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Henry Austin Dobson, LL.D.

Printed in England

  My dear Gosse,

      'Labuntur anni!'--which reminds me that I have never dedicated a volume of my papers to you. And yet it must be nearly a quarter of a century since we first began to interchange ideas:--a long time to have watched 'les étoiles qui filent'! Will you accept these Miscellanies in memory of those detached and delightful hours (between Ambition and Despair!) when we have sometimes loved Books for their own sakes, careless alike of those who wrote and those who write about them?

This volume was first published by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1899, although most of its contents had already appeared in a volume entitled Miscellanies, published in America in the previous year by Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co., of New York. It was reissued by the Oxford University Press in 1923, in their Standard Authors series, and is now reprinted in 'The World's Classics' in 1925. It has unfortunately proved impossible, on account of its size, to include the plan of Old Whitehall appearing in the original edition.

The majority of the papers in this volume are reprinted, by permission, from the 'Contemporary Review,' the 'National Review,' the 'Church Quarterly Review,' 'Longman's,' and the 'English Illustrated Magazine.' Others are reproduced with the consent of Messrs. Dent, and of Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. All have been revised or extended; and I hope they will be found sufficiently diversified in subject to justify the motto I have borrowed from Pliny, who, by the way, seems to have been in agreement with the later--

of the Prologue to 'Faust.'

Austin Dobson.

March, 1899.

Illustration

In February, 1785, when the books of the 'late learned Samuel Johnson, Esq; LL.D. Deceased,' were being sold by Mr. Christie at his Great Room in Pall Mall, one of the persons present was the poet, Samuel Rogers, then a youth of two-and-twenty. He recalls his attendance at this particular sale in order to chronicle the fact that he there met a very old gentleman,--so old that the flesh of his face looked like parchment,--who entertained the younger generation of Mr. Christie's clients by discoursing of the changes that had taken place in London within a memory which, to his auditors, seemed to rival that of the Count de St. Germain. He himself who spoke, he asserted, had 'shot snipes in Conduit-Street,' when Conduit Street was an open mead; and it may be added that he had a friend, Mr. Carew Hervey 2 Mildmay, who had done likewise.^[1] Concerning his age, beyond these indications, he was reticent; and he was popularly supposed to be what he appeared to be--at least a hundred. Oddly enough, the only well-known portrait of him was taken by Samuel Ireland at just this time and place. It exhibits a very ancient personage indeed, lean as a grasshopper, with a profile not unlike that of Fielding in Hogarth's posthumous sketch. He wears a military-looking hat, and a caped coat with deep cuffs and ruffles. His sword hilt projects between his skirts; and in his right hand, which is propped upon a stout walking-cane, he holds a book which has been knocked down to him, and which he is reading attentively without the aid of spectacles.

The cadet of a Jacobite family in the West Riding of Yorkshire, with an English father and an Irish mother, General James Edward Oglethorpe--for such was the name of Ireland's sitter--was not so old as he looked, and perhaps wished to be thought. When in July, 1785, he died, 3 contemporary prints vaguely stated his age at one hundred and two,^[2] and his epitaph in Cranham Church--an incontinent production by Capel Lofft which rivals the performances of Pope's Dr. Freind--is silent as to the date of his birth. His fullest biographer, Mr. Wright, and his latest biographer, Mr. Bruce, concur in fixing this as June 1, 1689. But shortly after Mr. Wright's book appeared in 1867, an indefatigable amateur of the parish register, the late Col. J. L. Chester, pointed out in 'Notes and Queries' that the date of the General's birth was plainly recorded at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, being there given as December 22, 1696--a date which (as regards day and month) is practically confirmed by the fact that, in the colony of Georgia, which he founded, the 21st December was long kept as his birthday. The seven years thus deducted from his lifetime make legend of many of the facts related of his youth. Even if he were really, as his epitaph avers, a 'Captain-Lieutenant' of the Queen's Guards in 1714 (at eighteen), it is very 4 improbable that he could have been the 'Adjutant-General Oglethorpe' who, in the same year, travelled from Lyons to Turin with Dr. Berkeley. But it is pretty clear that in 1714 he matriculated at Corpus, where he was a Gentleman Commoner. In 1715, either upon the recommendation of Marlborough or Argyll, he took service under Prince Eugene, and assisted at the siege of Belgrade by the Austrians. For this we have his own authority. 'Pray, General,' said Johnson to him in 1772, 'give us an account of the siege of Belgrade' (Boswell, by a slip of the pen, says Bender). Whereupon the old warrior, across the walnuts, and with the aid of some of the wine, described that military exploit. Hac ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus. 'Here we were, here were the Turks,' etc., etc., to all of which the Doctor 'listened with the closest attention.' It is from Boswell again, and indeed upon the same occasion, that we get the only other authentic anecdote of Oglethorpe's youth. À propos of duelling, Boswell tells the following story, as the General told it. Sitting once at table, under Eugene, with a certain Prince of Wurtemberg, the latter, by fillipping the surface of his wine, made some of it fly over the young volunteer, who was thus placed in the awkward dilemma of 5 having to choose between accepting or resenting a gratuitous affront. Oglethorpe's resolution was quickly taken. Saying with a smile, 'That's a good joke, but we do it much better in England!' he raised his glass, and flung the contents in His Serenity's face. Whereupon an old General present pacifically observed, 'Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l'avez commencé,' and the affair passed off in good humour.

With the peace of Passarowitz in 1718, hostilities between the Sultan and Charles VI. were brought to a close, and with those hostilities ended Oglethorpe's experiences as a Continental volunteer. A year or two later, by the death of his second brother, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, he succeeded to the family estate of Westbrook, near Godalming, which included a mansion where the Pretender was reported to have lain in hiding; and in October, 1722, like his father and brother before him, he took his seat in Parliament for Haslemere. As a senator, he was conspicuous for a frank speech and a benevolent motive. Colonization, commerce, free trade, and the silk manufacture in England were things which interested him; and he had a knack of homely illustration which was by no means ineffective in debate. But he was a working 6 rather than a talking politician, and his most valuable Parliamentary efforts were in connection with the Committee of 1729-30 into the state of the debtors' prisons in London--a Committee which, indeed, had originated with himself. A friend of his own, one Robert Castell, an amiable amateur architect, who, under guise of an introduction to Vitruvius, had prepared, and dedicated to Richard, Earl of Burlington, a stately subscription folio on the Villas of the Ancients, subsequently--and perhaps consequently--fell into grave pecuniary difficulties. He was thrown into the Fleet, at that time farmed by a wretch named Thomas Bambridge, who, in his capacity of Warden, cleared some five thousand pounds a year by fleecing and oppressing the unfortunate debtors under his charge. As long as Castell could contrive to pay heavily for the privilege of residing in one of the four or five shabby streets which then constituted the Rules or Liberties, he was permitted to do so. But when he became unable to satisfy the Warden's immoderate demands for 'presents' (as they were called), he was mercilessly transferred to one of the three spunging houses^[3] attached to the prison, a 7 crowded and loathsome den in which, moreover, the small-pox was then raging. He had never (as he protested) had that distemper; was extremely apprehensive of it; caught it almost immediately; and died in a few days, declaring, with his last breath, that he had been murdered by Bambridge. Oglethorpe promptly brought his friend's deplorable fate to the notice of the House of Commons; and a Select Committee to inquire into the state of the Gaols of the Kingdom was forthwith appointed, of which he was nominated Chairman. Its three Reports on the Fleet and the King's Bench prisons, still to be read in volume eight of Cobbett's 'Parliamentary History,' disclose the most sickening story of barbarity, extortion, and insanitation. The good and the bad, the sick and the hale, were found to be herded together in filthy dungeons; deaths, often from sheer starvation, were of daily occurrence; iron collars, thumb-screws, and the heaviest fetters were freely used for the refractory; and an unfortunate prisoner might be subjected to all this for the paltry debt of a shilling, which became the nucleus of endless gratuities and 'considerations,' 8 and the pretext for perpetual confinement. As a result of the labours of Oglethorpe's committee some of the more crying of these abuses were remedied; but many yet remained, thirty years later, to arouse the pious horror of John Howard. The 'garnish' money of the 'Beggar's Opera' and the 'begging box' of the 'Citizen of the World' still swelled the profits of the Deputy-Marshal and his myrmidons; the terrible gaol-fever continued to claim its tribute of victims; and the prison interiors of Goldsmith's 'Vicar' and Fielding's 'Amelia' can scarcely be regarded as evidences of an attained ideal. One of the most interesting mementos of Oglethorpe's endeavours--which, by the way, were not restricted to his Parliamentary labours--is Hogarth's picture, now in the National Portrait Gallery, of Bambridge under examination. It was painted for Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk, Knight of the Shire for Aberdeen, and a member of the Committee.^[4] Horace Walpole, who had the original oil-sketch, is loud in appreciation of the rendering of the inhuman gaoler. 'It is the very figure that Salvator Rosa would have drawn for Iago in the moment of detection. Villainy, fear, 9 and conscience are mixed in yellow and livid on his countenance, his lips are contracted by tremor, his face advances as eager to lie, his legs step back as thinking to make his escape; one hand is thrust precipitately into his bosom, the fingers of the other are catching uncertainly at his button-holes. If this was a portrait [and it was], it is the most speaking that ever was drawn; if it was not, it is still finer.'

The Committee of Enquiry into the state of the Gaols was not Oglethorpe's first philanthropic essay. In 1728 he had published anonymously a little pamphlet entitled 'The Sailor's Advocate,' in which he exposed the abuses of the cruel method of impressment countenanced by the Admiralty of his day, and, indeed, of many a day to follow. But the insight he had gained into the horrors of prison discipline had now turned his thoughts definitely in fresh directions; and he began to cast about to find employment and a future for those hapless beings who, from no unpardonable fault of their own, were most liable to fall into the clutches of Bambridge and his kind. After prolonged and anxious consideration, he was led to believe that the true solution of the question must be sought in assisted emigration--a conclusion in which he was fortified (he 10 says) by the successful settlement of Derry (under James I.) by the Corporation of London. The district he selected for his field of operation was one which had already attracted the projector. It lay on the east coast of North America, beyond and below the Savannah River, and to the north of the Spanish territory of Florida. The Spaniards, who claimed all America, threatened it periodically from the south; bands of desperate runaway blacks infested it from the Carolinas; and to the west were dense and trackless woods, filled with Cherokees, Chickasaws, and other hostile and predatory Indian tribes. But Oglethorpe, nothing daunted, put forward his scheme. With twenty other trustees, he petitioned the Throne for an Act of Incorporation, and in June, 1732, obtained a charter for settling and establishing a new colony, to be called Georgia, in honour of George II. In a couple of pamphlets, published in the same year, and entitled respectively 'An Essay on Plantations,' and 'A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South Carolina and Georgia,' he developed his ideas, which he affirmed to be 'the result of various readings and conversations in many years.' His appeal was warmly responded to by the public, and Parliament handed over to the trustees a sum of £10,000, the residue of a grant 11 voted but not paid to Berkeley for his frustrate college in the Bermudas. The trustees, who were themselves large contributors to the scheme, were, by their Charter, restrained from receiving any salary, fee, perquisite or profit whatsoever, nor could they hold any land; conditions entirely honourable to themselves, and not subsequently discredited. Slavery, which prevailed in the Carolinas, was also strictly prohibited, eventually by special Statute. After careful inquiries, thirty-five families, comprising representatives of many trades, and numbering in all one hundred and twenty persons, were chosen for the first settlers; and on the 16th of November, 1732, they set sail from Gravesend in the 'Anne' (Captain Thomas). They were accompanied by Oglethorpe himself; by a chaplain, the Rev. Henry Herbert, and by a Piedmontese named Amatis, whose function it was to instruct the new colonists in the art of rearing silkworms and winding silk. Oglethorpe who was empowered to act as a Colonial Governor, was at this date six-and-thirty, and notwithstanding an undeniable touch of romance in his character, still unmarried. He had already shown energy and tenacity of purpose; he was now to exhibit, in fuller measure, his gifts as an organizer and 12 administrator. He is described as tall, manly, and very handsome; as dignified, but not austere; and if it be added to these things that, as a country gentleman, he had an ample fortune, which he freely employed in the furtherance of his charitable designs, may fairly claim to be written, like Abou Ben Adhem, 'as one that loved his fellow-men.'

On January 13, 1733, after a prosperous voyage of some sixty days, the 'Anne' dropped anchor outside Charleston Bar in South Carolina, and Oglethorpe proceeded to select the site of the new settlement. The spot he fixed upon was a flat bluff or headland on the right (or south) bank of the Savannah, where, about ten miles from the mouth, it bends eastward to the Atlantic. This site extended from five to six miles into the country, with a river frontage of a mile. Forthwith the clearing of the ground began, and streets and squares were marked out. By the middle of March five houses were built or building, and a crane and magazines had been erected. The settlers had been solemnly warned against the dangers of drunkenness; and friendly relations were already in progress with the nearest body of Indians, a branch of the Creek tribe, barely half a mile off, at Yamacraw. Oglethorpe's management 13 of the Indians deserves the highest praise, and he speedily inspired them with a confidence which they never lost. They are 'desirous,' he wrote to the trustees, 'to be subjects to his Majesty, King George, to have lands given them among us, and to breed their children at our schools. Their chief, and his beloved man, who is the second man in the nation, desire to be instructed in the Christian religion.' A month or two later a formal convention was concluded with the Indians, under which the country between the Savannah and the Altamaha (Goldsmith's 'wild Altama' in 'The Deserted Village'), as far as the tide waters flowed, and including most of the islands, was ceded to the trustees; and, by a subsequent treaty, the Creeks engaged to have no dealings with the Spaniards or the French. As a protection against the former, Oglethorpe erected a strong outpost on the Ogechee river, which he christened (in honour of his patron) Fort Argyll; and this was followed, not long after, by the creation, on St. Simon's Island, at the mouth of the Altamaha, of the settlement and military station of Frederica. Meanwhile new emigrants continued to reach Savannah. A large body of these were Protestants, from Salzburg, whose expulsion from 14 their native land, by episcopal edict, had excited considerable sympathy in England.^[5] Oglethorpe and his trustees invited them to Georgia, where, in March, 1734, they arrived, to be welcomed warmly by the English colonists, and regaled, inter alia, with 'very fine, wholesome English beer.'^[6] They took up their abode in a locality chosen for them by Oglethorpe's aid, which they named 'Ebenezer.' As soon as they were established there, Oglethorpe, leaving his new colony in the charge of a bailiff or storekeeper, named Causton, set sail for England in H.M.S. 'Aldborough,' taking with him his now firm friend, the old Creek chief or Mico, Tomo-Chichi, his wife, Senauki, his boy-nephew and successor, Tooanahowi, and Hillispilli, his war-captain.^[7] Oglethorpe's politic object in choosing these 15 travelling companions was to impress his Indian allies with the resources of Great Britain, and the importance of her institutions.

Tomo-Chichi and his suite had certainly a flattering reception in London. The war-captain having been with difficulty restrained from appearing in his 'native nothingness' of paint and feathers, the party were taken to Kensington in three coaches to interview George II., who received them very graciously, and allowed them £20 a week during their four months' stay in town. They subsequently visited the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. William Wake) at Lambeth, and were made acquainted with whatever was 'curious and worthy Observation in and about the Cities of London and Westminster.' They received some £400 worth of presents, including a gold watch which was presented to Tooanahowi, with a pious admonition, by the youthful Duke of Cumberland. In return, they seem to have greatly (or gratefully) admired His Royal Highness's 'Exercise of riding the manag'd Horse', and to have been specially impressed by the magnificence of the Life Guards and the glories of the Thames on Lord Mayor's Day. After their return to Georgia in October, some of the tribe sent an elaborate letter of thanks to 16 Tomo-Chichi's English entertainers, but scarcely in a shape adapted for preservation in an autograph book. It consisted of the dressed skin of a young buffalo, painted by a Cherokee chief with red and black hieroglyphics; and in this form it long ornamented the Georgia Office in Old Palace Yard. Oglethorpe himself was also naturally the object of much attention, and he received many testimonies to the popularity of his enterprise. Some of these took peculiar forms. At the end of 1735 a certain eccentric Mr. Robert North, of Scarborough, offered prizes in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for the four best poems entitled 'The Christian Hero' (the name, it will be remembered, of an early devotional manual by Captain Richard Steele of the Guards). The first prize was to be a gold medal with Oglethorpe's head on one side, and that of Lady Elizabeth Hastings (Steele's 'Aspasia') on the other. Lady Elizabeth's effigy was, however, withheld at her own request, and that of Oglethorpe did not prove complimentary as a portrait. As for the poems--well, the poems may still be read in Sylvanus Urban his sixth volume. But the metrical utterance that really handed down Oglethorpe's name to posterity made its appearance a year later (1737). The couplet-- 17

in Alexander Pope's epistle to Colonel Cotterell, has done more to preserve the memory of the founder of Georgia than all the records of the Office at Westminster.

During Oglethorpe's stay in England he had been actively promoting the interests of the new province, but beyond the fact that, from his seat in the House, he had warmly supported two Acts prohibiting the introduction into the settlement of spirits and slavery, his doings have not been particularly recorded. In December, 1735, he set out on his return voyage with two vessels, the 'Symond' and the 'London Merchant,' having on board two hundred and twenty chosen settlers, and a fresh consignment of Salzburgers. He was accompanied, as missionaries, by John Wesley, at this time two-and-thirty, and his younger brother Charles, who was twenty-six. After a passage of many vexations and delays (like Fielding later, they were detained several weeks at the Isle of Wight by contrary winds), they reached their destination. Of course there were disappointments. Tybee Island, at the river-mouth, which should have been lighted, was still dark. But Savannah itself had greatly prospered in its 18 founder's absence. Where, three years before, there had been only the 'matted woods' of Goldsmith, now rose some two hundred comfortable dwellings with garden- and orchard-plots, and pasture lands filled with grazing cattle. There were even public recreation grounds, delightfully situated by the river side, where flourished orange trees and tulip-laurels, and white mulberries for the silk-worms, and tropical plants--coffee and cotton and palma Christi--which had been sent from the West Indies by Sir Hans Sloane. Savannah, however, was no longer to be Oglethorpe's chief care. The Spaniards, who had a stronghold at St. Augustine, in Florida, had begun to demonstrate uneasily along the Altamaha, and he turned his energies for the future mainly to the protection of the southern frontier. A body of Gaelic Highlanders from Inverness were already installed at Darien, about twelve miles up the Altamaha; and after adjusting some difficulties of the Salzburgers, who were dissatisfied with the site of Ebenezer, he hastened southward to St. Simon's Island, at the river mouth. Here in brief space he established, and stocked with emigrants, the fort of Frederica, for many years to come the main bulwark against Spanish aggression in North America; and it is with this fort on 19 St. Simon's Island that, during the remainder of his stay in Georgia, he was chiefly connected.

It has already been mentioned that Oglethorpe was accompanied on his return from England by the Wesley brothers. Their subsequent history is one of the difficult passages of the Georgia chronicle. Charles, the younger, who, besides being chaplain, was to be Oglethorpe's secretary, appears to have speedily wearied of his lay duties, added to which, during Oglethorpe's absence from Frederica, he became involved in a tangle of misunderstandings with the settlers--misunderstandings embittered by jealousies and complicated by feminine tittle-tattle. In a very few weeks he found Frederica too hot for him ('I was overjoyed at my deliverance out of this furnace'), and not long afterwards resigned his post, parting kindly with Oglethorpe, who, in spite of his impetuosity, never bore malice. Meanwhile his elder brother, whom Oglethorpe liked less, was not prospering at Savannah. He had come out to convert the Indians, but he never learned their language. On the other hand, he seems to have contrived to make himself exceedingly distasteful to the colonists. At this stage of his career--as he himself admitted later--he was a bigoted High Churchman. His exhortations, rigorous in doctrine 20 and personal in tone, were angrily resented by the very mixed community of the new settlement. He is, moreover, alleged to have 'interfered in family quarrels and the broils of social life.' Finally came the affaire du cœur which has been so frequently related. Always susceptible to feminine charm, he became attached to the storekeeper's niece, a designing coquette, who had nursed him through a fever, and deliberately laid herself out to attract him. Whether he actually made known his sentiments is obscure, but the Salzburg elders were certainly consulted privately as to the expediency of his marrying. They reported unfavourably, and the lady promptly consoled herself with a rival admirer. When afterwards, for some levity of behaviour as a married woman, Wesley declined to admit her to the Communion Table, her uncle and husband indicted him for defamation. The suit failed, but Savannah thenceforth became impossible for John Wesley, and he returned to England in December, 1737, as Whitefield was setting out to join him. Whitefield, in other ways, was equally ineffectual; and he, also, made no long stay in Georgia. In no case does there seem to have been any actual rupture with Oglethorpe. But from a letter he wrote later, à propos of the 21 excellent 'Practice of Christianity' which the good Manx Bishop, Dr. Wilson, had drawn up at his request, 'towards an Instruction for the Indians,' he was manifestly of opinion that the teaching of 'our Methodists' (by which he must be understood to mean the brothers and their successor) had not proved to be adapted to the spiritual requirements of the colony. Probably he would personally have preferred more loving-kindness and a little less formality.

The Wesleys, however, are but an episode in Georgian history; and during their residence in the settlement can scarcely have had any prolonged intercourse with Oglethorpe, whose life henceforward reads like a realization of the old stage direction, 'excursions and alarms.' Actually or indirectly he was continuously occupied in watching or checkmating the aggressive movements of the Spaniards; and his resources, offensive and defensive, were uncertain and inadequate. The Indians, his best friends, were excitable, and not always to be controlled by civilization; the Carolinians, besides being committed to slave-labour, were self-seeking and obstructive; while the Salzburgers, though inoffensive enough in their 'petrified Sabbath' at Ebenezer, declined to fight, even for hearth and home, and ultimately 22 had to 'fold their tents' altogether. After nine months of defending Georgia against its different dangers, Oglethorpe took advantage of a temporary lull to sail again for England, and beat up recruits. He was received with renewed enthusiasm, not a little heightened by the fact that the Court of Madrid, while privately strengthening St. Augustine, had the audacity to demand that neither Oglethorpe nor his levies should be allowed to go back. Nevertheless, with the approval of Government, his regiment of 600 men was raised; and in the following September (1738), he once more reached St. Simon's with the title of commander-in-chief of all his Majesty's forces in Georgia and South Carolina. Some further time was occupied in procuring and concluding fresh treaties with the Indians; and then came the long deferred Declaration of War with Spain, one of the first results of which was that Oglethorpe was ordered to reduce St. Augustine. This, a few months later, he prepared to do, but not with his usual good fortune. He had a fair equipment of regulars, Carolina militia, and Indians, and this land force, numbering some two thousand men, was intended to be supported from the sea by English men-of-war. But the Indians proved unmanageable; the colonial militia, besides being 23 inefficient, deserted freely; and the fleet failed to render the aid expected. Sickness and disaffection complicated matters, and after investing St. Augustine (which was found to be strongly garrisoned and well defended) for five weeks, Oglethorpe had no option but to withdraw ingloriously, to the great prejudice of his prestige both abroad and at home, where his old patron, the Duke of Argyll, had to explain in the House of Lords (what was indeed the truth) that the enterprise had miscarried 'only for want of supplies necessary to a possibility of success.'

Fortunately, for nearly two years after the siege of St. Augustine, Spain remained comparatively quiet. Then, in the spring of 1742, came Oglethorpe's opportunity. Before he had been the attacker, now he was to be the attacked, and the story, on a smaller scale, has a dash of the Elizabethan days. With Castilian deliberation the Spaniards of Florida and the Havana fitted out a pompous armada of forty or fifty ships, snows, galleys, and periaguas, the purpose of which was to sweep the heretics, summarily and for ever, from the North American settlements. The key of Georgia was St. Simon's Island, and St. Simon's Island, the defences of which had been recently strengthened, could not be neglected 24 by an invader. Into St. Simon's Island Oglethorpe accordingly threw himself with a rapidly organized band of followers. When, after an unsuccessful attack on Fort William (in Cumberland Island), the Spaniards arrived in St. Simon's Sound, he allowed them to land, spiked the guns of a smaller fort to the south, and retired upon Frederica, which was flanked by a dense oak forest, and approached by a morass. Here, under cover of the wood, and excellently served by his Indian scouts, he attacked the enemy in detail, a course which subjected them to much the same fate as that which befell Braddock's ill-starred expedition, fourteen years later, against Fort Duquesne. Notwithstanding their superiority, numbers of them, including several officers of distinction, were killed by sallies and ambuscades, and Oglethorpe himself, as a leader, seems to have shown not only extraordinary resource and decision, but also marked personal gallantry, taking two Spaniards prisoner, on one occasion, with his own hand. Finally, by a fortunate stratagem, he contrived, through the medium of a French spy, to persuade his foes that an English fleet was on its way to his relief--a statement which was opportunely supported by the chance appearance of some vessels off the coast. After about a week 25 of this desultory and disastrous warfare, the discomfited Spanish forces re-embarked, with Oglethorpe at their heels. They made a renewed but fruitless attack upon Fort William, which was bravely defended by Ensign Stuart. In a few days more they had faded away in the direction of St. Augustine, and Oglethorpe was able to order a thanksgiving for the end of the invasion. Seven or eight hundred men had put to flight more than five thousand; and Whitefield might well write (as he did) that 'the deliverance of Georgia from the Spaniards is such as cannot be paralleled but by some instances out of the Old Testament.'

During the remainder of his stay in Georgia, Oglethorpe continued to 'harass the Spaniard' by all the means at his command. But he was ill-supported from home both with money and men; and what was worse, his military operations had involved him personally in financial difficulties which sooner or later must have necessitated his return to England. The proximate cause of that return, however, was apparently to meet certain charges which had been preferred against him by one of his subordinates, Lieut.-Colonel Cook. In June, 1744, these were declared by a Board of General Officers to be 'false, malicious, and 26 without foundation,' and Cook was summarily dismissed the service. A month or two later (September 15) the 'Gentleman's Magazine' records the marriage of 'Gen. Oglethorpe,--to the only Daughter of the late Sir Nathan Wright, Bt., of Cranham Hall, Essex.' The lady, who was thirty-five, brought him a fresh fortune (Georgia must by this time have absorbed his own), and a pleasant Jacobean country-house with an old-fashioned garden. One of Mr. Urban's poets seems to have expected that Mrs. Oglethorpe would henceforth share her husband's 'fatigues, and conduct in the field.' But Oglethorpe never again went back to Georgia, which was thenceforth left to go its own gait, and adopt slave labour. In the Forty-Five, he was appointed to a command under that corpulent rival of Eugene and Marlborough, 'Billy the Butcher,' who subsequently accused him of 'lingering on the road' with his rangers in pursuit of the rebels. 'Lingering' was not a fault of Oglethorpe, who was promptly acquitted by court-martial--the King confirming the verdict. But though he was later made a Lieutenant-General, this incident, coupled with some distrust of his Jacobite antecedents, practically closed his career as a soldier. For several years he continued to speak ably and 27 earnestly in the House of Commons on matters military and philanthropic. Then, in 1754, two years after the trustees had finally washed their hands of Georgia, he lost the seat which he had held through seven Parliaments; and in 1765, two years after Florida was transferred to England at the Treaty of Paris, he became a full General, soon to be the oldest in the British army. But it was twenty years more before he finally quitted the scene, living past the American Revolution and the famous Declaration which made Georgia independent, to die at last in his Essex home, not as one might suppose, of old age, but of a violent fever which would have killed him at any time. He is buried in the little church at Cranham, where his widow was ultimately laid beside him.

There are many references to Oglethorpe in the memoirs of his day, through which he flits fitfully for half a century, vigorous, bright-eyed, and too eager of speech to complete his sentences. He was familiar, of course, with Boswell, to which eminent 'Authour,' after the publication of the 'Tour in Corsica,' he introduced himself in a particularly gratifying manner. 'My name, Sir, is Oglethorpe, and I wish to be acquainted with you.' He bade him not marry till he had first put the Corsicans in a proper situation. 28 'You may make a fortune in the doing of it,' said he; 'or, if you do not, you will have acquired such a character as will entitle you to make a fortune'--words which, if correctly reported, have a curious odd suggestion of his own experience. He was also known to Johnson, whose 'London' he had been one of the earliest to praise 'in all companies,' and there can be no doubt that such lines as those in that poem which speak of 'peaceful deserts, yet unclaimed by Spain', which might afford an asylum to the oppressed, must have found a responsive echo in Oglethorpe's heart. Both the Doctor and Boswell seem to have proposed to write their friend's life, but neither did; and we are left to explain their neglect either by indolence, or that absence of effective biographical material and predominance of minor detail which have proved such a stumbling block to Oglethorpe's biographers. Another contemporary whom he knew was Goldsmith, to whom he offered Cranham as an asylum from the fumum strepitumque Romæ. He sends him five pounds for a charitable purpose, and adds--'if a farm and a mere country scene will be a little refreshment from the smoke of London, we shall be glad of the happiness of seeing you at Cranham Hall.' Whether Goldsmith went (he was familiar 29 with another Essex house, Lord Clare's at Gosfield), is not related; but it was when Oglethorpe was calling upon him with Topham Beauclerk that he was insulted by Pilkington's historical pound--no, quarter-of-a-pound--of tea; and it was at Oglethorpe's, in April, 1773, that he sang Tony Lumpkin's 'Three Jolly Pigeons' and that other ditty, to the tune of the 'Humours of Balmagairy' ('Ah, me! when shall I marry me!'), which was left out of 'She Stoops' because the 'Miss Hardcastle' of the play was no vocalist. But the last, and perhaps the most picturesque accounts of Oglethorpe are given by Horace Walpole and Hannah More. 'I have got a new admirer,' writes that lively lady from Mrs. Garrick's in 1784. 'We flirt together prodigiously; it is the famous General Oglethorpe, perhaps the most remarkable man of his time ... the finest figure you ever saw. He perfectly realises all my ideas of Nestor. His literature is great [he knew some of Miss More's poetry by heart], his knowledge of the world extensive, and his faculties as bright as ever; he is one of the three persons still living who were mentioned by Pope; Lord Mansfield and Lord Marchmont are the other two ... He is quite a preux chevalier, heroic, romantic, and full of the 30 old gallantry.' Walpole, who was feebler, and frailer, and crippled with rheumatism, is hardly as enthusiastic as 'St. Hannah,' which was his own pet-name for Miss More. But his report is fully confirmatory of Oglethorpe's young old age. 'General Oglethorpe, who sometimes visits me ... has the activity of youth when compared with me. His eyes, ears, articulation, limbs, and memory would suit a boy, if a boy could recollect a century backwards. His teeth are gone; he is a shadow, and a wrinkled one; but his spirits and his spirit are in full bloom; two years and a half ago, he challenged a neighbouring gentleman for trespassing on his manor. "I could carry a cannon as easily as let off a pistol."' And this was written in April, 1785, a month or two before Oglethorpe's death.

Hannah More's conventional 'preux chevalier' strikes the final note of Oglethorpe better than her lightly-penned laudation. When he recommends her to study the old romances because it is the only way to acquire 'noble sentiments,' we are reminded not a little of his own kinship to Don Quixote; when we read of his restless and impulsive energy, we recall (and the parallel was drawn in his own day) the ubiquitous exploits of Swift's Peterborough: 31

He prosecuted Philanthropy in the spirit of a Paladin, rejoicing in the obstacles, the encounters, the nights sub Jove frigido; and it is easy to imagine him declaiming to Johnson and Goldsmith of the dangers of luxury, or quoting the admirable precepts of Mr. Addison's 'Cato.' His method, with all its advantages, had demonstrable drawbacks; and it is quite possible that, reasoning with his heart rather than his head, he was occasionally mistaken both in the means he employed and the agents he chose. It is possible, also, that in the presence of timidity or obstruction, he was sometimes imperious as well as impatient. Nescit cedere was the motto of his family. But he was a good man, disinterested, genuinely self-denying, sincerely religious after his fashion,--a fashion perhaps not altogether that of the Wesleys and Whitefields. In the matter of spirits and slave labour he was plainly in advance of his age; and if he was not exactly (as Warton claimed), 'at once a great 32 hero and a great legislator,' there can be no doubt as to his 'Benevolence of Soul,' and his unfeigned sympathy with the oppressed. 'His undertaking will succeed,' said the Governor of South Carolina, 'for he nobly devotes all his powers to serve the poor and rescue them from their wretchedness.' 'He has taken care of us to the utmost of his ability,' wrote the pastor of the grateful Salzburgers. 'Others would not in many years have accomplished what he has brought about in one.' And when, long after, the Spaniards sought to prejudice an Indian chief against his English friend, he answered, 'We love him. It is true he does not give us silver; but he gives us everything we want that he has. He has given me the coat off his back and the blanket from under him.'

Thirty years of taking-in; fifteen years of giving-out;--that, in brief, is Oliver Goldsmith's story. When, in 1758, his failure to pass at Surgeons' Hall finally threw him on letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, and the fifteen years had been begun. What was to come he knew not; but, from his bare-walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified past. He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish 'buckeen.' He had knocked at the doors of both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither. He had set out for London and stopped at Dublin; he had started for America and arrived at Cork. He had been many things: a medical student, a strolling musician, an apothecary, a corrector of the press, an usher at a Peckham 'academy.' Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. 34 And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his 'forty pounds a year' by farming a field or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting season from the 'blue bed to the brown,' and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. As it was, if he could not be said to have 'seen life steadily, and seen it whole,' he had, at all events, inspected it pretty closely in parts; and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things, which, in his turn, he was to re-impress upon his writings. 'No man'--says one of his biographers^[8]--'ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.' To his last hour he was drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that 'unhallowed time' when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities. To do as Goldsmith did would scarcely enable a man 35 to write a 'Vicar of Wakefield' or a 'Deserted Village,'--certainly his practice cannot be preached with safety 'to those that eddy round and round.' But viewing his entire career, it is difficult not to see how one part seems to have been an indispensable preparation for the other, and to marvel once more (with the philosopher Square) at 'the eternal Fitness of Things.'

The events of Goldsmith's life have been too often narrated to need repetition, and we shall not resort to the well-worn device of repeating them in order to say so. But the progress of time, advancing some things and effacing others, lends a fresh aspect even to masterpieces; for which reason it is always possible to speak of a writer's work. In this instance we shall restrict ourselves to Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. And, with regard to both, what strikes one first is the extreme tardiness of that late blossoming upon which Johnson commented. When a man succeeds as Goldsmith succeeded, friends and critics speedily discover that he had shown signs of excellence even from his boyish years. But setting aside those half-mythical ballads for the Dublin street-singers, and some doubtful verses for Jane Contarine, there is no definite evidence that, from 36 a doggerel couplet in his childhood to an epigram not much better than doggerel composed when he was five and twenty, he had written a line of verse of the slightest importance; and even five years later, although he refers to himself in a private letter as a 'poet,' it must have been solely upon the strength of the unpublished fragment of 'The Traveller,' which, in the interval, he had sent to his brother Henry from abroad. It is even more remarkable that--although so skilful a correspondent should have been fully sensible of his gifts--until, under the pressure of circumstances, he drifted into literature, the craft of letters seems never to have been his ambition. He thinks of turning lawyer, physician, clergyman--anything but author; and when at last he engages in that profession, it is to free himself from a scholastic slavery which he seems to have always regarded with peculiar bitterness, yet to which, after a first unsatisfactory trial of what was to be his true vocation, he unhesitatingly returned. If he went back anew to the pen, however, it was only to enable him to escape from it more effectually, and he was prepared to go as far as Coromandel. But Literature, 'toute entière à sa proie attachée,' refused to relinquish him; and, although he continued to make spasmodic efforts 37 to extricate himself from the toils, detained him relentlessly to the day of his death.

