Swift.
In 1833 they were in the possession of William Baker, Esq., of Crayfordbury.[121]
Amongst the company to the Upper Flask came Dr. Garth,[122] Addison, Swift, Steele, Parnell, Sir Richard Blackmore, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Dr. Arbuthnot, and others whose names are not connected with my subject.
But the friendship of the associates did not end with good-fellowship. Few things redound more to the credit of this famous club than the firmness of its members’ regard for one another, which often showed itself very practically, as in Addison’s frequent assistance of Steele, till wearied by his recklessness and folly, and in Swift’s help to him at a critical moment, which we have already glanced at.
For the sake of these celebrities the Upper Flask had been famous long before Richardson made the persecuted Clarissa alight there from the Hampstead coach. The mulberry-tree, now held together by iron bands,[123] in what was once the garden of the tavern, may have shaded in those far-off summers the brows of Isaac Bickerstaffe, Obadiah Greenhat, and others of the witty confederates banded against the vices and frivolities of the times. Their charming essays remain with us in the too-little-looked-at pages of the Spectator, Guardian, and Tatler. A few years later we should have found Colley Cibber, playwright and actor, seated beneath it, discussing stage business with his theatrical allies, Wilkes and Booth, over tankards of brown ale or a bowl of punch; or it may be the great Dr. Johnson himself, in his ‘bushy, grayish wig, brown clothes, black worsted stockings, and plain shirt’ (a solecism in the days of lace ruffles and embroidery). Goldsmith, too, may have sat there, having strolled through the pleasant fields from his cottage lodging ‘near a place called Kilburn Priory,’ with the MS. of his ‘Animated Nature.’ And Richardson must have been familiar with the place of his heroine’s attempted seclusion.
Samuel Stanton, vintner, was the proprietor of the Upper Flask, or Upper Bowling-green House, as it was called in 1707. He left it to his nephew and namesake, a man of considerable wealth and standing, it would appear, whose sister was married to the Earl of Warwick, and who bequeathed this house in 1750 to his niece, Lady Charlotte Rich, their daughter. In all probability it continued to be let as an inn for a considerable time after this date. A writer in the Universal Museum, 1764, says that, going to Hampstead to observe an eclipse of the sun, he noticed near the Upper Flask a stone fixed, stating that this spot was as high as the cupola of St. Paul’s. The stone has long since disappeared, but this note proves the existence of the tavern till within five years of the date when it came to be the property of George Steevens, the indefatigable annotator of Shakespeare, twenty of whose plays he published from the original text, and with the aid of Johnson brought out a complete edition of them in 1773. The fourth edition of his plays of Shakespeare, with notes, was undertaken and finished wholly by himself in the short space of eighteen months. To facilitate the printing of it, and prevent any delay for want of copy, proofs, etc., he was in the habit of starting with the patrol from Hampstead every morning between four and five o’clock, without reference to season or weather, taking with him the copy written overnight.[124]
‘Him still from Hampstead journeying with his book
Aurora oft for Cephalus mistook,
What time he brushed the dew with hasty pace,