SOURCE: "The Real Thomas Amory," in Essays and Studies, Vol. XXVI, 1940, pp. 45-72.

Readers of Lamb and Hazlitt know the name of John Buncle; his author, Thomas Amory (1691-1788), is ignored in no serious history of eighteenth-century literature and has his place in the D.N.B.; yet no one has troubled to disinter from his pages the autobiographical fragments which, as Leslie Stephen saw, are embedded in it, or to check his references to notable Englishmen or his reactions to the people and to literature of his own day. As his writings are the reflection of his own vivid personality, as his wildest adventures reflect his dreams if not invariably his experiences, it is worth while to attempt a full-length portrait, remembering that his own son equated Amory with his hero Buncle, and that there is nothing the least like his work in the whole vast field of English literature.

I was born in London and carried as an infant into Ireland, where I learned the Irish language, and became intimately acquainted with its original inhabitants; I was not only a lover of books from the time I could spell them to this hour; but read with an extraordinary pleasure, before I was twenty, the works of several of the fathers, and all the old romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain piety and extravagance, that rendered my virtues as well as my imperfections particularly mine. (Preface to John Buncle.)

The St. James's Chronicle stated that he was trained for a doctor (Buncle also, as we shall see, took to doctoring); but no profession could long keep him in one place. 'Compelled to be an adventurer when very young', by his own account he was a bundle of incongruous qualities; he developed 'a passion for extraordinary things and places'; was a passionate Unitarian; adored learned ladies; disliked commonplace people; dived from a (low?) cliff for fun, swam out to sea, boarded a ship, and sailed to the next port, leaving his companion to conclude him drowned; and was a good hand with the small sword.

If oddness consists in spirit, freedom of thought, and a zeal for the divine unity; in honouring women, who were admirable for goodness, letters, and arts; and in thinking, after all the scenes I have gone thro', that everything here is vanity; except that virtue and charity, which gives us a right to expect beyond the grave … then may it be written on my stone—Here lies an odd man.

So much for Thomas Amory on himself. His son, Robert Amory, M.D. of Wakefield, tells us that his grandfather went with William III to Ireland and became Secretary of the Forfeited Estates; that he was a considerable landowner in County Clare, his seat being Bunralty Castle; that the family was connected with the de Monforts, Pettys, and Fitzmaurices; and finally that his father lived on Millbank, but being 'now 97 years old … will not see any company, nor ever comes out of his room', adding that 'when very young, he was a very handsome man'. This statement will be found in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1788 (p. 1062); on November 25th of that year appears among the Obituaries: 'Nov. 25, Aged 97, Tho. Amory esq. author of John Buncle'.

The younger Amory had rushed into print in consequence of genealogical inaccuracies in an account of his father in the St. James's Chronicle for November 6th, 1788, but the personal details there given, evidently in the belief that Amory was dead, Boswellian as they are, are not denied:

Mr Amory was a man of very peculiar look and aspect; though at the same time he bore quite the appearance of a gentleman. He read much, and scarce ever stirred but like a bat in the dusk of the evening, and then he would take his usual walk, but seemed always to be ruminating upon speculative subjects, even while passing along the most crowded streets.

Public interest in Amory must have been considerable for such details to be acceptable, and it is significant that the Wakefield doctor finds it necessary to protest that his father 'never had but the one wife'; the public clearly thought that Buncle's many 'charmers' reflected his own experiences. But as his son begins his correction with the phrase 'My father (John Buncle) Thomas Amory esq', the public was hardly to blame for the mistake, and may even have drawn the deduction that Buncle's dismissal of his own offspring as thoroughly uninteresting was based on his knowledge of this his one surviving child. For not only was Dr. Robert Amory a dull dog, anxious to assert the dignity of his family indeed, but confused and heavy-handed in his description of his ancestry, but Amory himself was not interested in children, even giving no account of his own childhood, on the ground that it would not be fair to make the public pay for anything so uninteresting. One incident of that childhood indeed he does record, but that is because Steele, in the Tatler, had given currency to an inaccurate version of a story which he only knew by hearsay: the public ought to know the facts, which are, in truth, illuminating.

As 'a little boy in Dublin, between seven and eight', Amory knew his father's neighbours Mr. and Mrs. Eustace, the Orlando and Belinda of the 172nd Tatler; Belinda indeed, 'a lively prattling thing, by tarts and fruits, encouraged me to run into her parlour as often as I could… As I was a remarker so early in my life' (Buncle, iii, p. 3) he adds, he perceived the pride and obstinacy of the one, the vanity and satirical wit of the other, which led to the disaster. Belinda's sister spent a guinea on a fan with Indian figures on it; Belinda admired it, Orlando did not; they quarrelled; Belinda went to bed before him; and when she was asleep, the 'despotic husband' stabbed her, barricaded himself in his house, and was shot by an officer of justice at whom he was taking aim. The body was carried head downward through the city on a cart and the child saw it; 'and of all the faces of the dead I have seen, none ever looked like his. There was an anxiety, a range, a horror, and a despair to be seen in it, that no pencil could depict'. Is it fanciful to see in this tragic incident of Amory's childhood the origin of that quixotic desire to help and justify injured women, always young and always beautiful, which plays so large a part in his books?

The boy was sent to the best school in Dublin, Dr. Sheridan's, who on Swift's authority 'shone in his proper element' as a headmaster; the curriculum seems to have been far from conventional, and of high educational value. The boys acted plays in Greek and English, Amory playing Falstaff in Henry V (Buncle, i, p. 108), and recalling with delight the holiday joys of 'frolicks and rambles, and merry dancings we had at Mother Red-Cap's in Barn-Lane, the hurling matches we have played at Dolphin's Barn and the cakes and ale we used to have at the Organ-house on Arbor Hill'.

It was either in some Long Vacation or between school and college that he was 'placed in a French family of distinction' (Dedication to the Ladies), and met the first of his female prodigies; but he was certainly in Dublin by 1706 or 1707, going up to Trinity College at sixteen and spending five years there, devoted to five several subjects, of which Divinity was one. He 'lived in the same chambers' with his tutor, Jack Bruce, the 'bright and excellent', for four years, discussing inter alia Divinity: 'Religion', would Jack Bruce say, as we passed an evening over a little bowl of nectar, for he never taught in the dry, sour method—'Religion consists in a steady belief in the Existence of God', &c. and we learn that he placed the virtues of civility and good manners beside those of 'temperance, mercy and charity'.