If there is no evidence that he had written much when he entered upon what has been called his second period, he had not the less formed his opinions on many literary questions. Much of the matter of the 'Polite Learning' is plainly manufactured ad hoc; but in its references to authorship and criticism, there is an individual note which is absent elsewhere; and when he speaks of the tyranny of publishers, the petty standards of criticism, and the forlorn and precarious existence of the hapless writer for bread, he is evidently reproducing a condition of things with which he had become familiar during his brief bondage on the 'Monthly Review.' As to his personal views on poetry in particular, it is easy to collect them from this and later utterances. Against blank verse he objects from the first, as suited only to the sublimest themes--which is a polite way of shelving it altogether; while in favour of rhyme he alleges--perhaps borrowing his illustration from Montaigne--that the very restriction stimulates the fancy, as a fountain plays highest when the aperture is diminished. Blank verse, too (he asserts), imports into poetry a 'disgusting solemnity of manner' which is fatal 38 to 'agreeable trifling,'--an objection intimately connected with the feeling which afterwards made him the champion on the stage of character and humour. Among the poets who were his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, his likes and dislikes were strong. He fretted at the fashion which Gray's 'Elegy' set in poetry; he considered it a fine poem, but 'overloaded with epithet;' and he deplored the remoteness and want of emotion which distinguished the Pindaric Odes. Yet from many indications in his own writings he seems to have genuinely appreciated the work of Collins. Churchill, and Churchill's satire, he detested. With Young he had some personal acquaintance, and had evidently read his 'Night Thoughts' with attention. Of the poets of the last age, he admired Dryden, Pope, and Gay, but more than any of these, if imitation is to be regarded as the surest proof of sympathy, Prior, Addison, and Swift. By his inclinations and his training, indeed, he belonged to this school. But he was in advance of it in thinking that poetry, however didactic after the fashion of his own day, should be simple in its utterance and directed at the many rather than at the few. This is what he meant when, from the critical elevation of Griffiths' back parlour, he recommended Gray 39 to take the advice of Isocrates, and 'study the people.' If, with these ideas, he had been able to divest himself of the 'warbling groves' and 'finny deeps' of the Popesque vocabulary (of much of the more 'mechanic art' of that supreme artificer he did successfully divest himself), it would have needed but little to make him a prominent pioneer of the new school which was coming with Cowper. As it is, his poetical attitude is a little that intermediate one of Longfellow's maiden,--

Most of his minor and earlier pieces are imitative. In 'A New Simile,' and 'The Logicians Refuted' (if that be his), Swift is his acknowledged model; in 'The Double Transformation' it is Prior, modified by certain theories personal to himself. He was evidently well acquainted with collections such as the 'Ménagiana,' and with the French minor poets of the eighteenth century, many of which latter were among his books at his death. These he had carefully studied, probably during his continental wanderings, and from them he derives, like Prior, something of his grace and metrical buoyancy. The 40 'Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,' and 'Madam Blaize,' are both more or less constructed on the old French popular song of the hero of Pavia, Jacques de Chabannes, Seigneur de la Palice (sometimes Galisse), with, in the case of the former, a tag from an epigram by Voltaire, the original of which is in the Greek Anthology, though Voltaire simply 'conveyed' his version from an anonymous French predecessor. Similarly the lively stanzas 'To Iris in Bow Street,' the lines to Myra, the quatrain called 'A South American Ode,' and that 'On a Beautiful Youth struck blind with Lightning,' are all confessed or unconfessed translations. If Goldsmith had lived to collect his own works, it is possible that he would have announced the source of his inspiration in these instances as well as in one or two other cases,--the epitaph on Ned Purdon, for example,--where it has been reserved to his editors to discover his obligations. On the other hand, he might have contended, with perfect justice, that whatever the source of his ideas, he had made them his own when he got them; and certainly in lilt and lightness, the lines 'To Iris' are infinitely superior to those of La Monnoye on which they are based. But even a fervent admirer may admit that, dwelling as he did in 41 this very vitreous palace of Gallic adaptation, one does not expect to find him throwing stones at Prior for borrowing from the French, or commenting solemnly in the Life of Parnell upon the heinousness of plagiarism. 'It was the fashion,' he says, 'with the wits of the last age, to conceal the places from whence they took their hints or their subjects. A trifling acknowledgment would have made that lawful prize which may now be considered as plunder.' He might appropriately have added to this latter sentence the quotation which he struck out of the second issue of the 'Polite Learning,'--'Haud inexpertus loquor.'

Of his longer pieces, 'The Traveller' was apparently suggested to him by Addison's 'Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax,' a poem to which, in his preliminary notes to the 'Beauties of English Poesy,' he gives significant praise. 'There is in it,' he says, 'a strain of political thinking that was, at that time, new in our country.' He obviously intended that 'The Traveller' should be admired for the same reason; and both in that poem and its successor, 'The Deserted Village,' he lays stress upon the political import of his work. The one, we are told, is to illustrate the position that the happiness of the subject is independent 42 of the goodness of the sovereign; the other, to deplore the increase of luxury, and the miseries of depopulation. But, as a crowd of commentators have pointed out, it is hazardous for a poet to meddle with 'political thinking,' however much, under George the Second, it may have been needful to proclaim a serious purpose. If Goldsmith had depended solely upon the professedly didactic part of his attempt, his work would be as dead as 'Freedom,' or 'Sympathy,' or any other of Dodsley's forgotten quartos. Fortunately he did more than this. Sensibly or insensibly, he suffused his work with that philanthropy which is 'not learned by the royal road of tracts and platform speeches and monthly magazines,' but by personal commerce with poverty and sorrow; and he made his appeal to that clinging love of country, of old association, of 'home-bred happiness,' of innocent pleasure, which, with Englishmen, is never made in vain. Employing the couplet of Pope and Johnson, he has added to his measure a suavity that belonged to neither; but the beauty of his humanity and the tender melancholy of his wistful retrospect hold us more strongly and securely than the studious finish of his style.

'Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage,' 43 said the arch-critic whose name, according to Keats, the school of Pope displayed upon their 'decrepit standard.' Even in 'The Traveller' and 'The Deserted Village,' there are indications of over-labour; but in a poem which comes between them--the once famous 'Edwin and Angelina'--Goldsmith certainly carried out Boileau's maxim to the full. The first privately printed version differs considerably from that in the first edition of the 'Vicar;' this again is altered in the fourth; and there are other variations in the piece as printed in the 'Poems for Young Ladies.' 'As to my "Hermit,"' said the poet complacently, 'that poem, Cradock, cannot be amended,'--and undoubtedly it has been skilfully wrought. But it is impossible to look upon it now with the unpurged eyes of those upon whom the 'Reliques of Ancient Poetry' had but recently dawned, still less to endorse the verdict of Sir John Hawkins that 'it is one of the finest poems of the lyric kind that our language has to boast of.' Its over-soft prettiness is too much that of the chromo-lithograph, or the Parian bust (the porcelain, not the marble), and its 'beautiful simplicity' is in parts perilously close upon that inanity which Johnson, whose sturdy good sense not even friendship 44 could silence, declared to be the characteristic of much of Percy's collection. It is instructive as a study of poetical progress to contrast it with a ballad of our own day in the same measure,--the 'Talking Oak' of Tennyson.

The remaining poems of Goldsmith, excluding the 'Captivity,' and the admittedly occasional 'Threnodia Augustalis,' are not open to the charge of fictitious simplicity, or of that hyper-elaboration which, in the words of the poet just mentioned, makes for the 'ripe and rotten.' The gallery of kit-cats in 'Retaliation,' and the delightful bonhomie of 'The Haunch of Venison,' need no commendation. In kindly humour and not unkindly satire Goldsmith was at his best, and the imperishable portraits of Burke and Garrick and Reynolds, and the inimitable dinner at which Lord Clare's pasty was not, are as well known as any of the stock passages of 'The Deserted Village' or 'The Traveller,' though they have never been babbled 'in extremis vicis' by successive generations of schoolboys. It is usually said, probably with truth, that in these poems and the delightful 'Letter to Mrs. Bunbury,' Goldsmith's metre was suggested by the cantering anapests of the 'New Bath Guide,' and it is to be observed that 'Little Comedy's' 45 invitation is to the same favourite tune. But it is also the fact that a line of the once popular lyric of 'Ally Croaker,'--

has a kind of echo in the--

of Burke's portrait in 'Retaliation.' What is still more remarkable is that Gray's 'Sketch of his own Character,' the resemblance of which to Goldsmith has been pointed out by his editors, begins,--

Whether Goldsmith was thinking of Anstey or 'Ally Croaker,' it is at least worthy of passing notice that an Irish song of no particular literary merit should have succeeded in haunting the two foremost poets of their day.^[9] 46

Poetry brought Goldsmith fame, but money only indirectly. Those Saturnian days of the subscription-edition, when Pope and Gay and Prior counted their gains by thousands, were over and gone. He had arrived, it has been truly said, too late for the Patron, and too early for the Public. Of his lighter pieces, the best were posthumous; the rest were either paid for at hack prices or not at all. For 'The Deserted Village' Griffin gave him a hundred guineas, a sum so unexampled as to have prompted the pleasant legend that he returned it. For 'The Traveller' the only payment that can be definitely traced is £21. 'I cannot afford to court the draggle-tail muses,' he said laughingly to Lord Lisburn; 'they would let me starve; but by my other labours I can make shift to eat, and drink, and have good clothes.' It was in his 'other labours' that his poems helped him. The booksellers, who would not or could not remunerate him adequately for delayed production and 47 minute revision, were willing enough to secure the sanction of his name for humbler journey-work. If he was ill-paid for 'The Traveller,' he was not ill-paid for the 'Beauties of English Poesy' or the 'History of Animated Nature.'

Yet notwithstanding his ready pen, and his skill as a compiler, his life was a treadmill. 'While you are nibbling about elegant phrases, I am obliged to write half a volume,' he told his friend Cradock; and it was but natural that he should desire to escape into walks where he might accomplish something 'for his own hand,' by which, at the same time, he might exist. Fiction he had already essayed. Nearly two years before 'The Traveller' appeared, he had written a story about the length of 'Joseph Andrews,' for which he had received little more than a third of the sum paid by Andrew Millar to Fielding for his burlesque of Richardson's 'Pamela.' But obscure circumstances delayed the publication of the 'Vicar of Wakefield' for four years, and when at last it was issued, its first burst of success--a success, as far as can be ascertained, productive of no further profit to its author--was followed by a long period during which the sales were languid and uncertain. There remained the stage, with its two-fold 48 allurement of fame and fortune, both payable at sight, added to which it was always possible that a popular play, in those days when plays were bought to read, might find a brisk market in pamphlet form. The prospect was a tempting one, and it is scarcely surprising that Goldsmith, weary of the 'dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood,' and conscious of better things within him, should engage in that most tantalizing of all enterprises, the pursuit of dramatic success.

For acting and actors he had always shown a decided partiality.^[10] Vague stories, based, in all probability, upon the references to strolling players in his writings, hinted that he himself had once worn the comic sock as 'Scrub' in 'The Beaux' Stratagem;' and it is clear that soon after he arrived in England, he had completed a tragedy, for he read it in manuscript to a friend. That he had been besides an acute and observant play-goer is plain from his excellent account in 49 'The Bee' of Mademoiselle Clairon, whom he had seen at Paris, and from his sensible notes in the same periodical on 'gestic lore' as exhibited on the English stage. In his 'Polite Learning in Europe,' he had followed up Ralph's 'Case of Authors by Profession,' by protesting against the despotism of managers, and the unenlightened but economical policy of producing only the works of deceased playwrights; and he was equally opposed to the growing tendency on the part of the public--a tendency dating from Richardson and the French comédie larmoyante--to substitute sham sensibility and superficial refinement for that humourous delineation of manners which, with all their errors of morality and taste, had been the chief aim of Congreve and his contemporaries. To the fact that what was now known as 'genteel comedy' had almost wholly supplanted this elder and better manner, must be attributed his deferred entry upon a field so obviously adapted to his gifts. But when, in 1766, the 'Clandestine Marriage' of Garrick and Colman, with its evergreen 'Lord Ogleby,' seemed to herald a return to the side of laughter as opposed to that of tears, he took heart of grace, and, calling to mind something of the old inconsiderate benevolence which had been the Goldsmith 50 family-failing, set about his first comedy, 'The Good-Natur'd Man.'

Even without experiment, no one could have known better than Goldsmith upon what a sea of troubles he had embarked. Those obstacles which, more than thirty years before, had been so graphically described in Fielding's 'Pasquin,'--which Goldsmith himself had indicated with equal accuracy in his earliest book,--still lay in the way of all dramatic purpose, and he was to avoid none of them. When he submitted his completed work to Garrick, the all-powerful actor, who liked neither piece nor author, blew hot and cold so long that Goldsmith at last, in despair, transferred it to Colman. But, as if fate was inexorable, Colman, after accepting it effusively, also grew dilatory, and ultimately entered into a tacit league with Garrick not to produce it at Covent Garden until his former rival had brought out at Drury Lane a comedy by Goldsmith's countryman, Hugh Kelly, a sentimentalist of the first water. Upon the heels of the enthusiastic reception which Garrick's administrative tact secured for the superfine entanglements of 'False Delicacy,' came limping 'The Good-Natur'd Man' of Goldsmith, wet-blanketed beforehand by a sombre prologue from Johnson. No first appearance 51 could have been less favourable. Until it was finally saved in the fourth act by the excellent art of Shuter as 'Croaker,' its fate hung trembling in the balance, and even then one of its scenes--not afterwards reckoned the worst--had to be withdrawn in deference to the delicate scruples of an audience which could not suffer such inferior beings as bailiffs to come between the wind and its gentility. Yet, in spite of all these disadvantages, 'The Good-Natur'd Man' obtained a hearing, besides bringing its author about five hundred pounds, a sum far larger than anything he had ever made by poetry or fiction.

That the superior success of 'False Delicacy,' with its mincing morality and jumble of inadequate motives, was wholly temporary and accidental is evident from the fact that, to use a felicitous phrase, it has now to be disinterred in order to be discussed. But, notwithstanding one's instinctive sympathy for Goldsmith in his struggles with the managers, it is not equally clear that, everything considered, 'The Good-Natur'd Man' was unfairly treated by the public. Because Kelly's play was praised too much, it by no means follows that Goldsmith's play was praised too little. With all the advantage of its author's reputation, it has never since passed into 52 the répertoire, and, if it had something of the freshness of a first effort, it had also its inexperience. The chief character, Honeywood,--the weak and amiable 'good-natur'd man,'--never stands very firmly on his feet, and the first actor of the part, Garrick's promising young rival, Powell, failed, or disdained to make it a stage success. On the other hand, 'Croaker,' an admitted elaboration of Johnson's sketch of 'Suspirius' in 'The Rambler,' is a first-rate comic creation, and the charlatan 'Lofty,' a sort of 'Beau-Tibbs-above-Stairs,' is almost as good. But, as Garrick's keen eye saw, to have a second male figure of greater importance than the central personage was a serious error of judgment, added to which neither 'Miss Richland' nor 'Mrs. Croaker' ever establishes any hold upon the audience. Last of all, the plot, such as it is, cannot be described as either particularly ingenious or particularly novel. In another way the merit of the piece is, however, incontestable. It is written with all the perspicuous grace of Goldsmith's easy pen, and, in the absence of stagecraft, sparkles with neat and effective epigrams. One of these may be mentioned as illustrating the writer's curious (perhaps unconscious) habit of repeating ideas which had pleased him. He had 53 quoted in his 'Polite Learning' the exquisitely rhythmical close of Sir William Temple's prose essay 'Of Poetry,' and in 'The Bee' it still seems to haunt him. In 'The Good-Natur'd Man' he has absorbed it altogether, for he places it, without inverted commas, in the lips of Croaker.^[11]

But if its lack of constructive power and its errors of conception make it impossible to regard 'The Good-Natur'd Man' as a substantial gain to humourous drama, it was undoubtedly a formidable attack upon that 'mawkish drab of spurious breed,' Sentimental Comedy, and its success was amply sufficient to justify a second trial. That Goldsmith did not forthwith make this 54 renewed effort must be attributed partly to the recollection of his difficulties in getting his first play produced, partly to the fact that, his dramatic gains exhausted, he was almost immediately involved in a sequence of laborious taskwork. Still, he had never abandoned his ambition to restore humour and character to the stage; and as time went on, the sense of his past discouragements grew fainter, while the success of 'The Deserted Village' increased his importance as an author. Sentimentalism, in the meantime, had still a majority. Kelly, it is true, was now no longer to be feared. His sudden good fortune had swept him into the ranks of the party-writers, with the result that the damning of his next play, 'A Word to the Wise,' had been exaggerated into a political necessity. But the school which he represented had been recruited by a much abler man, Richard Cumberland, and it was probably the favourable reception of Cumberland's 'West Indian' that stimulated Goldsmith into striking one more blow for legitimate comedy. At all events, in the autumn of the year in which 'The West Indian' was produced, he is hard at work in the lanes at Hendon and Edgware, 'studying jests with a most tragical countenance' for a successor to 'The Good-Natur'd Man.' 55

To the modern spectator of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' with its unflagging humour and bustling action, it must seem almost inconceivable that its stage qualities can ever have been questioned. Yet questioned they undoubtedly were, and Goldsmith was spared none of his former humiliations. Even from the outset all was against him. His difference with Garrick had long been adjusted, and the Drury Lane manager would now probably have accepted a new play from his pen, especially as that astute observer had already detected signs of a reaction in the public taste. But Goldsmith was morally bound to Colman and Covent Garden; and Colman, in whose hands he placed his manuscript, proved even more disheartening and unmanageable than Garrick had been in the past. Before he had come to his decision, the close of 1772 had arrived. Early in the following year, under the irritation of suspense and suggested amendments combined, Goldsmith hastily transferred his proposal to Garrick; but, by Johnson's advice, as hastily withdrew it. Only by the express interposition of Johnson was Colman at last induced to make a distinct promise to bring out the play at a specific date. To believe in it, he could not be persuaded, and his contagious anticipations of 56 its failure passed insensibly to the actors, who, one after another shuffled out of their parts. Even over the epilogue there were vexatious disputes, and when at last, in March, 1773, 'She Stoops to Conquer' was performed, its leading actor had previously held no more exalted position than that of ground-harlequin, while one of its most prominent characters had simply been a post-boy in 'The Good-Natur'd Man.' But once fairly upon the boards neither lukewarm actors nor an adverse manager had any further influence over it, and the doubts of every one vanished in the uninterrupted applause of the audience. When, a few days later, it was printed with a brief and grateful dedication to its best friend, Johnson, the world already knew with certainty that a fresh masterpiece had been added to the roll of English Dramatic Literature, and that 'genteel comedy' had received a decisive blow.

The effect of this blow, it must be admitted, had been aided not a little by the appearance, only a week or two earlier, of Foote's clever puppet-show of 'The Handsome Housemaid; or, Piety in Pattens,' which was openly directed at Kelly and his following. But ridicule by itself, without some sample of a worthier substitute, 57 could not have sufficed to displace a persistent fashion. This timely corrective 'She Stoops to Conquer,' in the most unmistakable way, afforded. From end to end of the piece there is not a sickly or a maudlin word. Even Sheridan, writing 'The Rivals' two years later, thought it politic to insert 'Faulkland' and 'Julia' for the benefit of the sentimentalists. Goldsmith made no such concession, and his wholesome, hearty merriment put to flight the Comedy of Tears,--even as the Coquecigrues vanished before the large-lunged laugh of Pantagruel. If, as Johnson feared, the plot bordered slightly upon farce--and of what good comedy may this not be said?--at least it can be urged that its most farcical incident, the mistaking of a gentleman's house for an inn, had really happened, since it had happened to the writer himself. But the superfine objections of Walpole and his friends are now ancient history--history so ancient that it is scarcely credited, while Goldsmith's manly assertion (after Fielding) of the author's right 'to stoop among the low to copy nature,' has been ratified by successive generations of novelists and playwrights. What is beyond dispute is the healthy atmosphere, the skilful setting, the lasting freshness and fidelity to human nature of the 58 persons of his drama. Not content with the finished portraits of the Hardcastles (a Vicar and Mrs. Primrose promoted to the squirearchy),--not content with the incomparable and unapproachable Tony, the author has managed to make attractive what is too often insipid, his heroines and their lovers. Miss Hardcastle and Miss Neville are not only charming young women, but charming characters, while Marlow and Hastings are much more than stage young men. And let it be remembered--it cannot be too often remembered--that in returning to those Farquhars and Vanbrughs 'of the last age,' who differed so widely from the Kellys and Cumberlands of his own, Goldsmith has brought back no taint of their baser part. Depending solely for its avowed intention to 'make an audience merry,' upon the simple development of its humourous incident, his play (wonderful to relate!) attains its end without resorting to dubious suggestion or equivocal intrigue. Indeed, there is but one married woman in the piece, and she traverses it without a stain upon her character.

'She Stoops to Conquer' is Goldsmith's last dramatic work, for the trifling sketch of 'The Grumbler' had never more than a grateful purpose. 59 When, only a year later, the little funeral procession from 2, Brick Court laid him in his unknown grave in the Temple burying-ground, the new comedy of which he had written so hopefully to Garrick was still non-existent. Would it have been better than its last fortunate predecessor?--would those early reserves of memory and experience have still proved inexhaustible? The question cannot be answered. Through debt, and drudgery, and depression, the writer's genius had still advanced, and these might yet have proved powerless to check his progress. But at least it was given to him to end upon his best, and not to outlive it. For, in that critical sense which estimates the value of a work by its excellence at all points, it can scarcely be contested that 'She Stoops to Conquer' is his best production. In spite of their beauty and humanity, the lasting quality of 'The Traveller' and 'The Deserted Village' is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude between the poetry of convention and the poetry of nature--between the gradus epithet of Pope and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth. With the 'Vicar of Wakefield' again, immortal though it be, it is less his art that holds us than his charm, his humour, and his tenderness, which tempt us 60 to forget his inconsistency and his errors of haste. In 'She Stoops to Conquer,' neither defect of art nor defect of nature forbids us to give unqualified admiration to a work which lapse of time has shown to be still unrivalled in its kind.

In the year 175--](it is not possible to fix the date more precisely), there was what would now be called a public assault of arms at one of the great hotels of pre-revolutionary Paris. Among the amateurs who took part in it--for there were amateurs as well as professionals--was a foreign protégé of the Duke de Nivernais, that amiable and courteous nobleman who subsequently visited this country at the close of the Seven Years' War, in the character of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from his Most Christian Majesty, Louis XV. The stranger, who was in the prime of life, was of graceful figure and address, and his name had been no sooner announced than an English lady, then visiting the French capital, and possessed of great vivacity and considerable personal attractions, stepped forward and presented him with a bunch of roses. He received it with becoming gallantry, fastened it carefully on his left breast, and forthwith declared that he would defend it against all 62 comers. What is more, he kept his promise. He afterwards 'fenced with several of the first masters, not one of whom,' says the narrator of the story, 'could disturb a single leaf of the bouquet.' The lady was the celebrated Mrs. Margaret Woffington, then in the height of her fame as a beauty and an actress; the gentleman was an Italian, travelling for his pleasure. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant at Leghorn, and he was called Domenico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo.

Shortly after the foregoing incident, Signor Domenico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo ('I love'--says Goldsmith of Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs--'to give the whole name!') transported his foil and his good looks to this country. In addition to his proficiency as a fencer, he was 'a master of equitation,' having been a pupil of the then famous scientific horseman, Teillagory^[12] the elder. These were accomplishments which speedily procured for him both popularity and patrons in London. He became in a few months écuyer to Henry Herbert, tenth Earl of Pembroke, who was not only an accomplished cavalier himself, but was then, or was soon 63 to be, lieutenant-colonel of Elliot's Light Horse, a crack dragoon regiment, which, by the way, numbered among its corporals the future Astley of the Westminster Bridge Road Amphitheatre. Lord Pembroke had private manèges both in the neighbourhood of his house in Whitehall Gardens (part of the present No. 7), and at his family seat of Wilton, near Salisbury. At first his écuyer confined himself to teaching riding; but a chance encounter at the Thatched House Tavern with Dr. Keys, a well-known Irish fencer, in which he vanquished his antagonist, determined his choice of the calling of a maître d'armes. His first pupil was the Duke of Devonshire. Later he was engaged by the Princess of Wales to instruct the young princes in horsemanship and the use of the small sword, for which purposes premises were provided in Leicester Fields, within two doors from Hogarth's dwelling in the east corner. Before many years were over, Domenico Angelo--for he seems to have discarded first one and then the other of his last two names--set up a riding school of his own in Soho. But previously to all this, and apparently not long after his arrival in London, he had fallen in love with, and taken to wife, the daughter of an English naval officer. Judging from the picture of her which 64 Reynolds painted in 1766, the bride (who was a minor) must have been as handsome as her husband. The marriage took place in February, 1755, at St. George's, Hanover Square, the register of which duly records the union, by license of the Archbishop of Canterbury, of Domenico Angelo Malevolti, Esq., bachelor, and Elizabeth Johnson, spinster. The pair had a son, the Henry Angelo from whose disorganised and gossiping 'Reminiscences'^[13] most of the foregoing particulars are derived.

Harry Angelo, so he was called, is not explicit as to the date of his birth, which probably took place at the end of 1759 or the beginning of 1760. It seems at first to have been intended that he should enter the Navy; and, as a matter of fact, he was actually enrolled by Captain Augustus Hervey (Lady Hervey's second son) on the books of the 'Dragon' man-of-war in the capacity of midshipman; thereby becoming entitled, at an extremely tender age, to some twenty-five guineas prize money. After a short period under Dr. Rose of Chiswick, the translator of Sallust and editor of 'The Monthly Review,' 65 he went to Eton, where his father taught fencing; and at Eton he remained for some years. Two of his school-fellows were Nathan and Carrington Garrick, the actor's nephews; and young Angelo had pleasant memories of their uncle's visits to Eton, where, being a friend of the elder Angelo, he would regale all three boys sumptuously at the Christopher inn, and amuse them with quips and recitations.^[14] Harry Angelo had even the good fortune, while at Eton, to be taken to that solemn tomfoolery, the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, in which his father doubled the part of Mark Antony with that of director of fireworks. Another occasional visitor to the school, magnificently frogged and braided after the fashion of his kind, was the Italian quack Dominicetti, also a family friend, who treated the boys royally. But perhaps the most interesting memories of young Angelo's Eton days are those which recall a holiday spent at Amesbury with his father and mother, as the guest of the Duke and Duchess 66 of Queensberry. In his old age he could clearly picture the tall, thin figure of the taciturn Duke, in high leather gaiters, short-skirted frock, and gold-laced hat; and he well remembered the Duchess, then nearly eighty, but still energetic and garrulous, in a Quaker-coloured silk and black hood. He also remembered that he was allowed (like Gay before him) to fish for carp in the Amesbury water.

When he was entering his seventeenth year, Harry Angelo was sent to Paris to learn French. He was placed en pension in the Rue Poupé with a M. Boileau, a half-starved maître de langue, who, since he is seriously likened by his pupil to the Apothecary in 'Romeo and Juliet,' must really have resembled the typical Frenchman as depicted by Smollett and Rowlandson. Boileau was a conscientious teacher, but a miserable caterer; and young Angelo, after narrowly escaping collapse from starvation and close confinement, was eventually removed from his care. He passed, in the first instance, to a M. Liviez, whose wife was English, and (notwithstanding an undeniable squint) of a shape sufficiently elegant to have served as the model for Roubillac's figure of Eloquence on the Argyll tomb at Westminster Abbey. M. Liviez had been a dancer, 67 and ballet-master at a London theatre. At this date he was a bon vivant, who collected prints. He was also subject to fits of hypochondria (probably caused by over-eating), when he would imagine himself Apollo, and fiddle feverishly to the nine Muses, typified for the nonce by a hemicycle of chairs. As both he and his wife preferred to speak English, they made no pretence to teach their lodger French; but, from the point of commissariat, the change from the Rue Poupé to the Rue Battois was 'removal from Purgatory to Paradise.' While Angelo was in Paris, Garrick sent him an introduction to Préville, whom Sterne describes as 'Mercury himself,' and who was, indeed, in some respects Garrick's rival. Préville knew Foote; and when Foote came to the French capital, he invited Angelo to a supper, at which Préville was present. Foote, binding Angelo to secrecy, delighted the company by mimicking their common acquaintance, the great Roscius; and Préville in his turn imitated the leading French comedians. All this was not very favourable to proficiency in the French language, which Angelo would probably have learned better in M. Boileau's garret. On the other hand, under Motet, then the champion pareur of the Continent, he became an expert 68 swordsman--able, and only too willing, to take part in the encounters which, in the Paris of the day, were as common as street rows in London. But apart from swallowing the button and some inches of a foil when fencing with Lord Massereene in the Prison of the Abbaye (where that nobleman was unhappily in durance for debt), he seems to have enjoyed an exceptional immunity from accidents of all kinds.

He returned to London in 1775. His home at this time was at Carlisle House,^[15] in King's Square Court (now Carlisle Street), Soho. It was a spacious old Caroline mansion of red brick, which had belonged to the Howard family, and had been bought by Domenico Angelo from Lord Delaval, brother of Foote's patron, the Sir Francis to whom he dedicated his comedy of 'Taste.' There were lofty rooms with enriched ceilings; there was a marble-floored hall; there was a grand decorated staircase painted by Salvator's pupil, Henry Cook. In this building, at the beginning of 1763, its new owner had opened his fencing 69 school, and subsequently, in the garden at the back, had erected stables and a manège, which extended to Wardour Street. Between pupils, resident and otherwise, and troops of friends, Carlisle House must always have been well filled and animated. Garrick, who was accustomed to consult the elder Angelo on matters of costume and stage machinery, was often a visitor, and presented his adviser with a magnificent silver goblet (long preserved by the Angelos as an heirloom), which held three bottles of Burgundy. Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his father were also friends, and it was from Domenico Angelo that the younger man, as a boy at Harrow, acquired that use of the small sword which was to stand him in such good stead in his later duel with Captain Mathews. Wilkes, again, resplendent in his favourite scarlet and gold, not seldom looked in on his way from his Westminster or Kensington houses; and Foote, the Chevalier D'Éon, and General Paoli were constant guests. Home Tooke, who lived hard by in Dean Street, was another intimate; and, when he was not discussing contemporary politics with Wilkes and Tom Sheridan, would sometimes enliven the company by singing a parody on 'God save the King,' which was not entirely to the loyal taste 70 of the elder Angelo. Bach of the harpsichord,^[16] with Abel of the viol-da-gamba, were next-door neighbours and free of the house; Bartolozzi the engraver, and his inseparable Cipriani, were on an almost equally favoured footing. Another habitué was Gainsborough, whose passion for music is historical, and from whom any one could extract a sketch in return for a song or a tune. The walls of Abel's room were covered by drawings acquired in this manner, and pinned loosely to the paper-hangings,--drawings which afterwards fetched their price at Langford's in the Piazza. Besides these, came Philip de Loutherbourg, whom Domenico Angelo had introduced to Garrick as scene painter for Drury Lane; and Canaletto, whom he had known at Venice; and Zoffany; and George Stubbs, the author of the 'Anatomy of the Horse,' who carried on his studies in the Carlisle House Riding School, no doubt taking for model, among others, that famous white charger Monarch, of which the presentment survives to posterity, under King William III. of immortal memory, 71 in West's 'Battle of the Boyne.'^[17] 'All the celebrated horse painters of the last, and some of the veterans of the present age,' says the author of the 'Reminiscences,' 'were constant visitors at our table or at the manège.' Lastly, an enthusiastic, though scarcely artistic, amateur of the Carlisle Street stud was the corpulent 'Hero of Culloden,' William, Duke of Cumberland. If not the greatest, he was certainly the heaviest prince in Christendom, since he rode some four-and-twenty stone, and, as a boy, Harry Angelo well remembered the significant sidelong dip of the carriage when His Royal Highness poised his ponderous person on the step.

An establishment upon the scale and traditions of Carlisle House (and there was also a 'cake-house' or country-box at Acton, for which Zoffany painted decorations) could only have been maintained at considerable expense. But in this respect Domenico Angelo seems to have been unusually fortunate, even for a foreigner. Within a short period after his arrival in England his income, according to his son, was over two thousand a year; and this sum, in the height of 72 his prosperity, was nearly doubled. After Harry Angelo's account of his life in Paris, his records, always disconnected, grow looser in chronology; added to which, it is never quite easy to distinguish his personal recollections from the mere floating hearsay of a retentive but capricious memory. One of his earliest experiences, however, on returning to England, must have been his attendance, in December, 1775, at the trial, in the Old Bailey, of Mrs. Margaret Caroline Rudd, for complicity in the forgery for which the Brothers Perreau were subsequently hanged.^[18] His description of this fair-haired siren suggests a humbler Becky Sharp or Valérie Marneffe, and there can be little doubt that, as he implies, she owed her undeserved acquittal to the 'irresistible power of fascination' which captivated Boswell, and interested even his 'illustrious Friend.' Another incident at which Angelo assisted shortly afterwards, and which it is also possible to place precisely, was the riot that, in February, 1776, accompanied the attempt to produce at Drury 73 Lane Parson Bate's unpopular opera of 'The Blackamoor wash'd White.' Angelo was one of a boxful of the author's supporters, who were forced to retire under the furious cannonade of 'apples, oranges, and other such missiles,' to which they were exposed. But a still more important theatrical event was his presence on that historic June 10, 1776, when Garrick bade farewell to the stage. He and his mother were in Mrs. Garrick's box, and the two ladies continued sobbing so long after they had quitted the house as to prompt the ironic comment of the elder Angelo that they could not have grieved more at the great man's funeral itself. Harry Angelo was also a spectator of the progress to Tyburn, in the following February, of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd, to whom, and to the horrors of 'Execution Day' in general, he devotes some of the latter pages of his first volume. 'His [Dodd's] corpse-like appearance produced an awful picture of human woe. Tens of thousands of hats, which formed a black mass, as the coach advanced were taken off simultaneously, and so many tragic faces exhibited a spectacle the effect of which is beyond the power of words to describe. Thus the procession travelled onwards through the multitude, whose silence added to 74 the awfulness of the scene.' Two years later Angelo witnessed the execution of another clergyman, James Hackman, who was hanged for shooting Lord Sandwich's mistress, Martha Reay. The murder--it will be remembered--took place in the Piazza at Covent Garden, as the lady was leaving the theatre, and Angelo, according to his own account, had only quitted it himself a few minutes before. He afterwards saw the body of the criminal under dissection at Surgeons' Hall,--a gruesome testimony to the truth of Hogarth's final plate in the 'Four Stages of Cruelty.'

