Words, Words Words! by Partridge Eric;

Author:Partridge, Eric;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Falstaff among Antiquaries

DOI: 10.4324/9781315690216-17

I

ONE of the most entertaining figures of the eighteenth century was Captain Francis Grose,1 who appears to have been born early in 1731 and who is known to have died in 1791. Although, like the greatest of English historians, he saw no active service, he yet had a very sound knowledge of the Army and all that therein is. ' Stout and burly Captain Grose ' was the greatest antiquary, the most inveterate and successful joker, and the best porter-drinker of his century: he must have been a remarkable man on any one of these three counts. He was famous and—rare combination—harmlessly notorious.

1 A fuller account of the man and his work is appended to my edition of Grose's ' Vulgar Tongue' (Oxford University Press, 1931). His father, a Swiss, settled in England early in the eighteenth century and went to live at Richmond in Surrey; he prospered as a jeweller. Francis, after a classical education, did not, as one might have expected, go to a university (only Oxford and Cambridge existed in England at that time), but studied art. In 1766 he was elected a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists. From June 1755 until 1763 he was the Richmond Herald. Thence he passed to the adjutancy and paymastership of the Hampshire Militia, where, according to his own story, his only account-books were his right-hand and left-hand pockets: into the one he put all moneys received, from the other he drew all necessary expenses: that he was anything but a rogue is clear from the fact that it was at this period that he ran through a considerable patrimony. Nor was his sense of honour or his reputation for sterling honesty ever doubted. After a long period of research work (conducted on liberal and jovial lines) interspersed with travel in search of knowledge and curiosities, he held a captaincy and adjutancy in the Surrey Militia from 1778 till his death. From 1773 to 1787 he published his greatest work, ' The Antiquities of England and Wales'; in 1785 his 'Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue'; in the following year his valuable ' Military Antiquities' (especially of the English Army); in 1787, ' A Provincial Glossary', the materials of which he had been collecting for many years in the course of his other investigations. In 1789 he toured Scotland, where he was quizzed and feted by his fellow-antiquaries and where he met and delighted Robert Burns (' of whom more anon', to avail oneself of a fatally convenient cliché); that he worked hard, as well as playing boyishly, is proved by 'The Antiquities of Scotland' (1789-90). Early in 1791 he issued a volume of essays entitled 'The Grumbler ', and in the spring he set out on that tour of Ireland which ended in the grave, apoplexy taking him off while he dined at Dublin with his friend Nathaniel Hone. A friend completed and, not long after Grose's death, published ' The Antiquities of Ireland '.

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