[379] Dr. Francklin was probably the “Thomas Franklin” who signed the round-robin to Dr. Johnson asking him to re-write Goldsmith’s epitaph in English. Here the absence of the c from the name causes Croker to doubt the identity, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill to reject it. It is curious that Smith, with Garrick’s marriage certificate before him, makes the name agree with the questioned signature in the memorial to Johnson. Francklin knew Johnson and dedicated to him a translation of Lucian. “Boswell. I think Dr. Franklin’s definition of Man a good one—A tool-making animal. Johnson. But many a man never made a tool; and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool.” Francklin founded the Centinel, a paper of the Tatler variety, and published many translations. He was the first Chaplain to the Royal Academy, and composed a song, “The Patrons,” that was sung at the inaugural dinner.
[380] This certificate does not answer Smith’s inquiry: the place of the marriage. As a matter of fact, Dr. Francklin’s chapel, where the ceremony was performed, was not in Great Queen Street, but in Queen Street, near Russell Street, now Museum Street. The Charity School opposite the side entrance of Mudie’s Library marks the site of the chapel in which the knot was tied between David Garrick and Eva Maria Violetti. The facts are given correctly by a writer in Notes and Queries (March 31, 1877), who puts in the following documents:—
“On the 22nd June, 1749, Garrick was married to Eva Maria Violetti by M. Francklin, at his chapel near Russell Street, Bloomsbury; and afterwards, according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, by the Rev. M. Blyth, at the chapel of the Portuguese Embassy in South Audley Street” (Garrick’s Correspondence, 1831).
“Yesterday was married, by the Rev. Mr. Francklin, at his chapel, Russell Street, Bloomsbury, David Garrick, Esq., to Eva Maria Violetti” (General Advertiser, June 23, 1749).
[381] No picture in the National Gallery is better known and admired than Rubens’s “Chapeau de Paille.” It is a portrait of Mdlle. Lunden, with whom Rubens was in love. He is said to have painted her portrait without her knowledge while she sat in her garden, and to have obtained her acceptance of the picture. On her untimely death Rubens begged back this portrait, which her family had christened “Le Chapeau de Paille,” promising a replica in exchange. This is the National Gallery picture. In it, instead of a straw hat (chapeau de paille), Rubens has introduced a beaver hat (chapeau de poil), but the original name is still in vogue, though the name “Chapeau de Poil” appears on the frame of the picture in Room xii. of the National Gallery. In 1822 the picture passed from the Lunden family to M. Van Niewenhuysen for 89,000 florins, and from him it was acquired, through Smith the printseller, by the British Government.
[382] Edward Knight, known as Little Knight, is universally stated to have been born in Birmingham in 1774; “Bristol” and “1778” are probably misprints.
[383] Flora, or Hob in the Well, a farce by Cibber, adapted from Thomas Doggett’s Country Wake.
[384] The Soldier’s Daughter is a comedy by Cherry, Timothy Quaint being a minor character.—Fortune’s Frolic is a farce by Allingham. Robin Roughhead, a labourer, succeeds to the title and wealth; then he marries his humble sweetheart, Dolly, and makes the best of landlords.
[385] Of Knight as an actor we read: “There was an odd quickness, and a certain droll play about every muscle of his face, that fully prepared the audience for the jest that was to follow. His Sim, in Wild Oats, may be termed the most chaste and natural performance on the stage.” It was remarked of Knight, however, that he was too fond of laughter and tears, “squeezing his eyelids, and fidgetting and pelting about, till he got the necessary moisture.”
[386] A bronze statue in the garden of Burton Crescent shows Cartwright as a small, excessively bald man, seated with what might be a blue-book in his hand. A luxuriant fig tree was threatening to engulf him in its foliage in September 1905. The inscription states that he was “The First Consistent and Persevering Advocate of Universal Suffrage, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot, and Annual Parliaments.” For every evil, even for cold weather or bad plays, he prescribed “Annual Parliaments and Universal Suffrage.” The Reverend J. Richardson, in his Recollections, says that for many years the Lords of the Admiralty gave Cartwright half-pay, without suspecting that the “John Cartwright” on their books was their arch-critic, “Major” Cartwright, whose commission in the Nottinghamshire Militia had put this handle to his name and disguised his identity.
