Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

DRURY LANE

VOL. II.

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

IN AND ABOUT

DRURY LANE

AND OTHER PAPERS

REPRINTED FROM THE PAGES OF THE ‘TEMPLE BAR’ MAGAZINE

BY

D^R DORAN

AUTHOR OF ‘TABLE TRAITS AND SOMETHING ON THEM’ ‘JACOBITE LONDON’
‘QUEENS OF ENGLAND OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER’

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1881

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

LIFE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

But for Pepys and Evelyn we should know but little of the social life of the seventeenth century. A host of letter writers—Walpole, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Montagu, at the head of them—may be said to have photographed the next century for us. Lord Malmesbury, Lord Auckland, and some others succeeded; and now we are beginning to have revelations exclusively of the first years of the nineteenth century. The most important contributor to our knowledge in this respect is the late Sir George Jackson, whose volumes, ably edited by his widow, will afford us samples of the times in which our grandmothers were young and had swains at their feet—unless war called them away.

Gay people on the Continent had a bad time of it when war broke out in 1803, and the French government issued orders for the arrest of all English persons on whom hands could be laid. Bath expected to be more brilliant than ever by the return of the absentees; but their difficulty was how to return. All who were in France were made prisoners. A precipitate flight of crowds of English travellers from Geneva took place. They were not safe on any part of the Continent; but some, in disguise and on foot, reached Berlin, others got to the sea and arrived in England; but Bath was not sensible of any increase in numbers or gaiety, for the times were out of joint, though dowagers still played whist and young couples danced minuets.

Many of those who were shut up at Verdun chafed under the restraint as intolerable. Some, however, bore it philosophically, others gaily. A few took to French mistresses; other few to French wives. The French officials made ‘a good thing’ out of those who had money, granting them partial liberty for so many days or hours, according to the ‘consideration.’ Two or three, having spent hundreds of pounds in their bribes, at last took ‘French leave,’ and were lucky in not being recaptured. Their course is not to be commended. We have a higher opinion of Sir Sidney Smith, who, when a prisoner in the Temple, refused to have his parole, used to tell the governor to be vigilant, as he would be off on the first opportunity, and ultimately kept his word, broke prison, and found his painful way to England.

The seriousness of the times and their events little affected the Prince of Wales. He was indeed thought to be ill in the early part of 1804; but the illness arose, it was said, from the fact that the Prince and the Duke of Norfolk had been so drunk, for three whole days, that the former at last fell like a pig, and would have died like one, but for prompt and copious bleeding. How rude the ‘first gentleman’ could be, when he chose, to his wife, is well-known. At a drawing-room, held by Queen Charlotte in June 1807, when the Prince and Princess of Wales were present, he took no notice of the Princess. Turning his back upon her, he stood between her and the Queen, and as long as the Princess remained he kept up a conversation with his sisters, thereby preventing them from addressing a word to his wife. This feeling against his wife he paraded everywhere. He was jealous of her popularity—quite unnecessarily, for she made herself ridiculous, and the subject of scornful criticism, by her lavish display at evening parties of her protuberant beauties. At these parties, the Prince would stare at ladies whom he knew, without speaking to them. His condescending speech was addressed only to his first wife, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and her sister, Lady Haggerstone. The first of these ladies lived at Brighton with the state of a queen and the spirit of a goddess of mirth. Meanwhile, his Royal Highness flirted with his ‘future Duchess,’ the Marchioness of Hertford. One of Queen Fitzherbert’s merriest tales related how a man had sent to her some lemonade powders he had invented, on the ground that they were highly approved and constantly used by the Marchioness in question.

In 1802 Bath was surprised by a visit from the Duke of York. He brought the Duchess with him, and left her there next day. Her friends reported that she had been bitten in the hand by one of her numerous pet dogs, and that the wound was privately pumped upon daily. But the public story was, that his Royal Highness had lost 200,000l. at play, and had been compelled to break up his town establishment. The scandalous story of the Duke and Mrs. Clarke, a mistress, who sold places and commissions, is pleasantly balanced by an incident respecting a son of the Duke of Clarence and his mistress, Mrs. Jordan—Lieutenant Fitzclarence, in 1809. He was in Spain with our army in that year, and he reversed La Fontaine’s fable of the mule who was always talking of his mother the mare, but said little of his father the ass. The lieutenant was the foolish aide-de-camp of a foolish General Shaw, who was always showing him about to the Spaniards as the King of England’s grandson.

That grandson was about to be despatched on a mission to the Continent in 1813, but ministers changed their minds. They were afraid he would write every thing to his father, who would publish it in Bond Street; and so the gentleman was kept at home to sun himself in the bow window at White’s.

The grandest fête of sixty years since was the one given by the Prince, at Carlton House, in 1811. The King was in such ill health and the Princess Amelia in such a precarious condition that it was often deferred; and Jekyll remarked that no one could ever again say, ‘Fixed as fate!’ At length it came off, and, for one happy invited guest, made a hundred mad who were not invited. The Queen and Princesses declined to be present; but Louis XVIII. and the sad-looking Duchess of Angoulême appeared there, and the Prince received the former as a sovereign de facto. ‘I am only a Comte de Lille,’ said Louis modestly. ‘Sire,’ said the Prince, ‘you are the King of France and Navarre;’ and he treated his guest accordingly. Both the Prince’s wives (Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Princess of Wales) sat at home by themselves; but the ‘favourite’ was honoured by a command to attend the festival. One of the Prince’s ideas was to divorce his second wife and shut her up in Holyrood House for ever. This grand fête, it may be added, was soon forgotten in the excitement caused by the fight that was to come off between the Baltimore negro, Molyneux, and the chief of English boxers, Tom Cribb! It was a time, moreover, when later hours began to be fashionable. We hear of a ball lasting from twelve till eight; and of another at which the majority of dancers kept it up till ten in the morning.

We go back a couple of years, in order to remark that in 1809, while there was no lack of enjoyment among optimists, the press saw the worst side of everything; and the ‘Times’ especially denied or explained away our victories generally, and that of Talavera in particular. The public seem to have been almost as ill-informed as to what was being done abroad as they are now by ‘our own correspondents,’ who are sent to describe battle-fields or other troublesome matters, and who write columns on the boiling of their eggs and the obstinacy of their laundresses. ‘It is too much,’ says Jackson, ‘to hear the victory of Talavera called in question by the “Times;” a victory as honourable to British arms and British generalship as any they ever achieved. That paper should be offered up as a sacrifice to the manes of the heroes who fell on the Alberche. I have not patience to read it.’

In 1814 the Prince Regent had a narrow escape for his life. On one of his evenings of ennui he sent for George Colman to come from the King’s Bench, where he was a prisoner, to amuse him. Court jester and prince, they passed the night, drinking and fooling, till six o’clock, when his Highness was carried to bed in an apoplexy, from which he only recovered at the cost of seven and twenty ounces of blood! He was as near death at this critical juncture as a man could be and yet live. His constitution, however, carried him through. When the allied sovereigns entered London he was ready for all the duties and eager for all the pleasures that the occasion offered; but he shocked some people on one occasion by presiding at a public dinner on a Sunday.

That English society wanted refinement in the first decade of the present century is not to be disputed. When Mr. Jackson returned from long diplomatic service abroad in 1806, he dined one day at Lord Westmoreland’s. The guests were chiefly Russians. They were as much out of their element in English society as the young diplomatist says he was after the sociability, ease, and elegance of the society at foreign courts to which he had so long been accustomed.

Some of that foreign society was quite as free as it was easy. Jackson and other Englishmen at the Prussian court were admitted to the morning toilette of Madame de Vos, the King of Prussia’s grande maîtresse. While under the hands of her hairdresser she laughed and flirted with the English lords and gentlemen, who paid tribute to her beauty by making her presents of wine and tea, and other English matters, which she greedily accepted. There are three things, says the Welsh proverb, which always swallow and are never satisfied—the grave, the sea, and a king’s concubine.

Austerlitz killed Pitt as surely as Trafalgar killed Nelson. Each died for his country, but that country mourned more deeply for the great admiral, stricken down in the battle where he was the victor, than it did for the great minister who died of a broken heart. The last book he read, at Bath, was Miss Owenson’s (Lady Morgan’s) ‘Novice of St. Dominic.’ That now unreadable romance, Pitt said, he could not lay down till he had finished it, and thence did the ‘Novice’ come to be the rage for a time. People almost fought to obtain it at the libraries, and nothing in literature was talked of but a book which has long since fallen out of literature and of memory altogether. People, too, fought for another novel, ‘A Winter in London,’ in which fashionable life was illustrated by an incapable whose name and whose work are equally wrapt in oblivion.

Fox did not long survive his great rival Pitt. He died on the 13th of September, 1806. A week previously, when he was already dying, he transacted public business. He gave an audience in his bedroom to George Jackson, with instructions as to how the latter was to act on his new mission to Germany. There was a mixture of the solemn and the ludicrous in the scene. When Jackson was announced Mrs. Fox, in complete deshabille, was in the room. In her flurry she slipped into a closet, and, as the interview was prolonged, the lightly-draped lady kept signalling to Mr. Fox, as if he alone could hear her, by little coughs and murmurs, to warn him not to over-exert himself, or to dismiss the envoy, that she might be set free. At a moment when there was a pause in the conversation between the minister and his agent the fair captive tapped at the panel, asked if the young gentleman was not gone, and complained of being cold. The dying statesman looked at Jackson with a languid smile, and with friendly wishes bade him farewell—as it proved, for ever.

Descending to minor legislators, we meet with an Irish M.P., who, being told that the favour he asked would be granted on condition of his supporting government, replied that he would not give his constant support for so paltry a favour. The Irish member obtained the favour, and voted twice for government in payment for it. This was better diplomacy than Sir Charles Stuart’s (Marquis of Londonderry), who, when named to a post in Germany, told people that he was going to Spain, by way of being diplomatic. We were unlucky in our leading diplomatists generally at that time. Lord Aberdeen may serve as an example. He went to Toplitz, as English ambassador, and had the bad taste and idiotic indiscretion to say one day, openly at dinner, that he could not bear the undertaking, and would not go on with it to keep the crowns on the allied heads! One qualification was necessary to even a decently moderate success, namely, the ability to speak French; but Lord Aberdeen not only could not speak two words of French, but had the folly to tell everybody who addressed him in that language that he hated it. There was in some persons as much bad taste in acts as there was in others in words; and it is not without surprise that we hear of gentlemen sightseers who would pass the morning amid the horrors of a field of recent battle, and the evening at the play, philandering with ladies and talking an infinite deal of nothing. On another occasion, we hear of the gayest and most gigantic of picnics, where luxury abounded, while, within a few miles, French soldiers were dropping dead with hunger as they slowly retreated.

Mrs. Fitzherbert was in the early part of the century the Queen of Brighton, if not of England, and she was popularly called ‘Mrs. Prince.’ She certainly was one of the most queen-like women that ever lived; and stood in favourable contrast with Lady Holland, who is justly described as fussy, almost rude, straining at effect, and losing it in the very effort. There was another lady then in England striving to be effective, Madame de Staël; and she (who horrified Henry Brougham) was pronounced by female critics as ‘too anxious to glitter to be intrinsically good.’ A still more remarkable woman of that day was Lady Caroline Lamb. She was at a party at Lady Heathcote’s, had been flirting and quarrelling with Lord Byron, and therefore ‘stabbed herself with a knife at supper, so that the blood flew about her neighbours.’ When she came to, after a faint, a glass of water was handed to her, but she smashed the glass and cut herself with the pieces. ‘A little discipline,’ said Francis Jackson, ‘will bring these school-girl fancies into order.’ A good deal of disorder was to be found at breakfast as well as at supper-tables. Lady Caroline Hood was, probably, counselled not to go to the Regent’s ‘breakfast’; but ladies will, under certain circumstances, disregard friends and doctors also. Lady Caroline went, and had only herself to blame when she had to be carried away wrapped up in blankets.

Mrs. Fitzherbert’s conduct at Brighton was not always in the best taste. Mrs. Gunn, the bathing-woman, invariably addressed her as ‘Mrs. Prince’; but the latter did not live at the level of that dignity. She held afternoon gossips in her little drawing room, hung with black profiles (her salon aux silhouettes). Only guests of distinction were admitted here to exchange the stories of the day for piquant anecdotes and a cup of tea. There, too, M. le Prince was a subject of discussion. His sayings and doings were pretty freely handled. It was all done with gusto and elicited much mirth; but some visitors, who were glad to be there, professed to think it all very naughty and in the worst taste.

The fair one who had the reputation of being fairest where all were fair—the reigning queen of beauty in fact—was Miss Rumbold, daughter of Sir George. She was a ‘dashing’ beauty; but if to be beautiful was not common, to be dashing was to be fashionable. Accordingly, we find Miss Rumbold attended so little to the hints and admonitions of the Bishop of Durham, that the love of showing off an amazingly fine ankle prevented more than one offer from among the crowd of her adorers. The same pretty vanity was strong in the Princess Charlotte, at a later period, but Prince Leopold was not kept thereby from being a suitor. It may be concluded that gentlemen were, after all, not so particular as the adorers of Miss Rumbold, if Texier truly said of his daughter (whose beauty he was always praising in her presence) that there were five hundred lords, any one of whom would have been the happiest of men to have her for his own.

The utmost regularity was not incompatible with much eccentricity in many of the foremost individuals of the time. One of them, the Duke of Bedford, arranged his movements for a whole year in advance; and if one went wrong, his Grace was put out for six or eight months together. The silent Duke was under the thumb of his rattling Duchess, who used to laugh at his announcement, on starting for a long journey, of the precise moment of his return, and what dishes were to be ready for him on his arrival. He would be there, D.V., of course; but in any case, there he would be. The Duchess was as irregular as the Duke was the opposite. His obedience to her was that of Jerry Sneak. She would cry out in a room full of people, Johnny, do this; Johnny, do that; Johnny, I did not see you bow to such a person! Speak to him directly, and speak German, Johnny—and Duke Johnny answered not, but like a good boy, unhesitatingly obeyed.

Lady Holland, fanciful, sharp, and impertinent, did not attract Jackson’s brother Francis. Clever, he allowed that wayward lady to be, but not a wit of the quality she would fain have been thought. ‘There is too much effort—a straining after effect in all she says and does; and the effect is not always what she wishes or imagines it to be.’

In behalf of some of the fine ladies of the time, government officials cheated their own revenue department without scruple. Jackson was, one day in 1810, amused to find the ‘subs’ at the Foreign Office very anxious, at Lord Wellesley’s suggestion, to devise means of getting a box of shoes which had been sent from Spain, for Lady Holland, but which had been seized by the Custom House officers. Lady Holland was capricious, and as often insolent as civil; but she was not mean, like Lady Hyde Parker, who gave a ball to a crowd of guests and sent them home without supper. By the way, when there was a ball at Buckingham House, in the opening years of the century, no guests under the rank of earls’ sons and daughters were invited; but this exclusiveness had to be laid aside.

Nearly sixty years ago there was a queen of hearts in London who broke as many as she could, voluntarily or involuntarily. She was a Miss Acklom, daughter of a Nottinghamshire squire. Down at Exmouth, amid the loveliness and the idleness of the place, the nymph and a gallant officer named Tilson fell in love, or seemed to do so, with each other. The warrior, at all events, was deeply smitten, and marriage was to plunge him still deeper in love; but, almost at the church door, the cruel nymph declined to go further. The lover went straightway abroad. After a while, Miss Acklom was subdued by another wooer, Mr. Maddox; the beauty consented to become his wife. As the time of the nuptials drew near the lady’s grandfather died. She went into mourning, and came out of it with an announcement of a quality to put her lover into it; namely, that she had changed her mind. Like Tilson, Maddox sought solace in going to the stirring scenes abroad. Jackson wrote from his quarters at Dijon, in 1814, that the swain so ill-treated by Venus was ‘trying his luck with Mars, as an amateur.... From being a very handsome and lively-tempered young man, he has become quite the reverse.’ While two lovers were despairing a third presented himself. He was no other than that Lord Althorpe, who became so distinguished in the House of Commons as a statesman and a minister. My lord was accepted. Just as the marriage was about to take place this third lover’s grandmother died; whereupon the nymph put on mourning and went down to Bath to live in retirement. Old Mrs. Jackson prophesied that Miss Acklom would, on coming out of mourning, jilt the heir to an earldom as she had done ‘poor Maddox.’ George replied that Tilson had recently returned to England, a general, and ‘this perhaps may win her smiles again.’ Lord Althorpe proved to be a successful swain. Esther Acklom married him, about a month after Mrs. Jackson had presaged that she would play this lover false. The wedding was celebrated in April 1815, and in little more than three years the once volatile nymph was carried to her grave, leaving a childless widower to mourn a good wife’s loss.

The great scandal in high life within the first ten years of this century was the elopement of Lord Paget, afterwards the celebrated Marquis of Anglesea, with Lady Charlotte, wife of Henry Wellesley, nephew of the subsequently famous Arthur, and better known to us as the first Lord Cowley. All the world of fashion had seen what was going on except the lady’s husband. The guilty parties pleaded uncontrollable passion. The seducer abandoned his wife and eight children, the lady left a husband and four children; but she asked Mr. Arbuthnot to break the matter gently to their father. Lord Paget, who had told his father that he had sought death in battle in order to avoid the social catastrophe, was challenged by Colonel Cadogan, Lady Charlotte’s brother. The Colonel declared that one of them must die; but Lord Paget declined the chance on the ground that his life was devoted to the Colonel’s sister. To this lady he was married in 1810, in which year his union with his first wife was dissolved, and that lady became Duchess of Argyll.

Provincial fine society was somewhat rough but hearty; ‘all very friendly and hospitable; but as regards stuffing it would be difficult, I confess, to excel them.’ The allusion is to a Northumbrian high sheriff’s dinner party. At Brighton, described in 1809 as a dangerous rival to Bath, we are at a ball given by a Mr. and Mrs. Parker, ‘good people who have more money than sense or acquaintances, but who made up for the latter deficiency by giving balls to all whom they did not know and the few whom they did.’ Illustrious strangers went to dance, eat suppers, and drink champagne, and perhaps laugh at Mrs. Parker, who told everybody on coming in, and by way of compliment, that she had been disappointed of the flower of her party—some three or four personages who could not come. The lady was, after all, not such a fool as she looked. There was good satirical humour (when she went up to Lady Boyne, who was then in deep mourning for her daughter) in her request to the exemplary mother to open the ball! And apropos to Brighton, now so rich in vehicles, we smile at the record of the extortion of Brighton chairmen in 1809, and how they were brought to their senses by an ex-coachman to a gentleman. Jehu bought the old blue coach of the Blackburns, with the cock and trumpet upon it, which had been the glory of Bath; putting a pair of horses to it, the owner conveyed people all over the town at a shilling per person for the trip, before midnight, and one-and-sixpence after. While the chairmen stood upon their rights, earning nothing, this clever coachman whipped up a very pretty little fortune.

One of the most pushing and successful men in Bath in 1809 was Sigmond, who, after being a footman in Germany, set up as a dentist in the City of Hot Waters. His wife had been his mistress. The two together made more dash and lived at more expense than almost anybody in that city. They once invited the Duke of Gloucester to a grand supper, and he so far accepted the invitation as to send one of his gentlemen to represent him. People of better standing than the footman-dentist and his married mistress hardly behaved better. The mother of Sir George Jackson remembered Mrs. Piozzi and Dr. Johnson at Bath, and she could not imagine how Mrs. Piozzi could tolerate so coarse and bear-like a person as the Doctor; though the Doctor’s coarseness was matched by the lady’s levity. ‘Their manners,’ Mrs. Jackson wrote to her son, ‘were more disgusting than pleasing to most persons ... they both ought to have been ashamed of themselves.’

Sixty or seventy years ago locomotion was considered rapid when the Newcastle mail left that northern town on a Monday morning and reached London on the ensuing Wednesday at 5 A.M. In these days of electric cables and telegraphs, it is amusing to read of the method taken by a Rothschild to obtain news. We had not then got so far as sending or receiving news by carrier pigeons. In February 1807 Jackson arrived in London from Munich. The head of the Rothschild firm, hearing of the arrival, waited on the diplomatist, and, as the latter said, probed him dexterously to elicit any secrets he might possess relative to Prussian financial difficulties and state affairs generally. The Government was as ill off occasionally as the financier. They at one time depended on the French papers for news from abroad, and for the loan of these, ministers were indebted to the charity of the editor of the ‘Times.’

Looking into private life, we find various illustrations of its character. While war was raging abroad the waltz conquered the prudes of Bath, who, after gracefully battling against it, embraced it and their partners therein with a sort of ecstasy. Those were the days of heavy postage; and we read of a lady who thought to cheat the revenue by stuffing a hare sent to a friend, with letters, which that friend was to hand over according to the addresses. The ingenious method failed, inasmuch as the cook who received the hare tossed all the rumpled and blood-stained letters with which it was lined into the fire.

While Mr. Jackson had the affairs of the world to set down on paper, and often rose from the table where he was writing despatches only to catch a hasty glance at a battle, or to be off in a hurry, hardly pressed by a victorious foe, he was overwhelmed with commissions from thoughtless people. Some asked him to purchase for them carriages and horses, others hammers and nails; and, wrote his mother, ‘If in the course of your rambles through Saxony or Silesia you can meet with a piece of fine cambric for handkerchiefs pray secure it for me, as cambric is now of an exorbitant price in this country.’ Thousands of men were bleeding to death for want of bandages, and the easy-going old lady at Bath could think only of cheap handkerchiefs for herself.

One incident of the times reads like a page or two from Fielding. It refers to the Irish servant, Pat O’Raffer, who was with George Jackson in Bohemia. Pat was as lean as if he had lived for a month at a French table d’hôte. In Bath, when his master fell in love with Miss Rumbold, Pat fell in love with Miss Rumbold’s maid. In his absence, however, the abigail gave her company to another young man, but Pat continued to write to her ‘a very pretty letter’ all the same. As one of these letters especially contained a good deal of political and personal gossip, which began to spread through Bath, old Mrs. Jackson thought it would be well to secure it, and to stop the writing of similar epistles for the future; and she sent for the damsel, with the success narrated below.

