FOOTNOTES

[1] Two other residences of Smith’s, less definitely associated with his books or etchings, are recorded. The first is No. 8 Popham Terrace, near the Barley Mow Tavern, in Frog Lane, Islington. His sojourn here is mentioned, without dates, by Lewis in his History of Islington (1842). Frog Lane is now Popham Road, of which Popham Terrace appears to have been part. In 1809, Smith was living at No. 4 The Polygon, Somers Town.

[2] Thomas Lowe had taken Marylebone Gardens in 1763, at a rent of £170. Fresh from his triumphs as a tenor at Vauxhall, he made concerts the principal entertainment. In 1768 he compounded with his creditors.

[3] This theatre at Richmond was built two years before Smith’s birth, and was opened in May 1765, by Mr. Love, who spoke a prologue by Garrick. Love was the stage name of James Dance, who, as a son of George Dance, R.A., the City Architect, adopted it that he might not “disgrace his family,” a proceeding on which Genest comments: “Shall we never have done with this miserable cant? Foote, with much humour, makes Papillion say, in The Lyar: ‘As to Player, whatever might happen to me, I was determined not to bring a disgrace upon my family; and so I resolved to turn footman.’” The Devil to Pay, by Charles Coffey, was adapted from a play by Jevon called The Devil of a Wife, first produced at Drury Lane in 1731, when Love played “Jobson” and Mrs. Love “Nell.”

[4] “A convivial glass-grinder, then residing at No. 6, in Earl Street, Seven Dials, and who had, for upwards of fifty years, worn a green velvet cap,” is Smith’s note on his uncle. In his Nollekens he says: “In the British Museum there is a brass medal of Vittore Pisano, a painter of Verona, executed by himself … his cap, which is an upright one with many folds, reminded me of that sort usually worn, when I was a boy, by the old glass-grinders of the Seven Dials.”

[5] Dr. William Hunter (1718-83) was elder brother of the celebrated Dr. John Hunter, to whom in 1768 he gave up his house in Jermyn Street, taking possession of the one he had built for himself in Windmill Street. In 1764 he had been appointed Physician Extraordinary to the Queen. He became a foundation member of the Royal Academy, as Professor of Anatomy. It is related that half an hour before his death he exclaimed: “Had I a pen, and were I able to write, I would describe how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die.”

[6] Now rebuilt as No. 38.

[7] Strype’s edition of Stow, 1720, contains many such plates. John Kip, the engraver, was born in Amsterdam. He died at Westminster in 1722.

[8] In the miscellaneous pages of his Nollekens, Smith reports Elizabeth Carter, of “Epictetus” fame, as saying to a Covent Garden fruiterer, named Twigg (jocularly known as the “Twig of the Garden”): “I recollect, Sir, when Mr. Garrick acted, hackney chairs were then so numerous that they stood all round the Piazzas, down Southampton Street, and extended more than half-way along Maiden Lane, so much were they in requisition at that time.”

[9] Voltaire first came to London in May 1726, after his confinement in the Bastille, landing at Greenwich on a cloudless night. His first impressions of London are quoted by Mr. Archibald Ballantyne in his interesting Voltaire’s Visit to England. After being the guest of Bolingbroke, Voltaire returned to Paris in a state of indecision, but, again crossing the Channel, he settled at Wandsworth, where he found a friend and host in Sir Everard Falkener. He met Pope, and improved his English by attending the theatres. Chetwood says: “I furnished him every evening with the play of the night (at Drury Lane), which he took with him into the orchestra (his accustomed seat): in four or five months he not only conversed in elegant English, but wrote it with exact propriety.” Voltaire became a well-known figure in London, and wrote his Henriade in his London lodging at the sign of the “White Peruke,” Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, next door to the Bedford Head.

[10] Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences during the British Embassy to Pekin, 1816. Geo. Thos. Staunton, 1824. Printed for Private Circulation.

[11] Pliny the Younger, in writing to his friend, Baebius Macer, on the habits and life of his uncle, C. Plinius Secundus (Pliny the elder), says: “A shorthand writer constantly attended him, … who, in the winter, wore a particular sort of warm gloves, that the sharpness of the weather might not occasion any interruption to my uncle’s studies; and for the same reason, when in Rome, he was always carried in a chair. I recollect his once taking me to task for walking. ‘You need not,’ he said, ‘lose these hours.’ For he thought every hour gone that was not given to study” (Letters of Pliny the Younger, bk. iii. letter 5, p. 82. Bohn’s Classical Library).

[12] The Catalogue of this exhibition is entitled: “A Catalogue of the Paintings, Sculptures, Architecture, Models, Drawings, Engravings, etc., now exhibiting under the Patronage of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at their Great Room in the Strand, London.” It credits Mr. Nathaniel Smith, St. Martin’s Lane, with the following:—

210. A bust as large as life.

211. A figure of Time, imitating a bronze.

[13] Smith’s naval ancestor won his sobriquet, “Tom of Ten Thousand,” very easily. He had compelled the French corvette Gironde to salute the British colours in Plymouth Sound, for which, on complaint, he was dismissed the navy for exceeding his instructions, but was shortly reinstated. The public believed that he had fired into the Gironde to compel its respect to our flag, and on this exaggerated report gave him the name “Tom of Ten Thousand.” Smith, who rose to high rank, but won no great personal distinction, presided over the court-martial which condemned Admiral Byng in 1757.

It may be added that the name “Tom of Ten Thousand” has been borne by several men, notably by Thomas Thynne of Longleat, who was so called on account of his wealth. He was murdered in Pall Mall in February 1682, by three assassins hired by Count Königsmark. The murder is realistically portrayed on his tomb in the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. Another “Tom of Ten Thousand” was Thomas Hudson, a native of Leeds, who lost a large fortune in the South Sea Scheme, and, becoming insane, wandered the streets of London for years, leaning on a crutch.

[14] These coincidences of residence seem to be overstated by Smith. It must have been after, not before, his visit to Italy, which he made in his 36th year, that Wilson took apartments in the Piazza on the north side of Covent Garden. He lived above the rooms of Cock, the auctioneer, who was followed by Langford, and later still by George Robins. Sir Peter Lely had lived in the same house from 1662 until his death in 1680, and here his collections were sold in 1667. Smith seems to be wrong about Kneller. This painter’s house had been on the east side of the Square, known as the Little Piazza. Its garden, stretching back to Bow Street, was the scene of the famous quarrel between Kneller and Dr. Ratcliffe. A tenant who did precede Wilson was Hogarth, who, though he did not reside at Cock’s, had exhibited here his “Mariage à la Mode” gratis, with a view to its sale.

Wilson had a model made of a portion of the Piazza, which he used as a receptacle for his implements. The rustic work of the piers was provided with drawers, and the openings of the arches held pencils and oil bottles. An unbending devotion to his Italian manner of painting (he so Italianised a view of Kew Gardens that George the Third failed to recognise it) and a rough temper brought this fine painter to humbler dwellings in Charlotte Street, Great Queen Street, and Foley Place; finally, to a room in Tottenham Street. His fortunes were mended at the last by his appointment as Librarian to the Royal Academy, and his succession to a small estate in Wales on the death of his brother.

[15] See a plate in the Lady’s Magazine of 1870, in which Miss Catley wears such elbow ruffles in the character of Rosetta in Love in a Village.

[16] The death of Molly Mogg was thus announced in the Gentleman’s Magazine: “Mrs. Mary Mogg, at Oakingham: she was the person on whom Gay wrote the song of ‘Molly Mogg.’” This song was first printed in Mist’s Weekly Journal of August 27, 1726, with a note stating that “it was writ by two or three men of wit (who have diverted the public both in prose and verse), upon the occasion of their lying at a certain inn at Ockingham, where the daughter of the house was remarkably pretty, and whose name is Molly Mogg.” These “men of wit” were supposed to have been Pope, Swift, and Gay, and it was believed that they had together concocted the song, but the weight of evidence is in favour of Gay’s sole authorship. There is, however, enough doubt to warrant one in holding to the pleasant tradition that the three poets, over their cups at the Rose Inn, made the song which began (original version):—

“Says my Uncle, I pray you discover

What has been the cause of your woes,

That you pine and you whine like a lover?

I’ve seen Molly Mog of the Rose.

Oh, Nephew! your grief is but folly,

In town you may find better prog;

Half a crown there will get you a Molly,

A Molly much better than Mog.

…

The school boys delight in a play-day,

The schoolmaster’s joy is to flog;

The milk-maid’s delight is in May day,

But mine is in sweet Molly Mog.”

[17] Finch’s Grotto Garden stood on the site now occupied by the headquarters of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. It was opened—six years before John Thomas Smith was born—on the strength of a spring in the grounds which a Dr. Townshend was willing to declare medicinal. Concerts and fireworks were given with fair success, and here “Tommy” Lowe accepted engagements after his failure in the management of Marylebone Gardens. The tavern was burnt down in May 1795, and was replaced by another called the “Goldsmith’s Arms,” afterwards styled the “Old Grotto New Reviv’d.” This tavern bore the inscription—

“Here Herbs did grow

And flowers sweet,

But now ’tis call’d

Saint George’s Street.”

All that is known about Finch’s Grotto is told by Mr. Warwick Wroth in his admirable London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century.

[18] This famous aid to the teething of children was invented about the year 1717, when there appeared a Philosophical Essay upon the Celebrated Anodyne Necklace, dedicated to Dr. Paul Chamberlen (who died in this year), and the Royal Society. This tract, quoted by Mr. J. Eliot Hodgkin in Notes and Queries of Feb. 16, 1884, argues the advantages of the necklace as follows:—

“For since the difficult Cutting of Children’s Teeth proceeds from the hard and strict Closure of their Gums; If you get Them but once separated and opened, the Teeth will of themselves Naturally come Forth; Now the Smooth Alcalious Atoms of the Necklace, by their insinuating figure and shape, do so make way for their Protrusion by gently softening and opening the hard swelled Gums, that the Teeth will of themselves without any difficulty or pain Cut and come out, as has been sufficiently proved.”

Mr. Hodgkin describes the necklace as “of beads artificially prepared, small, like barley-corns,” costing five shillings. An early depôt was Garraway’s at the Royal Exchange Gate. In Smith’s day they were sold in Long Acre by Mr. Burchell at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace, and the price was still “5s. single,” with “an allowance by the dozen to sell again.” Burchell advertised: “After the Wearing of which about their Neck but One night, Children have immediately cut their Teeth with Safety, who but just before were on the Brink of the Grave.”

[19] According to Daulby’s numbering.

[20] For some curious erudition on go-carts see Smith’s Life of Nollekens, where he says (1829 ed. i. 221): “When I was a boy, the go-cart was common in every toy-shop in London; but it was to be found in the greatest abundance in the once far-famed turners’ shop in Spinning-wheel Alley, Moorfields: a narrow passage leading from those fields to the spot upon which the original Bethlehem Hospital stood in Bishopsgate Street. In 1825-26, however, both Spinning-wheel Alley and Old Bethlehem were considerably altered and widened, and subsequently named Liverpool Street.”

[21] Hone says: “The late King George IV. and his brothers and sisters, all the royal family of George III., were rocked. The rocker was a female officer of the household, with a salary” (Every Day Book). Rocker cradles are to-day made in Ireland by villagers, and sold from door to door.

[22] Two artists, father and son, bore the name of Israel von Meckenen. They flourished in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and appear to have collaborated on some 250 prints. The British Museum has a fine set of their engravings.

[23] The stone inscribed “Here lies Nancy Dawson” no longer exists. M. Dorsay Ansell, the obliging keeper of the burial-grounds (now laid out as one recreation-ground) of St. George the Martyr and St. George’s, Bloomsbury, is frequently applied to for information as to its existence. Eighteen years ago, when these grounds were formed, careful search was made for interesting stones, and the gravestone of Zachary Macaulay, among others, was discovered by Mr. Ansell. That of Nancy Dawson was never found, but it may be buried out of sight.

Nancy Dawson is stated to have died at Haverstock Hill, May 27, 1767. Her portrait in oils still hangs in the Garrick Club, and the print-sellers are familiar with her figure in theatrical costume. She is believed to have been born about 1730, to have been the daughter of a Clare Market porter, and to have lived in poverty in St. Giles’s or in a Drury Lane cellar. The rather ill-supported narratives of her career speak, as does Smith, of her waiting on the skittle-players at a Marylebone tavern, which Mr. George Clinch thinks (Marylebone and St. Pancras) may have been the old “Rose of Normandy” in High Street.

Nancy Dawson’s fortune was made in 1759 in the Beggars’ Opera. The man who danced the hornpipe among the thieves happened to have fallen ill, and his place was taken by Nancy, who was then a rising young actress. From that moment her success was secure. Her real monument is the song beginning—

“Of all the girls in our town,

The black, the fair, the red, the brown,

That dance and prance it up and down,

There’s none like Nancy Dawson!

Her easy mien, her shape so neat,

She foots, she trips, she looks so sweet,

Her ev’ry motion’s so complete,

I die for Nancy Dawson!”

[24] Musgrave’s note continues: “Whom she deserted upon his discovering that she had an intrigue with the exciseman of that district.”

[25] Rubens’s beautiful second wife, Helena Fourment, who was only sixteen when he married her. She is the subject of not a few of his pictures.

[26] Nollekens, the sculptor, highly approved of puddings for children, and would say, “Ay, now, what’s your name?” “Mrs. Rapworth, sir.” “Well, Mrs. Rapworth, you have done right; I wore a pudding when I was a little boy, and all my mother’s children wore puddings.”

[27] The parent of the Royal Academy, as an exhibiting body, was the Foundling Hospital in Guilford Street. A number of painters, including Hogarth, Reynolds, Richard Wilson, and Gainsborough, agreed to present pictures to Captain Coram’s charity. These were shown with such success, that the possibility of holding remunerative exhibitions was perceived, and in 1760 a free exhibition was opened in the rooms of the Society of Arts. In following years exhibitions were held in Spring Gardens. In 1765 the “Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain” obtained its charter; but disputes arose, and three years later twenty or more painters successfully petitioned George III. to establish the “Royal Academy of Arts in London.” So many of the original members of the Royal Academy are mentioned by Smith, that it will be useful to insert their names. They were all nominated by George III.:

A year and a day after the foundation of the Royal Academy, it was resolved: “There shall be a new order, or rank of members, to be called Associates of the Royal Academy.” Of the first twenty Associates, the following are mentioned in the Rainy Day: Richard Cosway, John Bacon, James Wyatt, Joseph Nollekens, James Barry (all of whom were afterwards R.A.’s); and Antonio Zucchi, Michael Angelo Rooker, and Biagio Rebecca.

The first Royal Academy exhibition was opened to the public in Pall Mall “immediately east of where the United Service Club now stands” (Wheatley) on the 26th of April, 1769. Two years later, the King assigned rooms in Somerset House to the Academy, but his offer was not utilised until the new Somerset House was ready, in 1780. Here the annual exhibitions were held for fifty-eight years. The Academicians then migrated to the eastern half of the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square. In 1869 the removal to Burlington House was made. The history of the rise and progress of the Royal Academy, which Smith wished might have been undertaken by its secretary, Henry Howard, R.A., has been written very fully by William Sandby, and again recently by the late J. E. Hodgson, R.A., and Mr. F. A. Eaton in collaboration.

[28] In this riot in St. George’s Fields, five or six people were killed by the Guards, and about fifteen wounded.

[29] Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) had come to London in 1763. On presenting himself before Sir Joshua Reynolds, the following dialogue occurred: “How long have you studied in Italy?” “I never studied in Italy—I studied in Zurich—I am a native of Switzerland—do you think I should study in Italy? and, above all, is it worth while?” “Young man, were I the author of these drawings, and were I offered ten thousand a year not to practise as an artist, I would reject the proposal with contempt.”

[30] Dr. John Armstrong, whose poem, “The Art of Preserving Health,” was long famous, is now best remembered as the author of a few stanzas in Thomson’s Castle of Indolence describing the morbid effects of indolence. Haydon writes of Fuseli: “He swore roundly, a habit which he told me he contracted from Dr. Armstrong.”

[31] Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, decided several cases arising out of Wilkes’s libels: his reply to Lord North’s extraordinary letter was the only one he could make. In spite of Wilkes’s easy victory at the poll, the House of Commons declared that Colonel Luttrell ought to have been elected, and his name was substituted for Wilkes’s in the return, a proceeding which inflamed the situation.

[32] Henry William Bunbury stands apart from his fellow-caricaturists as a wealthy amateur. He was the second son of the Rev. Sir William Bunbury, Bart., of Great Barton, Suffolk, and married Catherine Horneck, the “Little Comedy” of Goldsmith. Bretherton was an engraver and printseller in Bond Street. He engraved nearly all Bunbury’s drawings, and it was said that he alone could do so with good effect.

[33] For almost a century the exodus of the London citizens to the outlying country was considered fair game for satire. Bunbury’s caricature of 1772 only records the humours which Robert Lloyd had touched in “The Cit’s Country Box,” printed in No. 135 of the Connoisseur.

“The trav’ler with amazement sees

A temple, Gothic or Chinese,

With many a bell and tawdry rag on,

And crested with a sprawling dragon.

A wooden arch is bent astride

A ditch of water four feet wide;

With angles, curves, and zigzag lines,

From Halfpenny’s exact designs.

In front a level lawn is seen,

Without a shrub upon the green;

Where taste would want its first great law,

But for the skulking sly Ha-Ha;

By whose miraculous assistance

You gain a prospect two fields distance.

And now from Hyde Park Corner come

The gods of Athens and of Rome:

Here squabby Cupids take their places,

With Venus and the clumsy graces;

Apollo there, with aim so clever,

Stretches his leaden bow for ever.”

Even Cowper saw little but absurdity in the demand for villas and “summer-houses.”

“Suburban villas, highway-side retreats,

That dread th’ encroachment of our growing streets,

Tight boxes neatly sash’d, and in a blaze

With all a July sun’s collected rays,

Delight the citizen, who, gasping there,

Breathes clouds of dust, and calls it country air.”

Horace Smith, Lord Byron, and Thomas Hood all touched more or less satirically on this subject.

[34] There is a confusion here. Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting deals only with Jonathan Richardson the elder (1665-1745), portrait painter and critic; Smith refers to his son (1694-1771). The two were greatly attached to each other. There was a story that they sketched each other’s faces every day. Old Richardson, who wrote a treatise on Paradise Lost, was able to study the classics only through his son, on whom he doted. Hogarth made a caricature, which he suppressed, of the father using his son as a telescope to read the writers of Greece and Rome. W. H. Pyne says of Old Richardson in Wine and Walnuts: “He seldom rambled city-ways, though sometimes he stepped in at the ‘Rainbow,’ where he counted a few worthies, or looked in at Dick’s and gave them a note or two. He would not put his foot on the threshold of the ‘Devil,’ however, for he thought the sign profane. Fielding would run a furlong to escape him; he called him Doctor Fidget.”

[35] The milkmaids’ chief haunt was Islington, whence hundreds of them carried the milk into London every morning. In his print “Evening,” the scene of which is laid outside the “Middleton Head,” Hogarth has an Islington milkmaid milking a cow, and in his “Enraged Musicians,” a milkmaid with her cry of Milk Belouw contributes to the town noises. The “garlands of massive plate” which the milkmaids carried round on May Day were borrowed of pawnbrokers on security. One pawnbroker, says Hone, was particularly resorted to. He let his plate at so much per hour, under bond from housekeepers for its safe return. In this way one set of milkmaids would hire the garland from ten o’clock till one, and another from one till six, and so on during the first three days of May. These customs had all but passed away when Smith wrote his Rainy Day, but long after the milkmaids had ceased to celebrate the London May Day the chimney-sweepers brought out their Jacks-in-the-green, specimens of which have been seen in the streets in the last twenty years. In 1825, Hone speaks of the dances round the “garland” as a “lately disused custom.”

[36] The boxes and pavilions at Vauxhall were decorated with paintings at the suggestion of Hogarth, who permitted his “Four Times of the Day” to be copied by Francis Hayman. He also presented Tyers with a picture from his own hand, “Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn,” receiving in acknowledgment a gold ticket inscribed “In perpetuam Beneficii memoriam,” and giving admission to “a coachfull” of people. The Vauxhall paintings chiefly represented sports and sentimental scenes. Among Hayman’s works were, “The Game of Quadrille,” “Children Playing at Shuttlecock,” “Leap Frog,” “Falstaff’s Cowardice Detected,” etc. In November 1841, twenty-four of these pictures, all in a dirty condition, were sold in the Gardens at prices varying from 30s. to £10.

[37] Marcellus Lauron, or Laroon (1653-1702), was born at the Hague, and came to London, where he painted draperies for Sir Godfrey Kneller and executed his “Cryes of London,” engraved by Tempest. His son, Captain Marcellus Lauron, or Laroon, was soldier, artist, and actor, and a friend of Hogarth.

[38] Probably Dr. George Armstrong, brother of Dr. John Armstrong, author of the poem, “The Art of Preserving Health.”

[39] In Smith’s boyhood the “Queen’s Head and Artichoke” was a rural tavern and tea-garden in Marylebone Park, quarter of a mile north of the New Road, now Marylebone Road. The Marylebone Gardens were in decline, and their place was taken by three smaller resorts, the “Queen’s Head and Artichoke,” the “Jew’s Harp,” and the “Yorkshire Stingo.” The two first-named places were connected by a zigzag path known as Love Lane. In his Nollekens Smith has this choice morsel: “Mrs. Nollekens made it a rule to allow one servant—as they kept two—to go out on the alternate Sunday; for it was Mrs. Nollekens’ opinion that if they were never permitted to visit the ‘Jew’s Harp,’ ‘Queen’s Head and Artichoke,’ or Chalk Farm, they never would wash theirselves.” The site of the “Artichoke” was covered by Decimus Burton’s Colosseum.

[40] The “Jew’s Harp,” dubiously explained as a corruption of jeu trompe, i.e. toy-trumpet, stood near the lower portion of the Broad Walk in Regent’s Park. Its arbours and tea-garden were long an attraction to the London youth. Here Arthur Onslow, when Speaker, was accustomed to sit in an evening smoking his pipe, and sharing in the tavern talk. The landlord’s discovery that his guest was the Speaker of the House of Commons cost him his customer, for when Onslow found himself received at the “Jew’s Harp” with ceremony, he discontinued his visits.

[41] This farm in the possession of Thomas Willan was taken by order of the Treasury for the formation of Regent’s Park in 1794. It contained about 288 acres.

[42] Marylebone Gardens had their main entrance in High Street, Marylebone, and extended eastward to Harley Street.

[43] Richard Kendall’s farm, comprising about 133 acres, was absorbed in Regent’s Park.

[44] The “Green Man” (rebuilt) stands east of Portland Road, Metropolitan Railway Station, on the site of the “Farthing Pie House,” at which scraps of mutton put into a crust were sold for a farthing. The rural state of this neighbourhood, and the regrets which the spread of London awakened, are set forth in Dr. Ducarel’s speech in the chapter, “Nothing to Eat,” in Ephraim Hardcastle’s (William Henry Pyne’s) delightful Wine and Walnuts:—

“‘Verily I cannot get this mighty street out of my head,’ said the Doctor. ‘And then there is the new park—what do you call it? Mary-le-bone—no, the Regent’s Park: it seems to be an elegant, well-planned place, methinks, and will have a fine effect, no doubt, with its villas and what not, when the shrubs and trees have shot up a little. But I shall not live to see it, and I care not; for I remember those fields in their natural, rural garb, covered with herds of kine, when you might stretch across from old Willan’s farm there, a-top of Portland Street, right away without impediment to Saint John’s Wood, where I have gathered blackberries when a boy—which pretty place, I am sorry to see, these brick-and-mortar gentry have trenched upon. Why, Ephraim, you metropolitans will have half a day’s journey, if you proceed at this rate, ere you can get a mouthful of fresh air. Where the houses are to find inhabitants, and, when inhabited, where so many mouths are to find meat, must be found out by those who come after.’”

[45] Smith seems to have understated the facts. James Easton, the author of a curious work, entitled “Human Longevity, recording the name, age, place of residence, and year of the decease of 1712 persons, who attained a century and upwards, from A.D. 66 to 1799, etc.” (Salisbury, 1799), enumerates sixty-one cases in this year as against Smith’s forty-eight. He gives the following particulars of the three cases named by Smith:—

“Mrs. Keithe—133, of Newnham, Gloucestershire. She, lived moderately, and retained her senses till within fourteen days of her death. She left three daughters, the eldest aged one hundred and eleven; the second one hundred and ten; the youngest one hundred and nine. Also seven great, and great great grandchildren.

“Mr. Rice—115, of Southwark, cooper.

“Mrs. Chun—138, near Litchfield, Staffordshire; resided in the same house one hundred and three years. By frequent exercise, and temperate living, she attained so great longevity. She left one son and two daughters, the youngest upwards of one hundred years.”

[46] According to one story, Mother Damnable was Jinney, the daughter of a Kentish Town brick-maker, named Jacob Bingham. After living with a marauder named Gipsy George, who was hanged for sheep-stealing, Jinney passed from the protection of one criminal to another, until she was left a lonesome and embittered woman. She lived in her own cottage, built on waste land by her father, and abused everyone.

“’Tis Mother Damnable! that monstrous thing,

Unmatch’d by Macbeth’s wayward women’s ring.

For cursing, scolding, fuming, flinging fire

I’ the face of madam, lord, knight, gent, cit, squire.”

The story went that on the night of her death hundreds of persons saw the Devil enter her house. On the site rose the inn which bore her portrait as its sign. Smith’s mention of the terror with which it was regarded may have reference to its loneliness and gruesome traditions. In his own day the inn was a pleasant resort. “Then the old Mother Red Cap was the evening resort of worn-out Londoners, and many a happy evening was spent in the green fields round about the old wayside houses by the children of poorer classes. At that time the Dairy, at the junction of the Hampstead and Kentish Town roads, was not the fashionable building it is now, but with forms for the pedestrians to rest on, they served out milk fresh from the cow to all who came” (John Palmer, St. Pancras). This dairy, so long a landmark to North Londoners, has just disappeared in favour of a “Tube” railway station.

[47] This curious work may still be seen in Little Denmark Street, where its forty or fifty writhing figures, incrusted with grime, look at a little distance like some ordinary floral design. The original “Resurrection Gate” was erected about the year 1687, in accordance with an order of the vestry. The bill of expenses is extant, and its terms were contributed by Dr. Rimbault to Notes and Queries of June 23, 1864, showing the cost to have been £185, 14s. 6d., of which £27 was paid for the carving to an artist named Love. In 1900, the present Tuscan gate in Little Denmark Street was erected with the old carving inserted.

[48] Probably Charles Harriot Smith, the architect, who was at first a stone-carver. He died in 1864.

[49] The Reverend James Bean was Vicar of Olney, Buckinghamshire, and assistant librarian at the British Museum. He died in 1826, and was buried in St. George’s, Bloomsbury, burial-ground.

[50] Strype says these almshouses bore the inscription, “St. Giles’s Almshouse, anno domini 1656.” They were removed in 1782.

[51] Originally Queen Anne’s Square and now Queen Anne’s Gate.

[52] The Pound stood, as Smith indicates, in the broad space where St. Giles High Street, Tottenham Court Road, and Oxford Street met; it was removed in 1765.

[53] This song, entitled “Just the Thing,” is valuable as a portrait of the eighteenth-century “hooligan,” ancestor of Mr. Clarence Rook’s nineteenth century “Alf” in Hooligan Nights:—

“On Newgate steps Jack Chance was found,

And bred up near St. Giles’s Pound,

My story is true, deny it who can,

By saucy, leering Billingsgate Nan.

Her bosom glowed with heartfelt joy

When first she held the lovely boy.

Then home the prize she straight did bring,

And they all allow’d he was just the thing.

At twelve years old, I have been told,

The youth was sturdy, stout, and bold;

He learn’d to curse, to swear, and fight,

And everything but read and write.

But when he came to man’s estate,

His mind it ran on something great,

A-thieving then he scorn’d to tramp;

So hir’d a pad and went on the scamp.

At clubs he all Flash Soup did sing.

And they all allow’d he was just the thing.

His manual exercise gone through,

Of Bridewell, Pump, and Horse Pond too,

His back had often felt the smart

Of Tyburn strings at the tail of a cart.

He stood the patter, but that’s no matter,

He gammon’d the Twelve, and work’d on the water,

Then a pardon he got from his gracious King,

And swaggering Jack was just the thing.

