Gravelot, who kept a drawing-school in the Strand, nearly opposite Southampton Street, was another frequenter of Old Slaughter’s. Henri François Bourignon Gravelot was born in Paris in 1699, and died in that city in 1773. His drawings were always minutely finished, and his designs tasteful, particularly those which he etched himself for Sir John Hanmer’s small edition of Shakspere. He found an excellent engraver in poor Charles Grignon, Le Bas’ pupil, who in his old age was driven off the field, fell into poverty, and so remained till he died in 1810, aged 94.
John Gwynn, the architect, who lived in Little Court, Castle Street, Leicester Fields, also frequented this house. He built the bridge at Shrewsbury, and wrote a work on London improvements, which his friend Dr. Johnson revised and prefaced. The doctor also wrote strongly in favour of Gwynn’s talent and integrity when he was unsuccessfully competing with Mylne for the erection of old Blackfriars Bridge.
Hogarth, too, “used” Slaughter’s, and came there to rail at the “black old masters,” the follies of patrons, and the knavery of dealers. Here he would banter and brag, and sketch odd faces on his thumb-nail. Perhaps the “Midnight Conversation” was partly derived from convivial scenes in St. Martin’s Lane.
Roubilliac, the eccentric French sculptor, was another habitué of the place. His house and studio were opposite on the east side of the lane, and were approached by a long passage and gateway. Here his friends must have listened to his rhapsodies in broken English about his great statues of Handel, Sir Isaac Newton, and that of Shakspere now at the British Museum, which cost Garrick, who left it to the nation, three hundred guineas.[457]
That pompous and wretched portrait-painter, Hudson, Reynolds’s master and Richardson’s pupil, used also to frequent Slaughter’s. Hudson was the most ignorant of painters, yet he was for a time the fashion. He painted the portraits of the members of the Dilettanti Society, and was a great and ignorant collector of Rembrandt etchings. Hogarth used to call him, in his brusque way, “a fat-headed fellow.”
Here Hogarth would meet his own engraver, M’Ardell, who lived in Henrietta Street. One of the finest English mezzotints in respect of brilliancy is Hogarth’s portrait of Captain Coram, the brave old originator of the Foundling Hospital, by M’Ardell. His engravings after Reynolds are superb. That painter himself said that they would immortalise him.[458]
Here, also, came Luke Sullivan, another of Hogarth’s engravers, from the White Bear, Piccadilly. His etching of “The March to Finchley” is considered exquisite.[459] Sullivan was also an exquisite miniature-painter, particularly of female heads. He was a handsome, lively, reckless fellow, and died in miserable poverty.
At Slaughter’s, too, Hogarth must have met the unhappy Theodore Gardelle, the miniature-painter, who afterwards murdered his landlady in the Haymarket and burnt her body. Hogarth is said to have sketched him in his ghostly white cap on the day of his execution. Gardelle, like Greenacre, pleaded that he killed the woman by an accidental blow, and then destroyed the body in fear. Foote notices his gibbet in The Mayor of Garratt.
Old Moser, keeper of the drawing academy in Peter’s Court—Roubilliac’s old rooms—was often to be seen at the same haunt. Moser was a German Swiss, a gold-chaser and enameller; he became keeper of the Royal Academy in 1768. His daughter painted flowers.
That great painter, poor old Richard Wilson, neglected and almost starved by the senseless art-patrons of his day, occasionally came to Slaughter’s, probably to meet his countryman, blind Parry, the Welsh harper and great draught-player.
And, last of all, we must mention Nathanael Smith, the engraver, and Mr. Rawle, the accoutrement maker in the Strand, and the inseparable companion of Captain Grose, the great antiquary, on whom Burns wrote poems—a learned, fat, jovial Falstaff of a man, who compiled an indecorous but clever slang dictionary. It was at Rawle’s sale that Dickey Suett bought Charles II.’s black wig, which he wore for years in “Tom Thumb.”
Nos. 76 and 77 St. Martin’s Lane were originally one house, built by Payne, the architect of Salisbury Street and the original Lyceum. He built two small houses in his garden for his friends Gwynn, the competitor for Blackfriars Bridge, and Wale, the Royal Academy lecturer on perspective, and well-known book-illustrator. The entrances were in Little Court, Castle Street. In old times the street on this side, from Beard’s Court, to St. Martin’s Court, was called the Pavement; but the road has since been heightened three feet.
Below Payne’s, in Hogarth’s time, lived a bookseller named Harding, a seller of old prints, and author of a little book on the Monograms of Old Engravers. It was to this shop that Wilson, the sergeant painter, took an etching of his own, which was sold to Hudson as a genuine Rembrandt. That same night, by agreement, Wilson invited Hogarth and Hudson to supper. When the cold sirloin came in, Scott, the marine-painter, called out, “A sail, a sail!” for the beef was stuck with skewers bearing impressions of the new Rembrandt, of which Hudson was so proud.[460]
Nos. 88 and 89 were built on the site of a large mansion, the staircase of which was adorned with allegorical figures. It was here that Hogarth’s particular friend, John Pine, lived. Pine was the engraver and publisher of the scenes from the Armada tapestry in the House of Lords, now destroyed. He was a round, fat, oily man; and Hogarth drew him, much to his annoyance, as the fat friar eyeing the beef at the “Gate of Calais.” His son Robert, who painted one of the best portraits of Garrick, and carried off the hundred guinea prize of the Society of Arts for his picture of the “Siege of Calais,” also lived here, and, after him, Dr. Gartshore.
The house No. 96, on the west side, was Powell the colourman’s in 1828; it had then a Queen Anne door-frame, with spread-eagle and carved foliage and flowers, like the houses in Carey Street and Great Ormond Street, and a shutter sliding in grooves in the old-fashioned way. Mr. Powell’s mother made for many years annually a pipe of wine from the produce of a vine nearly a hundred feet long.[461] This house had a large staircase, painted with figures in procession, by a French artist named Clermont, who claimed one thousand guineas for his work, and received five hundred. Behind the house was the room which Hogarth has painted in “Marriage à la Mode.” The quack is Dr. Misaubin, whose vile portrait the satirist has given. The savage fat woman is his Irish wife. Dr. Misaubin, who lived in this house, was the son of a pastor of the Spitalfields French Church. The quack realised a great fortune by a famous pill. His son was murdered; his grandson squandered his money, and died in St. Martin’s Workhouse.
No. 104 was at one time the residence of Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s august father-in-law, a poor yet pretentious painter, who decorated St. Paul’s. He painted the staircase wall with allegories that were existing some years since in good condition. The junior Van Nost, the sculptor, afterwards lived here—the same artist who took that mask of Garrick’s face which afterwards belonged to the elder Mathews. After him, before 1768, came Hogarth’s convivial artist-friend, Francis Hayman, who decorated Vauxhall and illustrated countless books. Perhaps it was here that the Marquis of Granby, before sitting to the painter, had a round or two of sparring. Sir Joshua Reynolds, too, a graver and colder man, came to live here before he went to Great Newport Street.
