Poor Goldsmith’s weaknesses were a good deal played upon by that not too polite company. One afternoon, Burke and a young Irish officer, O’Moore, were crossing the square to Reynolds’s house to dinner. They passed a group who were gaping at, and making admiring remarks upon, some samples of beautiful foreign husseydom, who were looking out of the windows of one of the hotels. Goldsmith was at the skirt of the group, looking on. Burke said to O’Moore, as they passed him unseen, ‘Look at Goldsmith; by-and-by, at Reynolds’s you will see what I make of this.’ At the dinner, Burke treated Goldsmith with such coolness, that Oliver at last asked for an explanation. Burke readily replied that his manner was owing to the monstrous indiscretion on Goldsmith’s part, in the square, of which Burke and Mr. O’Moore had been the witnesses. Poor Goldsmith asked in what way he had been so indiscreet?
‘Why,’ answered Burke, ‘did you not exclaim, on looking up at those women, what stupid beasts the crowd must be for staring with such admiration at those painted Jezebels, while a man of your talent passed by unnoticed?’—‘Surely, my dear friend,’ cried Goldsmith, horror-struck, ‘I did not say so!’—‘If you had not said so,’ retorted Burke, ‘how should I have known it?’—‘That’s true,’ answered Goldsmith, with great humility; ‘I am very sorry; it was very foolish! I do recollect that something of the kind passed through my mind, but I did not think I had uttered it.’
It is a pity that Sir Joshua never records the names of his own guests; but his parties were so much swelled by invitations given on the spur of the moment, that it would have been impossible for him to set down beforehand more than the nucleus of his scrambling and unceremonious, but most enjoyable, dinners. Whether the famous Leicester Square dinners deserved to be called enjoyable, is a question which anyone may decide for himself, after reading the accounts given of them at a period when the supervision of Reynolds’s sister, Frances, could no longer be given to them. The table, made to hold seven or eight, was often made to hold twice the number. When the guests were at last packed, the deficiency of knives, forks, plates, and glasses made itself felt. Everyone called, as he wanted, for bread, wine, or beer, and lustily, or there was little chance of being served.
There had once, Courtenay says, been sets of decanters and glasses provided to furnish the table and enable the guests to help themselves. These had gone the way of all glass, and had not been replaced; but though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few, Courtenay admits that their shortcomings only enhanced the singular pleasure of the entertainment. The wine, cookery, and dishes were but little attended to; nor was the fish or venison ever talked of or recommended. Amidst the convivial, animated bustle of his guests, Sir Joshua sat perfectly composed; protected partly by his deafness, partly by his equanimity; always attentive, by help of his trumpet, to what was said, never minding what was eaten or drunk, but leaving everyone to scramble for himself. Peers, temporal and spiritual, statesmen, physicians, lawyers, actors, men of letters, painters, musicians, made up the motley group, ‘and played their parts,’ says Courtenay, ‘without dissonance or discord.’ Dinner was served precisely at five, whether all the company had arrived or not. Sir Joshua never kept many guests waiting for one, whatever his rank or consequence. ‘His friends and intimate acquaintance,’ concludes Courtenay, ‘will ever love his memory, and will ever regret those social hours and the cheerfulness of that irregular, convivial table, which no one has attempted to revive or imitate, or was indeed qualified to supply.’
Reynolds had a room in which his copyists, his pupils, and his drapery-men worked. Among them was one of the cleverest and most unfortunate of artists. Seldom is the name of Peter Toms now heard, but he once sat in Hudson’s studio with young Reynolds, and in the studio of Sir Joshua, as the better artist’s obedient humble servant; that is to say, he painted his employer’s draperies, and probably a good deal more, for Toms was a very fair portrait-painter. Peter worked too for various other great artists, and a purchaser of any picture of that time cannot be certain whether much of it is not from Toms’s imitative hand. Peter’s lack of original power did not keep him out of the Royal Academy, though in his day he was but a second-class artist. He belonged, too, to the Herald’s Office, as the painters of the Tudor period often did, and after filling in the canvasses of his masters in England, he went to Ireland on his own account and in reliance on the patronage of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Northumberland. Toms, however, found that the Irish refused to submit their physiognomies to his limning, and he waited for them to change their opinion of him in vain. Finally, he lost heart and hope. His vocation was gone; but in the London garret within which he took refuge he seems to have given himself a chance for life or death. Pencil in one hand and razor in the other, he made an effort to paint a picture, and apparently failed in accomplishing it, for he swept the razor across his throat, and was found the next morning stark dead by the side of the work which seems to have smitten him with despair.
Reynolds saw the ceremony of proclaiming George III. king in front of Savile House, where the monarch had resided while he was Prince of Wales. Into his own house came and went, for years, all the lofty virtues, vices, and rich nothingnesses of Reynolds’s time, to be painted. From his window he looked with pride on his gaudy carriage (the Seasons, limned on the panels, were by his own drapery man, Catton), in which he used to send his sister out for a daily drive. From the same window he saw Savile House gutted by the ‘No Popery’ rioters of 1780; fire has since swept all that was left of Page’s house on the north side of the Square; and in 1787 Reynolds looked on a newcomer to the Fields, Lawrence, afterwards Sir Thomas, who set up his easel against Sir Joshua’s, but who was not then strong enough to make such pretence. Some of the most characteristic groups of those days were to be seen clustered round the itinerant quack doctors—fellows who lied with a power that Orton, Luie, and even the ‘coachers’ of Luie, might envy. Leicester Square, in Reynolds’s days alone, would furnish matter for two or three volumes. We have only space to say further of Sir Joshua, that he died here in 1792, lay in state in Somerset House, and that as the funeral procession was on its way to St. Paul’s (with its first part in the Cathedral before the last part was clear of Somerset House) one of the occupants in one of the many mourning coaches said to a companion, ‘There is now, sir, a fine opening for a portrait-painter.’