Like a captain bold, well arm’d for war.

With bludgeon stout, or iron bar,

At heading a mob, he never did fail,

At burning a mass-house, or gutting a jail;

But a victim he fell to his country’s laws,

And died at last in religion’s cause.

No Popery! made the blade to swing,

And when tuck’d up he was just the thing.”

[54] Mr. George Clinch, in his Marylebone and St. Pancras, says that there is some reason to think that a portion at least of Capper’s farm still remains. A large furniture establishment at Nos. 195-198, Tottenham Court Road, exhibits on a wall in the rear two tablets marking the boundary of St. Pancras and St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and bearing eighteenth-century dates. An old lease of the property, Mr. Clinch adds, contains a clause binding the tenant to keep stabling for forty head of cattle, and it is known that the premises were once used as a large livery stable.

[55] Hanway Street now boasts only one milliner, but has several art and curiosity shops of the kind Smith loved. The “Blue Posts” (rebuilt) is still at the corner of Hanway Street. Mr. Joshua Sturges’ book, published in 1800, was on draughts, not chess. It was entitled Guide to the Game of Draughts, and was dedicated by permission to the Prince of Wales. It has an engraved frontispiece, “Figure of the Draught Table.”

Sturges was probably not buried, as Smith states, in the Hampstead Road, but in St. Pancras cemetery (see Notes and Queries, Series II. x. 64). Lovers of draughts may be glad to have a copy of his epitaph. It ran thus: “Sacred to the Memory of Mr. Joshua Sturges. Many years a Respectable licensed Victualler in this Parish; who departed this Life the 12th of August, 1813. Aged 55 years. He was esteemed for the many excellent Qualities he possessed, and his desire to improve the Minds, as also to benefit the Trade of his Brother Victuallers. His Genius was also eminently displayed to create innocent and rational amusement to Mankind, in the Production of his Treatise on the difficult game of Draughts, which Treatise received the Approbation of his Prince, and many other Distinguished Characters. In private Life he was mild and unassuming; in his public capacity neither the love of Interest or domestic ease, could separate this faithful Friend from the Society of which he was a Member, in the performance of Duties which his Mind deemed Paramount to all others. His example was worthy of Imitation in this World. May his Virtues be rewarded in the next. Peace to his Soul, and respected be his Memory.”

[56] Goodge Street (named after a Marylebone property owner) still retains some of its original houses, but no house whose ground floor has not been converted into a shop. Windmill Street, on the other hand, is a quaint little street of artificers in wood and metal, instrument makers, etc., many of its houses remaining in their first state, with forecourts. The rural traditions of this street are supported at No. 40 by a vine, bearing bunches of unripened grapes in August 1903. Colvill Court is now called Colvill Place, but it is essentially a court. The name Gresse’s Gardens (after the father of Alexander Gresse the water-colour painter) survives in Gresse Street, a queer little dusty, dusky byway, easy to enter from Rathbone Place, but difficult to quit at its southern end by Tudor Place. Here His Majesty’s mail vans are stabled.

[57] This pond is plainly marked also in Rocque’s map of 1745. Considering its interesting name, it has obtained singularly little mention by topographers.

[58] Whitefield built his chapel—in 1756, not 1754—on land leased for seventy-one years from General Fitzroy. He opened it on November 7th of the same year, preaching a sermon from the text, “Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” A house for the minister and twelve almshouses were added, and the chapel enlarged. Whitefield proposed to be buried in its vaults, and told to his congregation, “Messrs. John and Charles Wesley shall also be buried there. We will all lie together.” All three were buried elsewhere, but Mrs. Whitefield was buried here: her remains and those of all other persons, except Augustus Toplady, were removed to Chingford cemetery when the present building was begun. A remarkable monument was that to John Bacon, R.A., the sculptor, with its impressive inscription: “What I was as an artist seemed to me of some importance while I lived, but what I really was, as a believer in Jesus Christ, is the only thing of importance to me now.” After a serious fire in 1857, the original brick building was altered out of knowledge, and was finally demolished in 1889. For some years an iron chapel and an appeal for subscriptions occupied the ground. In 1892 the present ornately fronted chapel, inscribed “Whitefield Memorial,” was built. In 1903, the present minister, the Reverend C. Silvester Horne, received “recognition” as the thirteenth minister in succession to Whitefield.

[59] More correctly, Crab and Walnut Tree Field.

[60] Smith makes a slip in locating the historic fight between Broughton and Slack in April 1750, at the “Adam and Eve” tavern. It took place in Broughton’s own Amphitheatre near Adam and Eve Court in the Oxford Road. Smith correctly states the position of this Amphitheatre in his Antient Topography of London (1810): “Broughton’s Amphitheatre is still standing; it is at the south-west corner of Castle Street, Wells Street; the lower part is a coal shed, the upper a stage for timber.” Its site is now occupied by No. 62 Castle Street East, close to Adam and Eve Court.

Here it was that the founder of the modern prize-ring, whose “Broughton rules” were observed everywhere until 1838, met disaster in his fight with the plucky Norwich butcher. The result was his retirement from the ring, and the loss by his backer, the Duke of Cumberland, of a bet of £10,000. In his later years, Broughton lived in Walcot Place, Lambeth, where he died, aged 85. He was buried in Lambeth Church. A monument to him in the West Walk of the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey describes him as “Yeoman of the Guard”; and it is stated in the Dictionary of National Biography that a place among the Yeomen was obtained for him by the Duke of Cumberland. In his Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, Dean Stanley says: “After his name on the gravestone is a space, which was to have been filled up with the words ‘Champion of England.’ The Dean objected, and the blank remains.” But the blank does not remain. It was filled in 1832 with the names of Roger Monk, another Yeoman of the Guard, and his wife. It is worthy of note, too, that the earliest name on the tablet is that of Broughton’s wife, Elizabeth, who was actually buried here.

[61] See note [p. 105].

[62] Fischer had the further distinction of being married to a daughter of J. T. S., whose other daughter married a Mr. Smith, a sculptor.

[63] Gooseberry Fair followed the suppressed Tottenham Fair. Both were held in and about the Adam and Eve Tavern. Richard Yates and Ned Shuter appeared together at various London fairs.

[64] Charles Fleetwood threw Drury Lane into confusion both behind and before the scenes, by his unpunctual payment of salaries, and by attempting to introduce pantomimes against the wishes of the old play-goers. This led to noisy scenes in 1744, in one of which Horace Walpole stigmatised Fleetwood as “an impudent rascal” from his box, and was embarrassed by the enthusiastic approval of the audience.

[65] The exact site of the famous Footsteps is not easily determined. Dr. Rimbault (Notes and Queries, February 2, 1850) says that it was reputed to be “at the extreme termination of the north-east end of Upper Montague Street.” It is placed a little farther west by Robert Hill, the water-colour painter, who stated in a letter, quoted by Mr. Wheatley in his London: “I well remember the Brothers’ Footsteps. They were near a bank that divided two of the fields between Montague House and the New Road, and their situation must have been, if my recollection serves me, what is now Torrington Square.” Smith says the Footsteps were “on the site of Mr. Martin’s chapel, or nearly so.” Mr. John Martin, the Baptist minister, had the chapel in Keppel Street. It still exists. This brings the Footsteps a few yards south, but Smith’s indefiniteness must be taken into account. That these markings were visible as late as 1800 is proved by the following entry in the Commonplace Book of Joseph Moser: “June 16th, 1800. Went into the fields at the back of Montague House, and there saw, for the last time, the Forty Footsteps: the building materials are there to cover them from the sight of man.” The feeling with which these curious marks were regarded by educated people may be judged by a letter quoted in the Gentleman’s Magazine of December 1804, in which the writer expresses his conviction that “the Almighty has ordered it as a standing monument of his great displeasure of the horrid sin of duelling,” an opinion in which the poet Southey concurred. In 1828, Miss Jane Porter published her novel, The Field of the Forty Footsteps.

[66] Nearly a hundred years later, a similar superstition survived in London, and is thus noted by Brand in his Popular Antiquities: “In the Morning Post, Monday, May 2nd, 1791, it was mentioned ‘that yesterday, being the first of May, according to annual and superstitious custom, a number of persons went into the fields and bathed their faces with the dew on the grass, under the idea that it would render them beautiful.’”

[67] The occasion was a dinner at Tom Davies’s in 1762. “Boswell: Does not Gray’s poetry, sir, tower above the common mark? Johnson: Yes, sir; but we must attend to the difference between what men in general cannot do if they would, and what every man may do if he would. Sixteen-string Jack towered above the common mark.” Dr. William Bell, whom Rann robbed, was Rector of Christ Church, London, 1780-99, and treasurer of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

[68] Probably a mistake. These nosegays were given to condemned criminals on their way to Tyburn by the St. Sepulchre authorities. Rann was one of the last to receive the gift.

[69] Saunders Welch, the father of Mrs. Nollekens, was educated in Aylesbury workhouse, and for many years was a grocer in Museum Street, then Queen Street. He succeeded Fielding as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster. Smith says in his Nollekens that he met many people who recollected seeing him as High Constable of Westminster, “dressed in black, with a large, nine-storey George the Second’s wig highly powdered, with long flowing curls over his shoulder, a high three-cornered hat, and his black baton tipped with silver at either end, riding on a white horse to Tyburn with the malefactors.” A long and warm friendship existed between Saunders Welch and Dr. Johnson. “Johnson, who had an eager and unceasing curiosity to know human life in all its variety, told me that he attended Mr. Welch in his office for a whole winter, to hear the examinations of the culprits” (Boswell).

[70] To-day, High Street, Marylebone, is perhaps the most perfect High Street left in London. Neither from its north end in Marylebone Road nor from Oxford Street does it receive heavy traffic; its shops exist for the fine streets and squares around it, and it offers them the best of most things, from a tender chicken to a county history.

[71] “In the year 1741, the old church in which Hogarth has introduced his “Rake at the Altar with the Old Maid” was taken down, and the present one built on its site; so that the writers who have stated that the scene took place in the present edifice must acknowledge their error, if they will take the trouble to refer to Hogarth’s fifth plate of the Rake’s Progress, where they will find its publication to have taken place June 25, 1735.”—S.

[72] Probably Christopher Norton, of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy.

[73] Tradition reports that from Elizabeth it came to the Forsyths, and thence to the Duke of Portland. In his Marylebone and St. Pancras, Mr. Clinch writes: “In the year 1703 a large school was established here by Mr. De la Place. That gentleman’s daughter married the Rev. John Fountayne, Rector of North Sidmouth, in Wiltshire, and the latter succeeded Mr. De la Place in the school. The school is said to have obtained a considerable reputation among the nobility and gentry, whose sons there received an educational training previously to their removal to the universities.”

[74] “Mr. Fountayne had one son, afterwards Dean of York, and three daughters, viz. Mrs. Hargrave, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Metz. Mrs. Hargrave was lately living; she was the wife of Counsellor Hargrave, and was esteemed a great beauty. Another daughter of Monsieur De la Place married the Rev. Mr. Dyer, brother to the author of Grongar Hill, to whose nephew, the late Mr. Dyer, the printseller, I am obliged for some parts of the above information.”—S.

[75] Reproduced in Mr. Clinch’s Marylebone and St. Pancras (1890).

[76] Michael Angelo Rooker (1743-1801), the water-colour painter and engraver. “His works are drawn with conscientious accuracy, and show a sweet pencil” (Redgrave). He died March 3, 1801, in Dean Street, Soho, and was buried in the ground belonging to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, in the Kentish Town Road. Examples of his work are hung at South Kensington.

[77] The wonderful extra-illustrated copy presented to the Museum by John Charles Crowle, and valued at £5000.

[78] That is to say tiled.

[79] The Rev. John Fountayne was more than “noticed” by Handel; the two men were intimate. A grandson of Fountayne wrote in 1832: “One evening as my grandfather and Handel were walking together and alone, a new piece was struck up by the band. ‘Come, Mr. Fountayne,’ said Handel, ‘let us sit down and listen to this piece—I want to know your opinion of it.’ Down they sat, and after some time the old parson, turning to his companion, said, ‘It is not worth listening to—it’s very poor stuff.’ ‘You are right, Mr. F.,’ said Handel, ‘it is very poor stuff—I thought so myself when I had finished it.’ The old gentleman, being taken by surprise, was beginning to apologise; but Handel assured him there was no necessity; that the music was really bad, having been composed hastily, and his time for the production limited; and that the opinion given was as correct as it was honest” (Hone’s Year Book). “Clarke” was doubtless Dr. Adam Clarke, the Wesleyan, who died in Bayswater in 1832, and was well known for his bibliographical and theological works.

[80] Lady Harrington might well lend her jewels, since she often borrowed. Horace Walpole tells how, at the Coronation of George III., she appeared “covered with all the diamonds she could borrow, hire, or seize, with the air of Roxana, the finest figure at a distance.”

[81] The great actress. She played Violante to Garrick’s Don Felix in the actor’s last appearance.

[82] In his Memoirs, the Rev. John Trusler, who was educated at Dr. Fountayne’s school, does not spare Mrs. Fountayne’s tuft-hunting tendencies. In one instance she was covered with ridicule through the action of a Soho pastry-cook named Jenkins, who, wishing his son to enter the school, arranged that he should do so under the name of the Prince De Chimmay. When Mrs. Fountayne discovered that his father made tarts a mile from the school door, “she had the laugh so much against her, that she could not show her face for months.”

[83] The Royal College of Physicians, then housed in Warwick Lane.

[84] Norfolk Street was the northern continuation of Newman Street; it is now merged in Cleveland Street.

[85] John Baptist Locatelli, a native of Verona, had his studio in Union Street, Tottenham Court Road, from 1776. He was befriended by Horace Walpole, with whom he quarrelled bitterly over a group representing Theseus offering assistance to Hercules. Walpole refused to take this work, although he had already paid the sculptor £350 on account, and was probably justified, since Nollekens said the group looked “like the dry skins of two brickmakers stuffed with clotted flocks from an old mattress.” Locatelli worked also for the brothers Adam, and he superintended the carving of the basso-relievos put up by Nollekens on the outside of the Sessions House, Clerkenwell Green. In 1796 he left England for Milan, where Buonaparte employed him and granted him a pension. (See Smith’s Life of Nollekens, 1829, pp. 119-123, and Thornbury’s British Artists, vol. ii. pp. 9-16).

[86] Wilson, upon whom a note has been given under the year 1766, lived at No. 36 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, within a few minutes’ walk of this group of elms. He was accustomed of a fine evening, says Redgrave, to throw open his window and invite his friends to enjoy with him the glowing sunset behind the Hampstead and Highgate hills. Fitzroy Square was not begun until 1790-94. To-day the miles between Charlotte Street and these northern heights are filled by streets. Nevertheless, Hampstead church can still be seen from Charlotte Street, piercing the northern distance, and, but for the slight deflection of Rathbone Place, it would be visible from Oxford Street. John Constable afterwards lived in the same street. The elms under which Wilson and Baretti walked must have had their roots in the ground on which the east side of Cleveland Street is built.

[87] It is difficult to form an idea of this instrument. It was beaten with a rolling-pin, and appears to have been used as a drum in such a way (according to the manner in which it was struck) as to produce something like notes. This is indicated in Bonnell Thornton’s burlesque, Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day, in which occur the well-known lines which amused Dr. Johnson:—

“In strains more exalted the salt-box shall join,

And clattering and battering and clapping combine;

With a rap and a tap while the hollow side sounds.

Up and down leaps the flap, and with rattling rebounds.”

The character of the neighbourhood round the “Farthing Pie House” (Portland Road Station) in Smith’s boyhood, may be judged by Smith’s statement in his Vagabondiana, that “when the sites of Portland Place, Devonshire Street, etc., were fields, the famous Tommy Lowe, then a singer at Mary-le-bone Gardens, raised a subscription, to enable an unfortunate man to run a small chariot, drawn by four muzzled mastiffs, from a pond near Portland Chapel, called Cockney Ladle, which supplied Mary-le-bone Bason with water, to the ‘Farthing Pie House’ … in order to accommodate children with a ride for a halfpenny.”

[88] By Queen Anne Street Smith means the street which has borne the successive names of Little Queen Anne Street, Queen Anne Street East, Foley Place, and (now) Langham Street. The present Queen Anne Street is on the west side of Portland Place; it was originally Great Queen Anne Street, then Queen Anne Street West. A curious interest attaches to these streets, neither of which runs, as it seems destined to do, into Portland Place. Thus:—

Their failure to run directly into Portland Place (see dotted lines) is a relic of Foley House which occupied the site of the Langham Hotel, and interposed its gardens where these streets would have joined. It was afterwards intended to build a Queen Anne Square at the foot of Great Portland Street, but this project fell through.

[89] There were many ponds in the fields on which the streets of St. Pancras and Marylebone are built. In an early view of Whitefield’s Tabernacle, a pond is delineated on a spot now covered, as nearly as may be judged, by Torrington Square. Farther west, on the site of Duke Street, Portland Place, was the Cockney Ladle, in which small boys bathed at the risk of having their clothes seized by the parish beadles. Close by this—on the site of the backs of the east side of Harley Street—was the Marylebone Basin, a dangerously deep water. Many drownings occurred in ponds of which no trace or memory remains. Thus, the St. James’s Chronicle of August 8, 1769, says: “Two young chairmen [i.e. carriers of sedan chairs] were unfortunately drowned on Friday Evening last, in a Pond behind the North-Side of Portman-Square. They had been beating a Carpet in the Square, and being thereby warm and dirty agreed to bathe in the above Pond, not being aware of its great Depth. The Man who first went in could swim, and while he was swimming his Companion went in, but being presently out of his Depth he sunk. The Swimmer immediately made to the Place to save his Companion; but he, coming up again under the Swimmer, laid fast hold of him, and they both sunk down together and were drowned.”

[90] “On Friday last, Mr. Carlile, a Quaker of about 17 years of age, had the misfortune to fall into Marylebone-Bason, and was drowned” (Daily Advertiser, June 18, 1744).

[91] And from their contiguity to a French Protestant chapel, founded in 1756.

[92] The difficulty of writing recent history is exemplified by Smith in his account of Marylebone Gardens, which is far excelled by Mr. Warwick Wroth’s chapter on Marylebone Gardens in his London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (1896). Fully to annotate Smith’s chronology of these gardens would require many pages, and the result would be unsatisfactory. I shall therefore deal with only the more prominent names he mentions.

[93] May 7, 1668.

[94] M. Wroth says: “In 1691 the place was known as Long’s Bowling Green at the Rose, and for several years (circ. 1679-1736) persons of quality might have been seen bowling there during the summer-time.

‘At the Groom Porters battered bullies play;

Some Dukes at Marybone bowl time away.’”

These lines, often erroneously attributed to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, occur in Pope’s The Basset-table, an Eclogue.

[95] Rockhoult, or Rockholt House, was at Leyton, in Essex, and was “for a short period an auxiliary place of amusement for the Summer to the established Theatres” (Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1814). It was opened about 1742, and was apparently regarded as “the place to spend a happy day.” A ballad to “Delia” exclaimed—

“Delia, in whose form we trace

All that can a virgin grace,

Hark where pleasure, blithe as May,

Bids us to Rockholt haste away.”

[96] “The principal shareholder and manager of Ranelagh at this date was Sir Thomas Robinson, Bart., M.P., whose gigantic form was for many years familiar to frequenters of the Rotunda; a writer of 1774 calls him its Maypole, and Garland of Delights. Robinson lived at Prospect Place, adjoining the gardens.”

[97] The New Wells belonged to the Islington group of pleasure gardens, and stood on ground now occupied by Lower Rosomon Street, Clerkenwell. It flourished 1737-50, and numbered a collection of rattlesnakes among its attractions.

[98] Cuper’s Gardens, a great resort. The Feathers Tavern at the end of Waterloo Bridge is the successor of the tavern originally in the gardens, the site of which is traversed by the Waterloo Road. They were closed in 1759, after which Dr. Johnson, passing them in a coach with Langton, Beauclerk, and Lady Sydney Beauclerk (mother of his friend), jokingly proposed, to Lady Sydney’s horror, that they should lease them: “She had no notion of a joke, sir; she had come late into life, and had a mighty unpliable understanding.”

[99] Advertised as “the Pariton, an instrument never played in publick before.”

[100] Mary Ann Falkner was a niece of George Falkner, the Dublin printer, whom Foote caricatured on the stage. She appeared at Marylebone from 1747 to about 1752, giving such songs as “Amoret and Phyllis,” “The Happy Couple,” and “The Faithful Lover.” Much sought after, she remained faithful to her husband, a linen draper named Donaldson, until his conduct threw her under the protection of the second Earl of Halifax.

[101] M. Wroth says, on good evidence, that Trusler became proprietor only in 1756.

[102] The career of young John Trusler, afterwards the Rev. Dr. Trusler, is interesting. Without a collegiate training, he took Holy Orders, and officiated as a curate in London. His eye for business revealed to him the possibilities of sermon-mongering, and he was soon making a respectable income by supplying clergymen all over the country with sermons in script characters. His operations became something of a scandal, and Cowper scourged him in “The Task”—

“He grinds divinity of other days

Down into modern use, transforms old print

To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes

Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.

Are there who purchase of the doctor’s ware?

Oh, name it not in Gath! It cannot be

That grave and learned clerks should need such aid.

He doubtless is in sport, and does but droll,

Assuming thus a rank unknown before—

Grand caterer and dry-nurse of the Church!”

Trusler also issued the morning and evening services so printed and punctuated as to indicate to incompetent readers how they should be delivered. Cowper writes—

“He teaches those to read, whom schools dismiss’d,

And colleges, untaught; sells accent, tone,

And emphasis in score, and gives to prayer

The adagio and andante it demands.”

Prospering at this business, Trusler set up a publishing establishment in Wardour Street, from which he issued manuals of all kinds, including his most respectable work, Hogarth Moralised, in which Mrs. Hogarth became a partner and collaborator. At the age of 85 he died in his villa at Englefield Green, Middlesex.

[103] Miss Trusler’s seed and plum cakes were famous. In a judgment on Mrs. Cornelys for keeping an objectionable house, Sir John Fielding sagely remarked that her Soho assemblies were unnecessary, having regard to the many attractions elsewhere, such as “Ranelagh with its music and fireworks, and Marylebone Gardens, with music, wine, and plum-cake.”

[104] The arrival of three Cherokee Indian chiefs in the spring of 1762 roused the liveliest interest in London. These braves came over in token of friendship after the ratification of a treaty of peace at Charlestown, South Carolina. They were well-made men, six feet in height, and were dressed, says the Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1762), “in their own country habit with only a shirt, trousers, and mantle round them; their faces are painted of a copper colour, and their heads adorned with shells, feathers, ear-rings, and other trifling ornaments. They neither of them can speak to be understood, and very unfortunately lost their interpreter in their passage. A house is taken for them in Suffolk Street, and cloaths have been given them in the English fashion.” Among the thousands of Londoners who went to see the “Cherokee Kings” was Oliver Goldsmith.

[105] By an indenture dated August 30, 1763. This document, which Smith’s namesake Thomas Smith quoted in his History of the Parish of Marylebone, shows that the Gardens were attached to the Rose Tavern, and that they contained walks, statuary, boxes, benches, and musical appliances and books. Lowe’s lease was for fourteen years at the annual rent of £170.

[106] Not the well-known Stephen Storace (who was born only in this year), but his father, a Neapolitan, described by George Hogarth as “a good performer on the double bass in the band of the Opera House.”

[107] Nan Catley won hearts by her breezy manner and air of camaraderie. Hers “was the singing of unequalled animal spirits; it was Mrs. Jordan’s comedy carried into music.… She was bold, volatile, audacious” (Boaden: Life of Mrs. Siddons).

[108] Long before this, Dick Turpin had appeared in the Garden itself, and had surprised Mrs. Fountayne, the wife of the Marylebone schoolmaster, with a kiss. He impudently remarked, “Be not alarmed, madam; you can now boast that you have been kissed by Dick Turpin. Good-morning!”

[109] Lowe was now glad to obtain singing engagements at Sadler’s Wells and other tea-gardens. His career from riches to poverty is illustrated in the story, told by John Taylor in his Records of My Life, that, soon after becoming master of Marylebone Gardens, he was seen riding thither in his chariot with a large iron trunk behind it, which he explained he had purchased “to place the profits of the Gardens in.” Taylor adds that he had last seen Lowe in a lane near Aldersgate Street, coming out of a butcher’s shop, with some meat in a checked handkerchief.

[110] An editorial note in the third edition of the Rainy Day suggests that this name was made popular by Prior’s “Chloe.” This seems probable, for Prior gave all the vogue of an ideal to this woman, who, in real life, was the wife of a coachman in Long Acre, and was described by Johnson as “a despicable drab of the lowest species.”

[111] See note on Weston, [p. 208].

[112] Charles Bannister, the vocalist and actor, father of the more famous John Bannister.

[113] Signor Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, born near Ancona in the first decade of the eighteenth century, composed numerous operas and oratorios. Of the former his La Serva Padrona was revived in London as late as 1873.

[114] Felix Giardini, a Piedmontese musician, came to England in 1750, and met with encouragement. He died in Russia in 1793. After hearing him play at Bath, Gainsborough bought his viol-di-gamba, but was soon disgusted to find that the music remained with the Italian. Horace Walpole was not enthusiastic about Giardini as a composer, and advised Mason to employ Handel to set his Sappho. “Your Act is classical Athenian; shall it be subdi-di-di-vi-vi-vi-ded into modern Italian?”

[115] Dr. Arnold’s appearance at Bow Street was in respect of a rocket-stick which had descended in the sacrosanct garden of Mrs. Fountayne.

[116] “To James Winston, Esq. [secretary to the Garrick Club, and several times mentioned in the diary of John Payne Collier], I am obliged for the above notices; indeed, to that gentleman’s disinterested indulgence I am also indebted for many other curious particulars introduced in this work, selected from his most extensive and valuable library of English Theatrical Biography, both in manuscript and in print, a collection formed by himself during the last thirty years.”—S.

[117] “Torré was a printseller in partnership with the late Mr. Thane, and lived in Market Lane, Haymarket.”—S.

[118] Dr. William Kenrick, the rampageous critic and playwright. His comedy The Duellist is his best-remembered work. In July 1774 he began a course of lectures in the “Theatre for Burlettas” at Marylebone Gardens, which he termed “a School of Shakespeare,” an entertainment which he also gave at the Devil Tavern in Fleet Street. Kenrick attacked Dr. Johnson’s Shakespeare. On Goldsmith saying that he had never heard of Kenrick’s writings, the doctor replied: “Sir, he is one of the many who have made themselves public, without making themselves known.”

It is curious that Smith omits to mention Dr. Johnson’s rampageous visit to the Gardens to see Torré’s fireworks, with his friend George Steevens, the Shakesperian commentator. It may have taken place in this year, 1774.

[119] Robert Baddeley began his connection with the stage as cook to Foote. He was the original Moses in the School for Scandal. It was he who bequeathed £100 to provide the cake and wine which actors and journalists still consume on Twelfth Night. He is stated by Dr. Doran to have been the last actor to wear the royal livery of scarlet, which, as “His Majesty’s Servants,” the Drury Lane players were entitled to assume.

[120] A posthumous son of Henry Carey, author of “Sally in our Alley.” “Saville Carey I have heard sometimes touch Nan Catley’s manner feebly in the famous triumph of her hilarity, ‘Push about the Jorum’” (Boaden: Life of Mrs. Siddons). His worthless daughter, Nance Carey, bore to one Kean, a tailor, or a builder, a child whom she neglected and abandoned. This boy became Edmund Kean, the great actor (Doran’s Their Majestys’ Servants, vol. ii. pp. 523-26).

[121] These initials thinly disguise such well-known entertainers as Garrick, Bannister, Mrs. Baddeley, and the singers Mr. Darley, Mr. Vernon, and Nan Catley, all of whom were imitated by the versatile Carey.

[122] As Abel Drugger, one of his finest parts.

[123] The “Forge of Vulcan” was Signor Torré’s masterpiece; in it appeared Venus and Cupid in dialogue, in more or less relevant circumstances of flame and lava.

[124] Fantoccino, the Italian puppet-entertainment, was introduced to France by an Italian named Marion (hence “marionettes”), and then into England. The great London Fantoi show of the eighteenth century was Flockton’s.