The above, the Gordon riots of '80, and the burning in '92 of Wyatt's Pantheon, are some of the few things in Angelo's first volume which it is practicable to date with certainty. The second volume is scarcely more than a sequence of headed paragraphs, roughly parcelled into sections, and difficult to sample. Like his father (who died at Eton in 1802), he became a 'master of the sword,' and like him, again, he lived upon terms of quasi-familiarity with many titled practitioners of that art,--being, indeed, upon one occasion the guest of the Duke of Sussex at the extremely select Neapolitan Club, an honour which, as the Prince of Wales was also present, seems to have been afterwards regarded as too 75 good to be believed. Like Domenico Angelo, also, he had an extensive acquaintance with the artists and actors of his day. He had himself learned drawing at Eton under the Prince's master, Alexander Cozens, the apostle of 'blottesque,' and had studied a little with Bartolozzi and Cipriani. He had even ventured upon a few caricatures, in particular one of Lady Queensberry's black protégé, Soubise; and he was intimate with Thomas Rowlandson, whom he had known from boyhood, and followed to his grave in April, 1827. When Rowlandson was on his continental travels, Angelo was living in Paris, and he possessed many of the drawings which his friend executed at this time. In London they were frequently companions at Vauxhall and other places of amusement, where Rowlandson's busy pencil found its field of activity; and together they often heard the chimes at midnight in the house at Beaufort Buildings inhabited by Rowlandson's fat Mæcenas, the banker Mitchel, one of whose favourite guests was Peter Pindar. Angelo gives a good many anecdotes which have been utilized by Rowlandson's biographers; but perhaps the least hackneyed record of their alliance is contained in the pages which describe their joint visit to Portsmouth to see the French prizes 76 after Lord Howe's victory of the 1st June, 1794, Angelo got down first, and went on board the largest French vessel, the 'Sans Pareil' (80 guns). He gives a graphic account of the appalling devastation,--the decks ploughed up by the round shot, the masts gone by the board, the miserable boyish crew, the hogshead of spirits to keep up their courage in action, the jumble of dead and dying in the 'tween decks, and above all, the terrible, sickening stench. On Howe's vessel, the 'Queen Charlotte,' on the contrary, there was scarcely a trace of battle, though another ship, the 'Brunswick,' had suffered to a considerable extent. Rowlandson joined Angelo at Portsmouth, and they witnessed together the landing of the prisoners. Afterwards they visited Forton, where, upon leaving one of the sick wards, Rowlandson made a ghastly study of a dying 'Mounseer' sitting up in bed to write his will, a priest with a crucifix at his side. But by this time Angelo had had enough of the horrors of war, and he returned to town, leaving Rowlandson to go on to Southampton to make--so he says--sketches of Lord Moira's embarkation for La Vendée. Here, however, the writer's recollection must have failed him, for Lord Moira's fruitless expedition was nearly a year old. What Rowlandson 77 no doubt saw, was his Lordship's departure for Ostend to join the Duke of York. Angelo speaks highly of the--for Rowlandson--unusual finish and spirit of these drawings, with their boatloads of soldiers and studies of shipping. They were purchased by Fores of Piccadilly, but do not appear to have been reproduced. There is, however, at South Kensington a sketch by Rowlandson of the French prizes coming into Portsmouth, which must have been executed at this date.

Another associate of Angelo, and also of Rowlandson, was John (or more familiarly, Jack) Bannister, the actor. Bannister and Rowlandson had been students together at the Royal Academy, and had combined in worrying, by mimicry and caricature, gruff Richard Wilson, who had succeeded Frank Hayman as librarian. In the subsequent pranks of this practical joking age, Angelo, who had known them both from boyhood, often made a third; and he was present upon an occasion which was as unfeignedly pathetic as Garrick's famous farewell,--the farewell of Bannister to the stage. Many of the anecdotes contained in the entertainment which preceded this leave-taking--namely, 'Bannister's Budget,'--were included by permission in the 'Reminiscences;' 78 and Angelo, who had learned elocution from Tom Sheridan, and was an excellent amateur actor, more than once played for Bannister's benefits, notably at the Italian Opera House in 1792 as Mrs. Cole in Foote's 'Minor,' and in 1800 before the Royal Family at Windsor as Papillon in 'The Liar,' also by Foote. On this latter occasion the bill records that Mr. H. Angelo, 'by particular desire,' obliged with 'A Solo Duet; or, Ballad Singers in Cranbourn Alley.' These were by no means his solitary dramatic essays. At the pretty little private theatre which, in 1788, that emphatically lively nobleman, Richard, seventh Earl of Barrymore, erected at Wargrave-on-Thames, he was a frequent performer. His first, or one of his first parts, was that of Dick in Vanbrugh's 'Confederacy,' when Barrymore played Brass; and a later and favourite impersonation was Worsdale's rôle of Lady Pentweazel in Foote's 'Taste.' Angelo is careful, however, to make it clear that the exigencies of his professional engagements did not permit him to go to the full length of the Wargrave Court of Comus--some of whose revels must have closely resembled the 'blind hookey' by which the footman in 'The Newcomes' described the doings of Lord Farintosh. As he seems, nevertheless, to have accompanied Barrymore 79 to low spouting-clubs like Jacob's Well; to have driven with him at night through the long straggling street of Colnbrook, while his sportive Lordship was industriously 'fanning the daylights,' i.e., breaking the windows to right and left with his whip; and to have serenaded Mrs. Fitzherbert in his company at Brighton,--he had certainly sufficient opportunities for studying the 'caprices and eccentricities' of this illustrious and erratic specimen of what the late Mortimer Collins was wont to describe as the 'strong generation.' Besides acting at Wargrave, he had also often joined in the private theatricals at Brandenburgh House, then the Hammersmith home of Lord Berkeley's sister, that Margravine of Anspach whose comedy of 'The Sleep-walker' Walpole had printed at the Strawberry Hill Press. Lastly, he was a member of the short-lived Pic-Nic Society inaugurated by Lady Buckinghamshire, an association which combined balls and private plays with suppers on the principle of the line in Goldsmith's 'Retaliation,'--

Lady Buckinghamshire, a large personage, with a good digestion and an unlimited appetite for pleasure, was one of the three card-loving leaders 80 of fashion satirised so mercilessly by Gillray as 'Faro's Daughters,'--her fellow-sinners being Lady Archer and Mrs. Concannon. But whatever may have happened over the green tables at St. James's Square, 'gaming'--writes Angelo--'formed no part of the plan of the Pic-Nics.' Not the less, they had their element of chance. It was the practice to draw lots for furnishing the supper, an arrangement which, if it sometimes permitted the drawers to escape with the trifling contribution of a pound cake or a bag of China oranges, more frequently imposed upon them the enforced provision of a dozen of champagne or a three-guinea Périgord pie.

It would take a lengthy article to exhaust the budget of these chaotic memories, even if one made rigid selection of those incidents only in which the writer affirms that he was personally concerned. Not a few of the stories, however, are common property, and are told as well elsewhere. For instance, Angelo repeats the anecdote of Goldsmith's 'Croaker,' Shuter, who, following--for his 'Cries of London'--a particularly musical vendor of silver eels, found to his vexation that on this particular occasion the man was unaccountably mute. Questioning him at length, the poor fellow explained, with a burst of 81 tears, that his vife had died that day, and that he could not 'cry.' This is related in Taylor's 'Records,' and no doubt in a dozen places besides. Similarly, the anecdote of Hayman the painter and the Marquis of Granby having a bout with the gloves previous to a sitting, is to be found in the 'Somerset House Gazette' of 'Ephraim Hardcastle' (W. H. Pyne);^[19] and it has been suggested--we know not upon what authority--that Pyne had a good deal to do with Angelo's chronicles. Be this as it may, there are plenty of anecdotes which are so obviously connected with the narrator that, even if all the make-weights be discarded, a residue remains which is far too large to be dealt with here. We shall confine ourselves to the few pages which refer to Byron, whom Angelo seems to have known well. Byron, who had been one of Angelo's pupils at Harrow, had interested himself in establishing Angelo as a fencing master at Cambridge, where he entertained him and Theodore Hook at dinner, seeing them off himself afterwards by the London stage, duly fortified with stirrup cups of the famous St. John's College beer. When later Byron left Cambridge for 82 town, Angelo seems to have taken great pains to find a book which his noble friend wanted in order to decide a wager, and his eventual success increased the favour in which he stood. He was subsequently in the habit of giving Byron lessons at the Albany in the broadsword,--a fearsome exercise which was chosen in view of the pupil's tendency to flesh, and for which he elaborately handicapped himself with furs and flannels. Of the relations between Angelo and Byron at this date a memento is still said to survive at Mr. John Murray's in Albemarle Street. It is a screen made by Angelo for his patron. On one side are all the eminent pugilists from Broughton to Jackson; on the other the great actors from Betterton to Kean. When Byron left the country in 1816 the screen was sold with his effects, and so passed into the pious hands of its present possessor.

Reference has already been made to what Mr. Egerton Castle accurately describes as Angelo's 'graceful ease' in eluding dates, and it should be added that he gives very few particulars respecting his personal history or his professional establishments. At first, it may be assumed, he taught fencing at his father's school in Carlisle Street. Later on, the salle d'armes which he 83 mentions oftenest is that formerly belonging to the Frenchman Redas in the Opera House buildings at the corner of the Haymarket, almost facing the Orange Coffee House, then the chosen resort of foreigners of all sorts.^[20] When the Opera was burned down in 1789, these rooms were destroyed, and Angelo apparently transferred his quarters to Bond Street. Under the heading 'My Own Boastings,' he gives a list of his titled and aristocratic pupils to the year 1817, and it is certainly an imposing one. 'In the year of [Edmund] Kean's benefit' [1825?] he strained his thigh when fencing with the actor, and was thenceforth obliged 'to bid adieu to the practical exertions of the science.' His last years seem to have been passed in retirement at a village near Bath, and from his description of his means as 'a small annuity' it must be presumed that he was poor. He had been married, and he speaks of two of his sons to whom the Duke of York had given commissions in the army; but that is 84 all he says on the subject. Besides the volumes of 'Reminiscences,' he compiled a miscellany entitled 'Angelo's Pic-Nic,' to which George Cruikshank contributed a characteristic frontispiece. In addition to this, he issued an English version in smaller form of his father's 'École des Armes,' a magnificent subscription folio which had first appeared in 1763;^[21] and was reproduced two years later, under the head Escrime, in the Supplement to the 'Encyclopédie' of Diderot and D'Alembert. The translation of the 'School of Fencing,' as the smaller book of 1787 was called, is attributed to Rowlandson. Rowlandson also etched twenty-four plates for Angelo on the use of the Hungarian and Highland broadsword. These were put forth in 1798-9 by T. Egerton of the 'Military Library near Whitehall', the adventurous publisher who printed the first three novels of Jane Austen.

One of the things that most pleased Lord Macaulay in connection with his famous article in the 'Edinburgh' on Miss Aikin's 'Life of Addison,' was the confirmation of a minor statement which he had risked upon internal evidence. He had asserted confidently that Addison could never have spoken of Steele in the 'Old Whig' as 'Little Dickey;' and by a stroke of good fortune, a few days after his article appeared, he found the evidence he required. At a bookstall in Holborn he happened upon Chetwood's 'History of the Stage,' and presently discovered that 'Little Dickey' was the nickname of Henry Norris, a diminutive actor who had made his first appearance as 'Dicky' in Farquhar's 'Constant Couple.' Norris--it may be added--must have been a familiar figure to both Addison and Steele, because, besides taking a female part in 'The Funeral,' he had played Mr. Tipkin in 'The Tender Husband,' which contained 'many applauded strokes' from Addison's hand; and, 86 only three years before Addison wrote the 'Old Whig,' had also acted in Addison's own comedy of 'The Drummer.' But the anecdote, with its tardy exposure of a time-honoured blunder, aptly illustrates the main function of the modern biographer who deals with the great men of the last century. Rightly or wrongly--no doubt rightly as regards their leading characteristics--a certain conception of them has passed into currency, and it is no longer practicable to alter it materially. A 'new view,' if sufficiently ingenious or paradoxical, may appear to hold its own for a moment, but, as a rule, it lasts no longer. Swift, Addison, Pope, Steele, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, remain essentially what the common consent of the past has left them, and the utmost that latter-day industry can effect lies in the rectification of minute facts, and the tracing out of neglected threads of inquiry. Especially may it concern itself with that literary nettoyage à sec which has for its object the attenuation, and, if possible, the entire dispersing, of doubtful or discreditable tradition.

Of this method of biography, the 'Life of Steele,'^[22] by Mr. George A. Aitken, is a favourable, 87 and even typical, example. That Mr. Aitken is an enthusiast is plain; but he is also an enthusiast of exceptional patience, acuteness, and tenacity of purpose. He manifestly set out determined to know all that could possibly be known about Steele, and for some five years (to judge by his first advertisements) he laboured unweariedly at his task. The mere authorities referred to in his notes constitute an ample literature of the period, while the consultation of registers, the rummaging of records, and the general disturbance of contemporary pamphlets and documents which his inquiries must obviously have entailed, are fairly enough to take one's breath away. That in these days of hasty research and hastier publication such a train of investigation should have been undertaken at all, is remarkable; that so prolonged and arduous an effort should have been selected as the diploma-work of a young and previously untried writer, is more remarkable still. It would have been discouraging in the last degree if so much industry and perseverance had been barren of result, and it is satisfactory to find that Mr. Aitken has been fortunate enough to add considerably to the existing material respecting Steele. In the pages that follow it is proposed, not so much to recapitulate 88 Steele's story, as to emphasise, in their order, some of the more important discoveries which are due to his latest biographer.

Richard Steele, as we know already, was born at Dublin in March, 1672 (N. S.), being thus about six weeks older than Addison, who first saw the light in the following May. Beyond some vague references in 'The Tatler,' nothing definite has hitherto been ascertained about his parents, although his father (also Richard Steele) was reported to have been a lawyer. But the fact is now established that one Richard Steele, of Mountain (Monkstown), an attorney, was married in 1670 to a widow named Elinor Symes. These were Steele's father and mother. Steele himself tells us ('Tatler,' No. 181) that the former died when he was 'not quite five years of age,' and his mother, apparently, did not long survive her husband. The boy fell into the charge of his uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary to the first and second Dukes of Ormond, who had married a sister of one of Steele's parents. Through Ormond's influence his nephew was placed, in November, 1684, upon the foundation at the Charterhouse. Two years later he was joined there by Addison. It was then the reign of Dr. Thomas Walker, afterwards 'the ingenious T. 89 W.' of the 'Spectator,' but nothing has been recovered as to Steele's school-days. In November, 1689, he was elected to Christ Church, Oxford, with the usual exhibition of a boy on the Charterhouse foundation, and he matriculated in March, 1690,--Addison, then a demy at Magdalen, having preceded him. Letters already printed by Mr. Wills and others show that Steele tried hard for a studentship at Christ Church; but eventually he became a post-master at Merton, his college-tutor being Dr. Welbore Ellis, to whom he subsequently refers in the preface to the 'Christian Hero.' Of his intercourse with Addison at Smithfield and Oxford no record has come to light, and it is therefore still open to the essayist to piece the imperfections of this period by fictitious scores with the apple-woman or imaginary musings on the Merton terraces. But, in any such excursions in search of the picturesque, the fact that Steele was older instead of younger than Addison cannot safely be disregarded.

Why Richard Steele quitted the University to become a 'gentleman of the army' still remains obscure. His University career, if not brilliant, had been respectable, and he left Merton with the love of 'the whole Society.' Perhaps, like his compatriot Goldsmith, he preferred a red coat 90 to a black one. At all events, in 1694, his restless Irish spirit prompted him to enlist as a cadet in the second troop of Horse Guards, then commanded by his uncle's patron, James Butler, second Duke of Ormond. When he thus 'mounted a war-horse, with a great sword in his hand, and planted himself behind King William the Third against Lewis the Fourteenth' he lost (he says) 'the succession to a very good estate in the county of Wexford in Ireland;' for which, failing further particulars, we may perhaps provisionally read 'castle in Spain.' His next appearance was among the crowd of minstrels who, in black-framed folio, mourned Queen Mary's death. Already he had written verse, and had even burned an entire comedy at college. The chief interest, however, of 'The Procession,' which was the particular name of this particular 'melodious tear,' was its diplomatic dedication to John, Lord Cutts, himself a versifier, and what was more important, also the newly appointed colonel of the Coldstream Guards. Cutts speedily sought out his anonymous panegyrist, took him into his household, and eventually offered him a standard in his regiment. There is evidence, in the shape of transcripts from the Blenheim MSS., that Steele was acting as Cutts' secretary circa 91 1696-7 (a circumstance of which, by the way, there is confirmation in Carleton's 'Memoirs'^[23]); and it has hitherto been supposed that by his employer's interest--for Cutts gave him little but patronage--he became a captain in Lucas's Fusileers. Here, however, Mr. Aitken's cautious method discloses an unsuspected error. Steele is spoken of as a captain as early as 1700, and 'Lord Lucas's Regiment of Foot' (not specifically 'Fusileers') was only raised in February, 1702. If, therefore, before this date Steele had any right to the title of captain, it must have been as captain in the Coldstream Guards. Unfortunately, all efforts to trace him in the records of that regiment have hitherto proved unsuccessful. Neither as captain nor as ensign could its historian, General MacKinnon, though naturally watchful on the point, find any mention of his name.

By 1700 the former post-master of Merton had become a seasoned man about town, a recognized wit, and an habitual frequenter of Will's. 'Dick Steel is yours,' writes Congreve to a 92 friend early in the year. Already, too, there are indications that he had begun to feel the 'want of pence which vexes public men.' From this, however, as well as his part in the coffeehouse crusade against Dryden's 'Quack Maurus,' Blackmore, we must pass to the next rectification. That Steele fought a duel is already known. That it was forced upon him, that he endeavoured in every honourable way to evade it, and that finally, by misadventure, he all but killed his man, have been often circumstantially related. But the date of the occurrence has always been a mystery. Calling Luttrell and the 'Flying-Post' to his aid, Mr. Aitken has ascertained that the place was Hyde Park, the time June 16, 1700, and the other principal an Irishman, named Kelly. Luttrell's description of Steele as 'Capt. Steele, of the Lord Cutts regiment,' is confirmatory of the assumption that he was a captain in the Guards. Whether this was his only 'affair of honour,' or whether there were others, is doubtful; but it is not improbable that the repentant spirit engendered by this event, for his adversary's life long hung trembling in the balance, is closely connected with the publication, if not the preparation, of the 'Christian Hero,' which made its appearance a few months later. 93 Upon the scheme of this curious and by no means uninstructive manual, once so nearly forgotten as to be described as a poem, it is not necessary to linger now. But it may be noted that it was dated from the Tower Guard, where it was written, and that the governor of the Tower was the Lord Lucas in whose regiment Steele became an officer.

The year of which the first months witnessed the publication of the 'Christian Hero' witnessed in its close the production of Steele's first play, and, inconsequently enough, the one was the cause of the other. It was an almost inevitable result of the book that many of the author's former associates were alienated from him, while others, not nicely sensitive to the distinction drawn in Boileau's ami de la vertu plutôt que vertueux, maliciously contrasted his precepts with his practice. Finding himself 'slighted' (he says) 'instead of being encouraged, for his declarations as to religion,' it became 'incumbent upon him to enliven his character, for which reason he writ the comedy called "The Funeral," in which (though full of incidents that move laughter) Virtue and Vice appear just as they ought to do.' In other words, Steele endeavoured to swell that tide of reformation which Collier had set flowing 94 by his 'Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage,' and he followed up his first effort of 1701 by the 'Lying Lover' (1703) and the 'Tender Husband' (1705), the second of which was avowedly written 'in the severity Collier required.' His connection with the purification of the contemporary drama, however, would lead us too far from the special subject of this paper,--the revised facts of his biography. Among these, the order of the plays as given above is an important item. Owing to some traditional misconception, the 'Lying Lover,' which was a rather over-emphatic protest against duelling, was believed by all the older writers to be the last of Steele's early dramatic efforts. As a natural consequence, its being 'damned for its piety' was made responsible for the author's long abstinence from the task of theatrical regeneration. Unfortunately for logic, the facts which, in this instance, Mr. Aitken has extended rather than discovered, are diametrically opposed to any such convenient arrangement. The 'Tender Husband,' and not the 'Lying Lover,' was the last of Steele's first three plays,--that is to say, the moralized Collier mixture was succeeded by a strong infusion of Molière, while, so far from leaving off writing for the stage, there 95 is abundant evidence that, but for other cares and more absorbing occupations, Steele would speedily have proceeded to 'enliven his character' with a fresh comedy. Indeed, in a very instructive suit against Christopher Rich of Drury Lane, preserved among the Chancery Pleadings in the Record Office, mention is made of what may well have been the performance in question. It was to have treated a subject essayed both by Gay and Mrs. Centlivre, the 'Election of Gotham.'

The Chancery suit above referred to, which arose out of the profits of the 'Tender Husband,' began in 1707. Early in 1702 Steele had become a captain in Lucas's, and between that date and 1704 must have spent a considerable portion of his time at Landguard Fort, doing garrison duty with his company. He lodged, according to report, in a farmhouse at Walton. Mr. Aitken prints from various sources several new letters which belong to this period, together with some account of another in the long series of lawsuits about money with which Steele's biography begins to be plentifully besprinkled. In an autograph now in the Morrison collection, we find him certifying with Addison to the unimpeachable character of one 'Margery Maplesden, late Sutler 96 at the Tilt-yard Guard,' and we get passing glances of him at the Kit Cat Club and elsewhere. Perhaps we are right, too, in placing about this date the account of his search for the 'philosopher's stone.' The details of this episode in his career rest mainly upon the narrative of Mrs. de la Rivière Manley, the author of that 'cornucopia of scandal,' the 'New Atalantis;' but there is little doubt that there was ground for the story, since Steele himself, in later life, printed, without contradiction, a reference to it in 'Town Talk,' and it is besides connected with the next of Mr. Aitken's discoveries. According to 'Rivella,' an empiric, who found the sanguine Steele 'a bubble to his mind,' engaged him in the pursuit of the magnum arcanum. Furnaces were built without delay, and Steele's available resources began to vanish rapidly. In these transactions Mrs. Manley's husband played an ambiguous part, and, if we are to believe her, she herself impersonated the Dea ex machina, and warned Steele that he was being duped. It was not too soon. He only just saved his last negotiable property, his commission, and had to go into hiding. 'Fortune,' Mrs. Manley continues, 'did more for him in his adversity than would have lain in her way in prosperity; she threw him to 97 seek for refuge in a house where was a lady with very large possessions; he married her, she settled all upon him, and died soon after.'

This--and to some extent it is a corroboration of the story--was Steele's first wife, hitherto little more than a shifting shadow in his biography. She is now clearly proved to have been a West Indian widow called Margaret Stretch, who had inherited an estate in Barbados of £850 a year from her brother, Major Ford. Steele married her in the spring of 1705, and buried her two years later. There is some indication that her death was caused by a fright given her (when enceinte) by Steele's only sister, who was insane; but upon this point nothing definite can be affirmed. Looking to the circumstances in which (as narrated by Mrs. Manley) the acquaintanceship began, it is not improbable that the personal charms of the lady had less to do with the marriage than the beaux yeux de sa cassette. In any case Steele can scarcely escape the imputation which usually attaches to the union of a needy bachelor with a wealthy widow, and, as will be seen, he was not long inconsolable.

Whether, even at the time of the marriage, the Barbados estate was really productive of much ready money may be doubted. But in August, 98 1706, Steele was appointed Gentleman Waiter to Queen Anne's consort, Prince George of Denmark, and a few weeks after his wife's death, through the recommendation of Arthur Mainwaring, one of the members of the Kit Cat Club, Harley, then a Secretary of State, gave him the post of Gazetteer with an increased salary of £300 a year. 'The writer of the "Gazette" now,' says Hearne in May, 1707, 'is Captain Steele, who is the author of several romantic things, and is accounted an ingenious man.' As 'Captain Steele' he continued for many years to be known, but it is assumed that he left the army before his second marriage, which now followed. At his first wife's funeral had arrived as mourner a lady of about nine and twenty, the daughter of a deceased gentleman of Wales, and the Miss Mary Scurlock who has since become historical as the 'Prue' of the well-known Steele letters in the British Museum. That she was an heiress, and, as Mrs. Manley says, a 'cried-up beauty,' was known, though in the absence of express pictorial assurance of the latter fact, it has hitherto been difficult to see her with the admiring eyes of the enthusiastic writer who signs himself her 'most obsequious obedient husband.' But while unable to add greatly to our knowledge of 99 her character, Mr. Aitken has succeeded in discovering and copying her portrait by Kneller, a portrait which sufficiently justifies her husband's raptures. In Sir Godfrey's 'animated canvas,' she is shown as a very beautiful brunette, in a cinnamon satin dress, with a high, almost too high, forehead, and dark, brilliant eyes. Steele's phrase 'little wife' must have been a 'dear diminutive,' for she is not especially petite, but rather what Fielding's Mrs. James would style 'a very fine person of a woman,' and she has an arch, humourous expression, which suggests the wit with which she is credited. From the absence of a ring it has been conjectured that the portrait was taken before marriage. But Kneller was much more likely to have painted Mrs. Steele than Miss Scurlock, and the simple explanation may be either that rings were neglected or that the hands were painted in from a model. As in the case of Mrs. Stretch, Mr. Aitken has collected a mass of information about Mrs. Steele's relations. His good luck has also helped him to one veritable find. In her letter to her mother announcing her engagement, Miss Scurlock refers scornfully to a certain 'wretched impudence, H.O.,' who had recently written to her. This was manifestly a rejected but still importunate 100 suitor, although the precise measure of his implied iniquity remained unrevealed. It seems that his name was Henry Owen of Glassalt, Carmarthenshire, and that he was an embarrassed widower of (in the circuitous language of the law) 'thirty, thirty-five, or forty years of age at the most'--that is to say, he was over forty. Miss Scurlock had known him as a neighbour from childhood, and for four or five years past, at Bath, at London, and at other places, he, being a needy man with an entailed estate, had been bombarding her with his addresses. Only two years before her engagement to Steele, finding her obdurate, he had trumped up a suit against her for breach of contract of marriage, which apparently was not successful. The 'Libel' and 'Answer,' printed from the records of the Consistorial Court of London, are more curious than edifying, and tend to show that Owen was rather a cur. But the whole story is useful indirectly as suggesting that Miss Scurlock's constitutional prudery was not the only reason why she surrounded Steele's worship of her with so much mystery. Abhorrence of 'public doings' in 'changing the name of lover for husband' was certainly superficially justifiable in the circumstances. A gentleman who had brought a suit against her in 1704 for breach of contract, 101 and was still pestering her in August, 1707, with his unpalatable attentions, was quite capable of putting awkward obstacles in the way of that other ardent wooer from Lord Sunderland's office in Whitehall, who, in order to pay his court to 'the beautifullest object in the world,' was confessedly neglecting the 'Gazette' and the latest news from Ostend.

According to the license the marriage was to have taken place at St. Margaret's, Westminster; but the registers of that church, as well as those of St. James's, Piccadilly, and St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, have been fruitlessly searched for the record, and it is clear that, for some days, the ceremony was kept a secret, pending the arrival from Wales of Mrs. Scurlock's consent. It probably took place on the 9th of September, 1707, the day after the license was granted. In the previous month of August, Steele had rented a house, now no longer standing, in Bury Street, close to the turning out of Jermyn Street. This was a quarter of the town described by contemporary advertisements as in close proximity 'to St. James's Church, Chapel, Park, Palace, Coffee and Chocolate Houses'--in other words, it was in the very heart of the beau monde; and here Steele, moreover, would be within easy distance 102 of the Court, and the Cockpit at Whitehall. He appears to have begun his establishment upon the lavish footing of a gentleman whose expectations are larger than his means, and whose wife's dignity demands, if not 'the gilt coach and dappled Flanders mares' of Pope's Pamela, at least a chariot, a lady's-maid, and an adequate equipment of cinnamon satin. On paper his yearly income from all sources, Mrs. Scurlock's allowance not included, was about £1250. But by far the largest portion of this was derived from the Barbados property, which, besides being encumbered by legacies, seems to have made irregular returns. His salary as Gazetteer was also subject to 'deductions,' and as with the modest pay of a captain in Lucas's he had dabbled in alchemy, he was probably considerably in debt. The prospect was not a cheerful one, either for him or for 'Prue,' as he soon begins to call his more circumspect better-half, and the signs of trouble are quickly present. Always irrepressibly sanguine, and generally without ready money, he is constantly turning some pecuniary corner or other, not without anticipations and borrowings that bring their inevitable train of actions and bailiffs. All this has to be gently tempered to the apprehensive 'Prue,' who, to her other luxuries, contrives 103 to add a confidante, described as Mrs. (probably here it means Miss) Binns. Meanwhile her husband, bustling to and fro, now detained in his passage by a friend (and a 'pint of wine'),--now, it is to be feared, attentively shadowed by the watchful 'shoulder-dabbers,'--scribbles off, from remote 'blind taverns' and other casual coigns of vantage, a string of notes and notelets designed to keep his 'Absolute Governesse' at Bury Street minutely acquainted with his doings. Through all of these the 'dusky strand' of the 'West Indian business'--in other words, the protracted negotiation for the sale of the Barbados property--winds languidly and inextricably.

Steele's letters to his wife, accessible in the reprints by Nichols of 1787 and 1809, are, however, too well known to need description, and although Mr. Aitken has collated them with the originals, he does not profess to have made any material addition to their riches. As they progress, they record more than one of the various attempts at advancement with which their writer, egged on by his ambition and his embarrassments is perpetually preoccupied. To-day it is a gentleman-ushership that seems within his reach; to-morrow he is hoping to be Under-Secretary, 104 vice Addison promoted to Ireland. Then the strange disquieting figure of Swift appears upon the scene, not, as it seems, to exercise its usual power of fascination over 'Prue,' by whom--Swift declares later--Steele is governed 'most abominably, as bad as Marlborough.' With April, 1709, comes the establishment of the 'Tatler,' and we enter upon thrice-gleaned ground. The period covered by 'Mr. Bickerstaff's Lucubrations' and their successor, the 'Spectator,' lighted as it is by stray side-rays from the wonderful 'Journal to Stella,' offers few opportunities for any fresh illumination. Beyond printing, from the Blenheim MSS., some interesting accounts of Jacob Tonson, bearing upon the sale of the collected editions, and, from the British Museum, an assignment to Buckley the bookseller of a share in the 'Spectator,' Mr. Aitken adds nothing that is absolutely new to what has already been collected by Drake, Percy, Chalmers, Nichols, and other writers. With respect to the unexplained cessation of the 'Tatler,' he apparently inclines to the view that it was in some sort the result of an understanding with Harley, by which Steele, having been deprived of his Gazetteership as a caution, was allowed to retain, quamdiu se bene gesserit, his recently acquired 105 appointment as Commissioner of Stamps. But it is not probable that we shall ever know much more of a transaction concerning which Addison was unconsulted, and Swift uninformed. With all his customary openness, Steele could, if he pleased, keep his own counsel, and he seems to have done so on this occasion.

Nor are we really any wiser as to the reasons for the termination of the 'Spectator' in December, 1712, except that we know it to have been premeditated, since the 'Guardian' was projected before the 'Spectator' ceased to appear. From the Berkeley letters among Lord Egmont's MSS., we learn that Steele was once more dallying with his first love, the stage; and from the same source that, either early in February or late in January, the death of his mother-in-law had put him in possession of £500 per annum. To this improvement in his affairs is doubtless traceable that increased spirit of independence which precipitated what all lovers of letters must regard as his disastrous plunge into politics. Whatever the origin of the 'Guardian,' and however sincere its opening protests of neutrality, the situation was far too strained for one who, having a journal at his command, had been from his youth a partisan of the Revolution, and had already made 106 rash entry into party quarrels. Before May, 1713, he was involved in bitter hostilities with Swift, arising out of a Tory attack on the Nottinghams for their desertion to the Whigs. A few weeks later found him insisting upon the demolition, under the Treaty of Utrecht, of the harbour and fortifications of Dunkirk, which demolition, it was shrewdly suspected, the Ministry were intending to forego. In June he had resigned his Commissionership of Stamps, and in August he was elected member for the borough of Stockbridge. Almost concurrently he issued a pamphlet entitled 'The Importance of Dunkirk consider'd.' Swift, henceforth hanging always upon his traces, retorted with one of his cleverest pamphlets, 'The Importance of the "Guardian" considered,' and the 'under-spurleathers' of the Tory press began also to ply their pens against Steele, who by this time had dropped the 'Guardian' for a professedly political organ, the 'Englishman.' Shortly afterwards he issued 'The Crisis,' a pamphlet on the Hanoverian succession, which Swift followed by his masterly 'Publick Spirit of the Whigs.' No sooner had Steele taken his seat in the House in February than he found that in the eyes of those in power he was a marked man. He was at once impeached for seditious utterances 107 in 'The Crisis,' and, though he seems to have made an able defence, was expelled. Then, after a few doubtful months, Queen Anne died, his party came into power, and his troubles as a politician were at an end. In his best pamphlet, his 'Apology for Himself and his Writings,' he has given an account of this part of his career.

That career, as far as literature is concerned, may be said to close with the publication of the 'Apology,' in October, 1714. Not many months afterwards, on presenting an address, he was knighted by King George. During the rest of his life, which was prolonged to September, 1729, when he died at Carmarthen, he continued to publish various periodicals and tracts, none of which is of great importance. In December, 1718, Lady Steele died, and four years later her husband produced a fourth comedy, that 'Conscious Lovers' which honest Parson Adams declared to be (in parts) 'almost solemn enough for a sermon,' but which is nevertheless, perhaps by reason of Cibber's collaboration, one of the best constructed of his plays. Part of Mr. Aitken's second volume is occupied by Steele's connection, as patentee and manager, with Drury Lane Theatre, concerning which he has brought together much curious and hitherto unpublished information. Other points 108 upon which new light is thrown are the publication of 'The Ladies Library,' the establishment of the 'Censorium,' Steele's application for the Mastership of the Charterhouse, Mr. John Rollos and his mechanical hoop-petticoat, the failure of Steele's once famous contrivance, the Fish-Pool, his connection with the Dyers, and so forth.

