[454] These pictures were the “Canvass,” the “Poll,” the “Chairing,” and the “Election Feast.” They are said to have been painted by Hogarth for about forty-five guineas apiece. At the sale of Garrick’s pictures at Christie’s in June 1823 they were bought by Sir John Soane, and are in the Soane Museum.
[455] In 1829 the surprising period of seventy-three years had elapsed since Garrick became the tenant of his famous villa. He had enlarged and improved the house, planted many trees in the grounds, and erected on his lawn a “Grecian Temple” to receive the statue of Shakespeare by Roubiliac which now stands in the entrance hall of the British Museum. Here also stood his famous Shakespeare chair, designed by Hogarth: it is now in the possession of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. At Hampton Garrick received his friends with great hospitality, and occasionally gave fêtes champêtres with the accompaniments of fireworks and illuminations. Horace Walpole, finding himself a fellow-visitor with the Duke of Grafton, Lord and Lady Rochford, the Spanish Minister, and other great people, wrote to Bentley: “This is being sur un assez bon ton for a player.” Garrick gave treats to the children of Hampton in his grounds. After his death, Hampton House and the house in Adelphi Terrace were occupied for forty-three years by Mrs. Garrick. She preserved the Hampton furniture exactly as her husband left it.
[456] The mystery of Mrs. Garrick’s origin has never been cleared up. Some authorities say that she was the daughter of a respectable Vienna citizen named John Veigel. According to the story told by Charles Lee Lewis (see his Memoirs, 1805), and denied by Mrs. Garrick, she was the fruit of a liaison which the Earl of Burlington formed with a young lady of family on the Continent. At the time of her birth the Earl was back in England, whence he remitted funds for his daughter’s support. The money is said to have been dishonestly retained by the person in whose charge she was placed, and the child herself to have been forced to earn a living as a dancer. The Earl, hearing of this, arranged that she should come to England and dance for a higher salary. Later he took her into his house as companion and teacher to his legitimate daughter. Then Garrick appeared on the scene, and the benevolent Earl said to him: “Do you think you could satisfactorily receive her from my hands with a portion of ten thousand pounds?—and here let me inform you that she is my daughter.”
The above story is told by Lee Lewis on the authority of “an aged domestic who lived at the time it happened at Burlington House, Piccadilly.” Apparently the same gossiping lady is referred to in the following note in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s Life of Garrick: “A curious little story comes to me, told originally by a housekeeper in the Burlington family, and, though based on such a loose foundation, may be worth repeating. On this authority, the story ran that Lord Burlington, coming to see her, was struck by a picture, and, on inquiry, found she was actually the daughter of a lady whom he had known abroad. The result was the discovery that the Violette was actually his daughter. The authority of the old housekeeper seems below the dignity of biography, but her testimony comes to us very circumstantially.”
The story of Violette’s relationship to the Earl of Burlington was supported by the covert kindness which she received from that nobleman. But it has to be remembered that she was the “rage” of the whole town, “the finest and most admired dancer in the world,” according to Walpole, and that Lady Burlington, not less than her lord, was so fond of her, that she would accompany her to the theatre, and wait in the wings with a pelisse to throw over her when she came off the stage. Mr. Fitzgerald’s conclusion on the whole matter is that “her father was someone of rank at Vienna, possibly one of the Starenberg family, from whom it is said she brought letters of introduction to England.”
[457] Lancelot Brown (1715-83) is generally considered the founder of modern “natural” as distinct from “formal” landscape-gardening. He laid out Kew, the grounds of Blenheim, and parts of St. James’s Park and Kensington Gardens. His conversational abilities, extolled by Hannah More, contributed to his fame. John Taylor relates that he once assisted the gouty Lord Chatham into his carriage. “Now, sir, go and adorn your country,” said the grateful statesman. To which Brown aptly replied: “Go you, my lord, and save it.”