We shall meet some of Amory's undergraduate friends at Harrogate; meanwhile we may note that the Irish historian MacCurtin (Ladies, iii, p. 218) and Bishop Brown of Cork, 'a man of vast learning, exemplary piety and great goodness to the poor', but a Jacobite 'who in hatred to King William writ a book against drinking healths to the memory of anyone' (Ladies, i, p. 85) were friends of his, and of another friend, Mrs. Grierson he writes:

Mr Ballard's account of her in his Memoirs of some English Ladies lately published [1752] is not worth a rush. He knew nothing of her. And the imperfect relation he got from Mrs Barber is next to nothing. I was intimately acquainted with Mrs Grierson, and have passed a hundred afternoons with her in literary conversation in her own parlour. Therefore, it is in my power to give a very particular and exact account of this extraordinary woman,

which, alas, he never did. Now this passage serves to explain many episodes in John Buncle. Not only had Constantia Grierson studied obstetrics at seventeen under Mrs. Pilkington's father, a well-known Dublin doctor, but, according to Mrs. Pilkington herself, was mistress of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, a student of higher mathematics, and an elegant writer in verse and prose. She edited Terence, dedicating her edition in a Greek epigram to her son, afterwards a friend of Dr. Johnson, and her edition of Tacitus [1730] was pronounced by Dr. Harwood, a good judge, 'one of the best edited books ever delivered to the world'; her unpublished annotations of Sallust belonged successively to, and were treasured by, Lord George German and John Wilkes. She was an intimate friend of Swift, Dr. Sheridan, and Dr. Delany; and Mrs. Delany, before she became the Dean's wife, speaks appreciatively of 'beginning an acquaintance among the wits Mrs. Grierson, Mrs. Byron and Mrs. Pilkington' (Autobiography, i, p. 301); the society of Mrs. Grierson, then only twenty-five years old, was, that is to say, regarded as an honour by a distinguished and aristocratic Englishwoman visiting Dublin for the first time. As for the contemned Ballard,' his praise is so unstinted that one cannot but wonder what Amory could have added to it:

She was not only happy in a fine imagination, a great memory, an excellent understanding, and an exact judgement, but had all these crowned by virtue and piety; she was too learned to be vain, too wise to be conceited, too knowing and too clear-sighted to be irreligious. As her learning and her abilities raised her above her own sex, so they left her no room to envy any; on the contrary, her delight was to see others excel. She was always ready to advise and direct those who applied to her, and was herself willing to be advised. Lord Carteret [to whom her Tacitus was dedicated] when he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, obtained a patent for Mr. Grierson, her husband, to be the King's printer, and to distinguish and reward her uncommon merit, had her life inserted in it.

This gifted and delightful creature died in 1733 at the age of twenty-seven, and when we are tempted to laugh at Amory's many accomplished ladies, always young, always attractive, and always ready to discuss divinity, fluxions, the meaning of Hebrew phrases and the classics, it is well to remember that he had actually known, and known well, a woman who was at least as charming, learned, and accomplished as any Harriot or Statia of them all. In fact, what has been treated by every writer as utterly fantastic turns out to be autobiography, actual reminiscences of days spent in Mrs. Grierson's parlour, and not, as has always been supposed, the dreams of an unbalanced mind.

But before pursuing his adventures as depicted in his novels, we must say something of Amory's relations with Swift. His promised account of him never appeared, any more than did that of Mrs. Grierson, but the long Advertisement contains what he did write, and must be quoted in full. He is protesting against the four recent biographies, by 'Lord Orrery, The Observer on Lord Orrery, Dean[e] Swift Esq., and Mrs. Pilkington', as quite inadequate:

After all the man is not described. The ingenious female writer comes nearest to his character, so far as she relates; but her relation is an imperfect piece. My Lord, and the Remarker on his Lordship have given us mere critiques on his writings, and not so satisfactory as one could wish.

They are not painters. And as to Mr. Swift, the Dean's cousin, his essay is an odd kind of history of the doctor's family, and vindication of the Dean's high birth, pride, and proceedings. His true character is not attempted.

I knew him well, tho' I was never within side of his house, because I could not flatter, cringe, or meanly humour the extravagancies of any man. I am sure I knew him much better than any of those friends he entertained twice a week at the Deanery; Stella excepted. I had him often to myself in his rides and walks, and have studied his soul, when he little thought what I was about. As I lodged for a year within a few doors of him, I knew his times of going out to a minute, and generally nicked the opportunity. He was fond of company upon these occasions, and glad to have any rational to talk to: for, whatever was the meaning of it, he rarely had any of his friends attending him at his exercises. One servant only, and no companion, he had with him, as often as I have met him, or came up with him. What gave me the easier access to him, was my being tolerably well acquainted with our politicks and history, and knowing many places, things, people, and parties, moral and religious of his beloved England. Upon this account he was glad I joined him. We talked generally of factions and religion, states, revolutions, leaders and pieties. Sometimes we had other subjects. Who I was he never knew; nor did I seem to know he was the Dean for a long time, not till one Sunday evening that his Verger put me into his seat at St Patrick's prayers; without my knowing the Doctor sat there. Then I was obliged to recognize the great man, and seemed in a very great surprize. This pretended ignorance of mine as to the person of the Dean, had given me an opportunity of discoursing more freely with and of receiving more information from the Doctor, than otherwise I could have enjoyed. The Dean was proud beyond all other mortals that I have ever seen, and quite another man when he was known.

This may seem strange to many, but it must be to those who are not acquainted with me. I was so far from having a vanity to be known to Dr. Swift, or to be seen among the fortunate at his house (as I have heard those who met there called) that I am sure it would not have been in the power of any person or consideration to get me there. What I wanted in relation to the Dean, I had. This was enough for me; I desired no more of him. I was enabled by the means related, to know the excellencies and defects of his understanding; and the picture I have drawn of his mind you shall see, with some remarks on his writings, and on the cases of Vanessa and Stella.

