While at Oxford, where he became what is called “Faculty Student,” Impey, whose temper and manners were always endearing, was a great favourite. He was quite a pet with the Dean of Christ Church, Cyril Jackson, who had previously been tutor to their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. But the Dean, as a shrewd, practical man, could not be blind to Impey’s shortcomings, and to defects in his intellectual conformation, which must bar his progress in anything like real, worldly, active life. Though an elegant poet, a good Grecian, a first-rate Latinist, a good modern linguist, knowing well German, French, Italian, and Spanish, poor Impey had no head at all for mathematics, and very little head even for the four rules of arithmetic. With all his accomplishments, he could never sum up an hotel bill, or divide a round number of pounds and shillings into three equal parts. I have seen him perplexed in the extreme by his housekeeper’s account of a week’s expenditure; and here I may as well confess that I could afford him little help, being scarcely better up than he in Cocker or Walsingham.
We had generally to call in Mr. A., who had once been in some trade or other, and who always remained, in heart, mind, and practice, a sharp man of business. I believe that A. was quite incapable of appreciating what was in us, and despised us for what was out of us.
Very many years before this, Cyril
Jackson said
| CHAP. XVIII] | HIS DELICATE HEALTH | 177 |
But Impey was impeded by other circumstances; he started in life with that competency of fortune which generally proves fatal to hard work or persevering application; he had a very delicate, nervous, susceptible constitution, and at his first start in life he made a sad mistake in the choice of a profession. He entered the Army as a cornet of dragoons; after some months, being lodged in one of our cold, comfortless, damp barracks, he was attacked by a bronchial disease, which drove him from the service, kept him nearly all his life a valetudinarian, and never quite left him until death.
His father, the old Judge, had a
brother who had been a physician; and he wished Elijah to follow the profession of his uncle, who I believe had left him a
nice little property. But Impey would never have had nerve or decision
enough for medical practice. Neither the Bar nor the Church was to be thought of, as he had
an impediment in his speech, and a weakness of thorax and voice after his barrack malady.
The bronchitis was an unfortunate incident; but from his short military career, and his
careful drill, Impey derived the advantage of an easy and strikingly
elegant carriage; and this, like the disorder, accompanied him to the verge of the grave.
That for which he would have been admirably suited was some easy diplomatic employment, or
some post in our Foreign Office, where trustworthiness, intelligence, and literary and
philological acquirements were required. When well advanced in years and considerably
reduced in fortune, he did apply for some such post, through the Marquis of Lansdowne, whose father had
been his father’s intimate friend. The Marquis told him that possibly with time and
with great exertion—the applicant was already grey—
| 178 | ELIJAH BARWELL IMPEY | [CHAP. XVIII |
On this brilliant distant prospect my friend turned his back, not in anger, but not without contempt, for Lord Lansdowne owed him a kind turn; and other men being in office, or having patronage or influence, had given him promises. But it was quite natural that he should be thus treated by an ultra-liberal Whig Government. Though mild and considerate in politics, as in everything else, Elijah Impey was a Conservative and a High Churchman, a refined scholar, admirably qualified for the post he aimed at, and a most entire and perfect gentleman. When did the Whigs of our day ever employ such a man, being wholly or almost wholly without parliamentary or borough interest?
I was staying for a day or two with Impey down at Sandgate, in the old hotel close by the seaside, the then
keeper of which was a very uncourteous, uncleanly Boniface. After enduring many discomforts
and impositions—for he had been in the house some weeks before I joined him—he gently
complained to the landlord, one morning after breakfast, of certain greasy plates and dirty
napkins. No reproof could be more gentle, but that ill-conditioned Boniface took it in
dudgeon, flew out in a passion, and in the peculiar style of such people told my friend to
his face that he was no gentleman. “Am I not?” said
Impey. “Then I have been living sixty-five years in the
world under a great mistake. You had better bring your bill.” The bill, an
unconscionable one, was brought and paid, and we took our departure for the Pavilion at
Folkestone, where we found much civility. In his later years, when his infirmities were
thick upon him, and when even an hour’s reading distressed him, poor
Elijah would often complain to me that his had been a misled,
idling, vacant, wasted existence; that he ought to
| CHAP. XVIII] | HIS SOLITARY LIFE | 179 |
I always did my best to dissipate these vain regrets. I used to tell him, with all the sincerity of inward conviction, that his life had not been thrown away; that he had been highly useful in the world as reminding our ever-changing society of what the refined, accomplished English gentleman of the good old school had been; that his literary conversation, his just taste and criticism, had been serviceable to many younger men; and that some of his literary exercises would survive him and prove that he had been no sordid, sensual, or common man.
