For order, and beauty, and just regulation,
Support all the works of this ample creation.
For this, in compassion to mortals below,
The gods, their peculiar favor to show,
Sent Hermes to Bath in the shape of a beau:
That grandson of Atlas came down from above
To bless all the regions of pleasure and love;
To lead the fair nymph thro' the various maze,
Bright beauty to marshal, his glory and praise;
To govern, improve, and adorn the gay scene,
By the Graces instructed, and Cyprian queen:
As when in a garden delightful and gay,
Where Flora is wont all her charms to display,
The sweet hyacinthus with pleasure we view,
Contend with narcissus in delicate hue;
The gard'ner, industrious, trims out his border,
Puts each odoriferous plant in its order;
The myrtle he ranges, the rose and the lily,
With iris, and crocus, and daffa-down-dilly;
Sweet peas and sweet oranges all he disposes,
At once to regale both your eyes and your noses.
Long reign'd the great Nash, this omnipotent lord,
Respected by youth, and by parents ador'd;
For him not enough at a ball to preside,

The unwary and beautiful nymph would he guide;
Oft tell her a tale, how the credulous maid

By man, by perfidious man, is betrayed;

Taught Charity's hand to relieve the distress'd,
While tears have his tender compassion express'd,
But alas! he is gone, and the city can tell
How in years and in glory lamented he fell.

Him mourn'd all the Dryads on Claverton's mount;
Him Avon deplor'd, him the nymph of the fount,
The crystalline streams.

Then perish his picture-his statue decay-
A tribute more lasting the Muses shall pay.
If true, what philosophers all will assure us,
Who dissent from the doctrine of great Epicurus,
That the spirit's immortal (as poets allow):
In reward of his labors, his virtue and pains,
He is footing it now in the Elysian plains,
Indulg'd, as a token of Proserpine's favor,

To preside at her balls in a cream-color'd beaver.
Then peace to his ashes-our grief be suppress'd,

Since we find such a phoenix has sprung from his nest:

Kind Heaven has sent us another professor,

Who follows the steps of his great predecessor."

The end of the Bath Beau was somewhat less tragical than that of his London successor Brummell. Nash, in his old age and poverty, hung about the clubs and supper-tables, button-holed youngsters, who thought him a bore, spun his long yarns, and tried to insist on obsolete fashions, when near the end of his life's century.

The clergy took more care of him than the youngsters.

They heard that Nash was an octogenarian, and likely to die in his sins, and resolved to do their best to shrive him. Worthy and well-meaning men accordingly wrote him long letters, which, if he read, the Beau must have had more patience than we can lay claim to. There was, however, a great deal of hell-fire in these effusions, and there was nothing which Nash dreaded so much. As long as there was immediate fear of death, he was pious and humble; the moment the fear had passed, he was jovial and indifferent again. His especial delight, to the last, seems to have been swearing against the doctors, whom he treated like the individual in Anstey's "Bath Guide," shying their medicines out of window upon their own heads. But the wary old Beckoner called him in, in due time, with his broken, empty-chested voice; and Nash was forced to obey. Death claimed him—and much good it got of himin 1761, at the age of eighty-seven: there are few beaux who lived so long.

Thus ended a life, of which the moral lay, so to speak, out of it. The worthies of Bath were true to the worship of Folly, whom Anstey so well, though indelicately, describes as there conceiving Fashion; and though Nash, old, slovenly, disrespected, had long ceased to be either beau or monarch, treated his huge, unlovely corpse with the honor due to the great—or little. His funeral was as glorious as that of any hero, and far more showy, though much less solemn, than the burial of Sir John Moore. Perhaps for a bit of prose flummery, by way of contrast to Wolfe's lines on the latter event, there is little to equal the account in a contemporary paper: "Sorrow sate upon every face, and even children lisped that their sovereign was no more. The awfulness of the solemnity made the deepest impression on the minds of the distressed inhabitants. The peasant discontinued his toil, the ox rested from the plow, all nature seemed to sympathize with their loss, and the muffled bells rung a peal of bob-major."

The Beau left little behind him, and that little not worth much, even including his renown. Most of the presents which fools or flatterers had made him, had long since been sent chèz ma tante; a few trinkets and pictures, and a few books, which probably he had never read, constituted his little store.*

Bath and Tunbridge-for he had annexed that lesser kingdom to his own-had reason to mourn him, for he had almost made them what they were; but the country has not much cause to thank the upholder of gaming, the institutor of silly

* In the "Annual Register" (vol. v. p. 37), it is stated that a pension of ten guineas a month was paid to Nash during the latter years of his life by the Corporation of Bath.

