Barry Lyndon

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I did little more than make my appearance, and assume the command of
my estates, in the kingdom of Ireland; rewarding generously those
persons who had been kind to me in my former adversities, and taking
my fitting place among the aristocracy of the land. But, in truth, I
had small inducements to remain in it after having tasted of the
genteeler and more complete pleasures of English and Continental
life; and we passed our summers at Buxton, Bath, and Harrogate,
while Hackton Castle was being beautified in the elegant manner
already described by me, and the season at our mansion in Berkeley
Square.

It is wonderful how the possession of wealth brings out the virtues
of a man; or, at any rate, acts as a varnish or lustre to them, and
brings out their brilliancy and colour in a manner never known when
the individual stood in the cold grey atmosphere of poverty. I
assure you it was a very short time before I was a pretty fellow of
the first class; made no small sensation at the coffee-houses in
Pall Mall and afterwards at the most famous clubs. My style,
equipages, and elegant entertainments were in everybody's mouth, and
were described in all the morning prints. The needier part of Lady
Lyndon's relatives, and such as had been offended by the intolerable
pomposity of old Tiptoff, began to appear at our routs and
assemblies; and as for relations of my own, I found in London and
Ireland more than I had ever dreamed of, of cousins who claimed
affinity with me. There were, of course, natives of my own country
(of which I was not particularly proud), and I received visits from
three or four swaggering shabby Temple bucks, with tarnished lace
and Tipperary brogue, who were eating their way to the bar in
London; from several gambling adventurers at the watering-places,
whom I soon speedily let to know their place; and from others of
more reputable condition. Among them I may mention my cousin the
Lord Kilbarry, who, on the score of his relationship, borrowed
thirty pieces from me to pay his landlady in Swallow Street; and
whom, for my own reasons, I allowed to maintain and credit a
connection for which the Heralds' College gave no authority
whatsoever. Kilbarry had a cover at my table; punted at play, and
paid when he liked, which was seldom; had an intimacy with, and was
under considerable obligations to, my tailor; and always boasted of
his cousin the great Barry Lyndon of the West country.

Her Ladyship and I lived, after a while, pretty separate when in
London. She preferred quiet: or to say the truth, I preferred it;
being a great friend to a modest tranquil behaviour in woman, and a
taste for the domestic pleasures. Hence I encouraged her to dine at
home with her ladies, her chaplain, and a few of her friends;
admitted three or four proper and discreet persons to accompany her
to her box at the opera or play on proper occasions; and indeed
declined for her the too frequent visits of her friends and family,
preferring to receive them only twice or thrice in a season on our
grand reception days. Besides, she was a mother, and had great
comfort in the dressing, educating, and dandling our little Bryan,
for whose sake it was fit that she should give up the pleasures and
frivolities of the world; so she left THAT part of the duty of every
family of distinction to be performed by me. To say the truth, Lady
Lyndon's figure and appearance were not at this time such as to make
for their owner any very brilliant appearance in the fashionable
world. She had grown very fat, was short-sighted, pale in
complexion, careless about her dress, dull in demeanour; her
conversations with me characterised by a stupid despair, or a silly
blundering attempt at forced cheerfulness still more disagreeable:
hence our intercourse was but trifling, and my temptations to carry
her into the world, or to remain in her society, of necessity
exceedingly small. She would try my temper at home, too, in a
thousand ways. When requested by me (often, I own, rather roughly)
to entertain the company with conversation, wit, and learning, of
which she was a mistress: or music, of which she was an accomplished
performer, she would as often as not begin to cry, and leave the
room. My company from this, of course, fancied I was a tyrant over
her; whereas I was only a severe and careful guardian over a silly,
bad-tempered, and weak-minded lady.

