Introduction
1
Early in 1778 a new satirical poet caused a flutter in the polite circles of London. Within a few weeks of one another two poems, The Project and The Wreath of Fashion, were issued by Becket, the bookseller of the Adelphi in the Strand. Though anonymous, their author was soon known to be a young barrister named Richard Tickell. The Project treats of a scheme overlooked by the Academy of Projectors which Captain Gulliver visited in the course of his third voyage. In deft octosyllabics the satirist proposes applying Montesquieu’s discovery of the effect of climate on character to the problem of the parliamentary Opposition:
Suppose the Turks, who now agree
It wou’d fatigue them to be free,
Should build an ice-house, to debate
More cooly on affairs of state,
Might not some Mussulmen be brought,
To brace their minds, nor shrink at thought?
Surely the philosophers are right who have reasoned that England’s northern air is accountable for Englishmen’s love of liberty, and many a question has been lost by Administration from Parliament’s meeting in cold weather. An obvious solution would be to alter the season of meeting:
But ah, what honest squire would stay
To make his speech, instead of hay?
The Beaux would scarcely think of law,
To give up Scarborough or Spa’:
And say ye sportsmen, wou’d a member
Attend St. Stephen’s in September?
The poet’s more feasible plan is a better mode of heating the Parliament buildings. He suggests that in each House, replacing the table where votes, journals, and mace are laid, a vast “Buzaglo”1 be set up; that is, an open fire of intense heat, over which a Fire Committee should preside with a fuel supply of seditious tracts—Junius, Common Sense, and the works of Tucker and Price. Such a device will mollify the most inveterate foes of Administration:
From bench to bench, in spite of gout,
The soften’d Chatham moves about:
“My good Lord Sandwich, how d’ye do?
I like the speech; ’twas penn’d by you.
America has gone too far;
We must support so just a war.”
The reviewers were delighted with the poem, so distinguished by its good nature and wit amid the current tide of party polemics. The connoisseur in Horace Walpole was stronger than his Whiggism, and he found The Project excellent.2 Dr. Johnson, who disapproved of flippancy in politics, dissented. At a dinner party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’ on the 25th of April, Dr. Samuel Musgrave, the learned editor of Euripides, read the new poem. Johnson was not amused. “A temporary poem always entertains us,” urged Musgrave. “So,” replied Johnson, “does an account of the criminals hanged yesterday entertain us.”3
Rather ungratefully, Tickell followed up his reception as a poet in the circles of ton with a satire on one of society’s most conspicuous foibles. The Wreath of Fashion, or, the Art of Sentimental Poetry, said The Critical Review in its notice, “is levelled at the same vice in the poetical world, at which the School for Scandal was aimed in the theatrical and moral worlds,—at the present fashionable strain of sentimental whining.”4 It was an age of rhyming peers. Tickell declared in the preface that he was prompted to write his satire by reading a recent volume by a noble author (whom he did not name but who was the Earl of Carlisle, Byron’s “Lord, rhymester, petit-maître, pamphleteer”) containing one ode on the death of Mr. Gray and two on the death of his lordship’s spaniel. In The Wreath of Fashion Tickell deplored, with Sheridan, the vogue of tearful comedies and gently rebuked the inanities of newspaper poets. His chief ridicule was reserved for the poetic salon of Mrs. “Calliope” Miller at Batheaston, where the quality from Bath wrote bouts-rimés about buttered muffins and the like, dropped them into a classic vase, and applauded the winners crowned by Mrs. Miller with wreaths of myrtle.5 Over these rites of poetic sensibility, said the satirist, the goddess Fashion presides, and thus she must be supplicated:
On a spruce pedestal of Wedgwood ware,
Where motley forms, and tawdry emblems glare,
Behold she consecrates to cold applause,
A Petrefaction, work’d into a Vase:
The Vase of Sentiment!—to this impart
Thy kindred coldness, and congenial art....