As regards Steele's character, Mr. Aitken's inquiries further enforce the conclusion that, in any estimate of it, considerable allowance must be made for the influence of that miserable and malicious contemporary gossip, of which, as Fielding says, the 'only basis is lying.' For much of this, Steele's ill-starred excursion into faction is obviously responsible. 'Scandal between Whig and Tory,' said the ingenuous and experienced author of the 'New Atalantis,' 'goes for nothing,' and apart from her specific recantation in the dedication to 'Lucius,' this sentiment alone should suffice to discredit her, at all events in the absence of anything like corroborative evidence. The attacks of Dennis and the rest are as worthless. We know that Steele was not 'descended from a trooper's horse,' and we know that he was not 'born at Carrickfergus' (whatever social disqualification that particular natal accident may entail). Why should we listen to the circulators of these 109 or other stories--those of Savage, for example? With respect to Swift, the most dangerous because the most powerful detractor, it is clear, from the way in which he speaks of Steele and Steele's abilities before the strife of party had estranged them, that, if they had never quarrelled, he would have ranked him only a little lower than Addison.^[24] And if Steele has suffered from scandal and misrepresentation, he has also suffered from his own admissions. The perfect frankness and freedom of his letters has been accepted too literally. Charming and unique as they are, they leave upon many, who do not sufficiently bear in mind their extremely familiar character, an ill-defined impression that he was over-uxorious, over-sentimental. But a man is not necessarily this for a few extravagant billets-doux, or many irreproachable persons who now, in the time-honoured words of Mr. Micawber, 'walk erect before their fellow-men,' would incur the like condemnation. Again, it is, to all appearance, chiefly due to the 110 careless candour of some half-dozen of these documents that Steele has been branded as a drunkard. The fact is that, in an age when to take too much wine was no disgrace, he was neither better nor worse than his contemporaries; and there is besides definite evidence that he was easily over-come--far more easily than Addison. As to his money difficulties, they cannot be denied. But they were the difficulties of improvidence and not of profligacy, of a man who, with Fielding's joy of life and Goldsmith's 'knack of hoping,' always rated an uncertain income at its highest and not at its average amount, and who, moreover, paid his debts before he died. For the rest, upon the question of his general personality, it will suffice to cite one unimpeachable witness, whose testimony has only of late years come to light. Berkeley, who wrote for the 'Guardian,' and visited Steele much at Bloomsbury (where he saw nothing of Savage's bailiffs in livery), speaks expressly, in a letter to Sir John Perceval, of his love and consideration for his wife, of the generosity and benevolence of his temper, of his cheerfulness, his wit, and his good sense. He should hold it, he says, a sufficient recompense for writing the 'Treatise on Human Knowledge' that it gained him 'some share in the friendship of so worthy 111 a man.' The praise of Berkeley--Berkeley, to whom Pope gives 'every virtue under heaven,' and who is certainly one of the noblest figures of the century--outweighs whole cartloads of Grub Street scandal and skip-kennel pamphleteers.

With Steele's standing as a man of letters we are on surer ground, since his own works speak for him without the distortions of tradition. To the character of poet he made no pretence, nor could he, although--witness the Horatian lines to Marlborough--he possessed the eighteenth-century faculty of easy octosyllabics. Of his plays it has been said that they resemble essays rather than dramas, a judgment which sets one wondering what would have been the critic's opinion if Steele had never written the 'Spectator' and the 'Tatler.' It is perhaps more to the point that their perception of strongly marked humourous character is far more obvious than their stagecraft, and that their shortcomings in this latter respect are heightened by Steele's debatable endeavours not (as Cowper says) 'to let down the pulpit to the level of the stage,' but to lift the stage to a level with the pulpit. As a political writer, his honesty and enthusiasm were not sufficient to secure him permanent success in a line where they are not always thrice-armed that 112 have their quarrel just; and it is no discredit to him that he was unable to contend against the deadly irony of Swift. It is as an essayist that he will be best remembered. In the past, it has been too much the practice to regard him as the colourless colleague of Addison. We now know that he deserves a much higher place; that Addison, in fact, was quite as much indebted to Steele's inventive gifts as Steele could possibly have been indebted to Addison's sublimating spirit. It may be that he was a more negligent writer than Addison; it may be that he was inferior as a literary artist; but the genuineness of his feelings frequently carries him farther. Not a few of his lay sermons on anger, pride, flattery, magnanimity, and so forth, are unrivalled in their kind. He rallied the follies of society with unfailing tact and good-humour; he rebuked its vices with admirable courage and dignity; and he wrote of women and children as, in his day, no writer had hitherto dared to do. As the first painter of domesticity, the modern novel owes him much. But modern journalism owes him more, since--to use some words of his great adversary--he 'refined it first, and showed its use.'

Mr. Aitken's book has been described in the title to this paper as the 'latest' Life of Steele. 113 It will probably be the 'last.' No one, at all events, is likely to approach the subject again with the same indefatigable energy of research. To many of us, indeed, Biography, conceived in this uncompromising fashion, would be a thing impossible. To shrink from no investigation, however tedious, to take nothing at second-hand, to verify everything, to cross-examine everything, to leave no smallest stone unturned in the establishment of the most infinitesimal fact--these are conditions which presuppose a literary constitution of iron. It is but just to note that the method has its drawbacks. So narrow an attention to minutiæ tends to impair the selective power, and the defect of Mr. Aitken's work is--almost of necessity--its superabundance. It will be said that his determination to discover has sometimes carried him too far afield; that much of these two handsome volumes might with advantage have been committed to the safekeeping of an appendix; that the mass of detail, in short, is out of proportion to its actual relevance. To this, in all likelihood, the author would answer that his book is not designed (in Landor's phrase) to lie--

114 that he does not put it forward as a study or critical monograph; but that it is a leisurely and conscientious effort, reproducing much out-of-the-way information which is the lawful prize of his individual bow and spear; and that, rather than lose again what has been so painfully acquired, he is prepared to risk the charge of surplusage, content if his labours be recognized as the fullest and most trustworthy existing contribution towards the life and achievements of a distinguished man of letters who died nearly one hundred and seventy years ago. And this recognition his labours undoubtedly deserve.

'Never have a porch to your paper.' Acting upon this excellent maxim of the late Master of Balliol, we may at once explain that 'Monsieur Tonson' is the title of a long-popular recitation. It recounts, in rhyme of the Wolcot and Colman order, how, in the heyday of hoaxes and practical joking, a wag, called King in the verses, persecutes an unhappy French refugee in St. Giles's with repeated nightly inquiries for an imaginary 'Mr. Thompson,' until at length his maddened victim flies the house. And here comes in the effective point of the story. After a protracted absence abroad, the tormentor returns to London, when the whim seizes him to knock once more at the old door with the old question. By an extraordinary coincidence the Frenchman has just resumed residence in his former dwelling.

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the result being that he takes flight again, 'and ne'er is heard of more.' The author of this jeu d'esprit was John Taylor, the oculist and journalist; and it originated in a current anecdote, either actually founded on fact or invented by a Governor of Jamaica. After a prosperous career in prose, Taylor versified it for Fawcett, the comedian, who was giving recitations at the Freemasons' Tavern. It had an extraordinary vogue; was turned by Moncrieff into a farce (in which Gattie, and afterwards Matthews, took the leading part of Monsieur Morbleu, the Frenchman); was illustrated by Robert Cruikshank, and still, we are told, makes furtive appearance in popular 'Reciters.' By describing himself on the title-page of his memoirs as 'Author of "Monsieur Tonson,"' its writer plainly regarded the poem as his passport to fame; and whether one agrees with him or not, it may safely be taken as a pretext for some account of the gossiping and discursive volumes which contain his recollections.

John Taylor's grandfather, also John, was a person of considerable importance in his day, being indeed none other than the notorious oculist, 117 or 'Ophthalmiater,' known as the 'Chevalier' Taylor. Irreverent persons seem to have hinted that, as a matter of fact, this new-fangled Ophthalmiater meant no more than old Quack 'writ large;' and one William Hogarth, generally on the side of the irreverent, hitched the Chevalier into a well-known satirical etching which collectors entitle indifferently 'Consultation of Physicians' or 'Company of Undertakers.' Here the gifted recipient (as per advertisement) of so many distinctions 'Pontifical, Imperial, and Royal,' appears ignobly with Mrs. Sarah Mapp, the Epsom bone-setter, and that famous Dr. Joshua Ward, referred to by Fielding, whose pill (like a much-vaunted nostrum of our own day) had the property of posting at once to the part affected. Yet the Chevalier, despite inordinate vanity, and a fondness for fine clothes which made him fair game for the mocker, was undoubtedly a man of ability. 'He has a good person, is a natural orator, and has a facility of learning foreign languages'--says Dr. King, who met him at Tunbridge; and apart from the circumstance that he had been a pupil of Cheselden the anatomist, he was really a very skilful operator for cataract, and wrote a long list of works or pamphlets on the eye. He was a familiar figure in the different 118 Courts of Europe for his cures, real and imaginary, the story of which he relates--without showing any 'remarkable diffidence in recording his own talents and attainments,' says his grandson--in three volumes of Memoirs,^[25] having a longer title-page than that of Pamela.' Judging from his own account (which should probably be taken with the fullest allowance of cautionary salt); his experiences must have been peculiar, and his visiting list unusually varied. He asserts, without much detail, that he knew Lord Bath and Jack Sheppard; Mary Tofts, the Godalming rabbit-breeder, and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. He also professed acquaintance with Marshals Saxe and Keith; with Pöllnitz of the 119 'Virginians;' with Theodore, the bankrupt King of Corsica; with Boerhaave, Albinus, Linnæus, Pope, Voltaire, Metastasio, La Fontaine, etc. (If the fabulist be intended, there is clearly some mistake, since La Fontaine departed this life about eight years before the Chevalier was born.)^[26] He was a witness, he says, of the execution at Tyburn of Counsellor Christopher Layer for high treason (May, 1723), and he affirms that he was actually present in the Old Bailey upon that memorable occasion when Blake (alias Blue-skin) tried to cut the throat of Jonathan Wild. Having seen many men and cities, and full of honours--chiefly of foreign manufacture--the Chevalier died in a convent at Prague in 1780. At the time of his death, it may be noted, the famous Ophthalmiater was himself blind. He can scarcely be said to have wanted a vates sacer, for Churchill mentions him in 'The Ghost':

And Walpole gave him a not very happy epigram:

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His only son, John Taylor the Second, was also an oculist, but not of equal eminence, although one of his cures--that of a boy born blind--obtained the honours of a pamphlet by Oldys the antiquary, and a portrait by Worlidge the etcher. At the Chevalier's death John Taylor applied for the post, which his father had held, of oculist to the King, but the appointment was given to the Baron de Wenzel, one of the Chevalier's pupils, who had been fortunate enough to operate successfully on the old Duke of Bedford, of 'Junius' notoriety. To John Taylor the Second succeeded John Taylor the Third, the 'Author of "Monsieur Tonson."' Beginning life as an oculist, like his father and grandfather, he achieved considerable reputation in that capacity, and by good luck obtained at Wenzel's death the very appointment which his father had failed to secure. But in mid-career he relinquished his profession for journalism. For many years he was proprietor and editor of 'The Sun' newspaper, and in 1827 he also published a couple of volumes of prologues, epilogues, sonnets, and occasional 121 verses. His chief reputation, however, was that of a raconteur. 'In his latter days,' says 'The Literary Gazette,' in its obituary notice of May 19, 1832, he 'was, perhaps, as entertaining in conversation, with anecdote, playfulness, and satire, as any man within the bills of mortality.' Many of his good things are preserved in the two volumes of 'Records of My Life' which appeared shortly after his death,^[27] to the compilation of which he was impelled by the perfidy of a former partner and the invitation of an 'eminent publisher,' presumably Mr. Edward Bull, of Holles Street, whose imprint the volumes bear. His recollections are set down without any other method than a certain rough grouping; they have the garrulity and the repetitions of the advanced age at which they were penned; but they contain, in addition to a good deal that he had heard from others, much that had come within his own experiences. As he professes strict veracity, it is from the latter class that we shall chiefly make selection, beginning 122 as in duty bound, with the anecdotes of literary men.

Concerning Johnson and Goldsmith he has not much to say beyond the fact that, as a boy, he had once delivered a letter for the latter at the Temple, but without seeing him. It is, however, to the 'Author of "Monsieur Tonson"' that we owe the historic episode of the borrowed guinea slipped under the door, which recurs so prominently in all Goldsmith's biographies; while he tells one anecdote of Johnson which, as far as we can discover, has escaped the annotators of Boswell. According to Dr. Messenger Monsey, physician of Chelsea Hospital--a rough, Abernethy sort of man, whom his admirers compared with Swift--upon one occasion, when the age of George III. was under discussion, Johnson burst in with a 'Pooh! what does it signify when such an animal was born, or whether he had ever been born at all?'--an ultra-Jacobital utterance which the Whig narrator did not neglect to accentuate by reminding his hearers that to this very 'usurper' Johnson subsequently owed his pension. But as Monsey did not like the Doctor, and Taylor calls him a 'literary hippopotamus,' the incident is probably exaggerated. Then there is a story of Dr. Parr, in which is concerned another 123 of the Johnson circle, Edmund Burke. During the Hastings trial Parr was effusive (Taylor says 'diffusive') about the speeches of Sheridan and Fox, but silent as to Burke's, a circumstance which led that distinguished orator to suggest interrogatively that he presumed Parr found it faultless. 'Not so, Edmund,' was the reply, in Parr's best Johnsonese; 'your speech was oppressed by epithet, dislocated by parenthesis, and debilitated by amplification,'--a knock-me-down answer to which 'Edmund' made no recorded rejoinder. There is a touch of the lexicographic manner in another anecdote, this time of Hugh Kelly, the stay-maker turned dramatist and barrister, who was so proud of his silver that he kept even his spurs upon the sideboard. Examining a lady at the trial of George Barrington, the pick-pocket, Kelly inquired elaborately, 'Pray, madam, how could you, in the immensity of the crowd determine the identity of the man?' As he found that his question was wholly unintelligible to the witness, he reduced it to 'How do you know he was the man?' 'Because,' came the instant reply, 'I caught his hand in my pocket.' Taylor apparently knew both the Boswells, father and son, and, indeed, playfully claims part-authorship in the famous 'Life' upon 124 the ground that he had suggested the substitution of 'comprehending' for 'containing' in the title-page; and certainly--if that be proof--'comprehending' is there, and 'containing' is not.^[28] He had also relations with Wilkes, whom he praises for his wit and learning. For his learning we have the evidence of his 'Catullus,' but his wit seems, like much wit of his day, to have been largely based upon bad manners. Once a certain over-goaded Sir Watkin Lewes said angrily to him, 'I'll be your butt no longer.' Wilkes at once mercilessly retorted, 'With all my heart. I never like an empty one.'

Wolcot and Caleb Whitefoord of the 'Cross Readings,' Richard Owen Cambridge and Richard Cumberland--all figure in the 'Records.' Taylor thinks that the famous Whitefoord addition to 'Retaliation' was really by Goldsmith--a supposition which is not shared by modern Goldsmith critics. Of Wolcot there is a lengthy account, the most striking part of which refers to his last hours. Taylor asked him, on his death-bed, whether anything could be done for him. 'His answer, delivered in a deep and strong tone, was, "Bring back my youth,"' after 125 which futile request he fell into the sleep in which he died. Cambridge Taylor seems to have known but slightly, and apart from a long story, for the authenticity of which he does not vouch, has nothing memorable to say of him, except that he declared he had written his 'Scribleriad' while under the hands of his hairdresser,--a piece of fine-gentleman affectation which recalls Molière's poetaster. But Taylor tells a story of Cumberland which is at least well invented. Once--so it runs--Cumberland stumbled on entering a box at Drury Lane Theatre, and Sheridan sprang to his assistance. 'Ah, sir!' said the writer of the 'West Indian,' 'you are the only man to assist a falling author.' 'Rising,' you mean,' returned Sheridan, thus, either by malice or misadventure, employing almost the exact words which, in the 'Critic,' he had put into the mouth of 'Sir Fretful Plagiary,'--a character admittedly modelled upon Cumberland himself. Sheridan, too, supplies more than one page of these recollections, and their writer professes to have been present when he (Sheridan) spoke as follows concerning a pamphleteer who had written against him: 'I suppose that Mr. ---- thinks I am angry with him, but he is mistaken, for I never harbour 126 resentment. If his punishment depended on me, I would show him that the dignity of my mind was superior to all vindictive feelings. Far should I be from wishing to inflict a capital punishment upon him, grounded on his attack upon me; but yet on account of his general character and conduct, and as a warning to others, I would merely order him to be publicly whipped three times, to be placed in the pillory four times, to be confined in prison seven years, and then, as he would enjoy the freedom more after so long a confinement, I would have him transported for life.'

At the date of the above deliverance, the scene of which was a tavern in Portugal Street,--perhaps the now vanished Grange public house,--Sheridan was lessee of Drury Lane Theatre. In later years Taylor was to become acquainted with another Drury Lane magnate, Lord Byron, with whom he corresponded and exchanged poems. Concerning Lady Byron he reports that Mrs. Siddons, whom he regarded as an unimpeachable authority, assured him that if she had no other reason to admire his Lordship's judgment and taste, she should be fully convinced of both by his choice of a wife,--a sentiment which should certainly be set down to the credit of a lady who 127 is by no means over-praised. Among the Portugal Street roisterers was Richard Wilson, the painter. According to Taylor he must have been vintner as well, since most of the wine came from his cellar in Lincoln's Inn Fields (Great Queen Street), the company having condemned the tavern beverages. Apart from the fact that Wilson's 'favourite fluid,' like Churchill's, was porter, this particular is more out of keeping with his traditional lack of pence than another, also related by Taylor, in which he says that, upon one occasion, having procured Wilson a commission, he was obliged to lend him the money to buy brushes and canvas. With artists, however, Taylor's acquaintance was not large. He knew Peters the academician, afterwards the Rev.; and he knew Ozias Humphry the miniaturist, who in his old age became totally blind. With West and his rival Opie (Opie, like Wilson, lived in Queen Street) he was apparently on familiar terms, and he was often the guest of the former at the dinners which the Royal Academy of that day were accustomed to have on the anniversary of Queen Charlotte's birthday. Of West he speaks warmly; does not mention his vanity, and attributes much of his baiting by Peter Pindar to that satirist's partiality for Opie. Fuseli, 128 another resident in Great Queen Street, and Northcote, also flit through the record; and there is reference to a supper at Reynolds's, where it was idly debated whether Johnson would have written the 'Reflections on the French Revolution' better than Burke, and where--on the topic De mortuis--Reynolds propounded the practical dictum that 'the dead were nothing, and the living everything,'--a sentiment which shows him to have been in agreement with the On doit des égards aux vivants of Voltaire. But, on the whole, the annalist's memories of artists are of meagre interest, and the only compact anecdote related of a member of the profession refers to the architect known popularly as 'Capability' Brown. Once when Lord Chatham, disabled by the gout, was hobbling painfully down the stairs of St. James's Palace, Brown had the good fortune to assist him to his carriage. Lord Chatham thanked him, adding pleasantly, 'Now, sir; go and adorn your country.' To which Brown the capable retorted neatly, 'Go you, my Lord, and save it.'

Of anecdotes of actors and actresses the Author of 'Monsieur Tonson' has no lack. As already stated, he was much in request for prologues and epilogues; he was an active and 129 intelligent dramatic critic, and he was, moreover, intimate with most of the leading players of his day. To make any adequate summary of so large a body of theatrical gossip would be difficult; but a few stories may be selected concerning some of the older men. Of Garrick, whom Taylor's father had seen when he first came out at Goodman's Fields, and regarded as the Shakespeare of actors, he tells a number of anecdotes which, unfamiliar when the 'Records' were published, are now fairly well-known. Taylor was, however, the first, we believe, to record that effective story of Mrs. Clive, who, watching Garrick from behind the scenes, between smiles and tears, burst at last into emphatic and audible expression of her belief that he could 'act a gridiron;' and Taylor also says that once, when his father was performing an operation for cataract, Garrick, who was present, so enthralled the nervous patient by his humour, that he forgot both his fears and his pain. Of Garrick's Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Pritchard, Taylor, deriving his information from his father, speaks highly, and considers that Johnson degraded her memory by describing her as 'an ignorant woman, who talked of her gownd.' (Mrs. Pritchard had acted the heroine in the 130 great man's 'Irene,' and it is possible that he was prejudiced.) To Macklin, another celebrated Macbeth,--being, indeed, the first who performed that part in the old Scottish garb,--Taylor makes frequent reference. He saw him in Iago, in Sir Paul Pliant of the 'Double Dealer,' and in other characters; but held that he was 'too theoretical for nature. He had three pauses in his acting--the first, moderate; the second, twice as long; but his last, or "grand pause," as he styled it, was so long that the prompter on one occasion, thinking his memory failed, repeated the cue ... several times, and at last so loud as to be heard by the audience.' Whereupon Macklin in a passion rushed from the stage and knocked him down, exclaiming, 'The fellow interrupted me in my grand pause!' Quin, Macklin's rival, was also given to inordinate pauses, and once, while acting Horatio in Rowe's 'Fair Penitent' (the play in which George Primrose of Wakefield was to have made his début), he delayed so long to reply to the challenge of Lothario that a man in the gallery bawled out, 'Why don't you give the gentleman an answer, whether you will or no?' Taylor cites a good many instances of Quin's gourmandise, and of his ready, but rather full-flavoured 131 wit. He is perhaps best when on his dignity. Once at Allen's of Prior Park (Fielding's 'All-worthy'), the imperious Warburton attempted to degrade the guest into the actor by insidiously pressing Quin to recite something. Quin accordingly spoke a speech from Otway's 'Venice Preserved' which contained the lines,--

delivering them with so unmistakable an application to Allen and Warburton respectively that he was never again troubled by the divine for a specimen of his declamatory powers. Another story told by Taylor of Quin may be quoted, because it introduces Mrs. Clive. She had invited Quin to stay at Cliveden (Little Strawberry), of which the appointments were on as minute a scale as those of Petit-Trianon. When he had inspected the garden, she asked him if he had noticed a tiny piece of water which she called her pond. 'Yes, Kate,' he replied, 'I have seen your basin, but did not see a wash-ball.' Taylor seems surprised that Walpole should have been so much attracted to Mrs. Clive, whose personal charms were small, and whose manners, he alleges, were rough and 132 vulgar. He quotes, with apparent approval, some unpublished lines by Peter Pindar, criticising the epitaph in which Walpole declared that Comedy had died with his friend:

But one need no more swear to the truth of an epitaph than of a song. Catharine Clive had both humour and good-humour; her indefatigable needle was continually employed in the decoration of Walpole's Gothic museum, and it may be concluded that he knew perfectly what he was about. As a near neighbour, a blue stocking might have been wearisome, a beauty dangerous, and she was probably of far more use to him than either.

Except for the 'gridiron' anecdote, however, Mrs. Clive does not play any material part in Taylor's chronicle. With a later luminary, Miss Farren, he was not actually acquainted, although he had met her once with Lord Derby (whom she ultimately married), and had admired her genuine sensibility in Miss Lee's 'Chapter of Accidents.' But he seems to have been on 133 intimate terms with Mrs. Abington, both in her prime and also in her decline, for he was present when she degraded herself by acting Scrub in the 'Beaux' Stratagem;'^[29] and he had dined with her at Mrs. Jordan's, when she talked unceasingly and enthusiastically of Garrick,--a circumstance which, considering the trouble she had given him in his lifetime, may perhaps be regarded in the light of an expiatory exercise. Taylor also knew Mrs. Siddons, of whom he speaks warmly, saying that he had been intimate with her for years, and had 'many of her letters, with which even her request would not induce him to part.' He was, as a matter of fact, connected with the Kemble family by marriage, his first wife, Mrs. Duill, having been a Miss Satchell, whose sister had married Stephen Kemble, a huge Trulliber of a man who could act Falstaff without stuffing, and had gone through all the experiences of a strolling player, even to lunching in a Yorkshire turnip-field.^[30] Of John Kemble, and Charles 134 Kemble and his wife there is much in the 'Records,' but most of it has grown familiar by repetition. There is also much of other actors and actresses, as might be expected from one who had seen Dodd as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Lewis as Mercutio, 'Gentleman' Smith as Charles in the 'School for Scandal,' and Palmer--Lamb's Jack Palmer--as Sneer in the 'Critic' Taylor's portrait, in the poem called 'The Stage,' of the last-named performer may serve as an example of its writer's powers as a rival of Lloyd and Churchill:

In the foregoing plunges into the Taylorian bran-pie, we have, as promised at the outset, depended rather upon the writer's personal experiences than upon his miscellaneous anecdotes. 135 But we have by no means exhausted the personal experiences. Not to mention political magnates like Lord Chatham and Lord Chesterfield, whom we have almost entirely neglected, there are many references to characters difficult to classify, but no less diverting to recall. As a boy, Taylor had seen Coan, the Norfolk dwarf of Churchill's Rosciad

then lodging at a tavern in the Five Fields (now Eaton Square) kept by one of the Pinchbecks who invented the metal of that name; and he remembered the boxer Buckhorse, a debased specimen of humanity, whose humour consisted in permitting the Eton and Westminster boys to punch his battered features at the modest rate of a shilling the blow.^[31] He had also visited the famous Mrs. Teresa Cornelys, when that favourite of the Nobility and Gentry had fallen upon evil days, and was subsisting precariously as a purveyor of asses' milk at Knightsbridge; he had 136 known intimately a certain Mr. Donaldson, who, like Horace Walpole, had gone in danger of his life from the 'gentleman highwayman,' James Maclean; and at Angelo's in Carlisle Street, Soho, he had frequently met the Chevalier D'Eon in his woman's dress, but old, and equally decayed in manners and means. It is singular that the Author of 'Monsieur Tonson,' with all his dramatic proclivities, should never have attempted a play. As far as can be ascertained, however, his sole contribution to stage literature, prologues and epilogues excepted, was the lines for the rhyming Butler in Mrs. Inchbald's 'Lovers' Vows,' that version of Kotzebue's 'Das Kind der Liebe' which figures so conspicuously in Miss Austen's 'Mansfield Park.' 'Lovers' Vows' would appear to be fertile in suggestion, for it was in playing this piece that Charles Kean fell in love with his future wife, Miss Ellen Tree, sister of the musical Maria (Mrs. Bradshaw), who lives for ever in Henry Luttrell's happy epigram:

Writing to Pope in July, 1728, concerning the annotation of the 'Dunciad,' Swift comments upon the prompt oblivion which overtakes the minor details of contemporary history. 'Twenty miles from London nobody understands hints, initial letters, or town facts and passages; and in a few years not even those who live in London.' A somewhat similar opinion was expressed by Johnson. 'In sixty or seventy years, or less,' he said, 'all works which describe manners, require notes.' His own biography is a striking case in point. Almost from the beginning the editorial pen was freely exercised upon it, and long before the lesser term he mentions, it was already--to use an expressive phrase of Beaumarchais--'rongée d'extraits et couverte de critiques.' With Mr. Croker's edition of 1831 it might have been thought that the endurable limits of illustration and interpretation had been reached, and for some time, indeed, that opinion seems to 138 have obtained. But within a comparatively brief period three other editions of importance have made their appearance, each of which has its special features, while four and twenty years ago was published another (reissued in 1888), which had, at least, the advantage of an excellent plan. Boswell's book itself may now, in Parliamentary language, be taken for 'read.' As Johnson said of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' 'its merit is established, and individual praise or censure can neither augment nor diminish it.' But the publication, in Colonel Grant's excellent brief memoir, of the first systematic bibliography of Johnson's works, coupled with the almost simultaneous issue by Mr. H. R. Tedder, the able and accomplished librarian to the Athenæum Club, of a bibliography of Boswell's masterpiece, affords a sufficient pretext for some review of Boswell's editors and predecessors.

Johnson died on the evening of Monday, December 13, 1784. According to a letter dated May 5, 1785, from Michael Lort to Bishop Percy, printed in Nichols' 'Literary Illustrations,' the first Life appeared on the day following the death. But this is a manifest mistake, as reference to contemporary newspapers, or even to the pamphlet itself, should have sufficed to show. At p. 120 is an account of Johnson's funeral, which 139 did not take place until Monday, December 20. Moreover, the portrait by T. Trotter,^[32] for which Johnson is said to have sat 'some time since,' is dated the 16th, and in an article in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for December, it is expressly stated that the book 'was announced before the Doctor had been two days dead,' and appeared on the ninth morning after his death. It may even be doubtful if this is strictly accurate, as the first notification of the pamphlet in the 'Public Advertiser' appears on Thursday, the 23rd, and promises its publication that week. Its title is 'The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., with Occasional Remarks on his Writings, an Authentic Copy of his Will, and a Catalogue of his Works, &c.,' 1785. It is an octavo of iv-144 pages, and its publisher was the G. Kearsley, of 46 Fleet Street, who issued so many of Goldsmith's works. Its author, too, is supposed to have been the William Cook who subsequently wrote recollections of Goldsmith in the 'European Magazine' for 1793. In Kearsley's advertisement great pains are taken 140 to avert the possible charge of catchpenny haste, by the statement that the book had been drawn up for some time, but had been withheld from motives of delicacy. This anticipatory defence, however, Sylvanus Urban promptly demolished, in the above-mentioned notice, by adducing several palpable examples of 'hurry.' The sketch professes, nevertheless, to be 'warm from the life,' and, although speedily superseded by more leisurely efforts, is certainly not without interest as the earliest of its kind, even if it be not quite so early as it has hitherto been affirmed to be.

Cook's so-called Life was followed by articles in the 'European' and the 'Gentleman's Magazines' for December, 1784, which, according to the fashion of those days, appeared at the end and not at the beginning of the month. That in the 'European Magazine,' which was more critical than biographical, was continued through several numbers, and contains nothing to distinguish it from the respectable and laborious journey-work of the period. The memoir in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' is of a far more meritorious character, and was from the pen of Tom Tyers, the 'Tom Restless' of the 'Idler,' and the son of Jonathan, 'the founder of that excellent place of publick amusement, Vauxhall Gardens.' Tom Tyers 141 had really known Johnson with a certain degree of intimacy, and even Boswell is obliged to admit that Tyers lived with his illustrious friend 'in as easy a manner as almost any of his very numerous acquaintance.' He has certainly not caught Johnson's style, as his memories are couched in abrupt shorthand sentences which are the reverse of Johnsonese. But apart from a certain vanity of classical quotation, with which he seems to have been twitted by his contemporaries, 'Tom Restless' writes like a gentleman, and is fully entitled to the praise of having produced the first animated study of Johnson, who, from a sentence towards the close, appears to have anticipated that Tyers might be one day 'called upon to assist a posthumous account of him.' Mr. Napier says that Tyers continued his work in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for January, 1785. This is not exact, and is indeed practically contradicted by Mrs. Napier, since in the valuable volume of 'Johnsoniana' which accompanies her husband's edition, she prints no more than is to be found in the December number. What Tyers really did was to insert a number of minor corrections and additions in the annual supplement to the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1784, and in the number for February, 1785. 142

Without a close examination of contemporary advertisement sheets it would be difficult to fix precisely the date of publication of the next biography. It is a small octavo of 197 pages, entitled 'Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson; containing many valuable Original Letters, and several Interesting Anecdotes both of his Literary and Social Connections: the Whole authenticated by living Evidence.' The title-page is dated 1785. In the Preface mention is made of assistance rendered by Thomas Davies, the actor-bookseller of 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden, who is described as 'the late.' The book must therefore have appeared after Thursday, May 5, when Davies died. Its author is conjectured to have been the Rev. William Shaw, 'a modest and a decent man,' referred to in Boswell as the compiler of 'an Erse Grammar,' subsequently issued in 1778 as 'An Analysis of the Gaelic Language.' Colour is given to this supposition by the fact that another of the persons who supplied information was Mr. James Elphinston, by whom Shaw was introduced to Johnson, and by the references made to the Ossian controversy, in which Shaw did battle on Johnson's side against Macpherson. For the book itself, it is, like most of the pre-Boswellian efforts, Tyers's 143 sketch excepted, mainly critical, and makes no attempt to reproduce Johnson's talk or opinions, though it published, for the first time, two or three of his letters.

Chit-chat and personal characteristics are, however, somewhat more fully represented in what--neglecting for the moment Boswell's 'Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides'--may be regarded as the next effort in the biographical sequence, the famous 'Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of his Life,' by Hesther Lynch Piozzi, which was published in March, 1786. Written in Italy, where she was then living, it was printed in London. Its success, as might perhaps have been anticipated from the author's long connection with Johnson, was exceptional. The first edition, like that of Fielding's 'Amelia,' was exhausted on the day of publication, and other editions followed rapidly. Boswell, as may be guessed, was not well disposed towards the work of his fortunate rival, and in his own book is at considerable pains to expose her 'mistaken notion of Dr. Johnson's character,' while his coadjutor, Malone, who tells us that she made £500 by the 'Anecdotes,' plainly calls her both 'inaccurate and artful.' We, who are neither editors nor biographers of Boswell, need 144 not assume so censorious an attitude. That Mrs. Piozzi, by habit of mind, and from the circumstances under which her narrative was compiled, was negligent in her facts (she even blunders as to the date when she first met Johnson) may be admitted; and it is not inconceivable that, as Mrs. Napier says in the 'Prefatory Notice' to her 'Johnsoniana,' her account would have been 'more tender and true if it had been given by Mrs. Thrale instead of Mrs. Piozzi.' But the cumulative effect of her vivacious and disconnected recollections (even Malone admits them to be 'lively') is rather corroborative of, than at variance with, that produced by Johnson's more serious biographers. Her opportunities were great,--perhaps greater than those of any of her contemporaries,--her intercourse with Johnson was most unrestrained and unconventional, and notwithstanding all its faults, her little volume remains an essential part of Johnsonian literature.

Boswell, whose magnum opus we are now approaching, so fills the foreground with his fame that the partial obliteration of his predecessors is almost a necessary consequence. In this way Sir John Hawkins, whose 'Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,' 1787, comes next in importance to Mrs. Piozzi's 'Anecdotes,' has 145 suffered considerably; and his book, which immediately after Johnson's death was advertised as 'forthcoming,' is, to use the words of a recent writer, 'spoken of with contempt by many who have never taken the trouble to do more than turn over its leaves.' That the author seems to have been extremely unpopular can scarcely be denied. Malone, who accumulates a page of his characteristics, says that Percy called him 'most detestable,' Reynolds, 'absolutely dishonest,' and Dyer, 'mischievous, uncharitable, and malignant,' to which chaplet of dispraise the recorder adds, as his own contribution, that he was 'rigid and sanctimonious.' Johnson, too, styled him 'an unclubable man.' But against all this censure it must be remembered that he was selected as one of the first members of 'The Club' (to whose promoters his peculiarities can scarcely have been unknown, for he had belonged to the earlier association in Ivy Lane), and that Johnson appointed him one of his executors. Boswell, whose vanity Hawkins had wounded by the slight and supercilious way in which he spoke of him in the 'Life,' could scarcely be supposed to feel kindly to him; and though he professes to have modified what he said of this particular rival on account of his death, we have no means of 146 knowing how much he suppressed. He gives, nevertheless, what on the whole is a not unfair idea of Hawkins's volume. 'However inadequate and improper,' he says, 'as a Life of Dr. Johnson, and however discredited by unpardonable inaccuracies in other respects, [it] contains a collection of curious anecdotes and observations which few men but its authour could have brought together.' What is commendatory in this verdict is not exaggerated, and those who care enough for Johnson to travel beyond Boswell will certainly find Hawkins by no means so 'ponderous' as Boswell would have us to believe. Many of the particulars he gives are certainly not to be found elsewhere, and his knowledge of the seamy side of letters in Georgian London was 'extensive and peculiar.'

