understatement. We must remember,
it was not Kirby speaking, but the song-writer. Kirby would not, in my
opinion, have numbered years he was proud of 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