The gem of all the Soane treasures is an enormous transparent alabaster sarcophagus, discovered by Belzoni in 1816 in a tomb in the valley of Beban el Molook, near Thebes. It is nine feet four inches long, three feet eight inches wide, two feet eight inches deep, and is covered without and within with beautifully-cut hieroglyphics. It was the greatest discovery of the runaway Paduan Monk, and was undoubtedly the cenotaph or sarcophagus of a Pharaoh or Ptolemy. It was discovered in an enormous tomb of endless chambers, which the Arabs still call “Belzoni’s tomb.” On the bottom of the case is a full-length figure in relief, of Isis, the guardian of the dead. Sir John Soane gave £2000 for this sarcophagus to Mr. Salt, Consul General of Egypt and Belzoni’s employer. The raised lid is broken into nineteen pieces. The late Sir Gardner Wilkinson considered this to be the cenotaph of Osirei, the father of Rameses the Great. But the forgotten king for whom the Soane sarcophagus was really executed was Seti, surnamed Meni-en-Ptah, the father of Rameses the Great; he is called by Manetho Séthos.[740] Dr. Lepsius dates the commencement of his reign B.C. 1439. Dr. Brugsch places it twenty years earlier. Mr. Sharpe, with that delightful uncertainty characteristic of Egyptian antiquaries, drags the epoch down two hundred years later. Seti was the father of the Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites, and he made war against Syria. His son was the famous Rameses. All three kings were descended from the Shepherd Chiefs. The most beautiful fragment in Karnak represents this monarch, Seti, in his chariot, with a sword like a fish-slice in one hand, while in the other he clutches the topknots of a group of conquered enemies, Nubian, Syrian, and Jewish. The work is full of an almost Raphaelesque grace.
After this come some of Flaxman’s and Banks’s sketches and models, a cast of the shield of Achilles by the former, and one of the Boothby monument by the latter. There is also a fine collection of ancient gems and intaglios, pure in taste and exquisitely cut, and a set of the Napoleon medals, selected by Denon for the Empress Josephine, and in the finest possible state. We may also mention Sir Christopher Wren’s watch, some ivory chairs, and a table from Tippoo Saib’s devastated palace at Seringapatam, and a richly-mounted pistol taken by Peter the Great from a Turkish general at Azof in 1696. The latter was given to Napoleon by the Russian emperor at the treaty of Tilsit in 1807, and was presented by him to a French officer at St. Helena. The books, too, are of great interest. Here is the original MS. copy of the Gierusalemme Liberata, published at Ferrara in 1581, and in Tasso’s own handwriting; the first four folio editions of Shakspere, once the property of that great actor and Shaksperean student John Philip Kemble; a folio of designs for Elizabethan and Jacobean houses by the celebrated architect John Thorpe; Fauntleroy the forger’s illustrated copy of Pennant’s London, purchased for six hundred and fifty guineas; a Commentary on Paul’s Epistles, illuminated by the laborious Croatian, Giulio Clovio (who died in 1578), for Cardinal Grimani. Vasari raves about the minute finish of this painter.
The pictures, too, are good. There are three Canalettis full of that Dutch Venetian’s clear common sense; the finest, a view on the Grand Canal—his favourite subject—and “The Snake in the Grass,” better known as “Love unloosing the Zone of Beauty,” by Reynolds. There is a sadly faded replica of this in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. This one was purchased at the Marchioness of Thomond’s sale for £500. The “Rake’s Progress,” by Hogarth, in eight pictures, was purchased by Sir John in 1802 for £598. These inimitable pictures are incomparable, and display the fine, pure, sober colour of the great artist, and his broad touch so like that of Jan Steen.
The Soane collection also boasts of Hogarth’s four “Election” pictures, purchased at Garrick’s sale for £1732 10s. They are rather dark in tone. There is also a fine but curious Turner, “Van Tromp’s Barge entering the Texel;” a portrait by Goma of Napoleon in 1797, when emaciated and haggard, and a fine miniature of him in 1814, when fat and already on the decline, both physically and mentally, by Isabey the great miniature-painter, taken at Elba in 1814. In the dining-room is a portrait of Soane by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and in the gallery under the dome a bust of him by Chantrey.
Sir John Soane was the son of a humble Reading bricklayer, and brought up in Mr. Dance’s office. Carrying off a gold and silver medal at the Academy, he was sent as travelling student to Rome. In 1791 he obtained a Government employment, in 1800 enlarged the Bank of England, and in 1806 became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. He built the Dulwich Gallery, and in 1826 the Masonic Hall in Great Queen Street. In 1827 he gave £1000 to the Duke of York’s monument. At the close of his life he left his collection of works of art, valued at £50,000, to the nation, and died in 1837,[741] leaving his son penniless. In 1835 the English architects presented Sir John with a splendid medal in token of their approbation of his conduct and talents.
The Literary Fund Society, instituted in 1790, and incorporated in 1818, had formerly rooms at No. 4 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The society was established in order to aid authors of merit and good character who might be reduced to poverty by unavoidable circumstances, or be deprived of the power of exertion by enfeebled faculties or old age. George IV. and William IV. both contributed one hundred guineas a year to its funds, and this subscription is continued by our present Queen. The society distributed £1407 in 1846. The average annual amount of subscriptions and donations is about £1100. The Literary Fund Society moved afterwards to 73 Great Russell Street. Some years ago a split occurred in this society. Charles Dickens and Mr. C. W. Dilke, the proprietor of the Athenæum, objecting to the wasteful expense of the management, seceded from it; the result of this secession was the founding of the Guild of Literature, and the collection of £4000 by means of private theatricals—a sum which, unfortunately, still lies partly dormant. The Fund is now domiciled in Bloomsbury.
Both Pepys and Evelyn praise the house of Mr. Povey in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a prodigy of elegant comfort and ingenuity. The marqueterie floors, “the perspective picture in the little closet,” the grotto cellars, with a well for the wine, the fountains and imitation porphyry vases, his pictures and the bath at the top of the house, seem to have been the abstract of all luxurious ease.
Names were first put on doors in London in 1760, some years before the street-signs were removed. In 1764 houses were first numbered; the numbering commenced in New Burlington Street, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the second place numbered.
In Carey Street lived that excellent woman Mrs. Hester Chapone, who afterwards removed to Arundel Street. She was a friend of Mrs. Carter, who translated Epictetus, and of Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blue Stockings. She was one of the female admirers who thronged round Richardson the novelist, and she married a young Templar whom he had introduced to her. It was a love match, and she had the misfortune of losing him in less than ten months after their marriage. Her celebrated letters on The Improvement of the Mind, published in 1773, were written for a favourite niece, who married a Westminster Clergyman and died in childbed. Though Mrs. Chapone’s letters are now rather dry and old-fashioned, reminding us of the backboards of a too punctilious age, they contain some sensible and well-expressed thoughts. Here is a sound passage:—“Those ladies who pique themselves on the particular excellence of neatness are very apt to forget that the decent order of the house should be designed to promote the convenience and pleasure of those who are to be in it; and that if it is converted into a cause of trouble and constraint, their husbands’ guests would be happier without it.”[742]
Gibbons’s Tennis Court stood in Vere Street, Clare Market; it was turned into a theatre by Thomas Killigrew. Ogilby the poet, started a lottery of books at “the old theatre” in June 1668. He describes the books in his advertisements as “all of his own designment and composure.”