Born: Sir Robert
Walpole (Earl of Orford), eminent statesman, 1676,
Houghton, Norfolk; Prince Albert, consort of Queen
Victoria, 1819.
Died: Lopez Felix de la
Vega, Spanish poet and dramatist, 1635, Madrid; Lord
George Sackville, commander and statesman, 1785;
Christopher Christian Sturm, author of the
Reflections, 1786; Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of
Kingston, 1788, France;
Karl Theodor K�rner,
martial
lyrist, killed, 1813; Dr. Adam Clarke, eminent divine
and author, 1832, Haydon Hall, Middlesex; Louis
Philippe, ex-king of France, 1850, Claremont, Surrey.
Feast Day: St.
Zephyrinus, pope and martyr, 219. St. Gelasinus,
martyr, 297. St. Genesius (a comedian), martyr, end of
3rd century. St. Genesius of Arles, martyr.
LOPE DE
VEGAS EIGHTEEN HUNDRED PLAYS
Lope de Vega, or more fully
Lope Felix de Vega-Carpio, may be said to enjoy the
distinction of having been the most fertile of all
authors of imaginative literature. Born at Madrid in
1562, he was so precocious that, if we are to believe
his disciple and biographer, Montalvan, he dictated
poetry at five years old, before he could write. At
seventeen, while in the university of Alcala, he wrote
his dramatic romance of Dorothea, in which he depicted
himself as one of the characters, leading a wild and
dissolute life. Now a poet, now a soldier, now a
courtier, now an adventurer, Lope appeared under
various aspects�one of which was that of a subordinate
officer in the far-famed Armada, which made a vain
attempt to invade England. But wherever he was, and
whatever other work he was engaged in, he always
contrived to write poems and plays.
After many more fluctuations
in position, he became an ecclesiastic in 1609, and
officiated in daily church-offices for the rest of his
life. It will serve to illustrate the tone of moral
and social life in Spain, at that time, that Lope de
Vega not only continued to pour forth plays with
amazing rapidity, but that some of them were very
licentious in character. Poems, too, appeared in
almost equal abundance: some sacred, some immoral;
some based upon his own ideas, some in imitation of
Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, or Boccaccio. The words seemed
to flow almost spontaneously from his pen; for not
only are his works almost incredibly numerous, but
some of them are very long. One, called Gatomachia, or
the Battle of the Cats�in which two cats quarrel and
fight about a third�consists of no less than 2500
verses, 'rather long,' as one of his biographers
admits, 'for a badinage.'
If his chief productions had
not been dramas, he would still have been one of the
most prolific poets ever known; but his plays far
outnumbered his poems, and were the means of giving
something like nationality to the Spanish drama. In
1603, when forty-one years of age, he found that his
dramatic compositions reached the number of 341; it
swelled to 483 in 1609, about 800 in 1618, nearly 900
in 1619, 1070 in 1624, and 1800 at the time of his
death (August 26, 1635). According to ordinary
experience, this would be almost incredible; but we
mast believe that the dramas were mostly very short.
Montalvan, one of the biographers of Lope de Vega,
states that, while at Toledo, Lope wrote five dramas
in a fortnight; and that half a morning was often
enough for him to produce an entire act of a play.
It is asserted that every one
of these 1800 plays was acted in his lifetime. No less
than 500 of them have been printed, and occupy a place
among the literature of Spain. Some of them are
interludes, or short farces in prose; but the greater
number are comedies in verse, mostly in three portions
or acts. Of no other writer can it be said that his
printed plays fill twenty-six quarto volumes
(published between 1609 and 1647); and yet that his
unpublished plays were nearly thrice as many. Lope de
Vega gave that tone to the Spanish drama, brilliant
but immoral, which has been made so familiar to the
public by the various forms of Don Juan and the Barber
of Seville.