[458] Pain’s Hill, at Cobham, Surrey, was considered a triumph of landscape gardening by Horace Walpole and other connoisseurs. Its owner, the Hon. Charles Hamilton, not content with artificial ruins and temples disposed after the pictures of Poussin and Claude, added a hermitage and engaged a hermit at £700 a year. But as the hermit had all the hardship, and Hamilton all the sentiment, the arrangement broke down.
[459] Mr. Carr’s mention of Johnson’s frequent visits recalls the answer he made to Garrick when asked how he liked the spot: “Ah, David! it is the leaving of such places that makes a death-bed terrible.” Some interesting matter relating to the Garricks at Hampton will be found in Mr. Henry Ripley’s History and Topography of Hampton-on-Thames. The existence of the villa has recently been threatened by the westward extension of London’s electric tramways, but, happily, the danger of its removal has been averted.
[460] George Garrard, A.R.A. (1760-1826), animal painter and sculptor, led a successful movement to obtain copyright protection for works of plastic art. He died at Queen’s Buildings, Brompton.
[461] Michael Dahl (1656-1743) was born in Stockholm. He settled in London, and became the rival of Kneller. “If he excelled, it was only in the mediocrity by which he was surrounded” (Redgrave). He was buried in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.
[462] “I have not heard that song better performed since Mr. Incledon sung it. He was a great singer, sir, and I may say, in the words of our immortal Shakespeare, that, take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.” In these words Hoskins of the Cave of Harmony complimented Colonel Newcome on his rendering of “Wapping Old Stairs.” Incledon began life in the navy, where he sang himself into the good graces of his Admiral. Coming to London in 1783, he became a public singer; but it was not until 1790 that his success was established by his performance in The Poor Soldier at Covent Garden. In his later years he relied mainly on the provinces, in which he travelled under the style of “The Wandering Melodist.” Though exquisite in song he was clumsy in appearance. Leslie, the painter, describes him as having “the face and figure of a low sailor,” yet with these “the most manly and at the same time the most agreeable voice I ever heard.” Another good authority records that his voice “was of extraordinary power, both in the natural and the falsetto. The former, from A to G, a compass of about fourteen notes, was full and open, neither partaking of the reed nor the string, and sent forth without the smallest artifice; and such was its ductility, that when he sang pianissimo, it retained its original ductility. His falsetto, which he could use from D to E or F, or about ten notes, was rich, sweet, and brilliant.”
[463] Funny-movers attended to the boats. A funny was a narrow, clinker-built pleasure boat for a pair of sculls. “A most melancholy accident happened one evening this week in the river off Fulham. A young couple, on the point of marriage, took a sail in a funny, which unfortunately upset, and the two lovers were drowned” (Annual Register, 1808).
[464] The Battersea market-gardeners were famous. A rhyme of 1802 says—
The first asparagus raised in England is said to have come from Battersea; and such was the extent of the market-gardens, that large numbers of Welshwomen tramped thither every spring for employment in the summer months.
[465] Not Shakespeare.
[466] In A Sentimental Journey. See “The Passport,” “The Captive,” and “The Starling.”
[467] “Old Granby” was doubtless intended as a jesting compliment to the pensioner, in allusion to the bluff Lord Manners, Marquess of Granby, renowned for his toughness and gallantry.
[468] Hugh Hewson died in 1809, and it appears from a newspaper of that year, quoted by Robert Chambers (Favourite Authors: Smollett), that he was proud of being the prototype of Strap. “His shop was hung round with Latin quotations, and he would frequently point out to his acquaintance the several scenes in Roderick Random pertaining to himself, which had their foundation, not in the Doctor’s inventive fancy, but in truth and reality. The Doctor’s meeting him at a barber’s shop at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the subsequent mistake at the inn; their arrival together in London, and the assistance they experienced from Strap’s friend, were all of that description.”
But there are four Straps in the field. Faulkner, in his Chelsea, finds the “real” Strap in one William Lewis, a book-binder, who died in 1785. Smollett, he says, induced Lewis to set up business in Chelsea, and procured him customers. “I resided seven years in the same house with his widow, and had frequent opportunities of hearing a confirmation of the anecdotes of her husband, as related by the celebrated novelist.”