With votive song, and tributary verse,
Fashion’s gay train her gentle rites rehearse.
What soft poetic incense breathes around!
What soothing hymns from Adulation sound!
The Wreath of Fashion went through a half-dozen editions. David Garrick wrote a puff for it in The Monthly Review in which he ventured to prophesy that “elegant poetry, refined satire, and exquisite irony” would be revived by the new author;6 and Samuel Rogers, belated Augustan that he was, always remembered The Wreath as an early favorite.7
2
Who was the new poet? The turn of his couplets and the delicate barbs of his satire suggested a poetic school then growing outmoded. There were those who, when they learned his name, remembered his grandfather, Thomas Tickell, a poet of Queen Anne’s day and the particular friend of Mr. Addison. Thomas Tickell (1685-1740) served as Addison’s Under-Secretary of State and retained his post under Craggs and Carteret. In 1724, when Carteret became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Tickell was sent to Dublin as Secretary to the Lords Justices. There were cordial relations between Dublin Castle and the Deanery of St. Patrick’s, and a circle of friends that included Swift, the Delanys, Lord Orrery, and Dr. Sheridan maintained in Dublin an outpost of Augustan literary society. In this propitious atmosphere John Tickell, eldest son of Thomas and father of Richard, our poet, was born in 1729 and grew up to take his place among the Dublin virtuosi. But he had a volatile character and fell into a train of misadventures and difficulties. In 1748 he made a runaway marriage with Esther (or Hester) Pierson, and children to the number of six followed in rapid succession.8 At length he became disastrously involved in Anglo-Irish politics while serving on the court side as a magistrate after the Dublin riots in December 1759.9 His conduct on this occasion, though its precise nature is not clear, excited such indignation that he was obliged to leave Dublin. In 1765, according to information in the Tickell family papers, his mother purchased for him a civil appointment at Windsor Castle; but some years later, like other indigent Englishmen at that period, he went to live on the Continent and disappeared from sight.
Richard, the second son of John Tickell, is usually said to have been born at Bath in 1751, but neither the place nor the date can be verified. He and his elder brother Thomas were briefly at Westminster School (from 19 June 1764); when their father went to Windsor Castle, they were transferred to Eton (29 May 1765); three years later Richard proceeded to the Middle Temple (8 November 1768).10 Having in due time been called to the bar, he was, about the beginning of 1777, appointed by Lord Chancellor Bathurst a commissioner of bankrupts. However, as a contemporary biographer remarked, law was not to Tickell’s taste; “his disposition was too volatile and desultory for that study.”11 In April or May 1778 he was removed from his post. Doubtless his courtship of the muses had been at the expense of the law, for his fellow-commissioners had complained of his absences. Tickell turned in his distress to his most influential friend, David Garrick, who at once interceded for him with the Lord Chancellor, by way of Lady Bathurst.12 Garrick obtained from Bathurst a promise of reinstatement, but in June Bathurst was succeeded by Edward Thurlow, and Garrick had to begin all over again. His further attempts met with no success. “I am sorry we were both so unsuccessful in our Schems with the present Chancellor,” Garrick was informed by Lady Bathurst on the 25th of July; “I do assure you I did my part for Mʳ Tickle but I find he has enemies who flung cold water on my solicitations.”13 The news plunged Tickell into despair.
