A STRANGE COLLECTION.*
SETTING aside the illimitable flow of novels and biographies, and the undying pleasures of the interview, it becomes more and more a question where the subjects are to be found for that making of books whereof there is less and less an end. The effort now under our notice points to the most curious development in that direction which has come before us yet, and raises the question how far it is really fair to disinter dead memories for nothing but contempt and execration, with no earthly purpose beyond it. It is not good reading, it is in parts decidedly unwholesome ; a mere variation of the sort of study which used to be confined to the Newgate Calendar. And its contents are connected by nothing in the world but unity in sex and worthlessness, — but in worthlessness so utterly different in degree and kind, that one can but suppose that the editor made a kind of dip into the bag, and drew out the first names he found, to hang discourse 'upon. Whatever may have been the frailties and follies of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland," favourite of Kings and Magnates, and ancestor of Dukes and Ministers, it seems hard upon her descendants and historians that she should be coupled with " Moll Cutpurse, thief and receiver," and "Elizabeth Brownrigg, cruelty personified," and figure side by side with them upon such an index expurgatorius. The index is indeed a curiously frank production, in that • Lives of Twelve Bad Women Illustrations and Reviews of Feminine Turpitude MAYA by Impartial Hands. Edited by Arthur Vincent. Illustrated. London T. Maher trziw. " Duchess of Cleveland " is written down as Barbara Villiers's title to infamy, in the same type and on the same lines that " thief and receiver" are set forth as Moll Cutpurse's qualifications. So, too, do " Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset," and "Jenny Diver pick. pocket," court the attention of the reader curious in such analogies, side by side ; and "Elizabeth Chndleigh, Duchess of Kingston," precedes upon this strange bead-roll one " Mary Bateman, the Yorkshire witch," a lady whose dull and unedifying exploits are, we own, new to us.
Some of the names recall many young associations to our minds, and such is the force of the ridiculous, that the vulgar and stupid atrocities of Mrs. Brownrigg mainly recall to the older student's mind the comment of the poet:—
"She flogged six female 'prentices to death, And hid them in the coal-hole."
In commenting lately upon the increase of callousness which so undoubtedly marks the spirit of the day, we perhaps hardly laid sufficient stress upon the constant familiarity with horrors of all kinds that the enterprise of modern journalism breeds. Every murder at home or abroad, the latest domestic perversity and the last Parisian suicide, are recorded in detail for days till a successor crops up, and consequently when a great catastrophe like the fire in Paris comes to shock us, it strikes on a general mind that has supped so full of lesser horrors that the blow is fairly blunted, at all events in its outer seeming. It is possible that below the sur- face the generous feeling may not really have grown less. The study of a chapter on Mrs. Brownrigg will only be edifying to the lover of horrors pure and simple, which can never become picturesque except under the hand of a De Quincey. Barbara Villiers, with her fine pedigree and her lovely name and her Royal escapades, recalls a side of life which, if certainly not edifying, lacks, at all events, nothing of the picturesque to set it off. And to this day the story of the bigamist Duchess of Kingston, who was tried by her peers, remains among the " famous cases " which men care to recall. She was one of the beauties who, like the greater Lady Hamilton, immortalise harmony of feature at the expense of all other gifts. "She is large and ill- shaped," Horace Walpole wrote of her in an account of her trial; "there was nothing white but her face, and had it not been for that she would have looked like a bale of bombazine." Like Barbara Villiers and so many of her compeers, she came of a good family, the Chudleighs of Ashton, in Devonshire, and by the same precedent she reached thirty-nine before she became acquainted with the Duke of Kingston, a not very brilliant nobleman, nine years her senior. That her open connection with the Duke at such a period of life should have made no difference to her position as maid of honour to the Princess of Wales, leaving her to entertain all London to a fine concert and suppers in honour of Prince Edward's birth- day, is in itself sufficiently characteristic of the day they lived in :—
" You had heard before you left London," wrote Walpole, "of Miss Chudleigh's intended loyalty on the Prince's birthday. Poor thing ! I fear she has thrown away above a quarter's salary. It was magnificent and well understood—no crowd—and though a sultry night, no was not a moment incommoded. The court was illuminated on the whole summit of the wall with a battlement of lamps ; smaller ones on every step, and a figure of lanterns on the outside of the house. The virgin mistress began the ball with the Duke of York, but nobody did dance much. Miss Chudleigh desired the gamblers would go up into the garrets,—' Nay, they are not garrets ; it is only the roof of the house hollowed for upper servants—but I have no upper servants.' Everybody ran up ; there is a low gallery with bookcases and four chambers practised under the pent of the roof, each hung with the finest Indian pictures of different colours and with Chinese chairs of the same colours, vases of flowers in each for nosegays,—the supper was in two rooms and very fine, and on all the sideboards, and even on the chairs, were pyramids and triangles of strawberries and cherries."
And so forth and so forth. How well the special corre- spondent was anticipated in Horace Walpole! And how did the festivals of Elizabeth Chndleigh forecast the reprehensible revelry of Mrs. Bradley-Martin. It was as the Honourable Mrs. Augustus John Harvey that the Duchess of Kingston was indicted, and, as Hannah More wrote to her friends, "undignified and unduchessed, and narrowly escaped being burnt in the hand," to the virtuous disgust of Lord Camden, who only did not make the proposal because he had once paid his addresses to the lady, and thought it would have "looked ill-natured and ungallant." The result of her
trial, in those days, was that she departed in her yacht for St. Petersburg to visit the Empress Catherine, and on her way was entertained as a royal guest by Prince Radzivill for fourteen days, departing amid salvoes of artillery on her way. Previous to her trial she had especially distinguished herself by a passage-at-arms with Foote the caricaturist, who proposed to burlesque her on the stage as Lady Crocodile in A Trip to Calais. The letters that passed are set out in this volume, and, though the author thinks she failed to carry off the honours, we are not much inclined to compliment the English Aristophanes on his methods. "I am happy, Madam, to hear that your robe of innocence is in such perfect repair ; I was afraid it might be a little worse for the wearing. May it hold out to keep you warm the next winter." Such were the characteristics of a letter which "won the applause of all the wits," and made Foote conceive the idea of distributing a lampoon in the form of a handbill. When his theatre opened for the season, however, the public proved but lukewarm supporters, and a bill was found against him which resulted in his giving it up altogether, and dying of the strain and vexation. The loss of Foote was the loss of a witty man ; but it is scarcely fair to accuse the un- lucky Duchess of "hounding him to death " when the war was so completely of his own beginning.
It is because this curious compilation has attracted a good deal of attention that we have expressed at a little length our curiosity about its raison d'etre. Certainly the editor expresses so little respect or indulgence for his subjects, that he inclines us to regard these fair society triflers with rather more gentleness than he shows himself. They certainly seem to have had much attraction for the Hannah Mores and Horace Walpoles who loved to chronicle the world as it moved then. Mary Anne Clarke, known only in connection with royalty, and vaguely described as an "errant wife of a shadowy son of a rich bricklayer," fails to entertain us like the Duchess ; while why any one of them should be classed and sung with Mrs. Brownrigg and with Jenny Diver is among the problems of the modern book-world which are not too easy of solution.
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