There is a Westminster tradition of a waterman who pretended to be deaf, and who was much employed by lovers, barristers who wished to air their eloquence, and young M.P.s who wanted to recite their speeches undisturbed.
In 1821 died Copper Holms, a well-known character on the river. He lived, with his wife and children, somewhere along the shore in an ark, which he had artfully framed from a West-country vessel, and which, coppers and all, cost him £150. The City brought an action to compel him to remove the obstruction. The honest fellow was buried in “The Waterman’s Churchyard,” on the south side of St. Martin’s Church.[451]
In 1683 Dr. Thomas Tenison, vicar of the parish, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, lived in this street; he died at Lambeth in 1715. He founded in this parish a school and library. Though Swift did say he was “hot and heavy as a tailor’s iron,” he seems to have been one of the best and most tolerant of men, notwithstanding he attacked Hobbes and Bellarmine with his pen. He worked bravely during the plague, and was princely in his charities during the dreadful winter of 1683. It was he who prepared Monmouth for death, and smoothed Queen Mary’s dying pillow. He was a steady friend of William of Orange.
Two doors from Slaughter’s, on the west side, but lower down, lived Ambrose Philips, from 1720 to 1724. Pope laughed at his “Pastorals,” which had been overpraised by Tickell. Though a friend of Addison and Steele, his sprightly but effeminate copies of verses procured him from Henry Carey the name of “Namby Pamby.” His “Winter Scene,” a sketch of a Danish winter, is, however, admirable.
Ambrose Philips was laughed at for advertising in the London Gazette, of January 1714, for contributions to a Poetical Miscellany. He was a Leicestershire man, and chiefly remarkable for translating Racine’s “Distressed Mother.” When the Whigs came into power under George I. he was put into the commission of the peace, and made a Commissioner of the Lottery. He afterwards became Registrar of the Prerogative Court at Dublin, wrote in the Free Thinker, and died in 1749. Pope laughed at the small poet as—
“The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown,
Who turns a Persian tale for half-a-crown,
Just writes to make his barrenness appear,
And strains from hide-bound brains eight lines a year.”[452]
It was always one of Pope’s keenest strokes to call a man poor. Philips, in 1714, had industriously translated the Thousand and One Days, a series of Persian tales, and gained very honourably earned money. The wasp of Twickenham, whose malice never grew old, sketched Philips again as “Macer,” a simple, harmless fellow, who borrowed ends of verse, and whose highest ambition was “to wear red stockings and to dine with Steele.” Ambrose, naturally indignant to hear himself accused of stealing the little fame he had, very spiritedly hung up a birch at the bar of Button’s Coffee-house, with which he threatened to chastise the Æsop of the age if he dared show himself, but Pope wisely stayed at home.[453]
The first house from the corner of Newport Street, on the right hand going to Charing Cross, was occupied by Beard, the celebrated public singer, who in 1738-9 married Lady Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl Waldegrave. After her death the widower married the daughter of Mr. John Rich, the inventor of English pantomime, the best harlequin that probably ever lived, and the patentee of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1762. The parlour of the house had two windows facing the south towards Charing Cross. Here Mr. J. T. Smith describes his father smoking a pipe with Beard and George Lambert, the latter the founder of the Beef-steak Club and the clever scene-painter of Covent Garden Theatre. The fire of 1808 destroyed most of Lambert’s work with the theatre.[454]
Next to this house stood “Old Slaughter’s” Coffee-house, the great haunt of artists from Hogarth to Wilkie. Towards the end of its existence it was the head-quarters of naval and military officers before the establishment of West End Clubs. It was pulled down in 1844 to make way for the new street between Long Acre and Leicester Square. The original landlord, John Slaughter, started it in 1692, and died about 1740.[455] It first became known as “Old Slaughter’s” in 1760, when an opposition set up in the street under the name of “Young” or “New Slaughter’s.”
There is a foolish tradition that the coffee-house derived its name from being frequented by the butchers of Newport Market. Mr. Smith gives a charming chapter on the frequenters of this old haunt of Dryden and afterwards of Pope. The first he mentions was Mr. Ware, the architect, who published a folio edition of Palladio, the great Italian architect of Elizabeth’s time. Ware was originally a chimney-sweeper’s boy in Charles Court, Strand; but being one day seen chalking houses on the front of Whitehall, a gentleman passing became his patron, educated him, and sent him to Italy. His bust was one of Roubilliac’s best works. His skin is said to have retained the stain of soot to the day of his death.[456]