1802.
How often do we find peculiar attachments and propensities in the minds of persons of reported good understanding. Within my time, many men have indulged most ridiculously in their eccentricities. I have known one who had made a pretty large fortune in business, get up at four o’clock in the morning and walk the streets to pick up horseshoes which had been slipped in the course of the night, with no other motive than to see how many he could accumulate in a year. I also remember a rich soap-boiler who never missed an opportunity of pocketing nails, pieces of iron hoops, and bits of leather, in his daily walks; and these he would spread upon a large walnut-tree three-flapped dining-table, with a similar view to that of the above-mentioned gentleman. This wealthy citizen would often put on a red woollen cap, in shape like those worn by slaughter-house men, and a waggoner’s frock, in order to stoke his own furnace; after which, he would dress, get into his coach, and, attended by tall servants in bright blue liveries, drive to his villa, where his hungry friends were waiting his arrival.
The allusion to these peculiarities, which certainly are harmless, will serve by way of prelude to a more extraordinary one. The late Duke of Roxburgh,[298] whose wonderful library will ever be spoken of with the highest delight by bibliomaniacs, had an attachment to the portraits of malefactors as closely as Rowland Hill to his petted toad. I made many drawings of such characters for his Grace during their trials or confinement; that which I made this year, was of Governor Wall, whose trial produced much discussion.[299] Having been deprived of admission at the Old Bailey on the day of his trial, I went to the Duke, and he immediately wrote to a nobleman high in power, for an order to admit me to see the unfortunate criminal in the condemned cell, which application was firmly, and, in my humble opinion, very properly, refused. I walked home, where I found Isaac Solomon waiting to show me some of his improved black-lead pencils. Isaac, upon hearing me relate to my family the disappointment I had experienced, assured me that he could procure me a sight of the Governor, if I would only accompany him in the evening to Hatton Garden, and smoke a pipe with Dr. Forde, the Ordinary of Newgate,[300] with whom he said he was particularly intimate. Away we trudged; and, upon entering the club-room of a public-house, we found the said Doctor most pompously seated in a superb masonic chair, under a stately crimson canopy placed between the windows. The room was clouded with smoke, whiffed to the ceiling, which gave me a better idea of what I had heard of the Black Hole of Calcutta than any place I had seen. There were present at least a hundred associates of every denomination; of this number, my Jew, being a favoured man, was admitted to a whispering audience with the Doctor, which soon produced my introduction to him.
“Man’s life is all a mist, and in the dark our fortunes meet us.” Standing beneath a masonic lustre, the Doctor immediately recognised me as a friend of John Ireland, but more particularly of his older crony, Atkinson Bush; he requested me to take a pipe, to me a most detestable preliminary. He then whispered, “Meet me at the felon’s door at the break of day.” There I punctually applied, but, notwithstanding the order of the Doctor, I found it absolutely necessary, to protect myself from an increasing mob, to show the turnkey half-a-crown, who soon closed his hand and let me in. I was then introduced to a most diabolical-looking little wretch, denominated “the Yeoman of the Halter,” Jack Ketch’s head man. The Doctor soon arrived in his canonicals, and with his head as stiffly erect as a sheriff’s coachman when he is going to Court, with an enormous nosegay under his chin, gravely uttered, “Come this way, Mr. Smith.”
As we crossed the Press-yard a cock crew; and the solitary clanking of a restless chain was dreadfully horrible. The prisoners had not risen. Upon our entering a stone-cold room, a most sickly stench of green twigs, with which an old round-shouldered, goggle-eyed man was endeavouring to kindle a fire, annoyed me almost as much as the canaster fumigation of the Doctor’s Hatton Garden friends.
NEWGATE CHAPEL ON THE EVE OF SEVERAL EXECUTIONS
The prisoner entered. He was death’s counterfeit, tall, shrivelled, and pale; and his soul shot so piercingly through the port-holes of his head that the first glance of him nearly petrified me. I said in my heart, putting my pencil in my pocket, God forbid that I should disturb thy last moments! His hands were clasped, and he was truly penitent. After the Yeoman had requested him to stand up, “he pinioned him,” as the Newgate phrase is, and tied the cord with so little feeling, that the Governor, who had not given the wretch the accustomed fee, observed, “You have tied me very tight;” upon which Dr. Forde ordered him to slacken the cord, which he did, but not without muttering. “Thank you, Sir,” said the Governor to the Doctor, “it is of little moment.” He then observed to the attendant, who had brought in an immense iron shovelful of coals to throw on the fire, “Ay, in one hour that will be a blazing fire;” then, turning to the Doctor, questioned him: “Do tell me, Sir: I am informed I shall go down with great force; is it so?” After the construction and action of the machine had been explained, the Doctor questioned the Governor as to what kind of men he had at Goree. “Sir,” he answered, “they sent me the very riffraff.” The poor soul then joined the Doctor in prayer; and never did I witness more contrition at any condemned sermon than he then evinced.
