“The walk by the Severn-side” is the scene of lovers’ meetings in Farquhar’s “Recruiting Officer.” The “noble Serjeant Kite,” speaking in “the street, Shrewsbury,” bids all who desire to enlist, “repair” to him “at the sign of the Raven” (doubtless in Raven Street, where Dr. Burney was born); and Captain Plume censures “the March beer at the Raven.”
Burney was in the orchestra at Drury Lane, under Arne. If he was a drudge, his work seems to have been relieved by plays and operas, as well as by concerts, in which latter he most likely took some part. The kindness of Arne’s sister, Mrs. Cibber, “the most enchanting actress of her day,” more than made up for her brother’s negligence. Her house in Scotland Yard, was the resort of “wits, poets, and men of letters.” She made Burney welcome to it, and known to them. The rest was done by his modest and pleasing manners, great liveliness, and quick intelligence. At her house he gained the friendliness of Thomson and Garrick. There he again met Handel. Burney pauses in his volume on the Handel Commemoration of 1784, to tell us, that “after my first arrival in London, 1744, he” [Handel] “was seldom absent from the benefit for Decayed Musicians and their Families; and I have sometimes seen him at the Playhouses, the Opera, and at St. Martin’s church, when Mr. Kelway played the organ — Besides seeing Handel, myself, at his own house, in Brook-Street, and at Carlton-House, where he had rehearsals of his Oratorios; by meeting him at Mrs. Cibber’s, and at Frasi’s, who was then my scholar, I acquired considerable knowledge of his private character, and turn for humour. He was very fond of Mrs. Cibber, whose voice and manner had softened his severity for her want of musical knowledge. At her house, of a Sunday evening, he used to meet Quin, who, in spite of native roughness, was very fond of music. Yet the first time Mrs. Cibber prevailed on Handel to sit down while he was present (on which occasion I remember the great musician played the overture in Siroe, and delighted us all with the marvellous neatness with which he played the jig, at the end of it), Quin, after Handel was gone, being asked by Mrs. Cibber, whether he did not think Mr. Handel had a charming hand? replied, ‘A hand, Madam! you mistake, it’s a foot? ‘Poh! poh!’ says she, ‘has he not a fine finger?’
‘Toes, by G — , Madam!’ Indeed, his hand was then so fat, that the knuckles, which usually appear convex, were like those of a child, dinted or dimpled in, so as to be rendered concave; however, his touch was so smooth, and the tone of the instrument so much cherished, that his fingers seemed to grow to the keys. They were so curved and compact, when he played, that no motion, and scarcely the fingers themselves, could be discerned.”
Once, at a later time, Handel’s temper broke loose on Burney. “At Frasi’s, I remember, in the year 1748, he brought in his pocket the duet of Judas Macchaceus, ‘From these dread Scenes,’ in which she had not sung when that Oratorio was first performed in 1746. At the time he sat down to the harpsichord, to give her and me the time of it, while he sung her part, I hummed, at sight, the second, over his shoulder; in which he encouraged me, by desiring that I would sing out — but, unfortunately, something went wrong, and Handel, with his usual impetuosity, grew violent: a circumstance very terrific to a young musician. At length, however, recovering from my fright, I ventured to say, that I fancied there was a mistake in the writing; which, upon examining, Handel discovered to be the case: and then, instantly, with the greatest good humour and humility, said, ‘I pec your barton — I am a very odd tog — Maishter Schmitt is to blame.’”
Burney was parted from Arne by Fulk Greville, a young man of rank, fashion, and fortune, who coveted all kinds of distinction, from eminence in metaphysics (in which he fancied himself strong) to pre-eminence on the race-course and in the hunting-field, in “all the fashionable exercises” of riding, fencing, shooting at a mark, dancing, and tennis, down, or up, to music and drawing, writing verses, and laying out gardens and plantations. Mr. Greville wished for the continual company of a good musician, who would give him lessons, and who was also fit for “the society of a gentleman.” He doubted if there were such an one, but after hearing young Burney (who was ignorant of his object) talk, as well as play upon the harpsichord, he was so much taken with him as to pay Arne three hundred pounds to cancel Burney’s articles. Burney was even too much his companion, as Greville took him to the race-course and the gambling clubs — to Newmarket, to White’s, and to Boodle’s. He might do anything he chose, so long as Mr. Greville did not think it “fogrum.” Burney gave away the bride with whom Greville pretended to elope, because it was “fogrum” to be married like other people. Burney stood as proxy for a duke when Greville’s baby was baptised. He was to have gone to Italy with that “pair of our beauties,” Mr and Mrs. Greville (who are commemorated in the letters of Horace Walpole, and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), but just at that time he himself fell in love, and Mr. Greville graciously cancelled the unwritten articles which bound Burney to him by the words, “Why don’t you marry her?”