But Fortune is capricious, and at this moment Tickell made the acquaintance of one who was even closer than Garrick to the springs of patronage. This was William Brummell, whose only claim to remembrance today is the fact that he had a very famous son, but who appears in late eighteenth-century memoirs as an able backstairs politician and private secretary to Lord North. Brummell, we are informed by the Biographia Dramatica, “conceived a strong friendship for our author, and patronised him with a generosity and warmth that did him honour.”14 With the approval and perhaps at the instigation of Lord North, Tickell was at once set to work on a secret and important project. On the 7th of November he wrote Garrick pleading to be excused from writing a prologue that had been requested of him:
You may be assured Mr. Garrick’s wishes shall always have the force of commands with me; but when I acquaint you that at present... I am employed in a work that may make or mar my fortune, I can scarcely think you would wish to interrupt my attention to it.15
On Monday the 23rd of that month, three days before Parliament met for the new session, Becket announced the publication of a work entitled “ANTICIPATION, Containing the Substance of his M⸻y’s most gracious Speech to both H—s of P⸻t, on the Opening of the approaching Session. Together with a full and authentic account of the Debate in the H— of C⸻, that will take place on the motion for the address and amendment.” On Tuesday night Edward Gibbon wrote his friend Holroyd:
You sometimes complain that I do not send you early news; but you will now be satisfied with receiving a full and true account of all the parliamentary transactions of next Thursday. In town we think it an excellent piece of humour (the author is one Tickell). Burke and C. Fox are pleased with their own Speaches, but serious Patriots groan that such things should be turned to farce.16
Horace Walpole, though unable to deny the wit of Anticipation, was among those who thought its jocularity ill-timed. Said he:
The drollery of the pamphlet was congenial with the patron: a very unprosperous and disgraceful civil war, just heightened by a bloody proclamation of Sir Henry Clinton, and accompanied by a war with France, was not a very decent moment for joking!17
3
No one in any party was disposed to deny the seriousness of the moment. The preceding twelve months, as some were then aware, had proved the turning-point in the war with America. The threat of French aggression following Burgoyne’s defeat had transformed Britain’s war of subjugation into one of defence. After a comfortable winter in Philadelphia, without having struck a blow at the inferior American forces at Valley Forge, Sir William Howe was ordered to evacuate that city lest it be cut off by a French fleet. Englishmen at home could still cling to the official view, held by George III and expressed by Lord North in Anticipation, that most Americans, if given a chance to choose, would prefer conciliation with England to an upstart democracy and an “unnatural connection” with France. But those on the spot saw that the hope of affording Americans such a chance was now dashed. At Philadelphia Admiral Lord Howe’s secretary wrote in his journal on the 22nd of May:
I now look upon the Contest as at an End. No man can be expected to declare for us, when he cannot be assured of a Fortnight’s Protection. Every man, on the contrary, whatever might have been his primary Inclinations, will find it his Interest to oppose & drive us out of the Country.18
Two days later General Howe set sail for England and left Sir Henry Clinton to evacuate the troops in June. The incompetence or treachery of an American officer, Charles Lee, saved Clinton’s regiments from severe losses as they crossed New Jersey. After their arrival within the fortifications around New York, the British held not a square mile elsewhere on the mainland of the northern and middle colonies.
The summer was occupied with raids by British irregulars on the Pennsylvania and New York frontier and a series of inconclusive feints and chases between Admirals Howe and D’Estaing. In September Howe resigned his command and followed his brother home to England. Deeply disgruntled with Administration, the Howes joined General Burgoyne in efforts to obtain satisfaction from Parliament. The Whigs, hoping for disclosures embarrassing to the government, at once took up the cause of the commanders; while the ministers, with equal determination, resisted every move for a court-martial or inquiry.
