For a few months he went as nominal chaplain and tutor to the children
of a lady living at Richings Park, near West Drayton, where there was a
little college of deprived priests, among them being Bishop King of
Chichester. But when this society was declared treasonous, he retired
again to Eton to the same faithful friends, the Dickensons, the house
being called his own lest the accusation of harbouring malignants should
fall on the real owner.
A charming contemporary description of him at this date is left by John
Aubrey, the antiquary, who went to see him.
"I saw him, a prettie little man, sanguin [_i.e._, fresh-coloured], of a
chearful countenance, very gentele and courteous. I was received by him
with much humanity; he was in a kind of violet-coloured cloth gowne with
buttons and loopes (he wore not a black gowne), and he was reading
Thomas à Kempis. It was within a year before he deceased. He loved
Canarie, but moderately, to refresh his spirits; he had a bountiful
mind."
At last the end came very quietly. He was in his seventy-third year,
"weary of this uncharitable world," as he said. Only a fortnight ill,
and then dying so quietly that Mr. Montague, who had been talking to
him, left the room for half-an-hour and found him dead on his return.
He was one of those great men who have a genuine dislike of publicity.
He could not be induced to publish anything in his lifetime except a
Latin funeral oration--not that it mattered, as one of his
contemporaries hinted, "for he was so communicative that his chair was a
pulpit and his chamber a church." In fact it became so much a matter of
habit that his friends should propound questions on which he should
discourse, that he is recorded to have made a laughing refusal; "he sets
up tops," he said, in his allusive way "and I am to whip them for him."
But it is plain that he had a genuine contempt for his own written
style: he says that on the one side he errs by being "overfamiliar and
subrustic;" on the other as "sour and satyrical." He evidently had the
ironical quality in great perfection; his writings and recorded
conversation abound in quaint little unexpected turns and capricious
illustrations; he had one of those figurative minds that love to express
one idea in the terms of another, and see unexpected and felicitous
connections. His sermons are strange compositions; they straggle on
through page after page of thickly printed octavos, "he being a great
preacher according to the taste of those times," says an antique critic
of them, going on to object that they keep the reader in a "continued
twitter throughout." He must have been very light of heart who could
have "twittered" continuously through the good hour that the very
shortest of them must have taken to deliver. Quotations from Homer,
mystically interpreted, strange mythological stories, well worn
classical jests; perhaps the sense of humour was as different among the
men of that era from ours as their sense of theology undoubtedly
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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