Another claimant was one Duncan Niven, a Glasgow wig-maker, referred to in the Gentleman’s Magazine as “the person, it is said, from whom Dr. Smollett took his character of Strap in Roderick Random.”
Lastly, one Hutchinson, a Dunbar barber, had some pretensions to be Strap.
[469] Of these taverns the most famous are the Old Swans at London Bridge and Chelsea. The former stood for centuries beside Swan Stairs (now represented by the Old Swan Pier), and was well known to all passengers on the river who elected to avoid the dangerous “shooting” of London Bridge. On July 30, 1763, Dr. Johnson and Boswell landed for this reason at the Old Swan on their way down to Greenwich, re-embarking at Billingsgate.
The name of the Old Swan of Chelsea, an inn known to Pepys, is perpetuated in Old Swan House, a modern residence built from the designs of Mr. Norman Shaw. The “New Swan,” which, however, was really a second “Old Swan,” has also disappeared, but, according to Mr. R. Blunt’s excellent Historical Handbook to Chelsea, its quaint garden, entered by steps from the river, under the long signboard, is within the memory of many residents.
[470] “The bells of this church were recast by Ruddle, and tuned by Mr. Harrison, the inventor of the Timekeeper; they are esteemed equal to any peal of bells in this Kingdom, and have nearly the same sound as those of Magdalen College, Oxford” (Faulkner: Historical Account of Fulham, 1813).
[471] In Magna Britannia it is not only stated that this street was originally called Hartshorn Lane, but that Ben Jonson once lived in it (S.). The belief that Ben Jonson lived here as a boy rests on the statement of Fuller, who, in his Worthies, says: “Though I cannot with all my industrious inquiry find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband.”
[472] The circumstances of this crime have remained an unsolved mystery. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found in a ditch near Primrose Hill on the evening of October 17, five days after his disappearance from his house in Green Lane, Strand, and five weeks after hearing Titus Oates swear to the existence of a Popish plot. Smith’s statement that he was murdered in Somerset House rests on the utterly corrupt and contradictory testimony of Miles Prance, the Roman Catholic silversmith. His evidence, however, sent three men to the gallows, who protested their innocence to the last. The whole subject is re-examined by Mr. Andrew Lang in Longman’s Magazine of August 1903.
Four different medals were struck to commemorate and characterise the murder. In one of these Godfrey is represented walking with a sword through his body, while on the reverse St. Denis is shown carrying his head in his hand, with the inscription—
The design of another medal illustrates Prance’s statement that Godfrey’s body was first moved from Somerset House in a sedan chair, and then on a horse to Primrose Hill.
The burial of the murdered Justice in St. Martin’s Church was attended by more than a thousand people of distinction, and his portrait was placed in the vestry-room, where it hangs to this day.
[473] William Lloyd (1627-1717), successively Bishop of St. Asaph, Lichfield-and-Coventry, and Worcester, was Vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields 1677-80.
[474] “The two grand Ingrossers of Coles: viz. The Woodmonger, and the Chandler. In a dialogue, expressing their unjust and cruell raising the price of Coales, when, and how they please, to the generall oppression of the Poore. Penn’d on Purpose to lay open their subtile practices, and for the reliefe of many thousands of poore people, in, and about the Cities of London, and Westminster. By a Well-willer to the prosperity of this famous Common-wealth. London, Printed for John Harrison at the Holy-Lamb at the East end of S. Pauls, 1653.”
[475] It has been demonstrated by Mr. Sidney Young in his learned work, The Annals of the Barber Surgeons (1890), that this painting cannot represent the granting of the Charter by Henry VIII. This event occurred in 1512, when the King was but twenty-one years of age; Holbein makes him a man of fifty. Mr. Young believes Holbein’s subject to be the Union of the Barbers Company with the Guild of Surgeons, accomplished by Act of Parliament in 1540.