During this year the Tory government had been as hard pressed at home as the King’s forces had been abroad. The news of Saratoga, received early in December 1777, struck a staggering blow to the ministers, who at once adjourned Parliament for six weeks and endeavored to open indirect and secret negotiations with the American commissioners in Paris. When Parliament reconvened, Fox’s motion in the Commons “that no more of the Old Corps be sent out of the kingdom” produced a suddenly swollen minority. There was a cry throughout the country for Chatham. North had lost his zest for the war and would willingly have retired in favor of Chatham, but the King refused to consider such a move. In a desperate effort to counteract American negotiations with France, North then introduced, 17 February 1778, his conciliatory bills, which offered the repeal of the acts that had offended the colonists and conceded all but the name of independence. While the House was recovering from its amazement Charles Fox rose and said that he was glad Ministers had at last concurred with the long-standing views of Opposition. But had not their repentance come too late? Did not Ministers know that a commercial treaty between France and America had already been signed?19 “Acts of Parliament have made a war,” Walpole wrote Sir Horace Mann three days later, “but cannot repeal one.”20 On the 13th of March the French ambassador in London announced the treaty of friendship between France and the United States. Thereafter no one in either party expected much of North’s commission to treat with America. Detained in England until mid-April, the commissioners arrived in the Delaware a whole month after Congress had ratified the treaty with France and, to their great chagrin, just in time to take part in the retreat from Philadelphia. One member of the commission, George Johnstone, after futile private overtures to members of Congress, quarreled with his colleagues and returned in a huff to vindicate himself and criticize ministers and commanders before Parliament. On the whole, the commission did little more than aggravate the ill-feeling on both sides.
On the 7th of April, after a long absence, Lord Chatham, wrapped in flannels and supported by his sons, took his seat in the House of Lords. Rising for the second time in the debate to speak on the American war, he was struck down by an apoplexy from which he never recovered. His death, on the 11th of May, was believed and said by many to be a portent of doom to the Empire.
Meanwhile the specter of a French invasion caused the King late in March to communicate to Parliament his intention of ordering the militia “to be drawn out and embodied, and to march as occasion shall require.” Five encampments were established; peers and M.P.’s, Whig and Tory alike, hastened to raise regiments; and by June Gibbon could tell Holroyd that “The chief conversation at Almack’s is about tents, drill-Serjeants, subdivisions, firings, &c.”21 All summer and autumn the country was full of marching and countermarching for the edification of anxious royalty. In the newspapers appeared advertisements for “martial balsam,” recommended for those afflicted by toothache from exposure to damp canvas and mattresses. Even theater business was depressed by the rage for visiting the encampments. Sheridan, ever resourceful, dashed off as a counter-attraction his entertainment of The Camp, with a musical arrangement by Thomas Linley, a prologue by Tickell, and (according to the newspaper notices) “a perspective Representation of the grand camp at Coxheath, from a view taken by Mr. de Loutherbourg and erected under his direction.”
All this was diverting, but in midsummer occurred an incident that betrayed to the nation the smoldering antagonism between ministers and commanders. In the previous March Admiral Keppel, a staunch Whig who had refused to serve against America, had been promoted commander of the Channel fleet. He found, contrary to the Admiralty’s repeated assurances in Parliament, that ships and equipment were woefully inadequate for his crucial task of defending the coasts. At length reinforced, Keppel on the 27th of July engaged the Brest fleet off Ushant. In command of the British rearward squadron was Sir Hugh Palliser, a Tory M.P. and a Lord of the Admiralty. Following a short and indecisive action, Keppel gave orders for a new line of battle, but Palliser did not obey until after dark. By morning the French had escaped. Keppel did not report Palliser’s insubordination, but accounts of the action appeared in the papers, and before the opening of Parliament the incident had become a heated party issue, with Keppel exalted as a popular hero and Palliser condemned as the agent of a negligent and scheming ministry.