Breslaw, the conjurer, began his London appearances in 1772, in Cockspur Street. In 1774 he gave his entertainment on alternate days here and at the “King’s Arms” opposite the Royal Exchange. It is told of him while performing at Canterbury, he promised the Mayor that if the duration of his licence were extended he would give one night’s receipts to the poor. The Mayor agreed, and the conjurer had a full house. Hearing nothing further of the money, the Mayor called on Breslaw to inquire. The following dialogue ensued.

“Mr. Mayor, I have distributed the money myself.”

“Pray, sir, to whom?”

“To my own company, than whom none can be poorer.”

“This is a trick!”

“Sir, we live by tricks.”

[125] Baggio Rebecca, decorative painter, died in 1808. Of his election as Associate of the Royal Academy in 1771, Leslie says: “Academic advancement was rapid in those days. Every man who displayed the least ability was certain of election.” Rebecca had a small share in decorating the Royal Academy lecture-room at Somerset House.

[126] Most of these localities have ceased to be the resort of bird-fanciers. To-day the chief London quarters for song-birds are St. Giles’s, Leadenhall Market, and, above all, Sclater Street in Spitalfields, known as “Club Row.”

[127] The sights in this famous cockpit are recorded by Hogarth in his print of 1759, and by Rowlandson in Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808).

Bainbridge Street survives as a narrow lane behind New Oxford Street, leading from Dyott Street to the back of Meux’s brewery.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the cockpit behind Gray’s Inn (its exact locality is not easily discovered), enjoyed “the only vogue” (Hatton). Mr. William B. Boulton (The Amusements of Old London, 1901) quotes a description of it by Von Uffenbach, a German traveller, who says it was specially built for the sport.

Pickled-Egg Walk, afterwards Crawford’s Passage (now Crawford Passage, Ray Street, Clerkenwell), was named after the proprietor of the Pickled-Egg Tavern, who brought from the West of England a recipe for pickled eggs and supplied this novel cate to his customers. Pink mentions a tradition that Charles II. once paused here in a suburban journey and ate a pickled egg. The mains fought at the cockpit here were regularly advertised in the newspapers.

Charles Hughes and Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, opened the “Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy” in 1782.

Cock-fighting was made illegal in 1849, but a statement in Cocking and its Votaries (1895), by S. A. T. (for private circulation), makes it quite manifest that “not a few wealthy men in England still follow up this sport, stealthily but with much zeal—a fact that is as discreditable to the guardians of the law as it is to themselves.” I quote Mr. J. Charles Cox in his admirable edition of Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes (1903).

[128] Behind this formal entry lies the most affecting farewell scene ever enacted on a London stage. The doors of Drury Lane Theatre were opened at “half after five” on that evening of June 10, 1776, and the profits of the performance were announced to be given to the Theatrical Fund. It was but the last of a series of farewell nights in which Garrick had played his great parts for the last time to densely crowded houses. As Mr. Percy Fitzgerald says: “Other actors retire in one night, Garrick’s departure filled a whole season and only culminated on this last night.” “Last night,” he wrote, “I played Abel Drugger for the last time. I thought the audience were cracked, and they almost turned my brain.”

On June 5, King George and his Queen attended to see Garrick’s last “Richard.” Distinguished people were turned nightly from the doors, and many became almost frantic to think that they must see Garrick now or never again. Hannah More wrote: “I pity those who have not seen him. Posterity will never be able to form the slightest idea of his perfections.… I have seen him within three weeks take leave of Benedick, Sir John Brute, Kitely, Abel Drugger, Archer, and Leon.”

On the last night, of all, Garrick played Don Felix in Mrs. Centilivre’s comedy, which he chose, perhaps, as a foil to the tragedy of his farewell. In his Life of the actor Mr. Fitzgerald thus describes the supreme moment: “He retired slowly—up—up the stage, his eyes fixed on them with a lingering longing. Then stopped. The shouts of applause from that brilliant amphitheatre were broken by sobs and tears. To his ears were borne from many quarters the word ‘Farewell! Farewell!’ Mrs. Garrick was in her box, in an agony of hysterical tears. The wonderful eyes, still brilliant, were turned wistfully again and again to that sea of sympathetic faces, one of the most brilliant audiences perhaps that ever sat in Drury Lane; and at last, with an effort, he tore himself from their view.”

[129] Garrick’s last season at Drury Lane was Mrs. Siddons’ first. She was but twenty-one years of age, and made no striking success, though “her type was enlarged in the bill” (Boadley).

[130] A single short fall of lace from the hat has been far from unfashionable in recent years. Fans were carried later than 1776. A print of two ladies in outdoor costume in the Gallery of Fashion, published in May 1796, is reproduced by Fairholt, who remarks: “Both ladies carry the then indispensable article—a fan.” Indeed, the fashion-plates of the eighteenth century disclose hardly any period in which fans were not carried out of doors.

[131] Norton Street is now Bolsover Street, running south from near Portland Road Station, parallel east of Great Portland Street. In the eighteenth century it had considerable pretensions. From it Sir William Chambers’s funeral proceeded to the Abbey in March 1796. Wilson, Turner, and Wilkie all painted here. It is now a dull macadamised street in whose houses upholstering, steel-cutting, etc., are carried on.

[132] Smith erroneously notes that “this house, subsequently inhabited by the Duchess of Bolton, Sir John Nicholl, Sir Vicary Gibbs, and by Sir Charles Flower, Bart., has been recently pulled down, and several houses built upon the site.” The premises remain to this day, but they form several houses. As early as 1776 Northouck noted that Baltimore House was “either built without a plan, or else has had very whimsical owners; for the door has been shifted to different parts of the house, being now carried into the stable-yard.”

[133] The map engraved for Northouck’s History of London in 1772 shows that Smith was justified in these statements. The unexpected break in the houses which still occurs on the south side of Guilford Street is a relic of the desire to leave this square open to Highgate. This intention was defeated when the north side of Guilford Street was built. Thenceforward the north-westward growth of London was rapid, and by 1845 rurality had been pushed up to Chalk Farm by advancing brick and mortar.

[134] This Italian painter exhibited portraits and water colours at the Royal Academy from 1774 to 1778. He painted the principal ceiling at the old East India House.

[135] This painting is said to represent Mary, and her son James (afterwards James I. of England) as a boy four years of age. Doubts have been thrown on its history. (See Gentleman’s Magazine, vols. xlviii. and xlix.)

[136] A fortune-teller by tea-leaves, the leaves being “grouted” or turned over in the cup.

[137] At this time Charles Towneley (1737-1805) was living at No. 7 Park Street (now, with Queen Anne’s Square, named Queen Anne’s Gate), where he entertained, among others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Nollekens, and Johann Zoffany. The Townley collection of Greek and Roman statues, altars, urns, busts, etc., now in the British Museum, was freely shown to the public in Park Street.

[138] It was from Mr. Tunnard’s house, on Bankside, that Smith etched the river procession which brought Nelson’s body to Whitehall, mentioned in Smith’s note, [p. 182].

[139] The manager, and afterwards part proprietor, of Thrale’s brewery. He hung a fine mezzotint portrait of Johnson in the counting-house, and when Mrs. Thrale, in Johnson’s presence, asked him why he had done so, he replied, “Because, madam, I wish to have one wise man there.” “Sir,” said Johnson, “I thank you. It is a very handsome compliment, and I believe you speak sincerely.”

[140] The Rev. James Beresford became Rector of Kibworth Beauchamp, Lincoln, in 1812. He died in 1840.

[141] Elizabeth Carter, of “Epictetus” fame, the friend of Dr. Johnson. See note, [p. 231].

Anna Letitia Barbauld, the well-known miscellaneous writer, whose poem “Life! I know not what thou art” is her one imperishable composition.

Angelica Kauffman, the painter (1741-1807). See Smith’s account of her under the year 1807.

Mrs. Sheridan was the beautiful, clever, and faithful wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whom she assisted in the management of Drury Lane Theatre.

Charlotte Lenox, born in New York, 1720, was the author of The Life of Harriot Stuart, in which she portrayed her own youth. She found interest in high quarters, and was given apartments in Somerset House, which, however, she lost when that building was demolished. Dr. Johnson insisted on his friends sitting up all night at the Devil Tavern to celebrate Mrs. Lenox’s “first literary child” (Harriot Stuart), an immense apple pie being part of the entertainment. In the morning the waiters were so sleepy that the party had to wait two hours for their reckoning.

Mrs. Montague, the original “blue stocking,” had little womanly taste, but her mind was well stored and active; she lived in an atmosphere of English and foreign talent, and her assemblies at Montague House, in Portman Square, are historical. Dr. Johnson was severe on her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, remarking: “Reynolds is fond of her book, and I wonder at it; for neither I nor Beauclerk nor Mrs. Thrale could get through it.”

Hannah More had appeared in the London literary firmament in 1774; her tragedy Percy had just been given by Garrick, and her star was in brightest ascension.

Such was the fame of Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, author of a forgotten History of England, that Dr. Wilson, Rector of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, erected a statue to her in the chancel of that church during her lifetime. It was very properly removed by his successor.

Mrs. Elizabeth Griffith wrote several plays which Garrick presented with success. The Letters of Henry and Frances, which she wrote in collaboration with her husband, a dramatist, were popular.

[142] At No. 5 (now No. 4) Adelphi Terrace, Garrick lived between 1772 and 1779. He died at about 8 a.m. The house is distinguished by a commemorative tablet, as also (recently and more artistically) is his previous residence in Southampton Street, Strand.

[143] Boswell says: “Garrick’s funeral was talked of as extravagantly expensive, but Dr. Johnson, from his dislike to exaggeration, would not allow that it was distinguished by an extraordinary pomp. ‘Were there not six horses to each coach?’ said Mrs. Burney. Johnson: ‘Madam, there were no more six horses than six phœnixes.’” On this Croker notes: “There certainly were, and Johnson himself went in one of the coach and six.” Richard Cumberland saw Johnson standing beside the grave, at the foot of Shakespeare’s statue, bathed in tears. Horace Walpole wrote to the Countess of Ossory, February 1, 1779: “Yes, madam, I do think the pomp of Garrick’s funeral perfectly ridiculous,” and he gave his reasons with epigrammatic force. Others were of the same opinion; and John Henderson, the actor, wrote “a rather bitter impromptu on Mr. Garrick’s Funeral,” in which Garrick is represented as directing the pageant.

“‘Call all my carpenters—bid George attend.

And ransack Monmouth Street from end to end;

Buy all the black, defraud the starving moth.

Or let him, if he will, defile the cloth:

Bring moth and all—we have no time to lose—

If there’s not black enough, then buy the blues.’

…

Thus far he spoke, in an imperial tone,

And quite forgot the funeral was his own.”

[144] Antonio Zucchi, A.R.A., who became Angelica Kauffmann’s second husband, was employed by the brothers Adam, the architects of the Adelphi. The cost of the mantelpiece is given by Mr. Wheatley as £300, the probable figure. Mrs. Garrick died in the same house in 1822.

[145] The “English Grotto,” as it was called, was one of the Islington group of tea-gardens. Its proprietor, Jackson, pleased his public by an ingenious water-mill, an “enchanted fountain,” and a display of gold and silver fish. A pleasingly rustic view in the Crace collection is reproduced by Mr. Wroth in London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century.

[146] Francesco Bartolozzi, R.A., was an original member of the Royal Academy, and he engraved its diploma. His rapid rise, and his appointment to be engraver to the King at £300 a year, were disturbing to Sir Robert Strange, who treated him with misplaced contempt. “Let Strange beat that if he can,” exclaimed Bartolozzi, on executing his “Clytia.” Unfortunately he was improvident, and his studio became a manufactory of facile chalk studies, to many of which he put only the finishing touches. After a brilliant career in England, he went to Lisbon, where he was knighted, and died there in 1815, in his 88th year.

[147] John Hinchliffe (1731-94), the son of a livery-stable keeper in Swallow Street, was born in Westminster, and educated at Westminster School. He was consecrated Bishop of Peterborough, Dec. 17, 1769. He bought some of Smith’s youthful imitations of Rembrandt and Ostade. A note on Sherwin will be found under 1782.

[148] In 1781, Mary Robinson (1758-1800), known as “Perdita,” had ceased to be the mistress of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., whose bond for £20,000, never paid, was exchanged for the pension of £500 a year awarded her by Fox in 1783. She was portrayed by Reynolds twice, and by Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner, Zoffany, and twice by Cosway.

The original name of Mrs. Robinson’s family had been M’Dermott, which had been changed by an ancestor to Darby. Mrs. Darby had brought up her daughter under difficult circumstances. Obliged to earn her own living during her husband’s absence in America, she started a ladies’ boarding school in Little Chelsea, in which the future “Perdita” (as we learn from her autobiography) taught English literature to the daughters of the well-to-do citizens, and read to them “sacred and moral lessons on saints’ days and Sunday evenings.” The “high personage” referred to in this paragraph is of course the Prince, in whom Richard Cosway, the courtly miniaturist, found a lavish patron.

[149] Anticipating, on a higher scale, Dickens’s servant-girl bride, who, on stepping into a hackney-coach after the ceremony, “threw a red shawl, which she had, no doubt, brought on purpose, negligently over the number on the door, evidently to delude pedestrians into the belief that the hackney-coach was a private carriage” (Sketches by Boz).

[150] Smith’s first master, John Keyse Sherwin, had been a pupil of Bartolozzi. In his studio in St. James’s Street, he was patronised by the Duchesses of Devonshire and Rutland, Lady Jersey, and other ladies of rank, many of whom were eager to figure in his drawing of “The Finding of Moses,” in which the Princess Royal appeared as Pharaoh’s daughter. He was a wonderfully skilful portrait artist: “I have often seen him,” says Smith, “begin at the toe, draw upwards, and complete it at the top of the head in a most correct and masterly manner. He had also an extraordinary command over the use of both his hands.” He was an irregular worker, however, and debt and dissipation helped to kill him at the age of 39.

The sitting given to Sherwin by Mrs. Siddons took place soon after her re-appearance at Drury Lane Theatre, the beginning of her real fame, October 10, 1782. After opening with Isabella in Garrick’s version of The Fatal Marriage, she played Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter.

[151] William Henderson, a collector, lived at No. 33 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where he was the neighbour of Constable.

[152] Mathews’ collection, the formation of which had been the passion of his later years, was not dispersed. It consisted almost entirely of portraits, and on these he is said to have laid out about £5000. For their accommodation the younger Mathews built a special gallery for his father at Ivy Cottage, Kentish Town, from a design by Pugin. In gratifying his tastes, Mathews found that he had sacrificed his privacy to sight-seers; the rural cottage in which he had sought peace became a show-place. The collection ultimately passed to the Garrick Club.

[153] Apparently Smith refers to his will, as it then existed; but, as a matter of fact, he left no will. On his death, letters of administration were granted to his widow, the value of his estate being only £100. The second of the two witnesses was doubtless John Pritt Harley. See note, [p. 321].

[154] John Charles Crowle of Fryston Hall, Wakefield, lawyer and antiquary, was a member of the Dilettanti Society, and its Secretary, 1774-78. He was a noted joker and boon companion, and left a tangible proof of his interest in art and antiquity in the illustrated and interleaved copy of Pennant’s History of London which he bequeathed to the British Museum. He died in 1811.

[155] Rats’ Castle is described by Smith in his Nollekens as “a shattered house then standing on the east side of Dyot Street, and so called from the rat-catchers and canine snackers who inhabited it, and where they cleaned the skins of those unfortunate stray dogs who had suffered death the preceding night.” Nollekens obtained models for his Venuses from Mrs. Lobb, an elderly lady in a green calash, at the Fan Tavern in Dyot Street. This street was named after Richard Dyot, a parishioner of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. “The name was changed to George Street in consequence of a filthy song which attained wide popularity, but the original name was restored in 1877” (Wheatley).

[156] This inscription appears to be incorrect. An editorial note to the 1845 (second) edition of the Rainy Day points out that this well-known beggar died April 25, 1788, and that the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded his death thus: “In Bridewell, where he was confined a second time as a vagrant, the man known by the name of Old Simon, who for many years has gone about this city covered with rags, clouted shoes, three old hats upon his head, and his fingers full of brass rings. On the following day, the Coroner’s Inquest sat on his body, and brought in their verdict, ‘Died by the visitation of God.’”

[157] Dr. John Gardner, a well-known character, erected his tomb in the churchyard of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, some years before his death, and inscribed it:

Dr. John Gardner’s Last and Best Bedroom,

but finding that he was assumed to be already dead, and that his practice as a worm-doctor in Norton Folgate was declining, he interpolated the word “intended” thus:

Dr. John Gardner’s Intended Last and Best Bedroom.

A correspondent of Notes and Queries, Aug. 25, 1860, wrote: “I remember him well; a stout, burly man with a flaxen wig: he rode daily into London on a large roan-coloured horse.” It was said that he was buried in an erect position by his own wish. Gardner’s tombstone is still carefully preserved, and is a curiosity of the Hackney Road, whence the inscription can be read through the churchyard railings. It now runs:

1807
Dr. John Gardner’s
Last and best Bedroom
Who departed this life the 8th
Of April, 1835, in his 84th year.
Also are here Interred two of His
Sons and Two of His Granddaughters.

[158] “Funeral Weever”: John Weever (1576-1632), poet and antiquary; author of Ancient Funeral Monuments, 1631.

[159] “I know not whether Mrs. Nollekens was of Lord Monboddo’s opinion, that men originally had tails; but I could have informed her that it has been asserted that the species of monkeys that have no tails are more inclined to show tricks than those that have.”—(Smith.)

[160] The antiquary, and correspondent of White of Selborne. He joined this year (1783) the club founded by Johnson at the Essex Head in Essex Street, Strand.

[161] Mrs. Nollekens was Mary, second daughter of Mr. Saunders Welch, the police magistrate. Her flightiness and parsimony are Smith’s endless sport in his Life of her husband, and he was willing to believe that her character resembled that of Pekuah, the favourite attendant of the princess, in Rasselas. Miss Hawkins says in her Anecdotes, that Johnson drew Pekuah from Mary Welch, and that she had this from Anne Welch. In any case, the Doctor found “Pekuah’s” vivacity agreeable. Smith relates: “I have heard Mr. Nollekens say that the Doctor, when joked with about her, observed, ‘Yes, I think Mary would have been mine, if little Joe had not stepped in.’”

[162] “The name of Norman was so extensively known, that I consider it hardly possible for many of my readers to be ignorant of his fame; indeed, so much was he in requisition, that persons residing out of Town would frequently order the carriage for no other purpose than to consult Dr. Norman as to the state of Biddy’s health, just as people of rank now consult Partington or Thompson as to the irregularities of their children’s teeth” (Smith: Nollekens).

[163] George Keate was a man of miscellaneous talent. His best-known literary works are his serio-comic poem “The Distressed Poet” (1787), and his “Account of the Pelew Islands from the Journal of Captain Henry Wilson.” He enjoyed the friendship of Voltaire at Geneva, and was careful that the world should know it. In her Early Diary, Miss Burney gives a good portrait of Keate as she met him “at the house of six old maids, all sisters, and all above sixty.” She found him a “sluggish” conversationalist who aimed continually at making himself the subject of discussion, “while he listened with the greatest nonchalance, reclining his person upon the back of his chair and kicking his foot now over, and now under, a gold-headed cane.”

[164] This dealer probably bought dog-skins. “The dexterous of all dentists” may be explained by the following passage in Smith’s Vagabondiana (1817): “It is scarcely to be believed that some few years ago a woman of the name of Smith regularly went over London early in the morning, to strike out the teeth of dead dogs that had been stolen and killed for the sake of their skins. These teeth she sold to bookbinders, carvers, and gilders, as burnishing tools.”

[165] The Last Supper was one of many religious subjects which the Quaker artist painted for his uncritical patron, George III. It was a transparent painting, and was let into the east window, which was structurally altered for its accommodation; but it was long ago removed, and the window restored. It is a commonplace that West’s powers lagged far behind his ambition. “Twenty years after his death,” says Mr. E. T. Cook, “some of his pictures, for which he had been paid 3000 guineas, were knocked down at a public sale for £10; and such of his pictures as had been presented to the National Gallery have now been removed to the provinces.” West’s work for George III. is represented by seventeen paintings in the Queen Anne’s Drawing-Room at Hampton Court. These include “Hannibal Swearing never to make Peace with Rome,” “The Death of Epaminondas,” “The Death of General Wolfe” (a picture of some value), “The Final Departure of Regulus from Rome,” etc.

[166] Richard Wyatt of Egham was a well-known amateur, and the patron of John Opie. He married Priscilla, daughter of John Edgell of Milton Place, and had three sons and four daughters.

[167] Anne, or Nancy, Parsons is supposed to have been the daughter of a Bond Street tailor. She lived under the protection of a Mr. Horton, a West India merchant, with whom she went to Jamaica. On her return she lodged in Brewer Street, and, after living with Duke of Dorset and others, became the mistress of the Duke of Grafton. Junius bitterly says: “The name of Miss Parsons would hardly have been known if the first Lord of the Treasury had not led her in triumph through the Opera House, even in the presence of the Queen. When we see a man act in this manner, we may admit the shameless depravity of his heart, but what are we to think of his understanding?” Ultimately Nancy Parsons married Charles, second Viscount Maynard.

[168] Sir Richard Colt Hoare, second baronet (1758-1838), began life in the family bank, but, being made independent of business, he married a daughter of William Henry, Lord Lyttelton, and devoted himself to travel, study, and his art collections. He completed histories of ancient and modern Wiltshire, and smaller works, and was an excellent example of the wealthy antiquary.

[169] George Huddesford (1749-1809) was an artist in early life, studying under Reynolds; in middle life he took to scribbling, and showed a turn for satire. A collected edition of his works appeared in 1801, entitled: “The Poems of George Huddesford, M.A., late Fellow of New College, Oxford. Now first collected, including Salmagundi, Topsy-Turvy, Bubble and Squeak, and Crambe Repetita, with corrections and original additions.”

[170] These verses begin—

“In Liquorpond-street, as is well known to many,

An Artist resided who shaved for a penny.

Cut hair for three-halfpence, for three pence he bled,

And would draw, for a groat, every tooth in your head.

What annoy’d other folks never spoil’d his repose,

’Twas the same thing to him whether stocks fell or rose;

For blast and for mildew he car’d not a pin,

His crops never fail’d, for they grew on the chin.”

[171] Henry Kett (1761-1825) was a frequent subject of caricatures. The learned Thomas Warton’s comment on his “Juvenile Poems” was—

“Our Kett not a poet!

Why, how can you say so?

For if he’s no Ovid

I’m sure he’s a Naso.”

From his long face he was known as “Horse” Kett, and, enjoying the joke, he would say that he was going to “trot down the ‘High.’”

[172] George Stubbs, A.R.A., the great horse-painter of the eighteenth century. He painted sixteen race-horses, including Eclipse, for the Turf Review. His physical strength was such that he was said to have carried a dead horse up three flights of stairs to his dissecting attic. His “Fall of Phaeton” was popular, and showed him capable of great things. Many of Stubbs’s finest pictures are now in the possession of the King, the Duke of Westminster, Lord Rosebery, and Sir Walter Gilbey, who has produced an important work on his life and art. Stubbs lived for forty years at 24 Somerset Street, Portman Square.

[173] Woodforde was a dull but correct painter of historical subjects. He died at Ferrara.

[174] In Horwood’s map of London, of 1799, Orange Court is seen behind the King’s Mews.

[175] Miss Pope lived in Great Queen Street for forty years. Among her friends she was known as Mrs. Candour, from her playing that character, and from her habit of taking the part of any person spoken against in company. “I never heard her speak ill of any human being.… I have sometimes been even exasperated by her benevolence,” says James Smith, who writes delightfully about her in his Memoirs. Churchill sang her praises—

“See lively Pope advance in jig and trip,

Corinna, Cherry, Honeycombe, and Snip.”

The actress did not die in Great Queen Street, but at 17 Michael’s Place, Brompton, July 30, 1818.

[176] General John Burgoyne (1722-92) took part in the War of Independence, and surrendered with 5000 men at Saratoga on October 15, 1777. After a term as Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, he gave rein to his literary tastes, and wrote, among other plays, his delightful comedy, The Heiress. He died at No. 10 Hertford Street, August 4, 1792.

[177] It stood in Charlotte Street, looking east along Windmill Street. Robert Montgomery, of “Satan” memory, became minister of this chapel in 1843.

[178] Mrs. Mathew, wife of the Rev. Henry Mathew, of Percy Chapel, was famous for her assemblies at her house, No. 27 Rathbone Place, and her encouragement of artists. Here were seen Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Carter, the translator of Epictetus, and Mrs. Edward Montagu. Mrs. Mathew “was so extremely zealous in promoting the celebrity of Blake, that, upon hearing him read some of his early efforts in poetry, she thought so well of them as to request the Rev. Henry Mathew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind effort in defraying the expense of printing them” (Smith: Nollekens). Mr. Mathew consented, and wrote the “advertisement” for the volume, which was entitled Poetical Sketches, by W. B., and bore the date 1783. Not a few of the old houses in Rathbone Place remain, with their ground floors turned into shops. In these or similar houses lived Nathaniel Hone, R.A., who died here in 1784; Ozias Humphry, R.A., at No. 29; E. H. Bailey, the sculptor; and Peter de Wint.

[179] Smith’s prediction was strikingly borne out at the sale of the Earl of Crewe’s collection of the productions of Blake, held at Sotheby’s rooms March 30, 1903. The Illustrations of the Book of Job, containing twenty-two engravings, twenty-one original designs in colours, and a portrait of Blake by himself, was keenly contested. Bidding began at £1500, and ended at £5600, at which price the Job passed to Mr. Quaritch. Blake’s original inventions for Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” brought £1960, and all the remaining sixteen lots fetched high prices.

[180] Edward Oram, son of Old Oram, assisted Philip James De Loutherbourg, R.A., in the management of the Drury Lane scenery and stage effects. “Old” William Oram, “of the Board of Works,” was Surveyor to that body. He was much employed in panel decoration.

[181] John Ker, third Duke of Roxburgh, the book collector.—Sir John Fleming Leicester, first Baron de Tabley (1762-1827), was a patron of artists, and a good draughtsman. The public were freely admitted to his collection of British pictures at his house at 24 Hill Street, Berkeley Square.—Mr. Richard Bull was a well-known figure at the print sales and a subscriber to Smith’s publications.—Anthony Morris Storer, an ardent collector and “Graingeriser,” extra-illustrated Grainger’s Biographical History of England, and left the work to Eton College. A rather candid sketch of Storer is drawn by Rev. J. Richardson in his entertaining Recollections of the Last Half Century.—A note on Dr. Lort will be found elsewhere.—Mr. Haughton James, F.R.S., was born in Jamaica; he became a member of the Dilettanti Society in 1763.—Mr. Charles John Crowle and Sir James Winter Lake, Bart., so frequently mentioned by Smith, are the subjects of other notes.

[182] In this list of Smith’s patrons the following are of interest:—The “beautiful Miss Towry” was Anne, daughter of Captain George Phillips Towry, R.N., commissioner of victualling, who became the wife of Lord Ellenborough, afterwards Lord Chief Justice of England, Oct. 17, 1782. Her beauty was so great that passers-by would linger to watch her watering the flowers on the balcony of their house in Bloomsbury Square. Lady Ellenborough bore thirteen children, and, surviving her husband many years, died in Stratford Place, Oxford Street, Aug. 16, 1843, aged 74. Her portrait was painted by Reynolds.

Mr. Douglas was James Douglas, author of Nenia Britannica, a Sepulchral History of Great Britain. As a youth he helped Sir Ashton Lever to stuff birds for his museum. His abilities in painting were considerable, and we owe to him a full-length portrait of Captain Grose. His Travelling Anecdotes is an interesting book.

By “Mr. Chamberlain Clark” Smith means Mr. Richard Clark, but he antedates his title of City Chamberlain, to which post he was appointed only in 1798; he held it until 1831, and was Lord Mayor in 1784.

Dr. Joseph Drury was Headmaster of Harrow for twenty years, 1785-1805. He will always be remembered as Lord Byron’s headmaster.

John Wigston figures in Smith’s notes under the year 1796 as a patron of Morland.

Information concerning Captain Horsley and the Boddams will be found in Robinson’s History of Enfield.

Mr. Henry Hare Townsend was the owner of Bruce Castle, which he sold in 1792; it was afterwards occupied by Rowland Hill, who brought hither his school, disciplined on the “Hazlewood” system, before he became a public man and the founder of penny postage.