To speak of Hawkins after Mrs. Piozzi is a course more convenient than chronological, as it involves the neglect of an intermediate biographer. But the 'Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson,' from the pen of the Rev. Joseph Towers, which comes between them in 1786, has no serious import. It treats more of the writings than the character and life, and, except as the respectable effort of an educated man, need not detain us from Boswell 147 himself, whose first offering at the shrine of his adoration was made in September, 1785, when he published the 'Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.' The tour, of which Johnson had himself given an account in his 'Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,' had taken place as far back as 1773, and Boswell's journal had lain by him ever since. But the manuscript had been lent to different persons,--to Mrs. Thrale among the rest. 'I am glad you read Boswell's journal,' said Johnson to her; 'you are now sufficiently informed of the whole transaction, and need not regret that you did not make the tour to the Hebrides.' A more emphatic testimony is contained in the 'Journal' itself. Johnson, we are told, perused it diligently from day to day, and declared that he took great delight in doing so. 'It might be printed,' he said, 'were the subject fit for printing,' and further on he forbade Boswell to contract it. In his dedication to Malone, whose acquaintance he made in Baldwin's printing-office while correcting the proofs, Boswell showed that he was conscious of the strong point of his work, 'the numerous conversations, which (he said) form the most valuable part.' In the third edition, dated August, 1786, the success of the book 148 justified an ampler note of gratification: 'I will venture to predict, that this specimen of the colloquial talents and extemporaneous effusions of my illustrious fellow-traveller will become still more valuable, when, by the lapse of time, he shall have become an Ancient; when all those who can now bear testimony to the transcendent powers of his mind shall have passed away; and no other memorial of this great and good man shall remain but the following Journal, the other anecdotes and letters preserved by his friends, and those incomparable works, which have for many years been in the highest estimation, and will be read and admired as long as the English language shall be spoken or understood.' Whether this variation of Exegi monumentum is justifiable or not--and certainly some of the 'incomparable works,' have but faintly fulfilled their promise of diuturnity--Boswell's accentuation of his distinctive excellence, his admirably characteristic records of conversations, is unanswerable evidence of a settled purpose and a definite aim.

On a fly-leaf of the 'Tour to the Hebrides' (not as Mr. Napier supposed, confined to the third edition) was announced as 'preparing for the press' the greater work by which the 'Tour' was succeeded in 1791. At first it was to have 149 been comprised in one quarto volume, but it ultimately made its appearance in two. The publisher was Charles Dilly, in the Poultry, and the title-page ran as follows:--

'The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., comprehending an Account of his Studies and numerous Works, in chronological Order; a Series of his Epistolary Correspondence and Conversations with many eminent Persons; and various original Pieces of his Composition, never before published. The whole exhibiting a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great-Britain, for near half a Century, during which he flourished.'

In the dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, referring to the earlier book, Boswell dwells upon a difference of treatment which distinguishes the 'Life' from its predecessor. In the 'Tour' he had, it seems, been too open in his communications, freely exhibiting to the world the dexterity of Johnson's wit, even when that wit was exercised upon himself. His frankness had in some quarters been mistaken for insensibility, and he has therefore in the 'Life' been 'more reserved,' and though he tells nothing but the truth, has still kept in his mind that the whole truth is not always to be exposed. In the 150 Advertisement which succeeds, he enlarges upon the difficulties of his task, and the labour involved in the arrangement and collection of material; and he expresses his obligations to Malone, who had heard nearly all the work in manuscript, and had revised about half of it in type. Seventeen hundred copies of it were printed, and although the price in boards was two guineas, between May (the date of publication) and August twelve hundred of these had been sold. Boswell, who gives this information to his friend Temple, in a letter dated the 22nd of the latter month, expected that the entire impression would be disposed of before Christmas.

This hope, however, does not appear to have been realized, since the second edition in three volumes octavo, considerably revised, and including 'eight sheets of additional matter,' was not published until July, 1793. During the progress of the work through the press many additional letters and anecdotes had come to hand, which were inserted in an introduction and appendix. These numerous improvements were at the same time printed in quarto form for the benefit of the purchasers of the issue of 1791, and sold at half-a-crown, under the title of 'The Principal Corrections and Additions to the First 151 Edition of Mr. Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson.' As in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' the success of his labours inspired their author with a greater exultation of prefatory language. Referring to the death of Reynolds, which had taken place in the interval between the first and second editions, he says that Sir Joshua had read the book, and given 'the strongest testimony to its fidelity.' He has Johnsonised the land, he says farther on, and he trusts 'they will not only talk but think Johnson.'

He was still busily amending and retouching for a third edition when he died, on May 19, 1795, at his house, then No. 47, but now (or recently) No. 122, Great Portland Street. His task was taken up by Malone, who had been his adviser from the first, and under Malone's superintendence was issued, 'revised and augmented,' the third edition of 1799. From the fact that it contains Boswell's latest touches, this edition is held to be the most desirable by Johnson students. Boswell's friends contributed several notes, some of which were the work of the author's second son, James, then a student at Brasenose College, Oxford. Fourth, fifth, and sixth editions followed, all under the editorship of Malone. Then, shortly after the publication in 1811 of the last 152 of these, Malone himself died. Seventh, eighth, and ninth editions, all avowedly or unavowedly reproducing Malone's last issue, subsequently appeared, the ninth having some additions by Alexander Chalmers. Then came what is known as the 'Oxford' edition, by F. P. Walesby, of Wadham College, which contained some fresh recollections of Johnson and some stray particulars as to Boswell, whose portrait, for the first time, is added. A tiny issue in one volume, small octavo, beautifully printed in double columns at the Chiswick Press, is the only one that needs mention previous to the historical edition by the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, published in 1831.

As will be seen, the foregoing paragraphs deal more with Johnson's earlier biographers than with the main subject of this paper, Boswell's editors. But the earlier biographers are, if not the chief, at least no inconsiderable part of the material employed by those editors, and by none more conspicuously, more ably, and at the same time more unhappily, than by the one whose labours attracted the censure of Macaulay and Carlyle. What is most distinctive in Boswell is Boswell's method and Boswell's manner. Long before, Johnson had touched upon this 153 personal quality when writing of the Corsican tour. 'Your History,' he said, 'is like other histories, but your Journal is in a very high degree curious and delightful.... Your History was copied from books; your Journal rose out of your own experience and observation. You express images which operated strongly upon yourself, and you have impressed them with great force upon your readers.' From less friendly critics the verdict was the same. Walpole, though caustic and flippant, speaks to like purport; and Gray, who has been 'pleased and moved strangely,' declares it proves what he has always maintained, 'that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.' This faculty of communicating his impressions accurately to his reader is Boswell's most conspicuous gift. Present in his first book, it was more present in his second, and when he began his great biography it had reached its highest point. So individual is his manner, so unique his method of collecting and arranging his information, that to disturb the native character of his narrative by interpolating foreign material, must of necessity impair its specific character and imperil its personal note. Yet, by 154 some strange freak of fate, this was just the very treatment to which it was subjected.

From the very outset indeed, it would seem, his text was considerably 'edited.' Boswell, like many writers of his temperament, was fond of stimulating his flagging invention by miscellaneous advice, and it is plain from the comparison of his finished work with his rough notes, that in order to make his anecdotes more direct and effective he freely manipulated his reminiscences. But it is quite probable--and this is a point that we do not remember to have seen touched on--that much of the trimming which his records received is attributable to Malone. At all events, when Malone took up the editing after Boswell's death, he is known to have made many minor alterations in the process of 'settling the text,' and it is only reasonable to suppose that he had done the same thing in the author's lifetime, a supposition which would account for some at least of the variations which have been observed between Boswell's anecdotes in their earliest and their latest forms. But the admitted alterations of Malone were but trifles compared with the extraordinary readjustment which the book, as Malone left it, received at the hands of Mr. Croker. Not content 155 with working freely upon the text itself--compressing, omitting, transposing, as seemed good in his eyes--by a process almost inconceivable in a critic and littérateur of admitted experience, he liberally interlarded it with long extracts and letters from Hawkins, Piozzi, Cumberland, Murphy, and others of Boswell's predecessors and successors, and so turned into an irregular patchwork what the author had left a continuous and methodical design. Furthermore he incorporated with it, among other things, under its date of occurrence, the separate volume of the 'Tour to the Hebrides,'^[33] having first polled and trimmed that work according to his taste and fancy. Finally, he added--and this is the least questionable of his acts--an inordinate number of foot-notes. Many of these, it must be conceded, are of the highest value. Penned at a time when memories of Johnson 156 and his contemporaries were still fresh in men's minds, and collected by a writer whose industry and curiosity were as exceptional as his equipment and opportunities, they must always remain an inestimable magazine of Johnsoniana. Their worst fault is that they are more a warehouse than a treasury, and that they exhibit less of literary resource than literary incontinence.

But if the intrinsic and inherent worth of Croker's voluminous annotations has survived the verbal artillery of Macaulay and Carlyle, it has luckily been otherwise with his remodelling of Boswell's text, the principles of which were virtually abandoned in the second edition of 1835. Unfortunately, the execution of this concession to popular opinion was only partial. Although the majority of the passages added to the text were rearranged as foot-notes or distributed into appendices, the Scotch 'Tour' still upreared itself in the midst as a huge stumbling-block, while the journey to Wales and the letters of Johnson and Mrs. Thrale were retained. In 1847, when Mr. Croker prepared his definite edition, he continued impenitent to this extent, although he speaks in his 'Advertisement' of abridgment and alteration. Nay, he even acquiesced in the perpetuation of another enormity 157 which dates from the edition of 1835 (an edition which he only partly superintended), the breaking up of the book into chapters. This was a violation of Boswell's plan which it is impossible to describe except as an act of Vandalism. 'Divisions into books and chapters,' says Mr. Napier, unanswerably (if somewhat grandiloquently), 'if they have any meaning, are, as it were, articulations in the organic whole of a literary composition; and this special form cannot be superinduced merely externally.' Yet, all these drawbacks to the contrary, Mr. Croker's edition enjoyed a long popularity, and the edition just referred to was reprinted as late as 1876.

It would be beyond our province to trace the post-Crokerian issues of Boswell's book, which, with the exception of an illustrated edition under the superintendence of Dr. Robert Carruthers, author of the life of Pope, were mainly reprints of Malone. But from what has gone before, it will be surmised that the presentation, as far as practicable, of Boswell's unsophisticated text must sooner or later become the ambition of the modern editor. In this praiseworthy enterprise the pioneer appears to have been Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. In May, 1874, acting with the encouragement and countenance of Carlyle, to whom his work 158 was dedicated, he published with Messrs. Bickers an edition of Boswell's 'Life' in three volumes, of which the object was to exhibit Boswell's text in its first published form, and at the same time to show the alterations made or contemplated by him in the two subsequent editions with which he was concerned. Thus the reader was enabled to follow the process of revision in the author's mind, and to derive additional satisfaction from the spectacle of the naïf and highly ingenuous motives which prompted many of Boswell's rectifications and re-adjustments. As was inevitable in such a plan, the 'Tour to the Hebrides' was placed by itself at the end, an arrangement which had also been followed by Carruthers; the 'Diary of a Tour in Wales,' which Mr. Croker had turned into chap. xlvi. of his compilation, disappeared altogether; and the interpolated letters knew their place no more. The division into chapters also vanished with the restoration of the original text, which, together with Boswell's spelling, punctuation, paragraphs, and other special characteristics, were religiously preserved. By this arrangement, taken in connection with the foot-notes exhibiting the variations, the reader was placed in the position of a person having before him at one view the editions of 1791, 159 1793, and 1799, as well as the separate 'Corrections and Additions' issued by Boswell in 1793. Mr. Fitzgerald also appended certain notes of his own; but, wherever they occurred on the same page as Boswell's work, carefully fenced them off by a line of demarcation from what was legitimate Boswell. Upon these notes, generally brief and apposite, it is not necessary to dwell. The noticeable characteristic of Mr. Fitzgerald's edition is its loyalty to Boswell, and for that, if for that only, the lovers of Johnson owe him a deep debt of gratitude.^[34]

In 1880, six years after the first appearance of the above edition of Boswell's 'Life,' Mr. Fitzgerald published, under the title of 'Croker's Boswell and Boswell,' a volume which was apparently the outcome of his earlier labours in this field. With the first part of this, which treats mainly of the feud between Macaulay and Croker, and the peculiarities and defects of the latter as an editor, we have no immediate concern. But the second part, which exhibits Boswell at his work, collects much valuable information with 160 respect to his method of note-making, and, with the assistance of the curious memoranda belonging to the late Lord Houghton, published in 1874 by the Grampian Club under the title of 'Boswelliana,' shows how much judicious correction and adroit compression went to produce these 'literary and characteristical anecdotes ... told with authenticity, and in a lively manner,' which, as Boswell explained to his friend Temple, were to form the staple of his work. Other chapters of equal interest deal with Boswell's strange antipathies and second thoughts, both of which themes, and the former especially, are of no small importance to the minute student of his labours. We have mentioned this book of Mr. Fitzgerald's, because, among the many productions of his indefatigable pen, it is the one which has always interested us most, and it is obviously, as he declares in his preface, written con amore.

That the reproduction of Boswell neat--to use a convenient vulgarism--had attracted closer attention to the defects of Croker's concoction may be fairly assumed, and the volume just mentioned probably, and certainly among specialists, enforced this impression. Accordingly, in 1884, a new edition of the 'Life,' upon which the editor, the late Rev. Alexander Napier, vicar of Holkham, 161 had been engaged for several years, was issued by Messrs. George Bell and Sons. It was illustrated by facsimiles, steel engravings and portraits, and was received with considerable, and even, in some quarters, exaggerated, enthusiasm. In this edition the arrangement of Boswell's text was strictly followed, and the tours in Wales and Scotland were printed separately. Many of Croker's notes were withdrawn or abridged, and Mr. Napier, in pursuance of a theory, which is as sound as it is unusual, also omitted all those in which his predecessor had considered it his duty 'to act as censor on Boswell' and even on Johnson himself. The editor's duty, said Mr. Napier, 'is to subordinate himself to his author, and admit that only which elucidates his author's meaning.... It cannot be the duty of an editor to insult the writer whose book he edits. I confess that the notes of Mr. Croker which most offend are those in which, not seldom, he delights--let me be allowed to use a familiar colloquialism--to snub "Mr. Boswell."' In this deliverance no reasonable reader can fail to concur. Besides the editing of Croker, however, Mr. Napier added many useful notes of his own, as well as some very interesting appendices. One of these reproduces the autobiographical sketch of Johnson prefixed 162 by Richard Wright of Lichfield, in 1805, to Miss Hill Boothby's letters; another deals with that mysterious 'History of Prince Titi' which figures in Macaulay's review of Croker's first edition; a third successfully dissipates the legendary account of a meeting between Ursa Major and Adam Smith, which represents those 'grave and reverend seignors' as engaged in competitive Billingsgate. 'Carleton's Memoirs,' Theophilus Cibber's 'Lives of the Poets,' and the daughters of Mauritius Lowe are also treated of in this, the newest part of Mr. Napier's labours.

But his edition also includes a valuable supplement in the shape of a volume of 'Johnsoniana,' collected and edited by Mrs. Napier, whose praiseworthy plan is to avoid merely fragmentary 'sayings' and 'anecdotes,' and, as far as possible, to give only complete articles. Thus Mrs. Napier opens with Mrs. Piozzi's book, and then goes on to reprint Hawkins's collection of apophthegms, the Hill Boothby correspondence, Tom Tyers' sketch from the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' the essay published by Arthur Murphy in 1792 for his edition of Johnson's works, and various recollections and so forth collected from Reynolds, Cumberland, Madame D'Arblay, Hannah More, Percy, and others. But her freshest trouvaille is 163 the diary of a certain Dr. Thomas Campbell, an Irishman who visited England in 1775, and, after the fashion of the time, recorded his impressions. This diary has a curious history. Carried to Australia by some of its writer's descendants, it was peaceably travelling towards dissolution when it was unearthed behind an old press in one of the offices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. In 1854 it was published at Sydney by Mr. Samuel Raymond, and from that date until 1884 does not seem to have been reprinted in England. Dr. Campbell had some repute as an historian, and it was he who prepared for Percy the memoir of Goldsmith which, in 1837, was in the possession of Mr. Prior, and formed the first sketch for the straggling compilation afterwards prefixed to the well-known edition of Goldsmith's works dated 1801. Campbell's avowed object in coming to London was to 'see the lions,' and his notes are sufficiently amusing. He lodged at the Grecian Coffee House, and at the Hummums in Covent Garden, where once appeared the ghost of Johnson's dissolute relative, Parson Ford; he saw Woodward in Benjamin Hoadly's 'Suspicious Husband,' and Garrick as Lusignan and Lear, in which latter character Dr. Campbell, contradicting all received tradition, 164 considered 'he could not display himself.' He went to the auction-rooms in the Piazza; he went to the Foundling and the Temple and Dr. Dodd's Chapel; he went to Ranelagh and the Pantheon, where he watched those lapsed lovers, Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, carefully avoiding each other. He dined often at Thrale's, meeting Boswell and Baretti, and Murphy and Johnson. With the great man he was not impressed, and his portrait affords an example of Johnson as he struck an unsympathetic contemporary. According to Dr. Campbell this was his picture:--'He has the aspect of an Idiot, without the faintest ray of sense gleaming from any one feature--with the most awkward garb, and unpowdered grey wig, on one side only of his head--he is for ever dancing the devil's jig, and sometimes he makes the most driveling effort to whistle some thought in his absent paroxisms. He came up to me and took me by the hand, then sat down upon the sofa, and mumbled out that "he had heard two papers had appeared against him in the course of this week--one of which was--that he was to go to Ireland next summer in order to abuse the hospitality of that place also [a reference to the recently published 'Journey to the Western Islands']." His awkwardness 165 at table is just what Chesterfield described, and his roughness of manners kept pace with that. When Mrs. Thrale quoted something from Foster's "Sermons" he flew in a passion, and said that Foster was a man of mean ability, and of no original thinking. All which tho' I took to be most true, yet I held it not meet to have it so set down.' From this it will be perceived that Dr. Campbell was of those who identified the 'respectable Hottentot' of Chesterfield's letters with the 'great Lexicographer,' an identification which Dr. Birkbeck Hill, in 'Dr. Johnson His Friends and His Critics,' and subsequent writings, has successfully shown to be untenable.

Towards the close of 1884 Mr. Napier's edition was re-issued in the 'Standard Library,' making six small volumes, in which some only of the portrait illustrations of the first issue were reproduced. The chief addition consisted of a series of seven letters from Boswell to his friend Sir David Dalrymple. Extracts from this very interesting correspondence, bearing upon Boswell's first acquaintance with his Mentor, had appeared in the volume of 'Boswelliana' already mentioned, but they had been extracts and no more. Mr. Napier gave the letters in extenso. Two years 166 later the late Professor Henry Morley published, in five exceedingly handsome volumes, what, from the fact of its decoration by portraits from the brush of Sir Joshua, he christened the 'Reynolds' edition. In common with all Professor Morley's work, the editing of this issue was thoroughly straightforward and sensible. A new and noticeable feature was the prefixing to each of the prefaces of the different editors a succinct account of the writer. At the end came an essay entitled the 'Spirit of Johnson,' to which can scarcely be denied the merit claimed for it by a competent critic of being 'one of the best descriptions of Johnson's character that has ever been written.' There were also elaborate indices, of which one can only say in their dispraise that they were less elaborate than that prepared by the editor who follows Professor Morley. Like Mr. Napier, Mr. Morley was largely indebted to Croker; like Mr. Napier also he freely pruned his predecessor's luxuriance. And this brings us to the last of the three editions mentioned at the beginning of this paper, that issued in 1887 from the Clarendon Press by Dr. George Birkbeck Hill.

That Dr. Birkbeck Hill's book is 'un livre de bonne foi,' there can indeed be little doubt. He is well known as a devoted worshipper at Johnson's 167 shrine. He has been for years a persistent reviewer of books on this subject, and his essays (collected in 1878 from the 'Cornhill' and other periodicals under the title of 'Dr. Johnson His Friends and His Critics'), bear that unmistakable stamp which denotes the writer who has not crammed his subject for the purpose of preparing an article, but who has, so to speak, let the article write itself out of the fulness of his resources. Besides these he edited, in 1879, Boswell's 'Journal of a Tour to Corsica' and his correspondence with Andrew Erskine. But he has crowned his former labours by this sumptuous edition with its excellent typography, its handsome page, and its exhaustive index, which last, we can well believe, must have cost him, as he says, 'many months' heavy work.' That he himself executed this 'sublunary task,' as a recent writer has described it, is matter for congratulation; that he has also verified it page by page in proof almost entitles him to a Montyon prize for exceptional literary virtue. Our only regret is that his 'Preface' is touched a little too strongly with the sense of his unquestioned industry and conscientiousness. However legitimate it may be, the public is always somewhat impatient of the superbia quæsita meritis. Moreover, it is an extremely 168 difficult thing to display judiciously; and, after all, as Carlyle said of Croker's attempt, the editing of Boswell is 'a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure.'

This note of self-gratulation in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's introductory words is, nevertheless, but a trifling drawback when contrasted with the real merits of a performance which, in these days of piping-hot publication, has much of the leisurely grace of eighteenth-century scholarship. The labour--not only the labour of which the result remains on record, but that bloomless and fruitless labour with which everyone who has been engaged in editorial drudgery can sympathize--must have been unprecedented. Nothing could be more ungracious than to smear the petty blot of an occasional inaccuracy across the wide field which has been explored so observantly--certainly it could not be the desire of those who have ever experienced the multiplied chances of error involved by transcription, press-correction, revision, and re-revision. At the same time we frankly own that we think Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition has not escaped a dangerous defect of its qualities. It unquestionably errs on the side of excess. 'I have sought,' he says, 'to follow him [Johnson] wherever a remark of his required 169 illustration, and have read through many a book that I might trace to its source a reference or an allusion.' And he has no doubt been frequently very fortunate, notably in his identification of the quotation which Johnson made when he heard the Highland girl of Nairne singing at her spinning-wheel, in his solution of 'loplolly,' and in half a dozen similar cases. But, as regards 'remarks that require illustration,' there are manifestly two methods, the moderate and the immoderate. By the one nothing but such reference or elucidation as explains the text is admissible; by the other anything that can possibly be connected with it is drawn into its train, and the motley notes tread upon each other's heels much as, in the fairy tale, the three girls, the parson, and the sexton follow the fellow with the golden goose. To the latter of these methods rather than the former Dr. Birkbeck Hill 'seriously inclines,' and almost any portion of his book would serve to supply a case in point. Take, for instance, the note at page 269, vol. i., to the verse which Boswell quotes from Garrick's well-known 'Ode on Mr. Pelham.' Neither Malone nor Croker has anything upon this, and as Boswell himself tells us that Pelham died on the day on which Mallet's 170 edition of Lord Bolingbroke's works came out, and as the first line of his paragraph gives the exact date of the event, it is difficult to see what ground, and certainly what pressing need, there could be for farther comment. Yet Dr. Birkbeck Hill has no less than four 'illustrations.' First he tells us, from Walpole's letters, that Pelham died of a surfeit. This suggests another quotation from Johnson himself about the death of Pope, which introduces the story of the potted lampreys. Then comes a passage from Fielding's 'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,' to the effect that he (Fielding) was at his worst when Pelham died. Lastly comes a second quotation from Walpole, this time from his 'George II.,' in which we are told that the king said he should now 'have no more peace,' because Pelham was dead. The recondite erudition of all this is incontestable, but its utility is more than doubtful. Dr. Birkbeck Hill's method is seen more serviceably at work in a note on Reynolds's visit to Devonshire in 1762. First we get a record how Northcote, 'with great satisfaction to his mind,' touched the skirt of Sir Joshua's coat, and this quite naturally recalls the well-known anecdote how Reynolds himself in his youth had grasped the hand of the great Mr. Pope at 171 Christie's. The transition to Pope's own visit as a boy of twelve to Dryden at Will's Coffee House thus becomes an easy one. 'Who touched old Northcote's hand?' says Dr. Birkbeck Hill. 'Has the apostolic succession been continued?' and then he goes on to add: 'Since writing these lines I have read with pleasure the following passage in Mr. Ruskin's 'Præterita,' chap. i. p. 16: 'When at three-and-a-half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet.' Dryden, Pope, Reynolds, Northcote, Ruskin, so runs the chain of genius, with only one weak link in it.'

This is an excellent specimen of the concatenated process at the best. We are bound to add that there are many as good. We are moreover bound to admit that the examples of its abuse are by no means obtrusive. Dr. Birkbeck Hill, in short, has done his work thoroughly. His appendices--e.g. those on Johnson's Debates in Parliament, and on George Psalmanazar--are practically exhaustive, and he has left no stone unturned in his labour of interpretation. If in the result of that labour there is something of what Croker himself called 'surplusage,' it 172 must also be conceded that Boswell's famous biography has never before been annotated with equal enthusiasm, learning, and industry.^[35]

It is a curious fact--and, if it has not been already recorded, must assuredly have been remarked--that Fate seems always to provide the eminent painter with his special and particular interpreter on steel or copper. Thus, around Reynolds are the great mezzotinters, M^cArdell, Fisher, Watson, Valentine Green. Gainsborough has his nephew Gainsborough Dupont; Constable his Lucas. For Wilson there is Woollett; for Stothard there are Heath and Finden. To come to later days, there is Turner with his Willmores and Goodalls, and Landseer with his brother and (no pun intended) his Cousens. Similarly, for Wilkie (after Burnet), the born translator into dot and line seems to have been Raimbach. It was Raimbach who engraved 'The Rent Day,' 'Blind Man's Buff,' 'The Village Politicians,' and the majority of Sir David's chief works, and it is of Raimbach that we now propose to speak. Concerning his efforts as a craftsman, these pages could scarcely be 174 expected to treat; and his life, the life of a man occupied continuously in a sedentary pursuit, and residing, like Stothard, almost entirely in one place, affords but little incident to invite the chronicler of the picturesque. But he nevertheless left behind him a privately-printed memoir, of which a portion at least is not without its interest,--the interest attaching to every truthful record of occurrences which time has pushed backward into that perspective which transforms the trivial. In 1802 he went to Paris for a couple of months. The visits of foreigners to England have not been unattractive; and the visit of an Englishman to France, shortly after the Revolution, may also--with a few preliminary words as to the tourist--supply its memorabilia.

Abraham Raimbach was born on February 16, 1776, in Cecil Court, St. Martin's Lane. His father was a naturalized Swiss; his mother a Warwickshire woman, who claimed descent from Richard Burbage, the actor of Shakespeare's day. His childhood was uneventful, save for two incidents. One of these was his falling, as a baby, out of a second-floor window, when he was miraculously 'ballooned' by his long-clothes; the other, his being roused as a little boy of four by the roar of the Gordon rioters as they rushed 175 through the streets, calling to the sleeping inhabitants to light up their windows. After a modest education, chiefly at the Library School of St. Martin's--where Charles Mathews the Elder was his schoolfellow, and Liston afterwards held a post as master--he was formally apprenticed to Ravenet's pupil, John Hall, historical engraver to George the Third, and popularly regarded as the legitimate successor of Woollett. Hall was a man of more than ordinary cultivation, one of whose daughters had married the composer Stephen Storace,--the Storace who wrote the music to Colman's 'Iron Chest,' and (as Raimbach recollected) superintended the rehearsals thereof from a sedan-chair, in which, arrayed in flannels, he was carried on to the stage. Hall in his day had been introduced to Garrick; and he was sometimes visited by John Kemble, who impressed the young apprentice with his solemn and sepulchral enunciation, and his manifest inability to forget, even in private life, that he was not before the footlights. Another remembered visitor was Sheridan, nervously solicitous lest Hall, who was engraving his portrait, should needlessly emphasize that facial 'efflorescence'--so familiar in Gillray's caricatures--which the too-truthful Sir Joshua had neglected to disguise. 176

Sheridan, however, could only have appeared occasionally in the altitudes of Hall's study. But the three flights which ascended to it were often climbed by other contemporaries. Benjamin West (whose 'Cromwell dissolving the Long Parliament' Hall engraved), Opie and Northcote, Flaxman and Westall, all came frequently on business and pleasure, while the eclectic arts were represented by George Steevens (the Shakespeare critic), John Ireland (the Hogarth commentator), and Dibdin's 'Quisquilius,' George Baker, the print-collector and laceman of St. Paul's Churchyard. These, with Storace and his theatrical circle, must have made variety enough in a wearisome craft (for Hall's larger plates were many months in hand), and their conversation and opinions no doubt conspired to fill the young apprentice with a life-long interest in art and the stage. When at length, in August, 1796, his period of servitude came to an end, the professional outlook was by no means a cheerful one. The French Revolution was engrossing all men's thoughts, and the peaceful arts--that ars longa of the engraver in particular--were at their lowest ebb, the only patrons of prints being the booksellers. Young Raimbach's first definite employment was on Cooke's 'Tales of the Genii,' a task 177 which, it may be added, was even more precarious than usual, inasmuch as it was Cooke's custom, by prearrangement, not to pay for the work if he did not approve it when finished. Fortunately, in this instance he did approve, and Raimbach continued from time to time to reproduce for him in copper the designs for books of Thurston, the elder Corbould, and Madame D'Arblay's clever cousin, Edward Burney. He had long been an assiduous Royal Academy student, and he speedily 'doubled' his profession by miniature-painting, in which--'having,' as he modestly says, 'some facility of execution and the very common power [?] of making an inveterate likeness' (at three guineas a head)--he attained considerable success. Then, at the end of 1801, he procured a commission to execute three plates from Smirke's paintings for Forster's 'Arabian Nights.' He had for some time been lodging with a French modeller in Charles Street, and by this means had improved an already respectable acquaintance with the French language. With the proceeds of his three plates in his pocket, about £70, he set out in July, 1802, for a fortnight's visit to Paris.

The short-lived Peace of Amiens, patched up by the Addington ministry, had been signed in the preceding March, and the route to the Continent, 178 closed for ten or twelve years, was again open. The result was a rush across the Channel of all sorts and conditions of Englishmen, eager to note the changes resulting from the Revolution. Among these, the number of painters was considerable,--West, Turner, Flaxman, Shee, and Opie being all included. Securing a passport from the Secretary of State's office--a preliminary precaution which, in those days, meant an outlay of £2 5s.---Raimbach set out via Brighton and Dieppe. Competition, at this time, had reduced the coach fare to the former place to half a guinea inside. On July 9 he embarked for Dieppe in a little vessel, landing in France on the following day during a glorious sunrise, but drenched to the skin. His first impressions of the French were not unlike those of Hogarth fifty years before. The filth and slovenliness of the people, the number and shameless importunity of the beggars, the dragging of loaded carts and the bearing of heavy burdens by the weaker sex--all these, with the brusque revolutionary manners and the savage sans-culottism of the men, were things for which not even the long ear-pendants and picturesque Norman caps of the women could entirely atone. From Dieppe the traveller proceeded to Rouen in a ramshackle cabriolet, drawn by two ill-matched 179 but wiry horses which went better than they looked. At Rouen he arrived in time for a bread riot, promptly suppressed by the soldiery; and he inspected several churches, among others St. Maclou, being no doubt attracted thereto by the famous door-carvings of Jean Goujon. Then, on the impériale of a diligence, he made his way through the delightful landscape of Northern France, by Pontoise and St. Denis, 'cemetery of monarchs,' to Paris, which he reached on the evening of the 12th.

At Paris he took up his quarters in that 'dirtiest and noisiest of streets,' the Rue Montorgueil, where, twenty-two years before, Béranger had been born. Here he was keenly sensible of those exhalations in which the French capital competed with the 'Auld Reekie' of the eighteenth century, although, in this instance, they were blended and complicated with another odour, that of cookery. But, notwithstanding an abhorrence of 'evil smells' quite equal to that of Queen Elizabeth, he speedily became acclimatized, and pleasantly appreciative of the bright, cheerful, many-coloured life of the Parisian boulevards and the social attractions of the table d'hôte. In the capital, too, he found that the people were less brutal, short-spoken, and surly than in the provinces, and that 180 the Revolution, which had disfigured their palaces and monuments,^[36] had not wholly effaced their traditional politeness. On the second day after his arrival took place the annual fêtes of July in memory of the destruction of the Bastille. There were to be reviews and illuminations, fireworks on the Pont Neuf, dancing and mâts de cocagne in the Champs-Elysées and Place Vendôme, and free plays and concerts in the Tuileries gardens. But the weather was finer than the show. 'The fireworks on the bridge would not go off; the concert in the garden could not be heard, and the illuminations, though in good taste, were not sufficiently general to mark a decided national feeling.' It is consoling to our insular self-esteem that neither this celebration, nor that inaugurating Bonaparte as First Consul, which took place shortly afterwards, could be compared, in the opinion of this observer, with the Jubilee of George the Third, or the Coronation of George the Fourth, at both of which he subsequently assisted.

He was naturally anxious to get a glimpse of 181 the famous First Consul, but of this he had little hope, as Bonaparte seldom appeared in public except at a review or a theatre, and in the latter case always without previous announcement. After fruitless attempts to see the 'modern Attila' at the Opera and Théâtre Français, Raimbach was at length fortunate enough to effect his object at an inspection of the garrison of Paris in the Place du Carrousel, where he paid six francs for a seat at a first-floor window. After five-and-thirty years he still remembered vividly the small, thin, grave figure,--in the blue unornamented uniform, plain cocked hat, white pantaloons and jockey boots,--which, surrounded by a brilliant staff (among whom the Mameluke Roustan was conspicuous by his eastern costume), rode rapidly down the lines at a hand-canter,^[37] made a brief speech to the soldiers, saluted them with military formality, and then passed back under the archway of the Tuileries. Napoleon at this date was about thirty-two. Raimbach never saw him again, and beyond a casual inspection of the ladies of the Bonaparte family at Notre Dame, enjoyed no second opportunity of studying 182 the ruling race. But there were many things of compensating interest. At the Jardin des Plantes, for instance, there was an enormous female elephant, which had been transferred by right of conquest from the Stadtholder's collection at the Hague, and had brought its English keeper with it into captivity. Then there were the noble halls and galleries of the Louvre, crowded with the fruits of French victories ('les fruits de nos victoires!'), statues and pictures of all countries, and all exhibited free of charge to an exultant public. The Apollo Belvedere from the Vatican was already installed, and while Raimbach was still at Paris arrived the famous Venus de' Médici. Probably so splendid a 'loan collection' had never before been brought together.

