His Summer’s manhood, open, fresh, and fair,
His Virtue strict, his manners debonair,” etc.
Foote satirised Langford in The Minor as Smirke (not Puff) the auctioneer, who raises a Guido from “forty-five” to “sixty-three ten” by declaring that “it only wants a touch from the torch of Prometheus to start from the canvas.”
[196] Samuel Paterson (1728-1802), originally a stay-maker, became a bookseller, and about 1753 opened auction rooms in what remained of Essex House, which stood much on the site of Devereux Court, Essex Street. He afterwards removed to Covent Garden. He would have succeeded better in business had he been less fond of reading the books he sold. He was the first auctioneer who sold books in lots.—Hassell Hutchins, the auctioneer of King Street, Covent Garden, died in 1795.
[197] It was George Michael Moser (1704-83) who made the historic interruption: “Stay, stay, Toctor Shonson is going to say something.” Born at Schaffhausen, he rose from cabinet-making (in Soho) and the chasing of watch-cases and cane heads, to be the First Keeper of the Royal Academy. Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced him the first gold-chaser in the kingdom. He enamelled trinkets for watches with so much skill as to set a fashion, and it was said that George II. once ordered him a hat full of money for some of his works. Moser lived in Craven Buildings, which have lately been demolished to make way for Aldwych and Kingsway. He died, however, in his official keeper’s residence at Somerset House.
[198] John Millan had a bookshop at Charing Cross for more than fifty years. Richard Gough, the antiquary, frequented Millan’s shop, which he describes as “encrusted with Literature and Curiosities like so many stalactitical exudations.” Behind sat “the deity of the place, at the head of a Whist party.”
[199] Johnson’s letter to Sir Joshua Reynolds on behalf of young Paterson was dated June 2, 1783; his three letters to Ozias Humphrey, April 5, April 10, and May 31, 1784. He asks Humphrey to allow the boy to frequent his studio and see him paint. The Doctor had chosen good teachers for the youth. “Humphrey’s miniatures, before those of any other, remind us of the excellences and graces of Reynolds” (Redgrave: A Century of Painters, i. 421). Humphrey had himself been greatly encouraged in his youth by Reynolds, who said to him: “Born in my country, and your mother a lace-maker!—why, Vandyck’s mother was a maker of lace,” and he lent him some of his pictures to copy.
[200] Richard Gough (1735-1809), the antiquary whose British Topography, Sepulchral Monuments, translation of Camden’s Britannia, and other works, are in every great library. The Britannia occupied him seven years, and his investigations led him all over the country. It is said that during the seven years in which he was translating it he remained so accessible to his family at Enfield, that no member of it was aware of his undertaking. He was esteemed by Horace Walpole, who, however, often made a jest of his antiquary mind. Thus: “Gough, speaking of some Cross that has been renowned, says ‘there is now an unmeaning market-house in its place.’ Saving his reverence and our prejudices, I doubt there is a good deal more meaning in a market-house than in a cross” (Letter to Rev. W. Cole, Nov. 24, 1780).
[201] There were four Basires in direct succession. Smith refers to the second in the line, James Basire (1730-1802), the illustrator of Vetusta Monumenta. He compares him unfavourably with William Woollett (1735-85) and John Hall (1739-97), but it is not clear that West despised Basire, who, indeed, engraved his Pylades and Orestes.
[202] Dr. Lort was Librarian, not Chaplain, to the Duke of Devonshire. He moved in the Johnson set. For nineteen years he held the Rectory of St. Matthew’s, Friday Street, in which church (now demolished) there was a tablet to his memory. He died at 6 Savile Row, Nov. 5, 1790, after a carriage accident at Colchester. A water-colour portrait of him, by Sylvester Harding, is in the British Museum Print Room. In her diary Madam D’Arblay gives an entertaining picture of Dr. Lort as he appeared in the Thrale circle at Streatham, where on one occasion he talked against Dr. Johnson to his face without, it seems, any tragic results. “His manners,” she says, “are somewhat blunt and odd, and he is altogether out of the common road, without having chosen a better path.”