[387] It may be hoped that, had Smith lived to prepare his Book for a Rainy Day for the press, he would have expunged these embittered references to the wealth of Nollekens and legateeship of Francis Douce.
[388] Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger (1778-1827) was an amiable woman and a popular writer of history and biography. She was a friend of the Lambs, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Aikin, Campbell, and others. Among her works are Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn, and a poem on the slave-trade.
[389] From Mr. W. Roberts’ “Memorials of Christie’s, it appears that the original cup from Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, which was presented to David Garrick by the Mayor and Corporation, at the time of the Jubilee at Stratford, realised 121 guineas on April 30, 1825.” Smith mis-states the date. On May 30, 1903, a figure of Shakespeare carved from the tree was sold at Sotheby’s for £13, 5s.
[391] This derivation has been questioned by others. The New English Dictionary leaves the point doubtful, but quotes the Globe of July 24, 1882: “The ‘Busby,’ so often used colloquially when a large bushy wig is meant, most probably took its origin … not from Dr. Busby, the famous headmaster of Westminster School, but from the wig denominated a ‘Buzz,’ from being frizzled and bushy.” May it not be that the word sprang from “buzz,” in association with the name of the famous headmaster?—the one originating and the other confirming its use.
[392] Nevertheless periwigs were known in England considerably earlier. Fairholt mentions one that was ordered “for Sexton, the king’s fool,” in the reign of Henry VIII. In Hall’s Satires (1598) a courtier is made to lose his periwig while trying to bow on a windy day. Other instances are quoted by Fairholt in Costume in England.
[393] The Duke of Wellington once entertained a dinner-table with an account of Louis XIV.’s wig. His remarks were thus reported, at first hand, in Notes and Queries of Nov. 25, 1871, by Mr. Herbert Randolph:—
“I was in the year 1834 or 1835 dining in company with the Duke of Wellington at Betshanger in Kent, then the seat of Frederick Morice, Esq., now of Sir Walter James. It was about the time when the Bishop of London (Dr. Blomfield) had first appeared in the House of Lords without his wig, and a smart controversy arising out of the fact was going on. Opposite to the Duke at table hung a portrait of an admiral of Queen Anne’s time, an ancestor of Mr. Morice, and the finely painted ‘Ramillies wig’ upon his head caught the Duke’s attention. He took occasion from this to give, in his terse and decided manner, a complete history of wigs, having evidently mastered the subject in reference to the question of the day. He concluded, to the point, by saying: ‘Louis the Fourteenth had a hump, and no man, not even his valet, ever saw him without his wig. It hung down his back, like the judges’ wigs, to hide the hump. But the Dauphin, who hadn’t a hump, couldn’t bear the heat, so he cut it round close to the poll; and the episcopal wig that you are all making such a fuss about is the wig of the most profligate days of the French court.’”
[394] It was Woollett’s pleasing custom to celebrate the completion of a plate by firing a cannon from the roof of his house, No. 36 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. On this occasion he doubtless used an extra charge of powder.
[395] No allusion to Sir Cloudesley Shovel was intended by Pope. The line occurs in the Moral Essays, Epistle iii.—
Pope’s own note to the last line reads: “Ridicule the wretched taste of carving large periwigs on bustos, of which there are several vile examples among the tombs of Westminster and elsewhere.” Pope’s real victim, Hopkins, was “Vulture” Hopkins, who died in his house in Broad Street in 1732, leaving a fortune of £300,000 with peculiar conditions attached. Several thousand pounds were expended on his funeral.
[396] Thomas Dawson, Viscount—not Earl—of Cremorne, died 1813.