The good, stupid wench mentioned regretfully that the postage was two shillings and ninepence. I said, ‘Susan, this long story about things that you know nothing of, and can take no interest in, my good girl, has cost you, it seems, far more than it is worth.’ ‘Yes, indeed, ma’am,’ she answered, ‘it has. I like very well to hear from Mr. Raffer, but I do wish he would pay the postage.’ ‘Has this thoughtless man often put you to the expense?’ I inquired. ‘Oh, no, ma’am; it’s the first since he went; but he says he shall write again.’ ‘Shall you answer it, Susan?’ I asked. ‘Lor, ma’am,’ she said, ‘I should never know where to find a place to begin upon. Doesn’t you think, ma’am, it’s more like a piece of reading in the newspaper than a letter? Then I shouldn’t like to pay another two-and-ninepence.’ ‘Then, Susan,’ I said, ‘as my son’s name is mentioned in this letter, suppose I give you five shillings for it—that will pay the postage, and buy you a nice frilled neckerchief.’ Susan blushed and smiled with delight. The bargain was struck at once for this and any other despatch Mr. Raffer may send, silence on the subject being promised.... My only qualm of conscience in getting hold of the letter was, that I suggested to Susan to buy a frilled neckerchief, never allowing my own maids to wear any but plain ones.

In those days mistresses could rule the costume of their maids. In ours the latter dress in the same ill-taste adopted by their mistresses. But chignons, at last, have gone out, and with them the abominable smell which ‘pervaded’ the atmosphere.

By 1813 the minuet, a knowledge of dancing which Mrs. Montagu thought of more importance than a knowledge of French, ceased to be known in the ball-room. It fingered on the stage. The Coburg Theatre audiences looked upon the Minuet de la Cour and Gavotte, danced by M. and Mdme. Le Clercq, with a sort of wondering delight, and Taglioni and Fanny Elsler danced it on our opera stage, forty years ago, as a lady and cavalier of the time of Louis the Fourteenth. When the waltz first attempted (with its vulgar familiarity and an intimacy which made an Oriental ambassador almost faint) to supplant the minuet, in which the gentleman scarcely touched the tips of the lady’s fingers, and seemed abashed at his own audacity, there was a general outcry of fie upon it. But young ladies soon learned to laugh at the objections of their mothers, and flung themselves on the shirt-fronts of their partners with alacrity. Fashion sanctified it, and the youthful world thought it ill-bred prudery to set its face against what fashionable people of good taste considered innocent and amusing.

The actors of the first half of the century come pleasantly to the memories of some survivors, and to the knowledge of others who will be glad to become acquainted with them. Graceful Elliston, in Octavian, is said to have been superior to John Kemble. George Frederick Cooke was always fine, but never sober; ‘often so drunk as not to be able to come on the stage at all, and generally as not to be able to stand when on.’ We sit with Cooke’s exasperated audience, kept half an hour beyond time, when he was to play Mr. Oakley, and we join in the hissing when he does appear, and enjoy the mingled surprise and indignation that light up his countenance. ‘He, however, recollected himself, and after one violent effort, in which every feature of his speaking countenance had its peculiar expression, made a sort of half-disdainful half-respectful bow, and an exit steadier than his entrée, though hardly steady enough for dignity.’ Cooke’s Oakley, in its way, was as good as Emery’s Tyke, which, as a bit of tragi-comedy, was inexpressibly grand.

In 1809 Kemble was declining. In reference to his Hamlet, Jackson says, ‘Kemble was, of course, great, and his triumph, I believe, complete; but, in my humble opinion, he has gone off a good deal.’ Of the then new Covent Garden (burnt down in 1808), he writes; ‘It appears to me small, and the prevailing colour—brick red—very common and ineffective. The doors too, though they cost a large sum, and will, if they last as long, be very handsome some years hence, have a mean appearance, the mahogany being so very pale.’ Kemble lingered too long upon the stage. In 1801 we read, in reference to his Hotspur, ‘In some parts he warmed up to the situation and was very good; but he is too old for such a character, and the dress only shows off his unfitness the more. It made him appear decidedly aged, and thus, in a great measure, rendered all he had to say ineffective.’ But in those last years of his career Kemble flashed forth gleams of his old glory. In the year last named he and Mrs. Siddons played inimitably in ‘Isabella,’ in which Charles Kemble played Carlos, and showed signs that he was not going to remain the mere ‘stick’ which he had been for many years. Mrs. Siddons was, on the other hand, deteriorating. She had grown enormously large. When she killed herself, in ‘Isabella,’ and fell to the ground, the stage groaned beneath her; and if, in any character, she knelt, it took two good men to get her comfortably on her legs again. The greatest theatrical novelty of the day was when Kemble appeared at court to take leave on his intended departure for America, where he was to play twenty-two nights for six thousand pounds and his expenses paid. After all, Kemble did not go; his appearance at court, ‘a player,’ made some people think the world was coming to an end. But there was a worse sign of the times. When Bellingham, after shooting Mr. Percival, was conveyed in a coach to Newgate, the mob escorted and cheered him, shook hands with him, and congratulated him on having murdered a minister.

It is startling to find Mrs. Siddons accused of want of feeling when she took leave of the stage. As John Kemble continued to linger on it, his power of attracting audiences grew less. In 1812 it is said of his King John, ‘his conception of the character remains, of course, as excellent as ever; but his voice is gone, and I am told when the play is ended he is so exhausted as hardly to be able to speak or move.’

We conclude these desultory samples of by-gone life with an example of the remuneration of a leading barrister of the first years of this century, namely, Garrow. It is said of him that ‘he went into court one morning at York, made a speech of about twenty minutes, then doffed his wig and gown, pocketed four hundred pounds, besides one hundred pounds for his expenses, and drove off again to London.’

Those who have examined these grains from a full measure may find more perfect enjoyment by perusing ‘The Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson,’ and the interesting second series of the work known as ‘The Bath Archives.’

THE POSTMAN’S KNOCK.

‘A foot post doth come from Bury, in Suffolk, to the Green Dragon, in Bishopsgate Street, every Wednesday, by whom letters may be conveyed to and fro.’ So writes the water poet, John Taylor, in his ‘Carrier’s Cosmography,’ A.D. 1637. In like manner we learn that a foot post from Wasingham came every second Thursday to the Cross Keys, Holborn; and one from York, to the Rose and Crown, in St. John Street. Letters, however, could be sent every Monday to Scotland, ‘by the post that doth lodge at the King’s Arms, at the upper end of Cheapside.’ Letters did not travel then as fast as a certain general made one travel, by enclosing it in a cannon ball and firing it into a besieged town, for the purpose of conveying a message. Between the time when the first letter was written and that signalled by the postman’s knock this morning there never was a more singular mode of despatch.

The first letter ever written! Where is it? Let us be content to know, as beyond dispute, that the earliest sample we have of a letter is that of David to Joab. When we remember the contents and the purpose of that letter we may be honestly ashamed of the writer. We could have wished this letter had not been preserved; and we turn from it readily to consider the letters of more recent and less sacred kings.

The earliest royal sign manual existing of our own kings is that of Richard II. The grandest and firmest is that of Richard III. There exists a document of this king’s which was begun under dictation. Richard seems to have grown impatient with his secretary, snatched the pen from his hand, and finished the document with his own hand. His signature, Ricardus Rex, is written with wonderful boldness. The cross line of the ‘x’ looks like a pike-staff, and has a wickedly threatening air with it. There are letters of a far more interesting quality than the above, also written by Richard, in the collection of letters of the time of that king, with others of the later time of Henry VII. The work is one of the series published under the sanction of the Master of the Rolls. Richard’s letters are those of a kind-hearted man, who considers no subject to be too trifling for consideration. Several letters prove that he was an affectionate husband to Lady Anne. When she was Richard’s queen and had fallen sick, her husband wrote to Louis XI., civilly requesting him to send over some Burgundy and wines of Haute France, for the comforting and strengthening of that august lady’s stomach. On another occasion, when the governess of his little son Edward (that boy-prince of Wales whose unexpected death at Middleham nearly drove his father mad) was likely to lose some property through the dishonesty of a kinsman, Richard looked into her affairs and energetically set about seeing her righted. In details like these he comes before us, like a good-natured head of a family, sympathising with all who live under his roof. It is quite curious, too, to see that matters of dress were not beneath his notice. One of his many Irish favourites—favourites because they had supported the cause of Richard’s noble father, the Duke of York—was the Earl of Desmond. Richard was not only generous to the earl, he was desirous of seeing him dressed in the fashion which prevailed in England, but which had not yet reached Ireland. Richard requests Desmond to ‘renounce the wearing and usage of the Irish array, and to use the manner of apparel for his person after the English guise.’ The king sent patterns of dress to Ireland by the hands of a bishop. The right reverend modiste carried with him samples of ‘gowns, doublets, hose, and bonnets,’ of the latest taste, with a fac-simile of the king’s livery, a collar of gold of Richard’s device, and, finally, a neat assortment of ‘hats, kerchiefs, tippets, and shirts.’ In connection with such articles, and with the above household details, we hardly recognise the dark Richard of history and the drama. But light and shade prevail throughout. Richard could stoop to invent the fashion of a coat, and could climb through murder to a throne. Whatever may be his guilt with regard to the young princes in the Tower, he showed his wisdom when he took for wife Lady Anne, the daughter of the fierce Countess of Warwick, by immediately locking up his uncomfortable mother-in-law!

This series of letters is worthy of being studied. Richard appears quite another manner of man than we have been accustomed to take him to be. Henry VII., on the other hand, remains unaltered—mean, cruel, treacherous, and crafty. We will only allude to a letter of James IV. of Scotland to show his intelligence. In one of them, written to the King of Denmark, James announces that a band of Gipsies, pretending to be Christian pilgrims, had been in Scotland, and that he had sent them to Denmark, the latter country being, as he believed, in the vicinity of Egypt, from whence the wanderers had started.

In dealing with old letters, as much caution is necessary as in dealing with old pictures. All are not ancient masters that are called so. Some years ago there was an aged man in a German capital, who, throughout a long life, had made a decent income by painting pictures by any great artist of any time or place. If a rich amateur, travelling that way, wanted a work by some renowned painter of the early times he went to a dealer, and the dealer, undertaking to find him one, went to the old painter of other men’s pictures, who in a week produced a Da Vinci, a Raffaelle, or a Del Sarto, a Rubens, a Claude, or a Wouvermans—it mattered not what; and each party was satisfied. Once the old fellow tried to paint a picture of his own, but there was such a confusion of styles in it he could not offer it for sale, and in order to live respectably he was obliged once more to resort to forgery.

As for forged letters, they are thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. A few years ago a writer in the ‘Athenæum,’ referring to this fact, remarked, ‘In no age has literature been free from the intrusion of spurious records into the domain of truth. One man forges for the pure love of sport, throws his forged papers into a collection, to be found a hundred years later, merely to perplex the pundits. Another forges to sustain a crotchet or a principle. But the most industrious and the most facile are those who forge for profit. Everyone familiar with old papers is aware that the publication of historical documents—letters, plays, poems, maps, charts, and cylinders—has now ceased to be a learned profession, and has become a manufacture. As the Old Bailey had its tribes of rascals ready to witness against anybody and anything for money, so literature has its race of outcasts ready to furnish any document that may be wanted, from a Wardour Street pedigree, derived from scrolls in a Cheshire muniment room, up to a copy of Homer from a monastery at the summit of Mount Athos.’ Of the above there is no doubt. We may add that, in some cases, letters have been authentic and yet have been no more genuine than if they had been forged. That is to say, they misrepresented the feelings of the writers themselves. We have one sample of something intended in this way, though not carried out, by Crebillon and Sterne. Fun, profit, and mystification were at the bottom of it. Sterne, writing to Garrick in April 1762, says: ‘Crebillon has made a convention with me, which, if he be not too lazy, will be no bad persiflage. As soon as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of “Tristram Shandy,” which is to be answered by recriminations upon the coarseness of his own works. These are to be printed together—Crebillon against Sterne: Sterne against Crebillon. The copy to be sold, and the money to be equally divided. This is good Swiss policy!’ Nothing came of this design, but it illustrates how a letter may be authentic and yet not be genuine.

Widows’ letters are rudely said to be sometimes of this quality. This is, no doubt, untrue. The idea, however, is as old as Massinger. That dramatic poet makes his Hilario, in ‘The Picture,’ remark:

There be some

That in their husband’s sicknesses have wept

Their pottle of tears a day; but, being once certain,

At midnight, he was dead, have in the morning

Dried up their handkerchiefs, and thought no more on’t!

But Hilario, who says this, is the fool of the piece.

There are historical personages, whose letters and manuscripts generally we should expect would have disappeared altogether; voluntary destruction having been applied to them. On the other hand, there are personages whose manuscripts and whose letters, we should suppose, would have been preserved with a reverential affection. In each case the expectation is contrary to fact. We will instance Margaret of Anjou and William Shakespeare. When Edward IV. was on the throne he was so desirous to secure every letter or despatch written by that heroic wife of an unheroic king, that the penalty of death was awarded against any person who, receiving a letter, or being in possession of a letter from Queen Margaret, delayed in surrendering the same to the government. One would suppose that such a penalty would lead every individual holding such documents, if not to surrender at least to destroy them. But human nature is perverse, as well as bold, courageous and defiant. Many of Margaret’s correspondents hid the letters she had written to them; some of these have lately been published by the Camden Society. The volume is one of the most interesting of the series published by that Society, and the letters themselves are creditable to the writer. They show her less as a fiercely struggling, deeply sorrowing, terribly avenging queen, than as a sympathising woman, not so busy in her own affairs as to lack time for being interested in the affairs of others. She is ever ready to say a good word for a worthy man seeking advancement, and her heart responds to appeals from young maidens with whom the course of true love does not run smooth. For them, Queen Margaret writes with affectionate urgency to that sort of sire who is apt to say of a suitor to his daughter, who is unwelcome to himself, ‘I can’t imagine what the girl can see in such a fellow, to like him!’ To such stern fathers Margaret of Anjou writes like a wise and affectionate woman. She may be called a ‘matchmaker,’ for she seems to have gone to the work of coupling with great alacrity, but we are sure that many a young couple, in those turbulent times, owed to her a happiness and a harmony in their married life which poor Margaret never enjoyed in her own.

But Shakespeare! It is nothing less than marvellous that a man who wrote as he wrote—and, altogether, no other man ever wrote like him—that a poet, the author of such plays and such poems; that a man possessing so many friends and admirers, with whom his correspondence must have been extensive, should not have left a single line behind him traced by his own hand. Of all his poems and plays there does not exist a page, a line, a single word, in manuscript. All Shakespeare’s manuscript plays could not have perished in the fire which destroyed the Globe Theatre. The author must have made little account of them himself; but how great would our estimation be of a single act of any one of Shakespeare’s plays, in his own handwriting! We have just now got among us a parallel to the tulip mania. Thousands of pounds are willingly paid for a picture which the same number of shillings would once have purchased. Rather, let us say that the shillings were given for the picture, and that the pounds by thousands are given for the painter’s name. Well, what would not be willingly paid (for the sake of Shakespeare’s name) for the original manuscript, say of ‘Hamlet’? There would be a fierce fight among competitors for even a single passage. We fancy that the lines beginning with ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ or those that open with ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?’ or with ‘She never told her love,’ and hundreds of others, would not be had for guineas covering each letter. What a contention there would be for the first love-letter or for any love-letter which the poet wrote to Anne Hathaway; or indeed for any letter, addressed to anyone. A costly holograph! Alas! there are neither lines nor letters. All that has been saved of Shakespeare’s handwriting is confined to a couple of signatures of his name to certain deeds, and in those subscriptions the name is spelt differently. Even the forgers have not dared to produce a letter by Shakespeare.

There seems to have been at one time a regular manufactory for the production of letters by Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The market was swamped by cleverly forged documents. About twenty years ago, Robert Browning, the poet, edited a volume of letters by Shelley, and critics said that they would prove useful to all future biographers of that wayward genius. These letters turned out to be forgeries. One epistle was found to be a ‘crib’ from an article by Sir Francis Palgrave, in the ‘Quarterly Review.’ Another was slightly altered from a paper in a literary annual. When research was made, the discovery ensued that the supposed originals had been purchased by Mr. Moxon, the publisher, at an auction. The auctioneer had had them consigned to him by a bookseller in Pall Mall, and the bookseller had bought them from two unknown women, who looked as much like ladies as the letters looked like genuine productions. If Mr. Moxon had not sent a copy of the volume to Mr. Tennyson a long time might have elapsed before the fraud could have been discovered. But Mr. Palgrave, on a visit to the Laureate, happened to open the book, and his eye fell on a letter from Shelley to Godwin, written from Florence. Mr. Palgrave recognised in it a portion of an article on Florence, in the ‘Quarterly,’ written by his father, Sir Francis. Mr. Moxon called in all the copies of this volume of pseudo-epistles, and suppressed the publication altogether. A curious result has followed. The volume is worthless, but it is rare; and simply on account of its rarity it is set down in a London bookseller’s catalogue now before us at the price of 1l. 10s.

Stray letters of Shelley continued to turn up in the market. Letters to his wife, of the most confidential nature, containing aspersions on his father, were bought by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son. These too proved to be forgeries and were destroyed. Another letter, addressed to Byron, and bearing Shelley’s signature, contained an assertion against the fidelity of ‘Harriet.’ Whoever bought it paid six guineas for a calumny against a dead and defenceless woman, to which was appended the forged signature of her dead and defenceless husband. Forged letters purporting to be from Byron are, as it were, to be had at every turn. Also books with his alleged manuscript notes in the margin. Good judges assert that these notes and letters are written with a thorough knowledge of Byron’s life and feelings, and that the books are chosen with the most perfect knowledge of his tastes and peculiarities.

There was once a dreadful fashion of writing romances and novels in letters. Nothing seems more wearisome now, but they delighted the age in which they were written, and that says much for the patient endurance of the readers of the period. There is, however, one story told in letters, the humour of which will never grow old, namely, ‘Humphrey Clinker.’ Smollett never showed more ability, or humour, or power in delineating and discriminating character than in that admirable work. For humour, commend us to the letters of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble. The preciseness of that lady, who is satisfied if a suitable reason be given for things she complains of, and who is drolly serious in her logic, is charmingly illustrated in the following passage in one of her various letters addressed to the housekeeper, Mrs. Gwyllym, in the country, at Brambleton Hall: ‘You tell me the thunder has soured two barrels of beer in the seller, but how the thunder should get there, when the seller was double-locked, I can’t comprehend. Howsomever, I won’t have the beer thrown out till I have seen it with my own eyes. Perhaps it will recover. At least it will serve for vinegar for the servants.’

This pretended letter is not beyond the reality of much letter-writing of the last century. Southey, when collecting materials for ‘Espriella,’ came into possession of a letter from a farmer’s daughter. It was written towards the close of the century, and it runs thus:

Dear Miss,—The energy of the races prompts me to assure you that my request is forbidden, the idea of which I had awkwardly nourished, notwithstanding my propensity to reserve. M. T. will be there. Let me with confidence assure you that him and brothers will be very happy to meet you and brothers. Us girls cannot go, for reasons. The attention of the cows claims our assistance in the evening.

Unalterably yours.

In the days of heavy postage no one had the slightest scruple in cheating the revenue. Persons leaving home, whether for inland or foreign travel, were importuned by friends to carry letters for them to other friends. An idea prevailed that, if the letters were carried ‘open’—that is, unsealed—there was no infraction of the law, and that consequently no penalty could be exacted. This was a popular error. The law, moreover, was evaded in another way. A newspaper was sent by post in an envelope; inside the latter a long epistle was often written in invisible ink, generally milk. When this was dry the writing could not be seen. By holding the paper to the fire the writing came out in a sepia colour, and the law was broken. The Post Office authorities discovered this pretty trick, and parties were threatened with prosecution; but as the receivers invariably protested that they did not know who the senders were it was almost impossible to obtain a conviction. Senders indeed grew a little nervous, and many changed their method of conveying information in spite of the law. In place of writing in milk on the covers of the newspapers they made slight dots in ordinary ink under such printed letters as suited their purpose for conveying intelligence. This was troublesome for both sender and receiver, and it was therefore used only for brief messages. The postal tax pressed most heavily on the poor, but the ingenious poor discovered means to evade it. For instance, a son or daughter in town despatched a letter to parents in the country who were too poor to pay the postage. The parents declined to take such letter in, which they had legal right to do. Returned to the General Post Office, the letter on being opened was found to be a blank sheet of paper. The fact is that parents and children had agreed to send these blank sheets as indications that all was well with the sender; the receiver got that much of news and had nothing to pay for it. The letter was never taken in unless a particular mark was on the cover, which intimated that something of importance was to be read within.

Although a high rate of postage fell most heavily upon the poor there was scarcely anyone who did not feel it. Everyone wished to be relieved from it. We can hardly realise how peers, who could frank a large number of letters daily, and how members of Parliament, who could frank, every day except Sunday, a few, were beset by friends for franks for themselves, or for their friends, or for their friends’ friends. We have an illustration of this fact in the ‘Diary, Letters, and Journals of Sir George Jackson.’ Writing to his mother at Bath, in 1802, the then apprentice diplomatist says: ‘My sister tells me Bath was never so thin. I sympathise with her, knowing how voluminous her correspondence is, and that the thinness of Bath means “a dearth of frank men,” there being, she says, only Lords Rosslyn and Harcourt to fly to.’

In those old days heavy postage made long letters. As the receivers paid the postage they naturally expected their money’s worth. Often a sheet of Bath post, or even of foolscap, was crossed and recrossed, and not a hair’s breadth of the paper was left without its line. A letter then was written bit by bit, day after day, till the whole was completed. It was, in its way, a newspaper or a book; it was sent all through the branches of a family; it was lent to friends; it even went to mere acquaintances, and strangers made extracts from the choicest parts of it. In the second series of Miss Mitford’s ‘Letters and Correspondence’ she refers to one of these epistles. It was written by a lord who had been travelling on the Continent, and it was a clever, sensible, and instructive document. Miss Mitford borrowed it for the purpose of copying the contents, to accomplish which cost her six mortal hours, which the lady did not think were ill-spent.

When postage was high, letters were luxuries in which persons, far above the condition of those who are called poor, could not often indulge. We cannot give a better illustration of this than one we find in a letter addressed by Mr. Collins, the artist, to his brother, in 1816, when the landscape painter was twenty-eight years of age. Collins was then at Hastings sketching, and had invited his brother to come down from Saturday to Monday. ‘The whole amount of the expense would be the coach, provided you put two biscuits in your pocket, which would answer as a lunch; and I would have dinner for you, which would not increase my expenditure above tenpence. I shall be at the place where the coach stops for you, should you be able to come. Write me nothing about it unless you have other business, for a letter costs a dinner.’ This was the artist who was overjoyed to receive fifty pounds for his ‘Cromer Sands,’ the picture for which, at the sale of the Gillott collection, a purchaser was found to give, quite as joyously, three thousand seven hundred and eighty guineas.

