[350] These lines do not belong to The Maid of the Oaks, the subject of Garrick’s letter of 9th November. I have not been able to trace them.
[351] See Wilmot’s Letters, British Museum.—S.
[352] John Thane (1748-1818) was a well-known printseller in Soho, and the editor of British Autography: a Collection of Facsimiles of the Handwriting of Royal and Illustrious Personages, with their Authentic Portraits (1793).
[353] John Blaquière (1732-1812) sat in both Irish and United Kingdom Parliaments. At this time (1771) he was Secretary of Legation in Paris.
[354] This letter is the earliest from Walpole to Mrs. Abington in Peter Cunningham’s collection, where it bears the more precise date, September 1, 1771. At that time Walpole had no private acquaintance with Mrs. Abington. Eight years later, Mrs. Abington is still seeking his acquaintance, for he writes in April 1779 to excuse himself from an invitation she had sent him. But on May 22, 1779, Walpole says at the end of a letter to the Honourable H. S. Conway: “I am going to sup with Mrs. Abington, and hope Mrs. Clive will not hear of it.” No doubt he did so, and it was after this stage in their acquaintance that he wrote the letter of June 11, 1780 (see opposite page).
[355] Sir Walter James James, first Baronet (1759-1829), married Jane, sister of John Jeffreys, second Earl, and first Marquis, Camden.
[356] At this time Mrs. Jordan was absent from the stage, in obedience to her lover, the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William IV. By him she had ten children. She had also four children by Sir Richard Ford, and a daughter by her Cork manager, Richard Daly. But, says Leigh Hunt, she “made even Methodists love her.” In 1811 the Duke of Clarence made an arrangement by which she received £4400 a year for the maintenance of herself and all her children, on condition that if she returned to the stage the Duke’s daughters and £1500 a year were to revert to him. All these daughters married well. Mrs. Jordan died embarrassed and unhappy at St. Cloud, a good deal of mystery shrouding her end. Tate Wilkinson tells how she finally exchanged her maiden name of Bland for Jordan. “You have crossed the water, my dear,” he said to her once, “so I’ll call you Jordan.” “And by the memory of Sam! if she didn’t take my joke in earnest, and call herself Mrs. Jordan ever since.”
[357] In a letter dated January 24, 1816, in my possession, which was evidently intended to be sent as a circular to some of his stauncher patrons, Smith states that he had found the previous year very “unprofitable to the Arts,” and that owing to the great number of families who left England for France “last season” (i.e. after Waterloo), his income had been small. He has applied himself closely to his etching table, and is now able to lay before his correspondent the first three numbers of a small work at a remarkably cheap rate. This was his Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London, with Portraits of the Most Remarkable drawn from Life. The increase of beggars in London had engaged serious attention, and legislation was in the air. The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity was founded in 1818. Smith’s work is the artistic forerunner of Charles Lamb’s Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, written in 1822, when “the all-sweeping besom of sectarian reform” had done its work. The Herculean legless beggar whose portrait Lamb draws with so much gusto, appears in Smith’s gallery of etchings. But whereas Mr. E. V. Lucas identifies him as Samuel Horsey, I venture to think he was the beggar named John MacNally. Smith’s figure of Horsey hardly suggests a Hercules, nor does another portrait of him from Kirby’s “Wonderful and Scientific Museum.” I suggest that the beggar of whom Lamb wrote, in 1822, “He seemed earth-born, an Antæus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured; he was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble; the nature, which should have recruited his left leg and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules,” was identical with the beggar whom John Thomas Smith describes as an “extraordinary torso”: “His head, shoulders, and chest, which are exactly those of Hercules, would prove valuable models for the artist.” This Hercules is John MacNally. Were there two London legless beggars who could suggest to two minds such images of antique magnificence of physique? It is possible, but unlikely.
[358] First cousin, once removed, of the poet.
[359] Charles Manners-Sutton, Archbishop of Canterbury 1805-28.