A substitute was eventually found, and the routine of the establishment resumed its normal condition.
Some years later his eccentricities assumed a more serious form, and having nearly frightened an old woman out of her life by suddenly rising in his birthday suit with his ribs painted black from among furze bushes, he was placed under restraint, and, I believe, died in a madhouse.
Lord Ernest Bruce, who eventually blossomed into Marquis of Ailesbury, had a chronic deafness that apparently descended to his sons—“The Duffer,” long since dead, and the present holder of the title (Henry)—and it was better than any play to see the father and two sons narrating anecdotes to one another, with their hands to their respective ears, and bellowing like fog-horns, and then roaring like rhinoceroses as their jokes permeated their skulls over the family gatherings that periodically took place at Boodle’s.
At this time an excellent foreign restaurant had made its appearance in a side street of Soho, and many of the foreign attachés gave it their (private) patronage.
A joke that obtained was the scrambling for coppers from the window of a private room, and it was on one occasion when Baron Spaum was revelling in the excitement that the crowds became so dense that an appeal from the landlord necessitated a resort to a ruse.
A suitable (!) person who was dining in the public room kindly consented to don the Baron’s light overcoat and to scramble coppers that had been provided as he leisurely left the premises. The deception succeeded admirably, as the crowd followed the supposed benefactor. The assumption of the Baron’s coat was also a profound success, at least so all but the Baron agreed. He never saw his paletot again.
An old member of the Conservative, who was well known during the Sixties and Seventies, made it an invariable practice to sip brown sherry for two or three hours every afternoon. So monotonous were the constant applications to his pocket that he directed the total should be paid in one instalment before he left.
Fifteen and twenty glasses were the old toper’s average, but on one occasion when his consumption amounted to twenty-five, he fixed a glazed eye on the footman, and gurgled out: “Ten probable, eighteen possible, but twenty-five, never!” After which he paid up, and toddled into the attendant four-wheeler.
It was during the sixties that Mr. Justice Maule was in the zenith of his fame. Devoted to his profession, and to the old port of his Inn, no dinner of his brother benchers would have appeared complete without the adjunct of his beaming countenance, when, having stowed away three bottles under his belt, he would “tack” the few yards to his chambers in Paper Buildings, and hang a man in the morning with the decorum only to be attained by experience.
It was after one of these festive gatherings that Paper Buildings was burnt to the ground. The Judge, it appears, was a great reader; whether he always understood what he read (or did) under given circumstances is not quite clear, suffice that, having popped into bed and adjusted a vase conveniently on a chair, he proceeded to place a moderator lamp under his couch, after which the only reliable evidence obtainable was that the old gentleman woke with a start to find himself enveloped in flames.