The prodigious Connop Thirlwall.(Ryan)(Biography)

THIS HAS BEEN a dull, wet, bleak and dispiriting week in Victoria. So it might seem strange that I have selected for my "fill-in-a-few-spare-moments" reading a book entitled Primitiae; or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral and Entertaining. To help "cheerfulness break through", you might have expected me rather to be re-reading--say--Groucho Marx's hilarious autobiography Hello! I Must be Going, or Leo Rosten's The Return of Hyman Kaplan.

The book on the bedside table could not be more different, though its physical aspect is full of sensuous appeal. It is small and squarish, of those dimensions that neatly fit the jacket side-pocket. It is beautifully bound in half-leather, with richly gold-tooled spine and sumptuous marbled end-papers. It was published in London in 1809; apart from the inevitable foxing, it has stood up pretty well to its near 200 years on the shelf.

The author is Connop Thirlwall DD, Bishop of St David's; that is to say, he was the top Anglican in Wales, to which post he was appointed by the great Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister, in 1840. Admittedly, some of the essays don't sound very upbeat--"Of the Abuse and Profanation of the Sabbath" and "The Wages of Sin is Death". And so it goes on for about 250 pages, and the only spot where a trace of raciness creeps in is an unaccountably out-of-character poem of four pages called "The Pot-Boy'. It contains some positively risque lines:

 
   Then to beguile away the time 
   He tells the kitchen nymphs his tale; 
   His left hand bears some doggrel rhyme, 
   And in his right's a pot of ale. 
 
   And hard must be that kitchen fair, 
   Who could his am'rous tale neglect; 
   And often Moll or Jenny dare, 
   For him some stouter swain reject. 

To set him very roughly in period, Thirlwall's long life spanned most of the years between the death of Samuel Johnson and the jubilee of Queen Victoria. The most amazing simple fact about this book is that its author was a mere eleven years old when it was published, and some of its contents were written when he was only seven or eight. How would you cope with an eight-year-old who, in print, demanded of you: "Must we not expect some heavy misfortune to befal us, when we are launching into the ungodly pleasures of sin ..."

Come to that, how could an eleven-year-old, delicately raised, have acquired even the slightest idea of what might pass between a pot-boy and a kitchen-maid?

Having already mastered his native English, Thirlwall at age three launched himself into Latin, and by four was an accomplished scholar also in Greek. French and other languages followed. At twenty-one he was appointed a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, then became a barrister, and began what eventually became his masterly eight-volume History of Greece.