New Slaughter’s, at No. 82 in 1828, was established about 1760, and was demolished in 1843-44, when the new avenue of Garrick Street was made between Long Acre and Leicester Square. It was much frequented by artists who wished cheap fare and good society. Roubilliac was often to be found here. Wilkie long after enjoyed his frugal dinners here at a small cost. He was always the last dropper-in, and was never seen to dine in the house before dark. The fact is, the patient young Scotchman always slaved at his art till the last glimpse of daylight had disappeared below the red roofs.
Upon the site of the present Quakers’ Meeting-house in St. Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane, stood Roubilliac’s first studio after he left Cheere. Here he executed, with ecstatic raptures at his own genius, his great statue of Handel for Vauxhall. Here afterwards a drawing academy was started, Mr. Michael Moser being chosen the keeper. Reynolds, Mortimer, Nollekens, and M’Ardell were among the earliest members. Hogarth presented to it some of his father-in-law’s casts, but opposed the principle of cheap education to young artists, declaring that every foolish father would send his boy there to keep him out of the streets, and so the profession would be overstocked. In this academy the students sat to each other for drapery, and had also male and female models—sometimes in groups.
Amongst the early members of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy were the following:—Moser, afterwards keeper of the Academy; Hayman, Hogarth’s friend; Wale, the book-illustrator; Cipriani, famous for his book-prints; Allan Ramsay, Reynolds’s rival; F. M. Newton; Charles Catton, the prince of coach-painters; Zoffany, the dramatic portrait-painter; Collins, the sculptor, who modelled Hayman’s “Don Quixote;” Jeremy Meyer; William Woollett, the great engraver; Anthony Walker, also an engraver; Linnel, a carver in wood; John Mortimer, the Salvator Rosa of that day; Rubinstein, a drapery-painter and drudge to the portrait-painters; James Paine, son of the architect of the Lyceum; Tilly Kettle, who went to the East, painted several rajahs, and then died near Aleppo; William Pars, who was sent to Greece by the Dilettanti Society; Vandergutch, a painter who turned picture-dealer; Charles Grignon, the engraver; C. Norton, Charles Sherlock, and Charles Bibb, also engravers; Richmond, Keeble, Evans, Roper, Parsons, and Black, now forgotten; Russell, the crayon-painter; Richmond Cosway, the miniature-painter, a fop and a mystic; W. Marlowe, a landscape-painter; Messrs. Griggs, Rowe, Dubourg, Taylor, Dance, and Ratcliffe, pupils of gay Frank Hayman; Richard Earlom, engraver of the “Liber Veritatis” of Claude for the Duke of Richmond; J. A. Gresse, a fat artist who taught the queen and princesses drawing; Giuseppe Marchi, an assistant of Reynolds; Thomas Beech; Lambert, a sculptor, and pupil of Roubilliac; Reed, another pupil of the same great artist, who aided in executing the skeleton on Mrs. Nightingale’s monument, and was famous for his pancake clouds; Biaggio Rebecca, the decorator; Richard Wilson, the great landscape-painter; Terry, Lewis Lattifere, John Seton, David Martin, Burgess; Burch, the medallist; John Collett, an imitator of Hogarth; Nollekens, the sculptor; Reynolds, and, of course, Hogarth himself, the primum mobile.[462]
No. 112 was in old times one of those apothecaries’ shops with bottled snakes in the windows. It was kept by Leake, the inventor of a “diet-drink” once as famous as Lockyer’s pill.
Frank Hayman, one of these St. Martin’s Lane worthies, was originally a scene-painter at Drury Lane. He was with Hogarth at Moll King’s when Hogarth drew the girl squirting brandy at the other for his picture in the Rake’s Progress. Hayman was a Devonshire man, and a pupil of Brown. When he buried his wife, a friend asked him why he spent so much money on the funeral. “Oh, sir,” replied the droll, revelling fellow, “she would have done as much or more for me with pleasure.”
Quin and Hayman were inseparable boon companions. One night, after “beating the rounds,” they both fell into the kennel. Presently Hayman, sprawling out his shambling legs, kicked his bedfellow Quin. “Hallo! what are you at now?” growled the Welsh actor. “At? why, endeavouring to get up, to be sure, for this don’t suit my palate.” “Pooh!” replied Quin, “remain where you are; the watchman will come by shortly, and he will take us both up!”[463]
No. 113 was occupied by Thomas Major, a die-engraver to the Stamp Office, a pupil of Le Bas, and an excellent reproducer of subjects from Teniers. He was also an engraver of landscapes after pictures by Ferg, one of the artists employed with Sir James Thornhill at the Chelsea china manufactory.
The old watch-house or round-house used to stand exactly opposite the centre of the portico of Gibbs’s church.[464] There is a rare etching which represents its front during a riot. Stocks, elaborately carved with vigorous figures of a man being whipped by the hangman, stood near the wall of the watch-house. The carving, much mutilated, was preserved in the vaults under the church.
Near the stocks, with an entrance from the King’s Mews, stood “the Barn,” afterwards called “the Canteen,” which was a great resort of the chess, draught, and whist players of the City.
At the south-west corner of St. Martin’s Lane was the shop of Jefferys, the geographer to King George III.
No. 20 was a public-house, latterly the Portobello, with Admiral Vernon’s ship, well painted by Monamy, for its sign. The date, 1638, was on the front of this house, now removed.
No. 114 stands on the site of the old house of the Earls of Salisbury. Before the alterations of 1827 there were vestiges of the old building remaining. It has been a constant tradition in the lane, that in this house, in James II.’s reign, the seven bishops were lodged before they were conveyed to the Tower.
Opposite old Salisbury House stood a turnpike, and the tradition in the lane is that the Earl of Salisbury obtained its removal as a nuisance. At that time the church was literally in the fields. The turnpike-house stood (circa 1760) on the site of No. 28, afterwards (in 1828) Pullen’s wine-vaults. The Westminster Fire Office was first established in St. Martin’s Lane, between Chandos Street and May’s Buildings.
The White Horse livery-stables were originally tea-gardens,[465] and south of these was a hop-garden. The oldest house in the lane overhung the White Horse stables, and was standing in 1828.
No. 60 was formerly Chippendale’s, the great upholsterer and cabinet-maker, whose folio work was the great authority in the trade before Mr. Hope’s classic style overthrew for a time that of Louis Quatorze.
No. 63 formerly led to Roubilliac’s studio. Here, in 1828, the Sunday paper The Watchman, was printed.