4
Affairs stood in this critical posture when Parliament was summoned in the last week of November. Fearing defection in the Tory ranks, North called a private meeting of his friends beforehand to consult on strategy. He was himself there taxed with negligence, and extraordinary steps were taken to secure attendance in the government seats. Now a favorite parliamentary weapon of North’s had always been humor—or, as his opponents styled it, “buffoonery.” His motto, said Walpole, ought to have been “Aut dormitabo, aut ridebo.”22 And when Anticipation appeared, it was widely believed that North himself had had a hand in its composition.23 The very favorable reception of the pamphlet must have surpassed the hopes of both author and patron. For some days the papers printed eulogistic notices and long extracts. Representative is the comment in The Morning Chronicle on the day the session opened:
The literary piece of mimickry published on Monday last, under the title of Anticipation, is beyond compare one of the ablest sketches ever hit off by a man of fancy and talents. Mimicks in general distort the features of those they affect to imitate; the author of Anticipation, on the contrary, has preserved the vrais-semblance of each of the objects of imitation with wonderful correctness, and it is a question whether he deserves most applause for the humorous conceits with which he has dished out the oratory of his heroes, or the striking likenesses (in point of order, argument, imagery, and diction) which he has drawn of each speaker. Lord G[ranb]y’s harangue is, to those who have not been in the House of Commons on the first day of a session, a perfect example of Opposition oratory on such an occasion.—Mr. T. L[uttre]ll’s speech need not have had his name prefixed to it; no member, T. L[uttre]ll excepted, could possibly shew so much learning to so little purpose.... In a word, Anticipation is one of the best pamphlets the publick have been favoured with for years, and though it has in some measure a political tendency,... it serves, contrary to the effect of most political pamphlets, to put all parties in good humour.
The good nature of the parody was remarked by all who spoke of it. Certainly the pleasantest circumstance of the whole episode is the fact that some of the victims of Tickell’s mimicry enjoyed the humor of it; though we learn from Walpole that Welbore Ellis, “another justly and humourously drawn, proved how justly. He said, ‘It is well written, but I perceive the author takes me for a dull man.’”24
According to a tradition that is not implausible, North and his friends took copies of Anticipation into the House on the opening day and dispensed them gratis.25 An apparent consequence of this was Tickell’s luckiest satirical stroke, by virtue of which Anticipation lived on in the memory of anecdotists. Walpole, who was on the spot, reported that Col. Isaac Barré, an Opposition stalwart, “not having seen this pamphlet, the first day of the Session cited a foreign Governor with whom he was acquainted, exactly in the manner here ridiculed, and he also translated a French expression.”26 This episode grew appreciably in the telling. In 1823 Joseph Jekyll told Tom Moore (who wrote down everything he heard) of the
laughable effect on the House of Col. Barré’s speech; he being the only one (having just arrived from the country) ignorant of the pamphlet, and falling exactly into the same peculiarities which the pamphlet quizzed, particularly that of quoting French words and then translating them. At every new instance of this kind in his speech there was a roar of laughter from the House, which Barré, of course, could not understand.27
But this was not the last refinement. The progress of the story, from contemporary witnesses to Jekyll and Moore and finally to “Senex” writing his recollections in Blackwood’s in 1826, is an illustration and a warning of the ways of anecdotists. The humorous success of Anticipation, wrote “Senex,”
I well remember.... The style of the speeches was so well imitated, and the matter in many cases so happily forestalled, that, like Vulcan among Homer’s gods, it caused inextinguishable laughter. What gave much zest to the joke was the ignorance of most of the usual speaking members that any such pamphlet existed. Their great surprise at the loud mirth excited by speeches intended to make a very different impression, and the frequent cries of “Spoke, Spoke!” the meaning of which they could not possibly comprehend, may be easily conceived. One of its effects was to shorten the debate, for, as the joke soon spread, many were afraid to address the House for fear of involving themselves in the predicament of those who had been so humorously anticipated.28
5
