from Richard Twiss, a younger son of the family of Twiss resident about 1660 at Killintierna, co. Kerry (Burke, Landed Gentry). Richard Twiss [q. v.] was his brother. He is said to have been contemporary at Pembroke College, Cambridge, with William Pitt as a student under Tomline, but his name does not appear in the printed list of graduates of that university. ‘A hopeless passion for Mrs. Siddons’ is believed to have been once nourished by him, but he married on 1 May 1786 her sister, Frances (1759–1822), usually called Fanny, Kemble, second daughter of Roger Kemble [q. v.] Upon her marriage she retired from the stage, where her efforts as an actress had not been crowned with success. George Steevens [q. v.], the Shakespearean commentator, had championed her acting in the press, and wished to marry her, but the family deprecated the alliance (Fitzgerald, The Kembles, i. 227–32).
Mrs. Twiss, a lovely woman, of great sweetness of character, from 1807 kept a fashionable girls' school at 24 Camden Place, Bath, and was assisted in the management by her husband and their three daughters. He is described by Mrs. F. A. Kemble as a ‘grim-visaged, gaunt-figured, kind-hearted gentleman and profound scholar.’ A lively picture of husband and wife is given by George Hardinge (Nichols, Illustrations of Lit. iii. 37–8). ‘She was big as a house,’ affected in manner and with measured voice, but very good-natured. He was very thin, stooping, and ghastly pale; takes ‘absolute clouds of snuff,’ quaint in his phrases, ‘very dogmatical and spoilt as an original.’
Twiss died at Cheltenham on 28 April 1827, aged 68. His wife had predeceased him, at Bath, on 1 Oct. 1822. Their eldest son was Horace Twiss [q. v.]; another son, John Twiss, became a major-general in the army on 5 Jan. 1864, and was governor of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
Twiss published in two volumes in 1805, ‘A complete verbal Index to the Plays of Shakspeare, adapted to all the editions,’ with a dedication to John Philip Kemble. It was a work of immense labour, but as it gives the word only and not the passage in which it occurs, his labours have been superseded by later concordances. Seven hundred and fifty copies were printed of it, and 542 of them were destroyed by fire in 1807.
A famous portrait of Mrs. Twiss, a half-length, was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1783, and exhibited at Burlington House in 1890. It was sold by Christie & Manson among the pictures belonging to the Right Hon. G. A. F. Cavendish-Bentinck in July 1891 for 2,640 guineas. It was engraved by J. Jones (Roberts, Christie's, ii. 170). Another admirable oil portrait of her, the work of Opie, but ‘showing the influence of Sir Thomas Lawrence,’ belongs to Mr. Quintin Twiss, who also possesses miniatures of Francis Twiss and his wife.
[Gent. Mag. 1822 ii. 381, 1827 i. 476; Boaden's Mrs. Siddons, ii. 92–103; Boaden's J. P. Kemble, i. 328; Campbell's Mrs. Siddons, i. 15; F. A. Kemble's Records of a Girlhood, i. 20–26; Leslie and Taylor's Sir Joshua Reynolds, ii. 426–40; Rogers's Opie and his Works, p. 171; information from Mrs. Quintin W. F. Twiss.]
TWISS, HORACE (1787–1849), wit and politician, was the eldest son of Francis Twiss [q. v.] He was born, probably at Bath, in 1787, was admitted as a student at the Inner Temple in 1806, and was called to the bar on 28 June 1811. He inherited the love of his mother's family for the stage. His aunt, Mrs. Siddons, recited at her practical farewell of the stage on 29 June 1812 an address which he had written for her; he assisted when she gave her ‘readings from Shakespeare’ (Boaden, Mrs. Siddons, ii. 383), and he was one of the executors of her will. Several family letters from her to Twiss are now in the possession of Mr. Quintin Twiss. A satirical poem, called ‘St. Stephen's Chapel, by Horatius,’ which was published in 1807, is sometimes attributed to him, and he was known when a young man as a contributor of squibs and jeux d'esprit to the papers, especially to the ‘Morning Chronicle.’ It was said at a later date that his rise at the bar had been retarded by his social, literary, and political celebrity.
Twiss went the Oxford circuit, and rose to be one of its leaders. He afterwards attached himself to the courts of equity, and in 1827 he became king's counsel. In 1837 he was reader of his inn, and in 1838 he was its treasurer. Political life possessed great attractions for him, and in 1820 he was returned to parliament, through the interest of Lord Clarendon, for the borough of Wootton-Basset in Wiltshire. He sat for it through two parliaments lasting from 1820 to 1830, and from 1830 to the dissolution in April 1831 he represented the borough of Newport in the Isle of Wight. Lord Campbell had made his acquaintance in 1804 at a famous debating society which met at the Crown and Rolls in Chancery Lane. He was ‘the impersonation of a debating society rhetorician. … When he got into the House of Commons, though inexhaustibly fluent, his manner certainly was very flippant, factitious,
