“Did you see Mr. Anstey’s verses at Bath-Easton?”

What happened in Batheaston didn’t stay in Batheaston.

Within three weeks after Christopher Anstey read his ode “Winter Amusements” and its pointed follow-up at the Riggs-Millers’ salon on 3 Dec 1778, those poems were circulating in manuscript. Along with knowledge of what recently remarried lady he had written about.

On 29 December, the Blue Stockings Society hostess Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her sister-in-law Mary Robinson:

I have sent you some Verse of Mr Ansteys on ye subject [of Catharine Macaulay]. The first copy he put into ye Urn at Mrs Millers at Bath Easton & being desired when he drew them to read them a second time, instead of so doing he read ye other copy.

The previous year, the artist Richard Samuel had depicted both Montagu and Macaulay, along with seven other female British authors, as the Muses.

In January 1779 Anstey’s ode appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Westminster Magazine, the Scots Magazine, and other periodicals, usually linked to the Batheaston salon.

I haven’t found any hint of Anstey’s second poem being printed until the Riggs-Millers published the fourth volume of their Poetical Amusements in 1781. But people continued to hear about it.

On 14 January, Horace Walpole (shown above) wrote to the Countess of Ossory:

Did you see Mr. Anstey’s verses at Bath-Easton? They were truly more a production of this century; and not at all too good for a schoolboy. In the printed copy they have omitted an indecent stanza or two on Mrs. Macaulay. In truth Dame Thucydides has made but an uncouth match; but Anstey has tumbled from a greater height than she. Sense may be led astray by the senses; but how could a man write the ‘Bath Guide,’ and then nothing but doggerel and stupidity?

I suspect that when Walpole wrote, “they have omitted an indecent stanza or two,” he was referring to Anstey’s follow-up rather than lines suppressed from the original ode.

Now one rule about spreading unabashed gossip in eighteenth-century Britain was that when Horace-freakin’-Walpole said you’ve gone too far, you were deep into rudeness.

But what people wrote about Macaulay’s new marriage in poems and magazines was nothing compared to what they wrote in letters.

TOMORROW: Passion’s wild career indeed.