[397] The full-dress wigs of English judges are the nearest survival of the great Queen Anne wigs familiar in the portraits of these men. They are made of white horse hair, elaborately treated.
[398] Combing the wig in the theatre and the drawing-room was a habit, like twirling the moustache. Dryden pictures the wits rising as one man in the pit of the theatre and beginning to comb their wigs while they stared at a new masked beauty. “It became the mark of a young man of ton to be seen combing his periwig in the Mall, or at the theatre” (Fairholt: Costume in England). Hats were not worn on perukes that cost forty or fifty pounds. In Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (1672) we read: “A lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke.”
[399] It is said that, as a rule, Lely’s male portraits of the Charles II. period can be distinguished at once from Kneller’s portraits of the Court of William III., by observing that in the former the ends of the wig descend on the chest, in the latter they fall behind the shoulders.
[400] The distinction is particularly important in the case of Cibber, whose wig in the part of Sir Fopling Flutter was so admired that he regularly had it brought in a sedan-chair to the footlights, where he publicly donned it with great applause. Cibber’s modest private wig can be studied in Roubiliac’s coloured bust in the National Portrait Gallery.
[401] John Wallis, D.D. (1616-1703), a distinguished mathematician as well as theologian.
[402] Several particulars of Johnson’s wigs are given by Boswell. The improvements he made in his dress through the influence of Mrs. Thrale included “a Paris-made wig of handsome construction.” “In general,” says Croker, “his wigs were very shabby, and their fore parts were burned away by the near approach of the candle, which his short-sightedness rendered necessary in reading. At Streatham Mrs. Thrale’s butler always kept a better wig in his own hands, with which he met Johnson at the parlour door, when the bell had called him down to dinner; and this ludicrous ceremony was performed every day.”
[403] “Mr. Hillier, I believe, was of the same family as the late Nathaniel Hillier of Stoke, near Guildford, one of whose daughters married Colonel Onslow. He was a most extensive collector of engravings, and his cabinets contained numerous rarities, but he spoiled all his prints by staining them with coffee, to produce, as he thought, a mellow tint, but by which process he not only deprived most of them of their pristine brilliancy, but rendered their sale considerably less productive” (Smith). The trick of staining prints with coffee was once fairly common among collectors.
[404] Probably the pendent bobs or “dildos” on the “campaign” wig introduced in the reign of Charles II. were the origin of the pigtail. The “Ramillies” wig, named after the battle of 1706, had a long plaited tail, and immediately became the fashion. By 1731 the pigtail wig had reached its height of popularity and absurdity.
asks a country visitor in The Metamorphosis of the Town, and is answered—
[405] Horwood’s map of London (1799) shows the river walk from Abingdon Street almost to Chelsea Bridge between willows, along the water-edge, and nursery gardens. A good idea of Millbank as it was at this period may be obtained from the Earl of Albemarle’s Fifty Years of my Life (vol. i. cap. vi.), where we see the boys of Westminster School roaming these spaces, hiring guns from Mother Hubbard, and obtaining dogs and badgers from their obliging friend, William Heberfield, “Slender Billy,” who was mercilessly hanged in 1812 for passing forged notes. See a curious account of Palmer’s village in Charles Manby Smith’s Curiosities of London Life (1853). Smith has an etching of the Willow Walk in his Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797).
[406] William Collins, a modeller of mantelpieces and friezes, was an intimate friend of Nathaniel Smith (J. T. S.’s father), and is described by Smith, in his Antient Topography of London, as a fascinating modeller in clay and wax, and carver in wood. He took many of his subjects from Æsop’s Fables, and was much employed by Sir Henry Cheere, the statuary, who then had workshops near the south-east corner of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel. Roubillac worked here when he first came to England. Collins died in Tothill Fields, May 31, 1793. His mantelpiece in Ancaster House remains.
