(The recently discovered love-letters of Augustus Merriman have cast a new light on the 18th Century poet, dramatist and critic. Short of stature, ill-favoured, hunchbacked and clubfooted, Merriman may seem an unlikely figure as a lover, but his correspondence with the actress Clarissa Beaumarchais certainly does not lack passion. I place it here for anyone who delights in well-wrought prose.)


AUGUSTUS MERRIMAN TO CLARISSA BEAUMARCHAIS

12 Beaufort Buildings
15th May 1721

Dearest, darling Clarissa,
  It is with trembling hand that I take up my pen to inscribe this letter. So much depends upon it - my happiness, my sanity, perhaps my very life itself. But no - I vowed I would not commence in such a manner. I shall desist - but I shall not strike out those words - not in the hope that they may afright you into giving me the answer I so ardently desire, but that they may serve as an earnest of my heartfelt sincerity in what I must now say.
  I humbly dare to hope that what I am about to write may not come as too great a shock to you - still more that it will not be a source of embarrassment or - horrid thought! - mortification. There have been occasions when I have trembled upon the brink of making the revelation I must now make, and asking the question to which I must now beseech an answer, to your face - indeed, there have been moments when - heaven forgive me if I am wrong! - it seemed that you expected it, would even - God grant that it may be so - have welcomed it. I entreat you to believe that I failed to do so, and am instead now entrusting my inmost heart to a letter, not out of any cravenness - although it is true that Achilles himself might tremble at the prospect of failure in this undertaking - but so that you might be afforded the time to think upon my proposal at your leisure, and be spared the discomfiture of having to disappoint me in person, should you choose to reject it.
  You are aware, I hope, that I have long considered you the supreme adornment of the English stage - nay, rather say, of our age itself. What woman can hope to match the least of your accomplishments, or aspire to more than a dim counterfeit of your beauty? Cleopatra, Helen, Aphrodite herself would appear as bedraggled hoydens set beside you. That your radiant charms and keen mind go allied with the virtue of a saint and an angelic sweetness of disposition confirms my belief that you cannot be of any earthly origin. Such sentiments I have sought to intimate to you, albeit perhaps maladroitly, many and many a time - and you, of your natural modesty, have chosen to treat them as jest or mere idle flattery, and begged me to speak of something else. I say to you now, my angel, my revered one - I do not jest, and my feelings for you go far beyound the bounds of any disinterested admiration or even of friendship - in short, I love you more than life itself, and it would be the crowning moment of my existence if you would consent to become my wife.
  I am all too aware - as how should I not be? - that you are as far above me as the stars are above the earth. I am conscious of my shortcomings, the meagreness of my frame and the modesty of my means. Would that I were Atlas to lay the world at your feet! Yet you have given me reason to hope that you have some small fondness for me, and I swear to you that there is not a man in the kingdom who could love you as well as I. As long as I have strength to wield my poor pen I will hymn your praises so that your name may reverberate through the ages as the epitome of all that is beautiful and good. I am emboldened in my pursuit by the reflection that ofttimes of late I have heard you express your weariness of a player's life and your hope one day to find some more secure and enduring place in the world. If my humble hearth may content you, it would be my everlasting joy to offer you such a place.
  Clara Mia! Adored one! Make me the happiest of men! Come rule my home as you rule my heart!
  Your loving,
    Augustus
____

Clara my love, fairest of all her sex
Lights up my heart as the sun lights the earth
Angelic temper that nothing doth vex
Regal of carriage, yet eager of mirth
Insteps so dainty a naiad might sigh
Smile like the shine of the silvery moon
Slender of limb and so tender of eye
And a face as fresh as rosebuds in June



