
newspapers do not fail to record that the London
postmen delivered so many hundred thousand more
letters on that day than they do in general. Such is
nearly the whole extent of the observances now
peculiar to St. Valentine's Day.
At no remote period it was
very different. Ridiculous letters were unknown: and,
if letters of any kind were sent, they contained only
a courteous profession of attachment from some young
man to some young maiden, honeyed with a few
compliments to her various perfections, and expressive
of a hope that his love might meet with return. But
the true proper ceremony of St. Valentine's Day was
the drawing of a kind of lottery, followed by
ceremonies not much unlike what is generally called
the game of forfeits. Misson, a learned traveller, of the early part of the last century, gives apparently a correct account of the principal ceremonial of the day.
'On the eve of St. Valentine's Day,' he says, 'the young folks in England and Scotland, by a very ancient custom, celebrate a little festival. An
equal number of maids and bachelors get together: each writes their true or some feigned name upon separate billets, which they roll up, and draw by way of lots, the maids
taking the men's billets, and the men the maids': so that each of the young men lights upon a girl that he calls his valentine, and each of the girls upon a young man whom
she calls hers. By this means each has two valentines: but the man sticks faster to the valentine that has fallen to him than to the valentine to whom he is fallen. Fortune
having thus divided the company into so many couples, the valentines give balls and treats to their mistresses, wear their billets several days upon their bosoms or sleeves,
and this little sport often ends in love.'
In that curious record of
domestic life in England in the reign of Charles II,
Pepys's Diary, we find some notable illustrations of
this old custom. It appears that married and single
were then alike liable to be chosen as a valentine,
and that a present was invariably and necessarily
given to the choosing party. Mr. Pepys enters in his
diary, on Valentine's Day, 1667: 'This morning came
up to my wife's bedside (I being up dressing myself)
little Will Mercer to be her valentine, and brought
her name written upon blue paper in gold letters, done
by himself, very pretty; and we were both well pleased
with it. But I am also this year my
wife's valentine, and it will cost me £5: but that I
must have laid out if we had not been valentines.' Two
days after, he adds:
'I find that Mrs. Pierce's little
girl is my valentine, she having drawn me: which I was
not sorry for, it easing me of something more that I
must have given to others. But here I do first observe
the fashion of drawing mottoes as well as names, so
that Pierce, who drew my wife, did draw also a motto,
and this girl drew another for me. What mine was. I
forget: but my wife's was "Most courteous and most
fair," which, as it maybe used, or an anagram upon
each name, might be very pretty.'
Noticing, soon
afterwards, the jewels of the celebrated Miss Stuart,
who became Duchess of Richmond, he says: 'The Duke of
York, being once her valentine, did give her a jewel
of about £800: and my Lord Mandeville, her valentine
this year, a ring of about £300.' These presents were
undoubtedly given in order to relieve the obligation
under which the being drawn as valentines had placed
the donors. In February 1668, Pepys notes as follows:
'This evening my wife did with great pleasure shew me
her stock of jewels, increased by the ring she hath
made lately, as my valentine's gift this year, a
Turkey-stone set with diamonds. With this, and what
she had, she reckons that she hath above one hundred
and fifty pounds' worth of jewels of one kind or
other: and I am glad of it, for it is fit the wretch
should have something to content herself with.'
The
reader will understand wretch to be used as a term of
endearment. Notwithstanding the practice
of relieving, there seems to have been a disposition
to believe that the person drawn as a valentine had
some considerable likelihood of becoming the associate
of the party in wedlock. At least, we may suppose that
this idea would be gladly and easily arrived at, where
the party so drawn was at all eligible from other
considerations. There was, it appears, a prevalent
notion amongst the common people, that this was the
day on which the birds selected their mates. They seem
to have imagined that an influence was inherent in the
day, which rendered in some degree binding the lot or
chance by which any youth or maid was now led to fix
his attention on a person of the opposite sex. It was
supposed, for instance, that the first unmarried
person of the other sex whom one met on St.
Valentine's morning in walking abroad, was a destined
wife or a destined husband. Thus Gay makes a rural
dame remark:
'Last Valentine, the day
when binds of kind
Their paramours with mutual chirping', find,
I early rose just at the break of day,
Before the sun had chased the stars away:
A-field I went, amid the morning clew,
To milk my kine (for so should housewives do).
Thee first I spied—and the first swain we see,
In spite of Fortune shall our true love be.'