“May I?” cried Burney, and the deed was done. “She” (Esther Sleepe) “was a very lovely and intelligent girl, who made him as happy as a man could be made. But, before speaking of his married life, we must tell of a friendship which began three or four years before he met his wife, lasted two-and-twenty years after her death, and was shared with him by all his children. This was with Samuel Crisp, a man whose praise runs through all the Burney papers; whom Frances, from her earliest journal to her latest annotations on her letters and papers, never names but with expressions of love, honour, and reverence.
As he has hitherto been commemorated only by sundry misdescriptions in divers books, by a few lines in “The Gentleman’s Magazine,” an epitaph in Chesington Church, and some over-coloured paragraphs in Macaulay’s review of Mme. D’Arblay’s Diaries, let such amends as can, be made by telling what may be learned of him from the Burney papers, and of his family from the volumes (in their thoroughness in all ways a pleasure to eye and mind) which the courteous kindness of Mr. Crisp, of Denmark Hill, has put at the service of the Editor.
For some time it was far from easy to affiliate Mr. Crisp; so many were the Samuels in his ancient and wide-spread family. To add to the puzzle, Mr. Crisp had a double in another Samuel Crisp, who was born three years before him, and died about eight months after him; was, like himself, a bachelor, had some of his characteristics, and did things which “Daddy” might have done if his bent had been towards philanthropy instead of towards what is called “culture.” This pseudo Samuel Crisp has slipped into the same line of the index to “The Gentleman’s Magazine” with our Samuel, so that a reference to an article upon “his character” was, for a moment, thought to concern our dear and “honoured Daddy.”
The Crisps had much originality, fervour, and force. Many of them were men of mark. Mr. Crisp’s double was so well known in London, that it is surprising that Fanny should never have heard of him until she went to Bath in 1780. There she met a Miss Leigh, a cousin of her “Daddy,” and very likely a cousin of Jane Austen also. While telling Miss Leigh how happy she was to see a relation of Mr. Crisp, Fanny was overheard by Mrs. Bowdler, the mother of the Tunbridge Wells doctor who unintentionally enriched the English language with a new verb. Mrs. Bowdler, who (according to Fanny) was “a very clever woman,” but “not a very delicate one,”
“cried out ‘What Mr. Crisp is it? Is it Sam?’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said I, staring at her familiarity. ‘What,’ cried she again, ‘do you know little Sam Crisp?’
‘I don’t know for little,’ returned I, much surprised; ‘but he is the most intimate friend I have in the world, and the dearest. Do you know him then?’
‘Do I? yes, very well; I have known little Sam Crisp this long while.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ cried I, half affronted at her manner of naming him, ‘why you should so little him; I know not any one thing in the world in which he is little, — neither in head nor heart, — neither in understanding, person, talents, nor mind.’
‘I fancy, ma’am,’ said Miss Leigh, �
�you hardly mean the Mr. Crisp Miss Burney does.’
‘I mean Sam Crisp,’ said she, ‘The Greenwich Traveller.’ This appeased me, and we cleared up the mistake.” But not wholly was Fanny appeased, as on the next day, when she first saw Mr. Bowdler, the “very worthy” husband of this inelegant person, she describes Mr. Bowdler as being “an extremely little man, much less than Sam Crisp, I assure you, Mrs. Bowdler.”!
“Little Sam Crisp,” who had withdrawn from business for the last fourteen years of his life, paid the owners of the Greenwich stage-coach £27 yearly, for what “The Gentleman’s Magazine” calls his “daily amusement of riding in the coach from London to Greenwich, and returning in it immediately.” He acted on “his favourite motto, pro bono publico, and with the least ostentation performed many generous and charitable actions, which would have dignified a more ample fortune. He was the institutor of the Lactarium in St. George’s Fields, and selected the Latin mottoes for the facetious Mrs. Henniver, who got a little fortune there. He projected the mile and half stones near London, and teased the printers of news-papers into the plan of letter-boxes —
He was a good-humoured, obliging, and facetious companion, always paying a particular attention and a profusion of compliments to the ladies, especially to those who were agreeable.”
If he was a relation of the celebrated Sir Nicholas Crisp, it must have been collaterally, as was the case with our Mr. Crisp, who was a great-grand-nephew of Sir Nicholas, the direct line of whose heirs ended in 1740, in Sir Charles Crisp, of Dornford, in Oxfordshire. Sir Nicholas was a maker of history. What he did is to be seen in the State Papers and the Commons’ Journals, in Clarendon and Rushworth, in Pepys and Evelyn. His younger brother Tobias, the great-grandfather of our Mr. Crisp, made still more noise than Sir Nicholas in his time, and even after it, but it was among polemical Puritans. He has shrunk into a small space in dictionaries of biography and in histories of controversy.
