"And by the end of April we had completely metamorphosed Gore House. I am sure that poor Lady Blessington would not have known her coquettish villa again had she visited it; and I am afraid she would not have been much gratified to see that which the upholsterers, the whitewashers, the hangers of calico, and your humble servant, had wrought. As for the venerable Mr. Wilberforce, who, I believe, occupied Gore House some years before Lady Blessington's tenancy, he would have held up his hands in pious horror to see the changes we had made. A madcap masquerade of bizarre taste and queer fancies had turned Gore House completely inside out. In honest truth, we had played the very dickens with it. The gardens were certainly magnificent; and there was a sloping terrace of flowers in the form of a gigantic shell, and literally crammed with the choicest roses, which has seldom, I believe, been rivalled in ornamental gardening. But the house itself! The library had been kindly dealt by, save that from the ceiling were suspended a crowd of quicksilvered glass globes, which bobbed about like the pendent ostrich-eggs in an Eastern mosque. There was a room called the 'Floriana,' with walls and ceiling fluted with blue and white calico, and stuck all over with spangles. There was the 'Doriana,' also in calico, pink and white, and approached by a portal called the 'door of the dungeon of mystery,' which was studded with huge nails, and garnished with fetters in the well-known Newgate fashion. Looking towards the garden were the Alhambra Terrace and the Venetian Bridge. The back drawing-room was the Night of Stars, or the Rêverie de l'Etoile polaire; the night being represented by a cerulean ceiling painted over with fleecy clouds, and the firmament by hangings of blue gauze spangled with stars cut out of silver-foil paper! Then there was the vestibule of Jupiter Tonans, the walls covered with a salmagundi of the architecture of all nations, from the Acropolis to the Pyramids of Egypt, from Temple Bar to the Tower of Babel. The dining-room became the Hall of Jewels, or the Salon des Larmes de Danaë, and the 'Shower of Gems,' with a grand arabesque perforated ceiling, gaudy in gilding and distemper colours. Upstairs there was a room fitted up as a Chinese pagoda, another as an Italian cottage overlooking a vineyard and the Lake of Como; another as a cavern of ice in the Arctic regions, with sham columns imitating icebergs, and a stuffed white fox—bought cheap at a sale—in the chimney. The grand staircase belonged to me, and I painted its walls with a grotesque nightmare of portraits of people I had never seen, and hundreds more upon whom I had never set eyes save in the print-shops, till I saw the originals grinning, or scowling, or planted in blank amazement before the pictorial libels on the walls.
"In the gardens Sir Charles Fox built for us a huge barrack of wood, glass, and iron, which we called the 'Baronial Hall,' and which we filled with pictures and lithographs, and flags and calico, in our own peculiar fashion. We hired a large grazing-meadow at the back of the gardens, from a worthy Kensington cowkeeper, and having fitted up another barrack at one end of it, called it the 'Pré D'Orsay.' We memorialized the Middlesex magistrates, and, after a great deal of trouble, got a licence enabling us to sell wines and spirits, and to have music and dancing if we so chose. We sprinkled tents and alcoves all over our gardens, and built a gipsies' cavern, and a stalactite pagoda with double windows, in which gold and silver fish floated. And finally, having engaged an army of pages, cooks, scullions, waiters, barmaids, and clerks of the kitchen, we opened this monstrous place on the first of May, 1851, and bade all the world come and dine at Soyer's Symposium."
However, the ungrateful public disregarded the invitation, and poor Alexis Soyer is believed to have lost 4000l. by this enterprise. He died a few years after, at the early age of fifty. His friend Mr. Sala has said of him with true pathos:—"He was a vain man; but he was good and kind and charitable. There are paupers and beggars even among French cooks, and Alexis always had his pensioners and his alms-duns, to whom his hand was ever open. He was but a cook, but he was my dear and good friend."
We remember to have heard Soyer say of the writer of these truthful words, in reply to an inquiry as to the artist of the figures upon the staircase-walls, "He is a very clever fellow, of whom you will hear much,"—a prediction which has been fully verified.
Brompton, with its two centuries of Nursery fame, lasted to our time; southward, among "the Groves," were the Florida, Hoop and Toy, and other tea-garden taverns; there remains the Swan, with its bowling-green.
KNIGHTSBRIDGE TAVERNS.
Knightsbridge was formerly a noted "Spring-Garden," with several taverns, of gay and questionable character. Some of the older houses have historical interest. The Rose and Crown, formerly the Oliver Cromwell, has been licensed above three hundred years. It is said to be the house which sheltered Wyat, while his unfortunate Kentish followers rested on the adjacent green. A tradition of the locality also is that Cromwell's body-guard was once quartered here, the probability of which is carefully examined in Davis's Memorials of Knightsbridge. The house has been much modernized of late years; "but," says Mr. Davis, "enough still remains in its peculiar chimneys, oval-shaped windows, the low rooms, large yard, and extensive stabling, with the galleries above, and office-like places beneath, to testify to its antiquity and former importance." The Rising Sun, hard by, is a seventeenth century red-brick house, which formerly had much carved work in the rooms, and a good staircase remains.
The Fox and Bull is the third house that has existed under the same sign. The first was Elizabethan with carved and panelled rooms, ornamented ceiling; and it was not until 1799, that the immense fireplaces and dog-irons were removed for stove-grates. This house was pulled down about 1836, and the second immediately built upon its site; this stood till the Albert-gate improvements made the removal of the tavern business to its present situation.[48]
The original Fox and Bull is traditionally said to have been used by Queen Elizabeth on her visits to Lord Burghley, at Brompton. Its curious sign is said to be the only one of the kind existing. Here for a long time was maintained that Queen Anne style of society, where persons of parts and reputation were to be met with in public rooms. Captain Corbet was for a long time its head; Mr. Shaw, of the War Office, supplied the London Gazette; and Mr. Harris, of Covent Garden, his play-bills. Sir Joshua Reynolds is said to have been occasionally a visitor; as also Sir W. Wynn, the patron of Ryland. George Morland, too, was frequently here. The sign was once painted by Sir Joshua, and hung till 1807, when it was blown down and destroyed in a storm. The house is referred to in the Tatler, No. 259.