[476] Of this picture, which narrowly escaped the Fire of London, Pepys thus speaks in his Memoirs:—August 28, 1688. “And at noon comes by appointment Harris to dine with me: and after dinner he and I to Chyrurgeons’-hall, where they are building it new,—very fine; and there to see their theatre, which stood all the fire, and (which was our business) their great picture of Holbein’s, thinking to have bought it, by the help of Mr. Pierce, for a little money: I did think to give £200 for it, it being said to be worth £1000; but it is so spoiled that I have no mind to it, and is not a pleasant, though a good picture.”—S.
[477] This painting represents Edward VI. presenting the Royal Charter of Endowment to the Lord Mayor in 1552; it cannot, therefore, be by Holbein, who died in 1543. Walpole attributes the painting to Holbein, but says the picture was not completed by him. He states that Holbein introduced his own head into one corner. Wornum thinks that there is not a trace of this master’s hand in the picture.
[478] Her portrait has not been identified with certainty. An old Windsor catalogue, however, contains her name.
[479] Richard Dalton was keeper of pictures and antiquary to George III., and one of the artists who presented to George III. the petition for the foundation of the Royal Academy. In 1774, Dalton published about ten etchings from Holbein’s drawings. Perhaps his greatest service to British art was his bringing Bartolozzi to England.
[480] John Chamberlaine (1745-1812), antiquary, succeeded Dalton in 1791, and published “Imitations of Original Drawings, by Hans Holbein, in the Collection of His Majesty, for the Portraits of Illustrious Persons at the Court of Henry VIII.” He died at Paddington Green.
[481] Conrad Martin Metz (1755-1827) studied engraving in London under Bartolozzi; he engraved and imitated many drawings by the old masters.
[482] Edmund Lodge (1756-1839), Clarenceux Herald in 1838. His book, known briefly as Lodge’s Portraits, was originally issued in forty folio parts.
[483] Of Sandby’s “View of Westminster from the garden of old Somerset House” there is an engraving by Rawle in Smith’s Westminster Antiquities.
[484] Charles Long, Baron Farnborough (1761-1838), was Secretary of State for Ireland, and held other important posts. Thomas Moore calls him “the most determined placeman in England” (Memoirs, iv. 28). His advice was sought on the decoration of the royal palaces and on London street improvements. He gave many fine pictures to the National Gallery.
[485] These views may still be seen in Crowle’s “Pennant,” in the Print Room. The first represents London from Somerset House about 1795, and the second Somerset House from the east showing the Lambeth site of Westminster Bridge, etc. In addition, there are in the Crace collection two London views by Thomas Sandby, and seven by Paul. See note on Crowle, p. 86.
[486] In Smith’s day the river washed the base of the Water Gate, covering at high tide the gardens in which the London County Council’s band now plays in summer in London now possesses an approximation to an out-of-door Parisian café. Samuel Scott’s “View of Westminster from the Thames,” National Gallery, Room xix., shows the old state of things.
[487] Etty removed to Buckingham Street in the summer of 1824, from Stangate Walk, Lambeth. At first he took the “lower floor,” but, says Gilchrist, “the top floor was the watch-tower for which our artist sighed,” and he soon obtained it. Here, “having above him,” as he said, “none but the Angels, and the Catholics who had gone before him,” he lived for twenty-three years, finding an excellent housekeeper in his niece. The house stands unaltered, presenting five storeys to the river just behind the Water Gate. Etty’s last years (he died in 1849) were given to his birth-place, York, where his tomb is an object of interest in the grounds of St. Mary’s Abbey.
[488] Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), the marine and landscape painter, was scene-painter at three London theatres, including Drury Lane. “Incomparably the noblest master of cloud-form of all our artists,” was Ruskin’s praise of this artist; “the soul of frankness, generosity, and simplicity,” was Dickens’s praise of the man.
[489] Roubiliac’s statue of Newton, made for Trinity College, was pronounced by Chantrey “the noblest, I think, of all our English statues.” Similarly Roubiliac’s figure of Eloquence was considered by Canova “one of the noblest statues he had seen in England”: it occurs in the monument to John, Duke of Argyll and Greenwich, in Poets’ Corner.