It was this no doubt which attracted so many English artists to Paris, where French spoliation enabled them to study comparatively a pictorial collocation which nothing but the Grand Tour could otherwise have presented to them. Here, in all their splendour, were Rembrandt and Rubens, with the best of the Dutch and Flemish schools. Raphael's glorious 'Transfiguration;' the great rival altarpiece of Domenichino, the 'Communion of St. Jerome;' Correggio's 'Marriage of St. Catherine,'--all these, together with many of the 183 choicest specimens of the Carracci, of Guido, of Albano, of Guercino, were at this time to be seen in the long gallery of the Louvre, which Raimbach not only visited frequently, but drew in almost daily. In the magnificent Hall of Antiques, besides, he made the acquaintance of more than one contemporary French painter. Isabey, the miniaturist; Carle Vernet; his greater son, Horace, at this time a bright boy of thirteen or fourteen--were all then residing in apartments adjoining the galleries, and in some cases at Government expense. To the illustrious leader of the new Imperio-Classical School, which had succeeded with its wide-striding and brickdust-coloured nudities to the rosy mignardises of Fragonard and Boucher, Raimbach was not, however, introduced. M. Jacques Louis David, whose friendship with Robespierre had not only acquainted him with the interior of a prison, but had also brought him perilously close to the guillotine itself, was for the moment living in prudent seclusion, dividing his attentions between his palette and his violoncello. Meanwhile, a good example of his manner, 'The Sabines' (which Raimbach calls 'Rape of the Sabines'), executed immediately after his release from the Luxembourg, and popularly supposed to allude to the 184 heroic efforts which Madame David had made for her husband's safety, was at this time being exhibited to a public who were divided between enthusiasm for the subject and indignation at the door-money--door-money apparently having never before been charged for showing a picture. Of David's pupils and followers, Gérard, Girodet, Gros, Guérin, Ingres, and the rest, Raimbach also speaks, but, as in the case of the master himself, more from hearsay than personal experience. On the other hand, one of his own compatriots, Benjamin West, the favourite painter of George the Third,

was very much en évidence in public places. He had succeeded Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy, and the diplomatic French notabilities were doing their best to flatter him into the belief that Bonaparte was not only the greatest of men but of art collectors. Indeed, the First Consul himself favoured this idea by personally commending West's own 'Death on the Pale Horse,' the finished sketch of which he had brought with him from England to exhibit at the Salon. West, whose weakness was 'more than female vanity,' was by no means backward in 185 acknowledging these politic, if not perfidious, attentions, which he accepted without suspicion. 'Wherever I went,' he said simply,' people looked at me, and ministers and men of influence in the State were constantly in my company. I was one day in the Louvre--all eyes were upon me, and I could not help observing to Charles Fox, who happened to be walking with me, how strong was the love of Art and admiration of its professors in France.' Fox, whose reputation as an orator and a patriot had preceded him, was naturally the observed of all observers, and he was besides the object of special attentions on the part of Bonaparte.

Fox's chief mission to Paris, according to his biographer, Lord Russell, was to search the archives for his 'History of the Revolution of 1688.' But transcribing the correspondence of Barillon did not so exclusively occupy him as to divert him from the charms of the Théâtre Français, or, as it was at this time called, the 'Théâtre de la République.' Fox went frequently to see that new-risen queen of tragedy Mlle. Duchesnois, of whom it was said, 'qu'elle avait des larmes dans la voix.'^[38] He saw her in 'Andromaque' and 'Phèdre,' and as Roxane in 'Bajazet.' Raimbach 186 also, as might be anticipated from the schoolfellow of Charles Mathews and the admirer of Kemble, did not neglect the French theatres, which, he notes, were at this time more numerous than in all the other capitals of Europe put together. At the Grand Opéra, then rechristened 'Théâtre de la République et des Arts,' he heard the opera of 'Anacréon,' in which the principal male singer was François Lays, or Lais, and the foremost female that Mlle. Maillard to whom tradition assigned the part of the Goddess of Reason at the celebration of 1793, which celebration indeed, had been arranged by Lais with the prophet of the cult, Chaumette. Raimbach, however, thought little, as a vocalist, of the lady, then just succeeded to the place of her preceptress, the accomplished Mme. Saint-Huberty, who, as Countess d'Entraigues, was cruelly murdered with her husband at Barnes Terrace some few years later by an Italian valet.^[39] But he was charmed with the vocalization of Lais, and delighted with 187 the ballet, which included the elder Vestris ('Diou' de la danse) and Mme. Gardel. In particular the young engraver remembered an English hornpipe, executed in a jockey's dress by one Beaupré, which excelled anything of the kind he had ever seen in his own country. At the Théâtre Français,--possibly because his tastes lay rather in comedy than tragedy,--Raimbach says nothing of Racine and Mlle. Duchesnois. But he speaks of Monvel, the sole survivor of the old school of the Lekains and Prévilles and Barons, as still charming in spite of age and loss of teeth; and he also saw that practical joker and pet of the Parisians, Dugazon, who must have been almost as diminutive as Addison's 'little Dickey,' Henry Norris.^[40] But after Préville he was the prince of stage valets, and despite a tendency to exaggeration (which Raimbach duly 188 chronicles), almost perfect in his own line. Another stage luminary mentioned by Raimbach is Monvel's daughter, Mlle. Mars, at this time only three-and-twenty, and not yet displaying those supreme qualities which afterwards made her unrivalled in Europe. But she was already seductive as an ingenue; and her performance of Angélique in 'La Fausse Agnès' of Néricault Destouches (which Arthur Murphy afterwards borrowed for his farce of the 'Citizen'), is declared by Raimbach to have been 'replete with grace and good taste.' Finally, Raimbach saw the First Consul's tragedian, Talma, then in the height of his powers, and continuing successfully those reforms of costume and declamation which he was supposed to have learned in England. John Kemble, who was also visiting Paris, where he was hospitably entertained by the French actors, was now in his turn taking hints from Talma, since it was observable that when he got back to London he adopted Talma's costume for the Orestes of the 'Distressed Mother.'

The Italian Opera, of course, was not open, and of the remaining actors Raimbach says not very much. At the Vaudeville he saw Laporte, the leading harlequin of the day, and at Picart's Theatre in the Rue Feydeau witnessed what 189 must have been the 'Tom Jones à Londres' of M. Desforges, in which Picart himself, who was a better author than actor, took the part of the so-called 'Squire Westiern.' This representation, as might be expected, was amusing for its absurdities rather than its merits. But it can hardly have been more ridiculous to an Englishman than Poinsinet's earlier Comédie Lyrique, where Western and 'l'ami Jone' pursue the flying hart to the accompaniment of cors de chasse and the orthodox French hallali. Another (unconsciously) theatrical exhibition which Raimbach occasionally attended, was the Tribunat, one of the new Legislative bodies that at this time held its sittings in the Palais Royal, then, on that account, rechristened Palais du Tribunat. Here he met with the notorious Lewis Goldsmith, not, as afterwards, the inveterate assailant of Napoleon, but for the moment actively engaged in editing a paper called 'The Argus; or, London Reviewed in Paris,' which attacked the war and the English Government. At the Tribunat Goldsmith pointed out several of the minor men of the Revolution to Raimbach. But it was a colourless assembly, wholly in the power of the imperious First Consul, and its meetings had little instruction for a stranger. Goldsmith, however, was not 190 the sole compatriot Raimbach met in the Palais Royal. In the salons littéraires he came frequently in contact with Thomas Holcroft, of the 'Road to Ruin.' Holcroft had married a French wife, had a family, and was engaged in preparing those 'Travels in France,' which Sir Richard Phillips afterwards published. Holcroft was a friend of Opie (then also in Paris), who painted the portrait of him now at St. Martin's Place; but from Raimbach's account he must have been far more petulant and irritable than befitted the austere philosopher of his writings. Of another person whom Raimbach mentions he gives a rosier account than is given generally. At the Café Jacob in the Rue Jacob, an obscure cabaret in an obscure street, was frequently to be seen the once redoubtable Thomas Paine, then about sixty-five. Contemporaries represent him at this date as not only fallen upon evil days, but dirty in his habits and unduly addicted to spirits. That the general appearance of the author of the 'Rights of Man' was 'mean and poverty-stricken,' and that he was 'much withered and careworn,' Raimbach admits, and he moreover adds that he had 'sunk into complete insignificance, and was quite unnoticed by the Government.' But he also describes him as 'fluent in speech, of mild and gentle demeanour, 191 clear and distinct in enunciation,' and endowed with an 'exceedingly soft and agreeable voice'--words which, in this connection, somehow remind one of Lord Foppington's philosophic eulogy of Miss Hoyden. Certainly they scarcely suggest the seedy and dilapidated personage who drank brandy and 'declaimed upon Religion' in his cups, with whom modern records have acquainted us.^[41]

Raimbach's remaining experiences must be rapidly summarized. He attended the Palais de Justice, and was much impressed by the French forensic oratory. Concerning the oratory of the pulpit he is not equally enthusiastic, observing, indeed, that he should think the cause of religion derived little support from the eloquence of the clergy. But it must be remembered that at this period most of the priests were expatriated, and many of the churches were still used as warehouses and stables. One close by him in the Rue Montorgueil was, as a matter of fact, employed as a saddler's shop. He was much interested 192 in the now dispersed collection brought together in the Couvent des Petits-Augustins by M. Alexandre Lenoir, the artist and antiquary who decorated Malmaison for Josephine. This consisted of such monumental efforts as had escaped the fury of the Terror--escaping, it should be added, only miserably mutilated and defaced. Lenoir, who had received a severe bayonet wound in attempting to defend the tomb of Richelieu at the church of the Sorbonne, had admirably arranged these waifs and strays, and the collection of eighteenth-century sculpture was especially notable, as were also the specimens of stained glass. Among Raimbach's personal experiences came the successful consumption at Véry's in the Palais Royal of a fricassée of frogs. But this was done in ignorance, and not of set purpose, as in the case of the epicure, Charles Lamb, who speaks of them as 'the nicest little delicate things.' Raimbach's return to England somewhat precipitated by the fury of the First Consul at the attacks upon him in the 'Morning Chronicle,' was made by the Picardy route. At Calais he spent a day at the historical Lion d'Argent,^[42] 193 where Hogarth and so many of his fellow country-men had been before him, and he reached Dover shortly afterwards, giving, with his party, three ringing cheers at once more treading upon English soil. He had been absent two months instead of two weeks. His impressions de voyage, which occupy nearly half his 'Memoirs,' would have gained in permanent charm if he had described more and reflected less. All the same, his trip to Paris as a young man in 1802 was the one event of his career, for though he went abroad again on two or three occasions, received a gold medal from the Salon in 1814, for his engraving of 'The Village Politicians,' was fêted by Baron Gérard in 1825, and made a Corresponding Member of the Institute ten years later, the rest of his recollections are comparatively uninteresting, except for his intercourse with Wilkie, of whom he wrote a brief biography. He died in January, 1843, in his sixty-seventh year.^[43]

Now, when the widening of Parliament Street promises to afford an adequate approach to St. Stephen's, and another imposing range of buildings has arisen at Spring Gardens to match the Foreign and India Offices, it may be worth while to linger for a moment upon some former features of this much-changing locality. In such a retrospect, the Old Banqueting-House of Inigo Jones naturally becomes a prominent object. Its massive Northamptonshire stone and classic columns invest it with a dignity of which the towering pile of Whitehall Court can scarcely deprive it; and it seems to overlook Kent's stumpy Horse Guards opposite much as a nobleman with a pedigree might be expected to survey a neighbour of a newer creation. And yet, impressive though it is, it represents but an insignificant portion of the architect's original design, the imaginative extent of which may be studied in Campbell's 'Vitruvius Britannicus' and elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the present 195 Banqueting-House was only one out of four similar pavilions in a vast structure of which the ground plan would have extended from the river bank to a point far beyond the Horse Guards, and would have occupied all the space on either side of the road from Horse Guards Avenue to the Mews of Richmond Terrace. It included no fewer than seven splendid internal courts, and the façades towards the park and the Thames--the latter especially--were of great beauty. But the scheme was beyond the pocket of the first James, for whom, in 1619, it was designed; and a cheaper modification, reaching only to the roadway, and prepared twenty years later, fared no better with Charles I. The Banqueting-House, which was built in 1619-22, and is common to both projects, is consequently all that was ever executed of what, in its completed form, would have been a palace among palaces, surpassing the Louvre and the Escurial.

Apart from its existing employment as the museum of the Royal United Service Institution, the Banqueting-House to-day serves chiefly as a landmark or key by help of which its ancient environments may be mentally re-constructed. With Gibbons' fine bronze statue of James II., now erected in the enclosure at the side of 196 Gwydyr House,^[44] it practically constitutes the sole surviving portion of Old Whitehall as it appears in Vertue's engraving of John Fisher's famous 'Survey and Ground-Plot' of 1680 (or earlier); and about it was dispersed irregularly that pell-mell of buildings dating from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, which, in Jacobean and Caroline days, was known as 'our Palace of Westminster.' Roughly speaking, this confused aggregation^[45] might be defined geographically as bounded on the north by St. James's Park; on the south by the Thames; to the east by Scotland Yard and Spring Gardens, and to the west by Richmond Terrace Mews. It was traversed throughout its entire extent by the old roadway leading to Westminster Abbey, and this divided it into two portions, the larger and more important of which lay on the side of the Thames. From Scotland Yard to the Banqueting-House the road was fairly wide and open; but at the 197 western end of the Banqueting-House it suddenly narrowed, passing through the gate popularly known as Holbein's, and afterwards entering King Street through a second or King Street Gate. 'K[ing] Cha[rles],' the Marquis of Normanby told Evelyn, 'had a designe to buy all King Street, and build it nobly, it being the streete leading to Westm^r.' Once, too, when Evelyn had presented him with a copy of his 'book of Architecture,' he sketched a rough plan for the future building of Whitehall itself, 'together with the roomes of state, and other particulars.'^[46] But His Majesty's promises were better than his performances; and he had more pressing and less worshipful ways of spending his money.

It will be convenient to speak first of that part of the palace buildings which lay to the north of the road between King Street and Charing Cross. Here was the old Cockpit, which, in the time of Fisher's Plan, was included in the apartments of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and from which the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery saw the first Charles walk from St. James's Palace to the scaffold. Later it 198 became the Privy-Council Office, where, in Anne's reign, Harley was stabbed by Guiscard. Here also was the Tennis Court; and (fronting the Banqueting-House) the Tilt-Yard, where with such 'laudable Courtesy and pardonable Insolence,' Sir Roger de Coverley's ancestor defeated his opponent.^[47] On the site of the present Treasury, and looking upon the street, were the apartments of the Dukes of Monmouth and Ormond; to the west of these, the quarters of Captain Henry Cooke, 'Master of the Children [choir boys] of the Chapel Royal.' The remainder of the buildings on this side seem to have been chiefly occupied by Albemarle, though Lady Castlemaine had kitchens not far from the Tennis Court, while between the Horse Guard Yard and the Spring Garden were the rooms of one of the maids of honour, Mrs. Kirke. At the back stretched St. James's Park, where Charles II. made many improvements, and built his famous decoy for waterfowl. In Evelyn's days this must have almost attained the proportions of a menagerie. 'Here,' says he, 'was a curious sort of poultry not much exceeding the size of a tame pidgeon, with legs so short as their crops seem'd to touch y^e earth; a milk-white 199 raven; a stork which was a rarity at this season, seeing he was loose and could flie loftily; two Balearian [Balearic?] cranes, one of which having one of his leggs broken and cut off above the knee, had a wooden or boxen leg and thigh, with a joynt so accurately made that y^e creature could walke and use it as well as if it had ben natural; it was made by a souldier. The parke was at this time stored with numerous flocks of severall sorts of ordinary and extraordinary wild fowle, breeding about the Decoy, which for being neere so greate a citty, and among such a concourse of souldiers and people, is a singular and diverting thing. There were also deere of severall countries, white; spotted like leopards; antelopes, an elk, red deere, roebucks, staggs, Guinea goates, Arabian sheepe, &c. There were withy-potts or nests for the wild fowle to lay their eggs in, a little above y^e surface of y^e water.'^[48]

Thus we come to that larger and more important portion of Old Whitehall which lay to the south of the road between Westminster and Charing Cross. To the west of the Banqueting-House, and corresponding in length to the distance between the two great gates, was the 200 Privy Garden, where in May, 1662, Mr. Pepys, to his great solace and content, saw my Lady Castlemaine's laced smocks and linen petticoats floating gaily to the breeze. According to Hatton, the Privy Garden occupied about three and a quarter acres, and (as our plan shows) was laid out in sixteen grass-plots with statues in the centre of each. To the north a high wall separated it from the roadway, to the west was a line of trees, and to the east a straggling range of buildings nearly at right angles to the Banqueting-House. Here lived Evelyn's friend, Sir Robert Murray; and here were the apartments of the Lord Chamberlain, where, in November, 1679, Evelyn witnessed the re-marriage of his Lordship's daughter, a child of twelve years old, to the Duke of Grafton, the king's natural son by Barbara Palmer. Here, again, were the Council Office, the Lord Keeper's Office, and the Treasury. Opposite the Treasury, in the central walk of the garden, was a famous pyramidal dial, which had been set up in 1669 by Francis Hall, a Jesuit. A much-needed 'explication' of this was printed at Liège four years later by one H. Steel, who also engraved it.^[49] 201

To the south of the Privy Garden, and communicating with the Bowling Green, which lay to the west of it (presumably on the site now occupied by Richmond Terrace), was the famous Stone Gallery. On its northern side were domiciled the Earl of Lauderdale, Lord Peterborough, Prince Rupert, and Mr. Hyde; and somewhere in its vicinity, although not indicated upon Fisher's plan, doubtless because granted subsequently to the date of its execution, must have been the 'luxuriously-furnished' lodgings of that 'baby-faced' (but not guileless) Breton beauty, Louise Renée de Kéroualle. This, indeed, is clear from Evelyn's diary. '4 Oct. [1683] ... Following his Majesty this morning thro' the gallerie, I went, with the few who attended him, into the Dutchesse of Portsmouth's^[50] dressing-roome within her bedchamber, where she was in her morning loose garment, her maids combing her, newly out of her bed, his Ma^ty and the gallants standing about her; but that which engag'd my curiosity was the rich and splendid furniture of this woman's 202 apartment, now twice or thrice pull'd down and rebuilt to satisfie her prodigal and expensive pleasures, whilst her Ma^tys does not exceede some gentlemen's ladies in furniture and accommodation. Here I saw the new fabriq of French tapissry, for designe, tendernesse of worke, and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I had ever beheld. Some pieces had Versailles, St. Germain's, and other palaces of the French King, with huntings, figures, and landskips, exotiq fowls, and all to the life rarely don. Then for Japan cabinets, screenes, pendule clocks, greate vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braseras, etc. all of massie silver, and out of number, besides some of her Ma^tys best paintings.' '10 April [1691]. This night a sudden and terrible fire burnt down all the buildings over the stone gallery at White-hall to the water-side, beginning at the apartment of the late Dutchesse of Portsmouth^[51] (w^ch had ben pull'd down and rebuilt no lesse than three times to please her).'^[52] 203

Between the Stone Gallery and the old river-line, now obliterated by the Embankment, and covering a site which extended as far as Whitehall Palace Stairs, were the apartments of the King, the Queen, the Duke of York, and the great officers of the Court. The King's rooms, in suggestive proximity to those of the Maids of Honour, and with the notorious Chiffinch conveniently at hand, were to the left of the Privy Stairs; those of Catherine of Braganza, which, on the plan, look small and unimportant, lay to the right. Neither Pepys nor Evelyn gives us much information with regard to this part of the Palace. Mention is indeed made by them and others of the Shield Gallery, the Matted Gallery, the Boarded Gallery, the Vane Room, the Robe Chamber, the Green Chamber, the Theatre, the Adam and Eve Gallery (which took its name from a picture by Mabuse), and so forth; but the indications are too vague to enable us to fix their locality with certainty. By favour, however, of 'an ancient woman who made these 204 lodgings cleane, and had all y^e keys,' Evelyn seems to have minutely examined the King's private library, with which, though he spent three or four days over it, he was not greatly impressed. 'I went,' he says, 'with expectation of finding some curiosities, but though there were about 1000 volumes, there were few of importance which I had not perus'd before.' He found, nevertheless, a 'folio MS. of good thicknesse' containing the school exercises of Edward VI., together with his Journal, which Burnet afterwards made use of in his 'History of the Reformation.'^[53] Towards Whitehall Stairs, between the Banqueting-House and the river, were the Great Hall, and the Chapel where King of Chichester, and the witty South, and the eloquent Stillingfleet preached to an unedified congregation, and where peeping Mr. Pepys 'observed,' on a certain Sunday in October, 1660, 'how the Duke of York and Mrs. Palmer did talk to one another very wantonly through the hangings that parts the King's closet and the closet where the ladies sit.' An old view of Whitehall, from the Thames, gives a fair idea of its aspect at this time. To the right are the Chapel and Hall, with the loftier Banqueting-House appearing in the back-ground, and Holbein's Gate just distinguishable at its side. To the left is the covered Privy Stairs, whence the Royal Barge with its flags and trumpeters is just putting off. Here it must have been, that, little more than two months before Charles II.'s unexpected death, Evelyn witnessed the water celebration which took place in front of the Queen's apartments:--'[Nov.] 15, [1684] Being the Queene's birthday, there were fire-works on the Thames before White-hall, with pageants of castles, forts, and other devices of gyrandolas, serpents, the King and Queene's armes and mottos, all represented in fire, such as had not ben seen here. But the most remarkable was the several fires and skirmishes in the very water, which actually mov'd a long way, burning under the water, now and then appearing above it, giving reports like muskets and cannon, with granados and innumerable other devices. It is said it cost £1,500. It was concluded with a ball, where all the young ladys and gallants daunced in the greate hall. The court had not ben seene so brave and rich in apparell since his Ma^tys restauration.'^[54] To this 205 may succeed that memorable and oft-cited entry, which occurs only a few pages farther on, when Charles was lying dead: 'I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and prophanenesse, gaming and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfullnesse of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day se'nnight [25 January, 1685] I was witnesse of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleaveland, and Mazarine, etc., a French boy [François Duperrier] singing love songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000 in gold before them, upon which two gentlemen who were with me made reflexions with astonishment. Six days after was all in the dust!' The next three lines with their note of official anticlimax are not so generally reprinted: 'It was enjoyn'd that those who put on mourning should wear it as for a father, in y^e most solemn manner.'

From Whitehall Palace Stairs a roadway went, past the Chapel and Great Hall, through a wide open court to the Palace Gate, close to what was the site of the old Wardrobe (afterwards Lord Carrington's). To the right of this road, and extending as far as Scotland Yard, were groups of 206 inferior buildings and offices,--kitchens, butteries, pastries, spiceries, bakehouses, slaughter-houses, charcoal-houses, and the like,--traces of which may still be identified. The present Board of Trade, and the adjacent buildings in Horse Guards Avenue, occupy portions of the sites of the Wine-Cellar,^[55] Hall, and Chapel; the Confectionary is said to have been a white house between the former Museum of the United Service Institution^[56] and Lord Carrington's stables, and the old Beer Buttery long existed near the gates of Fife House, the place of which is now covered by part of Whitehall Court.

Standing in the entrance to Horse Guards Avenue (once Whitehall Yard), one may still, with the aid of an old view or two, and Fisher's indispensable plan, obtain a fair idea of the place in the time of the Stuarts. Opposite--where the Scottish Office and Horse Guards are at present--was the boundary wall of the old Tilt and Horse Guard Yards. To the left, immediately in front of the Banqueting-House, extended a row of posts, a little in advance of which--'in 207 the open street before Whitehall'--was the spot where, after much controversy, Charles I. is now allowed to have been beheaded. From the western end a line of buildings ran out to Holbein's Gate. These, which also looked into the Privy Garden, were, as already explained, the apartments of Lord Arlington, the Lord Chamberlain. Of Holbein's Gate itself,--although, according to Mr. Wornum, we are scarcely justified in styling it Holbein's,--Pennant, who seems to have seen it, gives the following account: 'To Holbein was owing the most beautiful gate at Whitehall, built with bricks of two colours, glazed, and disposed in a tesselated fashion. The top, as well as that of an elegant tower on each side, were [sic] embattled. On each front were four busts in baked clay, in proper colors, which resisted to the last every attack of the weather: possibly the artificial stone revived in this century. These, I have been lately informed, are preserved in a private hand. This charming structure fell a sacrifice to conveniency within my memory: as did another in 1723, built at the same time, but of far inferior beauty. The last blocked up the road to King-street, and was called King's-gate. Henry built it as a passage to the park, the tennis court, bowling-green, the cock-pit, and tilting-yard; 208 for he was extremely fond of athletic exercises; they suited his strength and his temper.'^[57]

Both these gates were engraved by Vertue in the 'Vetusta Monumenta' published by the Society of Antiquaries. The so-called Holbein's Gate, which long survived the buildings that connected it with the Banqueting-House, was pulled down in August, 1759, to make room for Parliament Street. The Duke of Cumberland had it removed to Windsor, with the intention of re-erecting it at the end of the Long Walk, and his Deputy Ranger, Thomas Sandby (the architect), was to have made some additions at the sides, the designs for which are still to be seen in J. T. Smith's 'Westminster.' But, as seems generally the case after removals of this kind, nothing was ever done in the matter. Meanwhile the medallions of which Pennant speaks were dispersed. Three of them, according to Smith, were, when he published his book, at Hatfield Peverell in Essex; two more got worked into keepers' lodges at Windsor. These, said Cunningham in 1849, 'are now, by Mr. Jesse's [i.e. the late J. Heneage Jesse's] exertions, at Hampton Court, where they are made to do 209 duty as two of the Roman Emperors, described by Hentzner, in his Travels, as then at Hampton Court.' They are of Italian workmanship, and may probably be attributed to John de Maiano.

Those who, having sufficiently examined the Palladian exterior of the Banqueting-House, and duly noted the famous weather-cock on the eastern end, which, or an earlier example thereof, James II. is said to have set up to warn him of the approach of the Dutch fleet, desire farther to inspect the interior, can easily do so, since (as already stated) the building is now a museum. Its chief feature of interest is the ceiling, which represents the Apotheosis of James I. It is painted black, partly gilded, and divided into panels by bands, ornamented with a guilloche. Of the three central compartments, that at one end represents the British Solomon on his throne, 'pointing to Prince Charles, who is being perfected by Wisdom.' The middle compartment shows him 'trampling on the globe and flying on the wings of Justice (an eagle) to heaven.' In the third he is 'embracing Minerva, and routing Rebellion and Envy.' These panels, and others at the sides, were painted by Rubens in 1635, with the assistance of his pupil, Jordaens. They were restored by Cipriani. In 1837, the whole 210 building, which had been closed since 1829, was refitted and repaired under the direction of Sir Robert Smirke.

It would occupy too large a space to trace the history of the Banqueting-House from its first erection to its Georgian transformation into an unconsecrated chapel (1724), seductive as it might be to speak of it as the theatre of Ben Jonson's masques and the buffooneries of Cromwell. In Charles II.'s time, to which, in the foregoing remarks, we have mainly confined ourselves, it was the scene of many impressive ceremonies and state receptions. It was in the Banqueting-House that Charles begged his Honourable House of Commons to amend the ways about Whitehall, so that Catherine of Braganza might not upon her arrival find it 'surrounded by water;' it was in the Banqueting-House that he gravely went through that half solemn half ludicrous business of touching for the evil; it was in the Banqueting-House that, coming from the Tower of London with a splendid cavalcade, he created at one time six Earls and six Barons. Under its storied roof he magnificently entertained the French Ambassador, Charles Colbert, Marquis de Croissy, on which occasion he presented Mr. Evelyn, from his own 211 royal plate, with a piece of that newly-imported Barbadian luxury, the King-pine;^[58] it was here also that he received the Russian Ambassador with his presents of carpets and sables and 'seahorse teeth;' and the swarthy envoys from Morocco, with their scymetars and white alhagas, and their lions and 'estridges' [ostriches]. But perhaps the brightest and most vivid page in connection with this famous old building is that in which Samuel Pepys relates what he saw from its roof on the 23rd of August, 1662:--

'. . Mr. Creed . . and I . . walked down to the Styllyard [Steel Yard] and so all along Thames-street, but could not get a boat: I offered eight shillings for a boat to attend me this afternoon, and they would not, it being the day of the Queen's coming to town from Hampton Court. So we fairly walked it to White Hall, and through my Lord's [Lord Sandwich's] lodgings we got into White Hall garden, and so to 212 the Bowling-green, and up to the top of the new Banqueting-House^[59] there, over the Thames, which was a most pleasant place as any I could have got; and all the show consisted chiefly in the number of boats and barges; and two pageants, one of a King, and another of a Queen, with her Maydes of Honour sitting at her feet very prettily; and they tell me the Queen is Sir Richard Ford's daughter. Anon come the King and Queen in a barge under a canopy with 10,000 [sic] barges and boats, I think, for we could see no water for them, nor discern the King nor Queen. And so they landed at White Hall Bridge and the great guns on the other side went off. But that which pleased me best was, that my Lady Castlemaine stood over against us upon a piece of White Hall, where I glutted myself with looking on her. But methought it was strange to see her Lord and her upon the same place walking up and down without taking notice one of another, only at first entry he put off his hat, and she made him a very civil salute, but afterwards took no notice one of another; but both of them now and then would take their child, 213 which the nurse held in her armes, and dandle it. One thing more; there happened a scaffold below to fall, and we feared some hurt, but there was none, but she of all the great ladies only run down among the common rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take care of a child that received some little hurt, which methought was so noble. Anon there came one there booted and spurred that she talked long with. And by and by, she being in her hair, she put on his hat, which was but an ordinary one, to keep the wind off. But methinks it became her mightily, as every thing else do.'^[60]

Evelyn's last curt entry respecting the old palace is as follows: '2 [4?] Jan. [1698].... White-hall burnt, nothing but walls and ruins left.' Luckily there are records more specific. Writing on the 5th, the Earl of Tullibardine tells Lord Annandale, 'Yesternight about four a clock a fire broke out in one of the garrets at White-hall, which burnt so furiously that it hath consumed all the king and queens apartments, the chappell, and all that was worth the standing at Whitehall, except the banquetting house.' And Sir James Ogilvie, Secretary of State, in a letter 214 of the same date, adds for postscript: 'Wee have had the greatest fire at Whitehal was ever seen. It al brunt doun except the bankating house and the Earl of Portlands lodgings, bot both are much damnified.'^[61] Thus it comes about that Inigo Jones's stately building, besides being the sole relic of a Whitehall that never existed, is also the sole relic of the Whitehall that was.

Nothing fades with such rapidity as the reputation of the mere favourite of society. If he be a dandy his name, perhaps, lingers here and there in the circular of a fashionable tailor; if a wit, his sayings, although--like those of Praed's 'Belle'--'extremely quoted' during his lifetime, scarcely survive his contemporaries and boon-companions. It may be that he secures to himself some notice from posterity by posthumous 'Memoirs' put together by a friend--perhaps a valet; or he may leave behind him some literary legacy which now and then is disinterred from the shelves of the British Museum Library (if, indeed, it has found an asylum there) by an enquirer curious in forgotten follies, or anxious to elucidate the caricatures of Gillray and 'HB.' But, as a rule, if he does not die early, he passes 'into the line of outworn faces,' and his place knows him no more. Only from a magazine obituary, or a stray paragraph in a provincial paper, does one learn, half-a-century afterwards, 216 that an old valetudinarian has died at Bath, or Cheltenham, or Boulogne, who, in his earlier days, was a favourite with the Prince Regent, a well-known habitué of Brooks's and White's, a member of the Neapolitan Club, and a frequent figure at Crockford's. These remarks, applicable, it should be observed, more exactly to the Georgian than the Victorian era, are mainly prompted by the difficulty experienced in obtaining particulars respecting the career of the once-famous wit and writer of vers de société, whose chief work forms the subject of this paper. Yet, if we may trust a manuscript note in our copy of the 'Letters to Julia,' the author of that book and 'Crockford House' attained the ripe age of eighty-six; and seventy years ago no one was better known in the higher classes of society as--to use a phrase which would have been employed in the days when 'Pelham' was penned--a man of the world du meilleur crû. The friend of Jekyll and Lord Alvanley, of Mackintosh and Sydney Smith, of Lord Holland and Jeffery, of Greville, of Moore, of Rogers; a wit with the wits, a scholar with the scholars; fairly earning a hearing, even in those days of 'Whistlecraft' burlesques and 'Twopenny Postboys,' as a writer of sparkling verse; an admirable talker and a 217 polished gentleman--Henry Luttrell must have been one of the most delightful of social companions. Secluded, however, in those inner circles to which admission was as difficult as getting on the list of 'Almack's,' he lies entirely beyond the range of the ordinary life-taker; and the few references to his character and works are only to be found sparsely scattered through the pages of contemporary, and, alas! often unindexed 'memoirs.' In Lady Holland's life of Sydney Smith, for example, there are some brief references to his lightness of hand, his willingness to be pleased, his amusing Irish stories. 'Luttrell,' says Smith, warning Lady Davy against overlooking the difficulties and embarrassments of life, 'before I taught him better, imagined muffins grew. He was wholly ignorant of all the intermediate processes of sowing, reaping, grinding, kneading, and baking.' This is not much of a contribution to a portrait, no doubt; but it affords a hint of that sublime and generally affected superiority to the homelier phenomena of life which forms an indispensable part of the equipment of the man of the world,--du meilleur crû. Yet, although we find Rogers regretting his attachment to, and monopoly by, 'persons of mere fashion,' Luttrell, it is only fair to infer, must have 218 been considerably more than this. Everywhere, by happy allusion, and fine turns of expression, his work shows an intimate knowledge of classic authors; and, as might be anticipated, of Horace in particular.