The Mr. Samuel Salt, whose name comes last in Smith’s list of his patrons, is no other than Charles Lamb’s Samuel Salt of the Inner Temple. “July 27. At his chambers in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, Samuel Salt, Esq., one of the benchers of that hon. society, and a governor of the South Sea Company” (Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1792).—Lawrence Sterne, at whose burial he assisted, was laid in the St. George’s (Hanover Square) burial-ground, facing Hyde Park, March 22, 1788. Sterne’s grave is well kept.

[183] The formation of Virginia Water was carried out at the instance of the Duke of Cumberland, as Ranger of Windsor Forest. Thomas Sandby, his Deputy Ranger, lived in the Lower Lodge, where he was soon joined by his brother Paul, the eminent water-colourist. The construction of the Virginia Water occupied him for several years, but it was completed long before the birth of Smith. The works were entirely destroyed by a storm in September 1768, and Smith witnessed in this year, 1785, only the finishing touches to the then reconstructing lake.

[184] In 1796, the Feathers Tavern, on the east side of the square, made way for Charles Dibdin’s “Sans Souci” theatre, in which he gave a single-handed entertainment. Here he produced his song, “My Name d’ye see’s Tom Tough.”

[185] The wealthy and talented “Athenian” Stuart (1713-88) had his sobriquet from his journey to Athens, and his account of Greek architecture embodied in The Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated, compiled by himself and his fellow-traveller, Nicholas Revett, and completed by Newton and Reveley. Hogarth satirised Stuart’s first volume (1762) in his print, “The Five Order of Perriwigs as they were worn at the Late Coronation, measured Architectonically.”

[186] Samuel Scott, whose paintings, “Old London Bridge,” “Old Westminster Bridge,” and a “View of Westminster,” are in the National Gallery, was one of Hogarth’s companions in the famous “Tour,” described in Gostling’s verses.

“Sam Scott and Hogarth, for their share,

The prospects of the sea and land did.”

Scott’s portrait by Hudson is in the National Gallery.

[187] See note, [p. 98].

[188] Luke Sullivan engraved several of Hogarth’s works, and among them his “Paul before Felix” (now in Lincoln’s Inn), to which he sat as model for the angel. He was a handsome, dissipated Irishman, and lodged at the “White Bear” in Piccadilly. His etching of the “March to Finchley” is superb. Ireland says that Hogarth had difficulty in keeping him at work on this plate. Sullivan was destroyed by his habits, and died prematurely.

[189] Francis Grose (1731-91), the famous antiquary, humorist, and spendthrift, who is immortalised by Burns—

“A chield’s amang you takin’ notes,

And, faith, he’ll prent it.”

[190] Valuable as this book certainly was for a number of years, it is now superseded by the elaborate work produced by Dr. Meyrick [A Critical Inquiry into Ancient Armour, by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, 1824], an inestimable and complete treasure to the historian, the artist, and the stage.—S.

[191] Thomas Hearne (1744-1817) belonged to that group of artists whose tinted topographical drawings initiated water-colour. He died in Macclesfield Street, Soho, April 13, 1817, and was buried in Bushey churchyard by Dr. Monro, Turner’s “good doctor” of the Adelphi, who used to set Turner and Girtin to make drawings for him in the Adelphi at the price of “half a crown apiece and a supper.”

[192] See note on Mr. Baker, [p. 115].

[193] Henry Edridge, A.R.A. (1769-1821), was born in Paddington, established himself as a portrait painter in Dufour’s Place, Golden Square, in 1789, and died in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square. He was the friend and pupil of Thomas Hearne, and, like him, was buried in Bushey churchyard by the benevolent Dr. Monro. The British Museum Print Room has pencil portraits by Edridge, and three of his sketch-books.—William Alexander (1761-1816) preceded Smith as Keeper of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. He was a skilful water-colourist, and the Print Room has his original sketches for the illustrations in the officially published Ancient Terra-cottas and Ancient Marbles, dealing with the Museum collections.—Edmunds was an upholsterer in Compton Street, Soho.

[194] The elephant was Chunee, the “Jumbo” of the Georgian era. Smith writes of his arrival under 1785, but it was not until 1809 that he and Mr. Baker could have seen Chunee coming from the docks. This famous elephant stood eleven feet in height, and was the attraction at Mr. Cross’s menagerie until March 1826, when his death was ordered. Chunee’s carcass was valued at £1000. Lord Byron must have seen Chunee when he “saw the tigers sup” in 1813, and Thomas Hood’s lament on his death is well known. Exeter Change, which stood at the Strand end of Burleigh Street, did not long survive its elephant: in April 1829 it was sold out of existence by George Robins.

[195] Abraham Langford (1711-74), the most fashionable auctioneer of his day, had his rooms in the Piazza, Covent Garden. He was buried in St. Pancras churchyard, and identical laudatory verses were cut on both sides of his tombstone—

“His spring was such as should have been,

Adroit and gay, unvexed by Care or Spleen,

His Summer’s manhood, open, fresh, and fair,

His Virtue strict, his manners debonair,” etc.

Foote satirised Langford in The Minor as Smirke (not Puff) the auctioneer, who raises a Guido from “forty-five” to “sixty-three ten” by declaring that “it only wants a touch from the torch of Prometheus to start from the canvas.”

[196] Samuel Paterson (1728-1802), originally a stay-maker, became a bookseller, and about 1753 opened auction rooms in what remained of Essex House, which stood much on the site of Devereux Court, Essex Street. He afterwards removed to Covent Garden. He would have succeeded better in business had he been less fond of reading the books he sold. He was the first auctioneer who sold books in lots.—Hassell Hutchins, the auctioneer of King Street, Covent Garden, died in 1795.

[197] It was George Michael Moser (1704-83) who made the historic interruption: “Stay, stay, Toctor Shonson is going to say something.” Born at Schaffhausen, he rose from cabinet-making (in Soho) and the chasing of watch-cases and cane heads, to be the First Keeper of the Royal Academy. Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced him the first gold-chaser in the kingdom. He enamelled trinkets for watches with so much skill as to set a fashion, and it was said that George II. once ordered him a hat full of money for some of his works. Moser lived in Craven Buildings, which have lately been demolished to make way for Aldwych and Kingsway. He died, however, in his official keeper’s residence at Somerset House.

[198] John Millan had a bookshop at Charing Cross for more than fifty years. Richard Gough, the antiquary, frequented Millan’s shop, which he describes as “encrusted with Literature and Curiosities like so many stalactitical exudations.” Behind sat “the deity of the place, at the head of a Whist party.”

[199] Johnson’s letter to Sir Joshua Reynolds on behalf of young Paterson was dated June 2, 1783; his three letters to Ozias Humphrey, April 5, April 10, and May 31, 1784. He asks Humphrey to allow the boy to frequent his studio and see him paint. The Doctor had chosen good teachers for the youth. “Humphrey’s miniatures, before those of any other, remind us of the excellences and graces of Reynolds” (Redgrave: A Century of Painters, i. 421). Humphrey had himself been greatly encouraged in his youth by Reynolds, who said to him: “Born in my country, and your mother a lace-maker!—why, Vandyck’s mother was a maker of lace,” and he lent him some of his pictures to copy.

[200] Richard Gough (1735-1809), the antiquary whose British Topography, Sepulchral Monuments, translation of Camden’s Britannia, and other works, are in every great library. The Britannia occupied him seven years, and his investigations led him all over the country. It is said that during the seven years in which he was translating it he remained so accessible to his family at Enfield, that no member of it was aware of his undertaking. He was esteemed by Horace Walpole, who, however, often made a jest of his antiquary mind. Thus: “Gough, speaking of some Cross that has been renowned, says ‘there is now an unmeaning market-house in its place.’ Saving his reverence and our prejudices, I doubt there is a good deal more meaning in a market-house than in a cross” (Letter to Rev. W. Cole, Nov. 24, 1780).

[201] There were four Basires in direct succession. Smith refers to the second in the line, James Basire (1730-1802), the illustrator of Vetusta Monumenta. He compares him unfavourably with William Woollett (1735-85) and John Hall (1739-97), but it is not clear that West despised Basire, who, indeed, engraved his Pylades and Orestes.

[202] Dr. Lort was Librarian, not Chaplain, to the Duke of Devonshire. He moved in the Johnson set. For nineteen years he held the Rectory of St. Matthew’s, Friday Street, in which church (now demolished) there was a tablet to his memory. He died at 6 Savile Row, Nov. 5, 1790, after a carriage accident at Colchester. A water-colour portrait of him, by Sylvester Harding, is in the British Museum Print Room. In her diary Madam D’Arblay gives an entertaining picture of Dr. Lort as he appeared in the Thrale circle at Streatham, where on one occasion he talked against Dr. Johnson to his face without, it seems, any tragic results. “His manners,” she says, “are somewhat blunt and odd, and he is altogether out of the common road, without having chosen a better path.”

[203] Old Cole, i.e. William Cole (1714-1782), was pronounced by Horace Walpole an “oracle in any antique difficulties.” The two travelled France together. Cole, who for many years was in Holy Orders, had filled forty folio volumes with notes on Cambridgeshire, concerning which he wrote to Walpole: “They are my only delight—they are my wife and children.” He earned such nicknames as Old Cole, Cole of Milton (where he lived), and Cardinal Cole (from his leanings to Romanism). Cole’s “wife and children” are now in the British Museum MSS. Department.

[204] The Rev. Dr. Isaac Gossett was proud of his long series of priced catalogues. Every bookseller knew his fad for milk-white vellum. So keen a bibliophile was Gossett, that an illness which kept him from the sale of the Pinelli collection vanished when he was given permission to inspect one of the volumes of the first Complutensian Polyglot Bible of Cardinal Ximenes, on vellum, and in the original binding. Dr. Gossett died in Newman Street, December 16, 1812, and was buried in Old Marylebone cemetery.

[205] Edward Cocker (1631-7?), writing master and arithmetician, is referred to in the phrase “according to Cocker.” The Dictionary of National Biography gives 1675 as the date of his death, but Mr. Wheatley (London Past and Present) quotes the Register of Burials at St. George the Martyr’s, Southwark: “Mr. Edward Cocker, Writing Mr. Aug. 26, 1676.”

[206] The wine and wit of Caleb Whitefoord (1734-1810) were both good. Smith reports Mrs. Nollekens as saying: “My dear Mrs. Pardice, you may safely take a glass of it, for it is the last of twelve which Mr. Caleb Whitefoord sent us as a present; and everybody who talks about wine should know his house has ever been famous for claret.” Smith, who often acidulates his ink, suggests that Whitefoord’s little presents and constant attendance on the Nollekens’ household showed the covetous collector rather than the kindly man. Burke, who thought meanly of Whitefoord’s services as secretary of the Commission for concluding peace with America, described him as a “diseur de bons mots.” Goldsmith mourns his wasted abilities in his “Retaliation”—

“Here Whitefoord reclines, deny it who can;

Tho’ he merrily lived, he is now a grave man.

What pity, alas! that so lib’ral a mind

Should so long be to Newspaper Essays confin’d!

…

Whose talents to fit any station were fit,

Yet happy if Woodfall confessed him a wit.”

Whitefoord’s Cross Readings of the newspapers—a form of humour that has been revived somewhat recently—delighted the town in 1766; Goldsmith envied him the idea, and Johnson praised his pseudonym—“Papyrius Cursor.” The following are specimens of these Cross Readings:—

“Yesterday Dr. Pretyman preached at St. James’s—

And performed it with ease in less than sixteen minutes”

“Several changes are talked of at Court—

Consisting of 9050 triple bob-majors.”

“Sunday night many noble families were alarmed—

By the constable of the watch, who apprehended them at cards.”

The wealthy wine-merchant and art lover lived to be the patron in David Wilkie’s painting, “The Letter of Introduction.” He died in Argyll Street, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Paddington, where lie Nollekens, Mrs. Siddons, Haydon, and many others of note.

[207] Captain William Baillie’s copies of Rembrandt’s etchings are still bought—by the simple—in the print-shops. The captain quitted the 18th Light Dragoons in 1761, and joined the Covent Garden Colony of artists. He knew everybody. Henry Angelo heard him say that for more than half a century he had passed his mornings in going from one apartment to another over the Piazza. His works, which have now little value, were issued by Boydell in 1792, and re-issued in 1803. One of his exploits, mentioned by Redgrave, was to purchase for £70 Cuyp’s fine “View of Dort” and convert it into two separate pictures called “Morning” and “Evening,” which were afterwards piously purchased for £2200 and reunited. Captain Baillie died Dec. 22, 1810, aged eighty-seven, at Lisson Green, Paddington. He was for many years a commissioner of Stamp Duties.

[208] Edwards’ Anecdotes of Painters is a useful little supplement to Walpole’s larger work. He was buried in old St. Pancras churchyard, now a recreation ground, where his name, however, does not appear on the memorial erected by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts to those whose graves were obliterated. His portrait in chalk is in the Print Room.

[209] Mr. George Baker, the lace-man, died in St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1811. He compiled “A Catalogue of Books, Poems, Tracts, and small detached Pieces, printed at the Press at Strawberry Hill, belonging to the late Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford,” 4to. Twenty copies only were printed, and were distributed in May 1811. Mr. Baker made a lifelong hobby of print-collecting, and his Hogarths, Woolletts, and Bartolozzis were scarcely surpassed.

[210] Woodhouse’s pictures and drawings were sold in 1801; the catalogues are in the British Museum.

[211] Joseph Musgrave, Esq., was a subscriber to Smith’s Antiquities of Westminster.

[212] “The most acid of all Manningtree’s evil and jealous-minded spirits, originally held in the service of that famous witch-finder-general, Matthew Hopkins” (Smith).—Hopkins, after bringing old women to execution as witches, was himself “swum” and hanged in 1647 for witchcraft. “Vinegar Tom” was one of the “imps” which a one-legged beggar woman named Elizabeth Clarke was persuaded by Hopkins to declare was under her control. Hopkins had originally been a lawyer at Manningtree.

[213] Samuel Wodhull, who lived wealthily in Berkeley Square, is best remembered for his translation of Euripides (1774-82), the first complete rendering of the Greek tragedian in English. He was buried at Thenford, his native place, in Northamptonshire.

[214] Thomas Worlidge (1700-66), a skilful etcher after Rembrandt, and illustrator of a book on antique gems, was nicknamed “Scritch-Scratch.” He is said to have had thirty-three children by his three marriages. He lived in the famous house in Great Queen Street (now divided and numbered 55-56) in which Reynolds had been the pupil of Thomas Hudson, and which now bears a tablet proclaiming it one of the homes of Sheridan.

[215] After Rawle’s death, his effects were sold at Hutchins’, Covent Garden, where this Charles the Second wig was bought by Suett, the actor, who, says Smith, “to prove to the company that it would suit him better than his harum-scarum opponent, put it upon his head, and, thus dignified, went on with his biddings, which were sometimes sarcastically serious, and at others ludicrously comic. The company, however, though so highly amused, thought it ungenerous to prolong the biddings, and therefore one and all declared that it ought to be knocked down to him before he took it off his head. Upon this Suett immediately attempted to take it off, but the ivory hammer, with the ruffled hand of the auctioneer, after being once flourished over his head, gave it in favour of the eccentric comedian.” Suett appeared in this wig in Fielding’s Tom Thumb, and we are told that “sick men laughed themselves well to see him peeping out of the black forest of hair.” Finally this wonderful wig was lost in the fire which destroyed the theatre at Birmingham. Mrs. Booth, the mother of the actress, was met by Suett, and all he said was: “Mrs. Booth, my wig’s gone.”

[216] Rawle died November 8, 1789 (Gentleman’s Magazine, 1789).

[217] From the Public Advertiser, July 12, 1774: “Miniature Painting.—Mr. Beauvais, well known at Tunbridge Wells to several of the nobility and gentry for taking a striking likeness, either in water colours or India ink. Miniature pictures copied by him from large pictures, to any size, and pictures repaired if damaged. He also teaches, by a peculiar method, Persons of the least capacity to take a Likeness in India Ink, or with a black lead pencil, in a short time. To be spoke with at Mr. Bryan’s, the ‘Blue Ball,’ St. Martin’s Street, Leicester Fields, from eleven to one o’clock.”

[218] “A most facetious, fat gentleman,” is Henry Angelo’s description of Mr. Mitchell, the wealthy partner in the bank of Hodsol & Company, and the unstinting patron of Rowlandson. Mitchell lived in Beaufort Buildings, in the Strand, which two years ago were demolished for the extension of the Savoy Hotel. Here the worthy banker loved to gather round him such choice spirits as Thomas Rowlandson, John Nixon, and Thomas Wolcot (Peter Pindar). “Well do I remember,” says Henry Angelo, “sitting in this comfortable apartment, listening to the stories of my old friend Peter Pindar, whose wit seemed not to kindle until after midnight, at the period of about his fifth or sixth glass of brandy and water. Rowlandson, too, having nearly accomplished his twelfth glass of punch, and replenishing his pipe with choice Oronooko, would chime in. The tales of these two gossips, told in one of those nights, each delectable to hear, would make a modern Boccaccio.”

[219] William Packer of Great Baddow, and of Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, was many years in the brewery of Combe, Delafield, & Company in Castle Street, Long Acre. This brewery was the nucleus of Watney, Combe, Reid, & Co.’s present establishment.

[220] John Henderson (1747-85) was known as the “Bath Roscius” from his success at Bath under John Palmer. After a great career at Drury Lane, he died at his house in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, November 25, 1785, it was said from a poison accidentally given to him by his wife. In addition to his Hogarths, he collected books relating to the drama. His library was described by the auctioneer who dispersed it as “the completest assemblage of English dramatic authors that has ever been exhibited for sale in this country.” It contained many books of crimes and marvels.

[221] John Ireland (died 1808) must not be confounded with the Shakespearian impostor. He was brought up to watchmaking in Maiden Lane. With Henderson he frequented the Feathers Tavern in Leicester Fields, and he wrote the actor’s biography. He is best known by his Illustrations to Hogarth, published by Boydell, and containing his portrait by Mortimer as frontispiece to the third volume.

[222] The employee is better remembered than the employer. William Seguier (1771-1843), topographical landscape-painter and picture restorer, was appointed Keeper of the Royal Pictures by George IV. He was also the first director of the National Gallery. Haydon pays him this tribute: “June 19, 1811. Seguier called, on whose judgment Wilkie and I so much rely. If Seguier coincides with us we are satisfied, and often we are convinced we are wrong if Seguier disagrees.”

[223] Carlo Antonio Delpini, the best clown of his day, played at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. He devised many stage mechanisms for pantomimes. In 1783 he arranged a masquerade at the Pantheon in celebration of the coming of age of the Prince of Wales, from whom in his old age he received a gift of £200. Delpini, we are told, had a presentiment that he should not die till the year “eight,” which was realised, for he died in the year 1828, at the age of 88. He was born in the parish of St. Martin, at Rome, and drew his last breath in the parish of St. Martin, London (to be precise, in Lancaster Court, Strand).

[224] John Palmer (1742-98), the original Joseph Surface, was known off the stage as Jack Plausible. Once, in patching up a quarrel with Sheridan, he said: “If you could see my heart, Mr. Sheridan,” and was answered, “Why, Jack, you forget I wrote it.” The Royalty Theatre, at which Smith hoped to be employed by him, was the ill-starred house in Well Street, in St. George’s in the East. The opposition of the great theatres caused its degeneration to a house for pantomimes and concerts. Palmer fell into debt and into Surrey Gaol. Nevertheless he appeared at Drury Lane as late as 1798. He is described by Charles Lamb as “a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman,” for which reason “Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.” Palmer died on the stage. His last uttered words, spoken in The Stranger, are said to have been: “There is another and a better world,” but this has been disputed: it is contended that the words really uttered by him as he fell were those in the fourth act: “I left them at a small town hard by.”

[225] Just forty years after Smith’s visit, in 1869, a correspondent of Notes and Queries had the curiosity to make a similar journey of discovery. He found only one of the dolphin knockers remaining, that on the door of No. 6. In June 1903 I found that this had gone the way of all men and knockers, but I am told it was there up to the early nineties. The neighbourhood can still show a few door-knockers of ancient types. There are old lion’s head-and-ring knockers in Gunpowder Alley and Hind Court. At No. 3 Red Lion Court is a good knocker, into which is introduced a bat with outstretched wings. The old knocker of No. 9 Bell’s Buildings, Salisbury Square, is adorned with the figure of a naked boy playing on a pipe. There is a fine example of a dolphin knocker at 25 Queen Anne’s Gate.

[226] The Garrat mock elections have often been described. Garrat was a rural spot between Wandsworth and Tooting. A committee organised to protect the village common from encroachments developed into a roaring municipal farce which was repeated after every General Election. The publicans of the southern villages willingly subscribed to the carnival, and reaped handsome profits; while Foote spread the fame and vogue of the elections by his farce The Mayor of Garrat. A mock knighthood was given, as a matter of course, to each mayor on his election. The first recorded mayor was Sir John Harper, a retailer of brick-dust, and the next, the most famous of all, Sir Jeffery Dunstan, a humorous vagabond whose ostensible trade was in old wigs. He was constantly portrayed, or used as the basis of caricature. In one print he is seen standing on a stool, asking “How far is it from the first of August to Westminster Bridge?” “Sir Jeffery” used his tongue with great freedom, and the authorities were so destitute of humour as to arrest him and obtain his imprisonment. The next Mayor of Garrat was Sir Harry Dinsdale. He was born in Shug Lane, Haymarket, in 1758, and appears to have haunted the Soho neighbourhood, for he married a woman out of St. Anne’s workhouse. He died in 1811.

[227] It must have been from his house No. 37, on the north side of Gerrard Street, now a restaurant, but retaining its old appearance and marked by a commemorative tablet, that Burke went to Westminster Hall on May 10, 1787, to impeach Warren Hastings. Of Burke’s life in Gerrard Street we have no nearer glimpse than that given by Smith.

[228] General John Money (1752-1817) was one of the earliest of English aeronauts. It was in an ascent from Norwich, July 22, 1785, that he was carried out to sea, where he “remained for seven hours struggling with his fate” before he was rescued.—Philip Reinagle, R.A. (1749-1833), was an animal, landscape, and dead game painter. Examples of his landscape work are at South Kensington.

[229] The Charles Greville here referred to was an early patron of Lawrence at Oxford, when the artist was a mere boy; also of Romney, whose portrait of Wortley Montague, the eccentric pseudo-Turk, he both bought and copied.

[230] Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), who married Emma Hart, Nelson’s Lady Hamilton, was a keen archæologist, and made a magnificent collection of Greek vases, which he sold to the British Museum. He purchased the Barberini, or “Portland,” vase from Byres, the architect, and sold it for 1800 guineas to the Duchess of Portland, in the sale of whose property it was bought by the family in 1829 for £1029. On February 7, 1745, after its acquisition by the British Museum (Montagu House), it was wantonly broken in pieces by a visitor named William Lloyd, who was sentenced to a fine or imprisonment. The fine was paid anonymously.

[231] Smith’s little present to Sir George Beaumont is the more interesting to us, because of that painter’s well-known love of brown, and his dictum that “there ought to be at least one brown tree in every landscape.” Beaumont’s name is inseparably associated with the National Gallery, and also with Wordsworth’s noble poem on his picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, containing the lines—

“Ah! then if mine had been the painter’s hand

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration, and the Poet’s dream,—

I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile,

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.”

[232] Henry Salt, the great traveller and British consul-general in Egypt. He sold antiquities to the British Museum, and had dealings, resulting in a quarrel, with Belzoni.

[233] Smith evidently refers to the plan affected by Alexander (not the greater John Rosher) Cozens, of throwing a blot, and then working it into a landscape composition.

[234] Smith expresses himself rather oddly here, for he married only once, his wife being Anne Maria Prickett, who, after a union of forty-five years, was left his widow.

[235] Sir James Winter Lake, Bart., a man of wealth and culture, compiled “Bibliotheca Lakeana” (a catalogue of his library) in 1808, and “British Portraits and Historical Prints, collected by J. W. L.” in the same year. His extra-illustrated Granger’s History extended to forty large folio volumes.

Lady Lake is mentioned in one of the many amusing dialogues recorded by Smith in his Life of Nollekens. Panton Betew, the silversmith of Old Compton Street, Soho, talking to Nollekens of their common memories, says: “Ay, I know there were many very clever things produced there (at Bow); what very curious heads for canes they made at that manufactory! I think Crowther was the proprietor’s name; he had a very beautiful daughter, who is married to Sir James Lake. Nat. Hone painted a portrait of her, in the character of Diana, and it was one of his best pictures.”

[236] Smith’s general meaning is plain, but I cannot with confidence explain the reference to Tooley Street. It may be no more than a slightly contemptuous way of referring to villa-building tradesmen (nobodies, like the three Tooley Street tailors) who at that time were building their Camomile Cottages in the country.

[237] The part of Major Sturgeon, J.P., “the fishmonger from Brentford,” was played by Foote in his own comedy, The Mayor of Garratt (1763). Sturgeon brags: “We had some desperate duty, Sir Jacob … such marchings and counter-marchings from Brentford to Ealing, from Ealing to Acton, from Acton to Uxbridge. Why, there was our last expedition to Hounslow; that day’s work carried off Major Molassas.”… Zoffany painted Foote in this character.

[238] Elizabeth Canning (1734-73), a domestic servant in Aldermanbury, startled London in 1753 by the circumstantial story she told of her capture in Moorfields, and her subsequent imprisonment and ill-treatment at Enfield by “Mother Wells” and a gipsy woman, Mary Squires. After Squires had been condemned to death, and Wells had been burned in the hand, the case was revised, with the result that Squires was pardoned and her accuser transported for perjury. The affair, which had originally come before Henry Fielding, the novelist, at Bow Street, aroused an incredible amount of feeling in London.

[239] The Merry Devil of Edmonton was for long carelessly attributed to Shakespeare. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his Shakespeare’s Life and Work, says: “It is a delightful comedy … but no sign of Shakespeare’s workmanship is apparent.”

[240] Thomas King (1730-1805) was a clever comedian. His stage career in London lasted fifty-four years. In November 1789 he played the part of Sir John Trotley in Garrick’s Bon Ton, or High Life above Stairs. “His acting,” says Charles Lamb, “left a taste on the palate sharp and sweet as a quince; with an old, hard, rough, withered face, like a john-apple, puckered up into a thousand wrinkles; with shrewd hints and tart replies.” The prologue of Bon Ton has these lines:—

“Ah! I loves life, and all the joys it yields—

Says Madam Fussock, warm from Spital-fields.

Bone Tone’s the space ’twixt Saturday and Monday,

And riding in a one-horse chair o’ Sunday!

’Tis drinking tea on summer afternoons

At Bagnigge-Wells, with China and gilt spoons!

’Tis laying by our stuffs, red cloaks, and pattens,

To dance Cow-tillions, all in silks and sattins!”

[241] Skelton says of Eleanor Rumming—

“She breweth noppy ale,

And maketh thereof fast sale

To travellers, to tinkers.

To sweaters, to swinkers,

And all good ale-drinkers.”

The woman kept an alehouse at Leatherhead, which, it is thought, Skelton may have visited when staying with his royal master at Nonsuch Palace. It has been claimed, however, on interesting evidence, that her alehouse was “Two-pot House,” between Cambridge and Hardwicke. (See Gentleman’s Magazine, Nov. 1794, and Chambers’ Book of Days under June 21.)

[242] This passage in St. Martin’s Lane was built by a Mr. May, who lived in a house of his own design in St. Martin’s Lane. Here Smith himself lived at his father’s house, the Rembrandt Head, No. 18, for some years; the house is now absorbed in Messrs. Harrison’s printing establishment. I have found no trace of Hartry, the valiant cupper, but only of a dentist of that name, who may have been his son.

[243] John Adams, teacher of mathematics, published The Mathematician’s Companion (1796). “The following use was made of Hogarth’s plates of the Idle and Industrious Apprentices, by the late John Adams, of Edmonton, schoolmaster. The prints were framed and hung up in the schoolroom, and Adams, once a month, after reading a lecture upon their vicious and virtuous examples, rewarded those boys who had conducted themselves well, and caned those who had behaved ill” (Smith: Nollekens).