It must have been here, in the sculptor’s time, that Garrick, coming to see how his Shakspere statue progressed, drew out a two-foot rule, and put on a tragic and threatening face to frighten a great red-headed Yorkshireman, who was sawing marble for Roubilliac; but who, to his surprise, merely rolled his quid, and coolly said, “What trick are you after next, my little master?” Upon the honest sculptor’s death, Read, one of his pupils, a conceited pretender, took the premises in 1762, and advertised himself as “Mr. Roubilliac’s successor.”
Read executed the poor monuments of the Duchess of Northumberland and of Admiral Tyrrell, now in Westminster Abbey. His master used to say to Read when he was bragging, “Ven you do de monument, den de varld vill see vot von d— ting you vill make.” Nollekens used to say of the admiral’s monument, “That figure going to heaven out of the sea looks for all the world as if it were hanging from a gallows with a rope round its neck.”[466]
No. 70 was formerly the house where Mr. Hone held his exhibition when his picture of “The Conjuror,” intended to ridicule Sir Joshua Reynolds as a plagiarist, and to insult Miss Angelica Kaufmann, was refused admittance at Somerset House. Mr. Nathanael Hone was a miniature-painter on enamel, who attempted oil pictures and grew envious of Reynolds. Hone was a tall, pompous, big, erect man, who wore a broad brimmed hat and a lapelled coat, punctiliously buttoned up to his chin. He walked with a measured, stately step, and spoke with an air of great self-importance—in this sort of way: “Joseph Nollekens, Esq., R.A., how—do—you—do?”[467]
The corner house of Long Acre, now 72, formed part of the extensive premises of Mr. Cobb, George III.’s upholsterer—a proud, pompous man, who always strutted about his workshops in full dress. It was Dance’s portrait of Mr. Cobb, given in exchange for a table, that led to Dance’s acquaintance with Garrick. One day in the library at Buckingham House, old King George asked Cobb to hand him a certain book. Instead of doing so, mistaken Cobb called to a man who was at work on a ladder, and said, “Fellow, give me that book.” The king instantly rose and asked the man’s name. “Jenkins,” replied the astonished upholsterer. “Then,” observed the good old king, “Jenkins shall hand me the book.”[468]
Alderman Boydell, the great encourager of art, when he first began with half a shop, used to etch small plates of landscapes in sets of six for sixpence. As there were few print-shops then in London, he prevailed upon the proprietors of toy-shops to put them in their windows for sale. Every Saturday he went the round of the shops to see what had been done, or to take more. His most successful shop was “The Cricket-Bat,” in Duke’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane.[469]
Abraham Raimbach, the engraver, was born in Cecil Court, St. Martin’s Lane, in 1776. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his early period, lived nearly opposite May’s Buildings. He afterwards went to Great Newport Street, where he first met Dr. Johnson.
O’Keefe describes being in a coffee-house in St. Martin’s Lane on the very morning when the famous No. 45 came out. The unconscious newsman came in, and, as a matter of course, laid the paper on the table before him. About the year 1777 O’Keefe was standing talking with his brother at Charing Cross, when a slender figure in a scarlet coat with a large bag, and fierce three-cocked hat, crossed the way, carefully choosing his steps, the weather being wet—it was John Wilkes.[470]
When Fuseli returned to London in 1779, after his foreign tour, he resided with a portrait painter named Cartwright, at No. 100 St. Martin’s Lane,[471] and he remained there till his marriage with Miss Rawlins in 1788, when he removed to Foley Street. Here he commenced his acquaintance with Professor Bonnycastle, and produced his popular picture of “The Nightmare” (1781), by which the publisher of the print realised £500. Here also he revised Cowper’s version of the Iliad, and became acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Moore, the author of Zeluco.
May’s Buildings bear the date of 1739. Mr. May, who built them, lived at No. 43, which he ornamented with pilasters and a cornice. This house used to be thought a good specimen of architectural brickwork.
The club of “The Eccentrics,” in May’s Buildings, was, in 1812, much frequented by the eloquent Richard Lalor Sheil, by William Mudford, the editor of the Courier, a man of logical and sarcastic power,—and by “Pope Davis,” an artist, in later years a great friend of the unfortunate Haydon. “Pope Davis” was so called from having painted, when in Rome, a large picture of the “Presentation of the Shrewsbury Family to the Pope.”[472]
The Royal Society of Literature, at 4 St. Martin’s Place, Charing Cross, was founded in 1823, “for the advancement of literature,” on which at present it has certainly had no very perceptible influence. It was incorporated by royal charter Sept. 13, 1826. George IV. gave 1000 guineas a year to this body, which rescued the last years of Coleridge’s wasted life from utter dependence, and placed Dr. Jamieson above want. William IV. discontinued the lavish grant of a king who was generous only with other people’s money, and was always in debt; and since that the somewhat effete society has sunk into a Transaction Publishing Society, or rather a club with an improving library. Sir Walter Scott’s opposition to the society was as determined as Hogarth’s against the Royal Academy. “The immediate and direct favour of the sovereign,” said Scott, who had a superstitious respect for any monarch, “is worth the patronage of ten thousand societies.” Literature wants no patronage now, thank God, but only intelligent purchasers; and whether a king does or does not read an author’s work, is of small consequence to any writer.
OLD SLAUGHTER’S COFFEE-HOUSE.
Admission to the Royal Society of Literature is obtained by a certificate, signed by three members, and an election by ballot. Ordinary members pay three guineas on admission, and two guineas annually, or compound by a payment of twenty guineas. The society devotes itself for the most part to the study of Greek and Latin inscriptions and Egyptian literature.[473] This learned body also professes to fix the standard of the English language; to read papers on history, poetry, philosophy, and philology; to correspond with learned men in foreign countries; to reward literary merit; and to publish unedited remains of ancient literature.
St. Martin’s Lane has seen many changes. Cranbourne Alley is gone with all its bonnet-shops, and the Mews and C’ribbee Islands are no more, but there still remain a few old houses, with brick pilasters and semi-Grecian pediments, to remind us of the days of Fuseli and Reynolds, Hayman and Old Slaughter’s, Hogarth and Roubilliac. I can assure my readers that a most respectable class of ghosts haunts the artist quarter in St. Martin’s Lane.
SALISBURY AND WORCESTER HOUSES, 1630.
CHAPTER XI.
LONG ACRE AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.
