“Catalogue of many natural rarities, with great industrie, cost, and thirty years’ travel into foreign countries, collected by Robert Herbert, alias Forges, Gent., and sworn servant to his Majesty; to be seen at the place called the Musick house at the Mitre, near the West End of S. Paul’s Church, 1664.”
This collection, or at least a great part of it, was bought by Sir Hans Sloane. It is conjectured that the Mitre was situated in London House Yard, at the north-west end of St Paul’s, on the spot where, afterwards, stood the house known by the sign of the Goose and Gridiron. Ned Ward[463] describes the appearance of another music-house of the same name in Wapping, which he calls “the Paradise of Wapping,” though more probably it was in Shadwell, where there is still a Music House Court, which seems to point to some such origin. His description of this prototype of the Oxford and Alhambra music-halls is not a little amusing. The music, consisting of fiddles, hautboys, and a humdrum organ, he compares to the grunting of a hog added as a base to a concert of caterwauling cats in the height of their ecstacy. The music-room was richly decorated with paintings, (Hornfair was one of the pictures,) carvings, and gilding; the seats were like pews in a church, and the orchestra railed in like a chancel. The musicians occasionally went round to collect contributions, as they still do in the Cafés Chantants of the Champs Elysées, Paris. The other rooms in the house were “furnished for the entertainment of the best of companies,” all painted with humorous subjects. The kitchen, used at that period in many taverns as a sitting room by the customers, was railed in and ornamented in the same gaudy style as the rest of the houses; a quantity of canary birds were suspended on the walls. Underground was a tippling sanctuary painted with drunken women tormenting the devil, and other somewhat quaint subjects. The wine of the establishment was good. Here, then, we may imagine our great-great-grandfathers listening to the woeful fiddles scraping “Sillenger’s Round,” “John, come kiss me,” “Old Simon the King,” or other old tunes, until flesh and blood could stand it no longer, and a dance would be indulged in to the music of “Green Sleeves,” “Yellow Stockings,” or some other equally comic dance and tune; after which everybody went home, through the dirty dark streets, doubtless “highly pleased with the entertainment.”
Older than either of these was the Mitre in Cheap, which is mentioned in the vestry books of St Michael’s, Cheapside, before the year 1475.[464] In “Your Five Gallants,” a comedy by Middleton, about 1608, Goldstone prefers it to the Mermaid:—“The Mitre in my mind for neat attendance, diligent boys and—push, excels it [the Mermaid] far.” But the most famous of the inns with this name, was the Mitre in Mitre Court, Fleet Street, one of Doctor Johnson’s favourite haunts, “where he loved to sit up late,”[465] and where Goldsmith, and the other celebrities, and minor stars that moved about the great doctor, used to meet him. This house is named in the play of “Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks,” in 1611. It was one of those houses which, for more than two centuries, was the constant resort of all the wits about town; even the name of Shakespeare throws its halo around this place:—
“Mr Thorpe, the enterprising bookseller of Bedford Street,” says Mr J. P. Collier, “is in possession of a MS. full of songs and poems in the handwriting of a person of the name of Richard Jackson; all prior to the year 1631, and including many unpublished poems by a variety of celebrated poets. One of the most curious is a song of five-seven-lines stanzas thus headed: ’Shakespeare’s Rime which he made at the Mytre in Fleete Street.’ It begins—‘From the rich Lavinian shore,’ and some few of the lines were published by Playford, and set as a catch. Another shorter piece is called in the margin: ’Shakespeare’s Rime:’—
‘Give me a Cup of rich Canary Wine,
Which was the Mitre’s (drink) and now is mine;
Of which had Horace and Anacreon tasted
Their lives as well as lines till now had lasted.’I have little doubt that the lines are genuine, as well as many other songs.”
In this same tavern Boswell supped, for the first time, with his idol, and the description of the biographer’s delight on that grand occasion has a festive air about it that cannot fail to make a lively impression on his readers:—
“He agreed to meet me in the evening at the Mitre. I called on him, and we went thither at nine. We had a good supper, and port wine, of which he then sometimes drank a bottle. The orthodox high church sound of the Mitre,—the figure and manner of the celebrated Samuel Johnson—the extraordinary power and precision of his conversation and the pride from finding myself admitted as his companion, produced a variety of sensations and a pleasing elevation of mind beyond what I had ever experienced.”
There, also, that amusing scene with the young ladies from Staffordshire took place, which would make an excellent companion picture to Leslie’s “Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman.”
“Two young women from Staffordshire visited him when I was present to consult him on the subject of Methodism, to which they were inclined. Come (said he) you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the Mitre, and we will talk over that subject, which they did; and after dinner, he took one of them on his knees and fondled them for half an hour together.”
Hogarth, too, was an occasional visitor at this tavern. A card is still extant, wherein he requested the company of Dr Arnold King to dine with him at the Mitre. The written part is contained within a circle, (representing a plate) to which a knife and fork are the supporters. In the centre is drawn a pie with a Mitre on the top of it, and the invitation—
Mr Hogarth’s compliments to Mr King, and desires the honour of his company to dinner, on Thursday next, to η. β. π. [Eta beta py.][466]