This passage is reprinted in the second supplementary volume of Hawkesworth's Swift with a denial of its accuracy by Deane Swift which cannot be regarded as final: Amory's account is so undramatic that in a man of his perfervid imagination it may be taken as true. Amory's college friends were a lively set, but one at least became a 'glorious penitent' and died owning a Thomas a Kempis (Buncle, ii, pp. 51, 57). He had the entree to the Castle (Buncle, iii, p. 304); knew the Knight of Kerry and the Knight of the Glin; had friends in Tipperary, Kildare, and Galway (iii, pp. 107, 173, 200); spent Christmas of 1715 with the Wolfes of Balineskey, and saw a friend acquitted by Sir John St. Leger, a judge who, he says, would never convict a duellist of murder. Soon after he went down, however, his father, already an old man, married 'an artful cruel servant-maid' who contrived to get him ousted from favour, and turned loose on the world, though with a comfortable sum in his pocket. In his wandering life he 'met with a wonderful deliverance' unnamed (Buncle, Preface), and at some time, in the 1720's presumably, went to London, where his friends included 'worthy John Toland—I say worthy from my own knowledge', and another deist 'Unhappy [elsewhere Mad] Tom Woodston, my intimate acquaintance', who was convicted of blasphemy on March 4th, 1729, the day before Buncle (read Amory) set off on the travels which form the subject of John Buncle.

A much more dangerous London acquaintance was Edmund Curll the bookseller, with whom Amory as well as Buncle lodged; only personal knowledge could have produced Buncle's description of him and his company. Curll was

in person very tall and thin, an ungainly, awkward, white-faced man. His eyes were a light grey, large, projecting, gogle and semi-blind. He was splay-footed and baker-kneed. He had a good natural understanding and was well acquainted with more than the title pages of books … debauchee to the last degree, and so injurious to society, that by filling his translations with unnecessary notes, forged letters, and bad pictures, he raised the price of a four shilling book to ten. His translators in pay, lay three in a bed, at the Pewter Platter Inn, Holbom, and he and they were ever at work to deceive the public.

The subsequent statement regarding 'the holy goggle of his eyes in his public devotions' and his penitence are not impressive, but 'there were men in respect of whom Curll was a cherubim' (vol. iv, p. 151). This passage suggests that Amory knew John Dunton's Life and Errors.

Curll took Amory round the town, to the playhouse (he mentions Garrick, iv, p. 294) Sadlers Wells, the night cellars, and that haunt of vice, Tom King's in Covent Garden. The female company was of the worst, but gave him a chance of meeting Carola Bennet, a victim reclaimed by a 'sensible and excellent' young clergyman, who ultimately married her: from a 'charming libertine' she had become 'beautiful and modest'. There is one touching story which probably reflects a real episode, the discovery of a woman whom Amory had known as an innocent girl in the last stages of disease and famine, his carrying her to the house of a good woman, and having her tenderly nursed until her death: the reader will remember Dr. Johnson, whose charity was nobler still because the woman was a stranger.

Amory must have gone abroad again, for his visit to France as a child can hardly have sufficed for his obvious knowledge of Paris. He compares an English wood to the 'venerable' forest of Fontainebleau (iii, p. 116), and had a most remarkable knowledge of French literature from Courayer, Fenelon, Mezeray to Calprenede and Moliere, whom he delighted in, and Voltaire, whom he detested. Much more doubtful is his having 'ventured in a light boat copied from the Indian Praw from the coast of Norway to a high latitude in West Greenland', which, with his descriptions of the Canary Islands and Brazil, must be ranked as a literary flight; but he certainly knew Scotland (iii, p. 190), St. Donat's in South Wales (iii, p. 64) and the Roman Wall (his one surviving letter proves that he was in Yorkshire in 1773), so that when Buncle 'set out to travel over Britain' he was only doing what his author had done before him.

But John Buncle was not Amory's first novel: that honour belongs to

Memoirs: concerning the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain. A History of Antiquities, Productions of Nature and Monuments of Art. Observations on the Christian Religion, as preferred by the Established Church, and Dissentors of every Denomination. Remarks on the Writings of the greatest English DIVINES; With a Variety of Disquisitions and Opinions relative to Criticism and Manners: and many extraordinary Actions. 2 vols. 8vo. 1755 (Vol. i reprinted 1769, vol. ii reprinted 1766).

The dedication is 'To Mrs. Monkhouse of Paterdale, on the Banks of the River Glenkroden, in Westmoreland'; the Advertisement already quoted describes the purpose of the book, and mentions a whole series of ladies whose stories—'true histories of amour, distress and relief—were never published, though allusions in his second and more famous work suggest that they were written. A second part, 'to be published with all convenient speed', never appeared.

The Memoirs must have succeeded, since in the following year appeared the far more famous work:

The Life of John Buncle Esq: containing Various Observations and Reflections made in several Parts of the World, and Many extraordinary Relations. In Four Volumes. 1756-66 (reprinted in l2mo, 1770, from which quotations are here given).

The book was a favourite with Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, and to the extracts given in the latter's 'Book for a Corner', read at the age of twelve, I owe my own introduction to Amory. A year or so later I was puzzling over Hazlitt's description of Buncle as 'the English Rabelais'; a less apt description of Amory's luscious delight in religious controversies, wild scenery, good eating, and the Fair Female Form it would be hard to conceive, but he and Hazlitt has at least the merit of gusto in common.

As the Memoirs of Several Ladies was a book for women, so John Buncle was a book for men. This 'true history of my life and notions' is dedicated to 'The Critics', and written 'to vindicate my character from misrepresentations and idle stories; and to illustrate my Memoirs'; it was, indeed, as he admitted, 'requisite to render the Memoirs before-mentioned intelligible'.

The matter of both books is fairly summed up in the title of the first; the manner may be described as the Picaresque in search of the Picturesque, with the important additions that the Picaro is a religious maniac, but a very learned one, and that he contrives to introduce a number of heroines of his favourite type by killing off a series of wives—'to lament a dead woman is not to lament a wife'—and to bring the hero into contact with other ladies, married and single, all as ready to tell their stories as Fielding's Man of the Hill. Running through all this is a singular acquaintance with art, literature, and the Fathers; a passion for caves, ruins, and wild nature; attacks on Popery and the Athanasian Creed; a remarkable appreciation of the social value of the convent system; a detailed acquaintance with birds and botany; and a prodigious gust of life, and you have a picture of the novelist whom his son equated with John Buncle.

