Congreve, on becoming acquainted with the Duchess of Marlborough, removed from Howard Street to a better house in Surrey Street, where he died, January 19, 1729. The career of this son of a Yorkshire officer had been one long undisturbed triumph. His first play had been revised by Dryden and praised by Southerne. Besides being commissioner of hackney-coach and wine licences, he also held a place in the Pipe Office, a post in the Custom House, and a secretaryship in Jamaica. He never quarrelled with the wits: both Addison and Steele admired and praised him, and Voltaire eulogises his comedies.
It was here that Voltaire, while lodging in Maiden Lane, visited the gouty and nearly blind dramatist, then infirm and on the verge of life. “Mr. Congreve,” he says, “had one defect, which was his entertaining too mean an idea of his profession—that of a writer—though it was to this he owed his fame and fortune. He spoke of his works as of trifles that were beneath him, and hinted to me in our first conversation that I should visit him upon no other footing than that of a gentleman who led a life of plainness and simplicity. I answered, that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman I should never have come to see him; and I was very much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity.”
The body of Congreve lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and was afterwards interred with great solemnity in Henry VII.’s Chapel. The Duke of Bridgewater and the Earl of Godolphin were amongst those who bore the pall. The monument was erected by the Duchess of Marlborough, to whom the favoured poet had left £10,000. Above his body—
“The ancient pillars rear their marble heads
To bear aloft the arch’d and pond’rous roof,
By its own weight made steadfast and immoveable.”[87]
Congreve’s bequest to the duchess of all his property, except £1000, including £200 to Mrs. Bracegirdle (a legacy afterwards cancelled), created much scandal. The shameless bookseller, Curll, instantly launched forth a life of Congreve, professing to be written by one Charles Wilson, Esq., but generally attributed to Oldmixon. The duchess’s friends were alarmed, and Arbuthnot interfered. Upon being told that some genuine letters and essays were to be published in the work, Mrs. Bracegirdle or the duchess[88] cried out with defiant affectation and a dramatic drawl, “Not one single sheet of paper, I dare to swear.”
The duchess, who raised a monument in the Abbey to her brilliant but artificial friend, is said to have had a wax image of him made to place on her toilette table. “To this she would talk as to the living Mr. Congreve, with all the freedom of the most polite and unreserved conversation.”[89]
Strand Lane used formerly to lead to a small landing-pier for wherries, called Strand Bridge. In Stow’s time the lane passed under a bridge down to the landing-place.[90] A writer in the Spectator describes how he landed here on a summer morning, arriving with ten sail of apricot boats, consigned to Covent Garden,[91] after having first touched at Nine Elms for melons. In this lane there is a fine Roman bath which, if indeed Roman, is the most western relic of Roman London, the centre of which was on the east end of the Royal Exchange.
No. 165 has been long used as a warehouse for the sale of Dr. Anderson’s pills. Dr. Patrick Anderson was physician to Charles I., and as early as 1649 a man named Inglis sold these quack pills at the Golden Unicorn, over against the Maypole in the Strand. Tom Brown says, “There are at least a score of pretenders to Anderson’s Scotch pills, and the Lord knows who has the true preparation.” Brown died in 1704. Sir Walter Scott used to tell one of his best stories about these pills. It dwelt on the passion for them entertained by a certain hypochondriacal Lowland laird. Bland or rough, old or young, no visitor at his house escaped a dose—“joost ane leetle Anderson;” and his toady “the doer” used always to swallow a brace.[92]
The Turk’s Head Coffee-house stood on the site of No. 142 Strand. Dr. Johnson used to sup at this house to encourage the hostess, who was a good civil woman, and had not too much business. July 28, 1763, Boswell mentions supping there with Dr. Johnson; and again, on August 3, in the same year, just before he set out for his wildgoose chase in Corsica.[93] No. 132 was the shop of a bookseller named Bathoe. The first circulating library in London was established here in 1740.
Jacob Tonson, Dryden’s grinding publisher and bookseller, lived at the Shakspere’s Head, over against Catherine Street, now No. 141 Strand, from about 1712 till he died, in 1735-6. Tonson seems to have been rough, hard, and penurious. The poet and publisher were perpetually squabbling, and Dryden was especially vexed at his trying to force him to dedicate his translation of Virgil to King William, and when he refused, making the engraver of the frontispiece aggravate the nose of Æneas till it became “a hooked promontory,” like that of the Protestant king. It was to Tonson’s shop at Gray’s Inn, however, that Dryden, on being refused money, probably sent that terrible triplet to the obdurate bibliopole:—