[407] Belgrave House stood at the west end of Millbank Row, the continuation of Abingdon Street. The Millbank of Gainsborough’s days extended from this point southward and westward (as it rounded the obtuse promontory) as far as the White Lead Mills, whence Turpentine Lane led north to the Jenny’s Whim Tavern and bridge. This picturesque wooden bridge spanned a reservoir of the Chelsea water-works.
[408] Albert van Everdingen (1621-1725), a Dutch painter of landscapes and sea-pieces.
[409] Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) was born at Leyden. His favourite subjects were river banks with peasants. Three of his pictures are in the National Gallery.
[410] Jacob van Ruysdael (1628-82), the greatest of Dutch landscape painters.
[411] Cornelius Gerritz Dekker (died 1678) painted at Haarlem; one of his landscapes is in the National Gallery.
[412] The Neat House Gardens added much to the pleasantness of the river walk at Millbank. They were held by gardeners who grew fruit and vegetables here for the London markets. About 1831 the soil taken to form St. Katherine’s Docks was brought up the river and laid upon them; after which Lupus Street and many other Pimlico streets were built on their site. It is a pity that no local name-relic exists of gardens which Massinger knew as a place for musk-melons (City Madam, Act iii. sc. 1), which Pepys visited with his wife, and which “would have pleased Ruysdael.”
[413] On August 3, 1802, Garnerin, or Garnerini, ascended in a balloon from Vauxhall Gardens with his wife and Mr. Glasford. A cat, which they dropped in a parachute, fell safely in a garden at Hampstead, and the balloon itself, after passing over the Green Park, Paddington, etc., descended in a paddock at Lord Rosslyn’s, at the top of Hampstead Hill. Mrs. Garnerin afterwards lost her life through ascending from Paris with fireworks.
[414] I conjecture that this is a misprint, and that Smith’s correspondent was St. Schültze, an artist and writer of ability, of whom Eckermann, in his Conversations with Goethe, writes, May 15, 1826: “I talked with Goethe to-day about St. Schültze, of whom he spoke very kindly. ‘When I was ill a few weeks since,’ said he, ‘I read his Heitere Stunden’ (Cheerful Hours) ‘with great pleasure.’ If Schültze had lived in England, he would have made an epoch; for, with his gift of observing and depicting, nothing was wanting but the sight of life on a large scale.”
[415] Friederich Campe compiled for the occasion a little book called Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer.
[416] Peter von Cornelius. Born at Düsseldorf in 1783, he achieved his great reputation at Munich, where he directed the Academy and embellished many public buildings. He died so late as 1867.
[417] Johann Gottlieb Schneider (1789-1864), of Dresden, one of the first organists of his day.
[418] After Dürer’s death from a decline, his close friend, Porkheimer, wrote to Johann Tscherte, of Vienna: “Nothing grieves me deeper than that he should have died so painful a death, which, under God’s providence, I can ascribe to nobody but his huswife, who gnawed into his very heart, and so tormented him, that he departed hence the sooner; for he was dried up to a faggot, and might nowhere seek a jovial humour, or go to his friends.… She and her sister are not queans; they are, I doubt not, in the number of honest, devout, and altogether God-fearing women; but a man might better have a quean, who was otherwise kindly, than such a gnawing, suspicious, quarrelsome, good woman, with whom he can have no peace or quiet, neither by day nor by night.”
[419] The architect, and author of a fine work on Ancient and Ornamental Architecture at Rome and in Italy, the materials for which he collected in the tour he mentions to Smith. He married the daughter of Smith’s acquaintance, Williams, a well-known button-maker in St. Martin’s Lane. William Blake found in him a good friend, and was worshipped by his son, Frederick Tatham, who said that a stroll with Blake was “as if he were walking with the Prophet Isaiah.” Late in life Charles Tatham fell into money difficulties, but obtained the post of warden of Greenwich Hospital, where he died in 1842.
[420] Stephen Porter of the Middle Temple, and of Trinity College, Cambridge, translated from the German a play called Lovers’ Vows, by Augustus von Kotzebue, 1798.
