During the years that had passed between the first opening of the Wells and this temporary resuscitation of their popularity, death had broken up that knot of brilliant wits and writers whose presence there has made Hampstead classical. Addison and Steele, Arbuthnot and Gay, were, in one sense, simply names, but names so intimately interwrought with the literature of their age and country as to be for ever inseparable from it.
‘Those sovereigns of the Muse’s skill
Are the true patterns of good writing still!’
Swift, parted by the Irish Sea from his old associates, still lived, Dean of St. Patrick’s; and only Pope, pale and sickly, represents the bright band of literary brothers who had found many suggestive themes, in the Well Walk and its vicinity, for the exercise of their genial humour or piquant censorship. Jarvis, the friend of the poet, writing about this period to Dean Swift, observes: ‘Pope is off and on, here and there, everywhere, à son ordinaire, therefore as well as we can hope for a carcase so crazy.’ Jarvis was the well-known ‘face-painter,’ contemporary with Sir Godfrey Kneller, and who had given lessons to Pope in portrait-painting.[260]
The latter continued to visit Hampstead for Murray’s sake, whose love for the charming place ‘amounted almost to a passion,’ and who sought it on every opportunity.
One of the persons most constantly seen in the Long Room and the walks, at this period, was the newly-made Poet Laureate (Colley Cibber), a man of vast intelligence, though a little too full of self-importance, and perhaps egotism. His ‘Birthday Odes’ were the delight of the wits and the amusement of the critics, who pounced down upon them in the Grub Street Journal, and other publications, and literally tore them line from line. Colley was himself insensible to satire, though he could wield it very successfully against others. He always remained perfectly satisfied with his own performances as playwright, manager, and poet. So devoid was he of any sense of the absurdity of his odes, that he was in the habit of carrying them about with him, and reading them to those of his acquaintances who would listen, all the while unconscious that the little ill-dressed man, with the pain-drawn, sallow face and large, dark, luminous eyes, who was never without a knot of the best people in the company, la crême des beaux esprits, about him, was passing round an epigram of his own, the reading of which occasioned hilarious laughter.
The lines ran as follows:
‘In merry old England it once was a rule,
The King had his poet, and also his fool;
But now we’re so frugal, I’d have you to know it,