Cross Readings--And Caleb Whitefoord

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Title:     Cross Readings--And Caleb Whitefoord
Author: Austin Dobson [More Titles by Dobson]

Towards the close of the year 1766--not many months after the publication of the Vicat of Wakefield--there appeared in Mr. Henry Sampson Woodfall's Public Advertiser, and other newspapers, a letter addressed "To the Printer," and signed "PAPYRIUS CURSOR." The name was a real Roman name; but in its burlesque applicability to the theme of the communication, it was as felicitous as Thackeray's "MANLIUS PENNIALINUS," or that "APOLLONIUS CURIUS" from whom Hood fabled to have borrowed the legend of "Lycus the Centaur." The writer of the letter lamented--as others have done before and since--the barren fertility of the news sheets of his day. There was, he contended, some diversion and diversity in card-playing. But as for the papers, the unconnected occurrences and miscellaneous advertisements, the abrupt transitions from article to article, without the slightest connection between one paragraph and another--so overburdened and confused the memory that when one was questioned, it was impossible to give even a tolerable account of what one had read. The mind became a jumble of "politics, religion, picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages, bankruptcies, preferments, resignations, executions, lottery tickets, India bonds, Scotch pebbles, Canada bills, French chicken gloves, auctioneers, and quack doctors," of all of which, particularly as the pages contained three columns, the bewildered reader could retain little or nothing. (One may perhaps pause for a moment to wonder, seeing that Papyrius could contrive to extract so much mental perplexity from Cowper's "folio of four pages"--he speaks specifically of this form,--what he would have done with Lloyd's, or a modern American Sunday paper!) Coming later to the point of his epistle, he goes on to explain that he has hit upon a method (as to which, be it added, he was not, as he thought, the originator[1]) of making this heterogeneous mass afford, like cards, a "variety of entertainment."

[Note:

1: As a matter of fact, he had been anticipated by a paper, No. 49 of "little Harrison's" spurious Tatler, vol. v., where the writer reads a newspaper "in a direct Line" ... "without Regard to the Distinction of Columns,"--which is precisely the proposal of Papyrius.]

By reading the afore-mentioned three columns horizontally and onwards, instead of vertically and downwards "in the old trite vulgar way," it was contended that much mirth might observingly be distilled from the most unhopeful material, as "blind Chance" frequently brought about the oddest conjunctions, and not seldom compelled sub juga aenea persons and things the most dissimilar and discordant. He then went on to give a number of examples in point, of which we select a few. This was the artless humour of it:--

"Yesterday Dr. Jones preached at St. James's,
and performed it with ease in less than 16 Minutes."
"Their R.H. the Dukes of York and Gloucester
were bound over to their good behaviour."
"At noon her R.H. the Princess Dowager was
married to Mr. Jenkins, an eminent Taylor."
"Friday a poor blind man fell into a saw-pit,
to which he was conducted by Sir Clement Cottrell."[2]
"A certain Commoner will be created a Peer.
N.B.--No greater reward will be offered."
"John Wilkes, Esq., set out for France,
being charged with returning from transportation."
"Last night a most terrible fire broke out,
and the evening concluded with the utmost Festivity."
"Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,
and afterwards toss'd and gored several Persons."
"On Tuesday an address was presented;
it happily miss'd fire, and the villain made off,
when the honour of knighthood was conferred on him
to the great joy of that noble family."
"Escaped from the New Gaol, Terence M'Dermot.
If he will return, he will be kindly received."
"Colds caught at this season are
The Companion to the Playhouse."
"Ready to sail to the West Indies,
the Canterbury Flying Machine in one day."
"To be sold to the best Bidder,
My Seat in Parliament being vacated."
"I have long laboured under a complaint
For ready money only,"
"Notice is hereby given,
and no Notice taken."

[Note:

2: Master of the Ceremonies.]

And so forth, fully justifying the writer's motto from Cicero, De Finibus: "Fortuitu Concursu hoc fieri, mirum est." It may seem that the mirthful element is not overpowering. But "gentle Dulness ever loves a joke"; and in 1766 this one, in modern parlance, "caught on." "Cross readings" had, moreover, one popular advantage: like the Limericks of Edward Lear, they were easily imitated. What is not so intelligible is, that they seem to have fascinated many people who were assuredly not dull. Even Johnson condescended to commend the aptness of the pseudonym, and to speak of the performance as "ingenious and diverting." Horace Walpole, writing to Montagu in December 1766, professes to have laughed over them till he cried. It was "the newest piece of humour," he declared, "except the Bath Guide [Anstey's], that he had seen of many years"; and Goldsmith--Goldsmith, who has been charged with want of sympathy for rival humourists--is reported by Northcote to have even gone so far as to say, in a transport of enthusiasm, that "it would have given him more pleasure to have been the author of them than of all the works he had ever published of his own,"--which, of course, must be classed with "Dr. Minor's" unconsidered speeches.