CLARISSA BEAUMARCHAIS TO AUGUSTUS MERRIMAN

18 Gt Queen Street
16th May 1721

Dear Sir,
  Believe me when I tell you that I am very far from insensible of the very great, nay, the all but overwhelming honour you do me in asking me to join my name and destiny to yours. On the contrary, I am most keenly aware that I am in all respects unworthy of the heart of one whom, excelling as he does almost all others in terms of poetic sensibility, fineness of feeling, and the higher virtues generally, any woman in the kingdom would be proud to steal the merest glance from.
  I have always nourished the liveliest and most tender affection for you, admixed with humble gratitude for the benevolent interest you have shown in my career and your innumerable kindnesses to me in seasons when I have needed a friend and should have perished for want of one, and it is the mere unvarnished truth to say that I could not love you more were you my own brother. However, by its very nature this fraternal character of my affection for you precludes my ever seeing you in the aspect of a suitor. Moreoever, even if this were not the case, bonds of the most intimate which are stronger than all the world prevent me from accepting your offer. In short, my heart already belongs to another. Such is the esteem in which I hold you that I could almost wish it were not so, but, it being so, I am, you will appreciate, powerless to effect an alteration.
  It grieves me to have to wound one whose wellbeing is as dear to me as my own, and it pains me even more to think that you may now have cause to withdraw that friendship which for some years has been the guiding light of my life. I pray that this will not be so, and I beg you never to refer to this matter again.
  Yr affectionate,
    Clarissa



12 Beaufort Buildings
16th May 1721

Darling Clarissa,
  Do, do, do, forgive my impetuous rashness. I wrote with deep feeling but little thought. You were, of course, right to reject me. Rest assured that my friendship and deep affection for you could never by any means be one whit altered much less effaced, and that I shall never again mortify you by alluding in any way to this grotesque error of judgement. I see now that certain signs I thought to have received were misinterpreted. The blame is all my own.
  And speak not of wounding, my pretty dove! You would have adorned my home, true, but in time I will recover. Indeed, now I have pause to reflect I wonder whatever moved me to make such a misguided offer, and am almost relieved you so wisely declined it. The fact of the matter is, my sister, who has long acted the part of a housekeeper to me, recently and unexpectedly married - there was I without a domestic factotum - there were you, as I thought, without haven or harbour - as I saw it, it was plainly a case of a lid without a pot and a pot without a lid.
  It was the fancy of a foolish moment, nothing more. As far as is possible, I wish you would forget I had ever mentioned it.
  Yours fraternally,
    Augustus

Post scriptum - Purely in the spirit of brotherly interest, may I enquire the name of the fortunate creature who has deprived me of my replacement housekeeper?



18 Gt Queen Street
16th May 1721

Sir,
  As always, your sensitivity does you credit, as does your tact in seeking to deprecate your motives and your consequent hurt. I thank you for your understanding.
  As to the identity of he to whom I have pledged my days, you will appreciate that I prefer not to speak of it to anyone prior to the making of a formal announcement.
  Yours ever,
    Clarissa


12 Beaufort Buildings
18th May 1721

Clarissa,
  I deprecate nothing! You would have made an excellent housekeeper. Your mother, I believe, ran a pothouse in Dundalk? Purely as a dramaturge I have often regretted that your youthful beauty has, thus far, monotonously confined you to the roles of enchantress, ingenue, empress, and prevented your being cast in those more humble, domestic parts for which you are so aptly fitted both by temperament and breeding. You may have the poitrine of Venus, but you have the forearms of a washerwoman. A loss to the theatre, I say - but perhaps in a year or so when the confining cage of beauty has finally cracked and shattered you will be allowed to favour your public with your Nell Scrubwife or your Mrs. Mingebag.
  But stay! Vulgar tittle-tattle has it that Miss Beaumarchais nee O'Malley's next role may be her most elevated yet, one that may waft her from the world of the footlights to the realm of footmen. Yes, my sweet, your secret is out. Dame Rumour whispers that my Lord the D___ of B_____ has been paying his respects in your dressing room. Of course, if I had known of such an illustrious attachment I should never have embarrassed you with my own poor suit - which under the circumstances doubtless provoked you to one of those merry, carefree little chuckles which carry to the back of any theatre and several streets beyond. What could I have to offer to compare with the shapely calves and well-filled purse of one of the highest of the land - a young man rich in everything save brains - one whose favour cannot fail to ennoble the woman fortunate enough to win his heart! Let me be the first to congratulate you, my very dear.
  Your Ever-adoring,
    Augustus

