Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/226

Hamilton was naturally a favourite at the court of St Germains, and maintained a prominent figure in many of the gorgeous entertainments of the epicurean monarch. He is said to have performed a part in the celebrated ballet of the Triumph of Love. Being by birth and education a professed Roman catholic, Charles II., who befriended him as a courtier, dared not, and could not by the laws, bestow on him any ostensible situation as a statesman. His brother James, however, was less scrupulous, and under his short reign Hamilton found himself colonel of a regiment of foot, and governor of Limerick. Having enjoyed the fruits of the monarch's rashness, Hamilton faithfully bore his share of the consequences, and accompanied his exiled prince to St Germains, but he was no lover of solitude, seclusion, and the Jesuits, and took little pains to conceal his sense of the disadvantageous change which the palace had experienced since his previous residence within its walls. The company of the brilliant wits of France sometimes exhilarated his retirement, but the playful count frequently found that in the sombre residence of the exiled monarch, the talents which had astonished and delighted multitudes must be confined to his own solitary person, or discover some other method of displaying themselves to the world; and it is likely that we may date to the loyalty of the author, the production of one of the most interesting pictures of men and manners that was ever penned. All the works of count Anthony Hamilton were prepared during his exile, and it was then that he formed, of the life and character of his brother-in-law, a nucleus round which he span a vivid description of the manners of the day, and of the most distinguished persons of the English court. In the "Memoirs of Grammont," unlike Le Sage, Cervantes, and Fielding, the author paints the vices, follies, and weaknesses of men, not as a spectator, but as an actor, and he may be suspected of having added many kindred adventures of his own to those partly true and partly imagined of his hero. But the elasticity of a vivid and lively imagination, acute in the observation of frailties and follies, is prominent in his graphic descriptions; and no one who reads his cool pictures of vice and sophism can avoid the conviction that the author looked on the whole with the eye of a satirist, and had a mind fitted for better things—while at the same time the spirit of "the age had accustomed his mind, in the words of La Harpe, ne connoitre d'autre vice que le ridicule. The picture of the English court drawn by Hamilton is highly instructive as matter of history—it represents an aspect of society which may never recur, and the characters of many individuals whose talents and adventures are interesting to the student of human nature: nor will the interest of these sketches be diminished, when they are compared with the characters of the same individuals pourtrayed by the graver pencils of Hyde and Burnet. That the picture is fascinating with all its deformity, has been well objected to the narrative of the witty philosopher, but few who read the work in this certainly more proper and becoming age will find much inducement to follow the morals of its heroes; and those who wish a graver history of the times may refer to the Atalantis of Mrs Manley, where if the details are more unvarnished, they are neither so likely to gratify a well regulated taste, nor to leave the morals so slightly .affected. The other works written by count Anthony Hamilton in his solitude were Le Belier, Fleur d'epine—Les quatre Facurdins et Teneyde. Many persons accused him of extravagance in his Eastern Tales—a proof that his refined wit had not allowed him to indulge sufficiently in real English grotesqueness, when he wished to caricature the French out of a ravenous appetite for the wonders of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Count Anthony Hamilton died at St Germains in 1720, in his 64th year, and on his death-bed exhibited feelings of religion, which Voltaire and others have taken pains to exhibit as inconsistent with his professions and the