Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.”
[232] Henry Salt, the great traveller and British consul-general in Egypt. He sold antiquities to the British Museum, and had dealings, resulting in a quarrel, with Belzoni.
[233] Smith evidently refers to the plan affected by Alexander (not the greater John Rosher) Cozens, of throwing a blot, and then working it into a landscape composition.
[234] Smith expresses himself rather oddly here, for he married only once, his wife being Anne Maria Prickett, who, after a union of forty-five years, was left his widow.
[235] Sir James Winter Lake, Bart., a man of wealth and culture, compiled “Bibliotheca Lakeana” (a catalogue of his library) in 1808, and “British Portraits and Historical Prints, collected by J. W. L.” in the same year. His extra-illustrated Granger’s History extended to forty large folio volumes.
Lady Lake is mentioned in one of the many amusing dialogues recorded by Smith in his Life of Nollekens. Panton Betew, the silversmith of Old Compton Street, Soho, talking to Nollekens of their common memories, says: “Ay, I know there were many very clever things produced there (at Bow); what very curious heads for canes they made at that manufactory! I think Crowther was the proprietor’s name; he had a very beautiful daughter, who is married to Sir James Lake. Nat. Hone painted a portrait of her, in the character of Diana, and it was one of his best pictures.”
[236] Smith’s general meaning is plain, but I cannot with confidence explain the reference to Tooley Street. It may be no more than a slightly contemptuous way of referring to villa-building tradesmen (nobodies, like the three Tooley Street tailors) who at that time were building their Camomile Cottages in the country.
[237] The part of Major Sturgeon, J.P., “the fishmonger from Brentford,” was played by Foote in his own comedy, The Mayor of Garratt (1763). Sturgeon brags: “We had some desperate duty, Sir Jacob … such marchings and counter-marchings from Brentford to Ealing, from Ealing to Acton, from Acton to Uxbridge. Why, there was our last expedition to Hounslow; that day’s work carried off Major Molassas.”… Zoffany painted Foote in this character.
[238] Elizabeth Canning (1734-73), a domestic servant in Aldermanbury, startled London in 1753 by the circumstantial story she told of her capture in Moorfields, and her subsequent imprisonment and ill-treatment at Enfield by “Mother Wells” and a gipsy woman, Mary Squires. After Squires had been condemned to death, and Wells had been burned in the hand, the case was revised, with the result that Squires was pardoned and her accuser transported for perjury. The affair, which had originally come before Henry Fielding, the novelist, at Bow Street, aroused an incredible amount of feeling in London.