Post-scriptum.
  With regard to your original, most touching letter of refusal, it strikes me in retrospect that the phrase 'I could not love you more were you my own brother' is unhappily chosen. I assume this would be the same brother who ended on the gibbet for dashing your father's brains out with a fencing mallet? Another man might take the comparison amiss.



18 Gt Queen Street
18th May 1721

Sir,
  It wanted tact in you to allude to my brother's unhappy end. True, he was a wayward and headstrong boy, yet it is a fact that I cared for him with all his moral defects just as I cared for you with all your physical ones.
  Yes, you have heard aright. There is an understanding between Lord De Coverley and myself. That you cannot be happy for me shows that you are not the man I thought you to be, and that I was wiser than I knew in turning down your suit. You lack maturity, sir.
  Cordially,
  Clarissa Beaumarchais, nee O'Malley but soon to be Lady Lumsden Harcourt De Coverley

Post-Scriptum:

  Footlights to footmen indeed! How clever! And great play with the word ennobling. This must be the famed Merriman wit I have heard people talk of and often longed to experience. Which reminds me, when I first arrived in London, a callow provincial girl as you so graciously reminded me in your letter, you were pointed out to me at one of Lady Petherick's salons. Referring to your wit, my interlocutor said, 'There is Augustus Merriman, a frightful droll.' So naive was I, I assumed that he had said, 'A frightful troll.' Imagine! I actually rebuked the man for his unkindness and insisted that many unsuspected virtues might lurk concealed in your ungainly form, like a cache of diamonds hidden in some stunted, blighted, improbably gnarled old oak tree.


12 Beaufort Buildings
19th May 1721

Clarissa,
  I, not happy for you? You do me an injustice, Madam. I am ecstatic at the thought of your amour with Lord De Coverley. It is a match made in heaven: a man with too much money and too little sense, and a brawny-armed bog-bred trollop who would copulate with one of the higher primates if it dangled a shiny object before her. Moreover, I have long been exercised by the problem of inbreeding among the aristocracy, tending to such results as the narrow forehead and fatuous complacency of your beau, and I am sure that the strain of syphilis you will introduce into the De Coverley line will liven things up considerably.
  My only concern, my little magpie, is lest your aristocratic patron should recover his wits and decide that he does not after all wish to bring into his family home a woman who must clamp her ankles in a carpenter's vise in order to close her legs fully, and cast you aside, friendless and outcast, once he has grown weary of your charms.
  Rest assured that, should this come to pass, I would not let you end in the gutter, and there will always be a place for you in my scullery.
  Best wishes,
  Augustus

P.S.
  So I lack maturity, do I? At least, unlike you, I do not facially resemble a cow.



18 Gt Queen Street
19th May 1721

Sir,
  It is brave of you to allege lack of comeliness in others.
  I thank you for your kind words of reassurance. May I in turn assure you that Lumsden is an honourable man, and I am quite certain of him. The only one of us liable to end in the gutter is you, once the inexplicable success your poorly-wrought plays enjoy has come to an end and you have squandered your money on platform shoes and dandruff emollients, although even then you would still have the recourse of earning a living in freak shows.
  I must now broach a most delicate subject. Some time ago I was informed by my dresser Bridget that, waiting for me in my dressing room one night and believing yourself unobserved, you abstracted a pair of monogrammed silken pantaloons belonging to myself. Since we were on cordial terms at the time, I made no mention of it, thinking it a touching, boyish gesture of affection on your part and assuming you only desired the garment as a keepsake. However, in light of recent developments, not least the severed cow's head you apparently had delivered to my chambers yesterday, and the fact that I can no longer be sure you are not employing the said pantaloons for some unimaginable act of depravity, I must insist on their return forthwith.
  Yours,
    Clarissa