[244] Samuel Ireland was father of William Henry Ireland, who forged Shakespearean MSS. and put forward the spurious play Vortigern. In his well-known Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth he proves himself rather “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles than a contributor of serviceable information” (Austin Dobson: William Hogarth: enlarged ed. 1898). This work must not be confused with John Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated.

[245] Perhaps it was an ordnance map mistake. “On the south side of Nag’s Head Lane, near Ponder’s End, is a deep well, probably the brick conduit noted in Ogilby’s roads 1698, and known by the name of Tim Ringer’s Well (King’s Ring Well, 2076 in the ordnance map), which was formerly considered infallible as a remedy for inflammation of the eyes” (Hodson and Ford: History of Enfield, 1873).

[246] Durance, or Durants, was visited by James I. when it was the home of Sir Henry Wroth, to whom Ben Jonson wrote his lines—

“How blessed art thou, canst love the country, Wroth

…

And though so near the City and the Court,

Art ta’en with neither’s vice or sport.”

Wroth’s executors sold the manor to Sir Thomas Stringer, who married a daughter of Judge Jeffreys.

[247] “But above all, I must not forget the Tulip Tree, the largest and biggest that ever was seen; there being but one more in Great Britain (as I am informed), and that at the Lord Peterborough’s. It blows with innumerable flowers in the months of June and July” (John Farmer: History of Waltham Abbey).

[248] Known as Cheshunt House or the Great House. When Smith visited it in 1791, it had been much modernised. There is no evidence, says Thorne (Environs of London), that the o’er great Cardinal ever lived there. Ten years after Smith’s visit, the Rev. Charles Mayo pulled down the larger part of the building in order to repair the remainder. After his time it remained desolate and neglected.

[249] Cornelius Janssen (1590-1665) is best remembered for his portrait of Milton as a boy, engraved in the first volume of Professor Masson’s Life of the poet. His original portrait of Sir Hugh Myddelton, now in the committee room of the Goldsmiths’ Hall, represents the great engineer with his left hand resting on a conch from which a stream of water gushes; over this are inscribed the words: “Fontes Fondinæ.” This portrait was presented to the Company by Lady Myddelton.

[250] Robert Lemon, the archivist. He discovered Milton’s “De Doctrina Christiania,” and gave assistance to Sir Walter Scott.

[251] Sir Robert Strange was engraver to Prince Charles. His distinguished career was chequered by his political sympathies, and by his bitter criticism of the Royal Academy, in consequence, partly, of its exclusion of engravers. Knighted by George III. (after he had engraved West’s apotheosis of the three royal children), he died in his last London home in Great Queen Street, July 5, 1792. See note, [p. 82].

[252] The bill of which Smith gives particulars is quoted in full by William Hookham Carpenter in his Pictorial Notices of Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1844). “It is more than probable that the account had been submitted to the supervision of Bishop Juxon, who, by the influence of Archbishop Laud, was appointed to the office of Lord Treasurer in 1635, which he held till 1641; and Anthony Wood tells us ‘he kept the King’s purse when necessities were deepest, and clamours were loudest.’” Vandyke had from Charles, in addition to payments against pictures, an annuity of £200 a year and houses at Blackfriars and Eltham.

[253] On February 23. After lying in state in the Royal Academy, the remains of Sir Joshua Reynolds were interred, on Saturday, March 3, in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, near the resting-place of Sir Christopher Wren. The pall was borne by ten peers, and the Archbishop of York took part in the service.

[254] Burke’s tribute had appeared in the Annual Register.

[255] Lieut.-Colonel Molesworth Phillips, whose career links Dr. Johnson to Charles Lamb, was the companion of Captain Cook on his last voyage. His marriage in 1782 to Susannah Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. Charles Burney, and sister of Fanny Burney, brought him into the Johnson set. He escorted Miss Burney to Westminster Hall to hear Warren Hastings on his defence. Lamb, recalling his old whist-playing friends in his “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey,” names him as “the high-minded associate of Cook, the veteran Colonel, with his lusty heart still sending cartels of defiance to old Time.” He died in 1832.

[256] Mrs. Cholmondeley, who appears several times in Boswell’s Life, was a younger sister of Peg Woffington, and the wife of the Hon. and Rev. George Cholmondeley.

[257] “Sheridan had very fine eyes, and he was very vain of them. He said to Rogers on his deathbed, ‘Tell Lady Besborough that my eyes will look up to the coffin-lid as brightly as ever.’”

[258] The Old Bun House at Chelsea flourished for nearly a century and a half, and yielded a livelihood to four generations of the same family. In its best days it was the resort of royalty and rank. Queen Charlotte presented Mrs. Hand with a silver mug, containing five guineas. The shop had a pleasant arcaded front, and, besides buns, offered its customers the sight of a number of curiosities. As many as fifty thousand people would assemble here on Good Friday mornings, and it is clear that Mrs. Hand had reason to issue her curious notice. The site of the Bun House and its garden is on the north side of the Pimlico Road, between Union Street and Westbourne Street. The name of Bunhouse Place, at the back, commemorates the establishment, which disappeared in 1839.

The danger of a mob assembling outside a London bun-shop on Good Friday morning has passed away. Mr. Henry Attwell sadly observed, in Notes and Queries, April 28, 1900, that “the last Good Friday of the nineteenth century” found the hot-cross bun degenerated from a spiced bun (“the spice recalling to the few who cared about its religious suggestiveness the embalming of our Lord”) into a vulgarised currant bun marked with deep indentures for convenience of division, instead of the old slight cross in which there was a touch of mystery.

[259] Roger L’Estrange, the pamphleteer and miscellaneous writer (1616-1704), was deprived of his office of surveyor and licenser of the press in 1688.

[260] The First Book of Architecture, first published in English in 1668.

[261] Then Montagu House. “I apprehend,” says Smith, in his Antient Topography of London, “that the custom of inlaying, or tesselating, wooden floors commenced in England in the reign of King Charles the First, and ended in that of Queen Anne. I have secured patterns of four such floors: two belonging to the reign of Charles the First, and two to that of Charles the Second. No. 1 is from that part of Whitehall lately inhabited by the Duchess of Portland. No. 2 is from Somerset House. Nos. 3 and 4 are from the present old gallery and waiting-room in the Marquis of Stafford’s house in Cleveland Row.”

[262] One of the first exhibitors before the establishment of the Royal Academy (S.). Keyse opened Bermondsey Spa in 1770, and in 1780 obtained a music licence. His greatest bid for public favour was a farewell representation of the Siege of Gibraltar. The present Spa Road crosses the site of the gardens, which were closed about 1805.

[263] See note, [p. 269].

[264] George Adams (died 1773) and his son George (died 1796) were mathematical instrument makers to George III. A book by the father on Terrestrial Globes was supplied with a dedication to the King by Dr. Johnson.—Peter Dollond (1730-1820) was second in the line of opticians. He was succeeded by his nephew, George Huggins, who assumed the name of Dollond.

[265] A critic wrote:

“Keyse’s mutton

Show’d how the painter had a strife

With nature, to outdo the life.”

Keyse’s realism had been anticipated by such painters as Jordaens and Snyder, whose butcher’s meat remains painfully juicy in the galleries of Brussels and Antwerp.

[266] “Mrs. Wrighten had a vivacious manner and a bewitching smile, and her ‘Hunting Song’ was popular” (Wroth: London Pleasure Gardens).

[267] Captain Edward Topham (1751-1820), after a brilliant regimental career in the Horse Guards, gave himself up to fashion and drama. He produced several plays, and in 1787 founded the World, a scurrilous daily paper, which brought him into the law courts. In Rowlandson’s well-known Vauxhall, the foremost figure in the crowd is an elderly beau, standing bolt upright, and defying through his glass the stare of a gaudy female of mature years who has found another cavalier. This is Captain, afterwards Major, Topham. He wrote the life of Elwes, the miser.

[268] Jonas Blewitt, who died in 1805, lived at Bermondsey, near the Spa Gardens, for which he wrote many songs. He wrote a Treatise on the Organ, and must not be confused with his son, the better-known Jonathan Blewitt, the musical director of the Surrey Theatre.

[269] Jonathan Battishill (1738-1801), composer, organist of Christ Church, Newgate Street, and St. Clement’s, Eastcheap, first became known by his music to the song “Kate of Aberdeen.” His anthems were sung in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and he set many of Charles Wesley’s hymns to music.

[270] Smith underlines Joseph to distinguish him from his better-known brother, James Caulfield, who was the author and printseller, and the publisher of much “Remarkable Persons” literature. Joseph Caulfield was a musical engraver, and a capable teacher of the pianoforte. He lived in Camden Town.

[271] John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-92), “was the soul of the Catch Club, and one of the Directors of the Concert of Ancient Music, but he had not the least real ear for music, and was equally insensible of harmony and melody” (Charles Butler’s Reminiscences). It was his treachery to Wilkes that gave Lord Sandwich his popular nickname, Jemmy Twitcher, taken from Macheath’s words in the Beggar’s Opera: “That Jemmy Twitcher should peach me, I own surprised me.”

[272] About the year 1770 Battishill wrote this glee in a competition for a gold medal offered by the Noblemen’s Catch Club.

[273] Smith had been Morland’s fellow-student at the Royal Academy, and they had frequently walked home together. Among his innumerable addresses, Morland had several in the Fitzroy Square region.

[274] Otter’s Pool was a country house at Aldenham, Herts, afterwards for many years the seat of Sir James Shaw Willes, the judge of common pleas.

[275] Surrey Chapel is now occupied by a large machinery firm. Rowland Hill used to say, in allusion to its octagonal form, that he liked a round building because there were no corners for the devil to hide in. Here he won the devotion of his congregation and the esteem of the many distinguished people who came to hear him. Sheridan said: “I go to hear Rowland Hill because his ideas come red-hot from the heart.” Dean Milner said to him, “Mr. Hill! Mr. Hill! I felt to-day ’tis this slap-dash preaching, say what they will, that does all the good.” He died at his house in Blackfriars Road, April 11, 1833, aged 88, and was buried in a vault under his pulpit.

[276] This fanatical advocate of Charles the First’s execution (at St. Margaret’s, Westminster) was one of the regicides executed in 1660.

[277] Smith is nowhere mentioned by Lamb, and other evidence of their acquaintance is wanting.

[278] George Frost (1754-1821) is remembered as the intimate friend of Constable. Smart was John Smart (1740-1811), the miniature painter. He died in London.

“His genius lov’d his Country’s native views;

Its taper spires, green lawns, or sheltered farms;

He touch’d each scene with Nature’s genuine hues,

And gave the Suffolk landscape all its charms.”

[279] Smith had evidently asked Constable to ascertain for him the exact date of Gainsborough’s birth. This is still uncertain: it took place in Sepulchre Street, Sudbury, at the end of April or beginning of May 1727. He was baptized on 14th May of that year in the Independent meeting-house in Sudbury.

[280] James Gubbins was a subscriber to Smith’s Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), a volume of etchings of cottage and rural scenes around London. One of its drawings represents a squatter’s shanty in Epping Forest, bowered in trees, and is entitled “Lady Plomer’s Palace on the summit of Hawke’s Hill Wood, Epping Forest.”

[281] The Minories drawing referred to by Constable was Smith’s etching in his Antient Topography of the north and east walls of the Convent of St. Clare, the remains of which were destroyed by fire on March 23, 1797. Only a year before, Mr. John Cranch (the C——h of Constable’s letter) had presented Smith with a sketch of the convent. Constable, therefore, refers to the swift supersession of Cranch’s sketch by Smith’s drawing after the fire.

[282] Elizabeth Pope died on 15th March of this year, aged 52. The funeral to the Abbey was met everywhere by great crowds. Her abilities had not been dimmed by those of Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, and Miss Farren, and her private life was blameless. The resemblance she bore to Lady Sarah Lennox was such that George III., seeing her act late in her career, exclaimed to his queen, “She is like Lady Sarah still.” There is a fine story of her parting with Garrick. On June 8, 1776, his last appearance but one, when he was playing Lear to her Cordelia, Garrick said to her with a sigh: “Ah, Bess! this is the last time of my being your father; you must now look out for someone else to adopt you.” “Then, sir,” she exclaimed, dropping on her knees, “give me a father’s blessing.” Garrick, deeply touched, raised her, and said, “God bless you!”

[283] Nevertheless Pope married two more wives. His most lasting affections appear to have been set on table delicacies. Once, when Kean asked him to act with him at Dublin, and take a benefit there, he declined, saying: “I must be at Plymouth at the time; it is exactly the season for mullet.” He maintained that there was but one crime: peppering a beef-steak.

[284] Pope had begun life as a crayon portrait painter in his birthplace, Cork. A highly finished water-colour portrait of Henry Grattan, from his hand, is in the British Museum Print Room.

[285] Francis Cotes, born in Cork Street, 1725, was a foundation member of the Royal Academy, and famous for his crayon portraits. He built himself a house in Cavendish Square (No. 32), in which Romney afterwards lived for twenty-one years, followed by Sir Martin A. Shee. It was demolished in 1904. The British Museum has four portrait subjects by Cotes in crayon. He is poorly represented in the National Gallery by a small portrait of Mrs. Brocas.

[286] Benjamin Green, born at Halesowen, became a drawing-master at Christ’s Hospital, and member of the Incorporated Society of Artists. He published many topographical plates, and engraved the illustrations in Morant’s History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (1768). His drawings of Canonbury Tower and Highbury Barn are in the British Museum Print Room. He died about 1800.

[287] The Right Honourable James Caulfield, first Earl of Charlemont (1728-99), distinguished himself in Ireland politically; in London he mixed with the Reynolds and Johnson set and was a member of the Dilettanti Club. In the college at St. Andrews, which Johnson and Boswell playfully imagined might be staffed by members of the Literary Club, Lord Charlemont was assigned the chair of modern history, and it was on Lord Charlemont that Boswell, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and others laid the task of bringing Dr. Johnson’s conversational powers into play by asking him whether a ludicrous statement in the newspapers that he was taking dancing lessons from Vestris was true.

[288] Thomas Cheesman, who had been pupil to Bartolozzi, engraved “The Lady’s Last Stake, or Picquet, or Virtue in Danger,” after Hogarth. He lived, successively, at 40 Oxford Street, 71 Newman Street, and 28 Francis Street. His portrait, by Bartolozzi, is in the National Portrait Gallery.

[289] Sir Lawrence Parsons (1758-1841), afterwards Earl of Rosse. Like Lord Charlemont, he was opposed to the Union, and twelve days after the date of this letter he moved in the Irish House of Commons an address to the Crown to expunge a paragraph in favour of the Union. This was carried by a majority of five votes.

[290] Had James Barry possessed no more than a tithe of the suavity of Reynolds or West, his career would have been more fortunate. In vain Burke, his best friend, pointed out that his business was to paint, not to dispute. He used his chair of painting at the Royal Academy to vilify the members to the students. In 1799 the climax arrived, and the Academicians resolved on his expulsion. The King consented, and the following entry appears in the records: “I have struck out the adjoining name, in consequence of the opinion entered in the minutes of the Council, and of the General Meeting, which I fully approve. April 23, 1779.—G. R.” No work of Barry’s is in the National Gallery, but he has an enduring memorial in his six great paintings in the hall of the Society of Arts, John Street. Here he finally lay in state among his works—as Haydon said, “a pall worthy of the corpse.”

[291] John Brand (1744-1806), the excellent historian of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and author of the Popular Antiquities. He came to London in 1784, to fill the rectory of St. Mary-at-Hill. In the same year he was appointed Resident Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, but he continued to discharge his duties in the City, and died there, suddenly, in his rectory. He was buried in the chancel of his church.

[292] The publication Flaxman indicates, and to which he wishes to subscribe, is Smith’s important “Antiquities of Westminster, the old Palace, St. Stephen’s Chapel (now the House of Commons).… Containing two hundred and forty-six engravings of topographical subjects, of which one hundred and twenty-two no longer remain.”

The reduction of the thickness of the side walls of St. Stephen’s Chapel from three feet to one foot gave additional four feet to the width of the chamber. So soon as the wainscotting was removed, it was seen that the walls were adorned with beautiful paintings of scriptural and historical subjects. The discovery excited great interest, both on account of the antiquity of the paintings, which were found to date from Edward III., and the fact that they were painted in oils and were consequently among the earliest specimens of that class of painting. Smith obtained permission to copy them. He began work each morning, as soon as it was light, and was followed so closely by the workmen that they sometimes demolished in the afternoon the painting he had copied in the morning. This task occupied him for six weeks. These valuable drawings are engraved and coloured in the Antiquities of Westminster.

[293] Edward Hussey Delaval (1729-1814) of Seaton-Delaval, Northumberland, the chemist, has a claim on the remembrance of Londoners. In 1769 he and Benjamin Franklin were commissioned to report to the Royal Society on the best means of protecting St. Paul’s from lightning. Parliament Stairs, where his house stood, was at the west end of the present Houses of Parliament, giving access to the river from Abingdon Street. Delaval, who traced his descent from the Conqueror’s standard-bearer at Hastings, died here, aged 85.

[294] Parliament Stairs were open several months in the summer for the accommodation of those gentlemen of Westminster School, who practise the manly and healthy exercise of rowing; the key was held by Mr. Tyrwhitt, whose servants regularly opened and closed the gates night and morning.—S.

[295] John Carter, F.R.S. (1748-1817), is airily described by Michael Bryan as “a harmless and inoffensive drudge.” He was employed by the Society of Antiquaries, and by Horace Walpole and others. His chief work, The Ancient Architecture of England, occupied him many years. Carter was enthusiastically musical, but the two operas on which he ventured are forgotten.

[296] Richard Bentley, only son of Dr. Bentley, the Master of Trinity. He designed beautiful illustrations for Walpole’s edition-de-luxe of six of Gray’s poems, including the Elegy, and gave much assistance in the architectural treatment of Strawberry Hill. Walpole was under no delusion about their joint experiments in Gothic. “Neither Mr. Bentley nor my workmen had studied the science,” he wrote to Thomas Barrett (June 5, 1788); “my house therefore is but a sketch for beginners.”

[297] George Arnald (1763-1841) is represented in the National Gallery by one pleasing landscape, hung in Room XX., “On the Ouse, Yorkshire.” Some of his London subjects are reproduced by Smith in his Westminster. His “View of the Palace and Abbey,” painted in 1803, just excludes Delaval’s house on the left.—George Francis Joseph, A.R.A. (1764-1846), was a well-known portrait painter in his day. He is represented in the National Gallery by portraits of Spencer, Perceval, and Sir Stamford Raffles, and in the British Museum Print Room by a water-colour portrait of Charles Lamb, engravings from which appear in many editions of Lamb’s works.

[298] John Ker, third Duke of Roxburgh (1740-1804), one of the greatest of book-collectors, lived at No. 11 St. James’s Square. Smith’s epithet “the late” appertains to the time at which he wrote this passage.

[299] The case of Colonel Joseph Wall was remarkable for the culprit’s twenty years’ evasion of justice. His crime was the murder of a soldier while he was Lieutenant-Governor of Goree, in Senegambia, in 1782. The command of the fort at Goree was an inferior appointment, usually given to some claimant who stood in no great favour with the War Minister, and the troops of the garrison were commonly regiments in disgrace. Wall exercised his authority with great cruelty, and in 1782 punished Benjamin Armstrong, a sergeant, with a wilful severity which resulted in his death. Aware of the nature of his action, Wall fled to France. He then came to England, and was tried by court-martial for cruelty; but the proceedings hung fire, and he went to reside at Bath. He was re-arrested in 1784, but escaped to the Continent. Finally, in 1797, he wrote to the Home Secretary, offering to stand his trial for murder. He was tried, and sentenced to death, and, though the likelihood of a reprieve seemed great, was hanged outside Newgate, January 28, 1802.

[300] The Gentleman’s Magazine records that Dr. Forde, the Ordinary of Newgate, was “a very worthy man, and was much and deservedly esteemed by the City magistrates, who, on his retirement from office, settled on him an annuity which provided for the comforts of his latter days.” Dr. Forde no doubt satisfied the City authorities, but the Parliamentary Committee which investigated the state of the prison in 1814 reported: “Beyond his attendance in chapel, and on those who are sentenced to death, Dr. Forde feels but few duties to be attached to his office. He knows nothing of the state of morals in the prison; he never sees any of the prisoners in private; … he never knows that any have been sick till he gets a warning to attend their funeral; and does not go to the infirmary, for it is not in his instructions.” Dr. Forde was succeeded by the Rev. Mr. Cotton, who first officiated August 8, 1814.

[301] Maria Cosway, wife of Richard Cosway, the miniaturist.

[302] Black Boy Alley was notorious in the eighteenth century, and at one time was infested by a gang who drowned their victims in the Fleet River. No fewer than twenty-one were executed at once, after which the humour of the neighbourhood called the place Jack Ketch’s Common. In 1802, and earlier, Black Boy Alley was the scene of a weekly display of badger-baiting.

[303] In the eighteenth century, Epping sent butter and sausages to the London market, but the industry declined long ago.

[304] Pie Corner was at the Smithfield end of Giltspur Street, a short distance north from the Old Bailey. “A very fine dirty place,” is D’Urfey’s description of this spot, where the Great Fire of London ended. It was long famous for its greasy cook-shops.

[305] In his Nollekens Smith puts the same jibe into the mouth of John Hamilton Mortimer, the painter. “Mortimer made Dr. Arne, who had a very red face with staring eyes, furiously angry by telling him that his eyes looked ‘like two oysters just opened for sauce put upon an oval side-dish of beet-root.’”

[306] Peter Coxe, an auctioneer, and the author of a poem in four cantos called “The Social Day,” published in 1823. He wrote also “The Exposé, or Napoleon Buonaparte unmasked in a Condensed Statement of his Career and Atrocities” (1809). His emollient has escaped my search. Coxe was one of a long line of well-known men who lived in the middle one of the three houses into which Schomberg House, Pall Mall, was divided. He died in 1844.

[307] This generous woman, better known under the lawful title of Lady Hamilton, when I showed her my etching of the funeral procession of her husband’s friend, the immortal Nelson, fainted and fell into my arms; and, believe me, reader, her mouth was equal to any production of Greek sculpture I have yet seen (S.).—Smith’s etching was entitled, “An Accurate View (drawn and etched by J. T. Smith, Engraver of the Antiquities of London and Westminster) from the house of W. Tunnard, Esq., on the Bankside, adjoining the Scite of Shakespeare’s Theatre, on Wednesday the 8th January 1806, when the remains of the great Admiral Lord Nelson were brought from Greenwich to Whitehall.”

[308]

“The Fair One, whose charms did the Barber enthral,

At the end of Fleet Market of fish kept a stall:

As red as her cheek no boil’d lobster was seen,

Not an eel that she sold was as soft as her skin.”

The Barber’s Nuptials.

[309] From The Wife’s Trial, Lamb’s dramatic version of Crabbe’s Confidant. See Mr. Lucas’s Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. v. p. 257.

[310] All previous relic-selling at Newgate was, however, eclipsed by the sale held in the partly demolished prison on Wednesday, 4th February 1903. The following account appeared in the City Press of 7th February:—

“In its way, probably, the sale which Messrs. Douglas Young & Co. conducted in the middle of the week, within the gloomy precincts of crime-stricken Newgate, was the most unique and memorable of its kind ever held. Crowds of the curious and speculative were naturally attracted to the fortress prison site.

“Interest more particularly hovered around the old toll bell, with its famous loyal inscription, and solid ton of metal. The hour was late when the lot (No. 188 in the catalogue) was reached, but that circumstance did not in any way detract from the briskness of the bidding. Starting at £30, the offers rapidly mounted; and, finally, the prized souvenir of many a tragic decade passed into the hands of Mr. Richardson (acting as agent for Madame Tussaud’s) for the exact sum of £100. The old flagstaff, whence the black flag was hoisted immediately after an execution had taken place, fell to the enterprise of Mr. Fox, a Cape gentleman, who, for 11½ guineas, has ensured that in future the Union Jack shall flutter in South African breezes from its fateful masthead.

“The famous oak and iron-cased half-latticed door associated with memories of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, of philanthropic fame, went for £20; while Sir George Chubb secured for £30, amidst some cheering, the wonderful old massive oak and iron-bound half-latticed main entrance door that was fixed up when the prison was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. A warder’s key-cupboard, fitted with shelf and iron hooks—identical with the one referred to in Barnaby Rudge—extracted £12, 10s. from the pockets of the bidder; while the appointments of the condemned cells, both male and female, realised fairly good prices—the former in particular.

“The chapel pulpit, at £8, 10s., was a distinctly disappointing figure; while it cannot be said that £5, 15s. was an extravagant sum to pay for the complete equipment of the execution shed. The taste for criminology, in the shape of the plaster casts of the heads of nine victims of the gallows, worked out at five guineas.

“Some of the liveliest bidding of the day took place over the numerous lots of copper washing bowls, in which the inmates of Newgate testified that cleanliness was next to godliness. The lowest price realised was £2, 12s. 6d. for a set of three bowls; while sets of four realised, on several occasions, as much as £5. Altogether it was a sale in which monotony and curiosity singularly intermingled, and, withal, one ever to be remembered by those who happened to be present.”

[311] The flying physician of the Chapter Coffee House was Dr. William Buchan, who, in the last half of the eighteenth century, was regularly consulted at this coffee-house in St. Paul’s Alley by ailing bookmen. His advice frequently took this form: “Now, let me prescribe for you. Here, John, bring a glass of punch for Mr.——, unless he likes brandy and water better. Take that, sir, and I’ll warrant you’ll soon be well. You’re a peg too low, you want stimulus, and if one glass won’t do, call for a second.” His place was in a box in the north-east corner of the room, known as the “Wittenagemot,” where he not only prescribed, but acted as an arbiter of debate. James Montgomery, in his Memoirs, describes him as “of venerable aspect, neat in his dress, his hair tied behind with a large ribbon, and a gold-headed cane in his hand, quite realising my idea of an Esculapian dignitary.”

Buchan was, indeed, a physician of repute, and his Domestic Medicine, or the Family Physician, was not only the first English work of its kind, but ran into nineteen large editions. It was said that the publishers gave him £700 down for it, and reaped £700 a year. In Russia and in America and the West Indies the book was welcomed. The Empress Catherine sent the author a gold medallion and a complimentary letter.

To members of the Society of Friends the career of this genial doctor is of some interest, inasmuch as at one time he was physician to the Yorkshire branch of the Foundling Hospital at Ackworth, an unfortunate institution which in 1779 was taken over by this Society, to become the flourishing and historic school of to-day. Buchan lived many years with his son at No. 6 Percy Street, Rathbone Place, and died there February 25, 1806, aged seventy-six. He was buried in the west cloister of Westminster Abbey, near Dr. Richard Jebb, and Wollett, the engraver.

[312] Flockton was for nearly half a century a showman at St. Bartholomew’s and Sturbridge Fairs. These lines appeared on some of his bills:—

“To raise the soul by means of wood and wire,

To Screw the fancy up a few pegs higher;

In miniature to show the world at large,

As folks conceive a ship who’ve seen a barge,

This is the scope of all our actors’ play,

Who hope their wooden aims will not be thrown away!”

He died at Camberwell, April 12, 1794, leaving £5000, most of which he bequeathed to his company. An engraving of his show bears the almost Yankee inscription, “The Only Booth in the Fair;” and on the balustrade of the stairs to its entrance is inscribed the curiously modern injunction, “Tumble up! tumble up!”

[313] Honey Lane Market, famous in the eighteenth century for its provisions, keeps its name close to Cheapside. In 1835, the pillared and belfried market-house gave place to the City of London School, since removed to the Thames Embankment. The “Market” is still an odd oasis of domestic shopping in the City’s larger operations.

[314] This was Belzoni’s “Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia;—and of a—Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in search of—the Ancient Berenice;—and another to—the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon. By G. Belzoni. London:—John Murray, Albemarle Street.—1820.” At the end of the book comes “Mrs. Belzoni’s Trifling Account—of the—Women of Egypt, Nubia, and Syria.”

That Belzoni, turned author, retained the physical strength of his showman days, is shown in a story told by Dr. Smiles in his Memoirs of John Murray. “Like many other men of Herculean power, he was not eager to exhibit his strength, but on one occasion he gave proof of it. Mr. Murray had asked him to accompany him to the Coronation of George IV. They had tickets of admittance to Westminster Hall, but on arriving there they found that the sudden advent of Queen Caroline, attended by a mob claiming admission to the Abbey, had alarmed the authorities, and who had caused all doors to be shut. That by which they should have entered was held close and guarded by several stalwart janitors. Belzoni thereupon advanced to the door, and, in spite of the efforts of these guardians, including Tom Crib and others of the pugilistic corps who had been engaged as constables, opened it with ease, and admitted himself and Mr. Murray.”