These brothers sprang from a Leicestershire family, which in the sixteenth century had a Gloucestershire offshoot, if it were not rather the main stock transplanted. Towards the end of that century two cadets of the Crisps of Marshfield, near Bristol, became citizens of London. Ellis, the younger of the two, had a large house in Bread Street, a seat at Hammersmith, house-property in London and in Bristol, with land both in southern counties and in Yorkshire. He made the old kindly will of a prosperous, godly man, remembering all his kinsfolk, all his wife’s kinsfolk, his city company, and the “poore people of the towne of Marshefielde,” in which he was born, and where, with his brother, he had founded almshouses. He died in 1625, the year of his shrievalty, that year in which Charles I. dissolved his first Parliament.
Would that we had ample room to tell of his eldest son, “Capitaine Nicholas Crisp, Esquier,” Charles I.’s “faithful farmer” of the Customs, and raiser of money; that adventurous merchant who “opened and settled the Guinea-trade, and built there the Castle of Coromandine”; that gallant Cavalier; that daring “Admiral of Sea-Pirats,” who raised a squadron of ships as well as a regiment for his King; who pawned for the King his collar of rubies, trafficked for him, plotted and was in exile for him; whose spirit and whose fortune no fines or plundering by Parliament could sensibly daunt or diminish. In words, which his son, Sir Thomas, wrote with prides Sir Nicholas was an “ould ffaithfull servant to King Charles the ffirst, and King Charles the second, for whom he suffered very much, and lost one hundred thousand pounds in their services, but was repaied in a great measure by King Charles the second his justice, and bounty, and is here mentioned by his executor as a gratefull acknowledgement.” This repayment will appear not the least notable fact in the life of Sir Nicholas. After the Restoration he was made a baronet, his ceaseless energy was then turned to improving brick-making, paper-mills, powder-mills, water-mills, etc. His desires “pro bono publico” were on a grander scale than those of Samuel Crisp, “the Greenwich traveller.” He troubled the mind of Sir Richard Browne, sometime English Minister in Paris, by planning a wet-dock at Deptford, to hold “two hundred sail of ships.” He treated with Browne’s son-in-law, Mr. Evelyn, at Sayes Court, and brought him up to London “about a vast design of a mole to be made for ships in part of his grounds at Sayes Court.” To complete the multiform Sir Nicholas, he was met, with the other Farmers of the Customs, by Mr. Pepys at Woolwich in 1662: when Pepys found them to be “very grave, fine gentlemen”; “ very good company”; — whom he was “very glad to know.”
Samuel Crisp, next brother to Sir Nicholas, was probably concerned with him in what the King and Sir Nicholas called “a Commission of Array”; the Parliament named it a plot to seize the City of London. Samuel’s estate was sequestered. Tobias, the third surviving son of Ellis, was like his brothers, born in Milton’s Bread Street, in 1602, a few years before Milton. He was of Eton, of Cambridge, and of Oxford, and rector of Brinkworth, in Hampshire, when the Civil War began. He had married Mary, daughter, and, in the end, heiress, of Rowland Wilson, citizen of London, and vintner, who seems to have been in Sir Nicholas Crisp’s Guinea Company, but was the reverse of him in politics, being a member of the Long Parliament, and (in the fatal year 1648-9) one of the Council of State. This connexion may have sometimes saved the person of Sir Nicholas at the cost of his purse. In the same month of the same year that the King raised his standard at Nottingham, Tobias (who was “Puritannically affected”), “to avoid the insolencies of the soldiers, especially of the Cavaliers, for whom he had but little affection, retired to London.”
Tobias had little “luck” alive, or dead. Shunning frays in Hampshire, he preached himself into worse in London, where he was “baited by fifty-two opponents in a grand dispute concerning freeness of grace.”
“By which encounter, which was eagerly managed on his part, he contracted a disease which brought him to his grave.” That is to say, in the heat and the crowd, he was infected by the small-pox, of which he died on the 27th of February, 1642. The controversy raged long after his demise. On the publication of a volume of his sermons after his death, the Westminster Assembly of Divines proposed that they should be publicly burned as heretical. His son Samuel, who was about ten when Tobias died, grew up a biblical student and a lay theologian. In 1689 he republished his father’s works, and brought upon himself a seven years’ strife. He provoked it by prefixing to the book the names of twelve Presbyterian and twelve Anabaptist ministers as approving the sermons. Samuel was denounced for reprinting sermons which should never have been preached, or published, at all. He defended himself in two volumes. The whole controversy rests undisturbed on the shelves of College-libraries, but John Gill, a Baptist minister, reprinted Toby in 1791. In the latest book that gives a sketch of him, we find him as “Tobias Crisp, Antinomian”; but what one of his foemen called him, i.e. “Crispinian,” seems nearer the fact. A contemporary describes him as being “innocent, and harmless, of all evil;... zealous and fervent of all good.”