She was luckily very fond of her youngest son, and through him I had
a wholesome and effectual hold of her; for if in any of her tantrums
or fits of haughtiness--(this woman was intolerably proud; and
repeatedly, at first, in our quarrels, dared to twit me with my own
original poverty and low birth),--if, I say, in our disputes she
pretended to have the upper hand, to assert her authority against
mine, to refuse to sign such papers as I might think necessary for
the distribution of our large and complicated property, I would have
Master Bryan carried off to Chiswick for a couple of days; and I
warrant me his lady-mother could hold out no longer, and would agree
to anything I chose to propose. The servants about her I took care
should be in my pay, not hers: especially the child's head nurse was
under MY orders, not those of my lady; and a very handsome, red-
cheeked, impudent jade she was; and a great fool she made me make of
myself. This woman was more mistress of the house than the poor-
spirited lady who owned it. She gave the law to the servants; and if
I showed any particular attention to any of the ladies who visited
us, the slut would not scruple to show her jealousy, and to find
means to send them packing. The fact is, a generous man is always
made a fool of by some woman or other, and this one had such an
influence over me that she could turn me round her finger.
[Footnote: From these curious confessions, it would appear that Mr.
Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way; that he denied her
society, bullied her into signing away her property, spent it in
gambling and taverns, was openly unfaithful to her; and, when she
complained, threatened to remove her children from her. Nor, indeed,
is he the only husband who has done the like, and has passed for
'nobody's enemy but his own:' a jovial good-natured fellow. The
world contains scores of such amiable people; and, indeed, it is
because justice has not been done them that we have edited this
autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance--one of
those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott and James--
there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a personage
already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry Lyndon is
not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader
look round, and ask himself, Do not as many rogues succeed in life
as honest men? more fools than men of talent? And is it not just
that the lives of this class should be described by the student of
human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes,
those perfect impossible heroes, whom our writers love to describe?
There is something naive and simple in that time-honoured style of
novel-writing by which Prince Prettyman, at the end of his
adventures, is put in possession of every worldly prosperity, as he
has been endowed with every mental and bodily excellence previously.
The novelist thinks that he can do no more for his darling hero than
make him a lord. Is it not a poor standard that, of the summum
bonum? The greatest good in life is not to be a lord; perhaps not
even to be happy. Poverty, illness, a humpback, may be rewards and
conditions of good, as well as that bodily prosperity which all of
us unconsciously set up for worship. But this is a subject for an
essay, not a note; and it is best to allow Mr. Lyndon to resume the
candid and ingenious narrative of his virtues and defects.]

Her infernal temper (Mrs. Stammer was the jade's name) and my wife's
moody despondency, made my house and home not over-pleasant: hence I
was driven a good deal abroad, where, as play was the fashion at
every club, tavern, and assembly, I, of course, was obliged to
resume my old habit, and to commence as an amateur those games at
which I was once unrivalled in Europe. But whether a man's temper
changes with prosperity, or his skill leaves him when, deprived of a
confederate, and pursuing the game no longer professionally, he
joins in it, like the rest of the world, for pastime, I know not;
but certain it is, that in the seasons of 1774-75 I lost much money
at 'White's' and the 'Cocoa-Tree,' and was compelled to meet my
losses by borrowing largely upon my wife's annuities, insuring her
Ladyship's life, and so forth. The terms at which I raised these
necessary sums and the outlays requisite for my improvements were,
of course, very onerous, and clipped the property considerably; and
it was some of these papers which my Lady Lyndon (who was of a
narrow, timid, and stingy turn) occasionally refused to sign: until
I PERSUADED her, as I have before shown.

My dealings on the turf ought to be mentioned, as forming part of my
history at this time; but, in truth, I have no particular pleasure
in recalling my Newmarket doings. I was infernally bit and bubbled
in almost every one of my transactions there; and though I could
ride a horse as well as any man in England, was no match with the
English noblemen at backing him. Fifteen years after my horse, Bay
Bulow, by Sophy Hardcastle, out of Eclipse, lost the Newmarket
stakes, for which he was the first favourite, I found that a noble
earl, who shall be nameless, had got into his stable the morning
before he ran; and the consequence was that an outside horse won,
and your humble servant was out to the amount of fifteen thousand
pounds. Strangers had no chance in those days on the heath: and,
though dazzled by the splendour and fashion assembled there, and
surrounded by the greatest persons of the land,--the royal dukes,
with their wives and splendid equipages; old Grafton, with his queer
bevy of company, and such men as Ancaster, Sandwich, Lorn,--a man
might have considered himself certain of fair play and have been not
a little proud of the society he kept; yet, I promise you, that,
exalted as it was, there was no set of men in Europe who knew how to
rob more genteelly, to bubble a stranger, to bribe a jockey, to
doctor a horse, or to arrange a betting-book. Even _I_ couldn't
stand against these accomplished gamesters of the highest families
in Europe. Was it my own want of style, or my want of fortune? I
know not. But now I was arrived at the height of my ambition, both
my skill and my luck seemed to be deserting me. Everything I touched
crumbled in my hand; every speculation I had failed, every agent I
trusted deceived me. I am, indeed, one of those born to make, and
not to keep fortunes; for the qualities and energy which lead a man
to effect the first are often the very causes of his ruin in the
latter case: indeed, I know of no other reason for the misfortunes
which finally befell me. [Footnote: The Memoirs seem to have been
written about the year 1814, in that calm retreat which Fortune had
selected for the author at the close of his life.]