On the literary side we note references to Don Quixote, Astrwea and other romances of the school of Calprenede, Amadis de Gaule, the Pilgrim's Progress, and David Simple (Buncle, i, p. 226); an absolute passion for Shakespeare and Milton; an intimate acquaintance with Moliere; a use of the word Gothic as a term of admiration in the manner of Browne Willis and Horace Walpole, whose appreciation of gardening he anticipates; and an insistence on the intellectual equality of men and women otherwise unknown before the next century. Even the Dedication to the Ladies describes how, when placed as a child with a French family, he met a girl of fourteen who 'could construe an Ode of Horace in a manner the most delightful and read a chapter in the Greek Testament with ease every morning'; he was later to meet with a child of eleven yet more precocious; and the theme is developed when, as a young man, he was inspired by the 'Admirable Maria', for whom we may, as elsewhere, read Constantia Grierson, to write that remarkable passage on the cultivation of the powers of women (Buncle, iv, p. 25)² to which no parallel can be found for half a century. In his Transactions and Observations in a Voyage to the Western Islands in the year 1741 (Ladies, i, p. 126) he anticipates Dr. Johnson by forty years, and, like Johnson, must have known Martin's books on those islands as a child, since where his own observations differed from Martin's he does not hesitate to say so. Twenty years before Gray had uttered his daring praise of the Lakes, Amory was exalting them, and scenery remoter and more wild, in unmeasured terms, as well as taking notice of inscriptions on Roman cinerary urns and the tombs among twelfth-century ruins. Is it fanciful to suggest that Leigh Hunt, a devoted Buncleite, took the title of his Men, Women and Books, from Amory's Notes relating to Men, and Things, and Books? This is mentioned in Buncle, iii, p. 147, as though it were published and accessible, but in iv, p. 287 as to be 'published as soon as possible'. The word 'Men' must be generic, as a book by Amory omitting all mention of women is unthinkable.

In 1739, he tells us in the Ladies, he 'travelled many hundred miles to visit antient monuments and to discover curious things' among the 'vast hills' of Northumberland, and met Marinda Bruce, the daughter with whom he endowed his old friend and tutor of the Dublin days, reciting Shakespeare; she asked him in, and proved to be a painter then engaged on 'finishing an arcadia and a crucifixion', the first after Poussin, the second (with some difficulty, one fancies) 'uniting the different excellencies' of Rubens and Coypel. 'These pictures got Miss Bruce a husband' in the shape of a Mr. Benbow, whose early death left her in possession of Hali Farm, its ruins, its live eagle in a niche, its grotto, its flower-frescoes 'beyond anything of Baptist' (had Amory visited Montague House?), and its ducks, green peas, and cream. Her companion, Elise Janson, a Huguenot refugee, had translated Astraea and herself written a romance entitled 'The history of Florisbella the Good, Queen of the Northern Hills', and both she and another lady, Carola Chawcer, tell the stories of their lives in approved eighteenth-century fashion, not without garnishings of Epictetus (in Greek), German philosophy, and the Council of Trent. So do other ladies whom he met, Miss West and Mrs. Schomberg (nee Bossuet), the latter

as beautiful as Lalage, a born mime; she takes off Warburton in the greatest exactness; his very voice, and the mien of his visage, as he contemplates, and as he predicates; and when she brings him on with a bit of his legation [The Divine Legation of Moses] in his mouth, or some scraps of his controversy with Stebbing, or Tilliard, or Sykes, or Jackson, one cannot help screeching with laughter. You see all the vanity and self sufficiency of this gentleman, in her face and manner, when she is drest as a parson, and then, like him dictates his fancies, and pronounces all the world, except himself, a crude writer. I really believe if the Doctor saw her at this work, he could not forbear laughing.

As for Miss West, her reading of Milton was better than Quin's, reported 'the best reader of the Paradise Lost now living'; he was an excellent Comus on the stage,³ but Miss West could make 'the poet admired and the actors forgotten'.

With regard to the Western Islands, however, it must be remembered that the poets may have sent him there; 'The stormy Hebrides' of Lycidas—and Amory was a fanatical admirer of Milton—he would not forget, and the authentic voice of poetry is heard as almost nowhere else at the time in that stanza in the Castle of Indolence beginning:

As when a shepherd of the Hebrid isle,
Plac'd far amid the melancholy main,

and in the ninth stanza of Collins's Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland:

Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill
Thy Muse may like those feathery tribes which spring
From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing
Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle,
To that hoar pile which still its ruins shews:
In whose small vaults, a pigmy folk is found,
Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows,
And culls them, wondering, from the hallow'd ground:
Or thither, where beneath the showery west,
The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid;
Once foes perhaps, together now they rest,
No slaves revere them, and no wars invade;
Yet frequent now, at midnight's solemn hour,
The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold,
And forth the monarchs stalk with sovran power
In pageant robes and wreathed with sheeny gold—
And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold.

Since Amory was a bookman first and foremost there is nothing strange in the fact that his passion for travelling, wild scenery, and romance should have led him to the Hebrides, to make accurate notes on the flora and fauna, and people the remote and lonely islands with new wonders of his own.

As Mrs. Schomberg had already in conversation rejected the authority of the Fathers as 'no more true than the splendid fancies of Bunyan the Tinker', and the minds of the other ladies ran on the same lines, it was a fit company that set out together for the Western Islands in the beginning of June 1741 in a ship commanded by Captain Scarlet, whose treatment of Hebridean superstitions was, as we shall see, unlike that of the poet. They spent a few days on the mainland of Scotland with a Mrs. Howel, and added to their number both that lady and her daughter, aged eleven, who discussed Bishop King's Origin of Evil and Chubb's True Gospel Asserted with modesty and spirit. They saw the Uists and Harris, Mull and Skye, passed the Green Island in the distance, and landed on Troda, whose birds and long-tailed rabbits are described, along with the four poor families who spoke only 'Irish', a convent of Poor Clares, and two old Franciscan friars. MacDuffs, Macphersons, Macleods, O'Connors, O'Rorkes, O'Briens, and O'Kellys peopled the convent; they wore 'the white plaid, that has a few narrow stripes of black, blue and red', with blue sleeves and silver crosses on their arms, the costume, in fact, of the old-fashioned inhabitants of Skye, crosses apart, as described by Martin at the end of the seventeenth century. Miss O'Rorke, of course, told her story, partly in excellent French, and defended 'the things of the Roman Religion' such as the Mass and prayers to the saints as 'figurative and spiritual' in a way which Amory so much admired that he promised her 'a welcome to his home and a comfortable provision'. Miss O'Brien, on the other hand, 'this charming votary', was a mystic on whom he could make no impression, so on June 28th they set sail again, and with a fair gale of wind sailed north-west round the Island of Lewis, coming at last 'to a vast rock' where they set up their tents, and found a solitary ensconced in a natural 'suite of rooms' in the side of a valley, where he had collected books, globes, mathematical instruments, a case of arms, a portrait and an admirable bust of a fair lady, and a gold box lettered The Heart of Belvidera. They drank Great George the Second after a good supper; the hermit told his story and that of Belvidera Dellon, who was torn from his arms by a ruffian, but happily discovered in a wood near Avignon, whereupon he married her, and, losing her ten years later, placed her heart in a box and retired to his Hebridean rock. The party then sailed to Lewis, where Buncle found some natives with black hair and eyes, though Martin had found 'all red-haired in his time', admired their musical gifts and native songs, and rode over to see a Mr. Bannerman, who wrote Unitarian tracts and escorted them to see some grottoes undescribed by Martin, which 'were really very strange'. The first series contained 'hundreds of rooms' full of stalactites and spars; another 'had a hideous and hollow noise in it', and as their lights were blown out they sat for long 'in an unspeakable horror'; he thought Martin's account of another cave in the Loch Grace inadequate, but noted that the animals of Lewis had nothing uncommon 'except their tiny breed of horses and a variety of birds'. He saw what appears to be a genuine Roman inscription to Julia Sorana, a Roman altar to Carausius, the marble urn of a daughter of the Augustan Legate, various Roman coins, and a stone circle which led to a discourse on the Druids and the discovery that it was used for divine service by a good old lady, Mrs. Gordon of Lewis, who presented him with a doctrinal manuscript written in a style suspiciously like his own.