In the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ,' he is called by 'Tickler' 'one of the most accomplished men in all England--a wit and a scholar.' 'Of course you know Luttrell,' said Byron to Lady Blessington; 'he is the best sayer of good things, and the most epigrammatic conversationist I ever met. There is a terseness and wit, mingled with fancy, in his observations that no one else possesses, and no one so peculiarly understands the apropos. Then, unlike all, or most other wits, Luttrell is never obtrusive; even the choicest bons mots are only brought forth when perfectly applicable, and they are given in a tone of good breeding which enhances their value.' 'None of the talkers whom I meet in London society,' says' Rogers, 'can slide in a brilliant thing with such readiness as he does.' The impression here given is rather of a wit than a humourist; there is more in it of Chamfort or Rivarol than Thackeray or Sydney Smith; but, in default of more definite information, it enables us to form an idea of the easy, fluent causeur, touching all topics lightly, quick 219 to catch the fleeting fancy and crystallize it into an epigram, to turn a dull corner with an adroit quotation from the classics (such things were possible formerly), to light up a mediocre story with a happy setting;--able and ready, in short, to give that sparkling ripple to the flow of conversation which made the gifted possessor of these rare qualities the envy of diners-out, and the delight of hostesses. The more conventional type of such a character Luttrell has himself sketched in easy octosyllabics:

It would be of no service to reproduce here any of the half-dozen good things of Luttrell that 220 linger in Moore's 'Diary.' Many of these are of that class whose prosperity lies emphatically in the ear of the listener; and we are too far removed from the speaker to be able to revive those niceties of manner and delivery which were essential to a just appreciation of them. With his verse the case is different. That, at least, was intended to be read; and although some of the allusions are necessarily obscure, we can, by a slight effort, place ourselves in the position of the audience to whom it was originally addressed. We must frankly confess, however, that, doubtless from the absence of those individual advantages of address and opportunity which gave him grace as a conversationalist, Luttrell's work, easy and polished though it be, scarcely impresses one as commensurate with the praise he received from his contemporaries. But of this the reader must judge from the specimens here reproduced.

The 'Letters to Julia,'^[62] Luttrell's longest and most ambitious effort, is an amplification of that 221 pleasant little ode in the first book of Horace, in which Lydia is enjoined by the poet not to ruin Sybaris by a too exclusive attachment to her apron-strings. The reader who recalls the sixteen lines of the original, may perhaps wonder how it was possible to expand so brief a lyric into a poem of two hundred pages. And, indeed, under the digressions of the author, the primary motive almost entirely disappears. But as he himself gives us the above explanation of the origin of his work, we are bound to regard it. His first conception, he says, was 'by filling up such an outline on a wider canvass ... to exhibit a picture, if imperfect not unfaithful, of modern habits and manners, and of the amusements and lighter occupations of the higher classes of society in England.'

Viewed in this aspect, it matters little how the idea was first suggested. In the four epistles of which the book consists, the parts of Lydia and Sybaris are taken by Charles, a man of fashion and pleasure, embarrassed, as a matter of course, but 'at the head of the suprême bon ton;' and Julia, a young widow of two-and-twenty, rather lower in the social scale, but rich and spoiled by flattery, who quite intends to marry her desirable admirer whenever it suits her to do so, but in the 222 meantime subjects him to all the petty tyrannies of coquetry and caprice. The writer of the letters is a cousin of the lady, who undertakes to remonstrate with her upon her harsh treatment of her lover. In this task, thanks to numberless digressions, he manages to ramble from 'Almack's' to Newmarket, from Brighton to Paris--where you will--sketching lightly picture after picture of the fashionable life of the first quarter of the century. Now he amplifies cur vitat olivum into a score of lines, descriptive of his recreant hero's avoidance of Moulsey and the Fives-Court; of--

now mourns that no longer--

now laments his abdication of his proud supremacy as a dresser, and master of the awful mysteries of the Cravat of our grandfathers. Readers will recall the anecdote of Brummell's tray-full of failures in the following:

This is a good sample of Luttrell's lighter manner. Here is another--a wail from 'Almack's' over the substitution of tea for supper: 225

We might easily multiply extracts of this kind. And jaunty and fluent as are the above passages, there are others which suggest that the author had a first-rate talent for natural description and quiet landscape, points which here and there seem to rise above his pictures of men and women--or rather, belles and exquisites. Here is a picture of a storm in the Park, which is close and effective, and quite as truthful in its realism as Swift's 'City Shower':

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And what dweller in London will not recognize the accuracy of this:

227

Here again--in a picture of the Serpentine in winter--are some lines which to us appear to be thoroughly successful in their choice and economy of epithet:

The main defect of the 'Letters to Julia' is its length. One of the poet's contemporaries (Kenney, the creator of Jeremy Diddler) complained indeed, that, besides being too long, it was 'not broad enough;' but with the absence of the latter dimension we need not quarrel. In point 228 of even execution, and that air of reticent good breeding which Byron declared to be characteristic of the author's style in speaking, little is wanting. The purpureus pannus is, in truth, carefully kept out of sight; and yet, notwithstanding the strict observance of the Horatian precept, there is a certain lack of colour and variety, which begets an impatient desire for discordance of some sort. One is reminded, in turning over the pages of faultlessly rhymed couplets, of that 'Cymodocée' of Chateaubriand, in which there was not a single elision, and concerning which the irreverent said,--'Tant pis pour Cymodocée!' That the poem treats solely of trivial pursuits and amusements cannot justly be counted as a defect, since the author's intention was to depict the habits of the merely fashionable world. This his graver contemporaries fully recognized when they nicknamed the book, 'Letters from a Dandy to a Dolly.' A less excusable fault is, that Luttrell nowhere opposes to his picture of frivolity any hint of higher or worthier employment; nor is there, as in these days there assuredly would be if the theme were treated by a modern, any subtle indication of a graver side to the story, or any skilful suggestion as to the unreality of so-called pleasure as an object in life. But these differences 229 are in some respects due to changed conditions of society, and altered points of view. We are sadder than our forefathers, and if we have no longer their hearty appetites, we are not so willingly grave that we do not occasionally envy them their high spirits.

Little room remains to speak of Luttrell's lesser effort of 'Crockford House,' even if it came within our scheme. The defect of tediousness is more conspicuous in it than in the former work, although the motive--denunciation of the prevailing vice of Play--is a better one. But the author seems to have had a doubt about making it public, since, according to Moore, he consulted Lord Sefton, Mr. Greville, and others, as to the expediency of a man of the town publishing such an attack upon the high priest of the gaming table--'a deference to society,' says Moore (rather unexpectedly, considering his antecedents), 'for which society will hardly thank him.' With 'Crockford House' are printed some lines on Rome and the dirtiness of that Imperial City. A rhyming tour de force on 'Burnham Beeches, and a few more of Luttrell's fugitive verses are included in the late Mr. Locker Lampson's 'Lyra Elegantiarum,' where is also to be found the admirable little epigram 230 upon Miss Ellen Tree, which has already been reproduced in these pages.^[64] Here, from the same collection, is a graver specimen:

There is a compactness about this which makes us wish for some other brief examples of Luttrell's serious style. It is his plans that are long, not his art. If, instead of amplifying 'Lydia, dic per omnes,' he had simply translated it, or 'Vixi puellis,' or 'Vitas hinnuleo,' or any of the lighter of Horace's odes, we should have had nearly perfect versions, for no man could have done them better.

We add one more of his lesser pieces, because the first lines alone are generally quoted. They are the quatrains to Moore about his 'Lallah Rookh.' Luttrell wrote them in the name of Rogers, whose 'Human Life' Lord Lauderdale was said to have by heart:

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Not the least piquant thing connected with this little jeu d'esprit, so carefully transferred to his Preface and Diary by the author of the 'Irish Melodies,' is, that Luttrell's informant was none other than Thomas Moore himself.^[65]

Looking from that coign of vantage, the portico of the National Gallery, upon what Peel called 'the finest site in Europe,' it is impossible not to think of its vicissitudes. With the exception of St. Martin's Church, which is comparatively modern, the only antiquity now left to link the present with the past is the statue of Charles I., riding unhasting, unresting, to his former Palace of Westminster, and dating from a day when Trafalgar Square was but an irregular range of houses surrounding a royal mews. Only a quarter of a century ago stood in its vicinity an older relic still. If the stones that formed the fine Jacobean frontage of Northumberland House could have spoken, they would have pleaded that they knew of a remoter time when, in place of the royal martyr proclaiming from his pedestal, in Waller's turncoat line, that

had risen the time-honoured cross which marked 233 the last halting-place of Queen Eleanor's body in its progress to the Abbey. The old Cross, again, had more ancient memories than Northumberland House. It could recall a falconry--not unhaunted of a certain rhyming Clerk of Works called Geoffrey Chaucer--which was long anterior to the royal mews; and it remembered how--

the hospital of St. Mary Rounceval had preceded the great palace of the Percies.

In any retrospect of Charing Cross, Queen Eleanor's monument forms a convenient starting point, and from Ralph Agas's well-known survey of 1592 we get a fair idea of its environment in the reign of Elizabeth. At this date there were, comparatively speaking, few buildings in its neighbourhood. On the river side, indeed, houses straggled from the Strand towards Whitehall; but St. Martin's was actually 'in the fields,' Spring Gardens was as open as 'S^t Jemes Parke,' and where to-day stand Covent Garden and Her Majesty's Theatre, laundresses laid their clothes to dry. Along Hedge Lane, which began at the 234 present Union Club and followed the line of Dorset Place and Whitcomb Street, you might, if so minded, carry your Corinna through green pastures to eat tarts at Hampstead or Highgate, passing, it may be, on the road, Master Ben Jonson from Hartshorne Lane (now Northumberland Street), unconscious for the moment of any other 'humour' in life than the unlimited consumption of blackberries. By the windmill at St. Giles's you might find him flying his kite, or (and why not, since the child is father to the man?) displaying prematurely his 'Roman infirmity' of boasting to his ragged playmates of the parish school.

But to the sober antiquary the pleasures of imagination are forbidden; and the Cross itself has yet to be described. Unfortunately, there are no really trustworthy representations of it, and even its designer's name is uncertain. It was long ascribed to Pietro Cavallini, to whom tradition also attributes the monument of Henry III. in Westminster Abbey. What is undoubted, however, is that it was one of several similar crosses erected by the executors of Eleanor of Castile; that it was begun by one Richard de Crundale, cementarius, and after his death continued by another of the family; and that its material came 235 from Caen in Normandy, and Corfe in Dorsetshire. From Agas's map it seems to have been octagonal in shape with tiers of niches; and it was decorated with paintings and gilt metal figures modelled by Alexander Le Imaginator. It stood from 1296 until, by vote of May the 3rd, 1643, the Long Parliament, in the same iconoclastic spirit which prompted the removal of the 'Golden Cross' sign as 'superstitious and idolatrous,' decreed its demolition. 'The parliament,' says a contemporary Royalist ballad, still to be found in Percy's 'Reliques,'

Other verses bewail its disappearance as a familiar landmark:

236

As a matter of fact, it was not actually 'taken down and carted' till the summer of 1647. Part of its stones, says Charles's biographer, William Lilly, went to pave Whitehall, and others were fashioned into knife-hafts, 'which, being well polished, looked like marble.' Sic transit gloria mundi!

Its site remained unoccupied for seven-and-twenty years. But here, in the interval, the regicides met their fate. Harrison, Cromwell's chaplain Peters, John Jones, Carew, and others, all suffered 'at the railed space where Charing Cross stood.' Pepys, between an account of the wantonness of Mrs. Palmer and the episode of 'a very pretty lady' who cried out at the playhouse 'to see Desdemona smothered,' has the following entry of Harrison's death, which he witnessed: '13^th [October, 1660]. I went out to Charing Cross to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come 237 shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again. Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the King at Charing Cross.'

Grave John Evelyn has also his record:--'17 [October, 1660]. Scot, Scroope, Cook, and Jones suffered for reward of their iniquities at Charing Crosse, in sight of the place where they put to death their natural Prince, and in the presence of the King his sonn, whom they also sought to kill. I saw not their execution; but met their quarters mangl'd and cutt and reeking as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. Oh, the miraculous providence of God!'

For further particulars of these dismal butcheries the reader is referred to the State Trials. In the years to come, less gruesome sights succeeded. From the overseers' books of St. Martin's, Mr. Peter Cunningham discovered entries of sums paid in 1666 and 1667 by 'Punchinello, y^e Italian popet-player for his Booth at Charing Cross,' and in 1668 there are similar records for the 'playhouse' of a 'Mounsr. Devone.' Then, in 1674, the present 'noble equestrian statue' as 238 Walpole styles it, was erected, not too promptly, by Charles II.

Its story is singular,--almost as singular as that of the statue of the Merry Monarch himself, which loyal Sir Robert Viner, 'Alderman, Knight and Baronet,' put up in the old Stocks Market, It appears to have been executed about 1633 by Hubert Le Sœur, a pupil of John of Bologna, for the Lord High Treasurer Weston, who intended it to embellish his garden at Roehampton. By the terms of the commission it was to be of brass, a foot larger than life, and the sculptor 'was to take advice of his Maj. (Charles I.) riders of greate horses, as well for the shape of the horse and action as for the graceful shape and action of his Maj. figure on the same.' Before the beginning of the Civil War, according to Walpole, the statue, cast but not erected, was sold by the Parliament to John Rivett, brazier, dwelling at the Dial near Holborn Conduit, who was strictly enjoined to break it up. Rivett, whose 'faith was large in time,' carefully buried it instead, and ingenuously exhibited some broken brass in earnest of its destruction. Report further says that, making capital out of both parties, he turned these mythic fragments into knife and fork handles, which the 239 Royalists bought eagerly as relics, and the Puritans as tokens of the downfall of a despot. In any case there is evidence to show that the statue was still in Rivett's possession in 1660, and it is assumed that it passed from him or his family to the second Charles. Strype says that he presented it to the King, which is not unlikely. The pedestal, finely carved with cupids, palms, armour, and so forth, is attributed to Grinling Gibbons. Somewhere near it was the Pillory where, every 10th of August, for several successive years, stood the infamous Titus Oates. Edmund Curll, too (upon that principle which makes Jack Sheppard one of the 'eminent' persons buried in St. Martin's), was once its 'distinguished' occupant, for one of his scandalous publications; and later Parsons of the Cock Lane Ghost suffered here those amenities so neatly described by Robert Lloyd in his 'Epistle to Churchill':

240

To the right of King Charles's statue, upon a site now traversed diagonally by Northumberland Avenue, stood, until 1874, the last of the great riverside mansions, Northumberland House. Its façade extended from the statue towards Northumberland Street, and its gardens went back to Scotland Yard, into which it had a gate. Northampton House, as it was first called, was built about 1605 for Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, by Bernard Jansen and Gerard Christmas--Christmas, it is supposed, being responsible for the florid gateway or 'frontispiece.' From the Earl of Northampton it passed to the Suffolks, and changed its name to Suffolk House, a name which it retained until 1670, when becoming the property of the Percies it was again re-christened. Londoners, except upon such special occasions as Exhibition years and the like, saw little of the place beyond the façade. Its original plan was a quadrangle, uncompleted at first on the garden-side. Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, added a new river-front, and a stone flight of stairs, which Mr. Evelyn regarded as clumsy and 'without any neat invention.' In the interior its chief glory was a double state-staircase with marble steps. There was also a state-gallery of magnificent proportions, a drawing-room 241 decorated by Angelica Kauffman, and a tapestry-chamber by Zuccarelli. The pictures which, with the wonderful stiff-tailed leaden lion so long familiar to passers by, are now transferred to Sion House at Isleworth, included Titian's famous Cornaro family (Evelyn's 'Venetian Senators'), and a number of minor masterpieces. One of the show-curiosities was a Sèvres vase nine feet high, presented to the second Duke of Northumberland by Charles X. of France.

It would be easy to accumulate anecdote around this ancient dwelling-place. From this 'house with stairs' by Charing Cross set out that merry marriage procession of Boyle and Howard, which Suckling has immortalized in the 'Ballad on a Wedding;' and hence, too, Mr. Horace Walpole, with a hackney-coach full of persons of condition fresh from the opera, started to interview the Cock Lane Ghost. Here again, in the fire of 1780, great part of the library of the Duke's chaplain and relative, Dr. Percy, was destroyed in his apartments, where, doubtless, he often received Reynolds and Johnson. Goldsmith, also, among others, made one very characteristic visit to the same spot, though not on this occasion as the guest of the Bishop of Dromore. 242 Let him tell the story in his own words, apud Washington Irving:--

'I dressed myself in the best manner I could, and, after studying some compliments I thought necessary on such an occasion, proceeded to Northumberland House, and acquainted the servants that I had particular business with the duke. They showed me into an ante-chamber, where, after waiting some time, a gentleman, very elegantly dressed, made his appearance; taking him for the duke, I delivered all the fine things I had composed in order to compliment him on the honour he had done me; when, to my great astonishment, he told me I had mistaken him for his master, who would see me immediately. At that instant the duke came into the apartment, and I was so confounded on the occasion, that I wanted words barely sufficient to express the sense I entertained of the duke's politeness, and went away exceedingly chagrined at the blunder I had committed.'^[67]

Fronting Northumberland House, a little to the left, and at some distance from the site of the present hotel of the same name, stood, until the advent of railroads brought about its downfall as a 243 posting-house, that older Golden Cross,^[68] whose idolatrous sign scandalized the Puritan House of Commons. But the sign must have been soon restored, for it is distinguishable in Canaletto's view of 1753, though the carriage at the door probably hides the long water-trough which, sixty years since, old Londoners still remembered as giving the place something of the air of a country inn. From the Golden Cross, houses extended northward to St. Martin's Church--Duncannon Street being as yet to come. Trafalgar Square and the space now occupied by the National and National Portrait Galleries was covered, as far back as Hemings' Row, by buildings surrounding the King's or Royal Mews. In the days before Agas's map this had been a falconry, dating from Richard II. or earlier; but in 1534, when Henry VIII.'s stables at Lomsbery (Bloomsbury) were fired and burned, the royal stables were transferred to the buildings at Charing Cross, which, nevertheless, retained their old name of mews (i.e., a mewing place) which they first had 244 'of the King's falcons there kept.' Here, in the Caroline days, the famous stallion 'Rowley' 'champed golden grain' like the horses in the 'Iliad,' and gave his nickname to a king. Here, too, M. St. Antoine taught the noble art of horsemanship. In 1732, William Kent rebuilt the façade. At this date, as shown in a plan in the British Museum, dated 1690, it still consisted of the 'Great Mews,' the 'Green Mews,' and the 'Back Mews.' It continued to be used for stabling until 1824, when the royal stud, gilt coach, and other paraphernalia were transferred to Pimlico. In 1830, after serving as a temporary shelter to Mr. Cross's menagerie, then ousted from Exeter Change, and to the homeless Public Records of Great Britain, it was pulled down. Not many traditions haunt its past which need a mention here. Its northeastern side, if we may trust Gay's 'Trivia,' was a chosen resort of thieves and gamblers. 'Careful Observers' (he says), 'studious of the Town,'

and it may be observed that the ill-famed rookery, known in Ben Jonson's day as the 'Bermudas' and later, by convenient euphemism, as the 'C'ribbee Islands,' was close to St. Martin's 245 Church, where it survived until 1829. At the Upper Mews-Gate stood a convivial house of call, celebrated in song by 'bright broken Maginn;'^[69] and hard by, from 1750 to 1790, 'Honest Tom Payne' kept the little old bookshop, 'in the shape of an L,' once so well known to book-lovers in the last century.^[70] 246

Towards 1829-30 the neighbourhood of Charing Cross began to assume something of its present aspect. Already, four years earlier, the College of Physicians, leaving its home in Warwick Lane, had taken up its abode in a handsome building at the bottom of Dorset Place, close by the newly-erected Union Club. Then, about 1830, the ground was cleared for Trafalgar Square, and the C'ribbee Islands and the rookeries were 'blotted from the things that be.' In 1832, the present National Gallery was begun. Nelson's Column followed, in 1840-9, and then, many years after, was finally completed by the addition of Landseer's lions. Since the National Gallery first became the laughing-stock of cockneys, it has been more than once enlarged; and even at the present moment further extensions at the back, of considerable importance to the picture-seer, are said to be in contemplation. But it is needless to dwell at any length upon the present aspect of the place. It is too modern for the uses of the antiquary; and it may be doubted if time can ever make it venerable. In justice to its unfortunate architect, Wilkins, it must, nevertheless, 247 be added that his work was done under most unfavourable restrictions. He was vexatiously hampered as to space, and Carlton House having been demolished, it was an express condition that he should avail himself of its fine Corinthian portico.

The only other building near Charing Cross which merits notice is St. Martin's Church. This, however, will better be reserved for treatment on some future occasion. But Spring Garden, or Gardens, part of which has already disappeared under the new Admiralty buildings, requires and deserves a final paragraph. It lies to the southwest of the Cross, and according to old definitions had a frontage extending from the end of the Haymarket to Wallingford House (the present Admiralty). In the days of James I. and Charles I. it was a pleasure-ground attached to Whitehall Palace, taking its name from one of those jets d'eau, the delight of seventeenth century topiarians, which suddenly sprinkled the visitor who unwittingly pressed it with his foot. It contained butts, a bathing-pond, and apparently part of the St. James's Park menagerie, since the State papers contain an order under date of the 31st January, 1626, for payment to Philip, Earl of Montgomery, of £72 5s. 10d. for 'keeping 248 the Spring Gardens and the beasts and fowls there.' One of the favourite amusements of the place was bowling, and it was while Charles was watching the players with his favourite Steenie, who lived at this date in Wallingford House, that an oft related incident took place:--'The Duke put on his hat; one Wilson, a Scotchman, first kissing the Duke's hand, snatched it off, saying, "Off with your hat before the King!" Buckingham, not apt to restrain his feelings, kicked the Scotchman; but the King, interfering, said, "Let him alone, George; he is either mad or a fool." "No, sir," replied the Scotchman, "I am a sober man; and if your majesty would give me leave I will tell you that of this man which many know, and none dare speak."'

Whether his majesty permitted the proffered revelation, so significant of the popular estimate of Buckingham, history has not recorded. But the garden at this time (1628) must have been private, for it was not until two years later that Charles threw it open by proclamation, appointing one Simon Osbaldeston 'keeper of the King's Garden called the Spring Garden and of His Majesty's Bowling-green there.' Four years after, it had grown so 'scandalous and insufferable' a resort that he closed it again. It must, however, 249 have been reopened, for in June, 1649, Mr. Evelyn tells us that he 'treated divers Ladies of my relations, in Spring Garden;' and though Cromwell shut it up once more, it could not have been for long, as ten years after Evelyn's date it was still offering its sheltering thickets to love-makers, and its neats' tongues and bad Rhenish to wandering epicures.

With the Restoration ends its history as a pleasure-ground. To the disgust of the dwellers at Charing Cross, houses began to arise upon it; and its frequenters migrated to the newer 'Spring Garden' at Vauxhall. By 1772, when Lord Berkeley was permitted to build over the so-called 'Wilderness,' its last traces had disappeared. But 'the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,' and Lord Berkeley's house in its turn has now made way for the office of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and that again for the London County Council.

As a locality Spring Gardens--the Spring Gardens of brick and mortar--has been unusually favoured with distinguished inhabitants. Here Cromwell is said to have had a house; and it was 'at one Thomson's,' next door to the Bull Head Tavern, in the thoroughfare leading to the park, that his Latin secretary, John Milton, 250 wrote his 'Joannis Philippi Angli Responsio,' etc. Colley Cibber's home, for several years, was hard by; so also was the lodging occupied by the author of the 'Seasons,' when he first came to London to negotiate his poem of 'Winter.' In Buckingham Court lived and died sprightly Mrs. Centlivre, whose husband (her third) was yeoman of the mouth to Anne and George I. Locket's ordinary--the 'Lackets' of my Lord Foppington and the fine gentlemen of Vanbrugh's day--stood on the site of Drummond's Bank. Two doors from it, towards Buckingham Court, was the famous 'Rummer' Tavern kept by Matthew Prior's uncle, Samuel Pryor, also or formerly landlord of that Rhenish Wine House in Cannon Row where Dorset first discovered the clever young student of Horace whom he helped to turn into a statesman and ambassador.^[71] The 'Rummer' appears in Hogarth's 'Night' ('Four Times of the Day,' 1738), which gives a view of the statue with the houses behind. Hogarth's 'Rummer,' however, is on the left, whereas the tavern (according to Cunningham) was, after 1710, removed to the right or Northumberland House side. Probably 251 in the plate, as in the one of Covent Garden in the same series, the view was reversed in the process of engraving.

Hogarth's name recalls another memory. It was in an auctioneer's room in Spring Gardens (now part of the offices of the London County Council) that the Society of Artists of Great Britain held their famous second exhibition of 1761, for the catalogue of which Wale and Hogarth made designs. Hogarth was also a prominent exhibitor, sending, among other oil paintings, 'The Lady's Last Stake' (Mr. Huth's), the 'Election Entertainment' (Soane Museum), and the luckless 'Sigismunda,' the last of which is now gaining, in the National Gallery, some of the reputation which was denied to it in the painter's lifetime.

No very material addition, in the way of supplementary information, can now be made to the frequently reprinted Life of Gay in Johnson's 'Poets,' or to the genial and kindly sketch in Thackeray's 'English Humourists.'^[72] John Gay was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and baptized on the 16th September at the Old Church of that town. He came of an ancient but impoverished family, being the younger son of William Gay, who lived at the 'Red Cross,' a house in Joy Street, which, judging from the church-rate paid by its occupants, must have been 253 one of the best of the Barnstaple dwellings. He lost his father in 1695, his mother--whose maiden name was Hanmer--having died in the previous year. He thus became an orphan at the early age of ten, and in all probability fell into the care of a Barnstaple uncle, Thomas Gay. He was educated at the free grammar school of his native place, where his master was one Rayner, afterwards succeeded by the 'Robert Luck, A.M.,' whose 'Miscellany of New Poems' was published in April, 1736 (four years after Gay's death), by Edward Cave. One of its pieces was a Latin version of Prior's 'Female Phaeton,' and the author, in a rhymed English introduction to his work, inscribed to Gay's patron, Charles Douglas, Duke of Queensberry and Dover, sought to associate himself with his former pupil's metrical proficiency:--

Moreover, it is asserted that Gay's dramatic turn was stimulated by the plays which the Barnstaple boys were in the habit of performing under this rhyming pedagogue. Of his schooldays, however, nothing is known with precision; but it is 254 clear from his subsequent career that he somewhere obtained more than a bowing acquaintance with the classics. There is still preserved, in the 'Forster Library' at South Kensington, a large paper copy of Maittaire's 'Horace' (Tonson and Watts, 1715), which contains his autograph, and is copiously annotated in his beautiful handwriting. This of itself should be sufficient to refute the aspersions sometimes cast upon his scholarship; for it affords unanswerable evidence that, even at thirty, and perhaps at a much later period, he remained a diligent student of the charming lyrist and satirist, who, above all others, commends himself to the attention of idle men. In his youth, however, it must be assumed that Gay's indolence was more strongly developed than his application, for his friends could find no better opening for him than that of apprentice to a London silk mercer. With this vocation he was speedily dissatisfied. Dr. Hill Burton, in his 'History of the Reign of Queen Anne,' implies that he ran away; but there is nothing to show that he took any step of so energetic a character. His nephew, the Rev. Joseph Baller, in the little publication entitled 'Gay's Chair,' explains that, 'not being able to bear the confinement of a shop,' his uncle became depressed in spirits and 255 health, and therefore returned to his native town, taking up his residence, not, as before, with Thomas Gay, but with his mother's brother, the Rev. John Hanmer, the Barnstaple Nonconformist minister.

That Gay should have found the littering of polished counters with taffeties and watered tabbies an uncongenial employment, is not surprising,--especially if thereto be added that thankless service of those feminine gadabouts who (as Swift says in the 'City Shower') 'pretend to cheapen Goods, but nothing buy.' Yet it is to be feared that the lack of energy which was his leading characteristic would have equally disposed him against any sustained or laborious occupation. When his health was restored, he went back to town, living for some time (according to Mr. Baller^[73]) 'as a private gentleman'--a statement which is scarcely reconcilable with the modest walk in life his family had selected for him. Already he is supposed to have made some spasmodic essays in literature; and the swarming taverns and coffee-houses of the metropolis afforded easy opportunities of access to notabilities of all sorts. He had besides some friends already established 256 in London. William Fortescue, Pope's correspondent, and later Master of the Rolls, had been his schoolmate at Luck's; while another of Luck's alumni was Aaron Hill, the playwright. According to a time-honoured tradition, Gay acted for some time as Hill's secretary. But Hill himself was only embarking in letters when, in May, 1708, Gay published, as an eight leaf folio, his first poem of 'Wine,' the purport of which may be gathered from the--

of its motto,--a moot theory which seems to have 'exercised' the author throughout his lifetime, since he is still discussing it in his last letters. 'I continue to drink nothing but water,' he tells Swift two years before his death, 'so that you can't require any poetry from me.'^[74] The publisher of 'Wine' was William Keble, at the Black-Spread-Eagle in Westminster Hall, and it was also pirated by Henry Hills of the 'brown sheets and scurvy letter,' referred to in 257 Gay's subsequent 'Epistle to Bernard Lintott.' 'Wine' professes to 'draw Miltonic air,' but the atmosphere inhaled is more suggestive of the 'Splendid Shilling' of John Philips. Gay did not reprint the poem in his subscription edition of 1720, perhaps because of its blank verse; but the concluding lines, which describe the breaking up of a 'midnight Modern Conversation' at the Devil Tavern by Temple Bar, already exhibit some of the more prominent characteristics of his later efforts:

As it is expressly stated that the Bordeaux--the particular vintage specified--was paid for, it is clear that, at this time, Gay must have succeeded 258 in finding either a purse or a patron. It is equally clear from his next ascertained production that he had already acquired some familiarity with the world of letters. A year after the publication of 'Wine,' Steele established the 'Tatler;' and in May, 1711, when the 'Spectator' was two months old, Gay obliged the Town with his impressions of 'the Histories and Characters of all our Periodical Papers, whether Monthly, Weekly or Diurnal,' in a threepenny pamphlet, entitled 'The Present State of Wit, in a Letter to a Friend in the Country.' This, which Mr. Arber has reprinted in volume vi. of his 'English Garner,' is of more than fugitive interest. It disclaims politics upon the ground that it does not care 'one farthing either for Whig or Tory,' but it refers to the 'Examiner' as 'a Paper which all Men, who speak without Prejudice, allow to be well Writ.' At this time Swift apparently knew nothing of his critic, for he tells Stella that 'the author seems to be a Whig.' ... 'Above all things, he praises the "Tatlers" and "Spectators;" and I believe Steele and Addison were privy to the printing of it. Thus is one treated by these impudent dogs' [with whom his relations were strained]. Apart from his disclaimer of politics, nevertheless, Gay, if he was anything, was a 259 Tory, and Swift was wrong. But Gay was evidently well informed about the secret history of Steele's ventures, and he gives an excellent account of the 'Esquire's [i.e. Bickerstaff's] Lucubrations.' 'He has indeed rescued it [Learning] out of the hands of Pedants, and Fools, and discover'd the true method of making it amiable and lovely to all mankind.^[75] In the dress he gives it, 'tis a most welcome guest at Tea-tables and Assemblies, and it is relish'd and caressed by the Merchants on the Change; accordingly, there is not a Lady at Court, nor a Banker in Lumbard-Street, who is not verily perswaded, that Captain Steele is the greatest Scholar, and best Casuist, of any Man in England.' From other passages it is also manifest that the writer (like Swift) knew who was Steele's unnamed colleague, for he speaks of Addison's assistance as 'no longer a Secret,' and compares the conjunction of the two friends to that of Somers and Halifax 'in a late Reign.' It may consequently be concluded that he had at least made Steele's acquaintance, and that the set of the 'Tatlers' in four volumes on royal paper, which Tonson at this time transmitted to Gay 260 'by Mr. Steel's Orders,' is at once a confirmation of the fact and a tacit recognition of the acceptable compliments contained in 'J. G.'s' 'Present State of Wit.'

'Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff,' however, was not the only notability to whom Gay had become known. In July, 1711, we find Pope sending Henry Cromwell his 'service to all my few friends, and to Mr. Gay in particular,' and in the same year Gay wrote the already mentioned 'Epistle to Bernard Lintott,' which contained, among other things, reference to the 'harmonious Muse' of the young author of the 'Pastorals' and the recently-issued 'Essay on Criticism.'

sang this panegyrist in one of those triplets that Swift abominated. But Pope, who saw the lines in manuscript, accepted the flattering unction without reserve, and the epistle accordingly, in the following May (1712), made its appearance in Lintott's famous 'Rape of the Lock' Miscellany, to which Gay also contributed the Story of Arachne from Ovid. He was still, it seems, unknown to the general public, for the contemporary announcement of the book, while 261 giving bold advertisement to such lesser lights as Fenton, Broome, and Henry Cromwell, refrains from including his name among the eminent hands who contributed to the collection. Nor is it probable that his reputation had been greatly served by the 'tragi-comical farce' he had issued a week or two before under the title of 'The Mohocks,'--i.e., the midnight revellers whose real, or imaginary, misdeeds were at that time engaging public attention. It was dedicated to John Dennis the critic, who was informed, in his own vocabulary, that its subject was 'Horrid and Tremendous,' that it was conceived 'according to the exactest Rules of Dramatick Poetry,' and that it was based upon his own 'Appius and Virginia.' Notwithstanding an intentionally ambiguous title-page,^[76] it was never acted, and its interest, like others of Gay's efforts, is purely temporary.

Before 1712 had ended, Pope was able to congratulate 262 his new ally upon what promised to be a material stroke of good fortune. He was appointed 'Secretary or Domestic Steward' to the Duchess of Monmouth,--that 'virtuous and excellent lady,' as Evelyn calls her, whose husband had been beheaded in the year of Gay's birth. The exact amount of dependence implied by this office is obscure, and it is differently estimated by different narrators. It is more material to note that Gay must already have been engaged upon his next poetical effort, perhaps his first serious one, the Georgic called 'Rural Sports,' which he inscribed to Pope. This was published by Tonson on the 13th January, 1713. To the reader of the post-Wordsworthian age, its merit is not obtrusive, and Johnson anticipated the toujours bien, jamais mieux of Madame Guizot, when he described it as 'never contemptible, nor ever excellent.' Mr. Underhill, indeed, goes so far as to deny it any experimental knowledge of country life; and, as a matter of fact, Gay himself admits that he had long been a town-dweller. Still, his childhood must have been passed among rural scenes, and it is by no means certain that if he had written his verses at Barnstaple he would--writing as he did under Anna Augusta--have written them in a different way. We suspect 263 that the germ of the objection, as often, is to be traced, not so much to the poem itself, as to certain preconceived shortcomings in its author. Johnson's disbelief in Goldsmith's ability to distinguish between a cow and a horse no doubt coloured his appreciation of the 'Animated Nature;' and Swift (whom Mr. Underhill quotes) doubted if Gay could tell an oak from a crab tree. 'You are sensible,' Swift went on, 'that I know the full extent of your country skill is in fishing for roaches, or gudgeons at the highest.' With such a testimony before us, criticism of 'Rural Sports' easily becomes a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, it deserves more consideration than it has received.