[421] Copper Holmes had constructed a floating home out of a West Country vessel, which cost him £150. He appears to have had his name “Copper” from the metal he acquired with this hulk. His ark was considered a nuisance, and the City authorities brought an action to compel him to remove it. He died in 1821.
[422] “The flat pavement on the southern side of the church, facing the “Golden Cross,” is called “the Watermen’s Burying-ground,” from the number of old Thames watermen who were brought thither to their last long rest from Hungerford, York, and Whitehall Stairs” (Walford: Old and New London).
[423] The reference is to an impersonation of Joe Hatch, the waterman, which Charles Mathews included in one of the single-handed “At Home” entertainments which he started in 1818. “One of the best occasional delineations of character, is that of Joe Hatch, a waterman, who is also termed the Thames Chancellor and Boat Barrister, a fellow (we presume a real portrait, though we have not the good fortune to know the original) who lays down the law of his craft, promotes and allays quarrels, and gratifies his fare with a ‘long, tough yarn’ of his own adventures” (Memoirs of Charles Mathews).
[424] “Curtis’s Halfpenny Hatch was a passage across St. George’s Fields from Narrow Wall, opposite Somerset House. It was a halfpenny toll-way through extensive nursery grounds” (Wine and Walnuts). It is now commemorated in the name Hatch Row, Roupell Street, Lambeth, and I have found that Palmer Street is still called, locally, “up the Hatch,” though, of course, nothing in the shape of a Hatch has existed within living memory. “Hatches,” or gates, at which halfpennies were levied, were common on the outskirts of London. Nollekens told Smith that he remembered one in Charlotte Street, kept by a miller, and another between the Oxford Road (Oxford Street) and Grosvenor Square.
[425] Philip Astley, the great equestrian, was inspired by the feats of Johnson and others at the Three Hats Tavern, Islington, to give his exhibitions in an open field near the Waterloo Road. The price of admission was sixpence. Astley started with only one horse, given him by General Elliott, in whose regiment he had served. A clown named Porter supplied the comic relief. In 1770 he moved to the foot of Westminster Bridge, where his famous Amphitheatre took shape. He is said rarely to have given more than five pounds for a horse, troubling “little for shape, make, or colour; temper was the only consideration.” His circus was repeatedly burnt down, but it became one of the recognised sights of London. On September 12, 1783, Horace Walpole writes: “I could find nothing at all to do, and so went to Astley’s, which indeed was much beyond my expectation. I do not wonder any longer that Darius was chosen king by the instructions he gave to his horse; nor that Caligula made his a consul.”
After Astley’s death in 1814, his manager, the great Ducrow, became the head of the circus business. The Ducrow family monument is a striking object in Kensal Green cemetery, where also is seen the monument of the Cooke family, whose head, Thomas Cooke, owned a circus in Astley’s time, and took it to Mauchline in 1784, where it was visited by Burns. The writer of an interesting article on the Cookes in the Tatler of July 29, 1903, says: “The aristocrats of the sawdust, they have been entertaining for at least 120 years, and to-day wherever there is a circus there is a Cooke.”
[426] This “dell” is still apparent in Salutation Court, in which is Hatch Row.
[427] William Curtis (1746-99) had this botanical garden in Lambeth Marsh, and there collected some of the material for his Flora Londinensis. Later, he opened his large establishment at Brompton. In 1782, he rendered a curious service to the suburbs by writing A Short History of the Brown-Tail Moth, to allay “the alarm which had been excited in the country round the Metropolis by an extraordinary abundance of the caterpillars of this moth, and which was so great, that the parish officers … attended in form to see them burnt by bushels at a time” (Nichol’s Literary Anecdotes). Curtis was buried in Battersea parish church.
[428] Richard Palmer Roupell, a wealthy lead-smelter in Gravel Lane, Southwark, owned much property in Southwark, Lambeth, and elsewhere. He lived at Aspen House, Brixton. There is a Roupell Road at Streatham and a Roupell Street in Lambeth. The name of Curtis, the botanist, deserves, but has not found, similar perpetuation in the neighbourhood.
