Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/262

4 and statuary, to the fabricator of the most grotesque drinking- cup, it has afforded models to artists, and is confidently asserted to have gone far in altering and improving the general taste of the age. During the exertions we have been commemorating, Hamilton was in the year 1772, created a knight of the Bath, a circumstance which will account for our sometimes varying his designation, as the events mentioned happened previously to, or after his elevation. The retired philosophical habits of Sir William Hamilton prevented him in the earliest years of his mission from forming intimacies with persons similarly situated, and he lived a life of domestic privacy, study, and observation of nature. But fame soon forced friends on his retirement, and all the eminent persons who visited his interesting neighbourhood became his guests. One of his friends, the French ambassador at the court of Naples, has told us that he protected the arts because the arts protected him, and enriched him. The motives of the characteristic may be doubted. A love of art fascinates even mercenary men into generosity, and the whole of Sir William Hamilton's conduct shows a love of art, and a carelessness of personal profit by his knowledge, not often exhibited. Duclos, secretary of the French academy, on visiting Naples, has drawn an enthusiastic picture of the felicity then enjoyed by Sir William Hamilton—his lady and himself in the prime of life, his daughter just opening to womanhood, beauty, and accomplishments; the public respect paid to his merits, and the internal peace of his amiable family; but this state of things was doomed to be sadly reversed. In 1775, Sir William lost his only daughter, and in 1782, he had to deplore the death of a wife who had brought him competence and domestic peace. After an absence of twenty years, he revisited Britain in 1784. The purpose of this visit is whispered to have been that he might interfere with an intended marriage of his nephew, Mr Greville, to Miss Emma Hart. If such was his view, it was fulfilled in a rather unexpected manner. It is at all times painful to make written reference to those private vices, generally suspected and seldom proved, the allusion to which usually receives the name of "scandal;" but in the case of the second lady Hamilton, they have been so unhesitatingly and amply detailed by those who have chosen to record such events, and so complacently received by the lady herself and her friends, that they must be considered matters of history, which no man will be found chivalrous enough to contradict. This second Theodosia passed the earlier part of her life in obscurity and great indigence, but soon showed that she had various ways in which she might make an independent livelihood. Some one who has written her memoirs, has given testimony to the rather doubtful circumstance, that her first act of infamy was the consequence of charitable feeling, which prompted her to give her virtue in exchange for the release of a friend who had been impressed. Be this as it may, she afterwards discovered more profitable means of using her charms. At one time she was a comic actress—at another, under the protection of some generous man of fashion; but her chief source of fame and emolument seems to have been her connexion with Romney and the other great artists of the day, to whom she seems to have furnished the models of more goddesses than classic poets ever invented. Mr Greville, a man of accurate taste, had chosen her as his companion, and the same principles of correct judgment which regulated his choice probably suggested a transference of his charge to the care of Sir William Hamilton. His own good opinion of her merits, and the character she had received from his friend, prompted Sir William soon after to marry this woman, and she took the title of lady Hamilton in 1791. At that time both returned to Britain, where Sir William attempted in vain to procure for his fair but frail bride, an introduction to the British court, which might authorize, according to royal etiquette, her presentation at