They then set off for St. Kilda, but were swept south by a terrific tempest, probably derived from one of Amory's commonplace books, to the Cape Verde Islands,⁴ where they spent a month and a day, and found the black inhabitants generous and good natured, and Zulima, the Governor's niece, exceedingly friendly, and quite ready to be converted to Unitarianism; in fact, with her uncle the noble Abdullah's leave, she sailed for England with them but is never heard of afterwards. They were driven north to the Green Island again, which Martin had only seen at a distance, and the ship's captain expressed his disbelief in the sailors' stories of 'Barbecula the finest glen in the world', where lived 'the great men, the souls of the Kings and champions, who lived and ruled in those islands in former times', and who obviously inspired the last lines in Collins's great stanza. The captain, however, promised: 'Be they great men or great women, hoblins or goblins, fairies or genii, I will give you a good account of them, ladies', and Buncle set out to find them for himself. What he did find was, in the words of the Postscript to the Ladies, 'a Villa Mouseion, a plain conventual retirement for the delights of reading and contemplation', with near twenty acres of garden and a statue of Mercury 'directing the traveller to the Elysian Fields', forty acres of laurels, shrubs, and flowers 'much finer than the Elysium at Stowe'; a statue of Cerberus stood 'on the way to Pluto's seat', and there were also statues of 'eight Greek Philosophers, twelve royal personages (all English except Marcus Aurelius), twenty-three divines, nine poets, eight Fathers, and many ladies'. Twenty ladies were 'sitting round a table, playing and singing', so the party started to sing 'the symphony in the opera of Rowland' to attract attention, and were invited by 'a black in a rich running dress, who came from his lady, Mrs. Harcourt, to know who we were'; she of course invited the party to stay; proved to be from the North Riding; had had a learned education; travelled all over Europe; inherited a fine estate, and was of course a Unitarian. A series of notes on Loyola, Mrs. Rowe, Jeremy Taylor, Conyers Middleton, and Dr. Cheyne, who, Amory says, turned to Jacob Behmen, 'the reverend philosopher, and William Law the father of our intellectuals, in his old age, after he had turned vegetarian', interrupt the story, and we may note that as regards Cheyne at least what Amory says is true: 'He carried his vegetarian views to great extremes', says the D.N.B., 'as when he maintains that old age permitted the use of animal food to man only to shorten human life'. His views on this point would hardly have suited Amory, who describes more good eating than any novelist on record; but Cheyne had written on The Philosophical Principles of Religion and on Fluxions, and would be dear to him on both accounts.

We then get a statement that Mrs. Harcourt 'died suddenly, at her seat in Richmondshire, the first of December 1743, and not in the year 37, as the world was told in several advertisements in the London Evening Post of December 1739, by a gentleman who was imposed on by a false account he received of her death; this statement it has proved impossible to check, as the Burney newspapers are evacuated and the journal is not at Bodley's. We hear that the ladies' statues were removed after Mrs. Harcourt's real death to the 'noble library' of another seat of hers in Richmondshire, though 'all the other statues remain there [in the Hebrides] still'. A beautiful Rotunda, used for religious services, completed the view, and the twelve ladies and 'their eleven eleves' passed the time in music, devotion, riding, and painting, the twelve dressed alike, the others 'wearing what they please, except that Diabolical innovation, that for ever execrable ensign the impious and unnatural hoop-petticoat', on the immorality of which Amory agrees with the Spectator. Every Saturday every member of the Society had to read 'an essay, observation, or poem of her composing' on the week's studies, the best being entered in a large folio book with the author's name; twelve poor girls who attended on them were, we are told, well educated and well fed. After this it seems superfluous to find an attack on the 'endless and wild imaginations of the Hutchinsonians'.

Near the Elysian Fields were the ruins 'of a once grand abbey of Benedictine nuns of the order of Cluny' covering more than an acre of ground, and a curiously sympathetic account of St. Bernard follows, as well as a list of sepulchral monuments to Charitas de Shareshull (ob. 1220), Caroletta de Shoreditch (ob. 1222), Agnes de Shardeloe (ob. 1225), and many more, the latest of 1464, as well as many inscriptions in Gaelic; this appears to be based on Martin's account of the tombs of Abbots in St. Mary's, Iona, combined with that at St. Ouran's near-by, one of which Martin calls splendid. An interesting passage follows:

By the way, Jewks, it is very wrong to ridicule nunneries in the manners some protestants do … I have had an intimacy with several ladies who had taken the vow and veil in Roman catholic cloisters, and … I declare that I never saw the least tendency to levity or indiscretion.… As to the stories of Love in a Nunnery, they are for the most part idle inventions; and if there be an unfortunate case now and then, it no more affects the church of Rome, than the debauch of a protestant daughter in her father's house … can be a blot on the morals of her pious parents.

Very few eighteenth-century polemical writers could have written such a paragraph.

Scalpa, by the way, they visited in a coracle, which he calls a Nerogue or Currogh; their waterman was called Shoneen, and caught them fish, and roasted eggs for dinner, and the sixty-odd inhabitants of Scalpa welcomed them warmly, setting before them fish, eggs, potatoes, oatcake, goat butter, goat's milk, and whisky or aqua vitae. They attended the Sunday service, 'beautiful in simplicity', in a field, and spent nine days weather bound, getting off at last in the coracle and coming safe to land.