[429] Strand Lane Stairs was the river outlet of Strand Lane, a narrow street which ran down from the Strand east of Somerset House. As Mr. Wheatley points out, it was originally the channel of the rivulet which crossed the Strand under Strand Bridge. The landing-place is now lost under the Embankment, but the upper portion of the lane still exists, and leads to the famous Roman Bath, which every Londoner intends to, but does not, visit.
[430] This restoration of the Chapel (the Banqueting House) was carried out by Sir John Soane, 1829-30.
[431] Henry Smedley, of Westminster, gave up the profession of the law for the study of the arts. He died in his house in the Broad Sanctuary, March 14, 1832.
[432] Richard Parkes Bonnington had not been dead a year when this talk was proceeding. His success had outrun his strength, and a most promising career was closed by consumption, September 23, 1828. He lies in St. James’s Church in Pentonville. Bonnington’s work is much appreciated in France. In the Louvre, where he studied as a boy, there are one or two fine examples of his work. The National Gallery has his “Venice: the Pillars of Piazzetta.” That the British Museum Print-Room has a fine collection of his sketches is largely due to the fact that he died during a visit to England, and that his drawings went to Christie’s, where they fetched £1200.
[433] This elaborate and beautiful work stands in the centre of St. Andrew’s Chapel. Beneath a canopy supported on columns lie the effigies of Lord and Lady Norris, and round them kneel their six soldier sons, four of whom died on the field. In his Antient Topography Smith tells how Roubiliac admired this stately cenotaph. “When my father had occasion to go to his master (Roubiliac) during the time he was putting up Sir Peter Warren’s monument in the Abbey, he was generally found standing by the monument of Norris, or by that of Vere. On one of these attendances he was observed with his arms folded before the north-west corner figure of one of the six knights (the sons) who support the cenotaph of Lord Norris, and appeared as if rivetted to the spot. My father, who had thrice delivered his message, without being once noticed, was at last smartly pinched on the elbow by Roubiliac, who at the same time said, but in a soft and smothered tone of voice, ‘Hush! Hush! He’ll speak presently.’”
[434] William Esdaile (1758-1837) was a partner in the banking house of Esdaile, Hammet, & Co., 21 Lombard Street. He took up print-collecting and bought lavishly. Falling into ill health, he spent the last five years of his life in poring over his prints, and died in his Clapham house, October 2, 1837. The disposal of his remarkable collection at Christie’s occupied sixteen days, and was attended by buyers from the Continent.
[435] The Clapham visited by Smith was that of Lord Macaulay’s young manhood and of Ruskin’s boyhood, and was rural and open beyond the belief of the present generation. In his recently published Life and Letters of Sir George Grove, Mr. Charles L. Graves says: “All the way from Wandsworth Road to Clapham Junction the neighbourhood was a favourite resort for solid City people, the wealthiest living on Clapham Common. But Clapham was thoroughly rural and not even semi-suburban in the ‘twenties’ and ‘thirties.’ Mr. Edmund Grove distinctly recollects seeing a man in the stocks at Clapham, then a most picturesque village with a watch-house for the ‘Charlies,’ and old inns with timbered fronts and spacious courtyards.”
[436] Charles Alexandre de Calonne succeeded Necker as comptroller-general of finance in 1783. He was unable to reduce French finance to order, and in 1787 found it advisable to retire to England. In Sir Nathaniel Wraxhall’s Memoirs I find the following:—
“The tester of Calonne’s bed having fallen upon him during the night, together with a portion of the ceiling of the room, he narrowly escaped suffocation. All Paris, when the fact became known, exclaimed, ‘Juste ciel!’ The tester of a bed is denominated in French ‘le ciel du lit.’… With him may be said to have commenced the emigration (to England) which soon became so general.”
[437] Henry Peter Standly, of St. Neot’s, an active magistrate, possessed an unrivalled collection of Hogarth’s prints and drawings, which was dispersed at Christie’s in 1845. He purchased drawings of landscapes from Smith.
