Mrs. A. T. Thomson

“ I received with the greatest pleasure imaginable your grace’s commands, as I shall ever do to the last moment of my life, and obey them with a readiness as becomes one to do, who, with all his faults, has not those fashionable ones of fickleness and insincerity, which the dear Duchess of Marlborough has, to my knowledge, so often met with in this false world.
I am sure your grace is overjoyed to hear the Duke is so well, and the more so because it is truth beyond contradiction, that as we owe our liberties to him, so he, under God, owes his life to the care and tenderness of the best of wives. ”

“ A touch of feminine feeling softened the harshness of the professed wit, always a dangerous, and scarcely ever a pleasing character in woman. As Lady Townshend gazed on the prisoners at the bar, and saw the elegant and melancholy aspect of Lord Kilmarnock, the heart that was not wholly seared by a worldly career is said to have been deeply and seriously touched by the graces of that incomparable person, and the mournful dignity of his manner. ”

“ His day was past; he had outlived his fame as a wit and social light; he was forgotten by many, if not by most, of his old associates. He wrote to Rogers, 'I am absolutely undone and broken-hearted.' Poor Sheridan! in spite of all thy faults, who is he whose morality is so stern that he cannot shed one tear over thy latter days! God forgive us, we are all sinners; and if we weep not for this man's deficiency, how shall we ask tears when our day comes? Even as I write, I feel my hand tremble and my eyes moisten over the sad end of one whom I love, though he died before I was born. ”

“ The complexion of George Villiers was singularly clear and beautiful, his forehead high and smooth, his eyes dark and full of intelligence and sweetness, whilst the perfect oval of his face, and delicate turn of features, fine, yet noble, and the air of refinement which characterised both his countenance and his bearing, rendered him one of the most attractive of human beings. ”

“ Has any man suffered in his liberty, life, or fortune, contrary to law? Stand forth and name him if you can. Tho' the King's person, his family, his government, and his ministers, have been openly abused a thousand times in the most scurrilous and reproachful terms, could it ever provoke him to one arbitrary act or to violate those laws which he had made the rule of his government? Look into the reigns of the James's and the Charles's, and tell me wither these divine and hereditary princes were guided by the same spirit of mildness and forgivness? ”

“ It seemed to me, when I read this book, as if life were too rotten for any belief, a nest of sharpers, adulterers, cut-throats, and prostitutes. There was none—as far as I remember—of that amiable weakness, of that better sentiment, which in Ben Jonson or Massinger reconcile us to human nature. If truth be a test of genius, it must be a proof of true poetry, that man is not made uglier than he is. Nay, his very ugliness loses its intensity and palls upon our diseased tastes, for want of some goodness, some purity and honesty to relieve it. I will not say that there is none of this in Congreve. ”

“ On the sixteenth of August, the King embarked at Orange-Holder, and landed two days afterwards at Greenwich. Every ship in the river saluted the royal vessel as it sailed, and multitudes thronged the banks of the Thames, uttering loud acclamations of joy at the arrival of the monarch. Yet George the First, a man of plain understanding, without ambition, the romance of monarchs, felt, it is said, that he had arrived to claim a crown not his own, and had an uncomfortable notion all his life, that he was somewhat of a character to which nature had little disposed him, an usurper. ”

“ This perplexing and irritating conduct on the part of Lord Sunderland was one of a series of political vexations, which Marlborough and his Duchess experienced at the hands of that able, but violent nobleman.
The Duchess of Marlborough had now wholly embarked on that voyage of politics which ended only with her long and weary life. A taste for the excitement for cabal, like a passion for gaming, grows with indulgence; it is rarely wholly relinquished, but fastens itself upon the character, until every faculty is absorbed in what is popularly termed a spirit of party. ”

“ What a life for the young poet who had wooed and won the Maid of Bath—for the man of strong domestic affections, who wept over his father's sternness, and loved his son only too well! It was bad enough for such mere worldlings as Captain Hanger or Beau Brummell, but for a man of higher and purer feelings, like Sheridan, who, with all his faults, had some poetry in his soul, such a career was doubly disgraceful. ”

“ The soldier of fortune, driven at an early age from home, sent from country to country, serving, with little hope of advancement, under various generals, Balmerino had learned to view life almost as a matter of indifference, compared with the honest satisfaction of preserving consistency. His existence had been one of trial, and of banishment from all domestic pleasures, and in the perils of his youthful days, he had learned to view it as so precarious, that his final doom came not to him as a surprise, but seemed merely a natural conclusion of a career of danger and adventure. ”

“ With few opportunities of mental culture, except such as society offered her, with scarcely the rudiments of education, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough became, at an early age, the affianced wife of a man who was, like herself, practical, not erudite, the scholar of the world, the pupil of fortune. At the time of this early engagement, she probably possessed, along with the vivacity, the sweetness and attractions natural to her sex. The world, and a love of politics, that bane to delicacy and grace in woman, had not then hardened her nature, and increased the acrimony of her temper. ”