At the latter end of 1664, says Defoe, two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague at the Drury Lane end of Long Acre. Dr. Hodges, however, a greater authority than Defoe, who wrote fifty-seven years after the event, says merely that the pestilence broke out in Westminster, and that two or three persons dying, the frightened neighbours removed into the City, and there carried the contagion. He, however, distinctly states that the pest came to us from Holland, and most probably in a parcel of infected goods from Smyrna.[474]
According to Defoe, the family with which the Frenchmen had lodged endeavoured to conceal the deaths; but the rumour growing, the Secretary of State heard of it, and sent two physicians and a surgeon to inspect the bodies. They certifying that the men had really died of the plague, the parish clerk returned the deaths to “the Hall,” and they were printed in the weekly bill of mortality. “The people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town.”[475] At Christmas Dr. Hodges attended a case of plague, and shortly afterwards a proclamation was issued for placing watchmen day and night at the doors of infected houses, which were to be marked with a red St. Andrew cross and the subscription “Lord have mercy upon us!”[476] By the next September the terrible disease had risen to its height, and the deaths ranged as high as 12,000 a week, and in the worst night after the bonfires had been burned in the street, to 4000 in the twelve hours.[477]
Great Queen Street, so called after Henrietta Maria, the imprudent but brave wife of Charles I., was built about 1629, before the troubles. Howes (editor of Stow) speaks in 1631, of “the new fair buildings leading into Drury Lane.”[478] Many of the houses were built by Webb, one of Inigo Jones’s scholars. The south was the fashionable side, looking towards the Pancras fields; most of the north side houses must, therefore, be of a later date. According to one authority Inigo Jones himself built Queen Street, at the cost of the Jesuits, designing it for a square, and leaving in the middle a niche for the statue of Queen Henrietta. “The stately and magnificent houses,” begun on the other side near Little Queen Street, were not continued. There were fleurs-de-luce placed on the walls in honour of the queen.[479]
George Digby, the second Earl of Bristol, lived in Great Queen Street, in a large house with seven rooms on a floor, a long gallery, and gardens. Evelyn describes going to see him (probably there), to consult about the site of Greenwich Hospital, with Denham the poet and surveyor, and one of Inigo Jones’s clerks. Digby was a Knight of the Garter, who first wrote against Popery and then converted himself. He persecuted Lord Strafford, yet then turning courtier, lived long enough to persecute Lord Clarendon. Grammont, Bussy, and Clarendon all decry the earl; and Horace Walpole writes wittily of him—“With great parts, he always hurt himself and his friends; with romantic bravery, he was always an unsuccessful commander. He spoke for the Test Act, though a Roman Catholic, and addicted himself to astrology on the birthday of true philosophy.”[480]
In 1671 Evelyn describes the earl’s house as taken by the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, of which he was one, and furnished with tapestry “of the king’s.” The Duke of Buckingham, the earl of Sandwich (Pepys’s patron), the Earl of Lauderdale, Sir John Finch, Waller the poet, and saturnine Colonel Titus (the author of the terrible pamphlet against Cromwell, Killing no Murder) were the new occupants.
They sat, says Evelyn, at the board in the council chamber, a very large room furnished with atlases, maps, charts, and globes. The first day’s debate was an ominous one: it related to the condition of New England, which had grown rich, strong, and “very independent as to their regard to Old England or his majesty. The colony was able to contest with all the other plantations,[481] and there was fear of her breaking from her dependence. Some of the council were for sending a menacing letter, but others who better understood the peevish and touchy humour of that colony were utterly against it.” A few weeks afterwards Evelyn was at the council, when a letter was read from Jamaica, describing how Morgan, the Welsh buccaneer, had sacked and burned Panama; the bravest thing of the kind done since Drake. Morgan, who cheated his companions and stole their spoil, afterwards came to England, and was, like detestable Blood, received at court.
Lord Chancellor Finch, Earl of Nottingham, who lived in Great Queen Street, presided as Lord High Steward at Lord Strafford’s trial, at which Evelyn was present, noticing the ill-bred impudence of Titus Oates.[482] Finch was the son of a recorder of London, and died in 1681. He was living here when that impudent thief, Sadler, stole the mace and purse, and carried them off in procession.
The choleric and Quixotic Lord Herbert of Cherbury lived in Great Queen Street, in a house on the south side, a few doors east of Great Wyld Street. Here he began his wild Deistic work, De Veritate, published in Paris in 1624, and in London three years before his death. He says that he finished this rhapsody in France, where it was praised by Tilenus, an Arminian professor at Sedan, and an opponent of the Calvinists, which procured him a pension from James I., and also from the learned Grotius when he came to Paris, after his escape in a linen-chest from the Calvinist fortress of Louvestein. Urged to publish by friends, Lord Herbert, afraid of the censure his book might receive, was relieved from his doubts by what his vanity and heated imagination pleased to consider a vision from heaven.
This Welsh Quixote says, “Being thus doubtful in my chamber one fair day in the summer, my casement being open towards the south, the sun shining clear and no wind stirring, I took my book, De Veritate, in my hand, and kneeling on my knees, devoutly said these words: ‘Oh, thou eternal God, author of the light which now shines upon me, and giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech thee of thy infinite goodness to pardon a greater request than a sinner ought to make. I am not satisfied enough whether I shall publish this book, De Veritate. If it be for thy glory, I beseech thee to give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall suppress it!’ I had no sooner spoken these words, but a loud though gentle noise[483] came from the heavens (for it was like nothing on earth), which did so comfort and cheer me that I took my petition as granted. And this (however strange it may seem) I protest before the eternal God is true. Neither am I in any way superstitiously deceived herein, since I did not only hear the noise, but in the serenest sky that ever I saw—being without all cloud—did, to my thinking, see the place from whence it came.”
The noise was probably some child falling from a chair overhead, or a chest of drawers being moved in an upper room; and if it had been thunder in a clear sky, it was no more than Horace once heard. Heaven does not often express its approval of Deistical books. Lord Herbert, doubted of general, and yet believed in individual revelation. What crazy vanity, to think the work of an amateur philosopher of sufficient importance for a special revelation,[484] that (in his own opinion) had been denied to a neglected world! Lord Herbert, though refused the sacrament by Usher, bore it very serenely, asked what o’clock it was, then said, “An hour hence I shall depart,” turned his head to the other side, and expired.[485] He had moved to this quarter from King Street. Lord Herbert, though he wrote a Life to vindicate that brutal tyrant Henry VIII., was inconsistent enough to join the Parliament against a less wise but more illegal king, Charles I. When I pass down Queen Street, wondering whether that southern window of the Welsh knight’s vision was on the front of the south side, or on the back of the southern side of the street, I sometimes think of those soft lines of his upon the question “whether love should continue for ever?”
“Having interr’d her infant birth,
The watery ground that late did mourn
Was strew’d with flowers for the return
Of the wish’d bridegroom of the earth.
“The well-accorded birds did sing
Their hymns unto the pleasant time,
And in a sweet consorted chime,
Did welcome in the cheerful spring.”
And then on my return home, I get out brave old Ben Jonson, and read his lines addressed to this last of the knights:—
“... and on whose every part
Truth might spend all her voice, Fame all her art.
Whether thy learning they would take, or wit,
Or valour, or thy judgment seasoning it,
Thy standing upright to thyself, thy ends
Like straight, thy piety to God and friends.”
Sir Thomas Fairfax, general of the Parliament, probably lived here, as he dated from this street a printed proclamation of the 12th of February 1648.
