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Updated: May 22, 2025
In a word, they were chatty. Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of its termination. The writer was a Mr Wraxall.
The impartial old Wraxall, the memorialist of the times of George III, having described a noble as a gambler, a drunkard, a smuggler, an appropriator of public money, who always cheated his tradesmen, who was one and sometimes all of them together, and a profligate generally, commonly adds, "But he was a perfect gentleman."
I was outside that dreadful building in less time than I can write almost as quickly as I could have said the words; and what frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. I only know that there was something more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember. What is this that I have done? Poor Mr Wraxall!
Wraxall, a very pleasant describer of men and manners, thus sketches him: "In Parliament he was invariably habited in a full-dress suit of clothes, commonly of a dark colour, without lace or embroidery, close buttoned, with his sword thrust through the pocket. His countenance was very expressive, but not of genius; still less did it indicate timidity or modesty.
Charles Fox spoke of General Howe's first victory as "the terrible news from Long Island." Wraxall says that the celebrated buff and blue colours of the Whig party were adopted by Fox in imitation of the Continental uniform; but his unsupported statement is open to question.
Every other authority, however, contradicts this assertion, which is indeed too monstrous to be credible. L'Etoile, vol. i. p. 550. This residence, which was situated near the Bastille, and subsequently known as the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, was the same in which la belle Gabrielle had breathed her last. Bassompierre, Mém. p. 25. Wraxall, History of France, vol. vi. p. 187.
Montagu's dinners and assemblies, writes Wraxall, 'were principally supported by, and they fell with, the giant talents of Johnson, who formed the nucleus round which all the subordinate members revolved. Wraxall's Memoirs, ed. 1815, i.160.
Even those who had suffered from his rudeness like Wraxall, the author of the well-known Memoirs, give the impression of being unable to find words strong enough to describe the power of his presence, so that they use expressions like the "compass of his gigantic faculties" and "the sublime attainments of his mind" in speaking of the gap felt by the company when he left a room.
What I want is not advice or medicine; I want what no doctor on earth can possibly give me relief from this terrible crushing responsibility. But Edie would bear no refusal. It was HER money, she said, the first she had ever earned in her whole life, and she should certainly do as she herself liked with it. Sir Antony Wraxall, she was quite confident, would soon be able to make him better.
On the first day of his stay at Råbäck Mr Wraxall found the church door open, and made these notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way.
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