“ Beneath the effeminacy of the Maccaroni, Lord Hervey was one of the few who united to intense finery in every minute detail, an acute and cultivated intellect. To perfect a Maccaroni it was in truth advisable, if not essential, to unite some smattering of learning, a pretension to wit, to his super-dandyism; to be the author of some personal squib, or the translator of some classic. Queen Caroline was too cultivated herself to suffer fools about her, and Lord Hervey was a man after her own taste; as a courtier he was essentially a fine gentleman ”

“ Brought up in a monastery, the simple-minded Katharine vainly hoped to reform her dissolute husband, whose inconstancy at first grieved and shocked her virtuous notions. Unlike her rival, Anne Duchess of York, a shrewd and worldly woman, who strove to fill her saloons with the young and the fair, Katharine was surrounded by her countrywomen, old, stiff, ungainly, repulsive Portuguese ladies, of birth and pride, who soon became the subjects of infinite merriment to King Charles’s court. ”

“ A fine prospect over the scenery of the Glenhens is commanded by the eminence on which the castle stands. An ancient avenue of lime-trees constitutes the approach to the fortress from the road.
In this abode dwelt the Viscount Kenmure until the summons of Lord Mar called him from the serene tenour of a course honoured by others, and peaceful from the tranquillity of the unhappy nobleman's own disposition; for his was not the restless ambition of Mar, nor the blind devotion of the Duke of Perth; nor the passion for fame and ascendancy which stimulated Lord George Murray in his exertions. ”

“ But Sheridan was more truly witty in putting down a young braggart whom he met at dinner at a country-house. There are still to be found, like the bones of dead asses in a field newly ploughed, in some parts of the country, youths, who are so hopelessly behind their age, and indeed every age, as to look upon authorship as degrading, all knowledge, save Latin and Greek, as 'a bore,' and all entertainment but hunting, shooting, fishing, and badger-drawing, as unworthy of a man. ”

“ Until the elevation of George Villiers from low estate to an unparalleled career of success, the race from which he sprang, though ancient and honourable, was but partially known to fame, and his ancestors, how valiant and loyal soever they had proved, had held the tenor of their way with little variation, and with only an occasional gleam of celebrity on one or other of its lineage; a course of moderate prosperity maintaining, without altering, its condition—rather, as Sir Henry Wotton has well expressed it, “without obscurity than with any great lustre.” ”

“ The principle of self-advancement grew with his growth, and soiled those beautiful attributes of a nature so brave and benignant, that we are unwilling to believe he could indulge a selfish passion, or even cherish a weakness. From the days when he was a page in the court of the second Charles, permitting, to say the least, the disgraceful mediation of the Duchess of Cleveland, to the hour when, for the last time, he carried the sword of state on New Year’s day before George the First, the ruling passion of Marlborough was gain—gain of patronage, of money, of fame, of power. ”

“ One hears of no repartee among Cromwell's followers; no dash, no merriment, in Fairfax's staff; eloquence, indeed, but no wit in the Parliamentarians; and, in truth, in the second Charles's time, the king might have headed the lists of the Wits himself—such a capital man as his Majesty is known to have been for a wet evening or a dull Sunday; such a famous teller of a story—such a perfect diner-out: no wonder that in his reign we had George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham of that family, 'mankind's epitome,' who had every pretension to every accomplishment combined in himself. ”

“ I make my earnest and dying prayers to God Almighty, that he may, in his mercy, thro the merits of Christ Jesus, save you and all my poor people, whom I always found honest and zealous to me and their duty, from that blindness of heart that will inevitably bring those ruins and disgraces upon you and your posterity; and I pray that Almighty and Mercifull God, who has often miraculously saved my family and name from utter ruin, may give you the spirit of courage, of zeal, and of fidelity, that you owe to your chief, to your name, to your selves, to your children, and to your country ”

“ No distinction was accounted greater, among the nobility, than the power, and disposition, to reward literary merit. To be a patron of the learned, to protect, with more effectual aids than mere empty commendations, some one, if not several, of the needy wits who came to the metropolis on speculation, was as essential a line of conduct to any young nobleman who aspired to fashionable distinction, as it is now to belong to a certain order of society, or to possess the attributes, without which gentlemen, in every age, must sooner or later sink in the estimation of their own class. ”

“ Sydney Smith's life is a chronicle of literary society. He was born in 1771, and he died in 1845. What a succession of great men does that period comprise! Scott, Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, Homer, Brougham and Cockburn were his familiars—a constellation which has set, we fear, for ever. Our world presents nothing like it: we must look back, not around us, for strong minds, cultivated up to the nicest point. Our age is too diffused, too practical for us to hope to witness again so grand a spectacle. ”

“ The men, he said, talked of nothing but their dull politics, and the women of nothing but their ugly clothes. Whereas, in Hanover, all these things were at perfection: men were patterns of politeness and gallantry; women, of beauty, wit, and entertainment. His troops there were the bravest in the world; his manufacturers the most ingenious; his people the happiest: in Hanover, in short, plenty reigned, riches flowed, arts flourished, magnificence abounded, everything was in abundance that could make a prince great, or a people blessed. ”