Sir Godfrey Kneller, the great portrait painter of William and Mary’s reign, but more especially of Queen Anne’s time, once lived in a house in this street. Sir Godfrey, though a humorist, was the vainest of men, and was made rather a butt by his friends Pope and Gay. Kneller was the son of a surveyor at Lübeck, and intended for the army. King George I., who created him a baronet, was the last of the sovereigns who sat to him. Sir Godfrey was the successor of Sir Peter Lely in England, but was still more slight and careless in manner. His portraits may be often known by the curls being thrown behind the back, while in Lely’s portraits they fall over the shoulders and chest. Kneller was a humorist, but very vain, as a man might well be whom Dryden, Pope, Addison, Prior, Tickell, and Steele had eulogised in verse. On one occasion, when Pope was sitting watching Kneller paint, he determined to fool him “to the top of his bent.” “Do you not think, Sir Godfrey,” said the little poet, slily, “that, if God had had your advice at the creation, he would have made a much better world?” The painter turned round sharply from his easel, fixed his eyes on Pope, and laying one hand on his deformed shoulder, replied, “Fore Gott, Mister Pope, I theenk I shoode.”
There was wit in all Kneller’s banter, and even when his quaint sayings told against himself, they seemed to reflect the humour of a man conscious of the ludicrous side of his own vanity. To his tailor who brought him his son to offer him as an apprentice emulative of Annibale Caracci, whose father had also sat cross-legged, Sir Godfrey said, grandly, “Dost thou think, man, I can make thy son a painter? No; God Almighty only makes painters.” To a low fellow whom he overheard cursing himself he said, “God damn you? No, God may damn the Duke of Marlborough, and perhaps Sir Godfrey Kneller; but do you think he will take the trouble of damning such a scoundrel as you?”[486]
Gay on one occasion read some verses to Sir Godfrey (probably those describing Pope’s imaginary welcome from Greece) in which these outrageous lines occur—
“What can the extent of his vast soul confine—
A painter, critic, engineer, divine?”
Upon which Kneller, remembering that he had been intended for a soldier, and perhaps scenting out the joke, said, “Ay, Mr. Gay, all vot you ’ave said is very faine and very true, but you ’ave forgot von theeng, my good friend. Egad, I should have been a general of an army, for ven I vos in Venice there vos a girandole, and all the Place of St. Mark vos in a smoke of gunpowder, and I did like the smell, Mr. Gay—should have been a great general, Mr. Gay.”[487]
His dream, too, was related by Pope to Spence as a good story of the German’s droll vanity. Kneller thought he had ascended by a very high hill to heaven, and there found St. Peter at the gate, dealing with a vast crowd of applicants. To one he said, “Of what sect was you?” “I was a Papist.” “Go you there.” “What was you?” “A Protestant.” “Go you there.” “And you?” “A Turk.” “Go you there.” In the meantime St. Luke had descried the painter, and asking if he was not the famous Sir Godfrey Kneller, entered into conversation with him about his beloved art, so that Sir Godfrey quite forgot about St. Peter till he heard a voice behind him—St. Peter’s—call out, “Come in, Sir Godfrey, and take whatever place you like.”[488]
Pope is said to have ridiculed his friend under the name of Helluo.[489] He certainly laughed at his justice in dismissing a soldier who had stolen a joint of meat, and blaming the butcher who had put it in the rogue’s way. Whenever he saw a constable, followed by a mob, coming up to his house at Whitton, he would call out to him, “Mr. Constable, you see that turning; go that way; you will find an ale-house, the sign of the King’s Head: go and make it up.”[490]
Jacob Tonson got pictures out of Kneller, covetous as he was, by praising him extravagantly, and sending him haunches of fat venison and dozens of cool claret. Sir Godfrey used to say to Vandergucht, “Oh, my goot man, this old Jacob loves me. He is a very goot man, for you see he loves me, he sends me goot things. The venison vos fat.” Old Geckie, the surgeon, however, got a picture or two even cheaper, for he sent no present, but then his praises were as fat as Jacob’s venison.[491]
Sir Godfrey used to get very angry if any doubt was expressed as to the legitimacy of the Pretender. “His father and mother have sat to me about thirty-six times a-piece, and I know every line and bit of their faces. Mine Gott, I could paint King James now by memory. I say the child is so like both, that there is not a feature in his face but what belongs to either father or mother—nay, the nails of his fingers are his mother’s—the queen that was. Doctor, you may be out in your letters, but I cannot be out in my lines.”[492]
Kneller had intended Hogarth’s father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, to paint his staircase at Whitton, but hearing that Newton was sitting to him, he was in dudgeon, declared that no portrait-painter should paint his house, and employed “sprawling” Laguerre instead.
Kneller’s prices were fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if with only one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole length. He painted much too fast and flimsily, and far too much by the help of foreign assistants—in fact, avowedly to fill his kitchen. In thirty years he made a large fortune, in spite of losing £20,000 in the South Sea Bubble. His wigs, drapery, and backgrounds were all painted for him. He is said to have left at his death 500 unfinished portraits.[493] His favourite work, the portrait of a Chinese converted and brought over by Couplet, a Jesuit, is at Windsor. But Walpole preferred his Grinling Gibbons at Houghton.
Kneller left his house in Great Queen Street to his wife, and after her decease to his godson Godfrey Huckle, who took the name of Kneller. Amongst the celebrated persons painted by Kneller in his best manner were Bolingbroke, Wren, Lady Wortley Montague, Pope, Locke, Burnet, Addison, Evelyn, and the Earl of Peterborough. The brittleness of this man’s fame is another proof that he who paints merely for his time must perish with his time.
Conway House was in Great Queen Street. Lord Conway, an able soldier, brought up by Lord Vere, his uncle, was an epicure, who by his agreeable conversation was very acceptable at the court of Charles I.[494] He had the misfortune to be utterly routed by the Scotch at Newburn—a defeat which gave them Newcastle. The previous Lord Conway was that Secretary of State of whom James I. said, “Steenie has given me two proper servants—a secretary (Conway) who can neither write nor read, and a groom of the bedchamber (Mr. Clarke, a one-handed man) who cannot truss my points.”[495] It had been well for England if this sottish pedant had had no worse servants than Conway and Clarke. Raleigh might then have been spared, and Overbuy would not have been poisoned.
Lord Conway, whose son, General Conway, was such an idol of Horace Walpole, lived in the family house in Great Queen Street.
Winchester House was not far off. Lord Pawlet figures in all the early scenes of the Civil War. He was one of the first nobles to raise forces in the West for the wrong-headed king. On one occasion Basing House was all but lost by a plot hatched between Waller and the Marquis of Winchester’s brother, but it was detected in time to save that important place. Basing, after three months’ siege by a conjunction of Parliament troops from Hampshire and Essex, was gallantly succoured by Colonel Gage. The Marchioness, a lady of great honour and alliance, being sister to the Earl of Essex and to the lady Marchioness of Hertford, enlisted all the Roman Catholics in Oxford in this dashing adventure.[496] Basing was, however, eventually stormed and taken by Cromwell, who put most of the garrison to the sword. William, the fourth marquis, died 1628, and was succeeded by his son, who was the father of Charles, created in 1689 Duke of Bolton, a title that became extinct in 1794.