His children were left to the care of their mother, and her father — Rowland Wilson. Tobias was rich, and their grandfather increased the wealth of the children. He left among them the church lands of Merton Abbey, in the parish of Malden, in Surrey. Among other property, he bequeathed to his grandchildren his bad debts, namely, what “the Crowne of Portugall” and King Charles II owed him. When his grandson, Samuel Crisp, died, in 1703, they were still unpaid. The first Samuel (1) describes himself in his will, made in 1701, as being then in his “sixty-nynth yeare,” and “the last survyving son of Dr. Tobias Crisp.” He had lived at Clapham in a pious and wealthy way, much as they who were called “the Clapham Sect” (or Set) did after him. His second son Samuel (2), seems to have received more than the rest. His eldest, Pheasaunt, a merchant, who died at Bombay, had provision made for him, but was reminded that he “married Mr. Dolins’ daughter” without his fathers consent, or even his knowledge; that his father had lent him money “in his straits,” which he had promised to repay to his younger brothers when he was worth four thou
sand pounds; and that he had borrowed a picture of “the Madona,” which his father bequeathed to him, seemingly because Pheasaunt showed no signs of returning it. His father also leaves him his own “pocket-bible of forty-four yeares vse, hopeinge that he will make a good vse of it.” Samuel, the second son, has the bible of Dr. Tobias. “My ffather’s bible, printed, 1631, in the margent of which from 1675, to 1680, I made annotations from 1st Corinthians to the end.” Four younger sons and a daughter are left more less curious bibles, some of them annotated. To-one of them, Stephen, “to furnish him somewhat in the blessed worke of the ministry,” the testator says, “I give all my manuscripts of Hebrew and Greek in my three times writing out the Bible in Hebrew and Greek letters, and rendring the whole into proper English. My booke of the list of 7000 and od sermons from 1648 to 1701, and all the sermon-books about 300, I give to my said sonne Stephen.”
Samuel (2) survived his father Samuel fourteen years, dying in 1717. He had married into a family living not far from the old home of the Crisps at Marshfield. He left five daughters and an only son, our Mr. Crisp, the third and last Samuel of this line of the Crisps. His mother, Mrs. Florence Crisp, did not live two years after her husband, so that “Daddy” was brought up by his sisters, three of whom appear to have been older than himself. When just in his “teens,” he became owner of his father’s share in the Merton property, and of his mother’s shares in land at Tockington in Gloucestershire, and at Camerton in Somersetshire. That he was well-taught we are assured; but there is a gap in his history between his father’s death in 1717, and his meeting young Burney at the house of Fulk Greville, near Andover, which can only be filled by fancy. All we know is that Mr. Crisp was a man of fashion, as well as of “taste”; that he was tall, handsome, of fine bearing, agreeable, and intelligent, excelling both as a musician and a painter when young, and that he did not let his accomplishments slip from him in middle-age. There are traces after he was seventy, of his accompanying Susan Burney on the harpsichord, and of his needing paint-brushes. Even when his fingers were swollen by gout, his handwriting is remarkable for its delicacy. The Puritanism of Tobias, and the Nonconformity of his son Samuel, had become feeble in the second Samuel; there was no sign of it in “ Daddy.” He heard Farinelli, Senesino, and Cuzzoni with rapture, and dwelt on their praise in the time of Agujari, Gabrielli, and Pacchieroti. He loved Shakespeare and Moliére, admired Fielding and Smollett, thought little of Richardson, considered Dr. Johnson a better talker than writer, and set Mrs. Montagu at naught. As became a man of wit, he supped with Quin, and had been intimate with Garrick. As a man of fashion, he knew the “virtuoso.” Duchess of Portland, and Mrs. Delany, her friend, and the friend of his eldest sister. He was intimate with the beautiful Maria Gunning and her husband, Lord Coventry. Among other men of letters he was friendly with Owen Cambridge, “a man of good estate, not unknown to the Muses,” as well as with Fulk Greville and his set, who probably called some of the others, “fogrum.” Mr. Crisp, in the words of the last century, was a “dilettante,” and a “virtuoso.” Greville, and Greville’s friends, teased, ridiculed, or chid him for lingering by young Burney’s harpsichord when they would fain have had him go a-hunting He guided the clever and interesting boy Burney by the experience of a kind-hearted man twenty years his elder.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 445
