“If you would only put some of that instinct into your bird drawings,” he told him, “you would be as good as the best. Why do you try to draw a chaffinch as if it were a vulture? It isn’t.”
Timothy would look sullen, for he disliked Frampton and loathed his comments. Margaret would soothe his tender vanity.
On her birthday, early in May, Frampton gave a tea-party to Margaret and her friends inside the theatre, which had now been well restored, with new decorations and seats in the auditorium. It looked charming. He made a little speech to his twenty guests from the stage.
“I am glad to welcome you to the Mullples Theatre,” he said. “I have not yet finished my enquiries into its origin, but I have learned this about it: it was built by one Sir Jocelyn Petersbury, who bought this estate in 1769. The Petersburys were wealthy West Indian and Virginian traders; Sir Jocelyn was the last of them. As quite a young man, he gave up all the family businesses, bought this place and set out to make it beautiful. He was to some extent moved by the taste of the time, but more by a personal fondness for water, I mean the sight and the sound of water. All over the estate are pools of great beauty, with pleasant summer-houses from which the water could be contemplated, or the noise of the sluices heard. I have no doubt that this fondness for the sight and sound of water brought him here and inspired the lay-out of the property. This laying-out and so forth may have taken him a few years to finish. When he was not here, he was in London, and I think that an allusion in one of Gibbon’s letters may be to him. He was a dilettante, a Voltairean, and anything and everything that was against the weight of the time. He wrote a pamphlet called A Plea for Conscience Money, a copy of which will be handed to each of you as you go. It calls on the statesmen of the time to give a tithe of what they steal from the nation to establish a Theatre of Taste, where the elegant may not be ashamed to be seen. It is a witty paper; I am glad to have been able to reprint it. He wrote a few copies of verses under his own name; these are all in couplets; a few specimens will suffice you probably. On Matilda going to the Bath is his happiest effort.
‘What novel splendour lights the western skies?Hesperus kindles from Matilda’s eyes.’One or two society newspapers seem to refer to him in lampoons as Sir Jesting Peter; but I cannot imagine what the lampoons mean. No doubt they refer to matters well known in his little clique. Boswell does not allude to him. A Voltairean would hardly have been welcomed by Dr. Johnson.