John Greenhill, a Long Acre celebrity, was one of the most promising of Lely’s scholars. He painted portraits, among others, of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Davenant. He also drew in crayons, and engraved. It is said that Lely was jealous of him, and would not let his pupil see him paint, till Greenhill’s handsome wife was sent to Sir Peter to sit for her portrait, which cost twelve broad pieces or £15. Greenhill, at first industrious, became acquainted with the players, and fell into debauched courses. Coming home drunk late one night from the Vine Tavern, he fell into the kennel in Long Acre, and was carried to Perrey Walton’s, the royal picture-cleaner, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he had been lodging, and died in his bed that night (1676), in the flower of his age. He was buried at St. Giles’s, and shameless Mrs. Aphra Behn, who admired his person and his paintings, wrote a long elegy on his death. Sir Peter is said to have settled £40 a year on Greenhill’s widow and children, but she died mad soon after her husband.[497]
In June 1718 Ryan, an actor of Lincoln’s Inn Theatre, was supping at the Sun in Long Acre, and had placed his sword quietly in the window, when a bully named Kelly came up and made passes at him, provoking him to a duel. The young actor took his sword, drew it, and passed it through the rascal’s body. The act being one of obvious self-defence, he was not called to serious account for it. This Ryan had acted with Betterton. Addison especially selected him as Marcus in his “Cato,” and Garrick confessed he took Ryan’s Richard as his model.[498]
Some years after, Ryan, by this time the Orestes, Macduff, Iago, Cassio, and Captain Plume of the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, in passing down Great Queen Street, after playing Scipio in “Sophonisba,” was fired at by a footpad, and had his jaw shattered. “Friend,” moaned the wounded man, “you have killed me, but I forgive you.” The actor, however, recovered to resume his place upon the boards, and generous Quin gave him £1000 in advance that he had put him down for in his will. He died in 1760.
Hudson, a wretched portrait-painter, although the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds, lived in a house now divided into two, Nos. 55 and 56. Portrait-painting, being unable to sink lower than Hudson, turned and began to rise again. When Reynolds in later years took a villa on Richmond Hill, somewhat above that of Hudson, he said, “I never thought I should live to look down on my old master.” Hudson’s house was afterwards occupied by that insipid poet, Hoole, the translator of Tasso and of Ariosto.
The old West End entrance of this street, a narrow passage known as the “Devil’s Gap,” was taken down in 1765.
Martin Folkes, an eminent scholar and antiquarian, was born in Great Queen Street in 1690. He was made vice-president of the Royal Society by Newton in 1723, and in 1727, on Sir Isaac’s death, disputed the presidentship with Sir Hans Sloane,—a post which he eventually obtained in 1741, on the resignation of Sir Hans. Folkes was a great numismatist, and seems to have been a generous, pleasant man. He died in 1784. The sale of his library, prints, and coins lasted fifty-six days. He was, as Leigh Hunt remarks, one of “the earliest persons among the gentry to marry an actress,”[499] setting by that means an excellent example. His wife’s name was Lucretia Bradshaw.
Miss Pope, of Queen Street, had a face grave and unpromising, but her humour was dry and racy as old sherry. Churchill, in the “Rosciad,” mentions her as vivaciously advancing in a jig to perform as Cherry and Polly Honeycomb. Later she grew into an excellent Mrs. Malaprop.[500]
This good woman, well-bred lady, and finished actress, lived for forty years in Queen Street, two doors east of Freemasons’ Tavern; there, the Miss Prue, and Cherry, and Jacinta, and Miss Biddy of years before, the friend of Garrick and the praised of Churchill, sat, surrounded by portraits of Lord Nuneham, General Churchill, Garrick, and Holland, and told the story of her first love to Horace Smith.
An attachment had sprung up between her and Holland, but Garrick had warned her of the man’s waywardness and instability. Miss Pope would not believe the accusations till one day, on her way to see Mrs. Clive at Twickenham, she beheld the unfaithful Holland in a boat with Mrs. Baddeley, near the Eel-pie Island. She accused him at the next rehearsal, he would confess no wrong, and she never spoke to him again but on the stage. “But I have reason to know,” said the old lady, shedding tears as she looked up at her cruel lover’s portrait, “that he never was really happy.”
Miss Pope left Queen Street at last, finding the Freemasons too noisy neighbours, especially after dinner. “Miss Pope,” says Hazlitt, “was the very picture of a duenna or an antiquated dowager in the latter spring of beauty—the second childhood of vanity; more quaint, fantastic, and old-fashioned, more pert, frothy, and light-headed than can be imagined.”[501]
It was not very easy to please poor soured Hazlitt, whose opinion of women had not been improved by his having been jilted by a servant girl. This good woman, Miss Pope, died at Hadley in 1801, her latter life having been embittered by the loss of her brother and favourite niece.
The Freemasons’ Hall, built by T. Sandby, architect, was opened in 1776, by Lord Petre, a Roman Catholic nobleman, with the usual mysterious ceremonials of the order. The annual assemblies of the lodges had previously been held in the halls of the City’s companies. The tavern was built in 1786, by William Tyler, and has since been enlarged. In the tavern public meetings and dinners take place, chiefly in May and June. Here a farewell banquet was given to John Philip Kemble, and a public dinner on his birthday, to James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. All the waiters in this tavern are Masons. The house has been lately enlarged. Its new great Hall was inaugurated by the dinner given to Charles Dickens by his friends on his departure for America in November 1857.