The sheriff arrived, attended by his officers, to receive the prisoner from the keeper. A new hat was then partly flattened on his head; for, owing to its being too small in the crown, it stood many inches too high behind. As we were crossing the Press-yard, the dreadful execrations of some of the felons so shook his frame, that he observed, “the clock had struck;” and, quickening his pace, he soon arrived at the room where the sheriff was to give a receipt for his body, according to the usual custom. Owing, however, to some informality in the wording of this receipt, he was not brought out so soon as the multitude expected; and it was this delay which occasioned a partial exultation from those who betted as to a reprieve, and not from any pleasure in seeing him executed. For the honour of England, I may say we are not so revengeful as some of our Continental neighbours have been; as Mrs. Cosway[301] assured me that she was in the room with David, then esteemed the first painter in Paris, at the time that he and Robespierre were in power; and that when the Reporter, from the guillotine, came in to announce eighty as the number of persons executed that morning, David, in the greatest possible rage, exclaimed, “No more!”
DR. ARNE
HE COMPOSED “RULE BRITANNIA”
After the execution, as soon as I was permitted to leave the prison, I found the Yeoman selling the rope with which the malefactor had been suspended, at a shilling an inch; and no sooner had I entered Newgate Street, than a lath of a fellow, past threescore years and ten, who had just arrived from the purlieus of Black Boy Alley,[302] woe-begone as Romeo’s apothecary, exclaimed,—“Here’s the identical rope at sixpence an inch.” A group of tatterdemalions soon collected round him, most vehemently expressing their eagerness to possess bits of the cord. It was pretty obvious, however, that the real business of this agent was to induce the Epping butter-men to squeeze in with their canvas bags, which contained their morning receipts in Newgate market.[303] A little further on, at the north-east corner of Warwick Lane, stood “Rosy Emma,” exuberant in talk, and hissing-hot from Pie Corner,[304] where she had taken her morning dose of gin and bitters; and as she had not waited to make her toilet, was consequently a lump of heat.
“Now, my readers, I have been told,
Love wounds by heat, and Death by cold;
Of size she would a barrow fill,
But more inclining to sit still.”
Possibly she might have been a descendant of Orator Henley, and I make no doubt at one time passionately admired by her Henry. I can safely declare, however, that her cheeks were purple, her nose of poppy-red or cochineal.
“The lady was pretty well in case,
But then she’d humour in her face;
Her skin was so bepimpled o’er,
There was not room for any more.”
Her eyes reminded me of Sheridan’s remark on those of Dr. Arne, “Like two oysters on an oval plate of stewed beet-root.”[305] I regretted most exceedingly, while she was cutting her rope and twisting her mouth, that most of her once-famed ivories had absconded; but it gave me inexpressible delight to see that her lips were not at all chapped. If Emma’s lips had been ever so deeply cracked, she could not have benefited by my friend “Social Day” Coxe’s[306] Conservatoria, as it was not then sold.
Emma in her tender blossom, I understand, assisted her mother in selling rice-milk and furmety to the early frequenters of Honey Lane market; and in the days of her full bloom, new-milk whey in White Conduit Fields, and at the Elephant and Castle. She must have been, as to her outward charms, during her highest flattery, little inferior to the beautiful Emma Lyon;[307] but in her last stage, perhaps not altogether unlike the heroine so voluptuously portrayed by my late highly talented friend, the Rev. George Huddesford, in his poem entitled “The Barber’s Nuptials.”[308] Rosy Emma, for so she was still called, was the reputed spouse of the Yeoman of the Halter, and the cord she was selling as the identical noose was for her own benefit. This was, according to the delightful writer, Charles Lamb,
“For honest ends, a most dishonest seeming.”[309]
LADY HAMILTON AS A BACCHANTE
“Romney! expert infallibly to trace …
The mind’s impression too on every face.”
Cowper
Now, as fame and beauty ever carry influence, Emma’s sale was rapid; had she been as lamentable as a Lincolnshire goose after plucking-time, “Misery’s Darling,” or like Alecto when at the entrance of Pandemonium, she would have had a sorry sale.[310] This money-trapping trick, steady John, the waiter at the Chapter Coffee-house, assured me was invariably put in practice whenever superior persons or notorious culprits had been executed. Then to breakfast, but with little or no appetite; however, after selecting one of Isaac Solomon’s H.B.’s, I made a whole-length portrait of the late Governor by recollection, which Dr. Buchan, the flying physician of the “Chapter”[311] frequenters, and several of the Pater-Noster vendors of his Domestic Medicine, considered a likeness; at all events, it was admitted into the portfolio of the Duke, with the following acknowledgment written on the back: “Drawn by memory.”