"Bien heureux"--to use Voltaire's phrase--is he who can laugh much at these things now. As Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests of one age are not the jests of another. But it is a little curious that, by one of those freaks of circumstance, or "fortuitous concourses," there is to-day generally included among the very works of Goldsmith above referred to something which, in the opinion of many, is conjectured to have been really the production of the ingenious compiler of the "Cross Readings." That compiler was one Caleb Whitefoord, a well-educated Scotch wine-merchant and picture-buyer, whose portrait figures in Wilkie's "Letter of Introduction." The friend of Benjamin Franklin, who had been his next-door neighbour at Craven Street, he became, in later years, something of a diplomatist, since in 1782-83 he was employed by the Shelburne administration in the Paris negotiation for the Treaty of Versailles. But at the date of the "Cross Readings" he was mainly what Burke, speaking contemptuously of his status as a plenipotentiary, styled a "diseur de bons mots"; and he was for this reason included among those "most distinguished Wits of the Metropolis," who, following Garrick's lead in 1774, diverted themselves at the St. James's Coffee-house by composing the epitaphs on Goldsmith which gave rise to the incomparable gallery entitled Retaliation. In the first four editions of that posthumous poem there is no mention of Whitefoord, who, either at, or soon after the first meeting above referred to, had written an epitaph on Goldsmith, two-thirds of which are declared to be "unfit for publication."[3] But when the fourth edition of Retaliation had been printed, an epitaph on Whitefoord was forwarded to the publisher, George Kearsly, by "a friend of the late Doctor Goldsmith," with an intimation that it was a transcript of an original in "the Doctor's own handwriting." "It is a striking proof of Doctor Goldsmith's good-nature," said the sender, glancing, we may suppose, at Whitefoord's performance. "I saw this sheet of paper in the Doctor's room, five or six days before he died; and, as I had got all the other Epitaphs, I asked him if I might take it. "In truth you may, my Boy (replied he), for it will be of no use to me where I am going."

[Note:

3: Hewins's Whitefoord Papers, 1898, p. xxvii. ff., where the first
four lines of twelve are given. They run--

Noll Goldsmith lies here, as famous for writing
As his namesake old Noll was for praying and fighting,
In friends he was rich, tho' not loaded with Pelf;
He spoke well of them, and thought well of himself.]

The lines--there are twenty-eight of them--speak of Whitefoord as, among other things, a

Rare compound of oddity, frolic and fun!
Who relish'd a joke, and rejoic'd in a pun;[4]
Whose temper was generous, open, sincere;
A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear;
Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will,
Whose daily bons mots half a column would fill;
A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free,
A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he.

What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind
Should so long be to news-paper-essays confin'd!
Who perhaps to the summit of science could soar,
Yet content "if the table he set on a roar";
Whose talents to fill any station were fit,
Yet happy if Woodfall confess'd him a wit.

[Note:

4: "Mr, W."--says a note to the fifth edition--"is so notorious a punster, that Doctor Goldsmith used to say, it was impossible to keep him company, without being infected with the itch of punning." Yet Johnson endured him, and apparently liked him, though he had the additional disqualification of being a North Briton.]

The "servile herd" of "tame imitators"--the "news-paper witlings" and "pert scribbling folks"--were further requested to visit his tomb--

To deck it, bring with you festoons of the vine,
And copious libations bestow on his shrine;
Then strew all around it (you can do no less)
Cross-readings, Ship-news, and Mistakes of the Press.

It is not recorded that Kearsly ever saw this in Goldsmith's "own handwriting"; the sender's name has never been made known; and--as above observed--it has been more than suspected that Whitefoord concocted it himself, or procured its concoction. As J.T. Smith points out in Nollekens and his Times, 1828, i, 337-8, Whitefoord was scarcely important enough to deserve a far longer epitaph than those bestowed on Burke and Reynolds; and Goldsmith, it may be added--as we know In the case of Beattie and Voltaire--was not in the habit of confusing small men with great. Moreover, the lines would (as intimated by the person who sent them to Kearsly) be an extraordinarily generous return for an epitaph "unfit for publication," by which, it is stated, Goldsmith had been greatly disturbed. Prior had his misgivings, particularly in respect to the words attributed to Goldsmith on his death-bed; and Forster allows that to him the story of the so-called "Postscript" has "a somewhat doubtful look." To which we unhesitatingly say--ditto.

Whitefoord, it seems, was in the habit of printing his "Cross Readings" on small single sheets, and circulating them among his friends. "Rainy-Day Smith" had a specimen of these. In one of Whitefoord's letters he professes to claim that his jeux d'esprit contained more than met the eye. "I have always," he wrote, "endeavour'd to make such changes [of Ministry] a matter of Laughter [rather] than of serious concern to the People, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c, and these Pieces have generally succeeded beyond my most sanguine Expectations, altho' they were not season'd with private Scandal or personal Abuse, of which our good neighbours of South Britain are realy too fond." In Debrett's New Foundling Hospital for Wit, new edition, 1784, there are several of his productions, including a letter to Woodfall "On the Errors of the Press," of which the following may serve as a sample: "I have known you turn a matter of hearsay, into a matter of heresy; Damon into a daemon; a delicious girl, into a delirious girl; the comic muse, into a comic mouse; a Jewish Rabbi, into a Jewish Rabbit; and when a correspondent, lamenting the corruption of the times, exclaimed 'O Mores!' you made him cry, 'O Moses!'" And here is an extract from another paper which explains the aforegoing reference to "horse Races": "1763--Spring Meeting... Mr. Wilkes's horse, LIBERTY, rode by himself, took the lead at starting; but being pushed hard by Mr. Bishop's black gelding, PRIVILEGE, fell down at the Devil's Ditch, and was no where." The "Ship News" is on the same pattern. "August 25 [1765] We hear that his Majesty's Ship Newcastle will soon have a new figure-head, the old one being almost worn out."

[The end]
Austin Dobson's essay: Cross Readings--And Caleb Whitefoord

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