Isaac Sparkes, a famous Irish comedian about 1774, was an old, fat, unwieldy man, with a vast double chin, and large, bushy, prominent eyebrows. When in London, he established in Long Acre a Club, which was frequented by Lord Townshend, Lord Effingham, Lord Lindore, Captain Mulcaster, Mr. Crewe of Cheshire, and “other nobles and fashionables.” Sparkes, who dressed well and had a commanding presence, probably presided over it, as he did at Dublin clubs, dressed in robes as Lord Chief Justice Joker.[502]
In one of the grand old houses in Great Queen Street, on the right hand as one goes towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields, occupied before 1830 by Messrs. Allman the booksellers, died Lewis the comedian, famous to the last, as Leigh Hunt tells us, for his invincible airiness and juvenility. “Mr. Lewis,” says the same veteran play-goer, “displayed a combination rarely to be found in acting—that of the fop and the real gentleman. With a voice, a manner, and a person all equally graceful and light, with features at once whimsical and genteel, he played on the top of his profession like a plume. He was the Mercutio of the age, in every sense of the word mercurial. His airy, breathless voice, thrown to the audience before he appeared, was the signal of his winged animal spirits; and when he gave a glance of his eye or touched with his finger another man’s ribs, it was the very punctum saliens of playfulness and innuendo. We saw him take leave of the public, a man of sixty-five, looking not more than half the age, in the character of the Copper Captain; and heard him say, in a voice broken with emotion, that for the space of thirty years he had not once incurred their displeasure.”[503]
Benjamin Franklin, when first in England, worked at the printing-office of Mr. Watts, in Little Wild Street, after being employed for twelve months at one Palmer’s, in Bartholomew Close. He lodged close by in Duke Street, opposite the Roman Catholic Chapel, with a widow, to whom he paid three-and-sixpence weekly. His landlady was a clergyman’s daughter, who had married a Catholic, and abjured Protestantism. She and Franklin were much together, as he kept good hours and she was lame and almost confined to her room. Their frugal supper often consisted of nothing but half an anchovy, a small slice of bread and butter each, and half a pint of ale between them. On Franklin proposing to leave for cheaper lodgings, she consented to let him retain his room at two shillings a week. In the attic of the house lived a voluntary nun. She was a lady who early in life had been sent to the Continent for her health, but unable to bear the climate, had returned home to live in seclusion on £12 a year, devoting the rest of her income to charity, and subsisting, healthy and cheerful, on nothing but water-gruel. Her presence was thought a blessing to the house, and several tenants in succession had charged her no rent. She permitted the occasional visits of Franklin and his landlady; and the brave American lad, while he pitied her superstition, felt confirmed in his frugality by her example.
During his first weeks with Mr. Watts, Franklin worked as a pressman, drinking only water while his companions had their five pints of porter daily. The “Water American,” as he was called, was, however, stronger than his colleagues, and tried to persuade some of them that strong beer was not necessary for strong work. His argument was that bread contained more materials of strength than beer, and that it was only corn in the beer that produced the strength in the liquid.
Born to be a reformer, Franklin persuaded the chapel to alter some of their laws; he resisted impositions, and conciliated the respect of his fellows. He worked as a pressman, as he had done in America, for the sake of the exercise. He used, he tells us, to carry up and down stairs with one hand a large form of type, while the other fifty men required both hands to do the same work.
Franklin’s fellow pressman drank every day a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with bread and cheese for breakfast, a pint between breakfast and dinner, one at dinner, one again at six in the afternoon, and another after his day’s work; and all this he declared to be necessary to give him strength for the press. “This custom,” said the King of Common Sense, “seemed to me abominable.” Franklin, however, failed to make a convert of this man, and he went on paying his four or five shillings a week for the “cursed beverage,” destined probably, poor devil, to remain all his life in a state of voluntary wretchedness, serfdom, and poverty.
A few of the men consented to follow Franklin’s example, and renouncing beer and cheese, to take for breakfast a basin of warm gruel, with butter, toast, and nutmeg. This did not cost more than a pint of beer—“namely, three halfpence”—and at the same time was more nourishing and kept the head clearer. Those who gorged themselves with beer would sometimes run up a score and come to the Water American for credit, “their light being out.” Franklin attended at the great stone table every Saturday evening to take up the little debts, which sometimes amounted to thirty shillings a week. “This circumstance,” says Franklin in his autobiography, “added to the reputation of my being a tolerable gabber—or, in other words, skilful in the art of burlesque—kept up my importance in the ‘chapel.’ I had, besides, recommended myself to the esteem of my master by my assiduous application to business, never observing ‘Saint’ Monday. My extraordinary quickness in composing always procured me such work as was most urgent, and which is commonly best paid; and thus my time passed away in a very pleasant manner.”[504]
Franklin, like a truly great man, was quietly proud of the humble origin from which he had risen; and when he came to England as the agent and ambassador of Massachusetts, he paid a visit to his work-room in Wild Street, and going to his old friend the press, said to the two workmen busy at it, “Come, my friends, we will drink together; it is now forty years since I worked like you at this very press as a journeyman printer.”
Wild House stood on the site of Little Wild Street. The Duchess of Ormond was living there in 1655.[505]
On the day when King James II. escaped from London the mob grew unruly, and assembled in great force to pull down houses where either mass was said or priests lodged. Don Pietro Ronguillo, the Spanish ambassador, who lived at Wild House, and whom Evelyn mentions as having received him with “extraordinary civility” (March 26, 1681), had not thought it necessary to ask for soldiers, though the rich Roman Catholics had sent him their money and plate as to a sanctuary, and the plate of the Chapel Royal was also in his care. But the house was sacked without mercy; his noble library perished in the flames; the chapel was demolished; the pictures, rich beds, and furniture were destroyed,—the poor Spaniard making his escape by a back door.[506] His only comfort was that the sacred Host in his chapel was rescued.[507]
In 1780 another savage and thievish Protestant mob, under Lord George Gordon, assembled in St. George’s Fields to petition Parliament against the Test Act, which relieved Roman Catholics from many vexatious penalties and unjust disabilities on condition of their taking their oaths of allegiance and disbelief in the infamous doctrines of the Jesuits. The mob assembled on the 2d of June, and jostled and insulted the Peers going to the House of Lords. The same evening the people demolished the greater part of the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street. On Monday they stripped the house and shop of Mr. Maberly, of Little Queen Street, who had been a witness at the trial of some rioters. On Tuesday they passed through Long Acre and burnt Newgate, releasing three hundred prisoners, and the same day destroyed the house of Justice Cox in Great Queen Street.[508] In these street riots seventy-two private houses and four public gaols were burnt, and more than four hundred rioters perished.
At the above-named chapel Nollekens, the eminent sculptor, was baptized in 1737. The present chapel is much resorted to on Sundays by the Irish poor and foreigners, who live about Drury Lane.
Nicholas Stone, the great monumental sculptor, lived in Long Acre. In 1619 Inigo Jones began the new Banqueting House at Whitehall, and replaced the one destroyed by fire six months before. This master mason was Nicholas Stone,[509] the sculptor of the fine monument to Sir Francis Vere in Westminster Abbey. His pay was 4s. 10d. a day. Stone also designed Dr. Donne’s splendid monument in St. Paul’s. Roubilliac was a great admirer of the kneeling knight at the north-west corner of Vere’s tomb. He used to stand and watch it, and say, “Hush! hush! he vill speak presently.” Mr. J. T. Smith seems to think that the Shakspere monument at Stratford is in this sculptor’s manner.[510] Inigo Jones, who had been fined for having borne arms at the siege of Basing House, joined with Nicholas Stone in burying their money near Inigo’s house in Scotland Yard; but as the Parliament encouraged servants to betray such hidden treasures, the partners removed their money and hid it again with their own hands in Lambeth Marsh.
Oliver Cromwell, when member for Cambridge, lived from 1637 to 1643, on the south side of Long Acre, two doors from Nicholas Stone the sculptor.