THE DUCHESS OF
KINGSTON
As an example of the
adventuress, amid several notabilities of a like kind,
in the earlier half of the reign of George III,
Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, is
prominently distinguished. She was the daughter of
Colonel Chudleigh, a gentle-man of good family in
Devonshire, who, through his friendship with Mr.
Pulteney, obtained for his daughter the post of maid
of honour to the Princess of Wales, mother of George
III. Her natural talents and attractions were here
cultivated and developed, and the charms of her
manners and conversation soon surrounded her with a
host of distinguished and enthusiastic admirers.
One of the most conspicuous of
these was the Duke of Hamilton, who made her an offer
of his hand, and was accepted. Circumstances, however,
prevented their immediate union; the parties agreed to
hold themselves as engaged, and the duke set out on a
tour on the continent, from which he regularly
corresponded with Miss Chudleigh. In the meantime,
Captain Hervey, son of the Earl of Bristol, came
forward as a suitor, under the auspices of Miss
Chudleigh's aunt, Mrs. Hanmer, who is said to have
intercepted the Duke of Hamilton's letters, and
otherwise exerted her influence to the utmost with her
niece, to induce her to discard him for the captain. A
volatile and impetuous disposition, guided apparently
by no high or abiding principle, induced Miss
Chudleigh, without much difficulty, to receive
Hervey's addresses, and they were privately married at
Lainston, near Winchester. This ill-advised step
proved the foundation of all her subsequent
perplexities.
Fearing the effects of his father's
anger, Captain Hervey dared not venture to acknowledge
his marriage, and his wife had to endure all the
inconveniences which a woman must submit to, who is
placed in such a position. She seems almost
immediately after the conclusion of the match, to have
repented of her precipitancy. Indifference was
followed by positive aversion, and though one son was
born of the union, who soon quitted the world, as he
had entered it, in secrecy and obscurity, a lasting
estrangement took place between the parents.
Captain Hervey, whose jealousy
was violently excited by the attentions paid to his
wife as Miss Chudleigh, gradually changed his line of
conduct, and threatened to proclaim their marriage to
the public, whilst she became only more determined to
find some pretext for its legal dissolution. With this
view, she is said to have gained access to the
register in which her wedding was recorded, and
destroyed the evidence of it, by tearing out the leaf.
The officiating clergyman was now dead. But not long
afterwards, her husband succeeded, by the death of his
father, to the earldom of Bristol, upon which a
revulsion took place in her crooked policy, and she
contrived, by bribing the officiating clerk, to get
her marriage reinserted in the same register from
which she had previously torn the record. So far for
the first acts of this singular drama.
From the aristocratic circles
amid which Miss Chudleigh reigned as queen, the Duke
of Kingston now stepped forth, and proffered her his
hand. He appears to have possessed many good
qualities, being mild and unassuming in his manners,
the very reverse of his mistress, whose love of
admiration had been the great occasion of her errors.
There can be no doubt that an illicit intercourse had
subsisted for some time betwixt them; but the duke's
attachment to her seems to have been sincere.
The Earl of Bristol had now
himself become desirous of severing his nuptial tics,
and he therefore was readily induced to concur in a
process of jactitation of marriage in the
ecclesiastical courts, which, by an adroit suppression
of evidence, terminated in a decree of nullification.
The path being thus, in their opinion, cleared, the
union of the duke and Miss Chudleigh was publicly
solemnised. For some years the duchess basked in all
the sunshine of wealth and exalted position, when at
last her husband died. By his will the duke was found
to have devised his estates to one of his younger
nephews, excluding the heir at law, and bequeathing to
his wife the enjoyment of the rents of the property
during her life.
The duchess being aware of the
contents of the will, and of certain restrictions
which had been imposed on her marrying again, had
endeavoured, though ineffectually, to procure before
the duke's death the execution of a more favourable
deed. The elder nephew, whose claims to the succession
had been ignored, resolved to dispute the validity of
his uncle's will. Through information received from a
Mrs. Cradock, who had been one of the witnesses to the
marriage of Miss Chudleigh with Captain Hervey, and
had afterwards, as she deemed, been rather shabbily
treated by the duchess, he instituted against the
latter an indictment for bigamy. She had previously to
this quitted the kingdom for the continent, but on
receiving intelligence of these proceedings, deemed it
prudent to return to England, to avoid an outlawry.
