Life of Edmond Malone/Maloniana/Notes written to Malone on Windham's Memoir, 1810
Notes written to Malone on Windham’s Memoir, 1810.
Mr. Wilberforce (21st August, 1810) terms him “one of the most extraordinary men this country ever produced.” Lord Wellesley, writing from Dorking, thanks him for an “interesting memoir, which he has read with great attention and satisfaction, and with all the respect due to its author and to its subject.” Mr. Trevor (the last Lord Hampden) says, “I cannot offer you my sincere thanks for this obliging attention without expressing in common with all the friends of that great and amiable man my admiration of the just and honourable tribute which you have paid to his memory, and thence have equally gratified their feelings and your own.” Lord Rosse writes from Parsonstown—“He (Mr. Windham) was undoubtedly the first gentleman in England, and fully merited everything you have said of him in your elegant panegyric. I regret it is so short, . . . . but hope it is only a foretaste of what we may hereafter hope to feast upon. . . . . The newspapers say that he has left many manuscripts. There is scarcely a subject he could touch which the magic of his imagination would not turn into something beautiful and valuable.” Lord Whitworth says, «Although I had not the good fortune to live in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wyndham, yet I beg leave to assure you that you could not have bestowed your work on an individual more sensible of his virtues both public and private, or who laments his loss more sincerely.”
The Bishop of Meath says, “I am grateful to receive from your own hands the tribute of praise you have paid to a man, whom to say I once had the happiness of knowing intimately, is to say I esteemed, admired, and loved. . . . . He was the last of the splendid constellations that shone in that part of the political hemisphere that most arrested my observation when I first knew London. . . . . What a void must he have left in your society!”
Mr. Canning writes from Hinckley, “I return you my best acknowledgments for the Memoir of Mr. Windham which I have read with great though melancholy pleasure. It contains some facts that were new to me. The sentiments are such as I have long and uniformly felt in common with you and with all who knew him well enough to value him as he deserved.”
The Bishop of Dromore thanks him for “the tribute paid to his departed friend, Mr. Windham, whose merit as a man, a statesman, and a scholar, was above all praise.”
Mr. Thomas Grenville expresses strong regrets for his “invaluable friend,” whom, in another passage, he terms “the perfect model of an English gentleman,” and adds, “The general regret which broke forth at the moment of his death, showed that his country was not insensible to the greatness of the loss which they had to deplore in him—a loss in some respects quite irreparable, as the extraordmary combination of his talents and character enabled him to do and say much for the public interests which no man now living can do or say with half the same effect or advantage.”
Lady Crewe, the Misses Berry, and Mrs. Burke lament him as a most serious loss, the last pathetically as “a person I so sincerely admired and loved as I did Mr. Windham. I feel his loss most sorely; for he was from his great attention to me almost my last support. But God’s will be done!”
Lord Holland “feels it to be a flattering distinction to be reckoned among the sincere friends and admirers of Mr. Windham. It is said he has left a diary from the time of leaving college to the day on which the fatal operation was performed.”
THE END.