John Bacon, R.A. (1740-99), established his reputation by his figure of Mars, which won him the good word of West, the patronage of the Archbishop of York, and his election as A.R.A. See note on p. 33.
John Charles Felix Rossi, R.A. (1762-1839), was born at Nottingham. He executed statues of Lord Cornwallis, Lord Heathfield, and others in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and decorated Buckingham Palace. His “Celadon and Amelia” was executed in Rome. His is the colossal figure of Britannia in Liverpool Exchange. He was buried in St. James’s churchyard, Hampstead Road.
Flaxman’s “Michael vanquishing Satan” was commissioned by Lord Egremont, and is now at Petworth.
Of busts, alone, Nollekens executed at least two hundred.
Chantrey’s genius was fully acknowledged by Nollekens, who would say when asked to model a bust: “Go to Chantrey; he’s the man for a bust! he’ll make a good bust for you! I always recommend him” (Smith: Nollekens).
Londoners see Sir Richard Westmacott’s statues every day without knowing it. His is the Achilles statue to Wellington in Hyde Park, the Duke of York on the York Column, and the statue of Fox in Bloomsbury Square. His statues in St. Paul’s and the Abbey are numerous; the Abbey has his beautiful monument to Mrs. Warren, a mother and child.
Edward Hodges Baily, R.A. (1788-1867), studied under Flaxman. The bas-relief on the Marble Arch is his, several statues in St. Paul’s, and the figure of Nelson in Trafalgar Square.
[490] William Young Ottley (1771-1836), author of The Origin and Early History of Engraving. His knowledge of painting is described as “astonishing” by Samuel Rogers. On Smith’s death Ottley became Keeper of the Prints.
[491] Maso Finiguerra, a skilful Florentine goldsmith, engraved in 1452 a silver plate to be used as a pax in the church of San Giovanni, and in order to judge of the effect of his design, the lines of which he intended to fill with enamel, he poured some liquid sulphur upon the plate. He then succeeded in taking impressions of the design on paper. These impressions were once thought to be the earliest known engravings. It is now proved that they were not, and that Finiguerra may have had direct instruction from an early German engraver.
[492] The site of Mr. Atkinson’s villa and grounds is indicated by Grove End Road, west of Lord’s Cricket Ground.
[493] Smith misquotes Ramsay, who wrote—
Gentle Shepherd, 1st ed., Act i. Sc. i. 5, 6.
[494] William West, actor and composer, lived to a great age, and was known as the “Father of the Stage.” Some of his songs, such as “When Love was fresh from her Cradle Bed,” were popular. He died in 1888.
[495] The Rev. Thomas Hartwell Horne, Rector of St. Edmund the King and St. Nicholas Acon, was a valuable servant of the British Museum, to which he came as cataloguer in 1824. He died at his house in Bloomsbury Square, January 27, 1862. Watt was Robert Watt, the bibliographer, compiler of Bibliotheca Britannica, etc.; he died in 1819.
[496] The Post Angel, of which the British Museum has a copy, was one of the enterprises of John Dunton. His rigmarole preface sets forth that “by Post-Angels I mean all the invisible Host of the Middle Region, that are employed about us either as Friends or Enemies”; his design is “to shew how we should enquire after News, not as Athenians but as Christians, or (in other words) a Divine Employment of every Remarkable Occurrence.” Features of this periodical were “The Lives and Deaths of the most Eminent Persons that Died in that Month,” and recurrent pious reflections under the head of “The Spiritual Observator.”
[497] John Taylor, who was Smith’s life-long friend and the most genial and patriarchal of artists, died at his house in Cirencester Place, November 21, 1838, in his ninety-ninth year. Smith mentions under the year 1779, that he had been the pupil of Frank Hayman, after which he took up the drawing of portraits in pencil, for which he received seven-and-sixpence to a guinea each. It is said that, in Oxford alone, in six or eight years, Taylor drew, or painted, more than three thousand heads. Finding this employment poorly paid, he took the advice of his fellow-artist “Jack” Gresse and set up as drawing-master, investing his savings in annuities which were to expire in 1840. He died just in time to escape want. See the early reference to Taylor, p. 80.
