“... Most musical of Lords,
A playing madrigals and glees
Upon the harpsichords.”
And this child’s father was old Lord Mornington, whose son was Arthur, Duke of Wellington.
If you scrutinise the faces of these juvenile choristers somewhat narrowly, and happen yourself to be a tolerably regular attendant at the abbey church of St. Peter’s, Westminster, it is not at all improbable that you may recognise one or two young gentlemen whom, arrayed in snowy surplices, you may have heard trilling forth in shrill notes their parts of the service among the gentlemen choristers and minor canons of the Abbey. I wonder if it is very wicked for them to be found at Evans’s thus late. I don’t mean at one o’clock in the morning, for they mostly disappear about midnight. Perhaps not so wicked, for I know there are some people so very religious that they only think of religion on Sundays; and fancy that week-day transactions can’t have the slightest connection with the Sabbath. However this may be, I must mention it as a curious fact in relation with the moral economy of Evans’s, that in the old days, when Captain Costigan or one of his peers, was about to sing anything approaching to a chanson grivoise, the juveniles were invariably marched out of the room by a discreet waiter, in order that their young ears might not be contaminated.
With respect to the remaining harmonic attractions of Evans’s, I shall be very brief. I believe that on some evenings individuals of the Ethiopian way of thinking, and accoutred in the ordinary amount of lamp-black, Welsh wig, and shirt-collars, and provided with the usual banjo, accordion, tambourine, and bones, are in the habit of informing the audience that things in general are assuming an appearance of “Hoop de dooden do;” also of lamenting the untimely demise of one Ned, an aged blackamoor, who stood towards them in an avuncular relation, and of passionately demanding the cause of their master effecting the sale of their persons, by auction or otherwise, on the day on which they entered into the state of matrimony. I am given to understand that a gentleman with an astonishing falsetto voice is a great favourite among the habitués, and that some screaming comic songs by popular vocalists are nightly given with immense applause; but I candidly confess that I am not qualified to speak with any great degree of certitude with respect to these performances. I go to Evans’s generally very late, and as seldom venture close to the proscenium. I am content to bide in the ante-saloon, and to muse upon Thersites Theorbo, glowering over his grog.
This iracund journalist—to borrow an epithet from Mr. Carlyle—is not by any means solitary in his patronage of the marble-tabled, portrait-hung café. To tell the honest truth, as, in Paris, if you wish to see the actors in vogue, you must go to the Café du Vaudeville—if the authors, to the Café Cardinal or the Café du Helder—if the artists, to the Café des Italians—if the students, to the Café Belge—and if the dandies, to the Café de Paris; so in London, if you wish to see the wits and the journalist men about town of the day, you must go to Evans’s about one o’clock in the morning. Then those ineffables turn out of the smoking-rooms of their clubs—clique-clubs mostly—and meet on this neutral ground to gird at one another. Autres temps, autres mœurs. A century since it used to be Wills’s or Button’s, or the Rose; now it is Evans’s. I should dearly like to draw some pen-and-ink portraits for you of the wits as they sit, and drink, and smoke, at one o’clock in the morning; but I dare not. As for Thersites Theorbo, he is a shadow. You know what I told you about clubs; and this place also is a prison-house to me. It is true, Heaven help me, that I am not affiliated to witcraft myself, that I am neither priest nor deacon. Still I have been one of the little boys in red cassocks, who swing the censers, and I dare not reveal the secrets of the sacristy. But I may just whisper furtively in your ear, that Ethelred Guffoon is never seen at Evans’s. It makes his head ache. Mr. Goodman Twoshoes, also, is but a seldom visitor to the Cave of Harmony. He prefers his snug corner-box at the Albion, where he can brew his beloved ginger-punch. It is not that the wits despise the “Cave.” Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, not unfrequently condescends to wither mankind through his spectacles from one of the marble tables; and I have seen the whole “Times” newspaper—proprietors, editors, special correspondents, and literary critics—hob-nobbing together at—— Will you hold your tongue, sir?
One trifling indiscretion more, and I have done with Evans’s. “It is not generally known,” as accurate, erudite, and amusing Mr. John Timbs would say, that the sly gallantry of Mr. Green, the proprietor of the Cave of Harmony, caused him, when his new and sumptuous music-hall was in course of construction, to move the architect to build some cunning loop-holes and points of espial connected with commodious apartments—in other words, with private boxes, somewhat resembling the baignoires in the Parisian theatres, whence ladies could see and hear all that was going on without being seen or heard. A somewhat similar contrivance exists, it will be remembered, in our House of Commons; I only wish that the fair ones who there lie perdues during a late debate, were doomed to hear as little trash as meets their ears from the secluded bowers overhanging Evans’s. What passport is required to ensure admission into these blissful regions I know not; but I have it on good authority that ladies of the “very highest rank and distinction”—to use a “Morning Postism”—have on several occasions graced Evans’s with their presence, and with condescending smiles looked down upon the revelries of their lords.
Tell me, you who are so quick of hearing, what is that noise above our heads—it must be in the street beyond—and which dominates the revelry as the sound of the cannon did the music of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before Quatre Bras. It grows louder and louder, it comes nearer and nearer, it swells into a hoarse continually-jarring roar, as I sit smoking at Evans’s. The sham blackamoor on the stage pauses in his buffoonery, forbears to smite his woolly pate with the tambourine; his colleague’s accordion is suspended in the midst of a phthisic wheeze, and the abhorred bones quiver, yet unreverberate in the nicoto-alcholoicho-charged air. The rattle of knives and forks, the buzzing conversation, cease; a hundred queries as to the cause of the noise rise on as many lips; the waiters forget to rattle the change, the toper forgets to sip his grog: there is intromission even in the inspiration of tobacco fumes: then comes the mighty answer—comes at once from all quarters—caught up, echoed and re-echoed, and fraught with dread, the momentous word—Fire!
Man, it has been somewhere pertinently observed, is a hunting animal. The delight in having something to run after: whether it be a pickpocket, who has just eloped with a watch or a silk handkerchief; a dog with a kettle tied to his tail, a hare, a deer, a woman, a fugitive hat, a slaver, a prima donna, a lord’s tuft, an oriental traveller, a deformed dwarf—something to chase, something to scour and scud after, something to run down, and ultimately devour and destroy: such a pursuit enlivens and comforts the heart of man, and makes him remember that he has the blood of Nimrod in his veins. The schoolboys at Eton have their “paper chases,” and course miles through the pleasant playing-fields, crossing brooks, and tearing through hedges, after a quire of foolscap torn up into shreds. The child chases a butterfly; the adult exhausts himself and his horse in racing after a much-stinking fox; and the octogenarian frets his palsied old limbs, and bursts into a feverish snail’s gallop, after a seat on the Treasury Bench, or a strip of blue velvet embroidered with “honi soit qui mal y pense” in gold, and called a garter. There is a wild, engrossing excitement and pleasure in hunting; the fox-hound, the otter, the “harmless necessary cat,” would tell you so, were their speech articulate; but of all things huntable, chasable, rundownable, I doubt if there be one that can equal a Fire.