Cornish Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Biography; Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
Robert Glynn assumed his mother's name and succeeded to the estates on
the death of his uncle, William Clobery. Robert Glynn was an M.D. and
a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he resided. He was a
simple-minded man, and was completely taken in by the Chatterton
forgeries, and for some time strenuously defended them. On which
account Horace Walpole speaks of him with great contempt as "an old
doting physician and Chattertonian at Cambridge." "I neither answer
Dr. Glynn, nor a _poissarde_. Twenty years ago I might have laughed at
both, but they are too small fry, and I am too old to take notice of
them. Besides, when leviathans and crocodiles and alligators tempest
and infest the ocean, I shall not go a-privateering in a cockboat
against a smuggling pinnace." That was in August, 1792.
Dr. Glynn was very fond of seeing young gownsmen at his rooms, and had
tea for them and conversed with them; but he never drank tea himself.
C. Carlyon says: "His custom was to walk about the room and talk most
agreeably upon such topics as he thought likely to interest his
company, which did not often consist of more than two or three
persons. As soon as the tea-table was set in order, and the boiling
water ready for making the infusion, the fragrant herb was taken, not
from an ordinary tea-caddy, but from a packet, consisting of several
envelopes curiously put together, in the centre of which was the tea.
Of this he used, at first, as much as would make a good cup for each
of the party; and, to meet fresh demands, I observed that he
invariably put an additional teaspoonful in the teapot; the excellence
of the beverage, thus prepared, ensuring him custom. He had likewise a
superior knack of supplying each cup with sugar from a considerable
distance, by a jerk of the hand which discharged it from the
sugar-tongs into the cup with unerring certainty, as he continued his
walk around the table, scarcely seeming to stop whilst he performed
these and other requisite evolutions of the entertainment."
Dr. Glynn or Clobery would only eat when his appetite summoned him
imperiously for a meal. A faithful old servant was in constant
attendance upon him, and, whenever his master called out for food, he
was prepared to set before him some plain dish and a pewter of porter.
Nothing would induce the doctor to believe that gout was hereditary.
He once took occasion to mark this with peculiar emphasis, when a
writer signing himself W. A. A. consulted him in his first attack,
then in his nineteenth year. He observed, "My young friend, you call
this gout! Pooh, pooh! You have not yet earned the costly privilege;
you must drink your double hogshead first."
"But my father, sir; it is in my blood by right of inheritance."
His reply was, "You talk nonsense. You may as well tell me you have a
broken leg in your veins by inheritance."
One Sunday morning he met an undergraduate of his acquaintance on his
way to S. Mary's Church, and said to him--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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