Who is there, indeed, that knows not Stewart’s? It has been presiding over this corner for the last two hundred years and more. It must be the oldest baker’s and confectioner’s business in London, beside which even such ancient houses as “Birch’s” or “Gunter’s” are comparatively modern. To-day it bears upon its rebuilt front, the date of its establishment—1688, and the massive foundations and old brickwork, which were brought to light during the recent rebuilding, fully support the theory that this was one of the original buildings erected by Sir Thomas Bond on the site of Clarendon House, when he laid out the street which bears his name.
Let us take this shop, as characteristic of many others, and try to recall what it may have witnessed in the lapse of years. In its early days it was, no doubt, too much occupied with its own affairs to take much note of great personages or historic events; but after it had settled down, so to speak, and had become, as it did, the purveyor of the staff of life to the Coffee-houses that had sprung up around it, it may be supposed to have given an eye, now and then, to the interesting men and beautiful women who passed by, or who made it a rendezvous while some of them waited for those who were spending or making fortunes in the gambling hells of St. James’s Street hard by.
Stewart’s Corner
Old Bond Sᵗ & Piccadilly
REBVILT 1907.
The Augustan age is here! Can that little shrivelled body limping along, having just come from its lodging in Berkeley Street, contain the great mind of Alexander Pope? Surely ’tis he, having but this moment penned a letter to Martha Blount, or put the finishing touches to his “Farewell to London.” He is probably on his way to visit my lord Burlington, whose home (the precursor of the later mansion built by his great grandson, and now known by the massive buildings of the modern Burlington House), is close by. Horace Walpole tells us that when asked why he built his mansion so far out of town, the first Earl replied, “Because he was determined to have no building beyond him!” Credite posteri! but he meant, and should have added, “to the north,” which is, in itself, wonderful enough for us to realize now, for Clarendon House and Berkeley House were already in existence to the west. Could it have been Pope, who asked the question? It seems likely, for we remember the anecdote of the irate gentleman who being in the poet’s company and required to give a definition of “a point of interrogation,” replied “that it was a little crooked thing that asked questions!”
And then that fine looking man in the full bottomed wig, can that be Mr. Addison of the Spectator, fresh from his lodgings in the Haymarket hard by, and still glowing in the reflected glory of “The Campaign?” None other. And lo! here is the handsome face of his hero, who “taught the doubtful battle where to rage,” as he hobbles along (he will soon be off to Bath to try and cure his gout)—fit indeed, monstrari digito, for other things besides his military glory. He will not turn in at Stewart’s we may be sure, for if the “tears of dotage” have not yet begun to flow, at least he is learning to save his money.
Here, too, comes jolly Dick Steele; he has just been into a coffee house to pen a line of excuse to his “dearest Prue,” in Kensington Square, and is on his way to a jollification with some of his boon companions; forgetful of his “Apology,” and hardly living up to the ethics of his “Christian Hero.” Still with all his faults, a pleasanter figure to meet than that dark-faced, dissatisfied-looking man in clerical attire. That is the redoubtable Dean Swift himself, one of the great geniuses, not only of his own day, but of all time. He knows this part of the town as well as he knows all the turns and twists of contemporary politics; and has probably come from his rooms in Ryder Street almost opposite. Wherever he is he will be penning that famous “Journal to Stella,” or plotting and planning with the heads of the Opposition—and there is no clearer or more potent brain among them. If he goes into the St. James’ Coffee House, or White’s Chocolate House, “the most fashionable hell in London,” or trudges further east to Willis’s, in Bow Street, be sure there will be plenty to note his strange manner and call him “the mad parson!” Perchance he may be taking the air to prepare himself for that particular dinner with my Lord Abercorn when there smoked upon the board the “fine fat haunch of venison, that smelt rarely on one side,” which he mentions, with such gusto, in his journal; or perhaps he is setting out on one of his long rambles to Chelsea to dine with the Dean of Carlisle, or to sup with Lord Mountjoy at Kensington Gravel Pits.
An observant traveller who visited London about this period, remarks that “Most of the streets are wonderfully well lighted, for in front of each house hangs a lantern or a large globe of glass, inside of which is placed a lamp which burns all night.” The light which hung before “Stewart’s” must have illuminated the face of many a “toast,” many a “Macaroni,” as they came up Bond Street, and sometimes that of one of those terrible “mohocks.” My Lord Mohun, not yet dreaming of his sanguinary and fatal encounter with his grace of Hamilton, but sufficiently notorious for that mysterious affair when Mountfort the player fell mortally wounded near his lodging in Norfolk Street; the eccentric Duke of Wharton, who once sent a bear to his tutor as an appropriate concomitant to his “bearish conduct”; who, marrying at sixteen, became a sort of Jacobite hero, and showed by some of his writings in “The True Briton,” what gifts he had squandered by a riotous life; and who finally ended his career in a Bernardine Convent, “the scorn and wonder of our days,” as Pope writes, “a sad outcast of each church and state.” Hervey, the “Sporus” of the same bitter pen, having dragged himself for a space from the Court, of which he was so characteristic an ornament, and from the company of the Princess who secretly loved him. Perhaps he will to-morrow fight, behind Arlington House, hard by, with Pulteney, who called him “a thing below contempt.” That slip of the foot at the critical moment saved the “thin-spun life,” and like so many protagonists in such encounters, the whilom enemies embrace, with more fervour on Pulteney’s part than on that of “My Lord” who but bows in silence and withdraws.
And then what a galaxy of beauty reflects the light from that “lantern or large globe of glass!” Here is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, not very much affected by the virulent lines of the “wicked wasp of Twickenham”; the lovely Molly Lepel, who married Lord Hervey, and whom Lady Suffolk loved so much; Mary Bellenden, afterwards Mrs. Campbell, another of those maids of honour whom Gay and Prior sung, and Swift and Arbuthnot undertook to prove the best wives, although we remember that the coachman at Leicester House solemnly forbade his son ever to think of any of them in so tender a way! Here, too, is Lady Mary Coke, who was used to almost regard herself as a royal widow, on the death of Edward Duke of York—for which “mealy faced boy” she had a “tendre”; the Duchess of Queensberry, Prior’s “Kitty ever fair,” whom Walpole thought looked “(by twilight) like a young beauty of an old-fashioned century,” and who died in Savile Row, in 1777, “of a surfeit of cherries.”
The list might be indefinitely extended, but “Anni labuntur” and other centuries are hurrying us along, bringing new faces in their train; George Selwyn with his witty talk and mania for executions; he is off now, probably to see John Rann, or “Sixteen-stringed Jack,” as he was called, strung up at Tyburn tree—my Lord Pembroke accompanies him, and the cronies chancing to meet a lot of young chimney sweeps who beg for money, Selwyn suddenly addresses them solemnly with the words “I have often heard of the sovereignty of the people. I suppose your highnesses are in Court mourning;” Charles James Fox, the most eminent of those “sons of faro,” who having lost his last penny and consoled himself by reading Homer in the small hours, is thinking of a “passover” to the Continent, which, as Selwyn says, will not be relished by the Jews; Lord March may also be seen, the wicked “old Q” of many a notorious story; and Hare—“the hare with many friends,” as his acquaintances nick-named him; and then the dandies of a later day; Alvanley, who succeeded Selwyn as a wit and almost rivalled Brummell as a dandy; “Ball” Hughes and “Teapot” Crawfurd; Lord Yarmouth and Prince Esterhazy; Jack Lee, and the great Brummell himself, who has cut the Regent and is thinking of bringing the old king into fashion!