She was an intimate friend of the famous Mrs. Montague, the acknowledged patron of the literary and artistic celebrities of the time, the entrée to whose drawing-rooms bestowed a sort of diploma on the favoured recipient, which, by the way, was never extended to the literary bookseller. Mrs. Donnellan died of what Mrs. Montague calls ‘a cold and fever,’ the precursor, probably, of our modern influenza, as universal a plague in 1772 as the latter in 1893-94.
Though for a brief period after the publication of Dr. Soames’ treatise the presence of an increased number of visitors gladdened his heart, it soon became apparent that no persuasive pamphlet, no poetical puff, could restore it. The favour of people of fashion had passed away from it.
The walk without the raffling-shops and gaming-tables, and the ballroom without the freedom of the all-night dancing, had no charms for any others than the real lovers of the delightful suburb for its own sake. It came to be considered as a sort of natural sanatorium, a pleasant rustic summer resort and resting-place; and as the fame of the waters fell away, except in the grateful remembrance of those who had imagined themselves benefited by them, the reputation of its pure, health-giving air and the natural beauty of its situation and surroundings became more obvious to persons who, like Mrs. Donnellan, Mr. Murray, and others, were permeated with an ever-growing love of them.
It was no doubt the dearth of entertainment for the visitors that suggested to the inventive imagination of the sexagenarian Robert Causton the idea of opening the tea-drinking house, with pleasure-gardens, waterworks, and various ingenious contrivances (to which I have elsewhere referred) in a part of Turner’s Wood, the wood where the lilies-of-the-valley, once indigenous on Hampstead Heath, lingered latest.
It was opened in 1737, and became so popular with Londoners and the general public, that it remained open twenty years afterwards, so that the enterprise must have amply repaid the originator.
From this it would seem that not only Mother Huff’s, but others of these apparently innocent places for refreshment and recreation (so-called tea and bun houses), with their fair bowling-greens, and garden bowers, for summer evenings’, and Sunday afternoons’ rest and pleasure, were included in the general blight which the drastic measures of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall had inflicted on Well Walk and its neighbourhood. We recognise the reason for this measure when we learn that many of their proprietors had succeeded, through a direct infringement of the law, in obtaining licenses for the sale of wine and punch, and in this way tea-houses had become sources of dissipation and vice.
In 1744, Pope, whose life had been one long illness, finally disappeared from the Well Walk, where with Murray and so many other wits and celebrities he had shared with the lighter crowd in the fashions and follies of the place—the last but one of that bright galaxy of literary stars in which it had been his privilege to shine and mingle. He died, to the regret of many admirers and the sincere sorrow of his friends. With all his faults—and they were flagrant—there must have been something lovable and sympathetic in his nature, to have won and kept the life-long friendship of men with minds and dispositions so differently constituted as Dr. Arbuthnot’s, Dean Swift’s, John Gay’s, and Mr. Murray’s.
His love for his mother and Gay was almost feminine in its steadfastness and tenderness, and I fancy we may discover something noble in his self-restraint when tending the latter from time to time during his illness at Hampstead, for, though suffering himself from the same circumstances, he never seems to have alluded to his own share of loss in the South Sea Bubble.
How affectionately each of the three ‘Yahoos’—Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Pope—alludes to the time they spent together at Twickenham, and how much of real pathos he, the most artificial of poets, crushed, as it were, into the two last lines of his intended epitaph on Gay!—
‘For all thy blameless life the sole return,