Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/357

 general applause, Yonge moved that counsel should be allowed to prisoners on impeachment for high treason. ‘Thank God!’ was Horace Walpole's comment, ‘we are a better-natured age than that of William III, and have relinquished a savage privilege with a good grace.’ Yonge appeared in a different light in February 1751, when he proposed that Murray should be committed to Newgate for contempt of the house in refusing to receive a reprimand at the bar in a kneeling posture [see, d. 1777]. He was subsequently chairman of a committee appointed to draw up a report upon Murray's case. In this report, which was read on 18 Feb. 1751, he proposed with no little judgment virtually to leave the matter over for another session. On 7 Feb. 1754, when, in view of the impending general election, he moved for the repeal of the bribery act, he made what was practically his last appearance in active politics. His career as a place-hunting politician had been marked by eminent success, and was appropriately extolled by Lord Chesterfield, who wrote of him in a letter to his son as a man ‘who has by a fitness of tongue raised himself successively to the best appointments in the kingdom.’ ‘And all this,’ he adds, ‘with a most sullied, not to say blasted character.’ It was the general opinion that he would have gone much higher but for his inexplicably evil reputation. Walpole used to say of him that nothing but so bad a character could have kept down his talents, and nothing but his talents have kept up his character. Pitt, writing to George Grenville (26 April 1748), employs his name as a synonym for habitual mendacity. To what he owed such an exceptionally unsavoury reputation is (as in the case of Lord Shelburne) an enigma. The nearest approach to a solution, perhaps, is that afforded by Hervey when he says that without having done anything remarkably profligate, anything out of the common track of a ductile courtier and a parliamentary tool, his name was proverbially used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible. ‘It is true,’ adds Hervey, ‘he was a great liar, but rather a mean than a vicious one. He had been always constant to the same party; he was good-natured and good-humoured, never offensive in company, nobody's friend, nobody's enemy. He had no wit in private conversation, but was remarkably quick in taking hints to harangue upon in parliament; he had a knack of words there that was surprising considering how little use they were to him anywhere else. He had a great command of what is called parliamentary language, and a talent of talking eloquently without a meaning, and expatiating agreeably upon nothing.’ A corroboration of the concluding touch is conveyed in the distich in the ‘State Dunces:’ Silence, ye Senates, while enribboned Yonge Pours forth melodious nothings from his tongue. Yonge was elected F.R.S. on 28 June 1748, and was created an honorary LL.D. by the university of Cambridge in 1749. During the summer vacation of 1755 he attended an anniversary meeting at Exeter (1 Aug.), a few days after which he was seized with a paralytic disorder which affected his speech. He made an apparently rapid recovery, but on 9 Aug. he had another attack, which proved fatal (Public Advertiser, 14 and 15 Aug. 1755). He died at his seat of Escott, near Honiton, on 10 Aug. ‘Sir William Yonge, who has been extinct so long, is at last dead,’ was the comment of Horace Walpole. He was buried on the 14th in the family vault beneath the chancel of Colyton church, where his coffin-plate has been preserved.

Yonge married, first, Mary, daughter of Samuel Heathcote of Hackney, from whom he was divorced by act of parliament, with permission to remarry, in 1724; and secondly, on 14 April 1729, Anne, daughter and coheiress of Thomas, lord Howard of Effingham (Hist. Reg. 1729, Chron. Diary, p. 25). By her he had issue six daughters and two sons, of whom the elder was Sir George Yonge [q. v.]

Yonge greatly cherished a reputation as a rhyming wit, which he did little to sustain, though it made him the butt of people of discernment, notably the poet Pope. In 1730 he joined with Roome and Concanen in converting the old comedy, ‘The Jovial Crew,’ by Richard Brome [q. v.], first produced in 1641, into a comic opera in three acts. The alteration was effected by curtailing the dialogue, leaving out the exceptionable parts, and adding a considerable number of songs, most of which, says Genest, are ‘vastly superior to the trash usually put into an opera.’ Most of the songs are attributed to Yonge. The piece in its new form, produced at Drury Lane on 8 Feb. 1730–1, had a great success, and was performed as late as 1791 (, Engl. Dram. Lit. 1899, iii. 130 n.; cf., iii. 288). The author ‘Of Modern Wit, an Epistle to the Right Hon. Sir William Young’ (1732), can hardly have been aware of Yonge's operatic triumph, for after eulogising his