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 never a man are we jealous,
        And never a man against us will he speak
        For who can be hard on a set of poor fellows
        Who only see Saturday once a week!

You chorus the last two lines.

That was the very song the unfortunate coachman of Kirby Hall joined in singing before he went out to face his end for the woman he loved.  He believed in her virtue to the very last.

‘The ravished wife of my bosom,’ he calls her all through the latter half of the play.  It is a real tragedy.  The songs of that day have lost their effect now, I suppose.  They will ever remain pathetic to me; and to hear the poor coachman William Martin invoking the name of his dear stolen wife Elizabeth, jug in hand, so tearfully, while he joins the song of Saturday, was a most moving thing.  You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out all over the theatre.  What it is that has gone from our drama, I cannot tell:  I am never affected now as I was then; and people in a low station of life could affect me then, without being flung at me, for I dislike an entire dish of them, I own.  We were simpler in our habits and ways of thinking.  Elizabeth Martin, according to report, was a woman to make better men than Ralph Thorkill act evilly—­as to good looks, I mean.  She was not entirely guiltless, I am afraid; though in the last scene, Mrs. Kempson, who played the part (as, alas, she could do to the very life!), so threw herself into the pathos of it that there were few to hold out against her, and we felt that Elizabeth had been misled.  So much for morality in those days!