Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/122

102 EIGHT FRIENDS OF THE GREAT in 1865 and only known for many years by an article in the Edinburgh review for April 1871 have within the last few months been partially revealed to a larger circle of readers. One more friend remains, Scrope Berdmore Davies, who excelled them all in knowledge of the classics and in brightness of conversation. An Eton boy, a Cambridge Don, he wasted his resources in the gambling hells of London and on the race-course of Newmarket. The second moiety of his life he spent, an exile from England, in pacing the digue of a Belgian seaside resort or in resting forsaken and neglected, on a bench in the gardens of the Tuileries or the Palais Royal. It is of Davies that I propose to write.

The name of Berdmore was more prominent in the eighteenth century than at the present day. One of the family was a prebendary in Southwell minster in 1743; a second, called Scrope Berdmore, was the warden of Merton college in 1790 and his armorial bookplate sometimes meets our eyes in the second-hand book catalogues. Another of them Thomas Berdmore, a dentist, dwelt in Racquet court, Fleet Street in November 1785. It was probably in allusion to him that Byron spoke of his friend as the " dens-descended Davies." In his profession this dentist attained to distinction. His treatise on "the disorders and deformities of the teeth and gums" came out in 1768 and a new edition was issued in 1770. About seventy years later it was deemed worthy of reprint in the American journal of dental science.

The boy's father, the Revd. Richard Davies came from Llangattock in Breconshire and graduated B.A. at Worcester college, Oxford, in 1779, while an elder brother matriculated from Merton college five years earlier. From 1777, two years be it noticed before he took his degree, to 1825, the year of his death, Richard Davies held the