Topham Beauclerk (1739-1780)

• Posted by mgr on August 31st, 2007 filed in Berühmte Dandys, HISTORISCHES
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Among the characters which pass through this magic-lantern, is Topham Beauclerk, so frequently mentioned, and mentioned with praise, in Boswell’s Johnson. He seems to have been a man of great elegance of manner, and peculiarity of that happy talent of conversation whose wit seems to be spontaneous, and whose anecdotes, however recherché, seem to flow from the subject. “Every thing,” remarked Johnson, “comes from Beauclerk so easily, that it appears to me that I labour when I say a good thing.”

Beauclerk was the only son of Lord Sydney Beauclerk, a son of Charles, first Duke of St Albans. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and, from the moment of his entering fashionable life, was remarked for the elegance of manner, and the liveliness of conversation, which continued to be his distinctions to the close of his career. Unfortunately, the fashion of the time not only allowed, but seems to have almost required, an irregularity of life which would tarnish the character of any man in our more decorous day. His unfortunate intercourse with Viscountess Bolingbroke, better known by her subsequent name of Lady Diana Beauclerk, produced a divorce, and in two days after a marriage. She was the eldest daughter of Charles, the second Duke of Marlborough, and was in early life as distinguished for her beauty, as in later years she was for her wit.

Johnson in his old age became acquainted with Topham Beauclerk, through their common friend, Langton, and even the sage and moralist acknowledged the captivation of his manners. “What a coalition!” said Garrick, when he heard of their acquaintance, “I shall have my old friend to bail out of the roundhouse.” But whatever might be the elegance of his companion’s laxity, Johnson did not hesitate to rebuke him. Beauclerk, like wits in general, had a propensity to satire, on which Johnson once took him to task in this rough style—”You never open your mouth but with the intention to give pain; and you have now given me pain, not from the power of what you have said, but from my seeing the intention.” At another tine, applying to him that line of Pope’s, slightly altered, he said—

‘Thy love of folly, and thy scorn of fools;’
everything you do shows the one, and every thing you say the other.”

Another rather less intelligible rebuke occurred in his saying, “Thy body is all vice and thy mind all virtue.” As the actions of the body proceed from the mind, it is difficult to conceive how the one can be impure without the other. At least Beauclerk did not appear to relish the distinction, and he was angry at the phrase. However, Johnson’s attempt to appease him was a curious specimen of his magniloquence. “Nay, sir, Alexander the Great, marching in triumph into Babylon, could not have desired to have had more said to him.”

Topham Beauclerk had two daughters by Lady Diana, one of whom became Lady Pembroke. He died at his house in Great Russell Street, then a place of fashion, in 1780, in his 41st year.

Quelle: Blackwood Edinburgh Magazine: High Life in the Last Century. February 1844: 164-183.

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