James Boswell.
It seems a long way back to the days when Addison, with that knot of literary men (‘who gave a more undying lustre to the reign of Queen Anne than even the brilliant victories of Marlborough’) met here; yet Pope, the last of them (save Swift), had been lavish in praise of Richardson’s “Pamela,” and knowing nothing personally of Johnson at the time, but the reputation of his scholarship, and of his poverty, upon the publication of the latter’s poem, “London,” used all he had of influence with Swift, and that of others with Lord Gower, to procure the writer of it an Irish degree, so that the title of Doctor might enable him to obtain a mastership of £60 per annum. The act was unsolicited, and should always be remembered to the credit of the bard of Twickenham. Pope had passed away, but Johnson had personally known him. Richardson, whom we last met in 1748, and who had fed ever since on the honey of feminine adulation, is still an occasional visitor to Hampstead, and finds his way to the Well Walk with his old friend Mrs. Donnellan, where Mrs. Delany and the Dean, who managed to spend a considerable portion of their time on this side of the Channel, might sometimes be met with, for they had personal connections and friends in Hampstead and the neighbourhood.[279]
Dapper little Colley Cibber, ‘the greatest fop either on or off the stage’ that Lady Braidshaigh had ever seen—‘an irreclaimable old sinner’ she calls him—still visits his favourite suburb, and haunts the precincts of the altered Wells, hunting after new faces, and as happy if he can obtain the notice of a fine woman as he was at the age of seventy-seven, when Richardson found him dabbling with the Tunbridge Waters, and described his vanity in a letter to Miss Mulso. In the interim one of his odes has been set to music by Mr. Greene, and been sung in the clubs and coffee-houses. But some things have gone out of his life. Mr. Foote is too busy with his summer performances at the Hay market to be wiled from business by the ancient Laureate, and his old friend, the handsome, clever Barton Booth, has long since found a place amongst the celebrities in Poets’ Corner.
Pertinaciously present at the Assembly balls and in the Long Room, we should see Dr. Akenside, pale and proud, and with the stamp of genius on his handsome brow, passing without recognition, or meeting supercilious looks of contempt, which he is not slow to return with scorn.
Sometimes Garrick brings his graceful Viola (she was called Violette by command of Maria Theresa), on the occasion of a special concert or other entertainment in the Long Room, where Goldsmith, who loves music, and still better to escort Miss Reynolds and her friends, appears in bag-wig and sword and his second-best suit of ‘Queen’s blue silk,’ lined with satin. Once Miss Reynolds was asked to toast the ugliest man she knew, and instantly named Oliver Goldsmith, but on reading “The Traveller,” rescinded her opinion. The beautiful thoughts of the poet transfigured the man, and she could never after think him ugly.
Another noticeable person seen here from time to time was the cheerful, chatty Dr. Young, the protégé of Mrs. Boscawen, widow of the Admiral who resided at Colney Hatch, the friend and correspondent of Richardson. Young’s daily utterances had no affinity with his sombre “Night Thoughts,” lines lit with loveliness though many of them be. Charming Mrs. Montague, too, occasionally appeared—a little later than May Day, when she was wholly engaged with her annual feast and garden-party, her guests being the little sweeps of London, enfranchised for one summer day in their miserable existence by this lady’s compassionate thought for them. Her death must have been a real sorrow for the black brotherhood of London climbing boys, their one friend out of all the great multitude of its inhabitants, till Elia’s gentle-hearted friend Jem White for some years resumed the festival.
As we have said, the persons we have recalled are well known to us, almost as well as if we had lived, and walked, and talked amongst them; they stand out saliently from the general company. But there is a new order amongst these whom we know not. The Toupees, young gentlemen of fashion, who, while periwigs were still worn, wisely took the ordering of their heads into their own hands, and wore their own hair powdered and brushed up from the forehead in a top-knot or toupee. They appear to have been the precursors of the modern masher, and when on the Mall, or at Ranelagh, or Vauxhall, were said to be composed of powder, lace, and essences. ‘You may know them,’ says one authority, ‘by the dress of the toupee, the buckles in their shoes, the choice of the waistcoat, and the cock of the hat.’[280]
But there were times when these ‘pretty fellows’ aspired to quite another rôle, that of hackney-coach and curricle driving, the latter vehicle being of such a height and build as to render the exercise really dangerous. Yet to drive furiously was a sine quâ non; and as the public parks scarcely admitted of such performances, the race-course at Hampstead was a favourite rendezvous for these “young bloods,” and the Chicken House, and other summer lodgings, were for some seasons much patronized by Templars, and other youths in the ranks of the Toupees.
To old ladies they seem to have been a terror in more ways than one, and they do not always appear to have put off the characteristics of the hackney coachman with his three-caped coat. When Swift, remembering the clever horsewoman Lady Betty Germain had been when Lady Betty Berkeley, recommended her for her health’s sake to ride when in London, among other reasons which she gave him for not doing so was this: that ‘nothing would more rejoice the Toupees than to see a horse throw an ancient gentlewoman.’ Miss Burney a few years later introduces us, in ‘Evelina,’ to some of these eighteenth-century Jehus.