The 'natural cathedral' in the rock, containing a writing table with a manuscript 'Historiae Naturales in the Saxon Hand' signed by 'Morchar the Carmelite A.D. 1422' is as incredible as Mrs. Harcourt's establishment, but Buncle knew all about the Cashel Psalter, and Martin mentions caves at Arran, in one of which, used as a church, a hundred men could sit, while another had an altar in it. It is more surprising to find that Amory was interested in Egyptology. A minute and scholarly description of two Egyptian mummycases and their contents, and two statues of gods, all sold to Mrs. Harcourt by a Copt 'who might have been honest' might almost come from a current Museum Guide Book, and must have been based on knowledge; scrolls, hieroglyphs, bearded faces, swathing, are vividly described, and no mere reading would have told Amory that polished basalt looks like steel.

One of Mrs. Harcourt's recluses, Mrs. Bathurst, 'a writer in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin', unexpectedly praises that 'great and beautiful genius Fenelon, Mme Bourignon and Mme Guion, the other illustrious visionary' in terms which leave no doubt that Amory's admiration for them was genuine; it is worth remembering that Wesley's abridgement of the latter was familiar to Dinah in Adam Bede. This Postscript also contains a 'description of the Green Island, its curiosities, and monuments of antiquity', a brief glimpse of the 'amazing frightful rock' of Scalpa and the 'little wrinkled rumpled woman' of nearly a hundred of whom he says 'I have not elsewhere seen anything for age that comes up to the Old Woman of Scalpa'; we could have done with more about her. The position of the islands is accurately described, but 'tho everything new and curious, what [sic] had not been observed by other people' was avowedly included, Mrs. Harcourt's establishment, like Belvidera's solitary, remains incredible; we must remember, however, that the accurate Martin saw an old Lay Capuchin on Benbecula, and a chapel whose altar bore a crucifix at St. Kilda.

When we come to John Buncle, obvious autobiography and critical opinions, often of great interest, are mixed up with extravagant romance in a fashion which can only be illustrated by a summary—a very brief summary—of the narrative;⁵ the two cannot be disentangled, and as a man is said to be known by his dreams, Amory is surely explained by his fantasies. His first 'charming angel' was a Miss Noel, whose reading of Hebrew so surprised him that he sat 'terrified, like the Enchanted Prince in Amadis of Gaul'; but she died of smallpox on December 29th, 1724, just before their marriage, so he returned to Dublin to find his father in the toils of his detestable young wife and sadly troubling his son's conscience by using the Prayer Book at Family Prayers; on May 1st, 1725, therefore, he left his father's house, and with fifty Spanish pistoles and a banknote for £500 made for England. The Dean of Derry was on board, but broke down in the gale, whereas Buncle's next 'angel', Miss Melmoth, sat calmly discoursing on the Divine Power with the mate and himself, while a group of officers, 'dismal disturbing howlers', cursed, swore and lost their heads. Miss Melmoth and he went north (the notes on the northern inns are very interesting: coffee, toast, and butter were provided even at 'a little lone house on the edge of Stainmore'), and he ran into an old schoolfellow who hailed him as Falstaff, having himself played the Prince in their performance of Henry V. The pair joyfully recalled their schooldays in the passage already quoted; Jack Prince told his story and invited him to stay; but on June 13th, 1725, Buncle left him to wander among the Lakes (which inspire many pages on the Deluge) and ran into Azora, who had a grotto, a garden, and a greenhouse at Burcot Lodge, and was of course a convinced Unitarian, with a father half ruined by a passion for alchemy. Azora understood algebra and had ten pupils, all devoted to her, and with these ladies he stayed until June 18th, 1725 (in the margin July 19th, 1726). His pages show an intimate knowledge of the wild Westmorland country, then wild indeed; he had an affair with highwaymen near Brough; met the 'glorious penitent' already mentioned; and decided to marry 'some sensible good-humoured girl of the mountains', and to encourage his two servants 'to pick up two bouncing females on scripture principles and start a state of his own'. Coming on a building 'more like a small gothic cathedral than a house' called Ulubrae, he was invited in, for once by a party of gentlemen; they discussed the rules of geometry and suggested improvements; 'studied the vegetable world' through the microscope, and a battle between a louse and a flea which the louse won; examined manuscripts and incunabula in the library and the works of great writers from Bellarmine to Scaliger, and noticed a remarkable cornelian portrait of Erasmus, to whom Amory devotes some learned notes (pp. 109-11). Hearing of a notable cave, he had himself lowered into it, getting out with difficulty to find Mr. Harcourt's house, where he met Harriot Eusebia his daughter, later the Mrs. Harcourt of the Ladies, whose paintings of scenes from the Revelation and whose powers of talking Latin, Spanish, and English were only less admirable than her religious notions. It was after her father's death at Constantinople in 1733 that she returned to England and and started the Hebridean nunnery with which we are already familiar.

He then met the sister of his old friend Charles Turner, and, while waiting his return from Scarborough, came on a country seat with a deep moat: its owner was that very Miss Melmoth whom he had already admired, and he settled down to wedded bliss for two years, for his Charlotte sang divinely, and he was the happiest man on earth till she died of a fever, when he set out, 'not like the Chevalier of La Mancha, in hopes of conquering a kingdom, or marrying some great Princess; but to see if I could find another good country girl for a wife, and get a little more money'. His first call was at Basil Grove, where an open door admitted him into a noble library filled with books and scientific instruments and adorned with an object rare in libraries of that or any period: in the middle of the room was a reading-desk, and on it leaned the skeleton of a man bearing the legend 'This skeleton was once Charles Henly, Esq.'; in its hand was a scroll of parchment exhorting the reader to piety. The explanation came from a second house in the neighbourhood where, under groves and trees, sat an ancient gentleman and his lovely granddaughter, whose father was the skeleton; they were rash enough to ask for Buncle's life history, and got it, after which they asked him to stay the night. The grandfather offered him his granddaughter's hand when she was two-and-twenty, but Statia, 'bright and beautiful as Aurora', developed religious scruples after the old man's death which were happily dispersed by Buncle's argument that it was 'cruel to deprive children of their entailed heavenly inheritance', 'a greater sin, in fact, than murder'. The cri du cœur, 'Marry then, illustrious Statia, marry and let the blessing of Abraham come upon us Gentiles', melted her, and they spent a year or two in perfect happiness till she died of the small-pox. After sitting with his eyes shut for three days, he set out for Harrogate, 'through scenes, an amazing mixture of the beautiful and terrible', meditating on commencing the 'Married Regular' after meeting with a convent of Ivonites, or married friars, among the fells of Westmorland. This he left on April 8th; 'spent several days in the cottage of a poor fisherman in Bishoprick'; kept an eye on the 'charming Antonia'; and met with Dorick Watson the hermit, a brother-in-law of the famous Abbé le Blanc, whose garden surpassed 'the laboured and expensive gardens of Chiswick, the work of the late Lord Burlington', for, having lost his Adelaide, 'Contemplation was become his Venus'. The name of Le Blanc introduces a curious attack on Voltaire, 'half infidel, half pagan, who 'writes the history of England with a partiality and malevolence almost as great as Smollet's' and 'like all the Jacobite clerics, prates against the placing of the Prince of Orange on the throne'. Worse still, he 'denies Shakespeare almost every dramatic excellence … though in his Mahomet, he pilfers from Macbeth almost every capital scene (Shakespear, who furnishes out more elegant, pleasing, and in teresting entertainment in his plays, than all the other dramatic writers, ancient and modern, have been able to do; and, without observing any one unity but that of character, for ever diverts and instructs)'. This almost foreshadows Dr. Johnson's famous Preface.