[439] John Inigo Richards, R.A., was one of the original members of the Royal Academy, and its secretary from 1788. He was for many years principal scene-painter at Covent Garden. He died in his Academy apartments, Dec. 18, 1810.
[440] Edwards’s Anecdotes of Painters.—S.
[441] Probably Dr. Robert Richardson, M.D., who had been travelling physician to Lord Mountjoy. He died in Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, November 5, 1847.
[442] Enthusiasm for art and carelessness of money went to the forming of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s unrivalled collection. Cunningham says: “Of every eminent artist he had such specimens as no other person possessed; not huddled into heaps, or scattered like the leaves of the Sibyl, but arranged in fine large portfolios properly labelled and enshrined.”
[443] Smith could not have seen the whole of Sir Peter Lely’s collection of prints and drawings. These were sold by auction in 1687, the sale lasting more than a month.—Thomas Hudson (1701-79) painted the portraits of members of the Dilettanti Society, and, being wealthy, collected many fine prints and drawings.—Archibald Campbell, third Duke, formed a very fine library.
[444] This name is given as Serre in the three old editions of the Rainy Day—a very misleading erratum. William Score was born in Devonshire about 1778. He became a pupil of Joshua Reynolds, and regularly exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy.
[445] “Sir Joshua Reynolds commenced two of his finest historical pictures without settling in what way the compositions were to be completed, or, indeed, without even thinking of their subjects. The head of Count Ugolino at Knowle, and the Infant Christ in Macklin’s picture, were painted on the canvases long before the artist considered subjects or combinations” (S.).—This historical painting, says Northcote, existed simply as a head of the Count until Burke and Goldsmith praised it, whereupon Sir Joshua had his canvas enlarged in order that he might add the other figures. When finished, the picture was bought by the Duke of Dorset for 400 guineas. It is not Reynolds at his best, and Charles Lamb, who saw it at the Reynolds exhibition held in 1813 in Pall Mall, criticised it rather severely.
[446] Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral at the defeat of the Armada, best known to history as Lord Howard of Effingham. The portrait Smith missed was painted by Frederigo Zucchero, whose (attributed) portraits of Queen Elizabeth, Leicester, Raleigh, and James I. are in the National Portrait Gallery. His Howard is now in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. The portraits of the Admirals were presented to Greenwich Hospital by George IV. (not William IV.) in 1823. William IV. added five naval pictures in 1835. As will be seen on a later page, Smith’s curiosity about the hanging of these pictures led him to visit Greenwich next day.
[447] Francis Legat, a Scotch engraver, came to London about 1780, and lived at 22 Charles Street, Westminster. Here he engraved “Mary Queen of Scots resigning her Crown” after Hamilton in 1786, and later Northcote’s painting. He died in 1809.
[448] Chantrey’s group, “The Sleeping Children,” in Lichfield Cathedral.
[449] This statue is now in the British Museum.
[450] The Chelsea porcelain manufacture was founded about 1745, and was at the height of its fame from 1750 to 1764 under Mr. Sprimont. The works finally closed in 1784. The Chelsea potters went forthwith to Derby, where they founded the Chelsea-Derby pottery. Remains of the old Chelsea furnaces, in which Dr. Johnson was allowed to test his compositions, are still to be seen in the cellars of the Prince of Wales Tavern, at the corner of Justice Walk and Lawrence Street, Chelsea.
[451] The case of Chelsea china in the British Museum contains similar figures of the Earl of Chatham, George III., a Thames waterman wearing Doggett’s Coat and Badge, etc.
[452] Johan Zoffany, R.A., born at Frankfort about 1735, painted portraits of Garrick, one of the best representing the actor as Abel Drugger.
[453] Thomas Davies, the actor and bookseller, more famous as the introducer to Dr. Johnson of Boswell. Johnson wrote the first sentence of his Memoirs of David Garrick.