It has been said that, if heavy postage produced essays, cheap postage makes epigrams. But the latter were not wanting in the very earliest days. Nothing could be more epigrammatic than the note sent by one Irish chief to another: ‘Pay me tribute, or else ——’ To which the equally epigrammatic answer was: ‘I owe you none, and if ——’ Of this sort were the notes between Foote’s mother and Foote. ‘Dear Sam,—I’m in prison. Yours, E. Foote.’ The old lady was under arrest for debt. The son’s answer was: ‘Dear Mother,—So am I. Yours, S. Foote.’ And again, the letters between old Mrs. Garrick and young Edmund Kean: ‘Dear Mr. Kean,—You can’t play Abel Drugger. Yours, &c.’ To which intimation Edmund wrote back: ‘Dear Madam,—I know it. Yours, E. K.’ Instances occur now and then where a joke has been played, the fun of which was to make a man pay heavy postage for very unnecessary information. When Collins, the artist, was once with some friends around him, one of them resisted every attempt to induce him to stay to supper. He withdrew, and the friends in council over their banquet resolved that the sulky guest should be punished. Accordingly on the following day Collins sent him a folded sheet of foolscap, in which was written: ‘After you left we had stout and oysters.’ The receiver understood what was meant, but he was equally resolved to have his revenge. Accordingly, biding his time, he transmitted, in a feigned hand, to Collins, a letter in which the painter read only, ‘Had you?’ Therewith the joke seemed at an end; but Collins would have the last word. He waited and waited till the thing was almost forgotten, and then the writer of the last query opened a letter one morning in which he had the satisfaction of finding an answer to it in the words, ‘Yes, we had.’ We cannot dismiss this part of the subject without expressing our regret that we are unable to remember the name of that British admiral who, after achieving a glorious victory at sea, despatched a letter to the Admiralty, in which there were only these or similar words: ‘ ... Beat the enemy; took, sunk, burned, and destroyed ships named in the margin.’ Tersest of admirals!

The publication of the letters of deceased persons first arose, or began to be so common, about the middle of the last century, that Dr. Arbuthnot declared the knowledge of such a fact added a new terror to death. In 1781 the custom had not improved. ‘It has become so much the fashion to publish letters,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘that I put as little into mine as I can.’ Nevertheless, when Boswell subsequently asked him if it would be proper to publish any of his letters after death, Johnson contented himself by remarking: ‘Nay, sir, when I am dead you may do as you will with mine.’

There has been no little affectation in some notable persons, and a remarkable candour in others, with respect to the publication of these documents. Pope addressed his letters to his friends, but he carefully and elaborately wrote and re-wrote them for posterity, and he was not sorry to see some of them get into print (he rather helping them to that end than obstructing them), that he might have a foretaste of the enjoyment which was more especially intended for after ages. Every line in Walpole’s letters reads as if it were as much intended for us of any year to come as for the happy friend to whom the letter was directed; but this diminishes neither Walpole’s credit nor our appreciation. Pepys never intended his ‘Diary’ to be perused by any mortal eye but his own. The Rev. Mr. Smith, however, deciphered the shorthand, and the best social history of Pepys’ time fell into the hands of a delighted and grateful public. Evelyn wrote his ‘Diary’ for his own satisfaction, indifferent, as Dr. Johnson about his letters, whether it were published or not after his death. Evelyn’s descendants were ignorant of its value, and it is to a stranger we owe those sketches of contemporary men and things which now enrich our literature. Pepys, Evelyn, Walpole—diaries and letters; of how many exquisite stories we should have known nothing but for those three individuals! It matters little whether they intended we should enjoy that knowledge or not; sufficient for us that we do. And let us note in passing another letter-writer—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Her letters are not quite so popular, so much read, or so well known, perhaps, as they used to be; they may have had their day, but the writer was well assured they would at least have that. ‘Keep my letters,’ she once wrote to a friend; ‘they will be as good as Madame de Sévigné’s forty years hence.’

They certainly contain many things worth the knowing. The writer’s descriptions of foreign scenes and incidents are full of life and spirit, generally truthful, and always effective without marring the truth. There is one passage in one of her ladyship’s letters which illustrates the writer’s power in a particularly delicate matter, which is well deserving notice. Mr. Montagu’s sister died. She had been Lady Mary Pierrepont’s dearest friend. Young Montagu had to communicate the news of his sister’s death to the young Lady Mary. In her reply the latter said: ‘I know it is not acting in form, but I do not look upon you as I do upon the rest of the world. You are brother to a woman whom I tenderly loved.’ The young fellow excused the informality; he was proud of being looked upon by the young beauty in a different way from the rest of the world. As that young beauty reminded him that he was brother to the woman she so tenderly loved, he was not dull, and had no difficulty in persuading her to love the brother even better than she had done the sister. The marriage, however, was not made in heaven. The lady herself had some suspicion about the consequences. ‘I tremble,’ she wrote to her intended husband, ‘for what we are doing. Shall we never repent?... I shall come to you only with a nightgown and petticoat, and that is all you will get by me.’ She adds significantly: ‘I had rather die than return to a dependency upon relations I have disobliged.’ In her first letter to her (absent) husband after marriage she alludes to the children of the family in which she was residing, and says: ‘It furnishes my imagination with agreeable pictures of our future life, and I flatter myself with the hopes of one day enjoying with you the same satisfaction ... when the noise of a nursery may have more charms for us than the music of the opera.’

While on the subject of the publication of posthumous letters, we may add that other men besides Johnson have written their own so as to gratify posterity as little as possible. Some are as cautious with respect to contemporaries. One of the most venerable of our peers was once told that several of his letters were catalogued for sale in a London auction room. ‘It is a matter of indifference to me,’ said the noble lord; ‘from the day I became a public man I never wrote a line worth the reading by anyone except the person to whom my letter was addressed.’

The assertion that a lady puts the essence, nay, the very purpose and import of her letter, in the postscript, has had many an ingenious but invented illustration. One of the best is that of a young lady in India to her friends at home, viz.:—‘P.S. You will see by my signature that I am married.’ Cobbett hated writing across already written lines, and declared that it was of French origin. The earliest letter by a lady, in this country, of which a copy exists, is one from Matilda, Queen of Henry I., to Archbishop Anselm. In this she styles him her ‘worthily reverenced lord,’ and herself ‘the lowest of the handmaidens of his holiness;’ phrases which show the mind and hand of some reverend secretary. Anne Boleyn’s last cry of love and anguish to her lord is worth a ream of the letters of earlier date written at second hand. It is genuineness that gives all the interest to the Paston Letters (once so disputed); Agnes Paston’s to her son may be said to be admirable for detail and simplicity. ‘God’s blessing and mine,’ is a fitting double benediction from a mother to her son. How picturesquely descriptive is the passage, ‘On Tuesday last Sir John Heveningham went to his church and heard three masses, and came home again, never merrier, and said to his wife that he would go say a little devotion in his garden and then he would dine; and forthwith he felt a fainting in his legs and slid down. This was at nine of the clock and he was dead ere noon.’ Such were life and death in the middle of the fifteenth century in the county of Norfolk. We may notice, after the above illustration of a letter from a mother to her son, one from a wife to her husband, but of the seventeenth century. In a letter from Susan Montague to her husband Edward, who has announced his being about to leave Madrid for England, the sprightly Susan replied to her ‘sweetheart’ that she fears she may weary his eyes with her ‘tedious scribblement,’ and after many allusions to herself and two ladies, with matters of confidence, Susan Montague concludes by saying: ‘So being very late, as a matter of ten o’clock, I bid you good night, going into the little bed, which I find less than ever it was, and never have no mind to go into it because I cannot find my sweeting there. But when I am there I sleep as little as may be, for I am still riding post to Madrid, which I hope doth presage that you will shortly post from there and come to the little chamber again, which I heartily pray for. So, dear heart, farewell. Your truly loving wife—Su. Montague.’ The orthography of ladies became rather worse than better in the times after Susan Montague wrote. In the last century ladies spelt ‘physician’ with a capital F, and in the old game of ‘loving’ would not be conscious of wrong in saying, ‘I love my love with a G, because he’s a Gustus!’ There are some curious samples of ill spelling in the Delany correspondence. Cacography seemed to be intermittent like the ague. The wrong thing came with the east wind or epidemics. Sometimes an odd word or two would baffle a lady. At the beginning of the present century the exquisite Alison Cockburn referred in one of her letters to some ‘unpareleled boon.’ The word caught her eye, and she gaily added as a postscript, ‘Cannot spell unparaleled.’

The letters of fine gentlemen are written in a fine gentlemanly way. If the fine gentleman be a wit and a poet it does not always improve the style of the letter. Much nonsense has been written upon Waller and his Sacharissa (Lady Dorothy Sidney). The facts of their supposed love passages have grown up out of the imaginations of sentimental writers. When Lady Dorothy married Lord Spencer, Waller wrote to her sister, Lady Lucy, a letter which would now be considered much more impudent than witty. But the poet’s hand is in it as well as the impudent wit’s. After sympathising with Lady Lucy on the loss of her sister ‘bedfellow,’ and expressing a hope that the latter would soon ‘taste of the first curse imposed on woman,’ and often; in due course of time, the poet wishes, ‘May she then arrive at that great curse so much declined by fair ladies, old age. May she live to be very old and yet seem young, be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth. And when she shall appear to be mortal, may her lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, that being there divorced we may all have an equal interest in her again.’

Letters to children are as difficult to write as books for children. Crabb Robinson stands at the head of all inditers of little epistles to little folk. He is not in the vein of Jeffrey to his granddaughter, as in ‘I send you my blessing and wish I was kissing your sweet rosy lips or your fat finger tips.’ Robinson comes nearer to Hood, only that he could not stoop to use old jokes as well as make new. The two are together in the following paragraph in Hood’s letter to May, one of Dr. Elliot’s daughters: ‘Tell Dunnie that Tom has set his trap in the balcony, and has caught a cold; and tell Jeanie that Fanny has set her foot in the garden, but it has not come up yet.... The other night, when I came from Stratford, the cold shrivelled me up so that when I got home I thought I was my own child.’ The best thing Crabb Robinson did in this way was by surprising a little girl, who said she did not know how to write a letter to her little brother, by proving to her that she was a perfect letter-writer. She had asked Robinson to suggest all the subjects. He proposed purposely something untrue, then something silly, but both were rejected by the child on the ground of their untruthfulness and silliness. This process went on till the child adopted such subjects as were adapted to her purpose, and she found she was a good letter-writer without knowing it.

We conclude with an unpublished letter, from an American lady we believe, who some quarter of a century ago aspired to be the instructor of children. The quaintness and simplicity, for it is all sober earnestness, are worthy of being preserved: ‘Dear Sir,—Having heard that you are in want of a governess for your children, I write to offer myself as a candidate for that post. My acquirements are English in all its branches, French, German, music, which I play well, singing, painting, drawing, and dancing. My age is just 28. I am a lady by birth, high-spirited, and I am sorry to say slightly quick-tempered, but still very fond of children, likewise of gentlemen’s society; I am rather delicate, and when not as well as usual require a few tempting viands. I hope, if you decide in having me for your children as their governess, that you will allow me the entrée of your drawing-room at all times, and that you will also allow me to join in all your domestic amusements. I wish to inform you that I have been in the habit of receiving 60l. (sixty pounds) per annum, or fifty pounds (50l.) with laundress, and all travelling expenses paid. You may be glad to hear that I have an elegant figure, small hands and feet, and am, if my friends and admirers are to be believed, engaging.’

With this sample we may leave our readers to pass on to fresh woods and pastures new.

THE TWENTY-THOUSAND-POUND WIDOW.

In the reign of Charles I. the Old Jewry, which runs from Cheapside to Cateaton Street, was a fashionable locality. Merchant princes lived and died there. The old church, St. Olave Jewry, or St. Olave Upwell, was a fashionable church. Merchant princesses worshipped there, and their daughters were worshipped by the undevout apprentices. The Jewry had its fashionable old hostelry in the Windmill. It lives in Ben Jonson’s drama. It was there that Captain Bobadil told of his heroism at the siege of Strigonium, and there he pished at the idea of Master Stephen’s Provant rapier passing for a Toledo blade. One May morning, A.D. 1628, George Newman, the rich widow Bennett’s first serving-man, was taking his early draught at the Windmill. His master, the rich mercer, a Bennett of the stock from which the Tankerville earls have sprung, was then lying, a month old in his tenantcy, in a grave in St. Olave’s, next to another mercer, Robert Large, the master of one who came to be more famous, namely, Caxton, the father of English printing. Bennett’s widow was then sitting behind her rich curtains in Jewry Street meditating on a world of speculative subjects. ‘She’s a twenty-thousand-pound widow,’ said Newman, as he wiped his lips with the sleeve of his coat. ‘She’ll be a bride, and a lady to boot, before long. She has as many suitors as she has thousands.’ ‘And,’ said a bystander, ‘will maybe marry the biggest knave or the most perfect fool of the lot.’ ‘Not so,’ rejoined the serving-man. ‘Do you see Mr. Recorder passing by from his court? He is a friend of the family, and will see that neither rogue nor ass carries off the wealthy widow.’ ‘Ay!’ cried the host of the Windmill, ‘Mistress Bennett is in safe hands, with Sir Heneage Finch for her guardian and her little son’s guardian.’ And so said all who stood within hearing.

The scene now changes to the widow’s best room, in her mansion in Old Jewry. If you can fancy the three slim Graces rolled into one, with no other result but delicious increase of beauty in form, motion, look, and expression, you may have a very fair idea of this most blooming and best endowed of widows. Physically, morally, materially, she was not to be equalled throughout the realm of mature womanhood. Fair of face, frank of speech, with an inheritance of two-thirds of her late husband’s property, a prosperous business, plate, diamonds, cash, the mansion in which she lived, a coach, six horses, and all things that tend to make life enjoyable, Mistress Bennett took her widowhood with that sort of resignation which is denoted by an air of calm content with providential dispensations. She was in such esteem that at least a score of lovers were contending for the honour of rendering her happy. Even the ladies were busy in commending certain of the suitors. The widow would not be persuaded. The lady advisers were frivolous. She would rely on the grave counsel of a grave man. Mr. Recorder would be her truest support if she ever found herself in any perplexity on the subject of marrying again. At the moment it was a subject that was not in her thoughts.

‘The subject is in the thoughts of young Butler, of Bramfield,’ said Lady Skinner. ‘He is a gentleman——’

‘He is a black, blunt-nosed one,’ interrupted the widow. And indeed Butler was not an Adonis.

‘I pity poor Sir Peter Temple,’ said another of Love’s messengers that morning. ‘Stowe does not make him happy; you might.’

‘Eleanor Tirrell will,’ replied the widow. ‘I wish they were all as well provided for.’

‘All!’ exclaimed Sir Peter’s friend. ‘Why, to what tune does the list run?’

‘First,’ answered the widow, ‘there is Sir Henry Mainwaring, a poor old battered knight, who is not master of as much land as his shoes can cover; and yet he is as proud as if he were a Mainwaring of Over Pecover. His worship was brought hither by the hand of the Countess of Bridgwater, but I speedily rid myself civilly of both. There have been other silly knights, and lords too, who have come and gone, and some of whom come and come again. Lord Bruce took a frank answer, and did not present himself twice. Lord Lumley, all in the glitter of his new title, will not take nay. Dr. Raven has even dared to offer himself without first feeling my pulse, and he swears his daring has not come to an end. Only the other day Sir Sackville Crowe beset me; and, heaven help me! I believed, for a moment, that Sir Heneage Finch himself had views towards me. But Sir Heneage could take an answer, and he besets me with hints of his aspirations no longer.’

‘Crow, Finch, Raven!’ exclaimed the group of ladies who were gathered round the twenty-thousand-pounder in her best room at St. Olave’s. ‘What a singular gathering of birds! You will be flown away with, widow, in spite of yourself.’

Mr. Recorder Finch, erst Speaker of the House of Commons, came into London to perform his legal duties, and returned in the evening to his house at Kensington. The house still stands. It is the kernel round which has grown the shell called Kensington Palace. Heneage Finch’s gardens extended only to what is now called the Broad Walk. The latter was then a pathway through Hyde Park from Kensington to Bayswater. The wicked public loved to connect his name with those of Crowe and Raven as ‘birds of a feather.’ The truth is, that Raven was the real, daring, and most persistent lover. Sir Sackville Crowe, indeed, had been the more serious in his pretensions, as he most needed the widow’s money. He was ‘a thief on the wrong side of Newgate;’ that is, he outspent his income and ruined his tradesmen. He paid them by agreement just a quarter of what he owed those poor fellows, and thus he submitted to be three-quarters kept by his butcher, baker, and tailor. He made an ‘appearance,’ which it was an easy thing to do at other people’s expense. He had been the official keeper of public funds, of which he unluckily failed to give satisfactory account. He alleged that his book-keeping had been done by deputy, and his deputy seems to have been loose in his arithmetic. Altogether, this Crowe was a supreme rogue, but he was one of a very large family. The widow’s fortune would have saved his post, if not his credit, at the Navy Treasury Office. The widow, however, scornfully refused to sit on the same branch with Crowe, and Sir Sackville, thoroughly plucked, was ejected from the office in question.

But, Dr. Raven! The doctor was of another quality. The physician would not be said nay. The nay was decies repetita, but it was not heeded. Still, he was not the nearer to his object by being impeded. One evening he took up a copy of Green’s ‘Quip,’ which was then a work of some thirty years old. His eye fell on these words: ‘Lawyers are troubled with the heat of the liver, which makes the palms of their hands so hot that they cannot be cooled unless they be rubbed with oil of angels.’ Forthwith Dr. Raven bethought him that Abigails were very like lawyers, and that he would try a few angels on the palms of Widow Bennett’s waiting-woman, to gain access to whom, however, he had to oil many a serving-man’s palm also. Abigail was willing to betray her mistress for a consideration, and it was made worth her while to admit Raven (like Iachimo into the chamber of the sleeping Imogen) into the apartment where the widow lay in a lapse of loveliness, buried in lace and rosy slumbers. Raven awoke the sleeping dove with all gentleness; as she did not scream he pressed his suit, craftily pointing out to her that as his presence compromised her reputation, the latter could only be saved by an immediate marriage. Then the thoroughly awakened goddess lifted up her voice to tremendous purpose. ‘Reputation,’ indeed! She knew hers to be safe, and she lustily screamed ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder;’ in order to bring in her household to keep it so. The men-servants, seeing no further chance of angels or marks from the physician, flung themselves upon Raven, as if he had really been more intent upon murder than marriage. They held him till the august parish constable arrived, and the constable ‘run him in’ to the Compter for the night. On the following morning Raven was brought up before Mr. Recorder Finch. That impartial judge, sympathising with the insulted widow, whom he so highly respected, committed Dr. Raven for trial at the ensuing sessions. It was not at all likely that Sir Heneage Finch would be slow in protecting the beautiful widow of his deceased friend from such saucy rogues as Dr. Raven, who was subsequently imprisoned for half a year.

The dramatists certainly had their eye upon this escapade of Raven’s. Rowley, especially, adopted the bed-room incident in his ‘City Match,’ where Alexander Bloodhound gets into the Widow Wagge’s chamber. Alexander half-undresses himself, and so frightens the widow that she consents to marry him to save her credit; but she disappoints the audacious wooer at last. Mr. Planché reproduced this scene in 1828 in his ‘Merchant’s Wedding.’ The daring suitor there was Frank Plotwell (C. Kemble); the lady was Aurelia, a wealthy heiress, played by Miss Chester, who was as superb a beauty as Widow Bennett herself. How glorious, too, Charles Kemble looked in his King Charles suit, and how like a jockey in his silks when he half-stripped, are things only to be remembered by old play-goers with good memories.

At this time there was a Kentish knight keeping lonely state in London. He was a widower twice over; but loving matrimony so well from his sweet experience of it that he was dying to find another mate. The Derings were of a very old stock, and Sir Edward, thirty years of age in 1628, might have looked high in search of the mate in question. He was of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a sound scholar. In religion rather austere, but with an anti-episcopalian bias. His tastes would have made him a very acceptable member of the Society of Antiquaries. In person he was a handsome fellow, was gifted with kindly dispositions, of good carriage and expression in speaking, was fond of applause, and was unaffectedly conscious that he deserved all he could get of it. Some ladies thought so too. Elizabeth Tufton, one of the nine muses—daughters, we should say—of Sir Nicholas, put her hand in his as frankly as he asked for it; and King James made a knight of the bridegroom, who was none the more a gentleman for the dignity conferred on him. The bride died after the birth of a son, and therewith ended a brief day-dream of married happiness. They carried the young mother to the grave when she was little more than twenty, nor was the young widower much older.

That young widower found consolation, however, at a pretty early period of his mourning time. He took to his home a new bride from Sussex, Ann Ashburnham, whose mother was connected with the family of the great Buckingham. Thenceforward, for a season, Sir Edward Dering became a public man. He was busier in Kent than his father, Sir Anthony (a baronet), and he was to be seen about court, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, attending more closely upon the Duke than upon Charles the First, and hoping to get into Parliament under Buckingham’s favour. But fate was against him. The Duke was assassinated in 1626, and Sir Edward was called from court by the sickness of his fair young wife. In one of her letters to him, while he was at Whitehall, she wrote, ‘I cannot send any good news of my couge’s going away, yet I eat joyes of lecarich.’ The ‘couge’s’ signified ‘cough’s.’ The futile remedy was ‘juice of liquorice.’ At the age of twenty-three this second Lady Dering was laid by the side of the first, leaving a son and daughter too young to remember their mother.

