An attachment had sprung up between her and Holland, but Garrick had warned her of the man’s waywardness and instability. Miss Pope would not believe the accusations till one day, on her way to see Mrs. Clive at Twickenham, she beheld the unfaithful Holland in a boat with Mrs. Baddeley, near the Eel-pie Island. She accused him at the next rehearsal, he would confess no wrong, and she never spoke to him again but on the stage. “But I have reason to know,” said the old lady, shedding tears as she looked up at her cruel lover’s portrait, “that he never was really happy.”
Miss Pope left Queen Street at last, finding the Freemasons too noisy neighbours, especially after dinner. “Miss Pope,” says Hazlitt, “was the very picture of a duenna or an antiquated dowager in the latter spring of beauty—the second childhood of vanity; more quaint, fantastic, and old-fashioned, more pert, frothy, and light-headed than can be imagined.”[501]
It was not very easy to please poor soured Hazlitt, whose opinion of women had not been improved by his having been jilted by a servant girl. This good woman, Miss Pope, died at Hadley in 1801, her latter life having been embittered by the loss of her brother and favourite niece.
The Freemasons’ Hall, built by T. Sandby, architect, was opened in 1776, by Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic nobleman, with the usual mysterious ceremonials of the order. The annual assemblies of the lodges had previously been held in the halls of the City’s companies. The tavern was built in 1786, by William Tyler, and has since been enlarged. In the tavern public meetings and dinners take place, chiefly in May and June. Here a farewell banquet was given to John Philip Kemble, and a public dinner on his birthday, to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. All the waiters in this tavern are Masons. The house has been lately enlarged. Its new great Hall was inaugurated by the dinner given to Charles Dickens by his friends on his departure for America in November 1857.
Isaac Sparkes, a famous Irish comedian about 1774, was an old, fat, unwieldy man, with a vast double chin, and large, bushy, prominent eyebrows. When in London, he established in Long Acre a Club, which was frequented by Lord Townshend, Lord Effingham, Lord Lindore, Captain Mulcaster, Mr. Crewe of Cheshire, and “other nobles and fashionables.” Sparkes, who dressed well and had a commanding presence, probably presided over it, as he did at Dublin clubs, dressed in robes as Lord Chief Justice Joker.[502]
In one of the grand old houses in Great Queen Street, on the right hand as one goes towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields, occupied before 1830 by Messrs. Allman the booksellers, died Lewis the comedian, famous to the last, as Leigh Hunt tells us, for his invincible airiness and juvenility. “Mr. Lewis,” says the same veteran play-goer, “displayed a combination rarely to be found in acting—that of the fop and the real gentleman. With a voice, a manner, and a person all equally graceful and light, with features at once whimsical and genteel, he played on the top of his profession like a plume. He was the Mercutio of the age, in every sense of the word mercurial. His airy, breathless voice, thrown to the audience before he appeared, was the signal of his winged animal spirits; and when he gave a glance of his eye or touched with his finger another man’s ribs, it was the very punctum saliens of playfulness and innuendo. We saw him take leave of the public, a man of sixty-five, looking not more than half the age, in the character of the Copper Captain; and heard him say, in a voice broken with emotion, that for the space of thirty years he had not once incurred their displeasure.”[503]
Benjamin Franklin, when first in England, worked at the printing-office of Mr. Watts, in Little Wild Street, after being employed for twelve months at one Palmer’s, in Bartholomew Close. He lodged close by in Duke Street, opposite the Roman Catholic Chapel, with a widow, to whom he paid three-and-sixpence weekly. His landlady was a clergyman’s daughter, who had married a Catholic, and abjured Protestantism. She and Franklin were much together, as he kept good hours and she was lame and almost confined to her room. Their frugal supper often consisted of nothing but half an anchovy, a small slice of bread and butter each, and half a pint of ale between them. On Franklin proposing to leave for cheaper lodgings, she consented to let him retain his room at two shillings a week. In the attic of the house lived a voluntary nun. She was a lady who early in life had been sent to the Continent for her health, but unable to bear the climate, had returned home to live in seclusion on £12 a year, devoting the rest of her income to charity, and subsisting, healthy and cheerful, on nothing but water-gruel. Her presence was thought a blessing to the house, and several tenants in succession had charged her no rent. She permitted the occasional visits of Franklin and his landlady; and the brave American lad, while he pitied her superstition, felt confirmed in his frugality by her example.
During his first weeks with Mr. Watts, Franklin worked as a pressman, drinking only water while his companions had their five pints of porter daily. The “Water American,” as he was called, was, however, stronger than his colleagues, and tried to persuade some of them that strong beer was not necessary for strong work. His argument was that bread contained more materials of strength than beer, and that it was only corn in the beer that produced the strength in the liquid.
Born to be a reformer, Franklin persuaded the chapel to alter some of their laws; he resisted impositions, and conciliated the respect of his fellows. He worked as a pressman, as he had done in America, for the sake of the exercise. He used, he tells us, to carry up and down stairs with one hand a large form of type, while the other fifty men required both hands to do the same work.
Franklin’s fellow pressman drank every day a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with bread and cheese for breakfast, a pint between breakfast and dinner, one at dinner, one again at six in the afternoon, and another after his day’s work; and all this he declared to be necessary to give him strength for the press. “This custom,” said the King of Common Sense, “seemed to me abominable.” Franklin, however, failed to make a convert of this man, and he went on paying his four or five shillings a week for the “cursed beverage,” destined probably, poor devil, to remain all his life in a state of voluntary wretchedness, serfdom, and poverty.