Anticipation had a great run. Such was the popular demand that a “Fourth Edition” was advertised by Becket within a week of first publication. Five more London editions and a Dublin reprint appeared before the end of the year. As soon as copies reached America, Anticipation was reprinted at both the British headquarters in New York and the American headquarters in Philadelphia. In announcing his New York reprint, James Rivington stated, with what degree of exaggeration the reader is free to guess, that “such was the reception given to this novel and immensely admired piece, that more than Forty Thousand copies were disposed of in a few days.”29 In London a rash of imitations broke out at once. Altercation, Deliberation, Anticipation Continued, Anticipation for the Year MDCCLXXIX, The Exhibition, or a Second Anticipation—all these appeared within a year. As late as 1812 appeared Anticipation: or, The Prize Address; which will be delivered at the Opening of the New Drury Lane Theatre, a squib inspired by the same circumstances that gave rise to the celebrated Rejected Addresses of James and Horace Smith. And there were others. But, as Dr. Johnson remarked of The Splendid Shilling, “the merit of such performances begins and ends with the first author.”30
There was another result of the publication of the satire that, to Tickell, was perhaps the most gratifying of all. The author was right, observed The London Magazine in its review, in predicting a majority for Administration in his mimic debate; “and we verily believe he might have added by way of note at the end—‘This will get me a place or a pension.’”31 This impertinence was justified by the event. On the 6th of December Richard Rigby, Paymaster and general factotum in North’s cabinet, wrote David Garrick a short but meaningful note: “I have had a meeting with Anticipation, and like him very much; I wish to have some further discourse with you upon that subject. Could you call here to-morrow morning about eleven?”32 The subject was unquestionably a ministerial reward for services rendered. About this time Tickell was granted a pension of 200l. per annum.33 Soon afterward an anonymous poet of the Batheaston circle returned good for evil in praising Tickell while attempting to recall him to virtue:
Some writers be of an amphibious race,
And prose and verse their elemental place.
Such he, whose wit made wond’ring senates roar,
And those to blush that never blush’d before.
Anticipation gave him sterling fame,
The Wreath of Fashion a poetic name.
And Nature gave, and at the gift repines,
At pension’d wit and prostituted lines.
Be your’s, O Tickell, to correct this vice,
That deals out praise or censure at a price,
And in one grand example prove to men,
How weak is Wit, when Party holds the pen;
And while you glow with more than virtue’s flame,
And all admire from whence such virtue came,
Each literary Swiss shall dread thy rage,
Dismiss their weapons, and no more engage.34
But man cannot live by wit alone. In the next two years Tickell wrote two more satirical tracts for the ministry, which, though not dull, were scarcely inspired; and in August 1781 he was appointed a commissioner of the Stamp Office. Here, with other beneficiaries of ministerial generosity and a salary of 500l., he stayed. A year earlier (25 July 1780) he had married Miss Mary Linley, a charming and witty young lady if less renowned than her sister Elizabeth (Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan). In September 1782, doubtless through the good offices of Lord North, they settled in an apartment in the Gold Staff Gallery at the top of Hampton Court Palace.35 Tickell’s talents were useful in the Linley-Sheridan family enterprise of Drury Lane Theatre. He served in the capacity of Mr. Puff as “a Practitioner of Panegyric” in the newspapers, refurbished old plays, and tried his hand, with mild success, at composing librettos. When Fox and North formed their coalition government (of unhappy memory), Tickell’s political allegiance was transferred to the Whigs. That he had long had a preference for Whig society appears from the satirical-affectionate picture of Brooks’s Club in his Epistle from the Honourable Charles Fox, Partridge-Shooting, to the Honourable John Townshend, Cruising, 1779. The devoted but sharp-tongued Mrs. Tickell informed her sister in a letter of 1785: “So I find the election has taken a happy turn at last and I am to congratulate myself with being the wife of a member of Brooks’s.... T. is delighted; the great point of his ambition is gained.”36 To which she added, at the thought of her husband’s increased opportunities for conviviality: “Farewell, a long farewell to all my comforts.”37 From the many fragments of Mary Tickell’s spritely letters that have been printed here and there, it is impossible not to give at least one representative passage showing both husband and wife in character. In an undated letter from Hampton Court she wrote:
The men stayed last night or rather this morning till four or five tho’ I entreated T—. to think of to-night’s fatigue for me and let them go, but ’twas all in vain, for the moment my back was turn’d off they march’d into the other room with their Bottles and Glasses and order’d Stephen to bring the fire after them—so at least they had the grace to think of not disturbing me, for you are to know since the cold wether we dine and sup in the Drawing Room. However unfortunately my ears were quick enough to reach to Stephen’s Pantry where I heard every cruel Pop of that odious five shilling claret which entirely hindered my closing my eyes, so here I am at half past one just after breakfast and thinking of my evening’s dissipation. Don’t you think that I should cut a figure in the great world?38
As a member of the glittering Whig fraternity that moved about Fox, Sheridan, and the Prince of Wales, Tickell became a large contributor to the great collective (and perennial) satire known as The Rolliad, a shilling edition of which, George Saintsbury once remarked, if properly annotated, would keep one amused from London to York. He also produced a number of more or less serious pamphlets attacking Pitt’s government; and during the regency crisis of 1788-89 he worked feverishly with the other Foxites in the expectation of a Whig triumph. But the King recovered, the Whigs’ hopes were dashed, and Tickell never obtained his expected seat in Parliament.39
Mary Tickell died in July 1787. Two years later Tickell eloped with the daughter of a captain in the East India Company’s service, Miss Sarah Ley, a reigning beauty who was for a time the rival of Emma Hamilton as Romney’s model.40 She was very young, very extravagant, and without any fortune. In a year or two her husband, who was chronically improvident and was now deprived of Mary Tickell’s common sense, found himself overwhelmed with debts. In May 1793 he appealed to Warren Hastings for a loan of 500l. and obtained it.41 Hastings was a friend of the Ley family, but that an intimate of the Fox-Sheridan circle and a contributor to The Rolliad should have turned to him for help is an indication of Tickell’s desperate straits. The loan was evidently not sufficient for his needs. On the 4th of November his lifeless body was found below the parapet outside his Hampton Court apartment. Two days later Joseph Farington recorded in his Diary: “Distressed circumstances and an apprehension of being arrested, it is said, is the cause of this momentary phrenzy.”42
6
As a successful parody of parliamentary proceedings and eloquence at the time of the American Revolution, Anticipation retains historical interest. One reviewer went so far as to say that a comparison of the actual debate with Tickell’s anticipated version would show that between the two “the difference as to the material grounds of disputation is trifling.”43 This is scarcely an exaggeration, though, as it turned out, the House was less full and the debate less animated than had been expected from the presence in town of so many generals and admirals known to be at odds with one another and the ministers. As a parodist, however, Tickell was less concerned to present the substance of a particular debate than the idiosyncracies of those who spoke frequently in the House, whether from Opposition or Administration benches. The verisimilitude of his subjects’ accents, attitudes, and hobby-horses of theme was unanimously acknowledged and praised by contemporaries. Anticipation is in short a speaking picture of that House of Commons in which, as well as in America, a bitter conflict was in progress. Here are Burke’s rumbling periods on the decline of the British Empire, and Fox’s skilful arguments to show that neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be successfully continued in America. David Hartley the younger quotes the recent sentiments of his friend Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and a radical Member from the City praises Washington and threatens ministers with the Tower and the block. Other Whigs attack profiteering army contractors, false news in the Gazettes, and the employment of Indians to butcher the colonists; others demand parliamentary inquiries that government officials suggest deferring until “about six months after Christmas.” Late in the evening Lord North rises and, after invoking the mighty shade of Chatham, takes up his secretary’s notes on speeches by the Opposition and urges upon an unruly House the need of unanimity.
It is a vivid and authentic picture, and it is also an entertaining one. Though parody is a minor genre, it has its masterpieces. But they should be read rather than talked about. Let the last opinion on Anticipation be that of George IV, who was a person of discernment in these matters. J. W. Croker recorded in his diary that at a royal dinner-party in January 1822 the talk had turned to Tickell. The King spoke of Anticipation “con amore and quoted some of the speeches.” He promised to have a copy looked out for Lady Conyngham, who had never read it. “The events and the pieces were gone by,” said the King; “but the wit and pleasantry of it never could fade.”44