12 Beaufort Buildings
20th May 1721

Madam,
  I have no knowledge of any pantaloons, nor can I possibly conjecture what my motive is supposed to have been in absconding with them. If I wanted to come into contact with syphilis there are many more pleasurable ways of doing so, none of which I need ennumerate to one as well-schooled in the arts of venery as yourself. I confess that for my vanity's sake alone, I could wish that my invention was so fertile as to be able to create some act of depravity you are not capable of imagining.
  Moreover, I am at a loss as to how anyone could purloin the several thousand square yards of fabric that comprise your underdrawers without recourse to a carrier's wagon.
  Yours Truly,
    Augustus

P.S. I have no knowledge of any cow's head either. Doubtless someone smelled the stench of corruption that emanates from your dwelling and mistook it for a charnel house.


18 Gt Queen Street
20th May 1721

Sir,
  What is that about a carrier's wagon? You once thought my bottom fetching and wrote a sonnet to that effect. Are you now implying that it is unnaturally large? Lord De Coverley does not think it so. The case would appear to resemble that of Aesop's fox and the grapes it could not reach. I grieve for the derangement of a once noble mind.
  Cordially hoping for your recovery,
    Clarissa


12 Beaufort Buildings
20th May 1721

I am implying, madam, that your bottom is the size of Africa. I grieve for any sofa you sit on.
  And don't quote Aesop to me, cow-features. When I took you up the only book you had read was The Resourceful Whore's Bloody Great Dictionary of Inventive Whoredom, and that only because you are mentioned in it on every page.
  Cordially hoping you expire painfully soon and burn in hell for all eternity with imps sticking pitchforks into your immense bottom,
    Augustus


18 Gt Queen Street
20th May 1721

Sir,
  Just give me my bloody pants back, you malevolent dwarf.



Vanhomrigh & McTaggart
Lawyers-at-the-Bar
23 Lincoln's Inn Court
June 2nd 1721

Dear Sir,
  This to inform you that we have been instructed to act for Miss Clarissa Beaumarchais in a case of libel arising from your review of her performance as Mistress Quickwit in Venus Ill-Served.
  While we do not seek to stifle your legitimate expression of opinion, even your contention that Miss Beaumarchais's reputation as an actress is the most overinflated thing since the South Sea Bubble, we believe that the line, 'How sorry it is to behold her once beautiful nose now pitted and rotted with syphilis,' is definitely actionable.
  We would further draw your notice to your claim that Miss Beaumarchais's posterior has similar dimensions to the continent of Africa. We append a sketch map of Africa, with the Covent Garden Theatre marked to the same scale, for your consideration.
  Miss Beaumarchais empowers us to tell you that unless a retraction is published prominently within the next seven days we will institute proceedings in the courts.
  She further desires you to cease and desist the somewhat unusual mode of communicating with her you have adopted since she stopped answering your correspondence, and instructs us to tell you that the severed cow's heads have now definitely been traced to an abattoir in your neighbourhood. Any further occurrences of this sort will also meet with legal action.
  Miss Beaumarchais also repeats her request for the return of her pantaloons.
  Your Sincerely,
    J.M. McTaggart

  Post-Scriptum
  Our client further instructs us to say, 'You're losing it, short-arse.'