144

HIS CHARACTERISTICS.

fashion, and the high-priest of folly. Yet Nash was free from many vices we should expect to find in such a man. He did not drink, for instance; one glass of wine, and a moderate quantity of small beer, being his allowance for dinner. He was early in his hours, and made others sensible in theirs. He was generous and charitable when he had the money; and when he had not he took care to make his subjects subscribe it. In a word, there have been worse men and greater fools; and we may again ask whether those who obeyed and flattered him were not more contemptible than Beau Nash himself. So much for the powers of impudence and a fine coat!

PHILIP, DUKE OF WHARTON.

If an illustration were wanted of that character unstable as water which shall not excel, this duke would at once supply it if we had to warn genius against self-indulgence-some clever boy against extravagance-some poet against the bottle-this is the "shocking example" we should select: if we wished to show how the most splendid talents, the greatest wealth, the most careful education, the most unusual advantages, may all prove useless to a man who is too vain or too frivolous to use them properly, it is enough to cite that nobleman, whose acts gained for him the name of the infamous Duke of Wharton. Never was character more mercurial, or life more unsettled than his; never, perhaps, were more changes crowded into a fewer number of years, more fame and infamy gathered into so short a space. Suffice it to say, that when Pope wanted a man to hold up to the scorn of the world, as a sample of wasted abilities, it was Wharton that he chose, and his lines rise in grandeur in proportion to the vileness of the

theme:

Thus with each gift of nature and of art,
And wanting nothing but an honest heart;
Grown all to all, from no one vice exempt,
And most contemptible, to shun contempt;
His passion still, to covet general praise,
His life to forfeit it a thousand ways;

A constant bounty which no friend has made;
An angel tongue which no man can persuade;
A fool with more of wit than all mankind;
Too rash for thought, for action too refined."

And then those memorable lines

"A tyrant to the wife his heart approved,
A rebel to the very king he loved;

He dies, sad outcast of each church and state;
And, harder still! flagitious, yet not great.

Though it may be doubted if the "lust of praise" was the

G

146

WHARTON'S ANCESTORS.-HIS EARLY YEARS.

cause of his eccentricities, so much as an utter restlessness and instability of character, Pope's description is sufficiently correct, and will prepare us for one of the most disappointing lives we could well have to read.

Philip, Duke of Wharton, was one of those men of whom an Irishman would say, that they were fortunate before they were born. His ancestors bequeathed him a name that stood high in England for bravery and excellence. The first of the house, Sir Thomas Wharton, had won his peerage from Henry VIII. for routing some 15,000 Scots with 500 men, and other gallant deeds. From his father the marquis he inherited much of his talents; but for the heroism of the former, he seems to have received it only in the extravagant form of foolhardiness. Walpole remembered, but could not tell where, a ballad he wrote on being arrested by the guard in St. James's Park, for singing the Jacobite song, "The King shall have his own again," and quotes two lines to show that he was not ashamed of his own cowardice on the occasion:

"The duke he drew out half his sword

The guard drew out the rest.

At the siege of Gibraltar, where he took up arms against his own king and country, he is said to have gone alone one night to the very walls of the town, and challenged the outpost. They asked him who he was, and when he replied, openly enough, "The Duke of Wharton," they actually allowed him to return without either firing on or capturing him. The story seems somewhat apocryphal, but it is quite possible that the English soldiers may have refrained from violence to a well-known madcap nobleman of their own nation.

Philip, son of the Marquis of Wharton, at that time only a baron, was born in the last year but one of the seventeenth century, and came into the world endowed with every quality which might have made a great man, if he had only added wisdom to them. His father wished to make him a brilliant statesman, and, to have a better chance of doing so, kept him at home, and had him educated under his own eye. He seems to have easily and rapidly acquired a knowledge of classical languages; and his memory was so keen that when a boy of thirteen he could repeat the greater part of the "Æneid" and of Horace by heart. His father's keen perception did not allow him to stop at classics; and he wisely prepared him for the career to which he was destined by the study of history, ancient and modern, and of English literature, and by teaching him, even at that early age, the art of thinking and writing on any given subject, by proposing themes for essays. There is certainly no surer mode of developing the reflective