Sir Edward was again solitary, and was bearing his solitude impatiently, when chance brought him acquainted with the story of the fair widow in the Jewry. A new act in the City comedy opens, and to gay music ‘enter Sir Edward Dering.’ It is St. Edmund’s day. Raven is in limbo. The widow is alone. The new lover calls in St. Olave’s. Mrs. Bennett, however, declines to receive him. He sends in a letter to her by her servant, who brings it back, but the maid tells him that her mistress had read it. Read it! Then there was hope. Within the next four days Sir Edward had oiled the palms of men-servants and clerks to the tune of eighty shillings. He called again, but was denied. He wrote again, and she kept the letter. Kept the letter! Here was a hint to proceed further. Sir Edward ‘oiled’ more palms, and moved cousins of his own and cousins of the widow—being of his acquaintance—to stir her to be gracious to so handsome and hopeful a lover. He had the widow’s cash-keeper to sup with him; and, perhaps at the cash-keeper’s suggestion, on the last day in November, 1628, Sir Edward was to be seen twice at the Old Jewry Church, near enough to the handsome widow for her to see him without appearing to turn her eyes expressly for that purpose. Reckoning on having made a favourable impression, he, on the following day, wrote a third letter. This Mistress Bennett deigned to keep, which was favour enough for the present. Presuming on that favour the ardent lover (who had lodged himself at a house opposite the widow’s), at the end of two or three days, rang thrice in one forenoon at the widow’s bell. ‘Mrs. Bennett was not at home.’ She was abroad, prosecuting the over-zealous lover, Dr. Raven. A friend, and not a servant of the widow, on Dering repeating his call next day, one Mr. George Loe, brought a very cautious message to the wooer. It was made up of what she said, and what he thought. What she said was to this effect: that a Mr. Steward, from whom she wished to buy the wardship he had had conferred on him of her own child, but who wished, on his side, to have legal marital wardship of the child’s mother, was ‘testy,’ and ‘she could give admittance to none till she had concluded all matters of business with him.’ What Loe added was, ‘She has a good opinion of you. I have spoken nobly of you. You shall hear from me as soon as Steward is disposed of, and,’ said Loe (probably the sly widow had told him to say it), ‘don’t refrain from going to the church where she prays unless you think it disparages yourself.’ Disparagement! It was an honour. On the very first Sunday in December Dering paid double worship at St. Olave’s, Old Jewry. He went as parishioner and lover, uniting, as Mr. Bruce says, in his preface to ‘Proceedings in Kent,’ ‘the worship of Mrs. Bennett with that ordinarily offered at St. Olave’s.’ The interference of servants in the affair here curiously manifests itself. As Sir Edward left the church George Newman, whom he had ‘oiled,’ whispered in Dering’s ear, ‘Good news!’ As Sir Edward was sitting after dinner at his own table Newman entered, and the fellow bade the cavalier be of good cheer. ‘My mistress,’ he said, ‘likes well your carriage, and, if your land is not settled on your eldest son, there is good hope for you.’ The news, true or false, was paid for at the cost of a pound sterling. If he smiled as he went out so also does Sir Edward, as he leans back in his chair, and murmurs to himself, ‘This evening I will seek counsel of Heneage Finch.’

At the Recorder’s house you may see, in the next scene of the drama, Finch and Dering at supper. The friends and kinsmen take their claret and talk of love. The two suitors to the widow were on terms of unlimited confidence and frankness. ‘Ned,’ said Sir Heneage, ‘I wend no more to the widow’s house. I have done. I have no success to look for. I have no desire to go further. I will do or say anything you ask me in this or any other matter.’ Nothing could be kinder than Sir Heneage Finch.

Meanwhile Mr. Steward was at the widow’s feet; or, rather, he stood upright on his own, dictating, rather than asking, terms. The widow’s heart was set, she said, upon having her child’s wardship in her own hands. She was willing to pay fifteen hundred pounds for it. As the words fell from her beautiful lips, Edmund Aspull, Mrs. Bennett’s cash-keeper, advanced, with the amount all ready. If Steward said anything gallant it has not reached the audience. He seems to have had an ‘aside,’ in which he murmured that for nothing less than four thousand pounds would he ever release his right in the ward. ‘With my good will,’ said the widow, ‘I will never look upon that fellow again!’ But, in legal matters she, of course, would consult her good friend, Sir Heneage. To do him justice, Finch was always ready to give prudent counsel whenever he was asked for it.

‘Madam,’ said George Newman, entering the room, ‘Sir Edward Dering is at the door; he prays of your kindness leave to present himself.’

‘Desire Sir Edward,’ replied the widow, ‘to excuse me. I am not willing to entertain discourse of that kind.’

Newman went to the outer door, where Aspull, the cashier, was talking with Sir Edward, and delivered the reply.

The lover stood in sad contemplation, and then he remarked, ‘I am in a wilderness of uncertainty.’

Aspull carried the ‘pretty phrase’ upstairs to his mistress.

‘Tell Sir Edward that I will see him,’ said Mrs. Bennett.

When serving-man and cash-keeper had left the wooer and the wooed to themselves, the latter went methodically to matters of business and matters of sentiment. Sir Edward had the privilege which custom gave a lover, on declaring himself; he ‘saluted’ the lady. He then went into details as to his state and estate, to all of which the widow listened with interest. When he touched on the question of affection, the handsome widow looked at the handsome widower, but she answered neither yea nor nay. She kept him as he was. Indeed, the knight begged her to defer her answer till he again presented himself to her. She consented, but therewith she remarked, ‘I have no present purpose of marrying.’ She would name a second day for the meeting, after her cousin Cradock (a friend of Sir Edward’s) should come to town. Dering saw that she was desirous he should then leave her to herself. He respectfully kissed the formally offered cheek, and bowing, withdrew. He, no doubt, went and told all to Sir Heneage.

Mistress Bennett said of Dering, soon after he had retired, ‘He comes not as boisterous as Steward and Sir Peter come. Steward! As soon as I get from him the broad seal which releases my child, he may be hanged ere I have anything more to do with him.’ What she said of both these suitors was duly reported to the third. Whereupon he pressed his suit and he got friends to press it for him. The widow, however, could not be hurried. Her cousin Cradock was a man it behoved her to consult upon a family question like the present; and the Recorder, being not only her friend but her suitor’s, would be indispensable authority on matters both of law and of property.

Day after day Dering’s patience waned till there was none left. On New Year’s day, 1629, the scene was of the liveliest at the widow’s house. Sir Edward had thought to frighten her into favouring his suit by courteously asking for the returning to him of his letters. The widow sent them back without a word of comment. Her friends standing round her wondered at her decision, and, if the lady and cavalier told their respective stories to Finch he probably looked as wise as a judge while he listened.

The scene is still at the widow’s house, and there again Sir Edward treads the stage. He cannot call on Mistress Bennett, but he can on Mistress Norton, who is his good friend, and the widow’s companion. From her and other household sources he hears that the widow is often sad and silent. If she breaks silence, it is only to remark that she will never marry at all. If Mrs. Norton commends Sir Edward the widow beshrews her companion, and protests that she hears so much of him all day long, she ‘can’t sleep all night for dreaming of him.’ Perhaps in one of those night visions she confounded Dering with Raven, for she dreamed that she ran away from him in her nightgear, out of the bedroom into her great parlour, whereby she caught catarrh. However, Sir Edward could not push his renewed suit to a happy termination. He sat for an hour with Mrs. Norton, talking of the widow, when he would have preferred to be talking with the widow herself. The latter was reported to be sad, in perplexity, and not likely to marry at all—just yet. This did not render Sir Edward’s suit desperate; but he wrote himself ‘fool’ for having asked for the return of his letters, when Newman told him that she had double services of plate, for town and country use, and that she had that glory of all proudly furnished houses of the olden time, beds, worth one hundred pounds the bed.

Again, the scene shifts to the street before Sir George Croke’s house. The lady is about to descend from her chariot, and lo! the lover is there with a petition to be allowed to assist her. He does more, of course; he escorts her into the parlour, where the judge and many ladies are assembled. While general conversation went on, Sir Edward assiduously courted the widow from behind her chair. They talk in whispers, and are let alone. It is all prayer on one side, fencing prettily on the other. Prettily made accusations are humbly answered; she will not be pressed, not she. Her final reply should be made through her cousin, Cradock.

‘Pray,’ said Dering, ‘sweeten the answer with your own breath.’ And then Sir George drank to him in a glass of muscado while Sir Edward kissed the lady’s cheek. As the judge and the lover parted at the door, the former did not hesitate to declare his conviction that the widow was not to be won.

‘Won she must be,’ thought Sir Edward, ‘by one means or another.’ He rather stooped to find them. For instance, on a certain morning the widow’s four-year-old son was walking with his nursemaid, Susan, in Finsbury Fields; Susan was induced by a friend to take the boy to Sir Edward’s lodging, where Dering regaled him with cake, gave him an amber box, treated the maid to a glass of wine, hoped her mistress would not be angry with him, and put in the maid’s hand a five-shilling piece.

‘Lor, sir!’ exclaimed Susan, ‘I, and all the house, pray for you; and young Master Simon here does ever call you Father!’

The widow did not seem to be in haste to ratify the relationship. Viscount Lumley’s chariot was at her door five times in one week. My Lord went to St. Olave’s, and escorted her home after service. All London began to take part in the comedy. New lovers again went to the Old Jewry only to meet denial. Lumley himself, who was but a ragged sort of viscount, was constrained, at last, to take reluctant leave, after his hopes had been buoyed up by interference in his favour by no less a person than the Earl of Dorset, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. Sir Edward did not benefit by the withdrawal of the Viscount. Reports reached him that the widow had expressed some liking for him, but not enough to induce her to marry with him. Driven to the extreme of perplexity, Sir Edward engaged another supporter, namely, the Cheapside mercer, Izaak Walton. Izaak celebrated Dering’s praises; mutual friends reported small incidents with much exaggeration. Cousin Cradock knew how Sir Edward might win her; another knew that she was already won, but was coy to confess it. One Master Catesby swore that Dering should both ‘win and wear.’ Lady Cleere told Dering’s father, Sir Anthony, that such a capricious widow was hardly worth the wearing; but Lady Wroth stood up for her as a good and wise gentlewoman, whom any lover might be proud to make his wife.

The grand scene of the comedy occurred when Sir Edward was admitted to see the widow, on condition that he made no reference to the subject of marrying. The interview was a scene for Frith to paint. Sir Edward, with formal low bow, acknowledged the graciousness which admitted him to this interview; but he hoped it would not be the last of that sort of happiness which he might enjoy. Mistress Bennett murmured that chance might still bring them within sight of one another. Then the lover stretched the contract a little, without breaking it. He touched upon his love, her happiness, and cleverly thanked her for forbidding him to pursue making further proposals, as therein might lie the fact that she need not forbid what she, perhaps, had resolved to grant. Some more word-fencing went on; but it ended with a denial on the lady’s part, and a request from the gentleman that she would authorise him to give a public reason for the denial.

‘Say,’ she replied, ‘that you left me, and take the glory of it.’

‘Nay!’ said Sir Edward; ‘I will never withdraw my affection nor my respect till I see you give your hand to another.’

We fear the widow was a dreadful coquette, for subsequent to the above ‘last sight,’ as the interview was called, Mistress Bennett granted an audience to Lord Lumley, when she went so far as to accept a ring from him—a step which almost implied a contract. But this roused the anxiety of her friends, and particularly of Viscount Campden, whose viscountship was just as new as Lumley’s. Lord Lumley, however, was an older member of the peerage. Lord Campden, like the deceased Bennett, had been a mercer; his name then was Baptist Hicks. Even after he had been knighted, Sir Baptist served customers in his open shop in Cheapside. He was now a peer, and people who were unable to attain the same dignity laughed at him. What was the use of Sir Baptist Hicks being a peer, when he had no son to inherit the title? But Lord Campden had a daughter; and the Cheapside mercer’s fair daughter (she was his eldest) was married to Edward, Baron Noel, of Ridlington. The mercer was resolved that Baron Edward should not dream of having derogated by such a match. Accordingly, the ex-shopkeeper succeeded in having the ‘remainder,’ that is, succession to the title, settled in the said son-in-law. In due time, Lord Noel became Viscount Campden, and then gained a step in the peerage by wedding with Juliana, the richest heiress of Cheapside. From them is descended the present Earl of Gainsborough, one of whose daughters, Lady Blanche Noel, made that romantic marriage two years ago with her father’s organist, Mr. Murphy.

But, we have to get back to the first ennobled of the Hickses and his friend, the widow. Lord Campden and Sir George Croke united in insisting that she should return to Lord Lumley the ring she had accepted, and therewith give him his coup de grâce. Ring and letter were despatched on St. Valentine’s Day, and Lord Lumley made his final exit. All London was busy with wondering what the next move would be. It seemed in favour of Sir Edward. Sir Henry Wotton met him in the presence chamber, and wished him ‘full sail.’ The mother of Sir Edward’s late wife, accompanied by that deceased wife’s sister, were indefatigable in lauding Dering’s conjugal virtues in the widow’s ear. Beneficed clergymen, church dignitaries, London gentlemen, country squires, met in the best room in the widow’s house and sang the chorus of his praise. The provoking beauty could not be brought to a decision. She had made a selection, she said, but she really could not say of whom. All in good time. And so this singular love affair proceeded, till the widow consented to grant one more interview, positively for the last time, to her pertinacious suitor, and failed to perform her promise.

‘I will go to Sir Heneage Finch,’ cried the perplexed wooer.

It is very clear that all along Finch perplexed Dering quite as much as the widow did. The Recorder spoke well of Sir Edward to himself and to his friends, and promised to speak well of him to the widow. And perhaps he did; but at the same time Sir Heneage did not neglect his own interests. One morning the bells of St. Dunstan’s in the West, the fashionable church for marriages, rang out a merry wedding peal. Dr. Raven came out of prison, where he was some time in durance for his silly assault, just in time to hear the peal. Sir Edward may be supposed to have put his head out inquiringly from his window. If so, he must have enjoyed a pretty sight—that of Sir Heneage Finch, in holiday array, leading into the beautiful widow Bennett’s house that most tantalising of fair women, as his bride—Lady Finch! Bow bells took up the peal, as if to announce to all Cocagne that they had all the while known what was going on. Cockneydom protested that it had never expected any other issue to the City comedy. Indeed there was a double marriage. While the widow had been playing with her suitors, her niece, pretty Mary Croke, daughter of Sir George, had been indulging in pretty love passages with Harbottle, afterwards Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Master of the Rolls. On April 16, 1629, aunt and niece, with their respective lovers, met at St. Dunstan’s, and were then and there happily married.

The marriage of Sir Heneage with the fair widow was productive of two daughters,[1] of whom one, Anne, married that Earl of Conway so celebrated by Burnet for his ignorance. When a foreign minister once spoke to him of the Circles of Germany, my lord laughed, and asked, ‘What have circles to do with affairs of state?’ We may appropriately add that Mrs. Bennett’s son, Simon, became a man of immense wealth—wealth which his three daughters carried into as many noble families, very much to the satisfaction of the latter. But what of the disappointed lover in this comedy? Well, the curtain went down merrily for him also. He happened to see pretty Unton Gibbes, daughter of the Warwickshire Sir Ralph, and Sir Edward, having an alacrity in falling in love, was ‘over head and ears’ immediately. The lady went straightway to the same depths. They came up together, happy man and wife, and lived like young lovers. He was passionately attached to her to the last; but she survived him full thirty years, finding solace at the affectionate hands of two sons and two daughters. For Unton, Sir Edward had one of those pet names which, outside the circle of love, sound so unlovely. It was Numps! ‘My ever dear Numps,’ he says, in a letter addressed to her from London, in 1640, full of political intelligence, ‘thy pretious and hearty letter I received with that ardor that it was written.... I shall not see thee so soon as I wish.... God preserve my pretty children and send thee ease of thy troublesome cough.... I thank thee for the length of thy welcome letters, wherein I confess that I cannot equal thy love;’ and he ends with ‘Thine, more and more, if possibly,’ &c. One passage of public news in this letter brings a well-known incident before us. ‘The scaffolds are up in Westminster Hall, and Strafford comes to the barre on Monday morning.’ Some of Sir Edward’s letters to his wife are subscribed ‘to thy best self the heart of thine own Edward Dering.’ And if he writes ‘thine in haste,’ he adds, ‘but heartily,’ and writes outside, ‘To my best and dearest friend the Lady Dering,’ while my lady endorses them, ‘From my dearest.’ One letter quaintly begins with ‘My dear and my comfortable Numps, my happiness is (for the greatest part of it in this world) circuited in the same sphere with thine. Love and cheerfulness are blessings invaluable, and if perchance some excentricke motion interpose, all at last (as in the sphaeres) helpe to make up the harmony. So I hope with us every motion shall helpe the tune.’ It would seem that, in absence, they encouraged one another from Scripture. ‘I did presently, as you wished,’ he writes, ‘read over the 91 Spalme (as you call it). I did think to return you a text, but am in haste;’ and ‘Thine own, as ever, for ever.’ The same tone makes musical all his letters, and her own seem to have been attuned to the same melody. The former are full moreover of most interesting public intelligence.

For a troubled time Sir Edward was the much perplexed and ill-requited Lieutenant of Dover Castle. Released from that charge, he was the happy, intellectual, Kentish squire. Next, his county returned him to the Long Parliament, and he commenced his career with fierce opposition to Laud, hoping that ‘His Grace would have more grace, or no Grace at all.’ Sir Edward was what would now be called an Ultra-Radical. He was for abolishing bishops and was ill-affected towards royalty. He took up with the ‘Root and Branch’ party, and they pushed him forward to the proposing of revolutionary measures; and when he withdrew from the course which they had forced him to take they loaded him with execration, and succeeded in turning him out of Parliament for breach of privilege. Subsequently, he lay hid from the pursuit of Parliament, and he is said to have disguised himself as a parson and to have read prayers in a village church. He joined the King. His estate was sequestered, his house at Surrenden was plundered. At a later period the Parliament allowed him to enter on signing the Covenant and paying a composition; but before the affair was concluded the erst lover of the twenty-thousand-pound widow was, in 1644, laid to rest in Pluckley churchyard, which neither covenanting nor compounding can ever disturb.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] It was his son, by a former marriage, who became Lord Chancellor and Earl of Nottingham.

TO BRIGHTON AND BACK AGAIN.

Some few years ago, philosophers were jostling excursionists in once gay Brighthelmstone; they discussed the prospects of science, and united archæology with a considerable amount of picnicking and claret-cup. We here submit for the general recreation a paper that was not read at the meeting of the British Association in that town, but which will be perused in the larger Elsewhere. Its staple commodity will consist of the anecdotal waifs and strays connected with old Brighton, which philosophers do not regard, but which have an especial value and interest of their own. Accordingly we pass by the Druidical mistletoe, British barrows, Roman coins, and Saxons, Danes, and Normans, and we come at once to the Brighton of the middle of the last century, when rumours of wars from abroad connected themselves with a literary question and song-writing at home.

About the year 1758 fears of invasion caused several camps to be established on our south coast. There was one at Brighton. Martial spirit attuned the popular lyre to both warlike and sentimental strains. One of the airs then composed has remained popular to this day. ‘The Girl I left behind me’ was originally known by that and also by a second name, ‘Brighton Camp,’ to which reference is made in the following verse:—

Oh, ne’er shall I forget the night,

The stars were bright above me,

And gaily lent their silv’ry light,

When first she vow’d to love me.

But now I’m bound to Brighton Camp,

Kind Heaven then pray guide me,

And send me safely back again

To the girl I’ve left behind me.

This air has been claimed as Irish by Moore and by Bunting. The former took great liberties with the air. Bunting left it as he found it. But he did not find it till the year 1800, when he heard it played by an Irish harper named O’Neile. The harper had probably picked it up from some regimental band leaving their quarters; but it was popular in England nearly half a century before the date of its first being known in Ireland.

Let those who throng Brighton now just consider what it was about a century ago. In 1761 we read that ‘the men of the town were wholly employed in fishing, and the women in mending their nets.’ There was, however, a free school in Brighton; and boys of twelve years of age, who had learned navigation there, obtained very fair wages in the ‘fishery.’ There was a population, fixed and movable, even at that period. Many of the houses are described as ‘of flint, with windows and doors frequently adorned with very good brick.’ When Brighton took its first step forward for the purpose of attracting visitors we may learn from a contemporary chronicle of 1761, in which we read that ‘Of late the town has become a resort for the drinking of salt water and for bathing. If the town grows in the next seven years as it has done in the last seven, there will be no better in England.’ Brighton then boasted of ‘one or two public rooms that could be equalled only by those of York.’ People could then put up with what was called ‘accommodation,’ which was of a very uncomfortable character; but everything was of a free-and-easy quality, and most visitors were content to take things as they found them.

To this rule, however, there was one notable exception, just where we should expect to find it.

Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since Dr. Johnson wrote to Boswell, in November of the year 1776, ‘I was some weeks this autumn at Brighthelmstone. The place was very dull, and I was not well.’ The fact is, that Johnson cared little for the beauties of nature. He was like Charles Lamb, who once being at the summit of a mountain from which there was a prospect of unsurpassable grandeur, saw nothing but with his mind’s eye, and that was at the moment directed to the ham and beef shop at the corner of St. Martin’s Court. In like manner, Johnson hated prospects and views. We have the authority of Mrs. Piozzi for recording that Johnson used to say the best garden was the one which produced the most roots and fruits, and the river most to be prized was the one which produced the most fish. The Doctor unmercifully laughed at Shenstone for valuing a stream according to its picturesqueness, and not its productiveness. Mrs. Piozzi believed that a walk in a wood when it rained was the only rural image which pleased Johnson. The pleasure then was perhaps derived from the thought that the rain would swell the peas, or make the turnips grow, or in some way or other tend to the comforting of the inward man. The feeling was akin to that of the epicurean who dwelt fondly on the orient gale which prospered the ship freighted with sugar for his gooseberry pie. It was that of Southey’s philosopher, who reverenced pig, and who, feeling a certain amount of poetry in a fragrant breeze, exclaimed,

O’er yon blossom’d field

Of beans it came, and thoughts of bacon rise.

Johnson detested the very sight of Brighton Downs, ‘because it was a country so truly desolate,’ he said, ‘that if one had a mind to hang oneself for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope.’ When the sage uttered this dictum he had certainly overlooked the subject of mutton. He forgot how admirable Sussex land was for turnip husbandry, and that even where the flints lay thickest the corn crops were all the more luxuriant. He did love forest trees, and might have remembered that the Sussex oak has no superior. He was fond of milk, and might have respected the Sussex cows which keep themselves almost beef, while they give rich milk, if so little of it. Hate the Downs! Let all such people remember, especially if they have a liking for a haunch of mutton, that the rot was never known to be caught upon the South Downs; reason sufficient to authorise an epicure’s respect. We see poetry even in a Brighton fish shop. Was it not Sir Wilfred himself who made first-rate fishermen of the primitive Brighton bunglers?

Johnson and Lamb are not the only intellectual persons whose minds could turn from the contemplation of great to the consideration of smaller things. When Charles James Fox was with a party viewing the old master-pieces in the Louvre, he turned from them to bewail the too great effulgence of the sun. ‘This heat,’ he remarked, ‘will burn up all my turnips at St. Anne’s.’ So, Thomas Granville, replying to Rogers, who was referring to the overpowering glory of a sunset at which they were looking, observed that it was ‘handsome.’

Half a century ago, Brighton was as destitute of trees as it was in Johnson’s time. But now, if the Doctor were alive and had a halter, he would find no difficulty in searching for a branch from which he might hang, the very bulkiest of acorns. Where formerly only the hardy tamarisk grew, we may now see, as a local historian (Erredge) points out, that ‘belts and copses of thriving trees have reared their heads, and the elm, fir, sycamore, horse-chestnut, larch, beech, hazel, birch, hawthorn, and the holly, and other evergreens, having, by culture, become acclimatised, thrive so well as to induce the belief that they are indigenous to the south-east coast.’

