Thomson in his “Seasons” calls it “huge Augusta.”
[45] Old Bedlam, at that time, stood “close by London Wall.” It was built after the model of the Tuileries, which is said to have given the French king great offence. In front of it Moorfields extended, with broad gravel walks crossing each other at right angles. These the writer well recollects; and Rivaz, an underwriter at Lloyd’s, his told him that he remembered when the merchants of London would parade these walks on a summer evening with their wives and daughters. But now, as a punning brother bard sings,—
“Moorfields are fields no more.”
[46a] A narrow passage immediately adjoining Drury Lane Theatre, and so called from the vineyard attached to Covent or Convent Garden.
[46b] The Hand-in-Hand Insurance Office was one of the very first insurance offices established in London. To make the engineer of the office thus early in the race is a piece of historical accuracy intended it is said, on the part of the writer.
[48] Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!
Were the last words of Marmion.
[49] Whitbread’s shears. An economical experiment of that gentleman. The present portico, towards Brydges-street, was afterwards erected under the lesseeship of Elliston, whose portrait in the Exhibition was thus noticed in the Examiner “Portrait of the great Lessee, in his favourite character of Mr. Elliston.”
[52] “Samuel Johnson is not so good: the measure and solemnity of his sentences, in all the limited variety of their structure, are indeed imitated with singular skill; but the diction is caricatured in a vulgar and unpleasing degree. To make Johnson call a doer ‘a ligneous barricado,’ and its knocker and bell its ‘frappant and tintinnabulant appendages,’ is neither just nor humorous; and we are surprised that a writer who has given such extraordinary proofs of his talent for finer ridicule and fairer imitation, should have stooped to a vein of pleasantry so low, and so long ago exhausted; especially as, in other passages of the same piece, he has shown how well qualified he was both to catch and to render the true characteristics of his original. The beginning, for example, we think excellent.”—Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review.
[54a] The celebrated Lord Chesterfield, whose Letters to his Son, according to Dr. Johnson, inculcate “the manners of a dancing-master and the morals of a —,” &c.
[54b] Lord Mayor of the theatric sky. This alludes to Leigh Hunt, who, in The Examiner, at this time kept the actors in hot water. Dr. Johnson’s argument is, like many of his other arguments, specious, but untenable; that which it defends has since been abandoned as impracticable. Mr. Whitbread contended that the actor was like a portrait in a picture, and accordingly placed the green curtain in a gilded frame remote from the foot-lights; alleging that no performer should mar the illusion by stepping out of the frame. Dowton was the first actor who, like Manfred’s ancestor in the Castle of Otranto, took the liberty of abandoning the canon. “Don’t tell me of frames and pictures,” ejaculated the testy comedian; “if I can’t be heard by the audience in the frame, I’ll walk out of it!” The proscenium has since been new-modelled, and the actors thereby brought nearer to the audience.