Part 26

[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.

[390] See note, p. 273.

[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.--

“When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend The wretch, who living saved a candle’s end; Shouldering God’s altar a vile image stands, Belies his features, nay extends his hands; That live-long wig which Gorgon’s self might own, Eternal buckle takes in Parian stone.”

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.

“But pray, what’s that much like a whip, Which with the air does wav’ring skip From side to side, and hip to hip?”

asks a country visitor in _The Metamorphosis of the Town_, and is answered--

“Sir, do not look so fierce and big, It is a modish pigtail wig.”

[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.