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Maule cannot be the original source of the quotation, as it is quoted nearly twenty years before his birth in Charles Jenner's The Placid Man: Or, The Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville (1770): "Sir Harry Clayton ... was perhaps far better qualified to have written a Peerage of England than Garter King at Arms, or Rouge Dragon, or any of those parti-coloured officers of the court of honour, who, as a great man complained on a late solemnity, are but too often so silly as not to know their own silly business." "Old Lord Pembroke" (Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke) is said by Horace Walpole (in a letter of May 28, 1774 to the Rev. William Cole) to have directed the quip, "Thou silly fellow! Thou dost not know thy own silly business," at John Anstis, Garter King at Arms (though in his 1833 edition of Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover, attributes the saying to Lord Chesterfield in a footnote, in the form "You foolish man, you do not understand your own foolish business"). Edmund Burke also quotes it ("'Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!' was once well said: but the trade here is not silly.") in a "Speech in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Esq." on May 7, 1789 (when Maule was just over a year old). Chesterfield or Pembroke fit best in point of time. (en) |