Katterfelto & Sons
Theatrical Agents
26b Russell Street
14th of June 1721

Dear Sir,
  In behalf of our client Miss Clarissa Beaumarchais we must regretfully decline your offer for her to take the leading role in your new play Harriet the Harlot of Holborn; or, the Diseas'd Wanton.
  While the First Act, in which Harriet whores her way from Dundalk to London, contains some memorable writing, particularly the scene in which she performs a number of instructive deviations in a baboon colony, in view of the fact that the she spends the entire Second act systematically infecting every member of the electoral register with syphilis while cackling insanely, and the whole of the Third Act being pelted in the stocks while the rest of the cast scream 'Harlot' at her, we are forced to agree with Miss Beaumarchais's view that overall the piece is lacking in dramatic tension and character development, and not a suitable vehicle for her at this point in her career. Moreover, far from concurring with your opinion that this is the role Miss Beaumarchais was born to play, we find this assertion potentially libellous and have referred your letter and the manuscript to our lawyers, Vanhomrigh and McTaggart, with a view to prosecution.
  This notwithstanding, Miss Beaumarchais feels there may possibly be some commercial potential in the play. She believes the part of 'Julius Merman', the handsome and noble poet whom Harriet loves and loses, may be partly autobiographical. She instructs us to encourage you to take this part yourself, believing the paying public would turn out in their thousands to see you assay the role of a romantic hero. Indeed, she says she will be happy to provide a stepladder to facilitate your performance.
  Miss Beaumarchais would also like to take this opportunity to reiterate a demand she has made several times now for the return of an intimate item of her property, and for you to please stop with the cow's heads.
  Yours Sincerely,
    Jacob Katterfelto


Vanhomrigh & McTaggart
Lawyers-at-the-Bar
23 Lincoln's Inn Court
July 7th 1721

Sir,
  You have been suggested to us as a possible author of the anonymous satirical pamphlet, 'A Modest Proposal For Dealing With The Problem Of A Certain Large-Bottomed Harlot From Dundalk', currently enjoying a vogue in the coffee houses.
  Inasmuch as the proposal contained therein, namely that several thousand hungry people could be fed by eating the said bottom of the said harlot, could be held to constitute a threat, should you be conclusively identified as the author of this tract it will go hard with you.
  Furthermore our client repeats her demand for the return of her nether garments and informs you that mouldering pig's backsides with the words 'This is you' carved into them are no more acceptable as gifts than cow's heads.
  Yours Sincerely,
    J. M. McTaggart

  PS,
Miss Beaumarchais instructs me to add that, unlike you, I have actually been privileged to see her bottom, and it is lovely. Indeed, I am kissing it as I write. Yum yum yum yum yum.


18 Gt Queen Street
10th July 1721

Stumpy,
  Thankyou for your graceful action in forwarding my pantaloons to my fiancee, together with an inventive account of how you came by them, sundry calumnies about my early life, and what appears to be a forged letter purporting to be from my lawyer and alleging certain passages betwixt me and him.
  Doubtless you will have heard that there has been a breach between De Coverley and myself. I wish you to know that this is merely temporary in nature and anyway has nothing to do with your slimy machinations, your repulsive toad. The fact is that, despite Lumsden daily urging me to seal our union, I have decided to continue my stage career for a while, seeing no reason to exchange the triumphs of my art for a domestic setting just yet. This and no other led to my estrangement from Lumsden - which, I reiterate, will pass. Despite all your efforts, my hold over him is complete and I will yet be Lady De Coverley.
  Nevertheless, I shall not forget the bad turn you have attempted to do me, and whether as Duchess or doyenne of the stage, I intend to exert all of my powers to effecting your complete and utter destruction, you maggot. If a single day goes by without my having done you some disservice I shall account it a day wasted. Good breeding and an innate compassion for the sickly and malformed prevent me expressing all that I think of you, so I shall just content myself with saying that it is my dearest dream that you may one day be brought to see yourself as others see you - a shambling, misshapen wretch who would be pitied rather than despised if he only had the sense to keep his loathsome gob shut for two seconds at a time instead of continually bombarding the town with failed epigrams and onion breath, a ridiculous kobold who giggles like a demented schoolgirl and apparently lets his blind, palsied mother cut his hair for him, a capering buffoon who glides about a dancefloor with the tranquil grace of an epileptic being devoured by termites, a squat, slobbering troglodyte with sausage fingers whom any woman would rather die of pleurisy than suffer herself to be touched by, a coarse, blunt-thumbed hobbledehoy who lights up a room like a rumour of smallpox, a dank-souled misanthrope with mouldering feet whose appearance at any social gathering is as welcome as the first signs of canker in the fur of a much-loved pet, a malign excrescence in ill-judged apparel whose very elbows cause infirm persons to weep with revulsion, a festering goblin with a soul of pus and the skin-tone of a scrotal sac, an animated pile of goat-puke in a badly-fitting frock-coat whom people fling themselves into middens to avoid, a waddling little arse-burp with the spirit of a slug-breeder and alarmingly hairy ears, a forlorn, twisted, Rumpelstiltskin figure with the social polish of a puddle of monkey-jism and eyebrows like deranged voles. Really, why do you not make an end to yourself? Your life must be as much a burden to you as it is to others.
  More in sorrow than in anger,
  Clarissa