John Taylor, the “Water-Poet” an eccentric poetaster, kept a public-house in Phœnix Alley, now Hanover Court, near Long Acre. He was a Thames waterman, who had fought at the taking of Cadiz, and afterwards travelled to Germany and Scotland as a servant to Sir William Waade. He was then made collector of the wine-dues for the lieutenant of the Tower, and wrote a life of Old Parr, and sixty-three volumes of satire and jingling doggerel, not altogether without vivacity and vigour. He called himself “the King’s Water Poet” and “the Queen’s Waterman;” and in 1623 wrote a tract called “The World runs on Wheels”—a violent attack on the use of coaches. “I dare truly affirm,” says the writer, “that every day in any term (especially if the court be at Whitehall) they do rob us of our livings and carry five hundred and sixty fares daily from us.” In this quaint pamphlet Taylor gives a humorous account of his once riding in his master’s coach from Whitehall to the Tower. “Before I had been drawn twenty yards,” he says, “such a timpany of pride puft me up that I was ready to burst with the wind-cholic of vaine glory.” He complains particularly of the streets and lanes being blocked with carriages, especially Blackfriars and Fleet Street or the Strand after a masque or play at court; the noise deafening every one and souring the beer, to the injury of the public health. It is Taylor who mentions that William Boonen, a Dutchman, first introduced coaches into England in 1564, and became Queen Elizabeth’s coachman. “It is,” he says, “a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, or brought a coach in a fog or mist of tobacco.” Nor did Taylor rest there, for he presented a petition to James I., which was submitted to Sir Francis Bacon and other commissioners, to compel all play-houses to stand on the Bankside, so as to give more work to watermen. In the Civil War, Taylor went to Oxford and wrote ballads for the king. On his return to London, he settled in Long Acre with a mourning crown for a sign;[511] but the Puritans resenting this emblem, he had his own portrait painted instead with this motto—
“There’s many a head stands for a sign:
Then, gentle reader, why not mine?”
Taylor was born in 1580, and died in 1654; and the following epitaph was written on the vain, honest fellow, who was buried at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields:—
“Here lies the Water-poet, honest John,
Who rowed on the streams of Helicon;
Where having many rocks and dangers past,
He at the haven of Heaven arrived at last.”[512]
From 1682 to 1686 John Dryden lived in Long Acre, on the north side, in a house facing what formerly was Rose Street. His name appears in the rate-books as “John Dryden, Esq.”—an unusual distinction—and the sum he paid to the poor varied from 18s. to £1.[513] It was here he resided when he was beaten, one December evening in 1679, by three ruffians hired by the Earl of Rochester and the Duchess of Portsmouth. Sir Walter Scott makes the poet live at the time in Gerard Street; but no part of Gerard Street was built in 1679. Rochester had the year before ridiculed Dryden as “Poet Squab,” and believed that Dryden had helped Mulgrave in ridiculing him in his clumsy “Essay on Satire.” The best lines of this dull poem are these:—
“Of fighting sparks Fame may her pleasure say,
But ’tis a bolder thing to run away.
The world may well forgive him all his ill,
For every fault does prove his penance still;
Falsely he falls into some dangerous noose,
And then as meanly labours to get loose.”
A letter from Rochester to a friend, dated November 21, in the above year, is still extant, in which he names Dryden as the author of the satire, and concludes with the following threat:—“If he (Dryden) falls on me at the blunt, which is his very good weapon in wit, I will forgive him, if you please, and leave the repartee to Black Will with a cudgel.”[514]
Dryden offered a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of the men who cudgelled him, depositing the money in the hands of “Mr. Blanchard, goldsmith, next door to Temple Bar,” but all in vain. The Rose Alley satire, the Rose Alley ambuscade, and the Dryden salutation, became established jokes with Dryden’s countless enemies. Even Mulgrave himself, in his Art of Poetry said of Dryden coldly—
“Though praised and punished for another’s rhymes,
His own deserve as great applause sometimes.”
And, in a conceited note, the amateur poet described the libel as one for which Dryden had been unjustly “applauded and wounded.” But these lines and this note Mulgrave afterwards suppressed.
Poor Otway, whom Rochester had satirised, and who had accused Dryden of saying of his Don Carlos that, “Egad, there was not a line in it he would be author of,” stood up bravely for Dryden as an honest satirist in these vigorous verses:—
“Poets in honour of the truth should write,
With the same spirit brave men for it fight.
*****
From any private cause where malice reigns,
Or general pique all blockheads have to brains.”
Dryden never took any poetical revenge on Rochester, and in the prefatory essay to his Juvenal he takes credit for that forbearance.[515]
Edward (more generally known as Ned) Ward was the landlord of public-houses alternately in Moorfields, Clerkenwell, Fulwood’s Rents, and Long Acre. He was born in 1667, and died 1731. He was a High Tory, and fond of the society of poets and authors.[516] Attacked in the Dunciad, he turned Don Quixote into Hudibrastic verse, and wrote endless songs, lampoons, coarse clever satires, and Dialogues on Matrimony (1710).
The father of Pepys’s long-suffering wife lived in Long Acre; and the bustling official describes, with a stultifying exactitude, his horror at a visit which he found himself forced to pay to a house surrounded by taverns.
Dr. Arbuthnot, in a letter to Mr. Watkins, gives Bessy Cox—a woman in Long Acre whom Prior would have married when her husband died—a detestable character. The infatuated poet left his estate between his old servant Jonathan Drift, and this woman, who boasted that she was the poet’s Emma,—another virago, Flanders Jane, being his Chloe.[517]
It is said of this careless, pleasant poet, that after spending an intellectual evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, in order to unbend, he would smoke a pipe and drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife in Long Acre. Cibber calls the man a butcher;[518] other writers make him a cobbler or a tavern-keeper, which is more likely. The shameless husband is said to have been proud of the poet’s preference for his wife. Pope, who was remorseless at the failings of friends, calls the woman a wretch, and said to Spence, “Prior was not a right good man; he used to bury himself for whole days and nights together with this poor mean creature, and often drank hard.” This person, who perhaps is misrepresented—and where there is a doubt the prisoner at the bar should always have the benefit of it—was the Venus of the poet’s verse. To her Prior wrote, after Walpole tried to impeach him:—
“From public noise and faction’s strife,
From all the busy ills of life,
Take me, my Chloe, to thy breast,
And lull my wearied soul to rest.
“For ever in this humble cell [ale-house]
Let thee and I [me], my fair one, dwell;
None enter else but Love, and he
Shall bar the door and keep the key.”
Prior was the son of a joiner,[519] and was brought up, as before mentioned, by his uncle, a tavern-keeper at Charing Cross, where the clever waiter’s knowledge of Horace led to his being sent to college by the Earl of Dorset. Abandoning literature, he finally became our ambassador to France. He died in retirement in 1721.