below their due
quantity. He was more, if he died at ninety-one; and Chillon Switzer
John Kirby, born eleven months after the elopement, was, we know,
twenty-three years old when the old man gave up the ghost and bequeathed
him little besides a law-suit with the Austrian Government, and the care
of Carinthia Jane, the second child of this extraordinary union; both
children born in wedlock, as you will hear. Sixty-three, or sixty-seven,
near upon seventy, when most men are reaping and stacking their sins
with groans and weak knees, Kirby was a match for his juniors, which
they discovered.

Captain John Peter Avason Kirby, son of a Lincolnshire squire of an
ancient stock, was proud of his blood, and claimed descent from a chief
of the Danish rovers.

'"What's rank to me!" cries Kirby;
"A titled lass let her be,
But unless my plans miscarry,
I'll show her when we marry;
As brave a pedigree," cries Kirby.'

That was the song-writer's answer to the charge that the countess had
stooped to a degrading alliance.

John Peter was fourth of a family of seven children, all males, and hard
at the bottle early in life: 'for want of proper occupation,' he says in
his Memoirs, and applauds his brother Stanson, the clergyman, for
being ahead of him in renouncing strong dunks, because he found that
he 'cursed better upon water.' Water, however, helped Stanson Kirby to
outlive his brothers and inherit the Lincolnshire property, and at the
period of the great scandal in London he was palsied, and waited on by
his grandson and heir Ralph Thorkill Kirby, the hero of an adventure
celebrated in our Law courts and on the English stage; for he took
possession of his coachman's wife, and was accused of compassing the
death of the husband. He was not hanged for it, so we are bound to think
him not guilty.

The stage-piece is called 'Saturday Night', and it had an astonishing
run, but is only remembered now for the song of 'Saturday,' sung by the
poor coachman and labourers at the village ale-house before he starts
to capture his wife from the clutches of her seducer and meets his
fate. Never was there a more popular song: you heard it everywhere. I
recollect one verse:

'O Saturday money is slippery metal,
And Saturday ale it is tipsy stuff
At home the old woman is boiling her kettle,
She thinks we don't know when we've tippled enough.
We drink, and of nev