I had always a taste for men of letters, and perhaps, if the truth
must be told, have no objection to playing the fine gentleman and
patron among the wits. Such people are usually needy, and of low
birth, and have an instinctive awe and love of a gentleman and a
laced coat; as all must have remarked who have frequented their
society. Mr. Reynolds, who was afterwards knighted, and certainly
the most elegant painter of his day, was a pretty dexterous courtier
of the wit tribe; and it was through this gentleman, who painted a
piece of me, Lady Lyndon, and our little Bryan, which was greatly
admired at the Exhibition (I was represented as quitting my wife, in
the costume of the Tippleton Yeomanry, of which I was major; the
child starting back from my helmet like what-d'ye-call'im--Hector's
son, as described by Mr. Pope in his 'Iliad'); it was through Mr.
Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of these gentlemen, and
their great chief, Mr. Johnson. I always thought their great chief a
great bear. He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving
himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than
those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors,
and not trouble myself about letters. His Scotch bear-leader, Mr.
Boswell, was a butt of the first quality. I never saw such a figure
as the fellow cut in what he called a Corsican habit, at one of Mrs.
Cornely's balls, at Carlisle House, Soho. But that the stories
connected with that same establishment are not the most profitable
tales in the world, I could tell tales of scores of queer doings
there. All the high and low demireps of the town gathered there,
from his Grace of Ancaster down to my countryman, poor Mr. Oliver
Goldsmith the poet, and from the Duchess of Kingston down to the
Bird of Paradise, or Kitty Fisher. Here I have met very queer
characters, who came to queer ends too: poor Hackman, that
afterwards was hanged for killing Miss Reay, and (on the sly) his
Reverence Doctor Simony, whom my friend Sam Foote, of the 'Little
Theatre,' bade to live even after forgery and the rope cut short the
unlucky parson's career.

It was a merry place, London, in those days, and that's the truth.
I'm writing now in my gouty old age, and people have grown vastly
more moral and matter-of-fact than they were at the close of the
last century, when the world was young with me. There was a
difference between a gentleman and a common fellow in those times.
We wore silk and embroidery then. Now every man has the same
coachmanlike look in his belcher and caped coat, and there is no
outward difference between my Lord and his groom. Then it took a man
of fashion a couple of hours to make his toilette, and he could show
some taste and genius in the selecting it. What a blaze of splendour
was a drawing-room, or an opera, of a gala night! What sums of money
were lost and won at the delicious faro-table! My gilt curricle and
out-riders, blazing in green and gold, were very different objects
from the equipages you see nowadays in the ring, with the stunted
grooms behind them. A man could drink four times as much as the
milksops nowadays can swallow; but 'tis useless expatiating on this
theme. Gentlemen are dead and gone. The fashion has now turned upon
your soldiers and sailors, and I grow quite moody and sad when I
think of thirty years ago.

This is a chapter devoted to reminiscences of what was a very happy
and splendid time with me, but presenting little of mark in the way
of adventure; as is generally the case when times are happy and
easy. It would seem idle to fill pages with accounts of the every-
day occupations of a man of fashion,--the fair ladies who smiled
upon him, the dresses he wore, the matches he played, and won or
lost. At this period of time, when youngsters are employed cutting
the Frenchmen's throats in Spain and France, lying out in bivouacs,
and feeding off commissariat beef and biscuit, they would not
understand what a life their ancestors led; and so I shall leave
further discourse upon the pleasures of the times when even the
Prince was a lad in leading-strings, when Charles Fox had not
subsided into a mere statesman, and Buonaparte was a beggarly brat
in his native island.

