By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects. Adams William Henry Davenport

The world has commended the man who gives out of his superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over again on the sword of the satirist.

      Meanness has not been confined to the obscure; it has had some distinguished votaries – as, for example, his Gracious Majesty King James I., whose economical propensities were notorious. Of him it was admirably written that

      ‘At Christ Church “Marriage,” done before the King,

      Lest those learn’d mates should want an offering,

      The King himself did offer – What, I pray?

      He offer’d, twice or thrice, to go away.’

      Take, again, the great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of mind were very happily hit off in the couplet ‘On a High Bridge over a Small Stream at Blenheim’:

      ‘The lofty arch his high ambition shows,

      The stream an emblem of his bounty flows.’

      Garrick was accused of money-grubbing, and his weakness in that respect was the subject of more than one smart jest by Foote. When somebody, àpropos of a remark made by Garrick on the parsimony of others, asked, ‘Why on earth doesn’t Garrick take the beam out of his own eye before attacking the mote in other people’s?’ – Foote replied, ‘He is not sure of selling the timber.’ And again, when Garrick, after dropping a guinea and failing to find it, said it had ‘gone to the devil, he thought,’ Foote remarked, ‘Well, David, let you alone for making a guinea go farther than anybody else’ – a repartee which was perhaps in the mind of Shirley Brooks when, referring to the excellence of Scotch shooting at long distances, he wrote:

      ‘But this we all knew

      That a Scotchman can do —

      Make a small piece of metal go awfully far.’

      Then there was Lord Eldon, whose nearness was proverbial, and whose unwillingness to spend displayed itself markedly in his commissariat department. An anonymous epigram professed to record an ‘Inquest Extraordinary’:

      ‘Found dead, a rat – no case could sure be harder:

      Verdict – Confined a week in Eldon’s larder.’

      We are also told that, when Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott quarrelled over the proper pronunciation of the legal term ‘lien’ – the former calling it ‘lion,’ and the latter ‘lean’ – Jekyll produced the following:

      ‘Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, why what do you mean

      By saying the Chancellor’s lion is lean?

      D’ye think that his kitchen’s so bad as all that,

      That nothing within it can ever get fat?’

      Of Lord Kenyon, another judge of like inhospitable tendencies, someone said that in his house it was always Lent in the kitchen and Passion Week in the parlour. On another occasion it was remarked that ‘in his lordship’s kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;’ to which Jekyll, pretending to be angry, replied, ‘Spits! in the name of common-sense, don’t talk about his spits – for nothing turns on them!’ When his lordship died, the words ‘Mors Janua Vita’ were by an error of the undertaker painted on the coffin; but, someone commenting on the substitution of ‘Vita’ for ‘Vitæ,’ Lord Ellenborough protested that there was no mistake. Kenyon, he declared, had directed that it should be ‘Vita,’ so that his estate might be saved the expense of a diphthong.