Charles Dibdin, born 1745, the author of 1300 songs, gave his musical entertainments at the Lyceum, and at Scott and Idle’s premises in the Strand. Latterly, assisted by his pupils, he conducted public musical soirees at Beaufort Buildings.
Coutts’s Bank.—[p. 86.]
Mr. Coutts died in 1822. He was a pallid, sickly, thin old gentleman, who wore a shabby coat and a brown scratch-wig.[768] He was once stopped in the street by a good-natured man, who insisted on giving him a guinea. The banker, however, declined the present with thanks, saying he was in no “immediate want.” Miss Harriet Mellon first appeared at Drury Lane in 1795, as Lydia Languish. Mr. Coutts married Miss Mellon in 1815. She made her last appearance at Drury Lane, early in the same year, as Audrey. She left the bulk of her fortune to Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, whose gold the Morning Herald once computed at 13 tons, or 107 flour-sacks full. The sum, £1,800,000, was the exact sum also left by old Jemmy Wood of Gloucester. Counting a sovereign a minute, it would take ten weeks to count; and placed sovereign to sovereign, it would reach 24 miles 260 yards.
Coutts’s Bank was founded by George Middleton. Till Coutts’s time it stood near St. Martin’s Church. Good-natured Gay banked there, and afterwards Dr. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, and the Duke of Wellington. The Royal Family have banked at Coutts’s ever since the reign of Queen Anne.
The Dark Arches.—[p. 97.]
“The Adelphi arches, many of which are used for cellars and coal-wharfs, remind one in their grim vastness,” says Mr. Timbs, “of the Etruscan Cloaca of old Rome.” Beneath the “dry arches” the most abandoned characters used to lurk; outcasts and vagrants came there to sleep, and many a street thief escaped from his pursuers in those subterranean haunts before the introduction of gas-light and a vigilant police. Mr. Egg, that tragic painter, placed the scene of one of his most pathetic pictures by this part of what was once the river-bank.
Society of Arts.—[p. 99.]
Lord Folkestone and Mr. Shipley founded the Society of Arts, at a meeting at Rawthmell’s Coffee-house, in Catharine Street, in March 1754. It was proposed to give rewards for the discovery of cobalt and the cultivation of madder in England. Premiums were also to be given for the best drawings to a certain number of boys and girls under the age of sixteen. The first prize, £15, was adjudged by the society to Cosway, then a boy of fifteen. The society was initiated in Crane Court; from thence it removed to Craig’s Court, Charing Cross; from there to the Strand, opposite Beaufort Buildings; and from thence, in 1774, to the Adelphi.
The subjects of Barry’s six pictures in the Council Room are the following (beginning on the left as you enter):—1. “Orpheus.” The figure of Orpheus and the heads of the two reclining women are thought fine. 2. “A Grecian Harvest Home” (the best of the series). 3. “Crowning the Victors at Olympia.” 4. “Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames.” (Dr. Burney, the composer, is composedly floating among tritons and sea-nymphs in his grand tie-wig and queue.) 5. “The Distribution of Premiums by the Society of Arts.” (This picture contains a portrait of Dr. Johnson, for which he sat.) 6. “Elysium, or the State of Final Retribution.”