Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Merry, Robert
MERRY, ROBERT (1755–1798), dilettante, a direct descendant of Sir Henry Merry, who was knighted by James I in 1621, was born in London in April 1755. His father was governor of Hudson's Bay Company, and his grandfather, Captain Merry, sailing in search of the North-west passage, discovered and gave its name to Merry's Island. His mother was the eldest daughter of Sir John Willes [q. v.], lord chief justice. Merry's education was entrusted to his father's sister, who sent him to Harrow, where his tutor was Dr. Parr, and then to Christ's College, Cambridge. He lived irregularly (cf. Monthly Mag. vii. 255), did not graduate, and on his return to London was entered of Lincoln's Inn, in accordance with his father's wishes. On the latter's death he immediately purchased a commission in the horse guards. The American war had begun; but after squandering a large part of his fortune on high living and heavy play, he sold out as adjutant of the first troop. He was twenty-five, without a profession, poor, and a disappointment to everybody but himself. He went abroad, and apparently spent some three or four years in travelling in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He finally joined the English colony settled in Florence.
He was there in 1784, studying Italian, lounging in the Tribuna, and definitely embarked upon a literary career in the ‘Arno,’ and in 1785 in the ‘Florence Miscellany.’ These were collections of verse by Mrs. Piozzi, Greatheed, Parsons, and Merry. ‘We wrote them,’ says Mrs. Piozzi, in a preface which won Horace Walpole's ironical praise, ‘to divert ourselves and to say kind things of each other’ (see also Gifford's Introduction to the Mæviad, ed. 1795). Merry rapidly became a recognised figure in Florentine society, and a member of the Della Cruscan Academy. But his social success, and above all his superiority as a versifier, quickened the jealousy and ill-will that underlay the fulsome admiration of the ‘Miscellany;’ his open liaison with the Countess Cowper, and the rivalry of the Grand-duke Leopold, made him an easy target for slander, and he had soon the whole English colony about his ears. He stood his ground for a time, then after lampooning his fellow-rhymers, abruptly quitted Florence in the spring of 1787. The ‘Miscellany’ had kindled curiosity in London, and literary coteries welcomed the poet. On 29 June his ‘Adieu and Recall to Love,’ signed ‘Della Crusca,’ appeared in the ‘World,’ then chiefly conducted by Captain Topham, a fellow-commoner of Merry's at Cambridge, and fellow-officer in the horse guards. ‘I read the beautiful lines,’ Mrs. Hannah Cowley [q. v.] declares, ‘and without rising from the table at which I was sitting answered them.’ Her reply, ‘The Pen,’ signed ‘Anna Matilda,’ was published in the ‘World’ of 12 July, and the correspondence thus started rapidly attracted a crowd of imitators, whose performances, welcomed by the ‘World’ and afterwards by the ‘Oracle,’ first amused and then revolted public taste. Merry's pseudonym gave its name to the Della Cruscan school, which faithfully exaggerated the worst features of his style—his affectation, incredibly foolish misuse of epithet, metaphor, and alliteration, his frantic efforts at sublimity, his obscurity and tasteless ornament. The best and worst of the poems in the ‘World’ were reprinted in the ‘British Album,’ which Bell brought out in 1789. It ran through three editions in the next two years, and the publication of the ‘Baviad,’ Gifford's satire on it, in 1791 sold a fourth and last. But it was mutual disappointment, as much as Gifford's satire, that ended Della Crusca's and Anna Matilda's sentimental versifying. They wrote, according to Mrs. Cowley's statement, without any knowledge of each other's identity until 1789. Then the ardent enthusiasts upon paper met, but the lady was forty-six, the lover thirty-four, and the only fruit of the meeting was one more poem, ‘The Interview,’ by Della Crusca, and some regrets in cloudy verse by Anna Matilda. The stream of nonsense flowed on in the newspapers, but Merry's part in it may fairly be said to have here terminated. When he published the ‘Laurel of Liberty’ next year it was under his own name. Merry had little humour; but if we compare his verses on ‘Fontenoy,’ ‘Werther,’ or ‘The Close of a Year,’ with the address to ‘Laura Maria’ (Mrs. Robinson), which Gifford quotes, it is not easy to avoid the impression that in the latter, as well as in some other flights in the ‘World’ and ‘Oracle,’ he was simply fooling his correspondents to the top of their bent. For the crazy introductions prefixed to the verses, most probably by Bell, the writers themselves can hardly be held responsible (see, for instance, the World of 28 Dec. 1787, 3 and 12 Jan. 1788; Brit. Mus. newspapers).
Merry had meanwhile been engaged in other literary ventures. ‘Paulina,’ a tale in verse, had appeared towards the close of 1787, ‘Diversity,’ a frigid and elaborate ode, in the following year (Monthly Rev. old ser. lxxx. 529–32), and in 1789 the ‘Ambitious Vengeance,’ a drama, which in plot, character, and situation is a mere travesty of Macbeth, was inserted in the ‘British Album.’ It was never acted. In the beginning of the same year he wrote the ode for the recovery of the king recited by Mrs. Siddons on 21 April (Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, ii. 277–8). But the events of the 14th July in Paris gave a new direction to his energies, and coloured the rest of his life. Merry did not judge the French revolution, but judged everything by it—his friends, himself, literature, art, all civil and social relations. He went immediately to Paris, visited the Assembly, where he saw ‘some disorder, but all from zeal,’ and on his return published the ‘Laurel of Liberty.’ The effort has a certain fire; but Della Crusca's defects are still prominent, and Walpole fastens with glee upon his ‘gossamery tears’ and ‘silky oceans.’ He aimed at the laureateship at this time, but his principles, already the talk of the town, made his candidature hopeless; and though the ‘World’ moved mountains on his behalf, the court was all for Pye. In the summer of 1791 he was again in Paris, presented to the convention a treatise on the ‘Nature of a Free Government,’ and resumed an acquaintance with the artist David. On 14 July his ode on the ‘Fall of the Bastille’ was declaimed at a meeting in the Strand of ‘1,500 English gentlemen,’ sympathisers with the French revolution (Gent. Mag. lxi. 673, &c.) Three months previously his ‘Lorenzo,’ a tragedy, had a brief success at Covent Garden (Oulton, London Theatres, ii. 81), and in August 1791 he married the well-known actress Elizabeth Brunton (Madame d'Arblay, Memoirs, 1842, v. 264).
