302 George Colman' s Random Records. ^ 



haps, will affirm that they are past the greater effort, though equal to the 

 less ; as, upon FalstafFs principle, ' Your worn-out serving man makes 

 your fresh tapster.' " Still some fits of conscience seize him, and he 

 takes refuge in example. " Gibber tells us that his principal object in 

 writing his life, is to prevent others from writing it after his death. 

 And now the motive for telling your own story is double. Since some 

 people of late take the life out of your hands before the breath is out 

 of your body, and that, without your leave, which does not appear to 

 me quite fair. 



fc But the excuses of autobiographers are not yet worn out. Each cry- 

 ing, ' behold the maiden modesty of Grimbald/ till at last, my face- 

 tious friend and schoolfellow, Frederic Reynolds, with his usual honesty, 

 asserts (A. D. 1826), that he has written, by the adyice of his phy- 

 sician, to cure himself of the ( blue devils' " We have then a pleasant 

 story, not the worse for its being as old as James the First's " Coun- 

 terblast against Tobacco." " A little group of schoolboys took to the 

 pipe, and like little Whigs, to show their independence of his Majesty, 

 smoked day and night, like the kitchen chimney of a tavern. This, of 

 course, was concealed, as much as you can conceal a smell, from the 

 dominie. Till one luckless evening, when the imps were all huddled 

 together round the fire of their own dormitory, involving each other in 

 vapours of their own creation, in burst the master. ' How, now?' 

 quoth he to the first lad, ' how dare you be smoking tobacco ?' ' Sir/ 

 said the boy, ' I am subject to head-aches, and a pipe takes off the 

 pain/ f And you, and you, and you ?' inquired the pedagogue, ques- 

 tioning each in his -turn. Each had something to say. One, ' a raging 

 tooth,' another, ' a cough,' another, ( the cholic.' ' Now, Sirrah !' 

 bellowed he to the last boy, c what disorder do you smoke for ?' 

 All the excuses were exhausted ; when the urchin, after a farewell whiff, 

 said, in a whining, hypocritical tone ' Sir ! I smoke for corns.'" George's 

 secret is, at last, disclosed in a letter which he desires his corres- 

 pondent to keep a ' profound secret.' It is, his having received a 

 very good offer from his bookseller. The reason is satisfactory. We 

 now plunge into the bustle of his biography. " Beginning your life I 

 mean your paper, is like beginning a journey in a post-chaise. You 

 never start at the time you intended. There is always something you 

 did not expect, to be said or done, before you set off ; some fiddle faddle 

 thing to be looked after, at the last moment. Now, just as I was step- 

 ping into my vehicle, that is, into this chapter, a sapient friend stopped 

 me, upon the very threshold of my existence, by warning me against 

 rushing upon my readers, without an exordium." 



George Colman was born in 1762. His grandfather, Francis Colman, 

 married the sister of the famous William Pulteney, Earl of Bath's wife ; 

 this grandfather died in Tuscany, where he was English ambassador. His 

 father, then but one year old, was taken under Pulteney's protection, 

 educated at Westminster, Oxford, and finally placed in Lincoln's-Inn as 

 a student of law. The elder Colman was promised an estate by his 

 protector ; but the death of Lord Pulteney in 1763, broke up the EarFs 

 plan. The estate was left to General Pulteney's discretion, who appears 

 to have exercised it by keeping the property to himself, Colman, 

 receiving a legacy, and, subsequently, 6,000 by the death of his 

 mother. This narrative is gone through, to refute a story in the old 

 Margravine of Anspach's Memoirs, that the elder Colman was a natural 



