[250] Robert Lemon, the archivist. He discovered Milton’s “De Doctrina Christiania,” and gave assistance to Sir Walter Scott.
[251] Sir Robert Strange was engraver to Prince Charles. His distinguished career was chequered by his political sympathies, and by his bitter criticism of the Royal Academy, in consequence, partly, of its exclusion of engravers. Knighted by George III. (after he had engraved West’s apotheosis of the three royal children), he died in his last London home in Great Queen Street, July 5, 1792. See note, [p. 82].
[252] The bill of which Smith gives particulars is quoted in full by William Hookham Carpenter in his Pictorial Notices of Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1844). “It is more than probable that the account had been submitted to the supervision of Bishop Juxon, who, by the influence of Archbishop Laud, was appointed to the office of Lord Treasurer in 1635, which he held till 1641; and Anthony Wood tells us ‘he kept the King’s purse when necessities were deepest, and clamours were loudest.’” Vandyke had from Charles, in addition to payments against pictures, an annuity of £200 a year and houses at Blackfriars and Eltham.
[253] On February 23. After lying in state in the Royal Academy, the remains of Sir Joshua Reynolds were interred, on Saturday, March 3, in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, near the resting-place of Sir Christopher Wren. The pall was borne by ten peers, and the Archbishop of York took part in the service.
[254] Burke’s tribute had appeared in the Annual Register.
[255] Lieut.-Colonel Molesworth Phillips, whose career links Dr. Johnson to Charles Lamb, was the companion of Captain Cook on his last voyage. His marriage in 1782 to Susannah Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. Charles Burney, and sister of Fanny Burney, brought him into the Johnson set. He escorted Miss Burney to Westminster Hall to hear Warren Hastings on his defence. Lamb, recalling his old whist-playing friends in his “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey,” names him as “the high-minded associate of Cook, the veteran Colonel, with his lusty heart still sending cartels of defiance to old Time.” He died in 1832.
[256] Mrs. Cholmondeley, who appears several times in Boswell’s Life, was a younger sister of Peg Woffington, and the wife of the Hon. and Rev. George Cholmondeley.
[257] “Sheridan had very fine eyes, and he was very vain of them. He said to Rogers on his deathbed, ‘Tell Lady Besborough that my eyes will look up to the coffin-lid as brightly as ever.’”
[258] The Old Bun House at Chelsea flourished for nearly a century and a half, and yielded a livelihood to four generations of the same family. In its best days it was the resort of royalty and rank. Queen Charlotte presented Mrs. Hand with a silver mug, containing five guineas. The shop had a pleasant arcaded front, and, besides buns, offered its customers the sight of a number of curiosities. As many as fifty thousand people would assemble here on Good Friday mornings, and it is clear that Mrs. Hand had reason to issue her curious notice. The site of the Bun House and its garden is on the north side of the Pimlico Road, between Union Street and Westbourne Street. The name of Bunhouse Place, at the back, commemorates the establishment, which disappeared in 1839.
The danger of a mob assembling outside a London bun-shop on Good Friday morning has passed away. Mr. Henry Attwell sadly observed, in Notes and Queries, April 28, 1900, that “the last Good Friday of the nineteenth century” found the hot-cross bun degenerated from a spiced bun (“the spice recalling to the few who cared about its religious suggestiveness the embalming of our Lord”) into a vulgarised currant bun marked with deep indentures for convenience of division, instead of the old slight cross in which there was a touch of mystery.