When I “met” him first he was not above a swap, and a bill for, say, £50, paid in £20 cash and the balance in tawdry gimcracks, was the usual style of transaction. At the time I refer to he lived in an unpretentious house in Gower Street; later on, as a younger generation are aware, he possessed a mansion in Grosvenor Square; rode in the Park at daylight during the Season, and gave dinner parties where any one from a member of the Victorian Order upwards was always assured of a hearty welcome. So keen, indeed, was the little man (or his wife) to be considered members of the fringe of Society that an enterprising young man—related to the noble House of Somerset—was unquestionably on a fixed scale of remuneration, and given carte blanche to bring any sprig of nobility at prices ranging from a guinea upwards. In addition, a few minor under-strappers, such as the late lamented Patty Coleman and others, had a free hand to produce “desirables.”
The little man—as we all know—is now a matter of history, his widow not long after again married and then followed him, though her memory is still cherished in the Synagogue as “Lewis of the Guards.”
Of the smaller fry, Fitch of Southwark; Sol Beyfus; Finney Davis of Mount Street; Lazarus of Dublin; Cook of Warwick Street, all assisted in spoiling the Egyptians; whilst their sons, almost without exception, have risen in the minor social scale as attorneys or chartered accountants, and their sons will assuredly figure in “Debrett’s” or the “Landed Gentry,” as instanced in a glaring case, where a railway navvy—who left his three sons a million sterling each in the Sixties—we are now informed in the peerage was undoubtedly descended from de—, who came over with the Conqueror, and that his genealogy is lost in antiquity—not always an unmixed evil.
In the old days the usurer used his own name, now they cull the peerage for the most historical they can find. But
“Brown, Jones, or Moses
Can change their names but not their noses.”
Perhaps no more marvellous example of Nature’s constant care for the wants of her needy creations is to be found than in the periodical appearance above the horizon of some nobody who, having amassed a colossal fortune, is henceforth ordained by a merciful Providence to rescue impecunious lords from the slough of despair, level-up princes who have exceeded their income, and to put upon their legs livery stablemen; authorities on horseflesh and their superiors generally by birth and education.
In the long-ago Sixties these providential phenomena were not appreciated as much as in these more enlightened days, and, even in such sinks of iniquity as Mott’s, an impecunious gentleman was assessed as a considerably more desirable quantity than knighted shop-boys, “H”-less capitalists, or promoted horse copers.
That even then they existed goes without saying; that they did not assist in making history is equally undeniable.
Amongst these one of the most remarkable was one Hirsch—Baron of somewhere—but whose untimely death before he attained to Debrett makes his genealogy difficult to trace with any degree of accuracy. Suddenly springing into prominence, he at once broke out into horseflesh; and although probably not knowing one end of a horse from another, soon collected a magnificent stud, and being surrounded by disinterested! councillors of the highest attainments, soon swept the board in most of the classic races. But the subject that brought him chiefly into prominence was his solicitude for his co-religionists: first, he proposed to buy Jerusalem, but meeting with obstacles that even money could not overcome, he contemplated a “personally-conducted tour,” whereby the Holy City should again become the habitation of the chosen race. But his premature death, alas! nipped all these aspirations in the bud, and the gimcrack shops in Bond Street still flourish, and the successors of Callisher, Bob Morris, and Sam Lewis continue to batten on Christian flesh. The sums that he expended and bequeathed on this desirable object were not without significance, and the leaves of the Talmud were ransacked to show that he was the undoubted 666, or some equally unintelligible hieroglyphic that had been predicted by the Prophets; and then death entered Bath House and snapped the various theories—Quod erat demonstrandum.
Baron de Forest, whom we occasionally hear of as one of the shining lights of modern Society, inherited a considerable portion of the deceased “nobleman’s” fortune, and is said to be related to him.