That Brighton should have changed in a certain number of years is a matter for no surprise at all. The sea rolls its waves over the site on which the primitive village stood exposed to its fury. The cliffs which from behind the village looked proudly over the waves have been in part destroyed by the assailing waters which, it was once thought, were too remote ever to do them harm. But all this has been the work of time, and of a very long time. Yet change quite as remarkable has been accomplished within the lives of many persons still living. They must be old persons indeed, and must have suffered fourscore years at least of change of themselves, in order to have been within the periods of what Brighthelmstone was and what Brighton is. What it was towards the close of the last century, about 1790, when it had ceased to be the secluded fishing village it once had been, can scarcely now be realised. It was no uncommon thing for the town to be then visited by unlicensed rovers of the deep. These thieves, who ranged from Beachy Head to Selsey Bill, would drop anchor after dark, and send a company of rascals on shore in a boat, whose mission it was to break into some rich farmer’s house, or some well-endowed mansion near the coast, and carry off thence every article of value that was portable and could be turned to pirate’s use. There was such terror of these water-rats, that wherever they broke in their coming paralysed honest people, who were powerless through terror. They bound and gagged the inmates of houses which they intended to despoil, caroused without limit, and having plundered the dwelling, staggered down to the beach, and carried on board their burglarious freight. They would then lift anchor and drop down along the coast on their way to a place of refuge, or to attack some other house where there was promise of booty and good cheer. Their audacity is explicable only on the ground that they had confederates among the police authorities, if such things were in those early days. In ancient times, when the French landed there and attacked the town, the Sussex men turned out with alacrity, and often gave the invaders a tremendous thrashing. The sons of those Sussex men quailed in presence of the native rascalry, which was often cruel, but generally avoided murder.

If any archæologist care about the Druidical name for Brighton—if indeed there ever was one—or sigh to learn by what classic term the Romans designated their station on the sea, the care and the sigh are expended in vain. Let such antiquary console himself by laughing at the explanation of its later name, handed down from one local historian to another. Brighthelmstone, as it was called, has not puzzled the easily-satisfied etymologists. To explain it they invent a Saxon bishop who never existed, Brighthelm. They both beatify and canonise him under the title of St. Brighthelm, and having raised him to this dignity, they erect a stone to commemorate him, or a ‘ton,’ i.e., ‘town,’ in which he may dwell, and thus we arrive at ‘Brighthelmstone.’ Some etymologists pooh-poohed this derivation altogether, and they put forth something worse of their own. With them ‘Brighthelmstone’ is born of the shining helms of the Saxon galleys which used (or did not use) to be off the town! Another party sees in the name simply the indication that the town once belonged to a warrior whose family name was Brighthelm. We must frankly confess that one theory is quite as reasonable as the other.

But, whatever the meaning of the name and whencesoever it came, there was a universal outcry of alarm and disgust when people in a hurry, or not much observant of orthography, cut the name down from a stately three- to a little two-decker. When Brighthelmstone began, in 1787, to be called Brighton, and that even in print, there was a howl of reprobation and a general demand to ‘give us back our three syllables!’ Even Sylvanus Urban in that year moved out of his old ways into the new-fangled groove, and talked of ‘Brighton’ as if he were a fashionable young fop wearing a round hat and his own hair, instead of cocked hat and powder. Sylvanus had announced that a certain Mr. Norman of Bromley had recently died at ‘Brighton!’ Instantly Mr. Urban was assailed with an et tu Brute sort of assault. Afflicted archæologists never thought such a blow could come from St. John’s Gate. One gentleman remonstrated in a tone of the deepest suffering. He argued that, if this abbreviating custom be carried on, Brighthelmstone will not only be wronged, but the world at large, and universal in geography particular, will be thrown into utter confusion. Foreign nations, potentates, governments, scholars, foreign humanity generally, we are told, will be bewildered, and will no longer be able to distinguish between Brighthelmstone in Sussex and Brighton a village in Yorkshire! Brighton in Yorkshire seems to have withdrawn itself modestly from the world; and if the Emperor of Germany reads of the demise of Brown, Jones, or Robinson at Brighton, that august person will not be troubled as to its local whereabout.

If Brighton Camps had their picturesque aspect and a certain connection with poetry, they had occasional deep shadows to contrast with their lights. The camp of 1795 is especially remarkable for its dark colouring. The defenders of the country were left by the circumlocution office of that day with an insufficient quantity of bread, and with nasty flour to make it. The hungry Oxford militia plundered a mill, and having got all they wanted for their own stomachs, they seized a quantity of corn at Newhaven, not for their half-starved comrades in camp, but for the pleasure of throwing the whole of it into the river at that place. Eight of the mutineers were tried, of whom two, Cooke (called ‘Captain’) and Parish, were sentenced to be shot, the rest to be flogged. During the eight days of trial the circumlocution office gave them as little food as when the office drove them to mutiny through hunger. If it had not been for the morning and evening supplies passed to them through the bars of their airing ground by Samaritans of Russell Street, the accused militiamen would not have lived through the trial to be shot or flogged. The last ceremony was carried out with much lugubrious pomp. Three of the six men received an instalment of 300 strokes, equivalent to 2,700 lashes, and the other three were respited for future punishment. Then came the more merciful act of putting quickly to death the two men condemned to be shot. There was indeed much slow circumstance before the two culprits were fairly in face of the company of their fellow-militiamen selected to carry out the sentence. For the support and encouragement of the firing party not to shirk their duty and attempt to run, there was drawn up behind them a company of artillery, with shotted cannon and lighted matches, ready to blow the firing party to atoms if they showed any reluctance to destroy their two comrades. They showed nothing but alacrity under the circumstances. Cooke and Parish, kneeling composedly on their own coffins, were shot by what was curiously described as ‘a delinquent platoon of twelve of their own regiment at the distance of only six paces,’ and then did not kill both! One, as he lay on the ground, had to be ‘finished’ by a pistol-shot through the head. Perhaps the ‘delinquent platoon’ were too hungry to aim steadily. One thing is sure, namely, that nobody at the circumlocution office was flogged for famishing the soldiers, nor was the rascal who supplied the filthy so-called flour hanged. Probably he held the plate at the next Brighton Charity Sermons, and sneered at the poor folk who only contributed ‘coppers.’

In the first year of the present century the ‘Crown and Anchor’ in East Street was proudly known as ‘The Hotel’; but the ‘Ship’ soon endeavoured to attract fashionable visitors by a dining-room decorated with ‘The Story of Telemachus’ in bronze on blue. At that time coaches had not learned to run between Brighton and London in five hours. In summer the earliest coach left Brighton at 7 A.M., and arrived in London at 5 P.M. The night coach left at 10 P.M. and was due in London at 7 the next morning, keeping its time when it could. Then for crossing ‘the streak of liquid silver,’ there were ‘pacquets’ advertised to run ‘in time of peace’ three times a week, always setting sail, weather permitting, in the evening. One of these ‘pacquets’ manifested Napoleonic ideas, for it was called the Buonaparte schooner, and it made a great boast of having two cabins, a state room, and the means of making up twenty beds.

At this period it is amusing to read in a local record that ‘literature is not neglected in this town; for in Middle Street there is an academy where young gentlemen are boarded and educated.’ The idea that a boarding-school necessarily implies literary cultivation has long since expired.

While our pulpits, in the early part of the present century were denouncing the stage, and persuading people to leave theatres to the devil, and to brace up their minds and bodies at the seaside, the marine pulpits were busy in bidding people to avoid the coast and to get back to London and their business as speedily as possible. In ‘Their Majesties’ Servants,’ I have alluded to the audiences who ‘were preached down to the coast, and especially to Brighton, and to the zealous pastors in the latter place who preached them back again. One of these, the Rev. Dr. Styles, of Union Street, Brighton, did his best to stop the progress of London on Sea. He left the question of the stage for others to deal with; but he strictly enjoined all virtuously minded people to avoid watering-places generally and Brighton in particular, unless they wished to play into the devil’s hands. He denounced the breaking up of homes, the mischief of minds at rest, and the consequences of flirting and philandering. He looked upon a brief holiday as a long sin at the seaside; and with prophecy of dire results attending on neglect of his counsel, he drove or sought to drive all the hard workers in search of health and in the enjoyment of that idle repose which helps them in their search, back to London. Then, as now, England stood shamefully distinguished for the indecorum of its sea-coast bathers; but, with certain religious principles whereby to hold firmly, the good doctor does not think that much ill may befal therefrom, and he sends all erring sheep with their faces towards London, and with a reference to Solomon’s Song (above all things!) bidding them to wait for a south wind of the Holy Spirit to blow over their spices!’

The list of Brighton notabilities is not a long one, but it invariably contains the name of Phœbe Hassell, who served in the army as a man and who died at an age which is calculated to make Mr. Thoms shake the head of incredulity. But there is a Brighton woman far worthier of being remembered than old Phœbe Hassell. We allude to the mother of James Rooke, a simple young fellow who had been drawn in by a crafty tailor, named Howell, to rob the mail, as it was then carried on horseback, between Brighton and Shoreham. On Phœbe Hassell’s information, the two were hanged and gibbeted. In course of time, the clothes and flesh of the culprits had utterly wasted away. When nothing remained but the skeletons, the aged mother of Rooke, who had often been a pilgrim to the mournful shrine of her son, went nightly to the gibbets in all weathers. Nothing prevented her from performing that sacred duty; and when her object became known it was sacredly respected. It was to collect the bones of her unhappy son, and of the companion in his sad fate, as time, wind, and tempest shook them apart and out of the respective skeletons till nothing was left in the chains. She gathered them, and carried them reverently and affectionately to her poor home; and when there were no more to gather, she deposited all in a little box, and perhaps with some sad memories of the hour when she had rejoiced at the birth of her son, she, all alone, save those memories, buried them in what she considered the hallowed ground of old Shoreham churchyard. Poor mother! Many a woman has been canonised for the performance of duties not half so holy.

The widow Rooke is forgotten, while the annals of fashion still keep warm the memory of people less worthy of being remembered. There was a time when Mrs. Prince, as old Dame Gunn, the bathing woman, used to call Mrs. Fitzherbert, reigned in Brighton. She was one of those women who justify the old saying that beauty is of every age. She was exquisite when young. There are some among us who may remember that she was queenly, when crowned by years. Like a queen, she was surrounded by duchesses at Brighton; the most august dandies worshipped at her shrine in Castle Square; and among those idolaters were the Prince’s own brothers, with men of less degree, yet perhaps higher fame. In the number of the latter must be reckoned Colonel Hanger (late Lord Coleraine), whose first freak was to join a gang of gipsies, and take a dusky bride from among the daughters in the tents. Hanger led such a rollicking life, that when he grew old and tired of it, the new and enforced quiet came upon him like a novel enjoyment.

There were some singular specimens of ladies in the old Brighton days. None more singular than Lady Clermont, who used to take a tea-spoonful of brandy in her tea, by first pouring the brandy over the back of the spoon and then correcting the mistake, which she attributed to defect of sight, by filling the spoon in the ordinary way. Of a different temper was the fair and ambitious Lady Haggerstone. My lady invited the Prince to a rural festival at her villa near the Spa. She received him in character, as a milkmaid, ready to concoct a syllabub for the royal guest. She carried in one hand a silver pail, in the other a milking stool, such as the most ingenious of artistic upholsterers could alone invent. A characteristic hat, with long cherry-coloured ribbons, adorned her head; and the milkmaid’s apron would have fetched hundreds of pounds for its lace. The syllabub, however, was never accomplished. Some absurd accident brought the attempt to an end, which after brief laughter was altogether forgotten. In contrast with this gentle masquerade, was the bold, loudly-brogued, but beautiful Lady Nagle, with her husband Sir Edmund’s miniature suspended from the longest of chains, flinging about as she moved, but always, as she said, near her heart. The Prince loved to have these and other fair ones about him. They made up his table at whist; brought him all sorts of gossip, home and foreign, and made themselves conspicuous in a hundred ways, as they figured on the Steyne and excited the wonder of simple-minded spectators.

Sir Benjamin Bloomfield was another of the old Brighton celebrities. He owed his position as Master of the Household to the Prince of Wales to an accident. ‘Slade,’ said his Royal Highness to the Colonel of that name, ‘do you know any gentleman who plays the violoncello?’ ‘I only know one, sir,’ replied the Colonel, ‘Captain Bloomfield, of the Artillery.’ ‘Bring him here to dinner,’ rejoined the Prince, ‘and tell him to bring his violoncello with him; we’ll play something together after dinner.’ The Captain played to good purpose. The Prince again invited him as a guest; subsequently he attached the violoncello player to his household, and Sir Benjamin became as well-known a figure on and about the Steyne as the Prince himself was.

The story of the Pavilion will be found more amusing in Cobbett’s satirical chronicle of its rise and progress than in any of the local histories. The history of its decline and fall is within the memory of him who never remembers anything—the oldest inhabitant. The noble eccentrics who figured in the Pavilion circle have been stereotyped. But there were eccentrics without, whose eccentricity amused those within that circle. One of these was well known on the Brighton stage.

An ignorant impatience of taxation was manifested at Brighton, especially when the heavy impost was laid on hair-powder. By nearly general resolve people avoided the tax by leaving off the powder. Anyone who ventured to appear in public, powdered, incurred the peril of being pelted. Even on the stage, when genteel comedy required the sword by the side and the powder on the hair, there was a difference of opinion as to the wearing of it, and the actor portant épée et poudre was both hissed and applauded, as sentiment prevailed among the audience. At Brighton, Mr. Fox, the manager’s son, had to appear in a character of the sword and powder period. He took a singular course. He powdered one half of his hair, and left the other au naturel. People laughed at his droll aspect, and also at his reason for putting it on. Mr. Fox explained that he had taken that course in order to please both parties—the powderers and the anti-powderers. It was accepted for wit.

As far less has been said and written of Brighton just as royalty began to tire of its old love, than of the town when it seemed a seventh heaven to the King, George IV., we will look into one year of its sayings and doings—A.D. 1825—when it was learning to go alone.

Brighton had long rejoiced in the sunshine of royalty. It veiled its head, and wore sackcloth, and cast ashes upon itself, when royalty was absent. At least, it would have done all this, but for certain consolatory circumstances. Nevertheless, it affected a very decent horror. This is especially manifested in the fashionable intelligence in the local papers. The first thing thought of there is the condition and prospects of the Pavilion. That shrine of haut ton is spoken of as a most interesting invalid, who is sick only because the sun is absent, and all Brighton is therefore sick with it. Yet will the invalid be convalescent if Hope is the physician, and then sympathetic Brighton will feel itself also ‘very much better, thank you.’ But ‘should the King’—for we now speak of the time when George IV. had grown tired of his gew-gaw—should ‘his most sacred Majesty’ nothing less than ‘graciously condescend to inhabit’ for awhile the ‘marine palace’ which he once both well and wisely loved—in such case Brighton would not only be restored to health, but would enjoy a sensation of stalwart youth and ecstatic immortality.

It is distressing to read the expression of sorrow at the idea that the King, so to speak, continually went on not coming. With the new year (1825) the wail opens to its old solemn tune. ‘There is no change at the Pavilion.’ ‘We hope that the desire to see his Majesty again among us may speedily be realised.’ Alas! the realisation does not speedily come, and the ‘Fashionable Intelligencer’ wept in its imitation lawn handkerchief, and then wiped its loyal eyes and exclaimed, ‘The gloom of silence and desertion continues to envelop the Pavilion.’ Double envelopes of desertion and of silence. Then followed reports that the King was coming soon. The soon was succeeded by ‘a period not yet determined.’ Finally, it was said that his Majesty would visit Brighton and take up his residence there during the Christmas holidays. But before that time and its event arrived, ‘Fashionable Intelligencer’ discovered that, instead of the King coming, his best wine was going. It did not require much logic to enable observers to come to the conclusion that if the best vintage were taking its departure, Sacred Majesty would not be among speedy arrivals. The town could hardly find consolation in the assurance that wherever the monarch might be, his heart was certainly at Brighton. The King never came. The local banks could not bear it. They unanimously broke.

A royal duke and duchess were scarcely equivalent to a king; yet the appearance of the Duke of York relieved in some degree the heart of Brighton from some of its heavings. There was a burst of joy when it was announced that H.R.H. ‘purposed to give an entertainment to his tonish friends.’ Everyone uninvited must henceforth consider himself to be mauvais ton. What a flutter there was when ‘tonish reporters’ proclaimed in the newspapers that the Duke would give a public breakfast at Ireland’s Royal Gardens, and that ‘the whole fashionable world would partake of the repast.’ Meanwhile ‘Fashionable Intelligencer’ watched the Duke and noted his ducal ways. We read with infinite emotion that his royal princeliness not only entered several shops, but that he purchased various articles in the most unassuming manner. The grand breakfast at last came off, and a very jolly affair it was; but Snob, who was not invited, and who felt his ‘fashionable’ honour very much ruffled in consequence, declared that the thing was low, and that the company were vulgar.

The Duchess of Gloucester did not put herself so prominently forward as the Duke of York; but the local observer did not fail to chronicle the proud circumstance, namely, that ‘The Duchess gives importance by her presence to the Steyne.’ Her condescension, too, was eulogised in lofty terms; but in the practice of proud humility the Duchess was nothing in comparison with the Bishop of Chichester. Robert James Carr was then, as prelate, only a year old. In the bloom of his official age the Right Rev. Father, &c., visited Brighton, and on his first Sunday there he repaired to the Royal Chapel. There was the ordinary congregation, but there was no clergyman. He had been taken ill and was unable to attend. But the diocesan was not proud. The fashionable chronicler tells us that the Bishop performed divine worship himself, ‘with his usual kindness and condescension.’

Sometimes high-born and ill-bred personages condescended to much stranger performances. Thus we find Jeames the Chronicler setting down a record of the fact that Sir Godfrey Webster, one of the fastest of the very rapid men of the day, had left the town, and that the regret was universal; but that the baronet would soon return, in order to take the chair of a free-and-easy at the ‘Swan Inn.’ It is to be observed, that whenever a ‘tonish’ person took his departure, all Brighton was filled with the most poignant regret. Also, that when a family or individual of the haut ton or beau monde (nice distinctions!) arrived, all Brighton was stirred with an indescribable sort of happiness. If Mrs. Fitzherbert left the town drowned in tears, the arrival of Lady Berwick brought it again to life and laughter. Sir Matthew Tierney’s post-carriage, galloping out of Brighton, pierced the hearts of all beholders; but there was balm in Gilead. How sympathetic must have been the fashionable reporter of 1825 when he wrote down the fact that, ‘Grateful rumour states that the esteemed Dukes of Richmond and Argyle, and the Marquis of Anglesea, again propose to add to the importance of the “Royal York Hotel” by residing there before the end of the present year.’ Mark the new and original figure, ‘grateful rumour.’ But to indulge in strange figures was the old Brighton reporter’s dearest delight. ‘The Marquis of Granby,’ says our friend, ‘without any feeling of indisposition, enjoys good spirits in Regency Square.’ This might astonish Mark Tapley, whose spirits were highest under prostration, but to us it seems natural enough. Another fashionable record, this time full of simplicity, is to the effect that ‘Lady William Gordon confesses the salutary influence of the coast air.’ Occasionally an unexpected arrival makes the reporter of it facetious. For example, the local chronicler states how the ‘Barossa,’ homeward bound from St. Helena, had dropped her anchor off the town the previous night, without any idea of her being there, and how her gallant captain, Hutchenson, went ashore, and gave joyous surprise to his lady and family, and how he was on board again, and on his way to the Downs, by five in the morning.

Speaking of ladies as well as of captains, let us not forget—indeed it is impossible to overlook—that incarnation of gaiety and beauty, the Lady Berwick of that day. Before her marriage, she was a Miss Sophia Dubouchet. This young lady was married to the second Lord Berwick in 1812. In some peerages she is styled plain ‘Sophia Dubouchet,’ with no more account of her family than if she had been, like Melchizedek, without father and without mother. It is clear that this lady, who died childless, was not of illustrious descent. How she looked at Brighton, in 1825, and what were ‘pretty Fanny’s ways’ in that year, at that place, we may gather from another of the scraps of intelligence. ‘A la mode Lady Berwick,’ says a contemporary local journal, ‘formerly Miss Sophia de Bouchez’ (the chroniclers were not particular as to names), ‘has been the source of attraction for our fashionable promenades during the week. It afforded us much pleasure to observe that the late abuse of the press has in no degree diminished the vivacity so characteristic of her ladyship and family.’ There were two other ladies at Brighton at that time who were of a quieter quality, and whose wealth was the least of their charms. They are thus registered in the fashionable column: ‘We have two of the richest heiresses in the country now with us, Miss Wykeham and Miss Pleydell.’ How little did the chronicler conjecture that the former lady, who died so recently as 1870, was the heroine of a romance, and might have been Queen of England if she had chosen to bear that magnificent title. When Miss Wykeham was at Brighton, at a much earlier period than 1825, she attracted the attention of the Duke of Clarence. She was then the much honoured heiress of an Oxfordshire squire, Wykeham of Swalcliffe, a member of the family of William of Wykeham. The royal Duke had other opportunities of seeing this beautiful and accomplished heiress; and, overcome by her beauty, her intellectual qualities, and her account at her banker’s, he made her the offer of his hand. With good common sense, Miss Wykeham declined the offer. The Duke subsequently married a German princess, but he never ceased to esteem the heiress, whose presence made Brighton so happy nearly half a century ago. As soon as the Duke became William IV., King of England, he, with the glad sanction of Queen Adelaide, prevailed on the lady whom he had once sought to make his wife, to accept a peerage. Miss Wykeham took the title of Baroness Wenman, whereby she revived an old title in her family. Her grandfather had married the sister and heiress of the Viscount Wenman, in the Irish peerage. The Viscount having died childless, in 1800, the dignity became extinct; but Wenman, as an English baronial title, was conferred on Miss Wykeham in 1834. For six and thirty years she wore it with dignity, and when she died, in 1870, there was not a memory more honoured in the three kingdoms than that of Sophia Elizabeth Wykeham, Baroness Wenman, of Thame Park, county Oxon.

When William IV. took up his residence at Brighton, he played the citizen king. He walked and talked in the streets, and knocked at the doors of his personal friends, paying morning visits, and speedily discovering that, altogether, ‘it wouldn’t do.’ Queen Victoria went down to look at the place, to give it a trial, and to come to the same conclusion, that ‘it wouldn’t do.’ When cabmen or their customers stood on the roofs of their cabs to gaze at the Queen over the garden walls, royalty quietly withdrew, and Brighton took good heart, and has since contrived to get on handsomely alone, but she is ever glad, and naturally so, when a prince or princess is to be reckoned among her visitors. Only now the inhabitants do not go out to meet them, as they did in 1815 to meet Queen Charlotte. Large bodies of them then received permission to welcome the Queen at Patcham. They were dressed in buff, and mounted. As they cantered by the side of the Queen’s carriage, as her escort, she smiled and bowed to such of them as were ‘getting a look at her,’ as if she liked it. The Prince Regent, the Duke of Clarence, and a bright array of nobility, waited in the open space before the Pavilion to do honour to her on her arrival. ‘The present,’ says a contemporary historian, ‘is beyond all doubt the most brilliant period in the annals of Brighton.’