The trial commenced on 15th
April 1776, before the House of Peers, in Westminster
Hall, which was filled by a distinguished audience,
including Queen Charlotte and several members of the
royal family. The evidence of the marriage with
Captain Hervey having been produced, and the whole
matter carefully sifted, the peers unanimously found
the duchess guilty of bigamy, with the exception of
the Duke of Newcastle, who pronounced her guilty
'erroneously but not intentionally.' The consequences
of this sentence would have been the issuing of a writ
Ne exeat regno to prevent her quitting the country,
but before it could be completed, she contrived to
escape to Calais, from which she never returned.
The heirs of the Duke of
Kingston, having thus succeeded in nullifying his
marriage, now endeavoured to get his will set aside;
but in this they were thoroughly unsuccessful. The
duchess was left to the undisturbed enjoyment of her
large income, which she dissipated in the indulgence
of all sorts of luxury. She had already purchased a
house at Calais, but it was inadequate to her ideas of
splendour, and she accordingly entered into terms for
the purchase of another at Montmartre, in the suburbs
of Paris. A dispute with the owner of this property
gave rise to a litigation, during the dependence of
which she made a journey to St. Petersburg, and there
entered into some speculations connected with the
distilling of brandy. She subsequently returned to
France, and became the purchaser of a fine domain in
the neighbourhood of Paris, belonging to a brother of
Louis XVI, the reigning sovereign.
The investment proved a good
one, the immense number of rabbits on the property
furnishing a most lucrative return. As much as 300
guineas is said to have been realized by her from this
source alone in the first week of her possession. But
the end was now approaching. In the midst of this
temporal prosperity, intelligence was one day brought
her, that judgment had been pronounced against her in
the suit regarding the house at Montmartre. So great
an agitation was produced on her by this news, that
she ruptured a blood. vessel, and was obliged to
confine herself to her bed. In the course of a few
days she seemed to rally, and insisted on getting up
and having herself dressed. Her attendant vainly
endeavoured to dissuade her, and she then called for a
glass of Madeira, which she drank, and insisted on a
second being brought. This also she drank off, and
then said she should like to lie down. Having
stretched herself on a couch, she soon appeared to
fall asleep, and remained in this state for some time,
when her servants felt an unusual coldness in her
hands, and on examining more closely, found that she
had passed away. Such was her end, to die among
strangers in a foreign land�a fitting termination,
perhaps, to her chequered and singular career.
One circumstance in connection
with the Duchess of Kingston ought not to be passed
over in silence. We allude to her well-known fracas
with Samuel Foote. That
celebrated wit and dramatist, who
derived a considerable portion of his fame from the
personalities which he introduced into his literary lucubrations, produced a
farce, entitled A Trip to
Calais, in which he brought forward the duchess under
the title of 'Lady Kitty Crocodile.' His procedure in
this transaction reflects little credit either on his
character as a man or policy as a schemer. The duchess
would have willingly paid him a handsome sum to
withdraw the piece; but, in the hopes of obtaining a
larger consideration, he out-maneuvered himself;
whilst she, by her interest with parties in power,
contrived to have the representation of the play
interdicted by the lord-chamberlain, and also its
publication, for the time at least, prevented.
BATTLE OF CRECY�WERE CANNON FIRST EMPLOYED THERE?
This extraordinary conflict,
to which the English for ages looked back as they have
latterly looked back to Waterloo, was fought on the
26th of August 1346, in an angle of ground lying
between the river Somme and the sea, in Picardy.