Whilst these improvements were going on in my estates,--my house,
from an antique Norman castle, being changed to an elegant Greek
temple, or palace--my gardens and woods losing their rustic
appearance to be adapted to the most genteel French style--my child
growing up at his mother's knees, and my influence in the country
increasing,--it must not be imagined that I stayed in Devonshire all
this while, and that I neglected to make visits to London, and my
various estates in England and Ireland.

I went to reside at the Trecothick estate and the Polwellan Wheal,
where I found, instead of profit, every kind of pettifogging
chicanery; I passed over in state to our territories in Ireland,
where I entertained the gentry in a style the Lord Lieutenant
himself could not equal; gave the fashion to Dublin (to be sure it
was a beggarly savage city in those days; and, since the time there
has been a pother about the Union, and the misfortunes attending it,
I have been at a loss to account for the mad praises of the old
order of things, which the fond Irish patriots have invented); I say
I set the fashion to Dublin; and small praise to me, for a poor
place it was in those times, whatever the Irish party may say.

In a former chapter I have given you a description of it. It was the
Warsaw of our part of the world: there was a splendid, ruined, half-
civilised nobility, ruling over a half-savage population. I say
half-savage advisedly. The commonalty in the streets were wild,
unshorn, and in rags. The most public places were not safe after
nightfall. The College, the public buildings, and the great gentry's
houses were splendid (the latter unfinished for the most part); but
the people were in a state more wretched than any vulgar I have ever
known: the exercise of their religion was only half allowed to them;
their clergy were forced to be educated out of the country; their
aristocracy was quite distinct from them; there was a Protestant
nobility, and in the towns, poor insolent Protestant corporations,
with a bankrupt retinue of mayors, aldermen, and municipal officers
--all of whom figured in addresses and had the public voice in the
country; but there was no sympathy and connection between the upper
and the lower people of the Irish. To one who had been bred so much
abroad as myself, this difference between Catholic and Protestant
was doubly striking; and though as firm as a rock in my own faith,
yet I could not help remembering my grandfather held a different
one, and wondering that there should be such a political difference
between the two. I passed among my neighbours for a dangerous
leveller, for entertaining and expressing such opinions, and
especially for asking the priest of the parish to my table at Castle
Lyndon. He was a gentleman, educated at Salamanca, and, to my mind,
a far better bred and more agreeable companion than his comrade the
rector, who had but a dozen Protestants for his congregation; who
was a lord's son, to be sure, but he could hardly spell, and the
great field of his labours was in the kennel and cockpit.

I did not extend and beautify the house of Castle Lyndon as I had
done our other estates, but contented myself with paying an
occasional visit there; exercising an almost royal hospitality, and
keeping open house during my stay. When absent, I gave to my aunt,
the widow Brady, and her six unmarried daughters (although they
always detested me), permission to inhabit the place; my mother
preferring my new mansion of Barryogue.

And as my Lord Bullingdon was by this time grown excessively tall
and troublesome, I determined to leave him under the care of a
proper governor in Ireland, with Mrs. Brady and her six daughters to
take care of him; and he was welcome to fall in love with all the
old ladies if he were so minded, and thereby imitate his
stepfather's example. When tired of Castle Lyndon, his Lordship was
at liberty to go and reside at my house with my mamma; but there was
no love lost between him and her, and, on account of my son Bryan, I
think she hated him as cordially as ever I myself could possibly do.

The county of Devon is not so lucky as the neighbouring county of
Cornwall, and has not the share of representatives which the latter
possesses; where I have known a moderate country gentleman, with a
few score of hundreds per annum from his estate, treble his income
by returning three or four Members to Parliament, and by the
influence with Ministers which these seats gave him. The
parliamentary interest of the house of Lyndon had been grossly
neglected during my wife's minority, and the incapacity of the Earl
her father; or, to speak more correctly, it had been smuggled away
from the Lyndon family altogether by the adroit old hypocrite of
Tiptoff Castle, who acted as most kinsmen and guardians do by their
wards and relatives, and robbed them. The Marquess of Tiptoff
returned four Members to Parliament: two for the borough of
Tippleton, which, as all the world knows, lies at the foot of our
estate of Hackton, bounded on the other side by Tiptoff Park. For
time out of mind we had sent Members for that borough, until
Tiptoff, taking advantage of the late lord's imbecility, put in his
own nominees. When his eldest son became of age, of course my Lord
was to take his seat for Tippleton; when Rigby (Nabob Rigby, who
made his fortune under Clive in India) died, the Marquess thought
fit to bring down his second son, my Lord George Poynings, to whom I
have introduced the reader in a former chapter, and determined, in
his high mightiness, that he too should go in and swell the ranks of
the Opposition--the big old Whigs, with whom the Marquess acted.