Fitting period wherewith to close these remarks. What a contrast is the fuss to get a sovereign into Brighton with the anxiety to get Charles II. out of it! For effecting the escape of the King, Captain Tattersall was rewarded with a pension of 100l. a year to himself and his descendants. We suppose that the most democratic of politicians would not object to a pension being paid which was originally earned by getting his most ‘religious majesty’ out of the kingdom.

ON SOME CLUBS, AND THEIR ENDS.

Of all historical parallels, there are few more curious than the one between the first club ever established and any similar association of modern times. We must go as far back as the reign of Philip of Macedon (B.C. 320) for that original club. It consisted of Greek gentlemen, who, from their number, called themselves ‘The Sixty.’ They met once a week, not at a tavern, but in a temple—that of Hercules, at Athens. Their secretary was a sprightly young Achaian, named Callimedes—so sprightly, indeed, that the jolly Sixty nicknamed him the Grasshopper. They must have had the highest opinion of their own wit, for every good thing that was uttered was entered in a book, and any member who had a repartee on the tip of his tongue was obliged to keep it there till what had provoked it had been written down! This book of wit, wisdom, and joking was in such repute that it was lent out to princes and other potentialities, on depositing a security for its return. Thus Athens furnished not only the first club, but the first idea of a circulating library.

One of the most singular features of some of the social gatherings of Roman gentlemen consists in the fact, that if a member did not consider himself ‘clubbable,’ or was not considered so by his colleagues, he might bring with him some one who was. If he possessed an extremely witty slave, and chose to bring him to the meeting, in such case Libanus was as welcome as Demenætus. There are clubs of the present day where dulness so prevails among the associates, where Sir Rayleigh D’Istressin is such a nonentity, and Mr. Hugh Doane Nohoo is so overflowing with nonsense, that it is a pity they cannot be represented by capable substitutes. The latter might be found among the public office clerks. How well many of these persons have discovered what they are especially fitted for is to be seen in the little companies that club together and exhibit themselves with alacrity as Nigger Serenaders!

In England here, although the name of club for a society was not known till the seventeenth century, the thing itself was in active practice three hundred years before. The first English club of which we know anything has a French name—La Cour de Bonne Compagnie. It was founded in the reign of Henry the Fourth, and we may take it that bonne compagnie was understood to signify, in English, good fellows. They met, like ‘The Sixty’ in Athens, once a week. The club was what would now be called a dining club—that is, meeting periodically in order to dine together, and to enjoy the ‘feast of reason and the flow of soul’ which come of good cheer, safe digestion, happy humour, and undying wit.

We may be very sure that at the meetings which took place at ‘The Mermaid,’ and at those where Ben Jonson’s sons sat around him in ‘The Apollo,’ the English language ripened into mellowness, beauty, and strength. Shakespeare, Raleigh, and the men whose sympathies were attuned to those of the soldier and the poet, must have done especially good work to that end during their joyous discussions at ‘The Mermaid.’ Politics do not seem to have been touched upon. The first club founded in London with a political purpose among its other objects was the Rota Club. More than two centuries have elapsed since the Rota saw its table and coffee-cups surrounded by such men as Milton, Cyriac Skinner (to whom Milton addressed the sonnet which urges play as well as work), Marvel, Harrington, Nevill, and very many others. They advocated a going-out of Members of Parliament by rotation, and used a ballot-box for the settlement of club questions—that is to say, they affirmed or negatived by that means the conclusions arrived at by the lecturer for the evening. They also supported the ballot, as the simplest and truest method of voting, generally. To this end we are only on the point of now coming partially.

There were some clubs that, meeting only for recreation, fell into a fixed purpose by accident. Small clubs they were, but they were the beginnings of great consequences. From the meeting together of a few ‘city gentlemen,’ members of the Wednesday Club, in the reign of William III., arose certain discussions on financial matters which led to the ‘Conferences’ of 1695, in which William Paterson took a leading part. From this club, its discussions and conferences, sprang a gigantic result—‘The Old Lady in Threadneedle Street;’ in other words, the Bank of England.

A dozen years later, the first germs of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, long enthroned in Somerset House, were planted in the modest room of ‘The Bear Tavern,’ in the Strand. Three individuals, to whom the past was dearer than the present or the future, there met to talk over the condition of the ancient monuments of the kingdom, while they smoked their pipes and sipped their ale. One of them was Humphrey Wanley, the well-known archæologist, and librarian to Harley, Earl of Oxford. They agreed to add to their numbers, meet every Friday night, and confine themselves to the consideration of matters and monuments which illustrated English history not later than the reign of James the First. The weekly business was to begin at six, and every absentee was to be fined sixpence. The club or society migrated from the parlour of one public-house to another before it found royal patronage, and a home in the palace which occupies the site of the one built by the Protector Somerset. After a brief sojourn of a month at ‘The Bear,’ they went, in 1708, to the ‘Young Devil’ tavern close by, and there they seem to have been housed for above a quarter of a century. In 1739 they moved to more commodious apartments in ‘The Mitre,’ Fleet Street, and they talked no more of sixpences. They numbered a hundred members. Each of them paid a guinea entrance-fee, and twelve shillings annual subscription. In 1770 they commenced the ‘Archæologia’; and in the following year George III. gave them the abiding-place beneath the roof of Somerset House, where, till the removal to Burlington House, they met weekly, on Thursdays, during six or seven months of the year, and sometimes, like Gratiano, spoke an infinite deal of nothing. At other times the meetings are full of interest, and emperors themselves have been glad to be enrolled among the Antiquaries, who began their career as a modest club in a Strand tavern of no great repute.

A more ancient society than the Antiquaries had also a home within Somerset House. The Royal Society is of much older date, but it began in a little club-gathering, in 1645, at Dr. Goddard’s lodgings in Wood Street, and for some time where it could, in Cheapside. After it rose from a club to an incorporated society, it first met in Gresham College, but afterwards occupied rooms in Somerset House for upwards of ninety years, when it migrated to Burlington House. Its first avowed object—the establishing of facts by successive experiments—was highly ridiculed, and that most wittily, by Butler, in ‘The Elephant in the Moon.’ One of the members is described as one who

—— had lately undertook

To prove and publish in a book

That men, whose natural eyes are out,

May, by more pow’rful art, be brought

To see with th’ empty holes as plain

As if their eyes were in again.

Another philosopher is said to be renowned

—— for his excellence

In height’ning words and shad’wing sense.

A third experimentalist and chatterer is transported with the ‘twang of his own trills.’ Collectively they are men who are satisfied,

As men are wont, o’ th’ bias’d side.

The society set up a telescope to make discoveries in the moon. They detect armies fighting, and an elephant moving among them. Delighted with what they had discovered, they drew up a narrative, to be published in the ‘Transactions.’ By the time this had been done, idle explorers have made out that the armies are gnats and flies on the lens, and that the elephant is a mouse that had got imprisoned in the tube. The philosophers are disconcerted, and the satirical poet rides over them roughshod, with a moral which is intended to make them as comfortable as a toad under a harrow. Butler flew at them again, in prose, in ‘An Occasional Reflection upon Dr. Charlton’s feeling a Dog’s Pulse at Gresham College.’ This is exquisite fooling. The paper is supposed to be written by Robert Boyle, Esq., and never was imitation so hard to be distinguished from an original. It is far superior in this respect to the prose imitations, in ‘Rejected Addresses,’ of the styles of Dr. Johnson and of Cobbett. We will not conclude this reference to the Wood-street Club, which has grown to such dignity and usefulness as the present Royal Society, without recording that, a little more than a hundred years ago, a Latin paper, on ‘Volcanoes,’ was read before it by a German, one Raspe. Whether it faithfully narrated Raspe’s experiences, who can tell?—for Raspe subsequently wrote that amusingly serious lie called ‘Baron Munchausen.’

In the early part of the last century, a body of ladies constituted themselves as ‘The Shakespeare Club.’ They met in rooms in Covent Garden, and their object was to raise funds to supply the managers of the two theatres, to enable them to act with appropriate splendour the plays of the national poet strictly according to his text; in other words, the end was to annihilate the adapters of the bard. How even the ladies themselves were divided in opinion and into clubs, is seen in the closing words to Fielding’s ‘Historical Register for 1736.’ The piece closes with a deprecatory appeal to the fair sex present, to whom an actor says: ‘And you ladies, whether you be Shakespeare’s ladies, or Beaumont and Fletcher’s ladies, I hope you will make allowance for a rehearsal.’

There was another club in the last century whose purpose was one which deserves for it everlasting respect and admiration. The excellent object it had in view was the suppression of wearisome preachers, or the putting down of silly and interminable sermons. Whether the means taken to arrive at the ends aimed at could be equally respected and admired, is a matter on which a certain difference of opinion may be justly allowed. It was the fashion of the time for ladies to carry fans, and for gentlemen to be inseparable from their canes. These weapons were turned to church uses by the ladies and gentlemen who were members of the Rattling Club. They were vagrant Christians, who attended such churches as possessed congregations who sat in need of relief from a great oppression—that of being bored by a preacher who (as Voltaire says of them all) stood five feet above contradiction. The Rattlers were perfectly unobtrusive during service, and indeed they were perfectly decorous during sermon, unless they were provoked by absurdity or tediousness. As soon as any provocation of that sort was felt, a Lady-Rattler began to agitate her fan, or a Gentleman-Rattler tapped his cane against the floor or the panelling of his pew. The signal was followed by the other members, and the interruption was continued, gradually increasing till there was such a fluttering of fans and a rattling of canes as to produce conviction on the mind of the preacher that the sooner he pronounced the word ‘finally’ the sooner there would be peace in the church. It would not be very unreasonable to call such conduct unseemly—even vulgar. The Rattling Club, however, had very august precedent for their proceedings. In as far as the eccentric young Queen Christina of Sweden set the example, she may be fairly looked upon as the founder of the Rattlers. In her own royal chapel, as well as in any ordinary church where she happened to be present before she passed over to the Church of Rome, Christina used to give decent attention to the sermon till she thought she had taken as much as would do her good. At that point she would slightly rap with her fan on the top of the back of the chair which always stood before her own in the Chapel Royal, or on any hard substance which happened to be near her, when she was being sermon-vexed in other places. If the preacher neglected to attend to this signal, her Majesty declared open warfare against him, and rattled away with her fan with increasing intensity till she had silenced the pulpit, or (if the preacher continued to pour forth his volleys) till she raised the siege and retreated in vexation. Let us mention here, by the way, that in the early intolerant age of the Reformation which followed the intolerable era of Popery in England, people were compelled (under serious penalties) to go to church whether they were Reformers or Romanists. Many of the latter attended the Protestant service rather than pay the fine, and yet preserved their consistency; and you may fancy the mirth in some old country-house, when the solemn knight and his lady, and the laughing daughters with their haughty brothers, as soon as they heard the church-bells ring, proceeded to stuff wool into their ears, and then went to a sermon with a joyous conviction of being unable to hear a word of it.

Let us now fancy ourselves standing in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in the year 1711. We are in front of the Land Bank, which had lately come to grief, and the street was not of the high estate it had been when lords smoked their pipes at its windows, and could smell the haycocks that were in St. Pancras Fields. Let us describe what took place. There was a going in and out, and a standing on the steps, and a gathering of increased numbers, and an universal cheerful gossiping, save on the part of Mr. Ferrers, who was dumb. Passengers stopped to look at these men, and were not slow to recognise the most eminent among the wellnigh five dozen standing or moving about the door, or going in and out. People from Drury Lane knew their neighbour Mr. Vertue, who was talking apart to a little knot of listeners—engravers like himself. There was Michael Dahl, talking a good deal about his Swedish patroness Queen Christina, and still more about his claims to be director of an Academy of Painting. At these claims his hearers may be taken to have smiled, especially if their eye happened to fall on a well-dressed, courteous gentleman, who passed into the house bowing to all who greeted him. There was not a child in Queen Street who could not recognise in him the great Sir Godfrey Kneller. Sir Godfrey was probably greeted most warmly by Laguerre, who had glorified the knight’s house at Whitton with more simple taste than usually distinguished Laguerre. Thornhill stood near the latter, and looked on him with no more perceptible air of triumph than a modest artist could help, who had been substituted for the other in the task of painting the Life of St. Paul within the dome of the metropolitan church. Richardson too was there, and his colleagues respected him as an artist who, if Kneller and Dahl were but away, would be at the head of portraiture in England. A laughing group stood round Richardson; he was narrating to them his own great story, which has been so often retold with other heroes of the tale: ‘The gentleman was singularly annoyed that his friend should declare that his Rubens was only a copy. He said to me: “I will knock any man’s brains out who will call it a copy! My dear Mr. Richardson, come down to my house, and give me your candid opinion!”’ We may fancy that merry and wise Richardson tripping up the steps laughingly, stopping, perhaps, in the hall to talk with two gentlemen, brothers, one of whom exhibits to him, and to smiling Laptist Monnoyer, some paintings on fans which excite his generous unreserved admiration. It is Mr. Godfrey, behind whose marvellously-decorated fans—on which figured landscapes created to make love in—the beauties of the time of Anne and the first two Georges used to feign to blush and hide confusion which they did not feel.

When these and others were assembled in the old bank, they numbered sixty-two. Every man came with his guinea ready for the treasurer. It was to be the annual subscription. Each member had also with him a list of twelve names, whom he voted for as directors for one year. Michael Dahl insinuated his right to be governor, but, saving Dahl’s vote, Kneller was unanimously elected; and with his quietly moving into the chair of that club, was the first Academy of Painting established in England.

The jealousy of Dahl, and a few individual affectations, marred some of the good that the Academy might have accomplished. In the second year, the Swedish favourite of Queen Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, withdrew, because Kneller was still preferred to him as governor or president. The Academy Club elected new members, with or without their consent. At that time there was a French painter in London, named Berchet. He had painted panels and ceilings in England from the time of the latter years of Charles II.; and when De la Fosse was over here, he must have been proud, if he was not jealous, of his pupil. If there be an old painted panel yet in the house that was the Duke of Schomberg’s, in Pall Mall, it is possibly a portion of the decoration of the house, and is, in such case, Berchet’s work. The belles and gallants of the day flocked to Ranelagh, to gaze at the summer-house so daintily tricked out by Berchet’s delicate pencil. Now, he was painting small mythological pieces, in oils; and the ‘Academicians,’ deeming him worthy of being a member, elected him. Berchet (by letter) ‘excused himself, being not well and tysicky, and could not bear the smoke of the lamp.’ His infirmity did not leave him, neither did his industry. He had just put his name at the foot of ‘A Bacchanalian,’ his last work, when the pencil dropped for ever from his hand, and Berchet’s occupation was gone.

We pass from Art to Fashionable Eccentricity. When squires were squires in England, and came up to London to see a little life, a club was founded for them in St. James’s Street, which was (and is) called Boodle’s, but which was long familiarly known as ‘The Topboot and Worsted Stocking Club.’ To rival Boodle’s dinners, or Almack’s, was not a difficult matter, since they seem to have consisted of uncouth legs of mutton, roasted geese, and buttered apple-pies. Something better than mere squirearchy must have been among the members, for Gibbon was one, and a hundred years ago the great historian wrote his letters there. It was the poor cookery of Boodle’s that probably gave rise to the ‘Sçavoir Vivre Club,’ the palates of whose members could not bear, nor their stomachs digest, the mutton, geese, and apple-pies of the club, which still exists. The ‘Sçavoir Vivre’ showed that they knew how to live, by composing or importing new dishes, and they showed that they knew how to dress, by creating the most eccentric of costumes. Among their imported dishes was macaroni. It become such a favourite dish at the club, and was so invariably brought to table, that the clubbists themselves became celebrated as ‘Macaronies.’ In dress they wore a toy cocked hat, gold-laced, buttoned and tasseled over hair fashioned into a foretop above the head, side-curls, and a clubbed tail. Tight striped silk breeches, and an equally tight coat and waistcoat, kept them together. Their tasseled canes were as long as those still carried by state footmen when they ride behind a carriage going to court on a drawing-room day. Like Tiddy Bob, they had a watch in each fob, with cable-chains, and a pound of seals at the end of them. Their white neck-cloths displayed a front bow as large as a cauliflower; and they daintily walked about in white silk stockings and diamond-buckled shoes, in all weathers. In any sense, for a Macaroni to wear a greatcoat was to confess his unworthiness of being a member of the august brotherhood. As equestrians, they figured in the park on little ponies, and looked as if they lacked strength to get on anything higher. The female Macaronies carried heads top-heavy with hair of their own and other peoples—hat, feathers, and a world of knicknackery. Their dress clung almost as closely to the body as the gentlemen’s to theirs. But they dragged after them a long, long gold-embroidered train, the very thought of which reminds us of the poet’s line:—

Hæc nunc auratâ cyclade verret humum.

The Macaronies and the Macaroniesses, as they were called, turned days, nights, hours, and seasons, topsy-turvy; and the former, to show that they were men, ran foot-races on Sundays in Kensington Gardens, very lightly clad, and putting in peril their little lives, by exhaustion of the little breath they carried in their little bodies. Having established macaroni as a dish to be thenceforward known in every household of taste, they died out, and men knew them no more.

The Eccentrics entered into the present century. The Keep-the-Line Club was one of the brilliant, fashionable, and shortlived clubs of the first quarter of the present century. Its members consisted of wits, artists, actors, authors, gentlemen, and peers. It had two purposes—enjoyment and preservation of temper, by putting it to the hardest trials. One of the rules was, that whenever a member was insulted by another, however grossly, the insulted person should rise and offer his best thanks to the offender. A witty fellow might here find good opportunity for his wit, if he only knew how to avail himself of opportunity. Another rule imposed a fine of a dozen of claret to the club, on the member who published any literary composition of his own. Samuel Rogers, Topham, Miles Peter Andrews, Merry, Morton, Reynolds, Fitzgerald, Horace Smith, Boaden, Kenney, and others, paid the fine willingly whenever it was fairly due. The penalty was once demanded of Wilson (the surgeon), and of John Tufton. The first had issued an advertisement announcing a course of lectures; Tufton had addressed an electioneering handbill to his constituents. Both publications were pronounced to be literary. The authors had not only to pay the penalty in claret, but to profess their unfeigned delight at its being imposed on them.

While the Keep-the-Line loved fun, others loved athletics. The Mary-le-bone Cricket Club of the olden days did not at all resemble what it afterwards became when known as Lord’s. In its early age, there was as much difficulty in passing a ballot successfully, as in the most exclusive clubs of the present day. The members included players from every degree in the peerage, members of the House of Commons, and gentlemen of large landed property. The costume of the club was skyblue! and their chief object—even before cricketing—was the performance of practical jokes. One of the latter was played by the bacchanalian Duke of Richmond on Fred Reynolds the dramatist. The Duke put Reynolds on horseback, and rode with him to a match on Moulsey Hurst. The steed ridden by Reynolds was from Astley’s, and the Duke led the way to where a body of soldiers were exercising with gun, drum, and trumpet. The circus war-horse immediately became dramatic, going through a course of unparalleled performances, which he concluded by flinging his sky-blue rider. But there were, besides the practical jokers, serious and accomplished cricketers. For bowling, David Harris; for batting, Tom Walker; and for wicket-keeping, sharp-eyed Hammond, had no equal except in Lord Frederick Beauclerc, who excelled, each in his speciality, and could beat everybody at all three.

In those days, the Mary-le-bone Club had no particular ground. From May to September they moved from place to place, encamping here and bivouacking there by day, and taking their ease in their inn by night. Hospitality varied this course very pleasantly. Sir Horace Mann, the King of Cricket, kept open house for the club at his seat near Maidstone, or at his marine residence at Margate. This hospitality did not cause him to be respected by the practical jokers. Some of the jokes lacked decency; and we do not see much fun in the emptying a man’s box of its snuff and filling it with hellebore, to make him sneeze a hundred times for one! It was a rule that no offence was to be taken at the roughest of these jokes, but it was not always in the power of a man to seem delighted at them. We quite sympathise with Miles Peter Andrews, who, being asked why he looked serious when everybody was laughing loudly at a jest perpetrated by the most convivial of the members, answered—‘My dear sir, I can see no fun in a man who owes me three guineas!’

The hospitality of Mann to the club was, if possible, exceeded by that of Richard Leigh, whose welcomes to the members at Wilmington were feudal in their sumptuousness. His good taste and liberality were manifested in many ways. His musical gatherings were exquisite treats. His love for athletic sports was shown in his zeal at getting up cricket matches. The eccentric Duchess of Gordon, who had married two dukes and a marquis to her three daughters, once said aloud to Richard Leigh: ‘I am the first, but you are the second, match-maker in England, Mr. Leigh.’

One of the droller incidents of the club-matches was long remembered. Reynolds, who was but an amateur, was one day called upon to go in for a member who was too ill to play. He went to the wicket with a feeling of fright, as if he stood in front of a loaded pistol levelled at him, when he saw that the formidable Harris was about to bowl. In his own words, he says: ‘My terrors were so much increased, by the mock pity and sympathy of Hammond, Beldam, and others round the wicket, that when this mighty bowler—the Jupiter Tonans—hurled his bolt at me, I shut my eyes in the intensity of my panic, and mechanically gave a random desperate blow, which, to my utter astonishment, was followed by a loud cry all over the ring of “Run! run!” I did run, and with all my force; and getting three notches, the Duke of Richmond, John Tufton, Leigh, Anguish, and other arch-wags, advanced and formally presented to me twenty-five sixpences in a hat, collected from the bystanders as “the reward of merit.” Even Lord Winchilsea and Sir Horace Mann contributed to this, and then all playfully commenced promoting a new subscription, which only stopped because I could not stop the next ball. To my great joy, up went my stumps and out I walked—certainly with some little éclat, being the first member of the club who had been considered a regular player—i.e., paid for his services.’

We have now to say a few words of some other clubs and their purposes. In the last century, Benjamin Franklin was in the chair at a private club which used to meet weekly at ‘The Prince of Wales’ in Conduit Street. A proposal was made to do something for starving authors. The members murmured over their pipes, stared at the punch-bowl, and thought authors were vulgar people, who were not worth being thought about. The matter, however, was not allowed to drop. Year after year some kind soul or another brought it hot upon the anvil, hammered at it till he was weary, and then passed the hammer to another and another, and he to another, till at last the something was beaten into shape, and shape into substance, till there was fashioned that excellent and praiseworthy institution, the Literary Fund. In its first year only a few shillings could be spared for one hungry author, but now it sends forth welcome relief by hundreds of pounds.