Edward III had invaded France, in pursuit of his
imagined right to the throne, and for some weeks
conducted his small army along the valley of the
Seine, in considerable danger from the much larger one
of Philip, the French king. At length he made a stand
on a favourable piece of ground at the village of
Crecy, and awaited in calmness and good order the
precipitate and disorderly attack of the opposite
host. By virtue of coolness and some hard fighting, he
gained the battle, and was able to destroy an immense
number of the enemy. The prowess shewn on the occasion
by his son the
Black Prince, and
other particulars of
the well-fought field, are generally familiar to the
readers of English history.
It is said there is still to
be seen upon the field a tower-like wind-mill, which
existed at the time of the action, and marking the
station of the English king.'
There is a doubtful statement,
to the effect that cannon were first used in military
encounter at the Battle of Crecy. It must be
considered as liable to great doubt. Our own
chroniclers make no allusion to such a circumstance;
neither is it mentioned in the ordinary copies of
Froissart, although his account of the battle is
remarkably ample and detailed. It has been surmised
that only some comparatively recent French writers
have introduced the assertion into their narratives,
as a sort of excuse for the panic which the troops of
King Philip exhibited on the occasion.
On the other
hand, there appears to be a manuscript copy of Froissart, preserved at Amiens,
from which the present
emperor of France has quoted the following passage in
his work on artillery: 'Et li Angles descliqu'erent
aucuns canons qu'il avaient en la bataille pour
esbahir les Genevois.' And it is alleged that Villani,
a contemporary Italian writer, states that cannon were
used by the English at Crecy. If these statements are
correct, we may consider it established that
artillery�though probably of a very simple and
portable kind�were first employed on this interesting
occasion.
THE MARRIAGE OF THE
ARTS
On Sunday, the 26th of August
1621, a comedy, entitled Technogamia, or the Marriage
of the Arts, written by Barton Holiday, M. A., of
Christ's Church, Oxford, was performed by students of
the same college, before James I at Woodstock. As a
typical specimen of the allegorical piece of the olden
time, this drama is not unworthy of notice. The
dramatis person�; consist of Polites, a magistrate;
Physica, and her daughter Astronomia; Ethicus, with
his wife Economa; Geographicus, a traveller, with his
servant Phantastes; Logicus, and his servant
Phlegmaticus; Grammaticus, a schoolmaster, and his
usher Choler; Poeta, and his servant Melancholia;
Medicus, and his servant Sanguis; Historia; Rhetorica;
Geometres; Arithmetica; Musica; Causidicus; Magus, and
his wife Astrologia; Physiognomus and Cheiromantes,
two cheating gipsies. All these are attired in goodly
and appropriate fashion. Astronomia, for instance,
wearing 'white gloves and pumps, an azure gown, and a
mantle seeded with stars; on her head a tiara, bearing
on the front the seven stars, and behind stars
promiscuously; on the right side, the sun; on the
left, the moon.' Astronomia is the brilliant heroine
of the play�the heaven to which Geographicus aspires
to travel, of which Geometres endeavours to take the
measure, in which Poeta desires to repose. On the
other hand, Arithmetica has a more natural passion for
Geometres, and Historia anxiously wishes to be united
to Poeta. Grammaticus, in an amorous mood, solicits
Rhetorica, whose flowers bloom only for Logicus.
These conflicting attachments
cause great confusion in the commonwealth of learning;
each of the enamoured personages endeavouring to
obtain the object of his or her affections. Polites
assists Geographicus; Magus employs his occult art in
favour of Geometres; while the Nine Muses, as in duty
bound, assist Poeta. Polites can with difficulty keep
the peace. The gipsies, Physiognomus and Cheiromantes,
pick Poeta's pocket, but find nothing therein but a
copy of Anacreon and a manuscript translation of
Horace. Physiognomus is appropriately branded on the
face, that all men may know him to be a rogue; and
Cheiromantes receives the same punishment on the hand;
and the two, with Magus and Astrologia, who had
attempted to strangle Astronomia, are justly banished
the commonwealth of the Sciences. Then Geographicus,
discharging his servant Phantastes, marries Astronomia;
Grammaticus espouses Rhetorica; Melancholia obtains
the hand of Musica, and takes Phantastes into his
service; Logicus, old and heartless, being left
without a mate, becomes an assistant to Polites; and
thus peace and harmony is restored among the Sciences.
