p>Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc
Notes
"THAT SWINNEY."
Junius thus wrote to H. S. Woodfall in a private note, to which Dr. Good has affixed the date July 21st, 1769 (vol. i. p. 174.*)
"That Swinney is a wretched but dangerous fool. He had the impudence to go to Lord G. Sackville, whom he had never spoken to, and to ask him whether or no he was the author of Junius: take care of him."
This paragraph has given rise to a great deal of speculation, large inferences have been drawn from it, yet no one has satisfactorily answered the question, who was "that Swinney?"
That neither Dr. Good nor Mr. George Woodfall, the editors of the edit. of 1812, knew anything about him, is manifest from their own bald note of explanation, "A correspondent of the printers." Some reports say that he was a collector of news for the Public Advertiser, and subsequently a bookseller at Birmingham, but I never saw any one fact adduced tending to show that there was any person of that name so employed. Others that the Rev. Dr. Sidney Swinney was the party referred to: and Mr. Smith, in his excellent notes to the Grenville Papers, vol. iii. p. lxviii., assumes this to be the fact. I incline to agree with him, but have only inference to strengthen conjecture. What may be the value of that inference will appear in the progress of this inquiry, Who was Dr. Sidney Swinney?
Reports collected by Mr. Butler, Mr. Barker, Mr. Coventry, and others, say that the Doctor had been chaplain to the Russian Embassy, chaplain to the Embassy at Constantinople, and chaplain to one of the British regiments serving in Germany. Mr. Falconer, in his Secret Revealed, p. 22., quotes a paragraph from one of Wray's letters to Lord Hardwick with reference to the proceedings at the Royal Society:
"Dr. Swinney, your Lordship's friend, presented his father-in-law Howell's book."
Swinney's father-in-law, here called Howell, was John Zephaniah Holwell, a remarkable man, whose name is intimately associated with the early history of British India, one of the few survivors of the Black Hole imprisonment, the successor of Clive as governor, and a writer on many subjects connected with Hindoo antiquities. Swinney enrols him amongst his heroes,
"Holwell, Clive, York, Lawrence, Adams, Coote,
Of Draper, Bath-strung for his baffled suit."
And he refers, in a note, to those
"Ungrateful monsters (heretofore in a certain trading company), who have endeavoured to vilify and sully one of the brightest characters that ever existed."
I learn farther, from a volume of Fugitive Pieces, published by Dr. Swinney, that he was the son of Major Mathew Swinney, whom after his flourishing fashion he calls on another occasion "Mathew Swinney of immortal memory;" from one of his dedications that the Doctor himself was educated at Eton; from the books of the Royal Society that he was of Clare Hall, Cambridge; from dates and dedications, that from 1764 to 1768, he was generally resident at Scarborough; and from the Gentleman's Magazine, that he died there 12th November, 1783.
That Swinney had been chaplain to the Russian Embassy I have no reason to believe; but that he had been in the East for a time, possibly as chaplain to the Embassy at Constantinople, is asserted in the brief biographical notice in the Gentleman's Magazine, and would seem to be proved by a work which he published in 1769, called—
"A Tour through some parts of the Levant: in which is included An Account of the Present State of the Seven Churches in Asia. Also a brief Explanation of the Apocalypse. By Sidney Swinney, D.D."
Nothing, however, can be inferred from a title-page of Swinney's. Here we have two or three distinct works referred to:—A Tour, including "An Account of the Seven Churches," and the "Explanation of the Apocalypse." Now I must direct attention to the fact, that from the peculiar punctuation and phraseology—the full-stop after Asia in this title-page—it may have been Swinney's intention to indicate, without asserting, that the Account of the Apocalypse only was by Sidney Swinney. If so, though Swinney's name alone figures in the title-page of the work, he is responsible only for one or two notes!
I would not have written conjecturally on this subject if I could have avoided it; but though Swinney was a F.A.S. F.R.S., and though the work is dedicated to the Fellows of those Societies, no copy of it is to be found in the libraries of either, or in the British Museum. I cannot, therefore, be sure that my own copy is perfect. What that copy contains is thus set forth in half a dozen lines of introduction:
"Before I [S. S.] enter upon the more important part of my dissertation [The Explanation of the Apocalypse], it may not be improper to give you some account of the present state of the Seven Churches in Asia, as they are, which was communicated to me by a certain friend of mine, in the description of a short tour which he made through the principal parts of the Levant: should they be accompanied with a few casual notes of my own, I trust the work will not be less acceptable to you on that account."
It must be obvious, after this declaration, that the Tour set forth so conspicuously in the title-page, was not written by Swinney. Now the "Itinerary" which follows is advowedly "wrote by the author of the preceding account," and this brings the reader and the work itself to "The End!"
The truth I suspect to have been this:—Swinney was not prudent and was poor, and raised money occasionally, after the miserable fashion of the time, by publishing books on subscription, and receiving subscriptions in anticipation of publication.
About this time, from 1767 to 1769, he published a Sermon; The Ninth Satire of Horace, a meaningless trifle of a hundred lines, swollen, by printing the original and notes, into a quarto; a volume of Fugitive Pieces; and the first canto of The Battle of Minden, a Poem in three Books, enriched with critical Notes by Two Friends, and with explanatory Notes by the Author. Of the latter work, as of the Tour, I have never seen but one copy, a splendid specimen of typography, splendidly bound, containing the first and second canto. Whether the third canto was ever published is to me doubtful; some of your correspondents may be able to give you information. My own impression is that it was not, and for the following reasons.
Swinney, it appears, had received subscriptions for the work, and promised in his prospectus a plan of the battle, and portraits of the heroes, which the work does not contain. "However, to make some little amends" to his "generous subscribers," Swinney announces his intention to present them with "three books instead of one."
The first book is dedicated to Earl Waldegrave, who commanded "the six British regiments of infantry" on the "ever memorable 1st August, 1759," and a note affixed states that "Book the Second" will be published on 1st January, and "Book the Third" on 1st of August.
But the public, as Swinney says, were kept "in suspense" almost three years for the second book, which was not published until 1772; and in the dedication of this second book, also to Earl Waldegrave, Swinney says:
"Doubtless many of my subscribers have thought me very unmindful of the promise I made them in my printed proposal, in which I undertook to publish my poem out of hand. Ill health has been the sole cause of my disappointing their expectations. A fever of the nerves … for these four years, has rendered me incapable.... In my original proposals I undertook to publish this work in two books. [In the introduction he says, as I have just quoted, one book.] Poetical matter hath increased upon me to such a degree, in the genial climate of Languedoc, as to have enabled me to compose several more books on this interesting subject, all which I purpose presenting my subscribers with at the original price of half a guinea.... Many months ago this Second Book was printed off; but on my arrival in town from Montauban (whither I purpose to return), I found there were so many faults and blunders in it throughout, that I was under the necessity of condemning five hundred copies to the inglorious purpose of defending pye bottoms from the dust of an oven.... Profit, my Lord, has not been my motive for publishing: if it had, I should be egregiously disappointed, for instead of gaining I shall be a considerable loser by the publication; and yet many of my subscribers have