This Literary Fund brings to our mind a literary club which we must not pass over—namely, ‘The Syncretics.’ The worthy gentleman who invented the name has never been discovered; but, dignified as the title looked, it sorely troubled some of the members, particularly those who had looked into a dictionary for the interpretation, yet who, on being asked for the meaning of ‘Syncretic,’ had forgotten the dictionary definition. The object of this united body was the encouragement of the dramatic element among the members. They were to write plays, which managers were to put on the stage for them; and as each play was acted, the Syncretics were bound, or were supposed to be bound, to support the drama of their brother-member by enthusiastic demonstrations of applause. Their motto seemed to be: ‘Hors nous et nos amis nul n’aura de l’esprit.’

When the amiable society had furnished nearly as many new dramas as there were members, the difficulty arose as to which play should have the precedence. It was a delicate matter. Each writer saw peculiar claims and merits in his own play, and those members whose pieces were as yet only on the stocks thought that the club should not be in too great a hurry, lest, by failing in their first venture, they should discourage the possible or probable new Shakespeares who as yet lacked time to bring about their dramatic dénouements. At length a decision was arrived at, and a play called ‘Martinuzzi’ had the good or evil fortune to be selected for representation. The public expectation had been stimulated to a high degree, but disappointment followed. ‘Martinuzzi’ was a lugubrious failure; but an ill-natured world would have it that it was most violently hissed by the author’s fellow-clubbists, the Syncretics. What will not a censorious world assert? The scandal-mongers affirmed that it was a Syncretic rule for each member, except the author, to hiss the play in course of representation, as each sibilant member hoped, by damning his brother’s play, to obtain a better chance of bringing his own forward earlier.

Is there anyone surviving whose pantomimic memories can flash vividly back half a generation? If so, how joyous yet sad must be his remembrance of another literary club—‘The Fielding’—and the pantomime of ‘Harlequin Guy Fawkes,’ acted by the members, at Covent Garden, in 1855! If the set purpose of that society at its formation was to found a school of mimes, the success was undoubted. It was a strange ambition, thought Smelfungus, for professional men and clerks in public offices to attempt to rival—nay, excel—the clowns, harlequins, lovers, and pantaloons who were imbued with the traditions of the times of Grimaldi and Bologna, Barnes and Parsloe. The amateurs were quite up to the regular business. Who that was there will forget the marvellous delivery of the patter song which Albert Smith rattled out as ‘Catesby’? Was ever stage-fight at the old Coburg (where Messrs. Blanchard and Bradley used to slay and be slain nightly with broad-swords, that hacked and hewed to orchestral accompaniments) equal to the terrific combat which was maintained between the awfully savage Catesby and the resolute assassin Guy Fawkes, who had Mr. Holmes under his mask? The latter seemed like a boneless unvertebrated acrobat who could throw his limbs anywhere he pleased out of his own way, or very much in the way of his adversary. The murderous earnestness of his fighting was in strong contrast with the hilarious humour of his burlesque-singing; and Mr. Holmes’s solemn humour was equally well illustrated in the part he took, with three other amateurs, in the performance of acrobatic feats in the scene of the Epsom Racecourse. They executed the easiest of feats with an admirable air of having achieved the impossible. The laughing spectators were almost deceived by the mock seriousness of the pseudo-acrobats; and, when the latter bowed to the applause, with an air of being exhausted by their seemingly laborious efforts, the applause grew louder, and the laughter shook the very house.

There were other members of the club who took part in this celebrated pantomime, and who were quite as effective as their fellows. Spectators calculated in vain the number of government-office windows Mr. Bidwell, the inimitable harlequin, must have leapt through, the government tables he must have vaulted over, and the government chairs he must have waltzed with for supposititious columbines, before he arrived at the perfection which he then displayed. One could not but wonder whether he went down to his office in Whitehall in his spangles covered by a greatcoat, from which he suddenly emerged to stir the often-manifested delight of the porter. Did he go to his desk by a hop, step, and a jump? Did he ever awe a reproving ‘Head of Department’ by shaking his ruler above him, as on the stage he shook his wand and paralysed the clown? Then there was Arthur Smith, who slipped about in Pantaloon as if he had never known boots, and heels to them, since he was born. Nor let us pass over Joe Robins, that airy medical student, who, we suppose, made the dissecting-room funny by his skeleton songs, if he chaunted the scraps of minstrelsy as farcically as he sang ‘Hot Codlins’ in the character of Clown. Horace Walpole said of some amateur actors at whose playing he was present, that they played so well it was a pity they had not sense enough not to play at all. He would not have been epigrammatic in that style had he witnessed the burlesquers and pantomimists of the Fielding Club. It was because of their sense and intelligence that they were so efficient. In their strength and buoyant spirits and exuberant health, they looked immortal. Alas! some of them have passed from the stage-manager to the sexton. One or two, having the alternative put before them, quitted motley and pantomime for ever, and took permanently to their office duties. Two or three went in an opposite direction; they stuck to the stage, and more or less adorn it now, under their proper or under stage-names. An odd fellow or so ‘got up a tree,’ as if that feat belonged to the harlequinade of life; but it is believed that their creditors saw less fun in the reality than in the pantomimic effect. In short, to quote Hood’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham College’—

Alack! They’re gone a thousand ways!

And some are serving in ‘The Greys,’

And some have perish’d young!—

Jack Harris weds his second wife,

Hal Baylis drives the wane of life,

And blithe Carew is hung!

We can only briefly refer to a few other clubs, some still, others till lately, existing. We may suppose that a member of the ‘Early Rising Association’ has no affinity with the ‘Owls.’ The ‘One-o’-clock Club’ would no more understand a cricket-club than the members of the one could look like the members of the other. ‘The Early Risers’ are members of one of those cricket-clubs. During the season they pitch their wickets at four o’clock in the morning, and play till seven, and then to business—pleasure with them taking the precedence. But work is their business of the day. Put the ‘Owls’ by their side, the foul birds would certainly bear no resemblance to a man and a brother. The ‘Owls’ used to meet at ‘The Sheridan Knowles,’ Bridge Street, Covent Garden. They sat without ever rising. Day and night some blinking member was to be found there making sacrifice of his faculties. It was not much to offer up; but, by one saddened victim or another, the sacrifice was being continually made. The smoke of their sacrifice ascended from their pipes, and their libations were made in the very hottest of mixed liquors. We believe that all the ‘Owls’ were utterly consumed—to the great relief of their friends. Aspiring young imbeciles who call themselves by that name are probably only the much-shattered wrecks of the ‘One-o’clock Club,’ an association which was established for the lofty purpose of late drinking! The ‘One-o’clock’ made ghosts of a good many of its members. If any of its paralysed survivors could bear being taken down to the Serpentine at daybreak on one of these winter mornings, we should like to show them the club of hardy bathers there who take their plunge, though they break the ice for it, and then run across the park to breakfast at a pace that would take all the poor breath out of the poorer body of any survivor of a club like the ‘One-o’clocks.’

We must say for the ‘Owls’ that they did not originally intend to be permanently drinking. They fell into bad ways. Sheridan Knowles himself was, probably, never anything more than the honorary patron of the club. Poor musical Augustine Wade, the composer of ‘Meet me by Moonlight alone,’ and the disposer of Mrs. Waylett, who gave melodious utterance to his ballads, was chairman of the club of ‘Owls’ in its best days. These were when it met upstairs at the ‘Shakespeare’s Head’ in Wych Street—sacred ground, nevertheless, for it was the home of genius, and, according to some authorities, the cradle of Punch.

We will say nothing of ‘The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks,’ for Brother Arnold has written its history and sung its requiem. What a host of great people, home and foreign, used to assemble in a French eating-house in a dirty little street near Leicester Square, where the Foreigners’ Club was held, and Mallet du Pau, Pozzo di Borgo, and our Vansittart were among the best talkers! We may wonder if ‘The Y. Z.’s’ of Liverpool have seen as wise heads among them as once met at ‘The Foreigners.’ Gone are the ‘Fabs,’ the ‘Fortnightly Associated Book Society’; ‘The Jelly Bags’ in nightcaps are as extinct as Barham’s ‘Wigs.’ ‘Our Club,’ whose number was once that of the ‘Forty Thieves,’ has never recovered the prestige it had in the days of Douglas Jerrold, while the ‘Cocked Hats,’ select in number, grow in hilarity as well as in ‘Archæo-knowledgy.’ The ‘Arts,’ or the Upst-Arts, as some wild wit called that club at its foundation, is, at least, existing. The ‘Civil Service’ has a cheerful home—and a hospitable—at ‘The Thatched House.’ Then there is a club so mysterious that we cannot learn whether its name is ‘The Sentry,’ or ‘The Century’; but its purposes are said to be very ‘advanced,’ in the well-understood political meaning of that word. By-and-by we shall probably hear a good deal of them. Meanwhile, we will close this paper with a quotation from Lord Campbell’s Life of Lord Thurlow. It will serve, at least, to show that modern club-ways were not the ways of the clubs of former days: ‘A.D. 1769. At that time, and indeed when I myself first began the study of the law, the modern club-system was unknown, and (as in the time of Swift and Addison) men went in the evenings for society to coffee-houses, in which they expected to encounter a particular set of acquaintance, but which were open to all who chose to enter and offer to join in the conversation, at the risk of meeting cold looks and mortifying rebuffs.’

THROUGH THE PARKS.

It cannot be said that we are a very grateful people to our kings—to such of them, that is, as have claims on our gratitude. Richard III., when he was yet but a young prince, flying his hawks over his manor at what is now called Notting Hill (an estate which fell to him on the attainder of its old possessor, De Vere, Earl of Oxford), had a great love for the drama. He was the first prince of the blood royal of England that ever formed a company of comedians in his pay, and we all know in what sort of light this Richard is represented on the stage of which he was such a noble patron. Again, take Charles I. Before his time Hyde Park was a royal inclosure. It was a sacred possession of the crown, into which no man dared venture who cared to continue to wear his ears. By special permission of sacred majesty an English nobleman or a foreign ambassador might be allowed to kill a buck there, but if a commoner man only ventured to look over the wall he ran great risk of paying for it in Newgate. Charles I., one bright May-day, threw open Hyde Park to the people. The people cut off his head, and made May-day a Hyde Park festival on many recurring anniversaries. They who were present enjoyed the glory of it; all who were absent envied them, and few had a thought to spend upon the king.

The popular history of Hyde Park really dates from the time when unlucky Charles made a gift of the place to his people. Previous to that circumstance the locality belongs to history of another sort. Druids once sang ‘Derry Down’—a phrase said to be druidical—in its groves, and nightingales once made its evening foliage melodious. It would be impossible for the one or for the other to exist there now. For our own parts, we would rather hear the nightingales than see the Druids, but it would not be for long. London boys would soon silence the birds; and the metropolitan police would probably take the Druids by the beard, and ‘run ’em in.’ Then, does it ever occur to the equestrians in the Row, or to those who charioteer it around the drive, or to the modest pedestrian who looks on at both as a part of the London Summer Exhibition, that through the parks once ran that ancient British or Roman road which began at Chester and ended at Dover? We all know till lately where it crossed the Thames, namely, at Stangate, opposite Horseferry Road. We can only fancy what the wayfarers looked like. We may be sure that they did not in the least resemble any of the groups or individuals who now lounge in or hurry through the park in these later days. The land passed from Briton to Saxon, from Saxon to Norman. William the ‘Conquistor’ gave much of it, in which the present parks were included, to the Abbey of Westminster. The ecclesiastical lords made the most of that part of the gift which comprised the manor of Eia (thence Hythe and Hyde); they enclosed it, but did not keep it solely for purposes of venison, although on questions of game they were excessively jealous. They recognised the salubrity of the place, and sent not only sick and convalescent monks, but nobles and rich merchants to recover their digestions, by drinking the waters of springs which flow now as copiously as ever. The leper house, on the site of which stands Knightsbridge Chapel, abutting on Hyde Park, was a sanatorium for patients so dreadfully afflicted. In other respects, the place was strictly private. There were no steel traps or spring guns, but intruders were kept off by equally efficacious means. It was a preserve, to break into which was almost a capital crime. Ultimately the Reformation dispossessed the ecclesiastics, and the land passed into the hands of the crown. Henry VIII. had no scruples. From St. James’s up to Highgate and Hampstead all (saving a few paths), was made hunting-ground for the king and his friends, native and foreign. The enclosed places were as sacred as the king’s private chamber, and no man, without special permission, or in course of rendering some duty to the king, could pass through the gate of the park any more than he dared step over the threshold of the royal sleeping-chamber, without warrant. Gradually, however, the exclusive sacredness of the place passed away. St. James’s was yet for the most part a palace garden, when Hyde Park was the convenient stage on which hot-headed young gallants and love-stricken court pages privately fought for nothing or their mistresses. People began to murmur at not being allowed to even look into that for the maintenance of which they paid pretty dearly. Then permissions were given to persons of quality to shoot a buck or to take the air. Men of lesser note subsequently gained admission; and at last, but not altogether without restriction, Charles I. opened the park, and invited the citizens to enter. From this point begins, as we have said, the popular history of Hyde Park.

Let us turn here, for a moment, to the other Park of St. James, including the Green, or Little St. James’s, Park. All this was enclosed by Henry VIII. Queen Elizabeth loved to walk in it. One of her appearances there is little known, but it is worth the telling, as it also illustrates her love for art. In 1561 one Vergetius was commissioned by the Queen to procure objects of art for her abroad, which Throckmorton, her envoy in Paris, forwarded to her. In the above year the envoy sent by the hands of a Mr. Sommers ‘the images of the twelve emperors.’ These were alleged to be medals of great antiquity. Throckmorton, however, informed Elizabeth that he had employed expert Italians to look into this matter, and they suspected the medals ‘to be counterfeit.’ Such as they were, their price was ‘six hundred crowns of the sun’—to be delivered in good condition within two months. By the same messenger Throckmorton informed Cecil that an experienced person had assured him that the medals were made of common copper and cunningly gilt.

Sommers, having delivered his despatches to Cecil, exhibited the images of the Cæsars. Cautious Cecil merely observed that ‘he liked them very well, but was not skilful of their antiquity;’ he would refer the question, he said, ‘to some cunning body,’ but ‘would not yet believe that it was æs Corinthium. He had seen such works of ancient art, in gold, silver, and brass, but not in such metal as this. He thought, moreover, that 600 crowns would be far too high a price to expect the Queen to disburse for them.

The loyal Sommers, anxious that Elizabeth should not be suspected of meanness, suggested that Cecil should invent any excuse for returning them rather than let Vergetius suppose ‘that the Queen would stick for 600 crowns to have such a thing of price.’

Thereupon Cecil took Sommers to the Park at St. James’s, where he knew the Queen was walking, and there the messenger, with the box of ‘images’ under his cloak, was presented to Elizabeth, who gave him her hand to kiss, asked how Lady Throckmorton ‘could away with France?’ glanced at his despatches, said she would read them in her chamber, and then, perceiving that Sommers had something under his cloak, ended with a ‘What have ye there?’

Sommers informed her; but when he named the price she protested with a ‘Marry!’ that she had the same set already in silver, but she bade him, as it was growing late, to bring them for inspection on the morrow. Accordingly, Sommers attended on her at the palace, and she laughed at seeing them so daintily handled, all curiously arranged in a gilt box, ‘in the holes made for that purpose,’ and covered over with a piece of crimson velvet. Then she told over the names as she looked at each portrait, and scanned as many of the devices as she, with Sommers’ aid, could decipher. She would come to no terms, however. He must leave them with Cecil for a while. She would consider of it.

Cecil kept the medallion portraits, waiting in vain for a chymist or artificer with skill enough to ‘touch’ them and tell him of what metal they were fashioned. Chaloner looked at them, and did not bring the matter nearer to a solution by remarking, ‘If I were rich, I would give a hundred crowns for them myself.’

The queen wrote with her own hand to Throckmorton. She has seen, she says, ‘the twelve medallions of the emperors, whereof she does not make such estimation as the price assigned. She returns them, and wills him to thank Vergetius for the same, telling him that she has caused certain closets and cabinets of her father to be searched, wherein a great number of such monuments in gold, silver, and copper have been found, and amongst them very fair monuments of the said emperors.’ And so ends this picturesque episode of the imperial ‘images.’ The park scene might suggest a picture to Frith or Ward, if either should ever happen to be in want of a subject.

And now, let us return to Hyde Park, and mark its progress to the end of the seventeenth century. Many a letter has been printed to show how speedily Hyde Park became the sacred ground of fashion. We will add to these illustrations one that has never been quoted.

In January, 1639, the fashionable world was looking out with pleasurable anticipation to the park season; so early in the year Madame Anne Merrick wrote to fair Mrs. Lyddall (both ladies were in the country) to entreat her ladyship to come up to town ‘in Hyde Park time.’ Madame Merrick adds: ‘The fear of a war with the Scots doth not a little trouble me, lest all the young gallants should go for soldiers, and the ladies should want servants to accompany them to that place of pleasure which both of us so zealously affect. I long to see those French ladies, Mme. Mornay and Mme. Darcy, and the new stars of the English court, Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Vaughan.’ The lady inquires whether sleeves are still worn down to the wrist—the mode brought in by the Duchess de Chevreuse. ‘Do they wear their necks up?’ she asks, meaning covered, not as Herrick says, with ‘a lawn about the shoulders, thrown into a sweet distraction.’ Mistress Merrick does not love the fashion of the gown coming up to the throat, and boldly says, ‘I do not hold any one worthy of a fair neck, or any other good part, that is not free to show it.’ How she looked, head upon pillow, and afterwards saucily erect in the park, may be seen in the modest lady’s request to fair Mrs. Lyddall to buy for her ‘half a dozen white night coifs which tie under the chin, and as many white hoods to wear over them a-days.’ Thus the park beauties of Charles’s time clapt their hoods over their night coifs, and exhibited in the park

The sleepy eye that speaks the melting soul.

Charles I., in opening the parks for free ingress and egress, reserved the crown rights over them as crown lands. Thirteen years after Mrs. Merrick wrote so fondly about it, that is to say, in 1652, the Parliament ordered Hyde Park to be sold for ready money. More than 600 acres fetched a little over 17,000l. The Protectorate did not exclude the people, but everyone who was aristocratic enough to appear in a carriage or on horseback was compelled to pay, each horseman a shilling, a coach half-a-crown, for admission. The fee was roughly levied by fellows armed with sticks, who were the agents of the purchasers of the land, and therefore were empowered by the state to levy the toll. One would like to know if Oliver, when he drove his own coach so awkwardly through the gate, had to pull up, and fumble under his doublet for a shilling. The higher classes grumbled. They could formerly take the air gratis, while Charles and his queen walked on the grass, looked on at the races, or affected to taste the milk offered them by the daintiest of maids. The nightingales and cuckoos never visited the park after it became ‘common.’ Cromwell and his friends, however, made a pretty show in the park, and were ‘mobbed,’ as our manner is. Not every man who stood near and shouted loudest was a Commonwealth man. Assassins watched their opportunity when he rode, or drove, or witnessed military pageants, or was a spectator of the horse-racing or of the hurling by Cornish gentlemen. They never had heart to draw trigger. Even when Cromwell tumbled from his own coach-box, no pistol was discharged save the one which he carried, and that went off by accident. The scene was entirely changed when, after the tap of Monk’s drums was heard coming up the then rural and sweet-savoured Gray’s Inn Lane, the troops by whom monarchy was to be restored encamped in Hyde Park, and all the world went thither to welcome them. Charles II. resumed the possession of the parks, reserving as before the crown rights. He bought the meadows which skirted the Reading Room (Piccadilly) and out of them made what is now called the Green Park. It was added to the land which Henry VIII., when he lived in Whitehall, honestly acquired. It was marshy land, with a hospital for female lepers upon it. Henry removed the leprous ladies, built a palace, and enclosed the park, to which Charles II. added the Upper St. James’s or Green Park, a portion of which was built over at a later period. Hyde Park felt the Restoration. It had become a field: Charles made it a pleasaunce. Fashion went to it rather than to the Mall. There was enjoyment within it all the year through, with high festival on May-day. When it became formal, the gayer pedestrians took possession of St. James’s and the Mall. But formality was not to be seen in the ride or the drive. Coach as well as horse-racing drew crowds of delighted spectators; but this was nothing to the joyous excitement which stirred the hearts and voices of the gazers when saucy Miss Stewart swept into the Park in that wonderful vehicle belonging to the king, the newly-invented ‘calash.’ The other royal mistress had wept and sworn in vain in order to have this triumph. The king’s wife, Queen Catherine, had mildly expressed a wish that she might be the first to enter the park in her husband’s novel carriage; but, poor woman! what was she that she should be heeded when two of the king’s concubines had expressed the same wish? And the gratification was accorded to the saucier of the two—if it can be said that the Stewart could be saucier than the Castlemaine. After Charles’s brother had taken refuge in France there was a recognised Jacobite walk in Hyde Park. The police would sometimes fling their net into the stream of plotters and promenaders with more or less success. The Jacobites were truculent in their joy as the news spread among them, as they walked, that Mons had fallen (A.D. 1691). Queen Mary happened to be walking, not far from them, on that Broad Walk which is now included within Kensington Gardens. Most of the Tory gentlemen paid her the courtesy due to a lady and a queen; but Sir John Fenwick assumed an insulting air, and cocked his hat rudely instead of raising it like a gentleman. Six years after, King William caught Sir John on the hip. The Jacobite was convicted of treason, and William had the greatest pleasure in courteously having him beheaded by act of attainder, as if the man who had insulted his wife had been a peer of the realm.

It is a singular circumstance that, after Hyde Park—the park which had been opened to the people by King Charles—had been sold and divided under Cromwell, ‘James’s Park’ was preserved. The latter was open only to members of Cromwell’s court and to a few other privileged persons who lived in Petty France, on the south-east side of the park. Milton was one of these. Later on a wider permission was given. Commonwealth ladies ruffled it there, and Cromwell himself paced it in serious converse with serious men. His wife kept her cows there, and talked of them with mild congenial spirits. With Charles II. came courtiers, swains, nymphs, lovers. Some took the Mall, and practised gallantry openly; others—chacun avec sa chacune—resorted to the welcome shades round Rosamond’s Pond, in the south-west corner of the park. Under the elms in what is now Pall Mall, or under the limes which skirted the Mall in the park, all that was gay, and light, and frivolous, frisked and frolicked; but thoughtful men threaded their way among them too, and shook their heads at much which some people would have shut their eyes at. Charles, standing under the park wall to exchange light talk with Nell Gwynne, who looked down and laughed upon him from her garden on the other side, was a sight which made Evelyn groan aloud. It was a type of the general naughtiness which prevailed. Half the graceless fops and hussies of the comedy of the period play out their impudent drama in St. James’s Park. In the comedies of that time the manners of people of quality are reflected. As has been remarked, how they dressed, talked, and thought; what they did, and how they did it; what they hoped for, and how they pursued it: all may be learnt from contemporary comedy. We fully agree with the judgment which says of the personages, that the fine gentlemen are such unmitigated rascals, and the women, girls, and matrons are such unlovely hussies—in rascality and unseemliness quite a match for the men—that one escapes from their wretched society, and a knowledge of their one object, and the confidences of the abominable creatures engaged therein, with a feeling of strong want of purification and of that ounce of civet by which the imagination may be sweetened.