[315] Dr. Robert Richardson (1779-1847) went to Egypt and Palestine with the Earl of Belmore in 1816, and published his Travels in 1822. Lady Blessington lent the book to Byron, who said: “The author is just the sort of man I should like to have with me for Greece—clever both as a man and a physician.” Richardson afterwards settled in Rathbone Place. He died in Gordon Street, Gordon Square, Nov. 5, 1847.

[316] The creator of the Leverian Museum was the eldest son of Sir Darcey Lever, of Alkrington, near Manchester. As a young man he had delighted in horses and birds. His treasures had grown in interest and numbers, until he was persuaded to turn a private hobby into a public speculation. He hired Leicester House in 1771, and for thirteen years maintained and increased it, at a cost of £50,000, against which he could set only £13,000 in receipts. In 1784 he was authorised to issue 36,000 guinea tickets, of which one was to entitle the holder to the entire museum. A proposal for the purchase of the museum by the nation, which Dr. Johnson favoured, came to nothing. Only 8000 tickets had been sold when the drawing took place. The one prize, the museum, was drawn by a Mr. Parkinson, who thus acquired for a guinea the largest general collection in Europe, including the curiosities collected by Captain Cook in his South Sea voyages.

Sir Ashton Lever died suddenly in 1788, at Manchester. Meanwhile Mr. Parkinson had built the Rotunda in Albion Place, at the south end of Blackfriars Bridge, for the display of the “Museum Leverianum.” The scheme failed, and in 1806 the museum was sold by auction at King & Lochee’s rooms in King Street, Covent Garden, the sale lasting sixty-five days. The catalogue filled 410 octavo pages, and there were 7879 lots. The deserted “Rotunda” at Blackfriars deteriorated until it was known to Tom Taylor as “something very much like a penny gaff.” Taylor, by the way, tells us that Sir Ashton Lever conceived the idea of sending a ship-load of potatoes to the defenders of Gibraltar, and this was done.

[317] By “this year” Smith means 1784. His note is little more than a copy of the following newspaper paragraph of May 29, 1784, quoted by Lewis in his History of Islington: “Thursday a grand cricket-match was played in the White Conduit Fields. Among the players were the Duke of Dorset, Lord Winchilsea, Lord Talbot, Colonel Tarleton, Mr. Howe, Mr. Damer, Hon. Mr. Lennox, and the Rev. Mr. Williams. A pavilion was erected for refreshments, and a number of ladies attended.”

John Frederick Sackville, third Duke of Dorset (1745-99), was a member of the Hambledon Club, and of the committee which drew up the original laws of the M.C.C. He employed several of the best cricketers of his day, and presented Sevenoaks with a cricket ground. As our Ambassador to France he arranged for a British cricket eleven to play in Paris, but the Revolution disturbances prevented the match.

The Earl of Winchilsea (1752-1826) was also a member of the Hambledon. He introduced four wickets, two inches higher than the standard. “The game is then rendered shorter by easier bowling out,” said the Hampshire Chronicle, but the Earl’s plan is still a dream and a controversy.

The Hon. Mr. Lennox is referred to in a newspaper of the period as “nephew to his grace of Richmond,” and he and Lord Winchilsea are described as the chief performers at White Conduit House.

Colonel Sir Banastre Tarleton went through the War of Independence with distinction, and lived with “Perdita” (Mary Robinson) for some years, receiving from her much devotion. He represented Liverpool in Parliament for twenty-two years, and attained the rank of General.

The White Conduit Club, of which these gentlemen were members, has a high importance in the history of cricket, for out of it sprang, in 1787, the Marylebone Cricket Club. “The M.C.C. Club,” says Mr. Andrew Lang in a sketch of cricket history, “may be said to have sprung from the ashes of the White Conduit Club, dissolved in 1787. One Thomas Lord, by the aid of some members of the older association, made a ground in the space which is now Dorset Square. This was the first ‘Lord’s’.” Two removals brought the ground to its present location in St. John’s Wood, where the first recorded match was played, June 22, 1814.

[318] Du Val’s Lane is now represented by Hornsey Road. It seems to have been originally “Devil’s Lane,” but to have been popularly re-named from Claude Duval (1643-70), the highwayman, who, like Dick Turpin, favoured this district. Born at Domfront in Normandy, Du Val came to England in the train of the Duke of Richmond, and took to the road. He was famous for his gallantries to his victims. He was captured on January 17, 1669 or 1670, in the Hole-in-the-Wall Tavern, Chandos Street, and although intercession was made for him by ladies of rank, he was hanged at Tyburn within four days. The exhibition of his body at the Tangier Tavern, St. Giles’s, drew such crowds that it had to be stopped. It is hard to believe that Du Val was accorded a grave in the centre aisle of Covent Garden Church, and that his epitaph began—

Here lies Du Vall: Reader, if male thou art,

Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart;

but it is so stated in the Memoirs of Monsieur Du Val, 1670. His funeral, we read, “was attended with many flambeaux, and a numerous train of mourners, whereof most were of the beautiful sex.”

[319] Nathaniel Hillier, of Pancras Lane, merchant, died March 1, 1783, aged 76 (Gentleman’s Magazine).

[320] This tea-pot passed into the possession of that eccentric virtuoso, Henry Constantine Noel, of whom Smith gives an account under 1818. Noel had the following extraordinary inscription engraved on it:—

“We are told by Lucian, that the earthen lamp, which had administered to the lucubrations of Epictetus, was at his death purchased for the enormous sum of three thousand drachmas: why, then, may not imagination equally amplify the value of this unadorned vessel, long employed for the infusion of that favourite herb, whose enlivening virtues are said to have so often protracted the elegant and edifying lucubrations of Samuel Johnson; the zealous advocate of that innocent beverage, against its declared enemy, Jonas Hanway. It was weighed out for sale under the inspection of Sir John Hawkins, at the very minute when they were in the next room closing the incision through which Mr. Cruickshank had explored the ruinated machinery of its dead master’s thorax; so Bray the silversmith, conveyed there in Sir John’s carriage, thus hastily to buy the plate, informed its present possessor, Henry Constantine Noel, by whom it was, for its celebrated services, on the 1st of November 1788, rescued from the undiscriminating obliterations of the furnace.”

[321] In this letter, Charles Townley, the collector of the Townley marbles, probably refers to William Lock (1732-1810), the wealthy connoisseur, and a friend of Madame d’Arblay. He lived at Norbury Park, where he was hospitable to Madame de Staël. He was described as the “arbiter, advocate, and common friend of all lovers of art.”

[322] The “Triumph of Bacchus” was one of eight great pictures which Rubens painted for the palace at Madrid.

[323] Annibale Caracci was employed by Cardinal Farnese to decorate the famous gallery that bears his name. He produced a masterly series of frescoes.

[324] Welbore Ellis, first Baron Mendip, was the third owner of Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, after the poet.

[325] “1811, Feb. 3.—In Great Ormond Street, Atkinson Bush, Esq., in the 76th year of his age” (European Magazine, February 1811).

[326] Parton’s book, Some Account of the Hospital and Parish of St. Giles’ in the Fields, Middlesex (1822), by “the late” Mr. John Parton, gives the plan in question, but does not touch on the matter of its authenticity. It is clear, however, that his plans and maps are largely conjectural.

[327] A distinction she shared with Miss Mary Moser. These are the only women who have been members of the Royal Academy, but it cannot be said that their talent was very exceptional. Peter Pindar irreverently said that Mary Moser was made an R.A. for “a sublime Picture of a Plate of Gooseberries.”

[328] The annals of British art do not contain a more tragic story than that of “the late” William Wynn Ryland. A man of great talent, he was engraver to George III., and an exhibitor at the Royal Academy; but it was his fate to be hanged at Tyburn for forging a bond of several thousand pounds. How he presented this document in person at the India House, is narrated by Henry Angelo as a proof of his extraordinary self-command.

“The cashier, on receiving the document, examined it carefully, and referred to the ledger; then, comparing the date, observed, ‘Here is a mistake, Sir; the bond, as entered, does not become due until to-morrow.’

“Ryland, begging permission to look at the book, on its being handed to him, observed: ‘So I perceive—there must be an error in your entry of one day;’ and offered to leave the bond, not betraying the least disappointment or surprise. The mistake appearing to the cashier to be obviously an error in his office, the bond was paid to Ryland, who departed with the money. The next day the true bond was presented, when the forgery was discovered, of course; and, within a few hours after, the fraud was made public, and steps were taken for the recovery of the perpetrator.

“This document, lately in the possession of a gentleman now deceased, I have often seen. It is, perhaps, the most extraordinary piece of deceptive art, in the shape of imitation, that was ever produced.”

A reprieve for Ryland was sought on the ground of his extraordinary abilities, but, as was usual in cases of forgery, without success. George III. is said to have replied: “No; a man with such ample means of providing for his wants could not reasonably plead necessity as an excuse for his crime.” But the artist’s petition for a respite was both granted and renewed. He explained that he desired no extension of life except as the means of completing his last engraving, and so adding to his wife’s stock of plates. The subject was Queen Eleanor sucking the poison from the arm of her husband, Edward I., from a painting by Angelica Kauffmann. He laboured hard on this work, and when he received the first proof from his printer, said, “Mr. Haddril, I thank you; my task is now accomplished.” He was hanged within a week, and his was the last execution at Tyburn. Henry Angelo says that, like Dr. Dodd, Ryland was allowed to proceed to Tyburn in a mourning coach.

The story of William Blake’s prophecy of Ryland’s end is well known. His father had intended to apprentice him to Ryland, but was frustrated by the unaccountable attitude of the boy, who, after they had called on the engraver at his studio, said, “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Twelve years later came the fulfilment. Col. W. F. Prideaux recently mentioned in Notes and Queries that he possesses a curious collection concerning Ryland’s case which was formed by the Rev. H. Cotton, the ordinary of Newgate. It includes the original handbill offering a reward for Ryland’s apprehension, and a drawing of the engraver’s mother by John Thomas Smith.

[329] In the Dictionary of National Biography, Miss E. T. Bradley sums up the impressions Angelica Kauffmann made: “Goldsmith wrote some lines to her; Garrick, whom she painted, was much fascinated by her, and Fuseli paid addresses to her. Her most serious flirtation, however, was with Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose acquaintance she made directly she arrived in London. He painted her portrait twice. She frequently visited his studio, and painted a weak and uncharacteristic portrait of the painter, which Bartolozzi engraved. Nathaniel Dance, whom she had met in Italy, is also said to have been hopelessly in love with her.”

[330] Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, first baronet (1734-1811), met Angelica Kauffmann in Italy, and was said to have been hopelessly in love with her. He was an original member of the Royal Academy, but resigned his diploma in 1790 on his marriage to Mrs. Drummer, known facetiously as “The Yorkshire Fortune,” from her possession of £18,000 a year. He assumed the additional name of Holland, and sat in Parliament for Grinstead. In his time he was a capable but stiff portrait painter, and painted full-length portraits of George III. and his Queen.

[331] A deed of separation was obtained from Pope Pius VI. After the “Count’s” death, Angelica Kauffmann married in London, July 14, 1781, Antonio Pietro Zucchi, a Venetian painter who had long lived in England, and had been employed by Adam, the architect. He decorated Garrick’s house in the Adelphi. He died in 1795.

[332] Thomas Pitt, first Baron Camelford, was a prominent politician and an opponent of Lord North. At Twickenham, where he settled in 1762, he and Horace Walpole exchanged ideas on Gothic architecture.

[333] Probably the well-known Dr. Bates, M.D., of Missenden, Bucks.

[334] Willey Reveley, architect, and editor of vol. iii. of Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens.

[335] Smith’s task had been protracted by his tiresome quarrel with his collaborator, John Sidney Hawkins. They pamphletted and “vindicated” to their hearts’ content, but the dispute is not worth unravelling.

[336] Henry White, then Sacrist of Lichfield Cathedral.

[337] George Dance, who died in 1825, was the architect of the recently demolished Newgate Prison, also of St. Luke’s Hospital and the Guildhall entrance façade. He was the last survivor of the foundation members of the Royal Academy, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. William Daniell, R.A., was well known for his Indian and Oriental illustrations. He painted a panorama of Madras, and another of “The City of Lucknow and the mode of Taming Wild Elephants.” His painting, “A View of the Long Walk, Windsor,” is in the royal collection.

[338] Fuseli’s quaint violences of speech were many, and gained in effect from his Swiss accent. He swore roundly, a habit which Haydon says he caught from his friend Dr. Armstrong, the poet. He said a subject should interest, astonish, or move; if it did none of these, it was worth “noding by Gode.” A visitor to his imposing, but unsuccessful, Milton Gallery of forty paintings, said to him, “Pray, sir, what is that picture?” “It is the bridging of Chaos; the subject from Milton.” “No wonder,” said the inquirer, “I did not know it, for I never read Milton, but I will.” “I advise you not, sir, for you will find it a d——d tough job.” He said, on looking at Northcote’s painting of the angel meeting Balaam and his ass: “Northcote, you are an angel at an ass, but an ass at an angel.” Once, at the table of Mr. Coutts, the banker, Mrs. Coutts, dressed like Morgiana, came dancing in, presenting her dagger at every breast. As she confronted Nollekens, Fuseli called out, “Strike—strike—there’s no fear; Nolly was never known to bleed.” He recommended a sculptor to find some newer emblem of eternity than a serpent with a tail in its mouth. The something newer (says Cunningham) startled a man whose imagination was none of the brightest, and he said, “How shall I find something new?” “Oh, nothing so easy,” said Fuseli; “I’ll help you to it. When I went away to Rome I left two fat men cutting fat bacon in St. Martin’s Lane; in ten years’ time I returned, and found the two fat men cutting fat bacon still; twenty years more have passed, and there the two fat fellows cut the fat flitches the same as ever. Carve them—if they do not look like an image of eternity, I wot not what does.”

[339] In the last ten years of his stage career Bannister travelled with his “Budget” of songs, anecdotes, and imitations, through England, Scotland, and Ireland.

[340] The Rev. Stephen Weston, F.R.S. (1747-1830), a well-known antiquary and classical scholar, held the Devonshire livings of Mainhead and Little Hempston, Devon, but left that county after the death of his wife. He engaged in some spirited attempts to translate Gray’s Elegy into Greek, and published his Elegia Grayiana, Græce, in 1794. He was fond of the French capital, and published The Praise of Paris in 1803. An old friend of Nollekens, he was present at the funeral so airily described by Smith in his life of the sculptor.

[341] Swan upping (or marking) is still carried out yearly on the Thames by the representatives of the Crown and by the Dyers’ and Vintners’ Companies, who have the privilege of keeping swans on the river. Formerly the state barges of the City went up to Staines, and ceremonies were performed. Even to-day the expedition of the swan-markers is picturesque; the skiffs bear the flags of the several authorities, the markers wear flannels and distinguishing jerseys, and the overseers don special tunics and peaked caps. The birds are caught by means of long hooked poles.

[342] Tooke did not, therefore, “try the question” of his silver caddy; but had it not been returned he would have done so in his character of the inimitable litigant. “A court of law,” says Hazlitt, in his masterly portrait of Tooke in The Spirit of the Age, “was the place where Mr. Tooke made the best figure in public. He might assuredly be said to be ‘native and endued unto that element.’ He had here to stand merely on the defensive: not to advance himself, but to block up the way: not to impress others, but to be himself impenetrable. All he wanted was negative success; and to this no one was better qualified to aspire. Cross purposes, moot-points, pleas, demurrers, flaws in the indictment, double meanings, cases, inconsequentialities, these were the playthings, the darlings of Mr. Tooke’s mind; and with these he baffled the Judge, dumbfounded the Counsel, and outwitted the Jury. The report of his trial before Lord Kenyon is a masterpiece of acuteness, dexterity, modest assurance, and legal effect. It is much like his examination before the Commissioners of the Income Tax—nothing could be got out of him in either case!”

[343] He had, indeed, prepared a tomb for himself in his garden at Wimbledon, and the funeral invitations, as first sent out, contemplated his burial here. He was buried in a family vault at Ealing, to which the following inscription was added: “JOHN HORNE TOOKE, late of Wimbledon, Author of the Diversions of Purley: was born June 1736, and died March 18, 1812, contented and happy.”

[344] The Rev. William Huntington obtained influence over multitudes by a grotesque piety and a compelling pulpit manner. He appended the initials S.S. to his name, signifying “Sinner Saved.” His true name was Hunt, and he himself tells how he added two syllables to it as a disguise after being called upon to support an illegitimate child. The son of a Kentish day labourer, he had been errand boy, gardener, cobbler, and coal-heaver. At last he turned wholly preacher, and in that character came up to London from Thames Ditton, “bringing two large carts, with furniture and other necessaries, besides a post-chaise well filled with children and cats,” as he relates. He became minister of Margaret Street Chapel, where he urged the power of prayer, telling his hearers that whenever he wanted a thing—a horse, a pair of breeches, or a pound of tea—he prayed for it and it came. In 1788 his admirers built him a chapel in the Gray’s Inn Road at a cost of £9000. He called it Providence Chapel, and was shrewd enough to obtain the personal freehold. He carried pulpit brusqueness to the extreme. “Wake that snoring sinner!” and “Silence that noisy numskull!” were his frequent observations. By his marriage with the widow of Sir James Sanderson, who had been Lord Mayor of London, he gained wealth, and in 1811 he became the tenant of Dr. Valangin’s mansion on Hermes Hill, Pentonville. This eminent Swiss physician had named his estate Hermes Hill in honour of Hermes Trismegithus, the fabled discoverer of chemistry. Huntington’s health failed him, and he exchanged the air of Pentonville for Tunbridge Wells, where he died July 1, 1813. Smith’s story of the disciple who purchased a barrel of beer at the sale of Huntington’s effects is apparently true. Extravagant prices were paid for less perishable souvenirs. An arm-chair worth fifty shillings fetched sixty guineas, and an ordinary pair of spectacles seven guineas. The Pentonville mansion has long disappeared, but Hermes Street dingily perpetuates its curious history.

[345] Smith’s Beef Steak friend, John Nixon, was an Irish factor, who, with his brother Richard, lived over his warehouses in Basinghall Street. He was wealthy and convivial, a bachelor, a good business man, an admirable host, an amateur actor, and a comic artist. His drawing of “The Jolly Undertakers” regaling themselves at the Falcon Tavern, near Clapham Junction, is well known; the landlord’s name was Robert Death, and the undertakers are seen regaling themselves “at Death’s door.” Nixon’s original picture long remained at the Falcon (now rebuilt), and was considered a fixture.

The history of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks was mournfully recalled two years ago by the closing and subsequent sale of its last home, the Lyceum Theatre. John Rich, the patentee of Covent Garden Theatre, is usually named as its founder, but the germ of the Society (its members loathed the name of Club) lay in the creature needs of his scene painter, George Lambert, of whom Edwards relates in his Anecdotes of Painting—

“As it frequently happened that he was too much hurried to leave his engagements for his regular dinner, he contented himself with a beefsteak broiled upon the fire in the painting-room. In this hasty meal he was sometimes joined by his visitors, who were pleased to participate in the humble repast of the artist. The savour of the dish and the conviviality of the accidental meeting inspired the party with a resolution to establish a club, which was accordingly done under the title of the ‘Beefsteak Club’; and the party assembled in the painting-room. The members were afterwards accommodated with a room in the playhouse, where the meetings were held for many years.”

Among the earlier members were Hogarth, Theophilus Cibber, George IV., when Prince of Wales, the Earl of Sandwich, George Colman, Wilkes. Charles Morris, the Laureate of the Beefsteaks, was admitted in 1785, and remained a member till his death in 1838, after being for more than fifty years the life and soul of the Society. “Die when you will, Charles, you’ll die in your youth,” were Curran’s words, and Morris died young at ninety-three. His “Sweet shady side of Pall Mall” is the best London song of its kind.

The Society dined and wined itself into the nineteenth century without a thought of change, but when Covent Garden Theatre was burnt down in 1808, the Beefsteakers, who had taken shelter at the Bedford Coffee House, went to the Lyceum Theatre at the invitation of Samuel James Arnold. There, for sixty years, they met in a banquet room behind the stage. In 1867 the number of members had fallen to eighteen, and in that year the famous coterie closed its doors and sent its Lares and Penates to Christie’s, that mart of abandoned playthings. “Brother” Walter Arnold’s Life and Death of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks (1871) is a singularly complete and interesting memorial of the “jolly old Steakers of England.”

The “Ad Libitum” Society, of which Nixon was also a member, and which was quite distinct from the Beefsteaks, held its meetings successively at the Shakespeare Tavern, the Piazza Coffee House, Robins’s Rooms, and the Bedford Coffee House. Thomas Dibdin gives a list of its members in his Reminiscences.

[346] Mrs. Abington died on the 4th.

[347] Garrick’s troubles with this actress were such that he wrote to her in reply to one of her complaints: “Let me be permitted to say, that I never yet saw Mrs. Abington theatrically happy for a week together.” During his later managership Garrick had ceaseless struggles with his actresses, by which he was greatly wearied. “The lively ‘Pivy’ Clive, the stately Mrs. Barry, Pope, the established Hoyden of the theatre, Miss Younge, Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Abington, all tried the effect of a modified revolt” (Percy Fitzgerald: Life of Garrick).

[348] Stafford Row was near Stafford Gate, St. James’s Park. Mrs. Yates died here in 1787, and Mrs. Radcliffe, the author of the Mysteries of Udolpho, in 1823.

[349] These lines occur in the epilogue to General Burgoyne’s comedy, The Maid of the Oaks, written by him expressly for Mrs. Abington, who performed the part of Lady Bab Lardoon in the season 1773-74. Garrick wrote the epilogue in question to be spoken by Mrs. Abington.

[350] These lines do not belong to The Maid of the Oaks, the subject of Garrick’s letter of 9th November. I have not been able to trace them.

[351] See Wilmot’s Letters, British Museum.—S.

[352] John Thane (1748-1818) was a well-known printseller in Soho, and the editor of British Autography: a Collection of Facsimiles of the Handwriting of Royal and Illustrious Personages, with their Authentic Portraits (1793).

[353] John Blaquière (1732-1812) sat in both Irish and United Kingdom Parliaments. At this time (1771) he was Secretary of Legation in Paris.

[354] This letter is the earliest from Walpole to Mrs. Abington in Peter Cunningham’s collection, where it bears the more precise date, September 1, 1771. At that time Walpole had no private acquaintance with Mrs. Abington. Eight years later, Mrs. Abington is still seeking his acquaintance, for he writes in April 1779 to excuse himself from an invitation she had sent him. But on May 22, 1779, Walpole says at the end of a letter to the Honourable H. S. Conway: “I am going to sup with Mrs. Abington, and hope Mrs. Clive will not hear of it.” No doubt he did so, and it was after this stage in their acquaintance that he wrote the letter of June 11, 1780 (see opposite page).

[355] Sir Walter James James, first Baronet (1759-1829), married Jane, sister of John Jeffreys, second Earl, and first Marquis, Camden.

[356] At this time Mrs. Jordan was absent from the stage, in obedience to her lover, the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William IV. By him she had ten children. She had also four children by Sir Richard Ford, and a daughter by her Cork manager, Richard Daly. But, says Leigh Hunt, she “made even Methodists love her.” In 1811 the Duke of Clarence made an arrangement by which she received £4400 a year for the maintenance of herself and all her children, on condition that if she returned to the stage the Duke’s daughters and £1500 a year were to revert to him. All these daughters married well. Mrs. Jordan died embarrassed and unhappy at St. Cloud, a good deal of mystery shrouding her end. Tate Wilkinson tells how she finally exchanged her maiden name of Bland for Jordan. “You have crossed the water, my dear,” he said to her once, “so I’ll call you Jordan.” “And by the memory of Sam! if she didn’t take my joke in earnest, and call herself Mrs. Jordan ever since.”

[357] In a letter dated January 24, 1816, in my possession, which was evidently intended to be sent as a circular to some of his stauncher patrons, Smith states that he had found the previous year very “unprofitable to the Arts,” and that owing to the great number of families who left England for France “last season” (i.e. after Waterloo), his income had been small. He has applied himself closely to his etching table, and is now able to lay before his correspondent the first three numbers of a small work at a remarkably cheap rate. This was his Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London, with Portraits of the Most Remarkable drawn from Life. The increase of beggars in London had engaged serious attention, and legislation was in the air. The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity was founded in 1818. Smith’s work is the artistic forerunner of Charles Lamb’s Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, written in 1822, when “the all-sweeping besom of sectarian reform” had done its work. The Herculean legless beggar whose portrait Lamb draws with so much gusto, appears in Smith’s gallery of etchings. But whereas Mr. E. V. Lucas identifies him as Samuel Horsey, I venture to think he was the beggar named John MacNally. Smith’s figure of Horsey hardly suggests a Hercules, nor does another portrait of him from Kirby’s “Wonderful and Scientific Museum.” I suggest that the beggar of whom Lamb wrote, in 1822, “He seemed earth-born, an Antæus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured; he was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble; the nature, which should have recruited his left leg and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules,” was identical with the beggar whom John Thomas Smith describes as an “extraordinary torso”: “His head, shoulders, and chest, which are exactly those of Hercules, would prove valuable models for the artist.” This Hercules is John MacNally. Were there two London legless beggars who could suggest to two minds such images of antique magnificence of physique? It is possible, but unlikely.

[358] First cousin, once removed, of the poet.

[359] Charles Manners-Sutton, Archbishop of Canterbury 1805-28.

[360] Thomas Gilliland, whose Dramatic Mirror is still consulted, was not too popular with the actors and actresses whose lives he compiled. He was practically warned off the Green-room of Drury Lane Theatre by Charles Mathews, the elder.

[361] Smith is mistaken as to the date of the first race. This was rowed on August 1, 1716. A portrait of a waterman in his boat, still preserved in the Watermen’s Hall, St. Mary’s Hill, is supposed to represent the first wearer of the coat and badge, a white horse being painted on the back-board of the boat. It is said that John Broughton, afterwards the prize-fighter, and the founder of boxing, was this winner. Under Doggett’s will, only one prize, the coat and badge, was given, but additional prizes have been added under the will of Sir William Jolliff, in 1820, and by the Fishmongers’ Company. These prizes are generous. Even the last of the six young watermen to reach the winning-post is sure of £2; the other unsuccessful candidates receive sums from £3 to £6 each. The winner of the race is £10 in pocket, his name is added to the long roll of previous winners, and he wears Doggett’s coat (made to fit him) among the coated élite of Watermen’s Hall.

A clever and genial man, Doggett was known everywhere by his immense wig, on the top of which, not without the aid of pins, rested a small cocked hat. He carried a rapier, and took snuff incessantly. Only two portraits of him are known: one represents him dancing the Cheshire Round with the motto, “Ne sutor ultra crepidam,” and the Garrick Club has a portrait, but its authenticity is questioned.

[362] The Waterman was, indeed, announced as the after-piece to The Wonder, but Garrick had no part in it, and his great farewell scene rendered its performance impossible alike to actors and audience.

[363] Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818) was a virtuoso, and collector of natural history specimens. She kept house for her brother, Sir Joseph Banks, at 32 Soho Square, at the corner of Frith Street. Here Sir Joseph, who is mentioned by Smith elsewhere, gave his Sunday evening conversaziones, at which Cavendish and Wollaston were the prominent guests. Sir Henry Holland describes these evenings in his Recollections. Gifford of the Quarterly remarked to Moore, that the Banks’ mansion was to science what Holland House was to literature. Horace Walpole poked incessant fun at Sir Joseph’s curiosity about remote Atlantic islands, and Peter Pindar scribbled verses like this:—

“To give a breakfast in Soho,

Sir Joseph’s bitterest foe

Must certainly allow him peerless merit:

Where on a wagtail and tom-tit

He shines, and sometimes on a nit:

Displaying powers few gentlemen inherit.”

The house was afterwards the home of the Linnæan Society, and is now the Hospital for Diseases of the Heart.

[364] Knick-knacks.