There is considerable ingenuity displayed in the
invention of this plot, the dialogue is witty, and the
professors of the sciences represented are humorously
satirised.
One would have supposed, that
the pedantic spirit of James would have been delighted
with this production, but such was not the case.
Anthony h Wood tells us that the king 'offered
several times to withdraw, but being persuaded by some
of those that were near him to have patience till it
were ended, lest the young men should be discouraged,
[he] adventured it, though much against his will.' And
the Cambridge students, pleased that the Oxford drama
did not interest the king, produced the following
epigram:
'At Christ-church marriage,
played before the king, Lest these learned mates
should want an offering, The king, himself, did
offer�What, I pray? He offered twice or thrice to go
away.'
It is not difficult to
perceive what it was that displeased the king.
Phlegmaticus was dressed 'in a pale russet suit, on
the hack whereof was represented one filling a pipe of
tobacco, his hat beset round about with tobacco-pipes,
with a can of drink hanging at his girdle.' He
entered, exclaiming: 'Fore Jove, most meteorological
tobacco! Pure Indian! not a jot sophisticated; a
tobacco-pipe is the chimney of perpetual hospitality.
Fore Jove, most metropolitan tobacco.' And then,
rather unphlegmatically, he broke out into the
following song:
Tobacco's a Musician,
And in a pipe delighteth;
It descends in a close,
Through the organs of the nose,
With a relish that inviteth.
This makes me sing, So ho, so ho, boys,
Ho, boys, sound I loudly;
Earth ne'er did breed
Such a jovial weed,
Whereof to boast so proudly.
Tobacco is a Lawyer,
His pipes do love long cases;
When our brains it enters,
Our feet do make indentures;
While we seal with stamping paces,
This makes me sing, &c.
Tobacco's a Physician,
Good both for sound and sickly;
'Tis a hot perfume,
That expels cold rheum,
And makes it flow down quickly.
This makes me sing, &c.
Tobacco is a Traveller,
Come from the Indies hither;
It passed sea and land,
Ere it came to my hand,
And 'scaped the wind and weather,
This makes me sing, &c.
Tobacco is a Critic,
That still old paper turneth,
Whose labour and care,
Is as smoke in the air,
That ascends from a rag when it burneth.
This makes me sing, &c.
Tobacco's an Ignis-fatuus,
A fat and fiery vapour,
That leads men about,
Till the fire be out,
Consuming like a taper.
This makes me sing, &c.
Tobacco is a Whiffler,
And cries huff snuff with fury,
His pipe's his club and link,
He's the wiser that does drink;
Thus armed I fear not a fury.
This makes me sing, So ho, so ho, boys,
Ho, boys, sound I loudly;
Earth ne'er did breed
Such a jovial weed,
Whereof to boast so proudly.
The royal author of the
Counterblast to Tobacco must have felt himself
insulted by such a song. Ben Jenson was wiser, when,
in his Gipsies' Meta-morphosis, he abused 'the
devil's own weed,' in language totally unpresentable
at the present day; and the delighted monarch ordered
the filthy, slangy, low play, to be performed three
several times in his kingly presence.
THE LAST OF
THE ARCTIC VOYAGERS
The nation has given �20,000
in prizes to the gallant men who have solved (so far
as it is yet solved) the problem of the North-West
Passage�that is, a navigable channel from the Atlantic
to the Pacific round the northern margin of America.