With all this there was a leaven of what was respectable or harmless. Charles himself may not seem heroic, but he is at least harmless as we see him, playing with his dogs, feeding his various birds, large and small, in Birdcage Walk, or walking to Whitehall, looking fresh from the dip we are told he had just taken in the canal. Occasionally a thief who admired the king’s breed of puppies would steal a favourite as it trotted at the very heels of majesty. ‘Will they never leave robbing his Majesty?’ is the query at the close of an advertisement, the opening of which implies how often the king was despoiled: ‘We must call upon you again for a black dog,’ &c.

When we remember that Charles often walked alone in both the parks, and that plotters were abroad, we may wonder that he was never molested by anyone worse than an enthusiast. It was a time when promenading ladies in the park took no offence at being accosted by gentlemen who were strangers. On the other hand, ladies saw nothing wrong in taking with them, in their drives in Hyde Park, some handsome boy who acted as girl on the stage, or walking with him in the Mall in his histrionic costume. The great glory of St. James’s was during Charles II.’s reign. His figure always has the park for a background. When he passed away the park was seldom visited by a sovereign; but William occasionally shut himself up on Duck Island, and smoked his pipe as he sat amid the all but stagnant waters. When the seventeenth century closed St. James’s belonged to the public, the lower classes of which went thither to contemplate the leaders of fashion and the gaudiest flowers of husseydom.

In the last century it was ‘the thing’ for promenaders in Hyde Park to gaze through the railings, and watch Queen Anne and her ladies airing their nobility within Kensington Gardens. The most important park incident of that Queen’s reign was the murderous duel between the Tory Duke of Hamilton and the Whig Lord Mohun. Their quarrel was personal and political, and it was embittered by a question as to right of property. On a gloomy November morning of 1712 they fought with swords, before it was quite daylight, and with such ferocity—hacking and rolling over each other on the ground—that, when Mohun dealt the Duke a mortal stab he himself fell dead on the grass. All the world went in crowds to the spot, to moralise, eat cakes, drink ale, and cut poor jokes on the scene of the butchery. No other park duel of the last century was so sanguinary. It was there that Martin, M.P. for Camelford, nearly killed Wilkes by shooting him through and through. ‘It would have been all over with me,’ said Wilkes, ‘only that Martin used government powder.’ It was in Hyde Park that George Garrick and Baddeley went out to pistol one another at instigation of a Jewish lover of Mrs. Baddeley, who hoped that George would kill the lady’s husband; but the affair ended by the parties dining together. A later fight was more serious; it occurred in December 1773. One Hugh Williamson managed to steal the despatches sent by the governors of the American colonies to Whately, one of the under-secretaries in England. Dr. Franklin received the stolen property, and sent the documents to America, where their publication caused the greatest indignation. Whately’s brother, a banker, expressed his suspicion of an American, one Temple, being the thief. Temple called Whately out, and the two pelted each other with shot, and then hacked and thrust at each other with swords, till Whately was removed in an almost dying state. At that time neither the thief nor the receiver was known. It was not till after the fight that Franklin acknowledged that he was the receiver, and it was not till much later that Hugh Williamson was discovered to be the thief. In 1780 the popular Lord Shelburne was hit in the groin in a duel with Colonel Fullarton, of whom, as an attaché to the English Embassy in Paris, the minister had spoken with great contempt. The City of London sent every day a ‘How d’ye do?’ to the leader of the Opposition. Subsequently parsons were not ashamed to do their bit of murder here, or run the risk of being murdered by another. Parson Bate fought his co-proprietor of the ‘Morning Post’ without much harm to either; and Parson Allen stretched his man, Dulany, dead on the turf. For this feat he suffered half-a-year’s imprisonment in Newgate. But this penalty did not prevent the Hon. Cosmo Gordon from killing Colonel Thomas on the same spot, nor weaken the arm of General Stewart in running his sword into Lord Macartney. When people of quality thought butchering one another a salve for wounded honour, fools of lower degree soon followed the example. In June, 1792, one Frizell, weary of a night’s debauch with other Irish law students, was sarcastically rebuked for his comparative sobriety by his friend Clarke. The whole party resorted to Hyde Park, in the beautiful summer dawn, to settle the question with pistols. In five minutes poor Frizell was lying stark dead among the buttercups and daisies. His tipsy companions tumbled the body into a hackney-coach, which was afterwards found standing in Piccadilly, without coachman or any passenger except the dead law student, who was beyond giving any account of himself. In August, 1796, Mr. Pride, an American, killed his countryman, Mr. Carpenter, in the park. In 1797 Colonel King exchanged six shots ineffectually with Colonel Fitzgerald, a married man, from whom King had only recently recovered his sister whom Fitzgerald had seduced from her home. Some time after this duel in the park Fitzgerald went over to Kilworth, Ireland, in order to gain possession again of the unhappy young lady. Her brother, who had become Lord Kingsborough, broke into Fitzgerald’s room for the purpose of chastising him. He would probably have been slain by the stalwart ruffian but for the timely arrival of his father, the Earl of Kingston, who, seeing his son’s danger, fired at Fitzgerald, and killed the rascal on the spot.

But people found life in Hyde Park as well as death. Frost could not keep them from it in February, nor dust and heat in June. Fashion rode round and round the Ring, as equestrians do in a circus, to attract the admiration of spectators. Since hackney-coaches had been forbidden to enter the park, at the close of William’s reign, because their crowded inmates used to indulge in loud and rude comments on such public characters as passed them, the place had become more delightful to exclusive fashionables. Rogues and hussies, however, had the most dashing equipages. Camps and reviews—particularly in the Jacobite period—varied the grand spectacle; and there were crowds who went, as to a festival, to see a soldier nearly flogged to death or shot outright. The fine people, with less curiosity, walked meanwhile, with well-bred indifference, beneath the five rows of walnut trees which flourished there till 1814, when, by the exigencies of war, they were all cut down to be converted into gun-stocks. After the West Bourn was converted into the ‘Serpentine River,’ by order of Queen Caroline, there was boating on it, as now, but the yachts were ‘for the diversion of the royal family.’ That good queen, having taken 300 acres of the park, added them to Kensington Gardens. The good lady would fain have undone the gracious act of Charles I., and would have made the parks private; but she changed her mind on hearing the probable cost: Walpole estimated it at three crowns. The roads at this time were a disgrace to the authorities; and when ducal carriages broke down in the ruts, and commonplace chariots drove through the panels behind which royalty was seated, the public were comforted, for they thought that improvement must ensue. Gallantry, meanwhile, did not care for roads. The sight of Molly Nisbett’s ankle, as she walked by the Serpentine, so moved Lord Macclesfield’s heart that he ‘fell in love’ with her, as the phrase goes; but happening to meet her sister Dorothy when he expected to meet Molly, he fell still more in love with her, and at last married her. Walpole epigrammatically says that the Countess Dolly was my lord’s mistress—or at least other people’s.

Just a hundred and eleven years ago, George II. reviewed, in the park, Colonel Burgoyne’s troop of light horse; and the Colonel’s son, Sir John Burgoyne, died only recently, in his ninetieth year. The review was as nothing compared with a spectacle afforded at a later period by the Ranger of the park, Lord Orford, who drove a four-in-hand of reindeer instead of horses. Deer-hunting in the park by the royal family and privileged persons was not uncommon as late as the latter half of the last century. There, too, might be seen, on his little Welsh pony, great Chatham—he who first called the parks the ‘lungs of London.’ Ugly Wilkes there found willing listeners among the handsomest of women. The beaux about to make the grand tour took leave of home by a display in the park, and probably dined with the Sçavoir Vivre Club, partaking of their favourite dish, from which beaux generally acquired the name of ‘macaronies.’ The headdresses of the latter were something like those of women very recently, and were almost as nasty. The women of that day sailed through the park in head-gear that made them look top-heavy, and long skirts which might be described in the words which Scripture applies to the skirts of Jerusalem. Thieves of every degree were busy among the thoughtless crowd; but gentlemanly young fellows would gallantly protect strange young ladies across the park when it grew dusk, and strip them of everything valuable before they were half across it. A detected thief, however, might think himself lucky if he escaped undrowned from the Serpentine water and unsuffocated from the Serpentine mud. Other dangers came from the park. Rifle practice went on there very actively—so actively that at last the landlord of the King’s Arms, Paddington, naturally complained at a ball, intended for the target, having crashed through his windows, and lodged in the wood of one of the boxes in his tap-room. At this exercise and at the reviews, the belles of the day used to muster in Amazonian uniforms corresponding with those of the regiments they intended to compliment. Blind Lord Derehurst used to ride through the old grass-road full gallop, but with a friend at his side, whereby he once came into collision with a furious rider who could see his way. Both were half killed by the shock; but when the blind lord recovered the use of his limbs he terrified everybody by galloping about the park more furiously than ever. When the men took to four-in-hand driving it was done with a perfection which may be still equalled, but also with a splendour of appointments which is not followed. The ladies, too, took up the reins, and condescended even ‘to whistle sweet their diuretic strains.’ The lady drivers had above a fifty years’ reign, from the days of Young’s Delia, who, in 1728, smacked the silken thong, ‘graceful as Jehu,’ to the period when Lady Archer ‘tooled’ her four white horses through the park, and Mrs. Gordon, in 1783, drove her phaeton and bays almost as rashly as Phaeton himself drove his father’s chariot and broke down before he got to the end of his course.

In the last century, while the charioteers exhibited themselves in Hyde Park, the promenaders took possession of that part of St. James’s known as the Mall. Along a portion of the road, Charles I., had walked his dolorous way to the scaffold at Whitehall; but he walked it like a true gentleman. The gay throng that succeeded remembered little of that King, in connection with the Park. They had lighter things to think of. At one time the scene was as animated as that of Venice in the old Carnival time, especially as long as visor-masks were in fashion. The Mall was the first place in which a newly-appointed chaplain to a lord fluttered his new black silk scarf, the sign and symbol of his dignity. His quality was known by the flag he hung out. The scarf had just been handed to him by my lord’s butler, who kept one or two samples of the article by him, ready to be delivered to any new chaplain named by my lord, in return for which the reverend gentleman was expected to drop into the butler’s hand at least a half-guinea. Even young officers in the Mall had little, if any, advantage of the young chaplain, as long as his scarf bore its new lustre, and his address had the necessary audacity. Old and young men of pleasure lounged in the Mall and idled in the chocolate houses. The ladies were there in beautiful, patched, painted, and scented crowds, the soft evening hours being their particular season. They criticised each other, and each admired herself. There Prior took the air to make himself fat, and Swift to make himself thin. There were walks to suit all tastes. That by Rosamond’s Pond for lovers, sentimental persons, and elegiac poets. The Green Walk had its scandal-mongers and beaux with their hats, not on their heads, but under their arms. Now and then a French or a Frenchified fop was to be seen, as Tom Brown has etched him, with both his hands in his pockets, carrying all his plaited coat before to show his silk breeches. Other figures grouped in the park picture included senators talking, or seeming to talk, of state affairs; milk-people crying ‘A can of milk, ladies! a can of red cow’s milk, sir!’ St. James’s Park had also its Close Walk, at the head of Rosamond’s Pond, in the south-west corner of the park. This got the name of the Jacobites’ Walk before there was one in Hyde Park. It was the resort of Tories in the latter years of William’s reign, whereas the Jacobite Walk in Hyde Park was the favourite conversing ground of the friends of the old and young Pretenders. The park was manifestly losing its fashionable aspect when Warburton ridiculed, while pretending to praise it. What could be more pastoral than the cows and milk-women near Spring Gardens? Comedy, Farce, Satire, were in all the walks. Rosamond’s Pond was the resource of hearts ill at ease. Madrigals and sonnets might best be composed in Birdcage Walk. Georgics and didactic poetry would find inspiration on Duck Island, for which, however, Warburton gives the very poor reason, that ‘the governor of it, Stephen Duck, can both instruct our friend (Mason) in the breed of the wild fowl and lend him of his genius to sing their generations.’ St. James’s has grown common, without lacking any people of the high quality that used to gather there in animated groups. King Charles loitered there for hours amid his birds, to the great delight of the crowds who watched him, killing time. Queen Caroline, George II.’s queen, would fain have had the park to herself, as Elizabeth had, but failing that, she only visited it in her sedan. But where those great personages tarried, for pleasure, personages equally great only hurry along, bent on business. A sovereign drives in the centre of the Mall, to open or close Parliament, or passes along the side of it on her way to hold a levee. But even this is a rare sight now. As for peers and senators of less degree, whichever way they go, they seem bent upon getting out of the park in the quickest way possible.

On the other hand, it is and almost always has been the business of pleasure-seekers to linger in Hyde Park. They go thither with alacrity; tarry with delight; wend their way homeward with regret, and return to the park with renewed zest. It has ever been so. The last century ended a long season of park joys; the present century added to them. People of the highest rank took the dust there, and seemed to enjoy it. The park had not been desecrated in their eyes by footmen fighting duels in it, like their masters. Ladies, indeed, not nicer than jockeys, were lauded for nothing but their riding. One Amazon of the Row was complimented by being likened to Diana, in everything but chastity. The greatest beau of the park at the end of the last century was also the greatest, among a hundred eccentrics, long after the beginning of this: namely, Beau Brummell. He is more familiar to us than Colonel Hanger, who spent 900l. a year on his dress—if he really paid his tailor. Republican France influenced Hyde Park to this extent, that ladies were nearest the French fashion who wore the least amount of dress. They needed only to show their faces to be the most attractive, as was often told them, but they heeded it not, except when they mounted the box to drive four in hand, and even then they looked as much like young coachmen as dress could make them. For years, on succeeding Sundays, Martin Von Butchell, the eccentric doctor, was there, beard and all, on his painted pony, a very good advertisement for the doctor. When death overtook the old man, who had an idea he was immortal, he was more missed than Romeo Coates, with his lofty phaeton, in shape and colour of a sea-shell, and his crest of a cock, with its motto, ‘While I live I’ll crow.’ The park, without Von Butchell and his variously painted pony, may be compared to the Haymarket stage without Compton.

All sorts of oddities were to be seen there, on the old-fashioned Sundays. A Polish countess proved to be a Drury Lane ballet-girl; a magnificent lady turned out to be a lady’s maid; and real ladies stooped to copy the fashions set by the counterfeits. But space fails to permit us to do more than refer to the dainty Petersham, the curled Geramb, the Four-in-hand and the Tandem clubs, the dandies who ruled when the men were at the wars, and the men who came back with the Don Cossacks and the allied sovereigns, and showed themselves in Hyde Park, as a proof that heroes were again upon the throne of fashion. The throne still exists and a full and splendid gathering is around it, on court days. In its way, Hyde Park is one of the most attractive of sights, when the season is at its brightest, and the Somebodies are there, with their kinsfolk eager to admire and imitate them. From royalty downwards, indeed, every class is to be seen in that moving panorama. Princes and mechanics, princesses and flower-girls, every grade is there, and not the least remarkable are those Anonymas, who dress with such exquisite propriety lest they should be mistaken for modest women.

SOME SCOTSWOMEN.

In the poetry of no nation are the ‘lasses’ more exquisitely courted than in that of Scotland. But old women, with one or two exceptions only, come off with ungallant treatment. This incivility may perhaps have been born of the suspicion that old women had a strong tendency towards growing into witches. On the other hand, witchery was common enough with the younger wenches. There are few things more remarkable in social history than the existence of women in Scotland who professed to be witches, and the cruel punishments inflicted, not only on women who were professed, but on those also who were suspected witches.

There was a grossly immoral side to this story, and the immorality was just the attractive part to individuals who could but practise it under the character of warlocks and witches. The latter, combined with the devil, established a reign of licentiousness in spite of all laws. We believe that the women and the devil did really, in a certain sense, come together, that is, in some cases. The fiend usually went abroad by night. He had a strong kindness for young witches only. Take all as merely human elements, and we know what wicked human nature could make of them. It cannot be doubted that many a licentious scoundrel passed himself off as the devil, and promised supernatural powers to all young witches who would obey him. Hallucinations would come of it; and desire to be witches, with power to severely punish all enemies, would spread among people of diseased minds. The fact that this devil was a worse sort of Don Giovanni, a hard drinker, and that he often piped while the young witches danced, in cutty sarks, or without sarks at all, were circumstances which tend to show a depraved humanity taking advantage of a humanity too weak to resist. Moreover, generally speaking, the devil had little regard for old witches. Nevertheless, these hags sometimes went to the stake asserting their might of sorcery. When they recanted, or urged their complete guiltlessness, they were not believed. In some instances they were proud of belonging to the Amazons of Hell.

The supernatural hags were long in dying out. Even Norna of the Fitful Head was not the last of the mystic queens of storm and rulers of the winds. ’Tis sixty years since, and a woman was then living in Stromness, an old weird woman, who sold winds to mariners at a remarkably low figure. For the small charge of sixpence, ‘awfu’ Bessie Miller’ would sell a wind to a skipper from any point of the compass he chose to have it. One relic of youthful beauty added dread fascination to this storm-witch. The bright blue eyes, that in their time had been the lode-stars of many a laddie’s heart, were bright and blue as ever. All else was old age in its most withered aspect, and the eyes were as two dazzling lights in a skull. The calm or storm vendors have ceased to be; but in the Orkneys there are old women who still earn an ‘honest penny’ by controlling nature; there is not a pain—from the first that a child can cause, to the last a mortal endures in getting well-rid of his mortality—but these crones profess to relieve. We learn too, on competent authority, that old Orkney women still retain an unaccountable aversion to turbot, and avoid naming it when crossing sounds and bays in boats.

Midnight courtships were quite as injurious as midnight meetings of young witches and rattling warlocks. Among the agricultural classes the ordinary time for courting is still, in many parts of Scotland—as it used to be universally—the middle of the night. A farmer’s swain—with an all-overishness about him for a particular lass, with whom he may have had a crack ‘’twixt the gloaming an’ the murk, when the kye comes hame’—will rise at midnight, walk over to his lady’s bower, and find her ready and willing to let him in, as the lady did Finlay, in the ballad, or go down to him, and walk and talk and enjoy ‘courtship,’ till the dawn, if it be summer-time, bids the rustic Romeo and Juliet depart. The report of the Royal Commissioners may be studied for the prose as well as the poetical side of this strange method of wooing—a method sanctioned by parents and not ill-thought of by friends, seeing that such was the course of their wooing an’ wedding, an a’. This custom is, doubtless, referred to in Joanna Baillie’s ballad—‘It fell on a morn when we were thrang’—

When the clocksy laird o’ the warlock glen,

Wha waited without, half blate, half cheery,

And lang’d for a sight o’ his winsome deary,

Raised up the lattice an’ cam’ crousely ben.

His coat was new an’ his o’erlay was white;

His mittens an’ hose were cozie and bien;

But a wooer that comes in braid daylight

Is no like a wooer that comes at e’en.

We may conclude, on other ballad evidence, that it was right unseemly for the lassie to make the first step in this owl-like courtship. The ballad of ‘The Maid gaed to the Mill’ is a warning. She pretended to go merely to get her corn ground, but really that the miller might make love to her—

The maid’s gane to the mill by night,

Hech hey, sae wanton!

The maid’s gane to the mill by night,

Hey, sae wanton she!

In connection with midnight courtship may be noticed the clandestine ‘Ruglen marriages,’ which were so called because in Rutherglen it was more easy to get legally married in spite of law than elsewhere. A couple of centuries ago an Act of Parliament visited clandestine marriages (that is, without banns) with heavy penalties and imprisonment, but it did not invalidate the marriage itself. The Rutherglen justices broke the law while professing to maintain it, made money thereby, and gave especial delight to the lasses. For example: a lad and lass wish to be quietly married; they got a friend to denounce them to a ‘Ruglen magistrate’ for having broken the law. The offenders were summoned before him; they of course acknowledged, in the presence of the court, that they were man and wife, which acknowledgment made them so legally. They were fined five shillings, and were given a copy of the sentence, which they signed; and this was universally taken as a legal certificate of the union. Other magistrates followed this lucrative business. When they told the young offenders that as to the statute penalty of three months’ imprisonment the court would take time to consider, the lad, lass, court, and assistants all laughed aloud, and the Ruglen marriage was a legal one.

In earlier days than those just referred to great evil arose from the fact that girls of twelve years of age could legally effect a marriage of their own will. We might suppose that the lovers could afford to patiently wait for the nymphs till then. Manœuvring mothers, however, frequently sacrificed lovers content to wait, for others whom the mothers preferred to favour. In 1659 the Countess of Buccleuch (in her own right) was married, when only eleven years of age, to Scott of High Chester, a lad of fourteen. This was the evil work of the bride’s mother, the Countess of Wemyss. The validity of the marriage was disputed, but meanwhile the bride finished her twelfth year, and then married the lad of her own accord. She died very early in her teens, and then her successor (for she was a great heiress), her sister Annie, was married, while still a child, to the natural son of Charles II.—the Duke of Monmouth. Parents and guardians were heavily fined for allowing these marriages when the parties were under age; but as they gained more by selling an heiress than they lost in paying the penalty, this did not deter them. On some occasions a gallant would carry off a child-heiress and keep her till she reached the lawful age. Towards the end of the seventeenth century this freak was looked upon as a crime. When Carnagie, the Earl of Northesk’s brother, thus ran off with Mary Gray of Baledgarnie, men said if he could be got, he deserved hanging, for an example to secure men’s children from such attempts.

This practice had died out, but in 1728, we hear of an ‘abduction in the old style.’ The offender was a Highlander. The damsel was a wright’s niece, named Mowbray. Her ‘gouvernante had betrayed her upon a promise of a thousand marks, the young lady having 3,000l. of fortune.’ The uncle luckily caught them near to Queensferry, as they were coming to town to be married. The newspapers add, ‘The gouvernante is committed to prison, as is also the gentleman.’ There were some illegitimate marriages that were severely punished. In the reign of Charles I., a tailor in Currie was beheaded for marrying his deceased wife’s half-brother’s daughter. As late as the reign of William and Mary, we hear of a certain Margaret Paterson, one of the beauties of the then prevailing husseydom. She had drawn into her irresistible toils the two young sons of a kirk minister named Kennedy. For this offence Margaret stood an hour in the ‘jougs,’ was whipped the whole length of the city, and was then transported to the plantations for the term of her natural life.