After an impassioned defence of the Reformation, he wins his 'innocent beauty', Antonia, who dies of the small-pox after two years, whereupon, after sitting with his eyes shut for four days, he at last gets to Harrogate. It is this chapter which ends with the famous passage on children which explains the odd contempt for his own childhood expressed in the Ladies:

N.B. As I mention nothing of any children by so many wives … once for all, I think it sufficient to observe that I had a great many, to carry on the succession, but as they never were concerned in any extraordinary affairs, nor ever did any remarkable things, that I heard of;—only rise and breakfast, read and saunter, drink and eat, it would not be fair, in my opinion, to make anyone pay for their history.

Harrogate, 'a small straggling village on a heath, two miles from Knaresborough', was unique among eighteenth-century watering places; the company was very good, though too often counteracting the action of the waters by self-indulgence (hence an address on 'Temperance! Divine Temperance') but 'the lady of pleasure, the well drest taylor, the gamester are not to be found there', though this statement is counteracted in part by the 'six Irish gentlemen who had been my contemporaries at Trinity College, Dublin … we had been Sociorums (a word of Swift's) at the conniving house Ring's end, for many a summer evening, and their regard for me was great'. All save Mr. Makins were 'handsome fine fellows', but the ladies 'preferred ugly Makins, as he was called, to many handsome men'; a zealous Unitarian of five and twenty 'he had but one eye, with which he squinted most shockingly, wore his own hair, which was short and bad, and only drest by his combing it himself in the morning, without oil or powder'; but he was 'matchless on the fiddle, sung well, and chatted agreeably'; whereas the gigantic Gallaspy was woefully immoral, a drunkard, a duellist, and most unsuitably 'passed life away in health, joy and plenty; dying without a pang for any kind of pain' at his house in Galway about 1753. We are reminded of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, whose misspent life had left him at fifty-three a rosy little cock-sparrow of a man, whose contemporaries groaned and envied him at Spa and Vichy.

Mr. Duckley prided himself on being all things to all men; Mr. Monaghan knew books and men; Mr. Gollogher, after reading very hard for several years and keeping a common-place book in four vast volumes, 'sold every book he had, determined to read no more, and spent his every day in the best company of every kind', his taste for Love and a Bottle resulting in his leaving nineteen daughters a thousand pounds each. It is sad that biographies of Mr. Gallaspy and 'Mr. O'Keefe, descended from the Irish kings and first cousin to the great O'Keefe who was buried not long ago in Westminster Abbey' (a fact: the dramatist's tablet is in the Cloisters) are lacking, apparently because Amory was in haste to get on to Miss Spence, 'a lady who had the head of Aristotle, the heart of a primitive Christian, and the form of Venus de Medicis'; it was the powers of the 'Admirable Maria' which led him (iv, p. 25) to those reflections on the cultivation of the minds of women which anticipate Charlotte Bronte. Maria's discussions of the differential calculus as practised by Newton and Leibnitz, and her refutation of Berkeley formed agreeable subjects of conversation on the ride to London which ended in their marriage, but Maria died in six months, and as he 'would not quarrel with Providence', he set out again to try his fortune, after printing her Moral Thoughts at length as a memorial of her.

'At a pleasant village not far from Nottingham' he met over a good supper a couple of invalids, one of them a chemist; Phlogiston—just made fashionable by Dr. Priestley—the properties of minerals, and the virtues of the Middle State formed the subject of their discourse, but next day produced another country house and hospitable host, as ready as usual to tell his story, for once of an unfaithful wife; the day after brought him to 'a lone inn' and Miss Turner. So charming was she that they sent for Father Fleming, Buncle's tame friar, at once, 'to qualify us for the implanted impulse, and sanctify the call', but soon after they had started for London their chariot and four overturned and the charmer was killed, dying with a Latin epitaph upon her lips. He rode on, and at Curll's met Dunk the miser, whom Curll, stationer as well as bookseller, supplied with 'paper, pens, ink, wax and pamphlets'. He had a lovely daughter whom Curll recommended as a wife; 'the charming Agnes' accepted Curll's letter of introduction, which seems rash, and was about to marry Buncle when she died and left him free for adventures in Westmorland, where he met her, disconcertingly, as the wife of one Dr. Stanvil; her body had been dug up and sold to the Doctor for dissection; one incision showed that she was alive, and the Doctor married her ('this case of Mrs Stanvil may be depended on as a fact'). The situation was an uncomfortable one for all parties, but fortunately a neighbour, Dr. Fitzgibbon, recognized Buncle as the man who had saved his son's life in Ireland,⁶ and took him as a pupil for two years. As the St. James's Chronicle specifically states that Amory was 'bred to some branch of the medical profession', and as Robert Amory did not contradict the statement, we may take it that this is another case of actual experience being fantastically worked into the life of Buncle, who married the doctor's daughter, 'the illustrious Julia', in the beginning of 1734 and took over the practice. Julia was drowned, however, and after he had sat with his eyes shut for ten days, he set out to pay a visit to the Stanvils; after a harangue on the properties of salts, the doctor fell down dead of 'a rarefaction in his stomach'. 'A decent tribute of tears' followed; Mrs. Stanvil agreed to become Mrs. Buncle in earnest; and the pair started for Bagatrogh Castle: but the poor lady died in the beginning of the year 1736, and her disconsolate husband sailed for Brazil via the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, spending nine years in Borneo and Asia and returning 'to a little flowery retreat within a few miles of London' (at Bedfont, in fact, as his son says) to rest from his labours and write the history of his life, with his observations on three continents, 'in a scheme that gives a relief to still-life, and renders it a contrast to the breezy, bustling crowds of men'. Almost on the last page of the fourth volume he alludes to The Voyages and Travels of Dr Lorimer; this like the Notes (p. 56) has not been traced, but his son the doctor informed Sylvanus Urban that Amory 'published many political and religious tracts, poems, and songs', a statement curiously illustrated by a correspondent in Notes and Queries who was the lucky possessor of the only known letter of Amory's and of several more which he did not, unfortunately, publish; true to type, it is addressed to one of a party of ladies during a visit of Amory's to Yorkshire at the age of 82. It was on going through his papers that C. de D. 'found several letters from T. Amory (John Buncle), and very curious ones they are. I send you a copy of one, which you may perhaps think worth preserving in your entertaining and instructive papers [i.e. Notes and Queries, vol. i, p. 589].'