[365] Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), of “Epictetus” fame, was the daughter of a Kent parson. She enjoyed the friendship of Dr. Johnson, to whom she was introduced by Cave. Mrs. Carter wrote Nos. 44 and 100 of the Rambler, essays which Johnson esteemed highly. Her resolution in acquiring a knowledge of Greek and Latin was extraordinary: she placed a bell at the head of her bed, and arranged that the sexton, who rose between four and five o’clock, should ring it by means of a cord which descended into the garden below. Her translation of Epictetus appeared in 1758; it was published by subscription at one guinea, and she made £1000 by it. Her attainments brought her many distinguished friends, and it was thought that Dr. Secker, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, wished to marry her. Mrs. Carter was one of the little company who dined with Johnson at Mrs. Garrick’s house, May 3, 1783, when Hannah More, looking at Johnson, “was struck with the mild radiance of the setting sun.”

[366] Mrs. Dards’ exhibition was at No. 1 Suffolk Street, Cockspur Street. The British Museum has one of her catalogues, dated 1800.

[367] This singular character, whose real name was Henry Constantine Jennings (1731-1819), died within the Rules of the King’s Bench, after spending one fortune on works of art and losing another on the turf. About 1778 he brought to England the antique sculpture known as Alcibiades’ Dog (now at Duncombe Park, Yorkshire), whence he had his nickname, “Dog Jennings.” His purchase of this work for a thousand guineas was the subject of one of Dr. Johnson’s conversations, recorded by Boswell. Jennings lived in the most easterly of the five houses into which Lindsey House, Chelsea, was divided in 1760. In Smith’s Nollekens he appears as a little man in a brown coat walking in Marylebone Fields, where Nollekens was for giving him twopence, mistaking him for a pauper.

Jennings was twice married, and at one time laid claim to a lapsed peerage. At Chelsea, where he maintained his house and grounds in a state of luxurious neglect, it was his custom twice a day to exercise himself with a ponderous lead-tipped broadsword: then (to use his own words), “mount my chaise horse, composed of leather and inflated with wind like a pair of bellows, on which I take exactly one thousand gallops.” Among his treasures was a statue of Venus, which he prized so highly, that for the first six months after acquiring it he had it placed during dinner at the head of his table, with two footmen in laced liveries in attendance on it—a situation that to-day would be worthy of Mr. Anstey’s humour.

[368] Sir Thomas Stepney, ninth and last baronet of Prendergast, Pembroke, died September 12, 1825, aged 65. He was long a member of White’s Club, and wore blue and white striped stockings, a peculiarity he shared with Nollekens, the sculptor. A worthier distinction was his descent from Sir Anthony Vandyke. Sir John Stepney, the third baronet, had married the daughter and heiress of the painter.

[369] Of John Burges, M.D. (1745-1807), there is a manuscript memoir in the library of the Royal College of Physicians. He made a fine collection of the materia medica, which ultimately passed to the college, where it is still preserved. Gillray’s legend “From Warwick Lane” refers, of course, to the earlier location of the college in the city.

[370] At the Royal Academy dinner of 1789 the health of Alderman Boydell as “the Commercial Mæcenas of England” was proposed by Edmund Burke. It was in this year that the Alderman began to exhibit in Pall Mall the works which he had commissioned for his Shakespeare Gallery. Next year he became Lord Mayor. Unfortunately, he miscalculated his financial powers, and the outbreak of the French Revolution entailed on him such loss of foreign custom that his death in 1804 was clouded by misfortune. He had employed nearly all the best artists and engravers of his day, and had spent £350,000 in his business. His Shakespeare Gallery, consisting of 170 pictures, was disposed of by lottery; the winner being Tassie, the gem-modeller, who sold them at Christie’s for £6157.

[371] First fashionable in 1745, and named after William, Duke of Cumberland. Smith might have seen it in his boyhood. It was smartly cocked in front.

[372] George Frederick Beltz (1777-1841), Lancaster Herald, and author of Memorials of the Order of the Garter, was one of Mrs. Garrick’s executors, and wrote the memoir of her in the Gentleman’s Magazine of November 1822.

[373] “Mr. Dance, in this picture of Garrick, has been guilty of an egregious anachronism. He has actually given Richard the Third the star of the Order of the Garter, when he ought to have known that it was not introduced before the reign of King Charles I.” (Smith: Nollekens).

[374] Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, fifth baronet (1772-1840), a generous patron of artists. His town house in St. James’s Square had fine pictures. He died after a fall from his horse in the hunting-field.

[375] The Dowager Lady Amherst would appear to be Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of Lieutenant-General Honourable George Cary, who married, 1767, Jeffrey, first Lord Amherst, Field-Marshal, who died in 1797, aged 80. Lady Amherst died in 1830.—William George Maton, M.D., dated his fortune from the day when he was approached by an equerry at Weymouth as a person who might be able to name a plant (arundo epigejos) which one of the royal princesses had found. He was thus brought into the presence of Queen Charlotte, and later became her physician extraordinary. Maton died on March 30, 1835, and was buried at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. There is a tablet to him in Salisbury Cathedral.—Mr. Carr was Mrs. Garrick’s solicitor, and was to be the next occupant of the famous Garrick Villa at Hampton.

[376] Elizabeth Wright Macauley, novelist, actress, and preacher of the gospel, died at York, March 1837, aged 52, in rather straitened circumstances. Her London home was at 52 Clarendon Square, St. Pancras. She published, in 1812, Effusions of Fancy, a collection of poems consisting of the “Birth of Friendship,” the “Birth of Affection,” and the “Birth of Sensibility.” In the last year of her life she had travelled the country lecturing on “Domestic Philosophy,” and giving recitations.

[377] At an earlier time the Abbey had been free to sight-seers, but a wanton injury to the figure of George Washington in Major André’s monument had led to the imposition of admission fees. Not long after Smith’s encounter, Charles Lamb wrote his protest against these fees, of which he says: “In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time) under the sum of two shillings.” Lamb’s complaint may have been rather overstrained by reason of its incorporation in his bitter letter to Southey in the London Magazine for October 1823.

Free admission was given to the larger part of the Abbey under Dean Ireland. Authorised guides were first appointed in 1826, and the nave and transepts were opened, and the fees lowered in 1841 at the suggestion of Lord John Thynne (Dean Stanley: Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey).

[378] The Rev. Thomas Rackett (1757-1841), Rector of Spetisbury with Charlton-Marshall, Dorset. He was a musician, a naturalist, an antiquary, and a friend of Garrick. He had been guided as a youth by Dr. John Hunter. His daughter Dorothea married Mr. S. Solly of Heathside, near Poole. She is mentioned on [p. 290].

[379] Dr. Francklin was probably the “Thomas Franklin” who signed the round-robin to Dr. Johnson asking him to re-write Goldsmith’s epitaph in English. Here the absence of the c from the name causes Croker to doubt the identity, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill to reject it. It is curious that Smith, with Garrick’s marriage certificate before him, makes the name agree with the questioned signature in the memorial to Johnson. Francklin knew Johnson and dedicated to him a translation of Lucian. “Boswell. I think Dr. Franklin’s definition of Man a good one—A tool-making animal. Johnson. But many a man never made a tool; and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool.” Francklin founded the Centinel, a paper of the Tatler variety, and published many translations. He was the first Chaplain to the Royal Academy, and composed a song, “The Patrons,” that was sung at the inaugural dinner.

[380] This certificate does not answer Smith’s inquiry: the place of the marriage. As a matter of fact, Dr. Francklin’s chapel, where the ceremony was performed, was not in Great Queen Street, but in Queen Street, near Russell Street, now Museum Street. The Charity School opposite the side entrance of Mudie’s Library marks the site of the chapel in which the knot was tied between David Garrick and Eva Maria Violetti. The facts are given correctly by a writer in Notes and Queries (March 31, 1877), who puts in the following documents:—

“On the 22nd June, 1749, Garrick was married to Eva Maria Violetti by M. Francklin, at his chapel near Russell Street, Bloomsbury; and afterwards, according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, by the Rev. M. Blyth, at the chapel of the Portuguese Embassy in South Audley Street” (Garrick’s Correspondence, 1831).

“Yesterday was married, by the Rev. Mr. Francklin, at his chapel, Russell Street, Bloomsbury, David Garrick, Esq., to Eva Maria Violetti” (General Advertiser, June 23, 1749).

[381] No picture in the National Gallery is better known and admired than Rubens’s “Chapeau de Paille.” It is a portrait of Mdlle. Lunden, with whom Rubens was in love. He is said to have painted her portrait without her knowledge while she sat in her garden, and to have obtained her acceptance of the picture. On her untimely death Rubens begged back this portrait, which her family had christened “Le Chapeau de Paille,” promising a replica in exchange. This is the National Gallery picture. In it, instead of a straw hat (chapeau de paille), Rubens has introduced a beaver hat (chapeau de poil), but the original name is still in vogue, though the name “Chapeau de Poil” appears on the frame of the picture in Room xii. of the National Gallery. In 1822 the picture passed from the Lunden family to M. Van Niewenhuysen for 89,000 florins, and from him it was acquired, through Smith the printseller, by the British Government.

[382] Edward Knight, known as Little Knight, is universally stated to have been born in Birmingham in 1774; “Bristol” and “1778” are probably misprints.

[383] Flora, or Hob in the Well, a farce by Cibber, adapted from Thomas Doggett’s Country Wake.

[384] The Soldier’s Daughter is a comedy by Cherry, Timothy Quaint being a minor character.—Fortune’s Frolic is a farce by Allingham. Robin Roughhead, a labourer, succeeds to the title and wealth; then he marries his humble sweetheart, Dolly, and makes the best of landlords.

[385] Of Knight as an actor we read: “There was an odd quickness, and a certain droll play about every muscle of his face, that fully prepared the audience for the jest that was to follow. His Sim, in Wild Oats, may be termed the most chaste and natural performance on the stage.” It was remarked of Knight, however, that he was too fond of laughter and tears, “squeezing his eyelids, and fidgetting and pelting about, till he got the necessary moisture.”

[386] A bronze statue in the garden of Burton Crescent shows Cartwright as a small, excessively bald man, seated with what might be a blue-book in his hand. A luxuriant fig tree was threatening to engulf him in its foliage in September 1905. The inscription states that he was “The First Consistent and Persevering Advocate of Universal Suffrage, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot, and Annual Parliaments.” For every evil, even for cold weather or bad plays, he prescribed “Annual Parliaments and Universal Suffrage.” The Reverend J. Richardson, in his Recollections, says that for many years the Lords of the Admiralty gave Cartwright half-pay, without suspecting that the “John Cartwright” on their books was their arch-critic, “Major” Cartwright, whose commission in the Nottinghamshire Militia had put this handle to his name and disguised his identity.

[387] It may be hoped that, had Smith lived to prepare his Book for a Rainy Day for the press, he would have expunged these embittered references to the wealth of Nollekens and legateeship of Francis Douce.

[388] Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger (1778-1827) was an amiable woman and a popular writer of history and biography. She was a friend of the Lambs, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Aikin, Campbell, and others. Among her works are Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn, and a poem on the slave-trade.

[389] From Mr. W. Roberts’ “Memorials of Christie’s, it appears that the original cup from Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, which was presented to David Garrick by the Mayor and Corporation, at the time of the Jubilee at Stratford, realised 121 guineas on April 30, 1825.” Smith mis-states the date. On May 30, 1903, a figure of Shakespeare carved from the tree was sold at Sotheby’s for £13, 5s.

[390] See note, [p. 273].

[391] This derivation has been questioned by others. The New English Dictionary leaves the point doubtful, but quotes the Globe of July 24, 1882: “The ‘Busby,’ so often used colloquially when a large bushy wig is meant, most probably took its origin … not from Dr. Busby, the famous headmaster of Westminster School, but from the wig denominated a ‘Buzz,’ from being frizzled and bushy.” May it not be that the word sprang from “buzz,” in association with the name of the famous headmaster?—the one originating and the other confirming its use.

[392] Nevertheless periwigs were known in England considerably earlier. Fairholt mentions one that was ordered “for Sexton, the king’s fool,” in the reign of Henry VIII. In Hall’s Satires (1598) a courtier is made to lose his periwig while trying to bow on a windy day. Other instances are quoted by Fairholt in Costume in England.

[393] The Duke of Wellington once entertained a dinner-table with an account of Louis XIV.’s wig. His remarks were thus reported, at first hand, in Notes and Queries of Nov. 25, 1871, by Mr. Herbert Randolph:—

“I was in the year 1834 or 1835 dining in company with the Duke of Wellington at Betshanger in Kent, then the seat of Frederick Morice, Esq., now of Sir Walter James. It was about the time when the Bishop of London (Dr. Blomfield) had first appeared in the House of Lords without his wig, and a smart controversy arising out of the fact was going on. Opposite to the Duke at table hung a portrait of an admiral of Queen Anne’s time, an ancestor of Mr. Morice, and the finely painted ‘Ramillies wig’ upon his head caught the Duke’s attention. He took occasion from this to give, in his terse and decided manner, a complete history of wigs, having evidently mastered the subject in reference to the question of the day. He concluded, to the point, by saying: ‘Louis the Fourteenth had a hump, and no man, not even his valet, ever saw him without his wig. It hung down his back, like the judges’ wigs, to hide the hump. But the Dauphin, who hadn’t a hump, couldn’t bear the heat, so he cut it round close to the poll; and the episcopal wig that you are all making such a fuss about is the wig of the most profligate days of the French court.’”

[394] It was Woollett’s pleasing custom to celebrate the completion of a plate by firing a cannon from the roof of his house, No. 36 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. On this occasion he doubtless used an extra charge of powder.

[395] No allusion to Sir Cloudesley Shovel was intended by Pope. The line occurs in the Moral Essays, Epistle iii.—

“When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend

The wretch, who living saved a candle’s end;

Shouldering God’s altar a vile image stands,

Belies his features, nay extends his hands;

That live-long wig which Gorgon’s self might own,

Eternal buckle takes in Parian stone.”

Pope’s own note to the last line reads: “Ridicule the wretched taste of carving large periwigs on bustos, of which there are several vile examples among the tombs of Westminster and elsewhere.” Pope’s real victim, Hopkins, was “Vulture” Hopkins, who died in his house in Broad Street in 1732, leaving a fortune of £300,000 with peculiar conditions attached. Several thousand pounds were expended on his funeral.

[396] Thomas Dawson, Viscount—not Earl—of Cremorne, died 1813.

[397] The full-dress wigs of English judges are the nearest survival of the great Queen Anne wigs familiar in the portraits of these men. They are made of white horse hair, elaborately treated.

[398] Combing the wig in the theatre and the drawing-room was a habit, like twirling the moustache. Dryden pictures the wits rising as one man in the pit of the theatre and beginning to comb their wigs while they stared at a new masked beauty. “It became the mark of a young man of ton to be seen combing his periwig in the Mall, or at the theatre” (Fairholt: Costume in England). Hats were not worn on perukes that cost forty or fifty pounds. In Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (1672) we read: “A lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke.”

[399] It is said that, as a rule, Lely’s male portraits of the Charles II. period can be distinguished at once from Kneller’s portraits of the Court of William III., by observing that in the former the ends of the wig descend on the chest, in the latter they fall behind the shoulders.

[400] The distinction is particularly important in the case of Cibber, whose wig in the part of Sir Fopling Flutter was so admired that he regularly had it brought in a sedan-chair to the footlights, where he publicly donned it with great applause. Cibber’s modest private wig can be studied in Roubiliac’s coloured bust in the National Portrait Gallery.

[401] John Wallis, D.D. (1616-1703), a distinguished mathematician as well as theologian.

[402] Several particulars of Johnson’s wigs are given by Boswell. The improvements he made in his dress through the influence of Mrs. Thrale included “a Paris-made wig of handsome construction.” “In general,” says Croker, “his wigs were very shabby, and their fore parts were burned away by the near approach of the candle, which his short-sightedness rendered necessary in reading. At Streatham Mrs. Thrale’s butler always kept a better wig in his own hands, with which he met Johnson at the parlour door, when the bell had called him down to dinner; and this ludicrous ceremony was performed every day.”

[403] “Mr. Hillier, I believe, was of the same family as the late Nathaniel Hillier of Stoke, near Guildford, one of whose daughters married Colonel Onslow. He was a most extensive collector of engravings, and his cabinets contained numerous rarities, but he spoiled all his prints by staining them with coffee, to produce, as he thought, a mellow tint, but by which process he not only deprived most of them of their pristine brilliancy, but rendered their sale considerably less productive” (Smith). The trick of staining prints with coffee was once fairly common among collectors.

[404] Probably the pendent bobs or “dildos” on the “campaign” wig introduced in the reign of Charles II. were the origin of the pigtail. The “Ramillies” wig, named after the battle of 1706, had a long plaited tail, and immediately became the fashion. By 1731 the pigtail wig had reached its height of popularity and absurdity.

“But pray, what’s that much like a whip,

Which with the air does wav’ring skip

From side to side, and hip to hip?”

asks a country visitor in The Metamorphosis of the Town, and is answered—

“Sir, do not look so fierce and big,

It is a modish pigtail wig.”

[405] Horwood’s map of London (1799) shows the river walk from Abingdon Street almost to Chelsea Bridge between willows, along the water-edge, and nursery gardens. A good idea of Millbank as it was at this period may be obtained from the Earl of Albemarle’s Fifty Years of my Life (vol. i. cap. vi.), where we see the boys of Westminster School roaming these spaces, hiring guns from Mother Hubbard, and obtaining dogs and badgers from their obliging friend, William Heberfield, “Slender Billy,” who was mercilessly hanged in 1812 for passing forged notes. See a curious account of Palmer’s village in Charles Manby Smith’s Curiosities of London Life (1853). Smith has an etching of the Willow Walk in his Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797).

[406] William Collins, a modeller of mantelpieces and friezes, was an intimate friend of Nathaniel Smith (J. T. S.’s father), and is described by Smith, in his Antient Topography of London, as a fascinating modeller in clay and wax, and carver in wood. He took many of his subjects from Æsop’s Fables, and was much employed by Sir Henry Cheere, the statuary, who then had workshops near the south-east corner of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel. Roubillac worked here when he first came to England. Collins died in Tothill Fields, May 31, 1793. His mantelpiece in Ancaster House remains.

[407] Belgrave House stood at the west end of Millbank Row, the continuation of Abingdon Street. The Millbank of Gainsborough’s days extended from this point southward and westward (as it rounded the obtuse promontory) as far as the White Lead Mills, whence Turpentine Lane led north to the Jenny’s Whim Tavern and bridge. This picturesque wooden bridge spanned a reservoir of the Chelsea water-works.

[408] Albert van Everdingen (1621-1725), a Dutch painter of landscapes and sea-pieces.

[409] Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) was born at Leyden. His favourite subjects were river banks with peasants. Three of his pictures are in the National Gallery.

[410] Jacob van Ruysdael (1628-82), the greatest of Dutch landscape painters.

[411] Cornelius Gerritz Dekker (died 1678) painted at Haarlem; one of his landscapes is in the National Gallery.

[412] The Neat House Gardens added much to the pleasantness of the river walk at Millbank. They were held by gardeners who grew fruit and vegetables here for the London markets. About 1831 the soil taken to form St. Katherine’s Docks was brought up the river and laid upon them; after which Lupus Street and many other Pimlico streets were built on their site. It is a pity that no local name-relic exists of gardens which Massinger knew as a place for musk-melons (City Madam, Act iii. sc. 1), which Pepys visited with his wife, and which “would have pleased Ruysdael.”

[413] On August 3, 1802, Garnerin, or Garnerini, ascended in a balloon from Vauxhall Gardens with his wife and Mr. Glasford. A cat, which they dropped in a parachute, fell safely in a garden at Hampstead, and the balloon itself, after passing over the Green Park, Paddington, etc., descended in a paddock at Lord Rosslyn’s, at the top of Hampstead Hill. Mrs. Garnerin afterwards lost her life through ascending from Paris with fireworks.

[414] I conjecture that this is a misprint, and that Smith’s correspondent was St. Schültze, an artist and writer of ability, of whom Eckermann, in his Conversations with Goethe, writes, May 15, 1826: “I talked with Goethe to-day about St. Schültze, of whom he spoke very kindly. ‘When I was ill a few weeks since,’ said he, ‘I read his Heitere Stunden’ (Cheerful Hours) ‘with great pleasure.’ If Schültze had lived in England, he would have made an epoch; for, with his gift of observing and depicting, nothing was wanting but the sight of life on a large scale.”

[415] Friederich Campe compiled for the occasion a little book called Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer.

[416] Peter von Cornelius. Born at Düsseldorf in 1783, he achieved his great reputation at Munich, where he directed the Academy and embellished many public buildings. He died so late as 1867.

[417] Johann Gottlieb Schneider (1789-1864), of Dresden, one of the first organists of his day.

[418] After Dürer’s death from a decline, his close friend, Porkheimer, wrote to Johann Tscherte, of Vienna: “Nothing grieves me deeper than that he should have died so painful a death, which, under God’s providence, I can ascribe to nobody but his huswife, who gnawed into his very heart, and so tormented him, that he departed hence the sooner; for he was dried up to a faggot, and might nowhere seek a jovial humour, or go to his friends.… She and her sister are not queans; they are, I doubt not, in the number of honest, devout, and altogether God-fearing women; but a man might better have a quean, who was otherwise kindly, than such a gnawing, suspicious, quarrelsome, good woman, with whom he can have no peace or quiet, neither by day nor by night.”

[419] The architect, and author of a fine work on Ancient and Ornamental Architecture at Rome and in Italy, the materials for which he collected in the tour he mentions to Smith. He married the daughter of Smith’s acquaintance, Williams, a well-known button-maker in St. Martin’s Lane. William Blake found in him a good friend, and was worshipped by his son, Frederick Tatham, who said that a stroll with Blake was “as if he were walking with the Prophet Isaiah.” Late in life Charles Tatham fell into money difficulties, but obtained the post of warden of Greenwich Hospital, where he died in 1842.

[420] Stephen Porter of the Middle Temple, and of Trinity College, Cambridge, translated from the German a play called Lovers’ Vows, by Augustus von Kotzebue, 1798.

[421] Copper Holmes had constructed a floating home out of a West Country vessel, which cost him £150. He appears to have had his name “Copper” from the metal he acquired with this hulk. His ark was considered a nuisance, and the City authorities brought an action to compel him to remove it. He died in 1821.

[422] “The flat pavement on the southern side of the church, facing the “Golden Cross,” is called “the Watermen’s Burying-ground,” from the number of old Thames watermen who were brought thither to their last long rest from Hungerford, York, and Whitehall Stairs” (Walford: Old and New London).

[423] The reference is to an impersonation of Joe Hatch, the waterman, which Charles Mathews included in one of the single-handed “At Home” entertainments which he started in 1818. “One of the best occasional delineations of character, is that of Joe Hatch, a waterman, who is also termed the Thames Chancellor and Boat Barrister, a fellow (we presume a real portrait, though we have not the good fortune to know the original) who lays down the law of his craft, promotes and allays quarrels, and gratifies his fare with a ‘long, tough yarn’ of his own adventures” (Memoirs of Charles Mathews).

[424] “Curtis’s Halfpenny Hatch was a passage across St. George’s Fields from Narrow Wall, opposite Somerset House. It was a halfpenny toll-way through extensive nursery grounds” (Wine and Walnuts). It is now commemorated in the name Hatch Row, Roupell Street, Lambeth, and I have found that Palmer Street is still called, locally, “up the Hatch,” though, of course, nothing in the shape of a Hatch has existed within living memory. “Hatches,” or gates, at which halfpennies were levied, were common on the outskirts of London. Nollekens told Smith that he remembered one in Charlotte Street, kept by a miller, and another between the Oxford Road (Oxford Street) and Grosvenor Square.

[425] Philip Astley, the great equestrian, was inspired by the feats of Johnson and others at the Three Hats Tavern, Islington, to give his exhibitions in an open field near the Waterloo Road. The price of admission was sixpence. Astley started with only one horse, given him by General Elliott, in whose regiment he had served. A clown named Porter supplied the comic relief. In 1770 he moved to the foot of Westminster Bridge, where his famous Amphitheatre took shape. He is said rarely to have given more than five pounds for a horse, troubling “little for shape, make, or colour; temper was the only consideration.” His circus was repeatedly burnt down, but it became one of the recognised sights of London. On September 12, 1783, Horace Walpole writes: “I could find nothing at all to do, and so went to Astley’s, which indeed was much beyond my expectation. I do not wonder any longer that Darius was chosen king by the instructions he gave to his horse; nor that Caligula made his a consul.”

After Astley’s death in 1814, his manager, the great Ducrow, became the head of the circus business. The Ducrow family monument is a striking object in Kensal Green cemetery, where also is seen the monument of the Cooke family, whose head, Thomas Cooke, owned a circus in Astley’s time, and took it to Mauchline in 1784, where it was visited by Burns. The writer of an interesting article on the Cookes in the Tatler of July 29, 1903, says: “The aristocrats of the sawdust, they have been entertaining for at least 120 years, and to-day wherever there is a circus there is a Cooke.”

[426] This “dell” is still apparent in Salutation Court, in which is Hatch Row.

[427] William Curtis (1746-99) had this botanical garden in Lambeth Marsh, and there collected some of the material for his Flora Londinensis. Later, he opened his large establishment at Brompton. In 1782, he rendered a curious service to the suburbs by writing A Short History of the Brown-Tail Moth, to allay “the alarm which had been excited in the country round the Metropolis by an extraordinary abundance of the caterpillars of this moth, and which was so great, that the parish officers … attended in form to see them burnt by bushels at a time” (Nichol’s Literary Anecdotes). Curtis was buried in Battersea parish church.

[428] Richard Palmer Roupell, a wealthy lead-smelter in Gravel Lane, Southwark, owned much property in Southwark, Lambeth, and elsewhere. He lived at Aspen House, Brixton. There is a Roupell Road at Streatham and a Roupell Street in Lambeth. The name of Curtis, the botanist, deserves, but has not found, similar perpetuation in the neighbourhood.

[429] Strand Lane Stairs was the river outlet of Strand Lane, a narrow street which ran down from the Strand east of Somerset House. As Mr. Wheatley points out, it was originally the channel of the rivulet which crossed the Strand under Strand Bridge. The landing-place is now lost under the Embankment, but the upper portion of the lane still exists, and leads to the famous Roman Bath, which every Londoner intends to, but does not, visit.

[430] This restoration of the Chapel (the Banqueting House) was carried out by Sir John Soane, 1829-30.

[431] Henry Smedley, of Westminster, gave up the profession of the law for the study of the arts. He died in his house in the Broad Sanctuary, March 14, 1832.

[432] Richard Parkes Bonnington had not been dead a year when this talk was proceeding. His success had outrun his strength, and a most promising career was closed by consumption, September 23, 1828. He lies in St. James’s Church in Pentonville. Bonnington’s work is much appreciated in France. In the Louvre, where he studied as a boy, there are one or two fine examples of his work. The National Gallery has his “Venice: the Pillars of Piazzetta.” That the British Museum Print-Room has a fine collection of his sketches is largely due to the fact that he died during a visit to England, and that his drawings went to Christie’s, where they fetched £1200.

[433] This elaborate and beautiful work stands in the centre of St. Andrew’s Chapel. Beneath a canopy supported on columns lie the effigies of Lord and Lady Norris, and round them kneel their six soldier sons, four of whom died on the field. In his Antient Topography Smith tells how Roubiliac admired this stately cenotaph. “When my father had occasion to go to his master (Roubiliac) during the time he was putting up Sir Peter Warren’s monument in the Abbey, he was generally found standing by the monument of Norris, or by that of Vere. On one of these attendances he was observed with his arms folded before the north-west corner figure of one of the six knights (the sons) who support the cenotaph of Lord Norris, and appeared as if rivetted to the spot. My father, who had thrice delivered his message, without being once noticed, was at last smartly pinched on the elbow by Roubiliac, who at the same time said, but in a soft and smothered tone of voice, ‘Hush! Hush! He’ll speak presently.’”

[434] William Esdaile (1758-1837) was a partner in the banking house of Esdaile, Hammet, & Co., 21 Lombard Street. He took up print-collecting and bought lavishly. Falling into ill health, he spent the last five years of his life in poring over his prints, and died in his Clapham house, October 2, 1837. The disposal of his remarkable collection at Christie’s occupied sixteen days, and was attended by buyers from the Continent.