[498] This caricature was brought out on September 7, 1762, and was entitled “The Bruiser, C. Churchill (once the Reverend!) in the Character of a Russian Hercules, regaling himself after having kill’d the Monster Caricatura that so sorely galled his virtuous friend, the Heaven-born Wilkes.” Mr. Austin Dobson says: “Churchill, who had been ordained a priest and abandoned that calling, appears as a bear, grasping a club, which is inscribed ‘Lye 1, Lye 2,’ etc., and regaling himself with a quart pot of ‘British Burgundy.’”
[499] Hayman died in 1776, so that this statement has a bearing on the vexed question of the date of the “Blue Boy,” which some writers put as late as 1779. Sir Walter Armstrong is convinced that 1770 is the correct date. If so, Gainsborough could not have painted the picture, as he is said to have done, to confute a passage in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s eighth Discourse, which was not delivered until December 1778. The Blue Boy was Master Jonathan Buttall, the ironmonger’s son. The subject, history, and ownership of this famous picture have been the subjects of a controversy second only, in lengthy inconclusiveness, to that on the Letters of Junius. In all probability the original picture is the one in the possession of the Duke of Westminster.
[500] When advanced in life, and unfitted for sprightly parts, Mrs. Abington determined to appear as Scrub, the man-of-all-work to Lady Bountiful in Farquhar’s comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem. “I was present,” says John Taylor, in his Records of My Life, “and remember nothing in her performance that might not have been expected from an actor of much inferior abilities. As a proof, too, that, like many of her profession, she thought herself capable of characters not within the scope of her powers, I once saw her play Ophelia to Mr. Garrick’s Hamlet; and, to use a simile of my old friend Dr. Monsey, she appeared like a mackerel on a gravel walk.”
[501] Hitherto, in the Rainy Day, William Chambers has appeared, another misleading slip. Sir Robert was the Indian judge, and is referred to by Johnson in a letter to Boswell, dated March 5, 1774: “Chambers is married, or almost married, to Miss Wilton, a girl of sixteen, exquisitely beautiful, whom he has, with his lawyer’s tongue, persuaded to take her chance with him in the East.” Miss Wilton was the daughter of Joseph Wilton, R.A., the sculptor.
[502] Mr. Taylor’s father was not only highly respected, but for many years held a principal situation in the Custom House (S.).
[503] They were cleaned and “restored” by John Francis Rigaud, R.A.
[504] Doubtless the letter from Mrs. Abington to Mrs. Jordan, printed under the year 1815.
[505] John Bannister (Honest Jack) left the stage on the night of June 1, 1815, when he played in Kenney’s comedy The World, and The Children in the Wood. “Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister’s performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood,” says Lamb; and Haydon, who in 1826 met Bannister by accident in Chenies Street, Bedford Square, writes: “He held out his hand just as he used to do on the stage, with the same frank native truth. As he spoke, the tones of his favourite ‘Walter’ pierced my heart. It was extraordinary, the effect. ‘Bannister,’ said I, ‘your voice recalls my early days.’—‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I had some touches, had I not?’”
[506] John Pritt Harley (1786-1858) distinguished himself as singer and actor. He appeared at Drury Lane in 1815, the year of Bannister’s retirement, and succeeded to many of that comedian’s parts. He was known as Fat Jack—from his thinness. “I have an exposition of sleep upon me,” were his last words, spoken on the stage of the Princess’s Theatre on August 20, 1858. He had hardly made his exit when he was seized with paralysis, and he died at 14 Upper Gower Street two days later. Harley was an excellent Shakespearean clown, and an ardent collector of walking-sticks.
[507] Porridge Island and another rookery called The Bermudas disappeared about 1829. These were cant names.