On this day in 1763, Horace Walpole, a British politician and man of letters, wrote an entertaining missive to his cousin, the Earl of Hertford. The letter covered many things, among them the doings in Parliament around the holiday season. If you change a couple of the proper nouns and update a word usage or two, it could be 21st-century Washington, D.C., he's writing about.
"We are a very absurd nation," Walpole tells his cousin. "The Parliament opens; everybody is bribed and the new establishment is perceived to be composed of adamant. …
"Christmas arrives; everybody goes out of town. … Parliament meets again; taxes are warmly opposed."
I wrote about this lively epistle six years ago, but because I'm still working on the opus I mentioned Monday, I reprise it here. You may ask, why should we care about an obscure 18th century British letter in the first place? It's a fair question, and here's the answer: A book titled "The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1" documents the first evidence of a famous quote usually attributed to Mickey Mantle two centuries later.
"If I had known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."
That quip is usually associated with baseball great Mickey Mantle. The Yankee star began using it after his playing days ended, but while he was still in his 50s.
Injuries and arthritis in his knees made Mantle, who once ran like a cheetah, hobble around like a much older man. But Mantle wasn't alluding to bad luck, the quality of medical care he received, or his own training methods. The quip was a reference to his four decades of enjoying the nightlife and abusing alcohol. But Mantle never pretended he coined the pithy line; he actually attributed it to his friend, Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Bobby Layne, another legendary carouser.
But where did Layne come by it?
Internet searches, which didn't exist when Bobby Layne died in Lubbock, Texas, during the Reagan administration, also variously place the words in the mouths of Mark Twain, labor leader George Meany, as well as Hollywood impresario Adolph Zukor and comedian George Burns.
(I found it in a mid-1970s book by baseball writer Hal Lebovitz, who called it an "old line." The speaker in this instance was baseball owner Bill Veeck, who added a postscript: "But I've had fun. No regrets.")
The evidence for Twain is weak, but as dedicated quote sleuth Ralph Keyes has documented, Twain and others apparently did say it -- they just didn't say it first. That distinction may belong to Robert Henley, the first Earl of Northington. In Horace Walpole's Dec. 29, 1763, letter to his cousin, he describes some of Henley's escapades, which also were fortified by adult beverages.
In a footnote to "Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1," the anthology's author, one Charles Duke Yonge, adds a vignette of his own:
"Lord Northington had been a very hard liver. He was a martyr to the gout; and one afternoon, as he was going downstairs out of his Court, he was heard to say to himself, "‘Damn these legs! If I had known they were to carry a Lord Chancellor, I would have taken better care of them.'"
It's hardly a straight line from Lord Northington to Mickey Mantle, but it's a fascinating one. As Mantle's Yankee teammate Yogi Berra liked to say (although others also said this first), it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. Charles Yonge, who died in 1891, would have appreciated Yogi's wit. He'd have admired Berra and Mantle's talent on the diamond, too. Besides being a historian and a classicist at Oxford College, Yonge was an accomplished cricket player.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