While Reynolds was ‘glorifying’ the Fields, that is to say, about the year 1783, John Hunter, the great anatomist, enthroned science in Leicester Square. His house, nearly opposite Reynolds’s, was next door to that once occupied by Hogarth, on the east side, but north of the painter’s dwelling. Hunter was then fifty-five years old. Like his eminent brother, William, John Hunter had a very respectable amount of self-appreciation, quite justifiably.
The governing body of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital had failed, through ignorance or favouritism, to recognise his ability and to reward his assiduity. But John Hunter was of too noble a spirit to be daunted or even depressed; and St. George’s Hospital honoured itself by bestowing on him the modest office of house-surgeon. It was thirty years after this that John Hunter settled himself in Leicester Square. There he spent three thousand pounds in the erection of a building in the rear of his house for the reception of a collection in comparative anatomy. Before this was completed he spent upon it many thousands of pounds,—it is said ninety thousand guineas! With him to work was to live. Dr. Garthshore entered the museum in the Square early one morning, and found Hunter already busily occupied. ‘Why, John,’ said the physician, ‘you are always at work!’ ‘I am,’ replied the surgeon; ‘and when I am dead you will not meet very soon with another John Hunter!’ He accused his great brother William of claiming the merit of surgical discoveries which John had made; and when a friend, talking to him, at his door in the Square, on his ‘Treatise on the Teeth,’ remarked that it would be answered by medical men simply to make their names known, Hunter rather unhandsomely observed: ‘Aye, we have all of us vermin that live upon us.’ Lavater took correct measure of the famous surgeon when he remarked, on seeing the portrait of Hunter: ‘That is the portrait of a man who thinks for himself!’
After John Hunter’s death his collection was purchased by Government for fifteen thousand pounds. It was removed from Leicester Square to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to the College of Surgeons, where it still forms a chief portion of the anatomical and pathological museum in that institution. The site of the Hunterian Museum in Leicester Square has been swallowed up by the Alhambra, where less profitable study of comparative anatomy may now be made by all who are interested in such pursuit. A similar destiny followed the other Hunterian Museum—that established by William Hunter, in Great Windmill Street, at the top of the Haymarket, where he built an amphitheatre and museum, with a spacious dwelling-house attached. In the dwelling-house Joanna Baillie passed some of her holiday and early days in London. She came from her native Scottish heath, and the only open moor like unto it where she could snatch a semblance of fresh air was the neighbouring inclosure of Leicester Square! William Hunter left his gigantic and valuable collection to his nephew, Dr. Baillie, for thirty years, to pass then to the University of Glasgow, where William himself had studied divinity, before the results of freedom of thought (both the Hunters would think for themselves) induced him to turn to the study of medicine. The Hunterian Museum in Windmill Street, after serving various purposes, became known as the Argyll Rooms, where human anatomy (it is believed) was liberally exhibited under magisterial license and the supervision of a severely moral police.
Leicester Square has been remarkable for its exhibitions. Richardson, the fire-eater, exhibited privately at Leicester House in 1672. A century later there was a public exhibition on that spot of quite another quality. The proprietor was Sir Ashton Lever, a Lancashire gentleman, educated at Oxford. As a country squire he formed and possessed the most extensive and beautiful aviary in the kingdom. Therewith, Sir Ashton collected animals and curiosities from all quarters of the world. This was the nucleus of the ‘museum’ subsequently brought to Leicester Fields. Among the curiosities was a striking likeness of George III. ‘cut in cannel coal;’ also Indian-ink drawings and portraits; baskets of flowers cut in paper, and wonderful for their accuracy; costumes of all ages and nations, and a collection of warlike weapons which disgusted a timid beholder, who describes them in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ (May 1773) as ‘desperate, diabolical instruments of destruction, invented, no doubt, by the devil himself.’ Soon after this, this wonderful collection was exhibited in Leicester House. There was a burst of wonder, as Pennant calls it, for a little while after the opening; but the ill-cultivated world soon grew indifferent to being instructed; and Sir Ashton got permission, with some difficulty, from Parliament, to dispose of the whole collection by lottery. Sir William Hamilton, Baron Dimsdale, and Mr. Pennant stated to the Committee of the House of Commons that they had never seen a collection of such inestimable value. ‘Sir Ashton Lever’s lottery tickets,’ says an advertisement of January 28, 1785, ‘are now on sale at Leicester House every day (Sundays excepted), from Nine in the morning till Six in the evening, at One Guinea each; and as each ticket will admit four persons, either together or separately, to view the Museum, no one will hereafter be admitted but by the Lottery Tickets, excepting those who have already annual admission.’ It is added that the whole was to be disposed of owing ‘to the very large sum expended in making it, and not from the deficiency of the daily receipts (as is generally imagined), which have annually increased; the average amount for the last three years being 1833l. per annum.’ It sounds odd that a ‘concern’ is got rid of because it was yearly growing more profitable!