My dear Miss,

I send you a curious paper for a few minutes' amusement to you and the ladies with you. It was written above thirty years ago. Perhaps you may have seen it in the magazines, where I put it; but the history of it was never known till now that I lay it before you.

I am,
Miss—
your faithful, humble servant,
Amouri

Newton Hall [2] 8. 73.

A Song
in praise of Miss Rowe.

Written one night extempore by a club of gentlemen in the county of Tipperary in Ireland. It was agreed that each member should, off-hand, write four lines, and they produced the following verses:

Nota bene.—When by our mutual contributions we had finished our song, we all drank bumpers to Miss Rowe's health, and sang the last verse in grand chorus.

I do not remember, in all my reading or acquaintance, such a thing being done before, and, perhaps, will never be again.

All the composers of this song (except Amory and Miss Rowe) are now in the grave. Here I am, round and sound, by the order of Providence, for some of God's adorable decrees.

Newton in Yorkshire, July th' 8th, 1773.

Amory's own verse must suffice; all the verses are metrical and in much the same manner, and the rhyme scheme is the same, the whole an imitation of Gay's Molly Mog.

In the dance, though the couples are scudding,
How graceful and light does she go!
No Englishman even lov'd pudding
As I love my sweet Molly Rowe.

This letter would be in place in the pages of Buncle: no wonder the author's son equated him and Amory. His earlier novel was written when he was well over sixty; the letter shows that this amazing gust of life was equally well marked when he was past eighty. That Amory spent part of his old age at Wakefield is also proved by a letter from a charming young Scots doctor, Thomas Christie, to John Nichols. Christie was making a tour of England, and on July 24th, 1787, writes from Lichfield, 'the birthplace of the glorious Johnson', that Wakefield had proved a disappointment: 'I neither learnt aught from the wisdom of the Rev. Dr. Turner … neither saw I Mr. Amory, the author of John Buncle, nor his son Dr. Amory M.D.' (Lit. Anec. ix, p. 379). Of Dr. Turner the D.N.B. states that 'his Wakefield ministry brought him into close connection with Thomas Amory', a sentence not, unfortunately, elucidated in the article on Amory himself; Unitarianism was clearly the link between them, for Turner and Priestley were intimate friends.

How does Amory stand among eighteenth-century novelists? First, we may note as significant that the only contemporary fiction he alludes to is by a woman, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, though his knowledge of seventeenth-century romances is wide and various. Next, he is the first novelist to make scenery play a vital part in his stories, treating the sight of wild Nature as an end in itself, not as an incident. Finally—and we may probably thank his father's library and perhaps Jack Bruce for this—his reading, though deep and wide, is both in form and matter mainly of the past. How he came across Thomas a Kempis and Madame Bourignon, still more how he came to appreciate the virtues of the conventual life from the time of St. Bernard to his own day, is more mysterious, but his conversion to Unitarianism may well have been due to Toland and Woolston. Two things are certain, he never forgot Mrs. Grierson, though of the character and name of his own wife we have no idea, and when he cast in the novel form his views on divinity, scenery, nuns, antiquities, the education of women, he would at another time have written pamphlets or essays; in the 1750s—and the Ladies was written after 1752, since that date occurs in a note—the pressure of the age forced him to use the novel, whatever absurdities it led him into.

What his contemporaries made of him may be gathered from the fact that though both books were translated into German, in 1769 and 1778, a parody, Geschichte einiger Esel, appeared in 1782-3, after the publication of Cogan's John Buncle Junior (1776), two volumes of letters professedly by

the youngest son of John Buncle Gent. of Marvellous Memory; who leaped Precipices, tumbled through Mountains [an adventure omitted here for lack of space] found wise and good Men, beautiful and learned Women.

as the Preface has it. 'My Progenitrix was his seventh consort', Cogan says, and when he comes to an elegant retreat, he cries 'Oh, for the pen of my worthy Sire, to describe this enchanting scene, to do justice to the bread and butter and delicious cream, to raise up some fair, for the loss of which to pour out the tear, and captivate our hearts!' The author quotes Gray's Elegy, and banters 'my father of Blessed memory'; but the authentic fire is wanting. There is only one John Buncle, and his name is Amory.

NOTE.—When he created Ulubrae (p. 64) had Amory heard of the inscription over the door of Auchinleck, that 'house of hewn stone, very stately and durable'? Or is this a pure coincidence?

Notes

¹Memoirs of the learned Ladies of Great Britain (1752).

² Ballard, in his account of Mrs. Elstob, remarks her guardian objected to her learning other languages 'through a vulgar mistaken notion that one tongue was enough for a woman '.

³ Can this refer to the famous performance of Comus for the benefit of Milton's granddaughter in 1750, at the very end of Quin's life, or was the masque acted earlier in the century?

⁴ Martin, trying to make St. Kilda's, met a storm which 'almost drove us to the Ocean', and this may have inspired Buncle's more romantic experiences.

⁵ It may be worth noting that a certain Mrs. Nally, of Duke Street, near Lincolns Inn Fields, who died in July 1743, had had eight husbands, according to the Gentleman's Magazine, 'and was scarce ever sick till a little before her death'.

⁶ The episode is narrated in Buncle, iv, p. 194: Buncle's skill with the small-sword brought him off victorious but with a broken collarbone.