A forward Miss in the
Connoisseur, a series of essays published in 1751-6, thus adverts to other notions with respect to the day:
'Last Friday was Valentine's Day, and the night before, I got five bay-leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth
to the middle: and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out
the yolk, and filled it with salt: and when I went to bed, ate it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers' names upon bits of paper,
and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water; and the first that rose up was to be our valentine. Would you think it?—Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay a-bed and shut my
eyes all the morning, till he came to our house: for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world.'
St. Valentine's Day is alluded
to by Shakspeare and by
Chaucer, and also by the poet
Lydgate (who died in 1440). One of the earliest known
writers of valentines, or poetical amorous addresses
for this day, was Charles Duke of Orleans, who was
taken at the battle of Agincourt. Drayton, a poet of Shakspeare's time, full of great but almost unknown
beauties, wrote thus charmingly:
TO HIS VALENTINE
'Muse, bid the morn
awake,
Sad winter now declines,
Each bird cloth choose a mate,
This day's St. Valentine's :
For that good bishop's sake
Get up, and let us see,
What beauty it shall be
That fortune us assigns.
But lo! in happy hour,
The place wherein she lies,
In yonder climbing tower
Gilt by the glittering rise;
Oh, Jove! that in a shower,
As once that thunder did,
When he in drops lay hid,
That I could her surprise!
Her canopy I'll draw,
With spangled plumes bedight,
No mortal ever saw
So ravishing a sight:
That it the gods might awe,
And powerfully transpierce
The globy universe,
Out-shooting every light.
My lips I'll softly lay
Upon her heavenly cheek,
Dyed like the dawning day,
As polish'd ivory sleek:
And in her ear I'll say,
"Oh thou bright morning-star
'Tis I that come so far,
My valentine to seek."
Each little bird, this
title,
Doth choose her loved peer,
Which constantly abide
In wedlock all the year,
As nature is their guide:
So may we two be true
This year, nor change for new,
As turtles coupled were.
Let's laugh at them that
choose
Their valentines by lot:
To wear their names that use,
Whom icily they have got.
Such poor choice we refuse,
Saint Valentine befriend;
We thus this morn may spend,
Else, Muse, awake her not'
Donne, another poet of the
same age, remarkable for rich though scattered
beauties, writes an epithalamium on the marriage of
the
Princess Elizabeth to Frederick Count Palatine of
the Rhine—the marriage which gave the present royal
family to the throne--and which took place on St.
Valentine's Day, 1614. The opening is fine
'Hail, Bishop Valentine!
whose day this is:
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
Thou marryest every year
The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove:
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher:
Thou mak'st the blackbird speed as soon
As cloth the goldfinch or the halcyon--
This day more cheerfully than ever shine,
This day which might inflame thyself, old
Valentine!'
The origin of these peculiar
observances of St. Valentine's Day is a subject of
some obscurity. The saint himself, who was a priest of
Rome, martyred in the third century, seems to have had
nothing to do with the matter, beyond the accident of
his day being used for the purpose. Mr. Douce, in his
Illustrations of Shakspeare, says:
'It was the
practice in ancient Rome, during a great part of the
month of February, to celebrate the Lupercalia, which
were feasts in honour of Pan and Juno. whence the
latter deity was named Februata, Februalis, and
Februlla. On this occasion, amidst a variety of
ceremonies, the names of young women were put into a
box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance
directed. The pastors of the early Christian church,
who, by every possible means, endeavoured to eradicate
the vestiges of pagan superstitions, and chiefly by
some commutations of their forms, substituted, in the
present instance, the names of particular saints
instead of those of the women: and as the festival of
the Lupercalia had commenced about the middle of
February, they appear to have chosen St. Valentine's
Day for celebrating the new feast, because it occurred
nearly at the same time.
This is, in part, the opinion
of a learned and rational compiler of the Lives of the
Saints, the Rev. Alban Butler.
It should seem, however, that
it was utterly impossible to extirpate altogether any
ceremony to which the common people had been much
accustomed—a fact which it were easy to prove in
tracing the origin of various other popular
superstitions. And, accordingly, the outline of the
ancient ceremonies was preserved, but modified by some
adaptation to the Christian system. It is reasonable
to suppose, that the above practice of choosing mates
would gradually become reciprocal in the sexes, and
that all persons so chosen would be called Valentines,
from the day on which the ceremony took place.'
February 15th
