Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/142

 value." The money was a myth. When letters of administration of his estate were granted on 2 September 1852 to his sister, Isabella Wood, a widow, the estate was sworn at something less than £450.

Hawtrey penned the general verdict on the character of Scrope Davies. He was a "most agreeable and kindhearted person. I shall not soon forget the pleasant hours I have passed with him." His fault seems to have been a disposition to quarrel. One or two anecdotes connected with his name still have point. He it was that on the strength of his intimacy with the testy sir Philip Francis once ventured to say, "sir Philip, will you allow me to put a question to you?" The answer was "at your peril, sir; at your peril." Another of his sayings had its origin in the dinners of the Whig club at Cambridge which Byron used to attend. At one of them the youth who became the duke of —— presided. He rose to give the recognised toast of Whiggism. "Gentlemen, I will give you the noble cause for which" (turning aside to Hobhouse in a whisper, "which of them died on the field?" but no answer; so the orator continued) "Sydney died on the field and Hampden on the scaffold."

Few, very few, now remember much of Scrope Davies. Mr. Walter Sichel asserted that Mr. Henley had forgotten that "the sir Berdmore Scrope in the first novel [Vivian Grey] and the sketch of lord Scrope in the second [Venetia] are patently derived from Byron's witty friend, Berdmore Scrope Davies." Another admirer of lord Beaconsfield was even less fortunate. Disraeli, addressing one of the Runnymede letters to the then sir John Cam Hobhouse says that some words of his in a recent debate seemed "not so much the inspiration of the moment as the reminiscence of some of those quips and cranks of Matthews and Scrope