Against the story of Nash and the Duchess of
Queensberry, so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful anecdote
that Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun's getting the hand of another duchess
under his high heel, and pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeper
into the flesh. In all the repertory of Nash's extravagances there is
not one story of this kind, not one that reveals a wicked force. He
was fatuous, but beneficent; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt.
Goldsmith, in this second edition at least, has taken more pains
with his life of Nash than he ever took again in a biography. His
_Parnell_, his _Bolingbroke_, his _Voltaire_, are not worthy of his
name and fame; not all the industry of annotators can ever make them
more than they were at first--potboilers, turned out with no care or
enthusiasm, and unconscientiously prepared. But this subtle figure
of a Master of Ceremonial; this queer old presentment of a pump-room
king, crowned with a white hat, waiting all day long in his best at
the bow-window of the Smyrna Coffee-House to get a bow from that
other, and alas! better accredited royalty, the Prince of Wales; this
picture, of an old beau, with his toy-shop of gold snuff-boxes, his
agate-rings, his senseless obelisk, his rattle of faded jokes and
blunted stories--all this had something very attractive to Goldsmith
both in its humour and its pathos; and he has left us, in his _Life of
Nash_, a study which is far too little known, but which deserves to
rank among the best-read productions of that infinitely sympathetic
pen, which has bequeathed to posterity Mr.
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