12 Beaufort Buildings
11th July 1721

Shit-tits,
  I am curious as to the nature of the powers you intend to use to effect my destruction. Perhaps you have in mind to form your lovers into some sort of cabal against me. True, there are many of them - a lesser man might quail at the prospect of facing enemies more numerous than the Golden Horde - but few are men of influence, the majority being toothless Lascar sailors and so forth, and besides any man who has had any traffic with you will be too busy trying to stop his nose falling off to pose any threat to me.
  Truly, you are delusional if you imagine you are of any consequence at all now that De Coverley has thrown you over. I fear your disease has reached its terminal stage, in which the brain begins to soften. All too soon will come your hideous and degrading end - as a mindless, shapeless mass of blackened and rotting flesh lying insensible in the gutter with dogs pissing on you and rats gnawing off the few extremities that are left to you.
  I am too much of a gentleman to respond in kind to your feebleminded attempts at invective. I have too great a sense of the absurd to take umbrage at aspersions cast upon my social standing by a terminal skank-whore such as yourself. However, in the brief span of relative sanity which may be vouchsafed you before you start foaming at the mouth and smearing your own shit on your face, I wish you to understand once for all what a bloated, loathsome, putrid, mendacious, corrupt, stinky, fat-arsed, cow-faced, pig-like, draughty-quimmed slapper you have always been. You should be towed out to sea and scuttled like the rotted old hell-barge you are. I once had thought of raising you from the cesspool of your brutish existence onto my own rarefied plane, but, although a day will doubtless arrive when you come crawling to me on swollen and pus-filled knees, I regret that all relations between us must now be severed. Pester me no more, madam. From now on I wish to devote my days to purity and beauty, and if our paths ever cross again I will beat your teeth out with a cobblestone.
  Yours,
  Augustus
____

Clara I hail thee, Whore of Babylon
Lice light the way to the pit of your womb
A bourn to which many travel, but none
Return but are struck with lingering doom
I sing of your charms: your blacksmith's arms, they
Sweat much, like your thighs hot as paprika
Skin like the lepers of far-off Cathay
And a bottom the size of Africa


* * *

March 12th 1724

Clarissa darling,
  Just a brief note to say how thrilled I was to run into you at the Vauxhall the other night, if damnably briefly. We seem to have rather lost touch of late, don't we? A shame when we used to be such good friends.
  I confess you have been on my mind ever since our encounter. As you may know my new play has been pulling in ecstatic reviews and boffo box office over at Drury Lane. Unfortunately I'm about to lose my leading lady as she's in an interesting condition - she was a vapid little trull anyway without a scintilla of your talent or beauty. I have been thinking - can not you get out of that stinkbomb of John Gay's and come and take the role? It really is a peach and you would make me the happiest of men.
  Yours, etc.,
    Augustus


Sir,
  I should be delighted.
    Clarissa



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15th Jan 2002