The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

by Leigh Hunt

"This was a winter's amusement, agreeable enough to a stranger for once or twice, and he was well diverted with the different humours when the mugs overflow.

"On King George's accession to the throne, the Tories had so much the better of the friends to the Protestant succession, that they gained the mobs on all public days to their side. This induced this set of gentlemen to establish mug-houses in all the corners of this great city, for well-affected tradesmen to meet and keep up the spirit of loyalty to the Protestant succession, and to be ready upon all tumults to join their forces for the suppression of the Tory mobs. Many an encounter they had, and many were the riots, till at last the Parliament was obliged by law to put an end to this city strife, which had this good effect, that, on pulling down the mug-houses in Salisbury Court, for which some boys were hanged on this Act, the city has not been troubled with them since."[311]

One of the mistresses whom Prior celebrates, under the name of Chloe, and compares to Venus and Diana, lived in Long Acre, and was the wife, some say, of a common soldier, others of a cobbler, others of the keeper of an ale-house. Perhaps she was all these, or there were three mistresses whose alliances were confounded. Spence says that the ale-house keeper was the first husband, and the cobbler the second. "Everybody knows," says Pope, "what a wretch she was." And again:—"Prior was not a right good man. He used to bury himself, for whole days and nights together, with a poor mean creature, and often drank hard. He turned from a strong Whig (which he had been when most with Lord Halifax) to a violent Tory; and did not care to converse with any Whigs after, any more than Rowe did with Tories."[312] "I have been assured," says Pope's friend, Richardson, the painter, "that Prior, after having spent the evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, would go and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed."[313] After the poet's death, Arbuthnot says something to the same effect; but we forget what.

None of the wits of that time seem to have known much about love as a sentiment. There is no end of the misconceptions of what is called love. Prior would probably have retorted upon Pope, that his own taste was not very delicate; and upon Arbuthnot, that the doctor was a sensualist in his way, and of a lower order.[314] He would have quoted Propertius, Raphael, and others, for the impartiality of his taste; and the woman, though in low life, might have had wit and beauty. The secret of these inequalities has been explained by Fielding.[315]

Sir Joshua Reynolds lived successively in St. Martin's Lane, and on the north side of Great Newport Street, before he settled finally in Leicester Square. In Newport Street was born the celebrated Horne Tooke, the son of a poulterer in the adjoining market; which made him say, that his father was a "Turkey merchant." He was, perhaps, the hardest-headed man that ever figured in the union of literature and politics; meaning, by that epithet, the power to discuss, and impenetrability to objection. He died at his house at Wimbledon, and was buried at Ealing. His history trenches too closely on the politics of our own day, to allow us to expatiate upon it in a work expressly devoted to the past.

St. Martin's Lane (see Charing Cross, for a notice of the church,) was once as famous for artists as Newman Street has been since. In Salisbury Court and in St. Martin's Lane the Royal Academy may be said to have originated, for in those places successively its original members first came together as a society established by themselves. Perhaps there was not a single artist, contemporary with Sir Joshua, who was unconnected with St. Martin's Lane, either as a lodger, student, or visitor. Old Slaughter's coffee-house, in the same lane, became celebrated on the same account, and as a resort of the contemporary wits, especially Hogarth, who may be said to have amalgamated in his works the wit and the painter. St. Martin's Lane and Leicester Square are the head-quarters of the memory of English art. In the annals of the former we meet with the names of Wilson and Gainsborough: in the latter flourished and died Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Sir Joshua's house in Leicester Square was on the eastern side, four doors from Sydney's Alley.[316] It was there he kept a handsome table, and was visited by Johnson and Goldsmith, and had the whole round of the fashionable world fluttering before him, and steadying itself to become immortal in his pictures: if, indeed, immortal they are to be, in the ordinary meaning of that word; for, out of certain misgivings, which perhaps argued a want of perfect claim to that destiny, he dabbled in experiments upon colours which have failed; and his pictures, though but of yesterday, already look old and worn out, while Titian's are as blooming as Apollo.

Hogarth, the greatest name in English art, lived in one of the two houses which now form Sabloniere's hotel. It was the one to the north. He was a little bustling man, with a face more lively than refined, a sort of knowing jockey look; and was irritable and egotistical, but not ungenerous. As a painter, he did what no man ever did before or since—brought out the absurdities of artificial life,

"Showed vice her own features, scorn her own image,"

and fairly painted even goods and chattels with a meaning! His intentions were less profound than his impulses; that is to say, he sometimes had an avowed common-place in view, as in the instance of the Industrious and Idle Apprentice, while the execution of it was full of much higher things and profounder humanities. As to the rest, if ever there was a wit on canvass, it was he. To take one instance alone, his spider's web over the poor's box is a union of remote ideas, coalescing but too perfectly.[317]