“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.

“The highest dispenser of human fame, Mr. Johnson’s pocket book”

In late 1777, around the time the British historian Catharine Macaulay was visiting France for her health, she appeared in an engraving.

Macaulay was a celebrity, so she had been depicted in many engravings—some admiring, some satirical. But this picture was unusual.

It was a group portrait titled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, drawn by Richard Samuel and engraved by someone named Walker. It appeared as a foldout in The Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book, for the Year of Our Lord 1778, published in London by Joseph Johnson.

The print showed nine women in vaguely classical costume engaged in different arts: music, painting, and so on. The caption below identified those women as:

Miss Carter, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Angelica Kauffman, on the Right hand; Mrs. Sheridan, in the Middle; Mrs. Lenox, Mrs. Macaulay, Miss More, Mrs. Montague, and Mrs. Griffith, on the Left hand.

These were all British women who had gained fame for some kind of writing, painting, or musical performances.

Samuel completed a painting based on the same composition and exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1779. As shown above, it now belongs to Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.

As portraiture, however, those pictures aren’t very good. Without the engraving’s caption, it would be impossible to connect the nine figures in the painting to the actual writers and artists. On 23 November, one of those women, poet and translator Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), wrote to another, Blue Stockings Society hostess Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800):

O Dear, O dear, how pretty we look, and what brave things has Mr. Johnson said of us! Indeed, my dear friend, I am just as sensible to present fame as you can be. Your Virgils and your Horaces may talk what they will of posterity, but I think it is much better to be celebrated by the men, women, and children, among whom one is actually living and looking.

One thing is very particularly agreeable to my vanity, to say nothing about my heart, that it seems to be a decided point, that you and I are always to figure in the literary world together, and that from the classical poet, the water drinking rhymes, to the highest dispenser of human fame, Mr. Johnson’s pocket book, it is perfectly well understood, that we are to make our appearance in the same piece. I am mortified, however, that we do not in this last display of our persons and talents stand in the same corner.

As I am told we do not, for to say truth, by the mere testimony of my own eyes, I cannot very exactly tell which is you, and which is I, and which is any body else. But this must arise from the deficiency of my sight, for some of the good people of Deal, I am told, affirm my picture to be excessively like.

As for Catharine Macaulay, she had an unusual face, already captured in those many engravings and at least one statue. By this date she was in her late forties, a widow, not in good health. But the figure of Clio, Muse of History, holding a scroll toward the center of the pictures doesn’t exhibit any of those personal features.

Still, this image reflects Macaulay’s place in British culture at the start of 1778. She was not only a celebrated historian, but she was being held up as the nation’s answer to the Muse of History herself.

And then it all came crashing down.

TOMORROW: A step too far.