When I was departing for Turkey, in 1847, he was breaking up, and he expressed a doubt as to whether he should live to see me on my return. “Live on, my dear Impey,” said I; “live on to give the world assurance of an English gentleman, a character becoming every day more scarce.” He did live to witness my return in the autumn of 1848; but I saw him but once, and then both his wit and his memory were gone. He died in the following spring. I grieved for his loss; but it was better that he should go. He was well prepared. For many years his daily life had been a preparation for death; life no longer offered him anything but suffering.
Considering his temperament and his infirmities, it was quite wonderful he
should have lasted as long as he did. He was nearly seventy when he died,
| 180 | ELIJAH BARWELL IMPEY | [CHAP. XVIII |
Sir George Rose, Mr. Longlands, Mr. Gleig, and many other surviving friends can bear witness to
* See “Memoirs of Sir Elijah Impey, Knt.,” by Elijah Barwell Impey, 1846. In the introduction to this book, written “in refutation of the calumnies of the Right Hon. Thomas Babington Macaulay,” the author gives an account of his first introduction to MacFarlane, and expresses his gratitude to him for his assistance in clearing his father’s memory from the aspersions cast upon it. “For what the author of ‘Our Indian Empire’ has done towards the elucidation of truth, it behoves not only me and my relatives, but every honest reader of his country’s annals, to be grateful.” |
| CHAP. XVIII] | MACAULAY’S ESSAYS | 181 |
Gleig, though in Holy Orders, after having been in
the Army, had I believe an almost equal difficulty in restraining himself from calling to
account the slanderer, who, in that essay and review about Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah, had
taunted and grossly outraged him, in his twofold capacity of soldier and Christian priest.
Would Macaulay have ventured on this outrage, if
Gleig had still worn a black stock, and not a white cravat? I will
venture to answer the question I have put. Macaulay, whose personal
timidity is quite equal to his literary impudence and
malevolence—Macaulay, who ran away from London at the mere scent
of a distant and a problematical duel with someone of Dan
O’Connell’s tail, and who lay perdu
nearly a week at Portsmouth before the ship which was to convey him to Calcutta was ready
to take him on board, would never have so insulted Gleig if he had
been in the Army instead of being in the Church. If Macaulay had
declined to fight, the strong, high-spirited author of the “Subaltern” would have bestowed upon him that
horse-whipping which he had so richly merited. The expected, but never fought, duel with
the Irishman is a tale that I may tell hereafter. My friend, Matthew
| 182 | ELIJAH BARWELL IMPEY | [CHAP. XVIII |
Kind, humorous, genial, gentlemanly Impey never disliked a joke, though it were ever so much at his own expense. In the later and rather uneventful stages of his life, there were three synchronisms—he went to live at Clapham, he began to write unsuccessful plays, and he made a purchase at Dollond’s. Sir George Rose put all this into one of his innumerable jests in rhyme:
“On Clapham Common lived a bard, And he was wondrous wise; So he took to writing spectacles. And wearing them likewise. And when his eyes were written out, Still worse the mischief grew, For the gods not only d———d his eyes, But his spectacles too.” |
I would not have given one of Rose’s good things for a score of his; and, as for personal qualities, and likeablenesses, “Oh! Signor mio! qual’ lungo intervallo!”
| CHAP. XVIII] | HASTINGS ON BREAKFASTS | 183 |
The great ex-Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, held breakfasts to be a moral index, and always rather attentively observed whether his young friends, more particularly, made a good matutinal meal. Impey, in his Christ Church (Oxford) days, was his frequent guest, generally riding across country from his Alma Mater on a pretty Arab which Hastings had given him. One morning, next after his arrival at Daylesford, Impey’s appetite failed him, and he left his ham and cold chicken untouched on his plate.
“Elijah,” said the great man, “how is this? You don’t eat your breakfast. I like to see a man eat a good breakfast; I take it as a sign that he is leading a moral and proper life. I never knew the loose, irregular liver that was a good breakfast-eater. Elijah, I hope that you do not sit up too late at night either over your books or at your Oxford wine parties?”
Impey in his old age confessed to me that at that period he very often did both by turns, reading late and drinking late; the last, if not the first, being the general habit of gentleman commoners in those days.
When in the country and in health, the ex-Governor-General who had saved and then so vastly extended our Indian Empire, always read family prayers before breakfast, and a short service in the evening before the household retired to bed. He composed some prayers himself. Impey possessed one of these, and used occasionally to read it in the evening to his domestics and the friend or two he might have staying with him. It was a beautiful prayer; better than commonly falls from our Bishops or Archbishops. I must try to obtain a copy of it from Mr. Archer.
Nearly everything I heard from Impey about Warren Hastings went to
raise my already very high estimate of that remarkable man and for a time much-traduced
personage. Every letter or paper
| 184 | ELIJAH BARWELL IMPEY | [CHAP. XVIII |
|
* Impey gave these papers, by will, to the British Museum Library. |
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