Thomas Seccombe

“ Hussey bore the severe attack with great forbearance, the Hibernian spirit was roused by the illiberal satire’ conveyed in the lines:
Nature indeed denies them sense;
But gives them legs and impudence
That beats all understanding.
To avoid a succession of duels, Williams prudently retired into Monmouthshire under a well-directed fire of counter lampoons. Years afterwards, when Lord Beaulieu was on a visit to Strawberry, Horace Walpole was disconcerted by the black looks that he cast upon the portrait of his old friend Hanbury Williams in his black-and-gold frame. ”

“ The late Alexander Stewart of Inverhayle was one of the foremost in the charge, and, observing an officer of the king's forces who, scorning to join the flight of all around, remained with his sword in his hand, as if determined to the very last to defend the post assigned to him, the highland gentleman commanded him to surrender, and received for reply a thrust which he caught on his target. ”

“ On the coronation of Charles II at Scone Urquhart finally quitted the old castle of Cromarty and joined the Scottish army. The expeditionary force was very heterogeneously composed, and, according to Urquhart, who had abated none of his antipathies, it was spoiled by presbyterians, whom he accuses of deserting on the eve of the battle, ‘lest they should seem to trust to the arm of flesh.’ Prior to the battle of Worcester Sir Thomas lodged in the town in the house of one Spilsbury, ‘a very honest sort of man,’ in whose attic was stored his very extensive baggage. ”

“ Richard Vickris as a youth fell under the influence of the quakers, who were at the time rapidly multiplying in Bristol, and his father, to rid him of the contagion, sent him to France. There, however, his tendencies were only developed by the metaphysics which he learned from or in the school of Malebranche, the hierophant of the modified Cartesianism of Louis XIV. Malebranche's ‘Recherche de la Verité’ determined him to join the Society of Friends, and, having returned to England, he married a young quakeress named Bishop, and regularly attended meeting. ”

“ Lady Vane, or ‘Lady Fanny’ as she was now called, was the finest minuet dancer in England, and as extravagant as the most capricious of danseuses. As early as January 1737 his lordship had occasion to advertise in the papers for the recovery of his wife, and for the next thirty years her escapades were both frequent and costly. She entertained large parties at the family seat of Fairlawn in Kent, where she diverted her guests by ridiculing her husband. ”

“ One of his dominant motives appears to have been a violent antipathy to Halifax, and when Peterborough, during the debate on the exclusion bill, said that it was a case in which every man in England was obliged to draw sword, and laid his hand upon his own, Bolton got as near as he could to Halifax, ‘being resolved to make sure of him in case any violence had been offered’ (Burnet) . Similarly, in 1689, again aiming at Halifax, he moved in the House of Lords for a committee to examine who had the chief hand in the severities and executions at the end of Charles II's reign. ”

“ In October 1694 the learned woollen-draper gave his boarder a letter of introduction to Dr. Charlett, master of University, in which he spoke highly of his young friend's honesty, discretion, and merit (Letter in Tanner MSS. at the Bodleian Library, xxv. 228) . It was probably through the instrumentality of Arbuthnot that Pate became such a familiar figure in the literary society of his epoch; he was doubtless taken up the more warmly because to men like Steele and Swift the combination of literary taste with the practice of trade was something of a novel sensation. ”

“ It was after the termination of this ‘battle of the guns’ that Whitworth made the greatest of his later discoveries. Experience had taught him that hard steel guns were unsafe, and that the safeguard consisted in employing ductile steel. A gun of hard steel, in case of unsoundness, explodes, whereas a gun of ductile steel indicates wear by losing its shape, but does not fly to pieces. When ductile steel, however, is cast into an ingot, its liability to ‘honeycomb’ or form air-cells is so great as almost to neutralise its superiority. ”

“ Having quitted the university without taking a degree, he next purchased Lord Monson's hounds, and hunted the Burton country for five years, in the course of which he acquired a fame for his pack which has scarcely been surpassed by that of any in England. Upon leaving Lincolnshire he hunted the Quorn hounds from 1817 to 1821, and again from 1823 to 1828, when he migrated to Pytchley. In the capacity of master of foxhounds no one has probably ever stood higher than Osbaldeston, and the ‘Squire,’ as he was called, and his huntsman, Tom Sebright, became ‘bywords’ in sporting circles. ”

“ Vere, according to Fuller, had 'more meekness and as much valour as his brother; as for his temper, it was true of him what is said of the Caspian Sea, that it doth never ebb nor flow, observing a constant tenor neither elated or depressed.' While Sir Francis was held in awe, Sir Horace is said to have been loved by his men (Biogr. Brit.) , and his manner was characterised by a courtierlike deference which was lacking in his brother. Prince Maurice extended to him a cordial friendship in place of the profound though cold respect he had entertained for Sir Francis. ”

“ The magistrates at Boston protested against the appointment and sought to annul it, but the church of Salem, taught by Williams to cherish the rights of self-governance, paid no heed to their mandate. The objection of the general council of Massachusetts Bay, and indeed of the solid puritan majority, to what they regarded as an excess of schismatic zeal, was not without reasonable justification. Williams's prime contention was that the civil powers should have no authority whatever over the consciences of men. ”

“ Paul I, in his desire to adopt an original policy, refused to affix his signature, and it was not until June 1798 that the outrage committed by the French upon the order of the knights of St. John at Malta, who had chosen him for their protector, disposed him to listen to the solicitations of Whitworth. The latter obtained his adhesion to an alliance with Great Britain offensive and defensive, with the object of putting a stop to the further encroachments of France, in December 1798, and the treaty paved the way for the operations of Suvarof and Korsakof in Northern Italy and the Alps. ”

