Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/388

 Anne Capel, fourth earl of Essex, took place on 1 Aug., and she died five years later in childbirth. The second daughter married Robert, son of Henry Boyle, earl of Shannon [q. v.], a commodore in the navy, who was drowned in the West Indies in 1779. Sir Charles's widow survived him twenty-two years, and was buried in St. Erasmus's Chapel in Westminster Abbey on 29 Dec. 1781. Her large estates passed to her grandson George, fifth earl of Essex, who assumed the name of Coningsby (, Peerage, iii. 378).

Hanbury Williams was notorious for his gallantries in town, and in the country, at Coldbrook, for festivities which, on a smaller scale, rivalled those of Houghton. Burke alluded to him as ‘the polished courtier, the votary of wit and pleasure.’ Walpole regarded him as a model for the gilded youth of his day. Johnson, according to Boswell, spoke contemptuously of ‘our lively and elegant though too licentious lyrick bard, Hanbury Williams, and said he had no fame but from boys who drank with him.’ Johnson himself had once prepared a reply to a satire upon Hervey, which was attributed to Williams, but when the real author was proved to be the garreteer who wrote ‘The Fool,’ the Johnsonian missile was not discharged. His occasional verse forms a not unworthy link between Prior and Gay, and Cowper and Canning. Yet the writings of Hanbury Williams were not thought to come up to the sparkle of his conversation, of which some idea may perhaps be gathered from the earlier letters of his friend Horace Walpole. He was a great hand at badinage. Upon the circumstance, once admitted by his cousin George Selwyn, that he had attended a certain public execution, he gradually reared a superstructure of fable with which he kept the company at White's in roars of laughter; Selwyn was too good-humoured to interrupt such a rich stream of grotesque anecdote, and the stories were passed round and re-edited until they were half believed to be true (, Lit. Anecd. ix. 200). In addition to White's, Sir Charles was one of the original members of the Society of Dilettanti (, History, p. 16).

A large number of his pieces, especially the political satires, appeared first in an ephemeral form, either as ballads or in periodicals. Only four of his separately issued ‘Odes’ are in the British Museum—‘An Ode to S. Poyntz, Esq.’ (1746, 7 pp. fol.), ‘An Ode to the Author of the Conquered Duchess,’ ‘An Ode on the Marriage of the D. … of M. …,’ and ‘The Unembarrassed Countenance,’ a satire on William Pitt, doubtfully ascribed to Williams (all in folio, 1746). The first attempt at a collective issue of his verses was made in ‘A Collection of Poems. Principally consisting of the most Celebrated Pieces of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Kt. of the Bath’ (London, 1763, 8vo). The British Museum has a copy with some valuable annotations by Horace Walpole. The satirical pieces in this volume reappear in the later (1822) issue of Williams's ‘Works,’ but according to Walpole, who had excellent means of knowing, the following are certainly not by him: ‘What Good Lord Bath, prim patriot now,’ ‘Orpheus and Hecate,’ ‘A Marlborough Duchess's Ghost to Orator Pitt,’ ‘The Unembarrassed Countenance,’ ‘Short Verses,’ and ‘Tar Water.’ Coarse though the last piece is, it is surpassed in this respect by some which are undoubtedly by Sir Charles, e.g. ‘O Lincoln, Joy of Womankind,’ or ‘General Churchill's Address to Venus.’ The admirable anapæstic stanzas, called ‘The Statesman’ (the Earl of Bath), containing the lines: Leave a blank here and there in each page To enrol the fair deeds of his youth! When you mention the acts of his age, Leave a blank for his honour and truth! Walpole strongly inclines to regard as by Williams, though he had heard that they were written by Dr. William King of Oxford.

‘The Odes of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Knight of the Bath,’ edited by J. Ritson in 1775 (London, 1780, 12mo; 1784, 12mo), is little more than a reprint of the ‘Collection’ of 1763. In March 1786 the committee of the Dilettanti Society had in contemplation to publish some inedited poems by Hanbury Williams; but ‘no resolution was ever arrived at’ in the matter. The only fairly complete edition of Hanbury Williams is that issued in three volumes, small octavo, in 1822, as ‘The Works of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, K.B., … from the Originals in the Possession of his Grandson, the Right Hon. the Earl of Essex, with Notes by Horace Walpole … with Portraits’ (London, 8vo). Unfortunately the performance of this work does not come up to the promise. It was miserably edited by the bookseller, Edward Jeffery of Pall Mall, who had on 21 June 1822 to publish an apology to Lord Essex for having connected his name with the publication, denounced by the ‘Quarterly’ as containing ‘specimens of obscenity and blasphemy more horrible than we have before seen collected into one publication.’ Carlyle subsequently spoke of