His wife, the daughter of John Brunton, an actor of some provincial fame, and sister of Louisa, countess of Craven [q. v.], was born in 1769, and in her sixteenth year, as Euphrasia, had carried Bath by storm. The manager Harris brought her to London, and she opened at Covent Garden in 1785 as Horatia, Murphy writing her a prologue. It was a success, but after the first season there was no question of her rivalling Mrs. Siddons, and the public enthusiasm waned. She kept her place, however, and during her short career in London had the chief tragic parts at Covent Garden (list in Genest, vii. 75–6). She had a sweet voice, a refined and graceful manner, but wanted energy. After her marriage—during the winter of 1791–2—she continued to act under her new name; but the outcry of his family—his mother was still alive—forced Merry to withdraw her from the stage in the spring. The complete failure of his play, ‘The Magician no Conjuror,’ produced at Covent Garden in February 1792, may have made the decision easier. They went together to France, and Merry was in Paris on 10 Aug. and on 2 Sept., but refused an invitation to be present at the trial of the king. Walpole tells a pretty story of his being mistaken by the mob for Abbé Maury, and of his being pursued with the cry ‘A la lanterne.’ In 1793 he and his wife returned to London, and lived in an unsettled way for the next three years, Merry haunting the clubs, declaiming on freedom and the French revolution, writing epigrams—some of which are very neat—against Pitt and his supporters in the ‘Argus’ and ‘Telegraph,’ and, notwithstanding his friend Topham's good-nature, sinking daily deeper into debt. ‘Fénelon,’ an adaptation of Marie-Joseph Chenier's play, was published in 1795, and the ‘Pains of Memory,’ a versified reproduction of talks with Rogers, in the following year. He also wrote the epilogue spoken by Mrs. Jordan at the notable performance of the pseudo-Shakespearean ‘Vortigern’ on 2 April 1796 [see Ireland, Samuel]. Regard for his family still kept his wife reluctantly from the stage; but when Wignell, of the New Theatre, Philadelphia, offered her an engagement in 1796, Merry, to whom life in London was becoming embarrassing, gave his consent, and in October they landed at New York. On 5 Dec. Mrs. Merry appeared in Philadelphia as Juliet, ‘perhaps the best Juliet,’ Dunlap thinks, ‘that was ever seen or heard’ (American Stage, 1832, p. 158). She acted in New York next year, and afterwards in the chief cities of the union, everywhere leaving her American rivals behind. Merry himself, in 1797, brought out his drama, ‘The Abbey of St. Augustine,’ at Philadelphia, but for the most part contented himself with the unofficial laureateship which the younger writers—though not without dissentient voices—readily granted to his London reputation. In 1798 he was living in Baltimore, grown fat and very indolent, and still clinging to his faith in the French revolution, upon which he had some vague plans for an epic. The ‘Monthly Magazine’ for August of that year announces a work by him on American manners, but on 14 Dec., in the morning, while walking in his garden, he fell in an apoplectic fit, and three hours later was dead. His widow married a manager of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Theatres named Warren, and died at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1808 (Gent. Mag. 1808, pt. ii. p. 749).
[In addition to the authorities quoted, Monthly Mag. iii. 46, vi. 129, vii. 255–8; European Mag. xxiv. 411–12, prefixed to which is a better engraving of Merry than that of the British Album; Letters of Horace Walpole, 1858, viii. 493–4, ix. pass.; Gifford's Autobiography, and Baviad and Mæviad; Frederick Reynolds's Memoirs, 1826, i. 281, 315, ii. passim; O'Keeffe's Memoirs, ii. 299; Boaden's Memoirs of Kemble, 1825; Mrs. Thrale's Autobiography, 1861, ii. 92–3, 197–206; D'Arblay's Diary and Letters, 1842, v. 264; Anna Matilda, 1788, p. xi; Miss Berry's Correspondence, 1866, i. 252–3; Monthly Review, enlarged ser. iv. 56–62, v. 201–5, 344, xix. 274–7, xxi. 149–5; Gent. Mag. 1799 pt. i. 252–4; Mathias's Pursuits of Literature, 1812, p. 449; Metcalfe's Book of Knights; Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 6675, f. 257; Baker's Biographia Dramatica; Oulton's London Theatres, 1795, ii. 80–1, 107; Thespian Dictionary; Genest, vii. 25, 29–30, 75–76; Appleton's American Biography; Dunlap's American Stage, 1832, pp. 155, 158, 173–7, 213; Griswold's Poets of America, 1856, p. 8 n.; Duyckinck's Cyclopædia of American Literature, i. 434; P. W. Clayden's Early Life of Samuel Rogers, passim.]
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.198
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
| Page | Col. | Line | |
| 295 | ii | 37 | Merry, Robert: for Cambridge, read Cambridge, being admitted there 2 April 1771. |
| 40 | for was entered of Lincoln's Inn read studied at Lincoln's Inn, where he had been entered 5 Nov. 1770, |