“ At the end of 1843, with the help of a loan from the Hares, Macmillan was able to take over Newby's business in Trinity Street, Cambridge, 'just opposite the Senate House.' The first Cambridge catalogue of Macmillan & Co. (the 'Co.' being represented by Daniel's brother Alexander, who for the present kept up the shop in Aldersgate Street, though this was relinquished before the end of the year) was issued in March 1844. The conjuncture was a happy one for a man of Macmillan's energies and special rifts. No man who oversold books for a livelihood was more conscious of a vocation. ”

“ Apart from the Duchess of Marlborough (upon whom, in his correspondence with Tonson, Vanbrugh wasted many unparliamentary epithets) and Hearne, who disliked all whigs impartially, Vanbrugh had a good word from everybody as the best of good fellows. As an architect, although he had a passion for size amounting to megalomania, he had an original and powerful imagination and a just idea of subordination. ”

“ Her charms were best known, wrote an acquaintance, ‘to a race of men departed long since; the Duke of Leeds and Lord Kilmorey are almost the only survivors of her fame and beauty.’ The testimony to her beauty is as strong as to the fact that she remained to the last a stranger to the veriest rudiments of good feeling. With the death of her husband, the second Lord Vane, in 1789 the title became extinct. The British Museum print-room has a ‘watch paper’ portrait (one and three-quarter inches in diameter) of ‘Lady Vane’ in winter dress, engraved in 1787. ”

“ When he was in Africa vast herds of game of every kind roamed over tracts which are now cultivated and thickly populated by Europeans; and the Kalahari desert was looked upon as an impassable barrier against advance from Cape Colony northwards. When, in 1849, Livingstone determined to investigate the truth of rumours as to a great lake in the Kalahari, Oswell and his friend Mungo Murray returned to South Africa from England in order to take part in the exploration, Oswell generously undertaking to defray the whole expense of the guides. ”

“ He was a nephew of Sir Norton Knatchbull, knight, of Mersham Hatch, Kent, who was sheriff of Kent in 1608, M.P. for Hythe in 1609, and founder of the free school at Ashford. The elder Sir Norton ‘was,’ says Philipot, in his ‘Visitation of the County of Kent,’ ‘a person who, for his favour and love to learning and antiquities in times when they are both fallen under such cheapness and contempt, cannot be mentioned without an equivalent to so just a merit.’ Sir Norton the younger succeeded to the family mansion and estate at Mersham Hatch upon his uncle's death in 1636. ”

“ He arrived to find the Dutch straining every nerve to save the island and town of Bommel, situate in the Maas between Dordrecht and Nymeguen, from a carefully concerted assault by the admiral of Aragon. Early in May the admiral captured Crèvecœur, occupied the land, and laid siege to Bommel. Early in July Vere crossed the Maas with six thousand men, and made a brilliant attack on the Spanish entrenchments, and, the vigilance of the allies being seconded by a mutiny in the camp of the enemy, the Spaniards had to beat an ignominious retreat before the close of the month. ”

“ He was stationed in the front on the right wing in the company of the Macintoshes, the Frasers, Stewarts, Camerons, and Macleans, the last-mentioned clan being under his command as well as his own. After loudly protesting against Lord George Murray's fatal error in keeping the highland army motionless to receive the English fire, he, when the order was at last given, charged with so much impetuosity that he swept the English line of soldiers in front of him completely away, and his dead body was found considerably in the rear of the English line covered with wounds. ”

“ His own reputation as the ‘most epigrammatic conversationalist’ Byron ever met, did not prevent his rapt admiration of Hood's genius and puns, and he once let the side dishes pass at Holland House in order to contemplate a man who had failed to laugh at Sydney Smith's jokes (Memoirs of Sydney Smith, by his daughter, Lady Holland, 1855, p. 319) . Smith once said of him that, until he taught him better, Luttrell imagined that muffins grew; but Luttrell himself constantly spoke of his taste for domesticity, and compared himself to the king of Bohemia, who had a taste for navigation. ”

“ He was one of the lords justices of Ireland from 1697 to 1699. He entertained William on more than one occasion at Winton, and seems to have stood high in his favour. His consequent dislike for the Princess Anne was intensified by jealousy of the Duke of Marlborough, and he is said, with probable truth, to have been engaged upon an intrigue with the Duke of Newcastle for passing over Anne in the interests of the Princess Sophia (Dartmouth's note on Burnet, iv. 540) . He was, however, soon reconciled to the new order of things upon William's death. ”

“ When, on that nobleman's death in 1761, he was left ‘without a shilling,’ he became mainly dependent upon charity. Johnson, who praised his learning and faculty for languages, but described his ‘ignorance of life’ as complete, subsequently advised him to write a geographical dictionary, and wrote a preface for his ‘Dictionary of Ancient Geography’ when it appeared in 1773. The book was well conceived, but Johnson confessed to Madame d'Arblay it destroyed his hopes of Macbean doing anything properly ‘when he found he had given as much labour to Capua as to Rome’ (D'Arblay, Diary, i. 114) . ”

“ On leaving Chatterton, Lemoine became for a time French master in a boarding-school at Vauxhall, kept by one Mannypenny, and led the master and scholars to believe him incapable ‘of speaking a word of English, but the constraint was too much for him long to bear, and imparting the secret of his disguise to the maids in the kitchen he received his dismissal.’ On coming of age in 1777 he inherited some property in Jersey, under the will of an aunt, Ann le Moine, who had died in 1766. ”