Rigby had been for some time in an ailing condition previous to his
demise, and you may be sure that the circumstance of his failing
health had not been passed over by the gentry of the county, who
were staunch Government men for the most part, and hated my Lord
Tiptoff's principles as dangerous and ruinous, 'We have been looking
out for a man to fight against him,' said the squires to me; 'we can
only match Tiptoff out of Hackton Castle. You, Mr. Lyndon, are our
man, and at the next county election we will swear to bring you in.'

I hated the Tiptoffs so, that I would have fought them at any
election. They not only would not visit at Hackton, but declined to
receive those who visited us; they kept the women of the county from
receiving my wife: they invented half the wild stories of my
profligacy and extravagance with which the neighbourhood was
entertained; they said I had frightened my wife into marriage, and
that she was a lost woman; they hinted that Bullingdon's life was
not secure under my roof, that his treatment was odious, and that I
wanted to put him out of the way to make place for Bryan my son. I
could scarce have a friend to Hackton, but they counted the bottles
drunk at my table. They ferreted out my dealings with my lawyers and
agents. If a creditor was unpaid, every item of his bill was known
at Tiptoff Hall; if I looked at a farmer's daughter, it was said I
had ruined her. My faults are many, I confess, and as a domestic
character, I can't boast of any particular regularity or temper; but
Lady Lyndon and I did not quarrel more than fashionable people do,
and, at first, we always used to make it up pretty well. I am a man
full of errors, certainly, but not the devil that these odious
backbiters at Tiptoff represented me to be. For the first three
years I never struck my wife but when I was in liquor. When I flung
the carving-knife at Bullingdon I was drunk, as everybody present
can testify; but as for having any systematic scheme against the
poor lad, I can declare solemnly that, beyond merely hating him (and
one's inclinations are not in one's power), I am guilty of no evil
towards him.

I had sufficient motives, then, for enmity against the Tiptoffs, and
am not a man to let a feeling of that kind lie inactive. Though a
Whig, or, perhaps, because a Whig, the Marquess was one of the
haughtiest men breathing, and treated commoners as his idol the
great Earl used to treat them--after he came to a coronet himself--
as so many low vassals, who might be proud to lick his shoe-buckle.
When the Tippleton mayor and corporation waited upon him, he
received them covered, never offered Mr. Mayor a chair, but retired
when the refreshments were brought, or had them served to the
worshipful aldermen in the steward's room. These honest Britons
never rebelled against such treatment, until instructed to do so by
my patriotism. No, the dogs liked to be bullied; and, in the course
of a long experience, I have met with but very few Englishmen who
are not of their way of thinking.

It was not until I opened their eyes that they knew their
degradation. I invited the Mayor to Hackton, and Mrs. Mayoress (a
very buxom pretty groceress she was, by the way) I made sit by my
wife, and drove them both out to the races in my curricle. Lady
Lyndon fought very hard against this condescension; but I had a way
with her, as the saying is, and though she had a temper, yet I had a
better one. A temper, psha! A wild-cat has a temper, but a keeper
can get the better of it; and I know very few women in the world
whom I could not master.

Well, I made much of the mayor and corporation; sent them bucks for
their dinners, or asked them to mine; made a point of attending
their assemblies, dancing with their wives and daughters, going
through, in short, all the acts of politeness which are necessary on
such occasions: and though old Tiptoff must have seen my goings on,
yet his head was so much in the clouds, that he never once
condescended to imagine his dynasty could be overthrown in his own
town of Tippleton, and issued his mandates as securely as if he had
been the Grand Turk, and the Tippletonians no better than so many
slaves of his will.

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