Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 6 June [1792]
Dear Giddy
I received your letters pr & nothing but the instant departure of your cousin saves you from an answer of the usual length. – The college is extremely silent; its silence depends on its thinness, & if you choose to investigate the matter higher, you are full as equal to it as I am. I observe a shoal of members who in a year or so will steer their course away, & then I think the Master will be left with th his fellows & his scholars by his side: for there seems little chance of much supply. I really see not any good reason why the tide shd get so strong into Oriel & so forsake Pembroke: & I am sorry for it chiefly because it will disable Smyth from laying by a little reserve for his old age. There is one remedy for all this & it is not in my power, but your father’s to administer it. Let him persuade the Master to undertake the Bampton Lectures, as I will be answerable for it that he can if he chooses: he may lend as much assistance as he shall think proper but I only hope they will not quarrel about the property, when the sermons shall have acquired that reputation which awaits them. So many members have never presented themselves for entrance at Oriel, as since Eveleigh has undertaken these lectures: the distribution of a copy to each member of the college has been a pretty little piece of management
Parr is not so much talked of as I expected: but all those who do speak of him, blame him. It appears to me that he has been equally injudicious & unwarrantable in the plan of his pamphlet & the execution of several parts: why insult Alderman Curtis? Why insult Parson Curtis with his lack of Greek? He has surely forgotten what he must have read in A. Smith, that mankind will not <<easily> sympathize with an insolent or a passionate man: & if pedantry be offensive & consist in an unreasonable display of knowledge, how much must his Greek in Roman characters & his Greek in Greek characters add to the disgust of his reader! He ought in my opinion to have told his tale with the neutrality of a third person: & to have avoided foreign matter.
I am vexed that the editors of the Morning Chronicle dare not print the facts which I communicated to them. They are extremely curious & perfectly authentic. Pitt or his gang sent emissaries to bring over the printers of the country papers to their side & now treasury papers go regularly into every county with paragraphs marked to be inserted in the provincial papers. This is the sum of the transaction. The details are remarkable enough. I can prove it only in one instance, but I may safely infer it in others.
My only reason for wishing you to draw up a statement of Hornblower’s affair is that evident injustice to an individual is much more sensibly felt by the public, than when oppression arrives at themselves through a thousand winding & concealed channels, the former being, you know, the [xxxx] only sort of injustice to which their judgments & feelings are daily innured. You can determine whether an unimpassioned narrative wd point their indignation agt the H. of C. by which I suppose it is deserved. My assistance I wd willingly lend, but surely without any affectation of modesty, I may say that it wd in such an instance be perfectly insignificant.
The Master has been long absent; & lately for a reason which wd astonish you well as you know him, full as much as the passing of the libel bill by the H. of Lords. Hume has observed that there is one passion of the human heart which the comic poets have never been able to exaggerate, for life always exceeds imagination, when this passion comes into play – but I have not time or room to tell the whole story. Et, ma foi il ne vaut pas la peine à souiller du papier avec le recit de ses ridicules bassesses – Have you procured the Code du Juge de Paix. If not, inform me that I may send it by Millet or Edwards. J. Hawkins comes here soon.
Yours
T. Beddoes
MS: Cornish Archives MS DG 41/34