Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/137

 Thenceforward his days were to be passed in those resorts abroad which were mainly frequented by the impecunious Englishmen who had brought themselves to penury. His future lot was to dream of the white cliffs of England and to dwell in imagination only among his old associates of Mayfair.

His life in Belgium and in France is familiar to us through the gossiping chroniclers of that age. Thomas Colley Grattan has described him in the second volume of "Beaten paths" (1862) in the chapter on "diners-out; Scrope Davies." For five or six years Davies had settled at Ostend "the Magnus Apollo of a confined set " and had become a trifle dictatorial. His life was varied by a change to Brussels for a week's dining out, and it was on one of these occasions in 1827 that Grattan first met him. At the beginning of dinner he was confused in speech and half-maudlin; he wanted warming-up. That time came and he "talked fluently, quoted freely" and evidently remembered much. His conversation lacked method and sequence but he brought into play the lives of Byron and Porson and the celebrities of the university that he had been brought up at. He could give "a repartee of Fox. a saying of Pitt, a tirade of Burke, or a sarcasm of Sheridan" as if he had heard them himself, and he showed the possession of a "perfect facility for the light and easy style of table-talk." His hair was "close cut and grizzled" and his forehead was poor. He had led a hard life and his mental powers and bodily vigour had suffered decay. They met at breakfast at the house of "Kit Hughes, the American minister," when Scrope enlarged on the "fancy" and probably recounted the narrative of Tom Moore's visit to the Crawley prize-fight. He had told Grattan at their first meeting that he had completed "all but the last chapter" of his life of Byron and that Murray had offered