Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

classical antiquity, was increasingly diluted, as some saw it, by a less genteel contingent
whose enthusiasms were for the vernacular. 37 The Nabob of Foote’s title is Sir Matthew
Mite, a coarse and pompous man, newly elected to the Society. The meeting begins, as
meetings still do today, with the acknowledgement of gifts. Mite’s mites are all items
relating to British history, marking him out as a man of limited education and poor taste.
They include ‘a pair of nut-crackers presented by Harry the Eighth to Anna Bullen...the
wood supposed to be walnut’, from which one of the antiquaries solemnly deduces that it
can now be proved that ‘before the Reformation walnut-trees were planted in England’. 38
Another offering is ‘a tobacco-stopper of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, made of the stern of the
ship in which he first compassed the globe; given to the Society by a clergyman from the
North Riding of Yorkshire’. 39
Here we have still the footling subjects the vulgar objects, the pointless
deductions familiar since the seventeenth century and with the additional class
distinctions of the eighteenth, for in the clergyman from Yorkshire we are expected to
recognise a provincial nobody. The high point of Foote’s satire is the paper Sir Matthew
delivers to the Society on the subject of his own researches. He confirms his limitations
as he announces: ‘Let others toil to illumine the dark annals of Greece or of Rome my
searches are sacred only to the service of Britain!’ 40 His particular topic is ‘the great Dick
Whittington, and his no less eminent cat’. 41 He goes on to define his terms, including
‘cat’ (‘a domestic, whiskered, four-footed animal’) and to explain that ‘cat’ could also
mean a kind of light cargo boat (which it does) and to suggest that Whittington had used
such a boat for the coastal trade on which he built his fortune and so the legend had arisen
from a slippage in terminology. 42 The audience at the Haymarket tittered appreciatively
at this buffoonery but Horace Walpole, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, was not
amused.
37
See Evans, History of the Society of Antiquaries.
38
Foote, The Nabob, p.104.
39
Foote, The Nabob, p.104.
40
Foote, The Nabob, p.105.
41
Foote, The Nabob, p.105.
42
Johnson, Dictionary, 1755, and ‘Cat, n, s, a sort of ship’
19