Little Burney's sharp-pointed pen describes Whalley
exactly:
One of the clergymen was Mr. W, a young man who has a
house on the Crescent, and is one of the best supporters of Lady
Miller's vase at Bath Easton. He is immensely tall, thin, and handsome,
but affected, delicate, and sentimentally pathetic; and his
conversation about his own "feelings," about "amiable motives,"
and about the wind—which, at the Crescent, he said in a tone of
dying horror, "blew in a manner really frightful!"—diverted me the
whole evening. But Miss Thrale, not content with private diversion,
laughed out at his expressions, till I am sure he perceived and understood
her merriment.
Later she mentions:—
In the evening we had Mrs. Lambart, who brought us a tale called
Edwy and Edilda, by the sentimental Mr. Whalley, and unreadably
soft and tender and senseless is it.
He was of the soft and tender school; Miss
Seward's heart "vibrates to every sentence of his last
charming letter"; they indulge in the "communication
of responsive ideas"; and on leaving Bath she
thus addresses him:—
Edwy, farewell! To Lichfield's darkened grove,
With aching heart and rising sighs, I go.
Yet bear a grateful spirit as I rove,
For all of thine which balm'd a cureless woe.
We cannot tell whether the "communication of responsive ideas" with so many fair ladies aroused Mrs. Whalley's jealousy ultimately, or whether incompatibility of temper was the cause, but in 1819 Mrs. Piozzi writes:—
I hear wondrous tales of Doctor and Mrs. Whalley; half the town
saying he is the party aggrieved, and the other half lamenting the
lady's fate. Two wiseacres sure, old acquaintances of forty years'
standing, and both past seventy years old!.
When Mrs. Siddons first knew them at Bath, there