[435] The Clapham visited by Smith was that of Lord Macaulay’s young manhood and of Ruskin’s boyhood, and was rural and open beyond the belief of the present generation. In his recently published Life and Letters of Sir George Grove, Mr. Charles L. Graves says: “All the way from Wandsworth Road to Clapham Junction the neighbourhood was a favourite resort for solid City people, the wealthiest living on Clapham Common. But Clapham was thoroughly rural and not even semi-suburban in the ‘twenties’ and ‘thirties.’ Mr. Edmund Grove distinctly recollects seeing a man in the stocks at Clapham, then a most picturesque village with a watch-house for the ‘Charlies,’ and old inns with timbered fronts and spacious courtyards.”

[436] Charles Alexandre de Calonne succeeded Necker as comptroller-general of finance in 1783. He was unable to reduce French finance to order, and in 1787 found it advisable to retire to England. In Sir Nathaniel Wraxhall’s Memoirs I find the following:—

“The tester of Calonne’s bed having fallen upon him during the night, together with a portion of the ceiling of the room, he narrowly escaped suffocation. All Paris, when the fact became known, exclaimed, ‘Juste ciel!’ The tester of a bed is denominated in French ‘le ciel du lit.’… With him may be said to have commenced the emigration (to England) which soon became so general.”

[437] Henry Peter Standly, of St. Neot’s, an active magistrate, possessed an unrivalled collection of Hogarth’s prints and drawings, which was dispersed at Christie’s in 1845. He purchased drawings of landscapes from Smith.

[438] See note, [p. 4].

[439] John Inigo Richards, R.A., was one of the original members of the Royal Academy, and its secretary from 1788. He was for many years principal scene-painter at Covent Garden. He died in his Academy apartments, Dec. 18, 1810.

[440] Edwards’s Anecdotes of Painters.—S.

[441] Probably Dr. Robert Richardson, M.D., who had been travelling physician to Lord Mountjoy. He died in Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, November 5, 1847.

[442] Enthusiasm for art and carelessness of money went to the forming of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s unrivalled collection. Cunningham says: “Of every eminent artist he had such specimens as no other person possessed; not huddled into heaps, or scattered like the leaves of the Sibyl, but arranged in fine large portfolios properly labelled and enshrined.”

[443] Smith could not have seen the whole of Sir Peter Lely’s collection of prints and drawings. These were sold by auction in 1687, the sale lasting more than a month.—Thomas Hudson (1701-79) painted the portraits of members of the Dilettanti Society, and, being wealthy, collected many fine prints and drawings.—Archibald Campbell, third Duke, formed a very fine library.

[444] This name is given as Serre in the three old editions of the Rainy Day—a very misleading erratum. William Score was born in Devonshire about 1778. He became a pupil of Joshua Reynolds, and regularly exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy.

[445] “Sir Joshua Reynolds commenced two of his finest historical pictures without settling in what way the compositions were to be completed, or, indeed, without even thinking of their subjects. The head of Count Ugolino at Knowle, and the Infant Christ in Macklin’s picture, were painted on the canvases long before the artist considered subjects or combinations” (S.).—This historical painting, says Northcote, existed simply as a head of the Count until Burke and Goldsmith praised it, whereupon Sir Joshua had his canvas enlarged in order that he might add the other figures. When finished, the picture was bought by the Duke of Dorset for 400 guineas. It is not Reynolds at his best, and Charles Lamb, who saw it at the Reynolds exhibition held in 1813 in Pall Mall, criticised it rather severely.

[446] Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral at the defeat of the Armada, best known to history as Lord Howard of Effingham. The portrait Smith missed was painted by Frederigo Zucchero, whose (attributed) portraits of Queen Elizabeth, Leicester, Raleigh, and James I. are in the National Portrait Gallery. His Howard is now in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. The portraits of the Admirals were presented to Greenwich Hospital by George IV. (not William IV.) in 1823. William IV. added five naval pictures in 1835. As will be seen on a later page, Smith’s curiosity about the hanging of these pictures led him to visit Greenwich next day.

[447] Francis Legat, a Scotch engraver, came to London about 1780, and lived at 22 Charles Street, Westminster. Here he engraved “Mary Queen of Scots resigning her Crown” after Hamilton in 1786, and later Northcote’s painting. He died in 1809.

[448] Chantrey’s group, “The Sleeping Children,” in Lichfield Cathedral.

[449] This statue is now in the British Museum.

[450] The Chelsea porcelain manufacture was founded about 1745, and was at the height of its fame from 1750 to 1764 under Mr. Sprimont. The works finally closed in 1784. The Chelsea potters went forthwith to Derby, where they founded the Chelsea-Derby pottery. Remains of the old Chelsea furnaces, in which Dr. Johnson was allowed to test his compositions, are still to be seen in the cellars of the Prince of Wales Tavern, at the corner of Justice Walk and Lawrence Street, Chelsea.

[451] The case of Chelsea china in the British Museum contains similar figures of the Earl of Chatham, George III., a Thames waterman wearing Doggett’s Coat and Badge, etc.

[452] Johan Zoffany, R.A., born at Frankfort about 1735, painted portraits of Garrick, one of the best representing the actor as Abel Drugger.

[453] Thomas Davies, the actor and bookseller, more famous as the introducer to Dr. Johnson of Boswell. Johnson wrote the first sentence of his Memoirs of David Garrick.

[454] These pictures were the “Canvass,” the “Poll,” the “Chairing,” and the “Election Feast.” They are said to have been painted by Hogarth for about forty-five guineas apiece. At the sale of Garrick’s pictures at Christie’s in June 1823 they were bought by Sir John Soane, and are in the Soane Museum.

[455] In 1829 the surprising period of seventy-three years had elapsed since Garrick became the tenant of his famous villa. He had enlarged and improved the house, planted many trees in the grounds, and erected on his lawn a “Grecian Temple” to receive the statue of Shakespeare by Roubiliac which now stands in the entrance hall of the British Museum. Here also stood his famous Shakespeare chair, designed by Hogarth: it is now in the possession of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. At Hampton Garrick received his friends with great hospitality, and occasionally gave fêtes champêtres with the accompaniments of fireworks and illuminations. Horace Walpole, finding himself a fellow-visitor with the Duke of Grafton, Lord and Lady Rochford, the Spanish Minister, and other great people, wrote to Bentley: “This is being sur un assez bon ton for a player.” Garrick gave treats to the children of Hampton in his grounds. After his death, Hampton House and the house in Adelphi Terrace were occupied for forty-three years by Mrs. Garrick. She preserved the Hampton furniture exactly as her husband left it.

[456] The mystery of Mrs. Garrick’s origin has never been cleared up. Some authorities say that she was the daughter of a respectable Vienna citizen named John Veigel. According to the story told by Charles Lee Lewis (see his Memoirs, 1805), and denied by Mrs. Garrick, she was the fruit of a liaison which the Earl of Burlington formed with a young lady of family on the Continent. At the time of her birth the Earl was back in England, whence he remitted funds for his daughter’s support. The money is said to have been dishonestly retained by the person in whose charge she was placed, and the child herself to have been forced to earn a living as a dancer. The Earl, hearing of this, arranged that she should come to England and dance for a higher salary. Later he took her into his house as companion and teacher to his legitimate daughter. Then Garrick appeared on the scene, and the benevolent Earl said to him: “Do you think you could satisfactorily receive her from my hands with a portion of ten thousand pounds?—and here let me inform you that she is my daughter.”

The above story is told by Lee Lewis on the authority of “an aged domestic who lived at the time it happened at Burlington House, Piccadilly.” Apparently the same gossiping lady is referred to in the following note in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s Life of Garrick: “A curious little story comes to me, told originally by a housekeeper in the Burlington family, and, though based on such a loose foundation, may be worth repeating. On this authority, the story ran that Lord Burlington, coming to see her, was struck by a picture, and, on inquiry, found she was actually the daughter of a lady whom he had known abroad. The result was the discovery that the Violette was actually his daughter. The authority of the old housekeeper seems below the dignity of biography, but her testimony comes to us very circumstantially.”

The story of Violette’s relationship to the Earl of Burlington was supported by the covert kindness which she received from that nobleman. But it has to be remembered that she was the “rage” of the whole town, “the finest and most admired dancer in the world,” according to Walpole, and that Lady Burlington, not less than her lord, was so fond of her, that she would accompany her to the theatre, and wait in the wings with a pelisse to throw over her when she came off the stage. Mr. Fitzgerald’s conclusion on the whole matter is that “her father was someone of rank at Vienna, possibly one of the Starenberg family, from whom it is said she brought letters of introduction to England.”

[457] Lancelot Brown (1715-83) is generally considered the founder of modern “natural” as distinct from “formal” landscape-gardening. He laid out Kew, the grounds of Blenheim, and parts of St. James’s Park and Kensington Gardens. His conversational abilities, extolled by Hannah More, contributed to his fame. John Taylor relates that he once assisted the gouty Lord Chatham into his carriage. “Now, sir, go and adorn your country,” said the grateful statesman. To which Brown aptly replied: “Go you, my lord, and save it.”

[458] Pain’s Hill, at Cobham, Surrey, was considered a triumph of landscape gardening by Horace Walpole and other connoisseurs. Its owner, the Hon. Charles Hamilton, not content with artificial ruins and temples disposed after the pictures of Poussin and Claude, added a hermitage and engaged a hermit at £700 a year. But as the hermit had all the hardship, and Hamilton all the sentiment, the arrangement broke down.

[459] Mr. Carr’s mention of Johnson’s frequent visits recalls the answer he made to Garrick when asked how he liked the spot: “Ah, David! it is the leaving of such places that makes a death-bed terrible.” Some interesting matter relating to the Garricks at Hampton will be found in Mr. Henry Ripley’s History and Topography of Hampton-on-Thames. The existence of the villa has recently been threatened by the westward extension of London’s electric tramways, but, happily, the danger of its removal has been averted.

[460] George Garrard, A.R.A. (1760-1826), animal painter and sculptor, led a successful movement to obtain copyright protection for works of plastic art. He died at Queen’s Buildings, Brompton.

[461] Michael Dahl (1656-1743) was born in Stockholm. He settled in London, and became the rival of Kneller. “If he excelled, it was only in the mediocrity by which he was surrounded” (Redgrave). He was buried in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.

[462] “I have not heard that song better performed since Mr. Incledon sung it. He was a great singer, sir, and I may say, in the words of our immortal Shakespeare, that, take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.” In these words Hoskins of the Cave of Harmony complimented Colonel Newcome on his rendering of “Wapping Old Stairs.” Incledon began life in the navy, where he sang himself into the good graces of his Admiral. Coming to London in 1783, he became a public singer; but it was not until 1790 that his success was established by his performance in The Poor Soldier at Covent Garden. In his later years he relied mainly on the provinces, in which he travelled under the style of “The Wandering Melodist.” Though exquisite in song he was clumsy in appearance. Leslie, the painter, describes him as having “the face and figure of a low sailor,” yet with these “the most manly and at the same time the most agreeable voice I ever heard.” Another good authority records that his voice “was of extraordinary power, both in the natural and the falsetto. The former, from A to G, a compass of about fourteen notes, was full and open, neither partaking of the reed nor the string, and sent forth without the smallest artifice; and such was its ductility, that when he sang pianissimo, it retained its original ductility. His falsetto, which he could use from D to E or F, or about ten notes, was rich, sweet, and brilliant.”

[463] Funny-movers attended to the boats. A funny was a narrow, clinker-built pleasure boat for a pair of sculls. “A most melancholy accident happened one evening this week in the river off Fulham. A young couple, on the point of marriage, took a sail in a funny, which unfortunately upset, and the two lovers were drowned” (Annual Register, 1808).

[464] The Battersea market-gardeners were famous. A rhyme of 1802 says—

“Gardeners in shoals from Battersea shall run,

To raise their kindlier hot-beds in the sun.”

The first asparagus raised in England is said to have come from Battersea; and such was the extent of the market-gardens, that large numbers of Welshwomen tramped thither every spring for employment in the summer months.

[465] Not Shakespeare.

[466] In A Sentimental Journey. See “The Passport,” “The Captive,” and “The Starling.”

[467] “Old Granby” was doubtless intended as a jesting compliment to the pensioner, in allusion to the bluff Lord Manners, Marquess of Granby, renowned for his toughness and gallantry.

[468] Hugh Hewson died in 1809, and it appears from a newspaper of that year, quoted by Robert Chambers (Favourite Authors: Smollett), that he was proud of being the prototype of Strap. “His shop was hung round with Latin quotations, and he would frequently point out to his acquaintance the several scenes in Roderick Random pertaining to himself, which had their foundation, not in the Doctor’s inventive fancy, but in truth and reality. The Doctor’s meeting him at a barber’s shop at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the subsequent mistake at the inn; their arrival together in London, and the assistance they experienced from Strap’s friend, were all of that description.”

But there are four Straps in the field. Faulkner, in his Chelsea, finds the “real” Strap in one William Lewis, a book-binder, who died in 1785. Smollett, he says, induced Lewis to set up business in Chelsea, and procured him customers. “I resided seven years in the same house with his widow, and had frequent opportunities of hearing a confirmation of the anecdotes of her husband, as related by the celebrated novelist.”

Another claimant was one Duncan Niven, a Glasgow wig-maker, referred to in the Gentleman’s Magazine as “the person, it is said, from whom Dr. Smollett took his character of Strap in Roderick Random.”

Lastly, one Hutchinson, a Dunbar barber, had some pretensions to be Strap.

[469] Of these taverns the most famous are the Old Swans at London Bridge and Chelsea. The former stood for centuries beside Swan Stairs (now represented by the Old Swan Pier), and was well known to all passengers on the river who elected to avoid the dangerous “shooting” of London Bridge. On July 30, 1763, Dr. Johnson and Boswell landed for this reason at the Old Swan on their way down to Greenwich, re-embarking at Billingsgate.

The name of the Old Swan of Chelsea, an inn known to Pepys, is perpetuated in Old Swan House, a modern residence built from the designs of Mr. Norman Shaw. The “New Swan,” which, however, was really a second “Old Swan,” has also disappeared, but, according to Mr. R. Blunt’s excellent Historical Handbook to Chelsea, its quaint garden, entered by steps from the river, under the long signboard, is within the memory of many residents.

[470] “The bells of this church were recast by Ruddle, and tuned by Mr. Harrison, the inventor of the Timekeeper; they are esteemed equal to any peal of bells in this Kingdom, and have nearly the same sound as those of Magdalen College, Oxford” (Faulkner: Historical Account of Fulham, 1813).

[471] In Magna Britannia it is not only stated that this street was originally called Hartshorn Lane, but that Ben Jonson once lived in it (S.). The belief that Ben Jonson lived here as a boy rests on the statement of Fuller, who, in his Worthies, says: “Though I cannot with all my industrious inquiry find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband.”

[472] The circumstances of this crime have remained an unsolved mystery. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found in a ditch near Primrose Hill on the evening of October 17, five days after his disappearance from his house in Green Lane, Strand, and five weeks after hearing Titus Oates swear to the existence of a Popish plot. Smith’s statement that he was murdered in Somerset House rests on the utterly corrupt and contradictory testimony of Miles Prance, the Roman Catholic silversmith. His evidence, however, sent three men to the gallows, who protested their innocence to the last. The whole subject is re-examined by Mr. Andrew Lang in Longman’s Magazine of August 1903.

Four different medals were struck to commemorate and characterise the murder. In one of these Godfrey is represented walking with a sword through his body, while on the reverse St. Denis is shown carrying his head in his hand, with the inscription—

“Godfrey walks uphill after he is dead;

Dennis walks downhill carrying his head.”

The design of another medal illustrates Prance’s statement that Godfrey’s body was first moved from Somerset House in a sedan chair, and then on a horse to Primrose Hill.

The burial of the murdered Justice in St. Martin’s Church was attended by more than a thousand people of distinction, and his portrait was placed in the vestry-room, where it hangs to this day.

[473] William Lloyd (1627-1717), successively Bishop of St. Asaph, Lichfield-and-Coventry, and Worcester, was Vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields 1677-80.

[474] “The two grand Ingrossers of Coles: viz. The Woodmonger, and the Chandler. In a dialogue, expressing their unjust and cruell raising the price of Coales, when, and how they please, to the generall oppression of the Poore. Penn’d on Purpose to lay open their subtile practices, and for the reliefe of many thousands of poore people, in, and about the Cities of London, and Westminster. By a Well-willer to the prosperity of this famous Common-wealth. London, Printed for John Harrison at the Holy-Lamb at the East end of S. Pauls, 1653.”

[475] It has been demonstrated by Mr. Sidney Young in his learned work, The Annals of the Barber Surgeons (1890), that this painting cannot represent the granting of the Charter by Henry VIII. This event occurred in 1512, when the King was but twenty-one years of age; Holbein makes him a man of fifty. Mr. Young believes Holbein’s subject to be the Union of the Barbers Company with the Guild of Surgeons, accomplished by Act of Parliament in 1540.

[476] Of this picture, which narrowly escaped the Fire of London, Pepys thus speaks in his Memoirs:—August 28, 1688. “And at noon comes by appointment Harris to dine with me: and after dinner he and I to Chyrurgeons’-hall, where they are building it new,—very fine; and there to see their theatre, which stood all the fire, and (which was our business) their great picture of Holbein’s, thinking to have bought it, by the help of Mr. Pierce, for a little money: I did think to give £200 for it, it being said to be worth £1000; but it is so spoiled that I have no mind to it, and is not a pleasant, though a good picture.”—S.

[477] This painting represents Edward VI. presenting the Royal Charter of Endowment to the Lord Mayor in 1552; it cannot, therefore, be by Holbein, who died in 1543. Walpole attributes the painting to Holbein, but says the picture was not completed by him. He states that Holbein introduced his own head into one corner. Wornum thinks that there is not a trace of this master’s hand in the picture.

[478] Her portrait has not been identified with certainty. An old Windsor catalogue, however, contains her name.

[479] Richard Dalton was keeper of pictures and antiquary to George III., and one of the artists who presented to George III. the petition for the foundation of the Royal Academy. In 1774, Dalton published about ten etchings from Holbein’s drawings. Perhaps his greatest service to British art was his bringing Bartolozzi to England.

[480] John Chamberlaine (1745-1812), antiquary, succeeded Dalton in 1791, and published “Imitations of Original Drawings, by Hans Holbein, in the Collection of His Majesty, for the Portraits of Illustrious Persons at the Court of Henry VIII.” He died at Paddington Green.

[481] Conrad Martin Metz (1755-1827) studied engraving in London under Bartolozzi; he engraved and imitated many drawings by the old masters.

[482] Edmund Lodge (1756-1839), Clarenceux Herald in 1838. His book, known briefly as Lodge’s Portraits, was originally issued in forty folio parts.

[483] Of Sandby’s “View of Westminster from the garden of old Somerset House” there is an engraving by Rawle in Smith’s Westminster Antiquities.

[484] Charles Long, Baron Farnborough (1761-1838), was Secretary of State for Ireland, and held other important posts. Thomas Moore calls him “the most determined placeman in England” (Memoirs, iv. 28). His advice was sought on the decoration of the royal palaces and on London street improvements. He gave many fine pictures to the National Gallery.

[485] These views may still be seen in Crowle’s “Pennant,” in the Print Room. The first represents London from Somerset House about 1795, and the second Somerset House from the east showing the Lambeth site of Westminster Bridge, etc. In addition, there are in the Crace collection two London views by Thomas Sandby, and seven by Paul. See note on Crowle, [p. 86].

[486] In Smith’s day the river washed the base of the Water Gate, covering at high tide the gardens in which the London County Council’s band now plays in summer in London now possesses an approximation to an out-of-door Parisian café. Samuel Scott’s “View of Westminster from the Thames,” National Gallery, Room xix., shows the old state of things.

[487] Etty removed to Buckingham Street in the summer of 1824, from Stangate Walk, Lambeth. At first he took the “lower floor,” but, says Gilchrist, “the top floor was the watch-tower for which our artist sighed,” and he soon obtained it. Here, “having above him,” as he said, “none but the Angels, and the Catholics who had gone before him,” he lived for twenty-three years, finding an excellent housekeeper in his niece. The house stands unaltered, presenting five storeys to the river just behind the Water Gate. Etty’s last years (he died in 1849) were given to his birth-place, York, where his tomb is an object of interest in the grounds of St. Mary’s Abbey.

[488] Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), the marine and landscape painter, was scene-painter at three London theatres, including Drury Lane. “Incomparably the noblest master of cloud-form of all our artists,” was Ruskin’s praise of this artist; “the soul of frankness, generosity, and simplicity,” was Dickens’s praise of the man.

[489] Roubiliac’s statue of Newton, made for Trinity College, was pronounced by Chantrey “the noblest, I think, of all our English statues.” Similarly Roubiliac’s figure of Eloquence was considered by Canova “one of the noblest statues he had seen in England”: it occurs in the monument to John, Duke of Argyll and Greenwich, in Poets’ Corner.

John Bacon, R.A. (1740-99), established his reputation by his figure of Mars, which won him the good word of West, the patronage of the Archbishop of York, and his election as A.R.A. See note on [p. 33].

John Charles Felix Rossi, R.A. (1762-1839), was born at Nottingham. He executed statues of Lord Cornwallis, Lord Heathfield, and others in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and decorated Buckingham Palace. His “Celadon and Amelia” was executed in Rome. His is the colossal figure of Britannia in Liverpool Exchange. He was buried in St. James’s churchyard, Hampstead Road.

Flaxman’s “Michael vanquishing Satan” was commissioned by Lord Egremont, and is now at Petworth.

Of busts, alone, Nollekens executed at least two hundred.

Chantrey’s genius was fully acknowledged by Nollekens, who would say when asked to model a bust: “Go to Chantrey; he’s the man for a bust! he’ll make a good bust for you! I always recommend him” (Smith: Nollekens).

Londoners see Sir Richard Westmacott’s statues every day without knowing it. His is the Achilles statue to Wellington in Hyde Park, the Duke of York on the York Column, and the statue of Fox in Bloomsbury Square. His statues in St. Paul’s and the Abbey are numerous; the Abbey has his beautiful monument to Mrs. Warren, a mother and child.

Edward Hodges Baily, R.A. (1788-1867), studied under Flaxman. The bas-relief on the Marble Arch is his, several statues in St. Paul’s, and the figure of Nelson in Trafalgar Square.

[490] William Young Ottley (1771-1836), author of The Origin and Early History of Engraving. His knowledge of painting is described as “astonishing” by Samuel Rogers. On Smith’s death Ottley became Keeper of the Prints.

[491] Maso Finiguerra, a skilful Florentine goldsmith, engraved in 1452 a silver plate to be used as a pax in the church of San Giovanni, and in order to judge of the effect of his design, the lines of which he intended to fill with enamel, he poured some liquid sulphur upon the plate. He then succeeded in taking impressions of the design on paper. These impressions were once thought to be the earliest known engravings. It is now proved that they were not, and that Finiguerra may have had direct instruction from an early German engraver.

[492] The site of Mr. Atkinson’s villa and grounds is indicated by Grove End Road, west of Lord’s Cricket Ground.

[493] Smith misquotes Ramsay, who wrote—

“How halesome ’tis to snuff the cawler air,

And all the sweets it bears, when void of care.”

Gentle Shepherd, 1st ed., Act i. Sc. i. 5, 6.

[494] William West, actor and composer, lived to a great age, and was known as the “Father of the Stage.” Some of his songs, such as “When Love was fresh from her Cradle Bed,” were popular. He died in 1888.

[495] The Rev. Thomas Hartwell Horne, Rector of St. Edmund the King and St. Nicholas Acon, was a valuable servant of the British Museum, to which he came as cataloguer in 1824. He died at his house in Bloomsbury Square, January 27, 1862. Watt was Robert Watt, the bibliographer, compiler of Bibliotheca Britannica, etc.; he died in 1819.

[496] The Post Angel, of which the British Museum has a copy, was one of the enterprises of John Dunton. His rigmarole preface sets forth that “by Post-Angels I mean all the invisible Host of the Middle Region, that are employed about us either as Friends or Enemies”; his design is “to shew how we should enquire after News, not as Athenians but as Christians, or (in other words) a Divine Employment of every Remarkable Occurrence.” Features of this periodical were “The Lives and Deaths of the most Eminent Persons that Died in that Month,” and recurrent pious reflections under the head of “The Spiritual Observator.”

[497] John Taylor, who was Smith’s life-long friend and the most genial and patriarchal of artists, died at his house in Cirencester Place, November 21, 1838, in his ninety-ninth year. Smith mentions under the year 1779, that he had been the pupil of Frank Hayman, after which he took up the drawing of portraits in pencil, for which he received seven-and-sixpence to a guinea each. It is said that, in Oxford alone, in six or eight years, Taylor drew, or painted, more than three thousand heads. Finding this employment poorly paid, he took the advice of his fellow-artist “Jack” Gresse and set up as drawing-master, investing his savings in annuities which were to expire in 1840. He died just in time to escape want. See the early reference to Taylor, [p. 80].

[498] This caricature was brought out on September 7, 1762, and was entitled “The Bruiser, C. Churchill (once the Reverend!) in the Character of a Russian Hercules, regaling himself after having kill’d the Monster Caricatura that so sorely galled his virtuous friend, the Heaven-born Wilkes.” Mr. Austin Dobson says: “Churchill, who had been ordained a priest and abandoned that calling, appears as a bear, grasping a club, which is inscribed ‘Lye 1, Lye 2,’ etc., and regaling himself with a quart pot of ‘British Burgundy.’”

[499] Hayman died in 1776, so that this statement has a bearing on the vexed question of the date of the “Blue Boy,” which some writers put as late as 1779. Sir Walter Armstrong is convinced that 1770 is the correct date. If so, Gainsborough could not have painted the picture, as he is said to have done, to confute a passage in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s eighth Discourse, which was not delivered until December 1778. The Blue Boy was Master Jonathan Buttall, the ironmonger’s son. The subject, history, and ownership of this famous picture have been the subjects of a controversy second only, in lengthy inconclusiveness, to that on the Letters of Junius. In all probability the original picture is the one in the possession of the Duke of Westminster.

[500] When advanced in life, and unfitted for sprightly parts, Mrs. Abington determined to appear as Scrub, the man-of-all-work to Lady Bountiful in Farquhar’s comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem. “I was present,” says John Taylor, in his Records of My Life, “and remember nothing in her performance that might not have been expected from an actor of much inferior abilities. As a proof, too, that, like many of her profession, she thought herself capable of characters not within the scope of her powers, I once saw her play Ophelia to Mr. Garrick’s Hamlet; and, to use a simile of my old friend Dr. Monsey, she appeared like a mackerel on a gravel walk.”

[501] Hitherto, in the Rainy Day, William Chambers has appeared, another misleading slip. Sir Robert was the Indian judge, and is referred to by Johnson in a letter to Boswell, dated March 5, 1774: “Chambers is married, or almost married, to Miss Wilton, a girl of sixteen, exquisitely beautiful, whom he has, with his lawyer’s tongue, persuaded to take her chance with him in the East.” Miss Wilton was the daughter of Joseph Wilton, R.A., the sculptor.

[502] Mr. Taylor’s father was not only highly respected, but for many years held a principal situation in the Custom House (S.).

[503] They were cleaned and “restored” by John Francis Rigaud, R.A.

[504] Doubtless the letter from Mrs. Abington to Mrs. Jordan, printed under the year 1815.

[505] John Bannister (Honest Jack) left the stage on the night of June 1, 1815, when he played in Kenney’s comedy The World, and The Children in the Wood. “Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister’s performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood,” says Lamb; and Haydon, who in 1826 met Bannister by accident in Chenies Street, Bedford Square, writes: “He held out his hand just as he used to do on the stage, with the same frank native truth. As he spoke, the tones of his favourite ‘Walter’ pierced my heart. It was extraordinary, the effect. ‘Bannister,’ said I, ‘your voice recalls my early days.’—‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I had some touches, had I not?’”

[506] John Pritt Harley (1786-1858) distinguished himself as singer and actor. He appeared at Drury Lane in 1815, the year of Bannister’s retirement, and succeeded to many of that comedian’s parts. He was known as Fat Jack—from his thinness. “I have an exposition of sleep upon me,” were his last words, spoken on the stage of the Princess’s Theatre on August 20, 1858. He had hardly made his exit when he was seized with paralysis, and he died at 14 Upper Gower Street two days later. Harley was an excellent Shakespearean clown, and an ardent collector of walking-sticks.

[507] Porridge Island and another rookery called The Bermudas disappeared about 1829. These were cant names.