There were twenty-two attempts made to discover such a
passage in the sixteenth century, twenty in the
seventeenth, and twenty-one in the eighteenth �nearly
the whole of these sixty-three attempts being made by
natives of this country, and most of them without any
material aid from the government.
In the present
century, the regular arctic expeditions, planned and
supported by the government, began in 1817; and during
the next forty years, Parry, John Ross, James Ross,
Back, Franklin, Lyons, Beecher, Austin, Kellett,
Osborne, Collinson, M'Clure, Rae, Simpson, M'Clintock,
and other gallant men, made those discoveries which
cost the nation more than a million sterling, besides
many valuable lives.
Sir John Franklin headed one
of
the expeditions; and his stay being strangely
protracted, ships were sent out in search of him year
after year. Captain M'Clure did not obtain any
information concerning poor Franklin's fate; but he
made such discoveries as justify us in asserting that
a North-West Passage is found. So far back as 1745,
parliament offered a reward of �20,000 to the
discoverer of the much-coveted passage; this reward
was never paid or claimed, and its offer was
with-drawn in 1828; but Parry and John Ross each
received �5000, in recognition of what they had
done�leaving to the country to reward other
discoverers as it might choose.
The reasons why Captain
(afterwards Sir Robert) M'Clure may be considered as
having practically solved the problem, may be stated
in a few words. In 1850, Captains M'Clure and
Collinson were sent out in the Investigation and the
Enterprise, to assist in searching for Sir John
Franklin and his hapless companions. They proceeded by
the Pacific to Behring's Strait, and thence worked
their way eastward to the frozen regions. Collin-son's
labours were confined chiefly to such open water as
could be found close to the American shores; but
M'Clure pushed forward in a more northern route. What
he endured during four years, mostly in regions where
no civilised man had ever before been, his narrative
must tell�so far as any narrative can do justice to
such labour. He returned to England from Davis's
Strait in the autumn of 1854. True, he had to leave
his ship behind him, hopelessly locked in among
mountains of ice; and he had to walk and sledge over
hundreds of miles of ice to reach other ships which
had entered the frozen regions in the opposite
direction; but still he had water under him all the
way; and he was thus the first commander of a vessel
who really made the passage.
A 'navigable' passage it
certainly was not, in the proper meaning of the term,
but still it solved the main problem. In 1855, a
committee of the House of Commons investigated the
matter, and decided that a grant of �10,000 should be
made for this discovery�making, with the �5000 given
to Parry, and a sum of equal amount to John Ross, a
total of �20,000; equivalent to that which, more than
a century earlier, had been offered for the discovery
of this North-West Passage. Parliament and the
government agreeing to this, the �10,000 was paid to
the hardy explorers in August 1855��5,000 to Captain M'Clure himself, and �5000
to his officers and crew.
This was entirely distinct
from the reward given �not for the discovery of the
North-West Passage �but for any authentic tidings of
the fate of Sir John Franklin. After an enormous sun
had been spent in fitting out expeditions for the
last-named purpose, the government offered �20,000 to
any one who should 'discover and effectually relieve
the crews of H. M. ships Erebus and Terror' (those
which Franklin commanded); �10,000 to any one who
'should give such intelligence as might lead to the
succour of the crews of those ships;' and �10,000 to
any person who should, 'in the judgment of the Board
of Admiralty, first succeed in ascertaining the fate
of those crews.'
The first and second of these prizes
were never earned, for the hapless men were never seen
alive by any of their countrymen in time for succour
to be afforded them; but the third prize was given in
1856 to Dr. Rae, who, by a daring overland journey
from the Hudson Bay Company's Settlements, found
circumstantial, though not unmistakable evidences of
the deplorable deaths of Franklin and some of his
companions. In 1858 and 1859, Captain M'Clintock
completed the investigation, and rendered certain that
which Dr. Rae had shewn to be probable; but as the
�10,000 had been appropriated, it required a second
grant from parliament (�6000) to make a suitable
recognition of Captain M'Clintock's eminent though
mournful services.