Apart from the production at Drury Lane, in May, 1713, of a deplorable play, 'The Wife of Bath,' and the contribution to Steele's 'Guardian' of two brightly written papers on 'Flattery' and 'Dress' (Nos. 11 and 149), Gay's next ascertained work was 'The Fan' (December). It is one of the contradictions of criticism that this poor and ineffectual poem should have been received with greater indulgence than the relatively far superior 'Rural Sports.' Gay's mythology is never very happy (Mr. Elwin roundly styles it 'stupid'), and he always writes best with his 264 eye on the object. Pope, however, professed to be interested in 'The Fan,' and even touched himself on that 'little modish machine' in parts,--circumstances which give it a slender vitality. A week or two later appeared Steele's 'Poetical Miscellany,' in which Gay is represented by 'A Contemplation on Night,' 'A Thought on Eternity,' and by a pair of elegies ('Panthea' and 'Araminta'). But his first individual performance, 'The Shepherd's Week,' belongs to the early part of 1714. This again is closely connected with his friendship with Pope. Pope, smarting under the praise which Tickell had given in the 'Guardian' to the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips, and not content with perfidiously reviewing Philips himself in the same periodical, now contrived to induce the author of 'Rural Sports' to aid the cause by burlesquing his rival in a sequence of sham eclogues, in which he was to exhibit the Golden Age with the gilt off, 'after the true ancient guise of Theocritus,' or, in plainer words, by representing it in its blowzed and unkempt reality, to cast merited ridicule upon the 'mild Arcadians' of the period. 'Thou wilt not find my Shepherdesses'--says the Author's 'Proeme'--'idly piping on oaten Reeds, but milking the Kine, tying up the 265 Sheaves, or if the Hogs are astray driving them to their Styes. My Shepherd gathereth none other Nosegays but what are the growth of our own Fields, he sleepeth not under Myrtle shades, but under a Hedge, nor doth he vigilantly defend his Flocks from Wolves [this was a palpable hit at Philips!] because there are none.' Like Fielding's 'Joseph Andrews,' the execution of 'The Shepherd's Week' went far beyond its avowed purpose of mere raillery. Wheresoever and howsoever acquired, Gay's little idylls abound with interesting folk-lore and closely-studied rural scenes. Bowzybeus, the fiddler, delights his audience with 'Chevy Chace' and the 'Children of the Wood.' Bumkinet and Grubbinol sing 'Patient Grissel,' and the 'Gillian of Croydon' of the popular Mr. D'Urfey;^[77] Hobnelia burns hazel-nuts to find her sweetheart; Marian, with fateful generosity, gives Colin Clout a pocket knife with a posy on it; while Buxoma, whose favourite fare is the 'White-pot thick' which was the culinary glory of Sir Roger de Coverley's 266 ancestress--Buxoma plays 'Hot Cockles' with Cuddy:

But perhaps the most suggestive old-time touches--touches not without a kindly satire--occur in the 'Dirge' of Blouzelinda, where the parish-priest, in consideration of the ten-shilling sermon fee,

and the lads and lasses fence her last resting-place around with wicker--

From a biographical point of view, however, the most interesting part of 'The Shepherd's Week' is its dedicatory prologue to Bolingbroke, a circumstance which, according to Swift, constituted that 'original sin' against the Court which afterwards interfered so much with Gay's prospects of preferment. But its allusions also show that the former mercer's apprentice had already made the acquaintance of the 'skilful 267 Leach' Arbuthnot, and probably of some gentler critics, whose favour was of greater importance. 'No more,' says the poet,

'Blooming Hide, with eyes so rare,' was Lady Jane Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, and elder sister of the Catherine who was subsequently to be Gay's firm friend.

The Scriblerus Club, to which Pope had introduced him, and for which he is said to have acted as Secretary, had also done Gay the greater service of securing him a powerful ally in Swift, and it was doubtless to his connection with this famous association, of which Lord Oxford was an occasional member, that he was indebted for his next stroke of good fortune. By June, 1714, he had resigned, or been dismissed from, his position in the household of the Duchess of Monmouth. But in that month, with the aid of 268 his new friends, he was appointed Secretary to Lord Clarendon, then Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Hanover, and there exists a brief rhymed appeal or 'Epigrammatical Petition' from the impecunious poet to Lord Oxford, in his capacity as Lord Treasurer, for funds to enable him to enter upon his functions.

He got, not without difficulty, and probably through the instrumentality of Arbuthnot, who handed in his memorial, a grant of £100, for his outfit; and he also got, from Swift in Ireland, a letter of fatherly advice exhorting him to learn to be a manager, to mind his Latin, to look up Aristotle upon Politics and Grotius 'De Jure Belli et Pacis.' For a brief space we must imagine him strutting in his fine clothes through the clipped avenues of Herrenhausen, yawning over the routine life of the petty German Court, 269 and perfecting himself in the diplomatic arts of 'bowing profoundly, speaking deliberately, and wearing both sides of his long periwig before.' Then the death of Queen Anne put an end to all these halcyon days. What was worse, the 'Shepherd's Week,' as already stated, had been dedicated to Bolingbroke, and Bolingbroke--ill-luck would have it--was not in favour with Her Most Gracious Majesty's successor. In this juncture, as a course which 'could do no harm,' Pope, who seems always to have treated Gay with unfailing affection, counselled his dejected friend 'to write something on the King, or Prince, or Princess,' and Arbuthnot said ditto to Pope. Gay, cheering up accordingly, set about a formal 'Epistle to a Lady [probably Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk]: Occasion'd by the arrival of Her Royal Highness [i.e. the Princess of Wales, whom he had seen at Hanover].' In this he takes opportunity to touch plaintively upon the forlorn hopes of needy suitors:

270

The only appreciable result of this ingenuous appeal was that Their Royal Highnesses came to Drury Lane in February, 1715, to witness Gay's next dramatic effort, the tragi-comi-pastoral farce of 'The What d' ye Call it,' a piece after the fashion of Buckingham's 'Rehearsal,' inasmuch as it parodies the popular tragedies of the day, and even roused the ire of Steele by taking liberties with Addison's 'Cato.' Without the 'Key' which was speedily prepared by Theobald and Griffin the actor, its allusions must at first have fallen rather flat upon an uninstructed audience, especially as its action was grave and its images comic. Gay's matter-of-fact friend, Cromwell, who saw the gestures but, being deaf, could not hear the words, naturally found it hopelessly unintelligible. But it brought its author a hundred pounds, and it contains one of his most musical songs, ''Twas when the seas were roaring.' A few months after its publication in book form, Lord Burlington sent the poet into Devonshire, an expedition which he commemorated in a pleasant tributary epistle published in 1715 with the title of 'A Journey to Exeter.' He had two travelling companions, no needless precaution when Bagshot Heath swarmed with 'broken gamesters' who had taken to the 271 road, and he describes delightfully his impressions de voyage,--the fat and garrulous landlord at Hartley-Row, the red trout and 'rich metheglin' at Steele's borough of Stockbridge, the 'cloak'd shepherd' on Salisbury Plain, the lobsters and 'unadulterate wine' at Morecombe-lake,^[80] and last of all, the female barber at Axminster:

Incidentally, we learn that Gay could draw more or less, for he sketches the 'eyeless' faces of his fellow travellers asleep in two elbow chairs at Dorchester. Also that, at thirty, he was already stout:

It must have been about this time that Gay composed another poem, somewhat akin to the Exeter epistle, inasmuch as both were probably 272 influenced by the verses on 'Morning' and 'A City Shower,' which Swift had contributed to Steele's 'Tatler.' Indeed, in the Preface to 'Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared at the end of January, 1716, Gay specially refers to hints given to him by Dr. Swift. The theme is an unexpected one for an author whose tastes were certainly not pedestrian ('any lady with a coach and six horses would carry you to Japan,' wrote the Dean later); but it has still its attraction to the antiquary and the student of the early eighteenth century. Every one who wishes to realize the London of the first George, with its signs and its street cries (that ramage de la ville which candid Will. Honeycomb preferred to larks and nightingales), its link boys and its chairmen, its sweeps, small-coal men, milk-maids, Mohocks, and the rest, must give his days and nights to the study of 'Trivia.' He will obtain valuable expert advice as to the ceremony of giving or refusing the wall; learn to distinguish and divide between a Witney Roquelaure and a Kersey Wrap-Rascal; and, it may be, discover to his astonishment that there were oiled umbrellas before Jonas Hanway. And here may appropriately come in the poet's warnings of wet weather: 273

Here also, to compare with Swift, is the 'Morning' of Gay:

274

It is consoling to think that Gay made some £40 by this eighteen-penny poem, and £100 more by the subscriptions which Pope and others, always jealously watching over his interests, obtained to a large paper edition.^[81] But it is impossible to commend his next production, of which, indeed, it is suspected that he did no more than bear the blame. Although he signed the advertisement of the comedy entitled 'Three Hours after Marriage,' it is pretty sure that he had Pope and Arbuthnot for active collaborators. Whether Pope libelled Dennis as 'Sir Tremendous,' or Arbuthnot Woodward, or Gay himself the Duchess of Monmouth as the very incidental 'Countess of Hippokekoana' (Ipecacuanha?)--are questions scarcely worthy of discussion now. It is sufficient that the piece was both gross and 275 silly. It failed ignominiously on the boards in January, 1717, and is not likely to be consulted in type except by such fanatics of the fugitive as George Steevens, who reprinted it in the 'Additions to Pope' of 1776.

During all this period Gay seems to have been vaguely expecting Court favour, and to have suffered most of the discouragements of hope deferred. Yet, if the Court neglected his pretensions--and it nowhere appears that they were very well grounded--he always found friends whose kindness took a practical form. Lord Burlington, as we have seen, had sent him to Exeter; in 1717, Mr. Pulteney carried him to Aix as his Secretary, a trip which furnished the occasion for a second Epistle. Then, in 1718, he went with Lord Harcourt to Cockthorpe in Oxfordshire, where befell that pretty tragedy of the two haymakers struck dead by lightning, which sentimental Mr. Pope made the subject of a fine and famous letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who, unluckily for sentiment, received it in anything but a sentimental spirit. Both the journeys to Aix and Exeter were reprinted in the grand quarto edition of Gay's poems which Tonson and Lintott published in 1720, with a frontispiece by the illustrious William Kent, and 276 with a list of subscribers rivalling in number and exceeding in interest that prefixed to the Prior of 1718. Those munificent patrons of literature, the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, took fifty copies each! In the second volume were included a number of epistles and miscellaneous pieces, some of which were published for the first time, as well as a new pastoral tragedy called 'Dione.' One of the ballads, 'Sweet William's Farewell to Black Ey'd Susan,' was long popular, and is still justly ranked among the best efforts of the writer's muse. Of the thousand pounds which Gay cleared over this venture his friends hoped he would make provident use, suggesting purchase of an annuity, investment in the funds, and so forth. But Craggs had given him some South Sea Stock, and to this he added his new windfall, becoming in short space master of £20,000. Again his well-wishers clustered about him with prudent counsels. At least, said easygoing Fenton, secure as much as will make you certain of 'a clean shirt, and a shoulder of mutton every day.' But the 'most refractory, honest, good-natur'd man,' as Swift calls him, was not to be so advised. He was seized by the South Sea madness, and promptly lost both principal and profits.

Among the other names on the subscription 277 list of the volumes of 1720 are two which have a special attraction in Gay's life, for they are those of his kindest friends, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry. The lady was the charming and wayward Catherine Hyde,--the 'Kitty' whose first appearance at Drury Lane playhouse as a triumphant beauty of eighteen Prior had celebrated in some of his brightest and airiest verses, and whose picture, as a milkmaid of quality, painted by Charles Jervas at a later date, is to be seen at the National Portrait Gallery. As already stated, Gay had written of her sister Jane (by this time Countess of Essex) as far back as 1714; and it may be that her own acquaintance with him dated from the same period. In any case, after her marriage to the Duke of Queensberry in 1720, she appears to have taken Gay under her protection. 'He [Gay] is always with the Duchess of Queensberry'--writes Mrs. Bradshaw to Mrs. Howard in 1721;^[82] and five years afterwards the poet himself tells Swift that he 278 has been with his patrons in Oxfordshire [Stoney Middleton] and at Petersham and 'wheresoever they would carry me.' In the interval he is helping Congreve to nurse his gout 'at the Bath,' or living almost altogether with Lord Burlington at Chiswick or Piccadilly or Tunbridge Wells, or acting as secretary to Pope at Twickenham ('which you know is no idle charge'), or borrowing sheets from Jervas to entertain Swift in those Whitehall lodgings which had been granted to him by the Earl of Lincoln in 1722, and were taken from him by Sir Robert Walpole in 1729. It says much for the charm of his character that he knew how to acquire and how to retain friends so constant and so diverse. But though his life sounds pleasant in the summary, it must have involved humiliations which would have been intolerable to a more independent man. According to Arbuthnot, the Burlingtons sometimes left their protégé in want of the necessaries of life, and neither they nor his other great friends were very active to procure him preferment. 'They wonder,' says Gay plaintively to Swift in 1722, 'at each other for not providing for me; and I wonder at them all.' From a letter which he wrote to Pope two years later, it is nevertheless clear that somebody 279 had given him a lottery commissionership worth £150 per annum, so that, for a man whose claims were not urgent, he can hardly be said to have been culpably neglected.

Previously to his appointment as a lottery commissioner he had been seriously ill. The loss of his South Sea Stock preyed upon his spirits; and his despondency 'being attended with the cholic'--in the unvarnished language of the 'Biographia Britannica'--'brought his life in danger.' Upon his recovery, and pending the postponed advancement he was always 'lacking' ('the Court keeps him at hard meat,' wrote Swift in 1725), he produced another play, 'The Captives,' which ran for a week in January, 1724, the third or author's night being expressly commanded by his old patrons, the Prince and Princess of Wales. Then, at the request of the Princess, he set to work upon the 'Fables' by which his reputation as a writer mainly survives. 'Gay is writing Tales for Prince William,' Pope tells Swift. After many delays, partly in production by the press, partly owing to Gay's own dilatory habits, the first series appeared in 1727,^[83] 280 and was well received, although, if Swift is to be believed, their 'nipping turns' upon courtiers were not best welcomed where the poet most needed encouragement. To this it is perhaps to be attributed that when George II. came at last to the throne nothing better was found for Gay than the post of gentleman-usher to the little Princess Louisa--a child under three. By this time he was more than forty, and he had self-respect enough to think himself too 'far advanced in life.' He therefore politely declined the nomination. With this, however, his long-deferred expectations definitely vanished. 'I have no prospect,' he wrote with tardy enlightenment to Swift, 'but in depending wholly upon myself, and my own conduct. As I am used to disappointments, I can bear them; but as I can have no more hopes, I can no more be disappointed, so that I am in a blessed condition.'

Strangely enough, when these words were penned in October, 1727, he had already completed what was to be his greatest dramatic success, the famous 'Beggar's Opera,' which, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields on the 29th of January, 1728, for a season overthrew Italian song,--'that Dagon of the Nobility and Gentry, 281 who had so long seduced them to idolatry,' as the 'Companion to the Playhouse' puts it,--and made its Author's name a household word. How it first occurred to Swift what 'an odd pretty sort of thing a Newgate Pastoral might make;' how friends hesitated, and Cibber rejected, and the public rapturously applauded; how it was sung at street corners, and painted on screens; how it procured its 'Polly' (Lavinia Fenton) a coronet, and made Rich (the manager) gay, and Gay (the author) rich--all these things are the stock in trade of literature. At Mr. John Murray's in Albemarle Street may still be seen one of the three pictures which William Hogarth painted of that all conquering company, and which, years afterwards, was engraved by another William--William Blake. The Coryphæus of the highway (Walker) appears in the centre, while 'Lucy' (Mrs. Egleton) pleads for him to the left, and 'Polly' (Miss Fenton) to the right. Rich and the Duke of Bolton, who married 'Polly,' are among the spectators. Scandal, in the person of John, Lord Hervey, adds that the opera owed a part of its popularity to something in the dilemma of Macheath 'between his twa Deborahs' which irresistibly suggested the equally equivocal position of Walpole 282 between Catherine Shorter and Molly Skerret. This is probably exaggerated, as is also the aid which Gay is reported to have received from Pope and others,^[84] but it accounts in a measure for the fate which befell Gay's next enterprise.

That some attempt to perpetuate so signal a success as the 'Beggar's Opera' should not be made was scarcely in the nature of things; and Gay set speedily about the preparation of a sequel, to which he gave the name of the popular heroine of the earlier piece. But 'Polly' was saved from the common fate of continuations by the drastic action of the Lord Chamberlain, taken, it is surmised, upon the instruction of Walpole. When it was almost ready for rehearsal, the representation was prohibited. The result of this not very far-sighted step on the part of the authorities was of course to invest its publication as a book (1729) with an unprecedented and wholly fictitious interest. Friends on all sides, and especially those opposed to the Court, strained every nerve to promote the sale. The Duchess of Marlborough (Congreve's 283 Henrietta) gave £100 for a copy; and the Duchess of Queensberry, who had the temerity to solicit subscriptions within the very precincts of St. James's, was forbidden to return to them. Thereupon the Duke, nothing loth, threw up his appointments as Vice Admiral of Scotland and Lord of the Bedchamber, and followed his lady, who delivered a Parthian shaft in the shape of a very indiscreet and saucy letter to His Majesty King George II. In all this, it is plain that Gay's misfortune was simply made the instrument of political antagonisms: but, for the moment, his name was on every lip. 'The inoffensive John Gay'--writes Arbuthnot to Swift under date of March 19, 1729--'is now become one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe, the terror of the ministers, the chief author of the "Craftsman," and all the seditious pamphlets, which have been published against the Government. He has got several turned out of their places; the greatest ornament of the court banished from it for his sake;^[85] another great lady [Mrs. Howard] in danger of being Chassé [sic] likewise; about seven or eight duchesses 284 pressing forward, like the antient circumcelliones in the church, who shall suffer martyrdom on his account first. He is the darling of the city . . . I can assure you, this is the very identical John Gay, whom you formerly knew, and lodged with in Whitehall two years ago.' The gross result was that Gay gained about £1200 by the publication of 'Polly' as a six shilling quarto, of which Bowyer, the printer, in one year struck off 10,500 copies; by the representation of the 'Beggar's Opera' he had made, according to his own account, 'between £700 and £800' to Rich's £4000.

During a great part of 1728 Gay resided at Bath with the Duchess of Marlborough. After the prohibition of 'Polly,' he appears, as usual, to have fallen ill, and to have been tenderly nursed by Arbuthnot. 'I may say, without vanity, his life, under God, is due to the unwearied endeavors and care of your humble servant,' writes this devoted friend to Swift. Then the Queensberrys took formal charge of John Gay and henceforth he lived either at their town house in Burlington Gardens (where now stands the Western Branch of the Bank of England), or at their pleasant country-seat of Amesbury in Wiltshire. The Duke kept the poet's 285 money; the Duchess watched over the poet and his wardrobe.^[86] 'I was a long time,' he says in 1730, 'before I could prevail with her to let me allow myself a pair of shoes with two heels; for I had lost one, and the shoes were so decayed, that they were not worth mending.' Elsewhere it is--'I am ordered by the duchess to grow rich in the manner of Sir John Cutler.^[87] I have nothing, at this present writing, but my frock that was made at Salisbury, and a bob-perriwig.' In an earlier paper in these volumes^[88] we have given some account of the joint letters which at this period Gay and his kind protectress wrote to Swift in Ireland, and they present a most engaging picture of the alliance between the author 286 of 'The Hare and Many Friends' and the grande dame de par le monde of the last century. Most of them were written from Amesbury (where nothing but a summer house now remains of the buildings as they were in Gay's time), and their main theme is the invitation of Swift to England. The final epistle of the series is dated November 16, 1732; and in this Gay reports that he has 'come to London before the family to follow his own inventions,' which included the production of his recently written Opera of 'Achilles.' A few days later, he was attacked by a constitutional malady to which he had long been subject, and died on the 4th of December. After lying in state in Exeter Change, he was (says Arbuthnot, who had again nursed and attended him) 'interred at Westminster-Abbey, as if he had been a peer of the realm;' and the Queensberrys erected a handsome monument to his memory. By other friends he was mourned as sincerely, if not as sumptuously. Pope, who had always loved him, felt a genuine sorrow, and five days elapsed before Swift at Dublin could summon courage to open the boding letter which announced his death. His fortune, of which his patrons had made themselves the voluntary stewards, amounted to about £6000. It was 287 divided between his sisters, Mrs. Baller and Mrs. Fortescue.

His last letter to Swift had ended:--'Believe me, as I am, unchangeable in the regard, love and esteem I have for you.' The words reveal the chief source of his personal charm. He was thoroughly kindly and affectionate, with just that touch of clinging in his character, and of helplessness in his nature, which, when it does not inspire contempt (and Gay's parts save him from that), makes a man the spoiled child of men and the playfellow of women. He had his faults, it is true: he was as indolent as Thomson, as fond of fine clothes as Goldsmith; as great a gourmand as La Fontaine. That he was easily depressed, was probably due in some measure to his inactive life and his uncertain health. But at his best, he must have been a delightfully soothing and unobtrusive companion--invaluable for fêtes and gala days, and equally well adapted for the half lights and unrestrained intercourse of familiar life. 'You will never'--writes Swift to the Duchess of Queensberry, 'be able to procure another so useful, so sincere, so virtuous, so disinterested, so entertaining, so easy, and so humble a friend, as that person whose death all good men lament.' The praise is high, but there is little doubt that 288 it was genuine. Pope's antithetical epitaph, despite the terrible mangling it has received at the hands of Johnson, may also be quoted:

The monument in Westminster Abbey, for which the above was composed, bears, in addition, a flippant and foolish couplet of Gay's own which can only have been--as indeed it is stated to have been--the expression of a momentary mood.

To attempt any detailed examination of Gay's works is unnecessary. Those which are most likely to attract the nineteenth century reader have been mentioned in the course of the foregoing pages. Stripped of the adventitious circumstances which threw the halo of notoriety around them, his two best known plays remain of 289 interest chiefly for their songs,^[89] which have all the qualities songs possess when the writer, besides being a poet, is a musician as well. This lyric faculty is also present in all Gay's lesser pieces, and is as manifest in the ballad on Molly Mog of the 'Rose' Inn at Wokingham, as in 'Black-Ey'd Susan' or ''Twas when the Seas were roaring.' In his longer poems he is always happiest when he is most unconstrained and natural, or treads the terra firma of the world he knows. The 'Fan,' the miscellaneous 'Eclogues,' the 'Epistles,' are all more or less forced and conventional. But exceptions occur even in these. There is a foretaste of Fielding in 'The Birth of the Squire;' and the 'Welcome from Greece' (1720), in which he exhibits Pope's friends assembling to greet him after his successful translation of the 'Iliad,' has a brightness and vivacity of movement, which seems to be the result of an unusually 290 fresh inspiration. It is written, moreover, in an ottava rima stanza far earlier than Tennant's or Frere's or Byron's.^[90] The 'Tales' are mediocre, and generally indelicate; the 'Translations' have no special merit. In the 'Fables' Gay finds a more congenial vocation. The easy octosyllabic measure, not packed and idiomatic like Swift's, not light and ironical like Prior's, but ambling, colloquial, and even a little down-at-heel, after the fashion of the bard himself, 291 suited his habits and his Muse. An uncompromising criticism might perhaps be inclined to hint that these little pieces are by no means faultless; that they are occasionally deficient in narrative art, that they lack real variety of theme, and that they are often wearisome, almost unmanly, in their querulous insistence on the vices of servility and the hollowness of Courts. On the other hand, it must be admitted that they are full of good nature and good sense; and if not characterized by the highest philosophical wisdom, show much humorous criticism of life and practical observation of mankind. They have, too, some other recommendations, which can scarcely be ignored. They have given pleasure to several generations of readers, old and young; and they have enriched the language with more than one indispensable quotation. 'While there is Life, there's Hope,' 'When a Lady's in the Case,' and 'Two of a Trade can ne'er agree,'--are still part of the current coin of conversation.

That 'fine madness' of incongruity which tempted Charles Lamb into laughter at a funeral, led him, at the top of Skiddaw, to think upon the ham-and-beef shop in St. Martin's Lane. Where was this historic ham-and-beef shop? And where, under reconstructions and renewals, is the St. Martin's Lane of Lamb?--the St. Martin's Lane of the last century? 'It butteth,' says honest John Strype in his Stow of 1720, 'on Northumberland House in the Strand, and runneth Northwards beyond Long Acre, and the new Buildings in Cock and Pye Fields.' In other words, it extended from the southern end of the present Little St. Andrew Street (the site of the old Cock and Pye), past Long Acre and St. Martin's Church, to a spot in the Strand then opposite Northumberland House, but now at the entrance of Northumberland Avenue. This was the St. Martin's Lane of 1720; and judging from Evans's map, it was also the St. Martin's Lane 293 of 1799.^[91] Sixty years ago, its limits had become contracted. It had been cut into at Long Acre by a continuation of Cranbourn Street, and its southern boundary was the then newly completed Trafalgar Square. Ten years later still, directories give the southern termination as Chandos Street and Hemings' Row. Hemings' Row--the 'Dirty Lane' of our grandfathers--disappeared in 1889 with the creation of Charing Cross Road, but Chandos Street still ends the eastern side of the Lane, and serves to link the old thoroughfare with Strype's description. For it was just above Chandos Street that stood an ancient turnpike, to which Steele seems to allude in his 'Ramble from Richmond to London.' In that delightful 'Voyage où il vous plaira' he relates how, out of pure idleness, he diverted himself by following in 'an Hack' the hack of a handsome young lady with a mask and a maid. The damsel's chariot was travelling 'through Long-Acre towards St. James's.' 'Thereupon,' says the vivacious essayist, 'we drove for King-street, to save the Pass at St. Martin's-Lane.' At the end of Newport Street and Long Acre the vehicles become entangled, and for a moment 294 he gets a glimpse of his charmer 'with her Mask off.' The chase continues 'in all Parts of the Town' for an hour and a half, when the quarry is discovered to be a 'Silk-Worm,' which is your hackney-coachman's term for those profitable fares 'who ramble twice or thrice a Week from Shop to Shop, to turn over all the Goods . . without buying any thing.' So Captain Richard Steele, after a few more vagrant experiences, goes home to scribble his 'Spectator' thereon (it is No. 454, for Monday, August 11th; 1712), and, if possible, to explain his erratic proceedings to his 'Absolute Governesse' at her new residence in Bloomsbury Square.

The site of the turnpike house here referred to is supposed to have been 28, the first number on the eastern side of the Lane. But the more important buildings were on the western side, and with the western side it is convenient to begin. Just beyond Parr's Bank and the present Free Library was Peter's Court, which Strype describes as 'a very handsome and gentile Place, with good Houses, well contrived, with little Gardens to them,'--a state of things not very easy to conceive at present, as Peter's Court, which must have gone back as far as the Garrick Theatre, and the narrow entrance to which was 295 between Nos. 111 and 110, has now given place to the establishment of Messrs. Chatto and Windus. In Peter's Court, or at its entrance, was one of the many coffee-houses known as 'Tom's,' and even, if we may believe Mr. John Ashton,^[92] the best known of them, although that distinction is generally claimed for 'Tom's' in Russell Street, already referred to in the 'Tour of Covent Garden.'^[93] But the most memorable building in Peter's Court must have been the dancing school which afterwards became the first studio of Monsieur Louis-François Roubillac, the sculptor, who, according to contemporary prints, there carved the statue of Handel in the character of Orpheus which so long ornamented the gardens at Vauxhall. The Handel is said to have been the first original work Roubillac executed in England, and the date of its erection, May, 1738, fixes that of his residence in Peter's Court. How much longer he remained there is unrecorded, but his old studio was subsequently, for a long period, the home of the St. Martin's Lane Academy of which we 296 hear so much in the middle of the last century. At the death of Sir James Thornhill the material of his drawing school in James Street, Covent Garden, came into the hands of his son-in-law, Hogarth. 'Thinking,' says Hogarth, 'that an academy conducted on proper and moderate principle had some use, [I] proposed that a number of artists should enter into a subscription for the hire of a place large enough to admit thirty or forty people to draw after a naked figure.' The former dancing school in Peter's Court exactly answered to these requirements, and Hogarth lent his coadjutors Sir James's furniture. It was in this institution, of which Michael Moser was the treasurer and manager, and of the interior of which Hogarth himself painted a picture, now at Burlington House, that the majority of the artists of the reigns of George II. and George III. received or completed their educations. Reynolds, Ramsay, Zoffany, Wilson, Hayman, Cosway, Roubillac himself, Nollekens, and a host of minor names, were all scholars in this school, whose career of usefulness only ceased with the establishment in 1769 of the Royal Academy, to which its 'anatomical figures, busts, statues, etc.,' were in course of time transferred. 297

After the St. Martin's Lane Academy had vacated its old quarters in Peter's Court, the great room was pulled down and rebuilt as a Friends' Meeting House. Whether it was here that--en route for the ham-and-beef shop--Lamb made those studies of 'uncommunicating muteness,' which he has described so vividly in his 'Essays,' his editors say not. But a Friends' Meeting House continued to occupy the site of Roubillac's old studio until far into the present century, when, with the march of renovation, it moved to the eastern side of the Lane. Beyond the site of Peter's Court is the Duke of York's (formerly the Trafalgar Square) Theatre, which extends over the ground once occupied by Nos. 107 to 103, a space with many artistic memories. Here, for instance, at or 'behind No. 104,' lived Sir James Thornhill, in a large house with a grand allegoric staircase painted by himself. One of his successors was John Van Nost, son of the Van Nost of Piccadilly, who rivalled Cheere in leaden figures, and who was credited with that egregious gilt statue of George I. which once adorned the enclosure at Leicester Fields. Another tenant of the same house was Frank Hayman, Hogarth's crony and co-decorator at Vauxhall, who filled so many eighteenth century books with noses à la Cyrano 298 and spindle-shanks. (His own legs, by the way, were probably his model, if one may judge from those of Viscount Squanderfield in the 'Marriage A-la-Mode,' for whom he was the admitted sitter.) A jovial, careless boon-companion, he grew gouty as he grew older, and though, like Thornhill, he migrated ultimately to Dean Street, Soho, it may well have been in St. Martin's Lane that occurred the incident which Pyne relates in the 'Somerset House Gazette.' When Hayman was engaged upon one of the large canvases for Tyers' New Room next the Rotunda at Vauxhall--it would seem to have been that in which Britannia was represented distributing laurels to certain distinguished officers--the Marquis of Granby, who sat by Tyers' request to the artist, and had heard of his past prowess as a pupil of Broughton, proposed a preliminary, set-to with the gloves. Hayman pleaded that he was old and infirm. But Lord Granby maintained that he, too, was no longer young, and, moreover, that he was out of practice owing to his absence in Germany. The pair began accordingly, and, after a magnificent display of science on either side, Hayman, warming with the game, 'got home' so effectually on the 'bread basket' of the noble and gallant Marquis that they both, being heavy 299 men, came to the ground with a terrific crash. Thereupon Mrs. Hayman (she had been the widow of Frank's friend, Fleetwood, the Drury Lane manager), rushing frantically upon the scene, discovered her husband and the illustrious hero of Minden 'rolling over each other on the carpet, like two enraged bears.'^[94]

The year of Minden fight is 1759, and the date of the hand-to-hand conflict in which the popular warrior, whose bald head and blue uniform decorated half the signs in the kingdom,^[95] figures so ingloriously, must consequently be placed later. But the house 'behind No. 104,' or No. 104 itself, had another resident who is more eminent than either Hayman or Thornhill. In 1753, according to Malone, Sir Joshua Reynolds, then plain 'Mr.,' took up his abode at a house in the Lane described as 'nearly opposite to May's Buildings' (on the eastern side), and 'nearly opposite to May's Buildings' must have been a pretty accurate indication of No. 104. Reynolds had not long returned from Italy, painting, as his franker friends informed him, in a manner 300 that could never succeed, since it was not in the least like the manner of Kneller. Posterity has not confirmed that sagacious prediction. Unfortunately for our paper, however, Reynolds made only a brief stay in St. Martin's Lane, and there is no existent list of his sitters at this date. But the first portrait he painted after his establishment in London was that of his assistant, Giuseppe Marchi, the Italian boy who had accompanied him from Rome, and who, eventually, after a probation in the Peter's Court Academy, became himself an indifferent painter and a capable engraver. It was, in fact, Marchi's picture in a turban and oriental dress, now at Burlington House, which prompted the unfavourable criticism quoted above. No very notable incident concerning Reynolds's residence at No. 104 has been recorded, and in the same year (1753) in which he came to it he moved higher up on the left to No. 5, Great Newport Street, the only other London dwelling he occupied until his final migration to No. 47, Leicester Fields. But it was at St. Martin's Lane that he was joined by his youngest sister, Frances, whose artistic attempts made other people laugh and her brother cry, and who figures in Boswell's pages as the 'Renny dear' of Johnson. 301

sang the great man, in disrespectful parody of Percy's 'Reliques.' He left her a book in his will, and loved her in spite of her fidgetty peculiarities. At this date, however, Johnson was not yet known to Reynolds, whose acquaintance he only made after Reynolds had removed to Great Newport Street.

Four doors beyond No. 104 lived the portrait-painter John Cartwright, a mediocrity whose chief claim to remembrance lies in the circumstance that he had been, while at Rome, the fellow-student of the fantastic genius Henry Fuseli, a circumstance which led the latter, when he took up his abode in town in 1778, to quarter himself upon his old associate. It must have been at No. 100 that Fuseli produced his extraordinary 'Nightmare,' of which the success may be measured by the fact that it produced some five hundred pounds to its publisher and some twenty to its inventor. In No. 100, too, he painted his 'Œdipus and his Daughters,' and planned that Cyclopean enterprise, the illustrated Shakespeare of Boydell. Thackeray thought 302 poorly of that 'black and ghastly gallery,' whose vast atlas folios spelled ruin to the worthy alderman; and a generation accustomed to the accomplished and instructed conceptions of Mr. Edwin Abbey is hardly likely to sympathize greatly with the murky Lears and Macbeths of Fuseli, or even with his 'Titania'--for all that Allan Cunningham compares it with Hogarth's 'Strolling Actresses,' a comparison which, in this connection, has a knell of condemnation. One wonders whether it was from St. Martin's Lane that Fuseli was summoned by Horace Walpole to try his hand at Dryden's Theodore and Honoria--a task surely more in the line of Horace's friend, Lady Di Beauclerk, who did the sublime studies 'in soot water', for the 'Mysterious Mother.'^[96] But in St. Martin's Lane Fuseli continued to reside until 1788, when he married his model, Miss Sophia Rawlins, of Bath, and moved to 72, Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square.

In 1828, and, indeed, for at least a quarter of a century afterwards, No. 96 was a colour-shop, which, in Cunningham's 'Handbook' of 1849 and 1850, the attentive reader is invited to 'observe.' Its tenant previous to 1828 was 303 one Powell, whose mother for many years had made 'a pipe of wine' from a vine nearly a hundred feet long which was attached to the establishment, and which must have been much more remarkable than the historical plant in Bolt Court, from which, in 1784, Dr. Johnson gathered 'three bunches of grapes.' In Powell's time No. 96 was a fine old building whose Queen Anne door-frame was deeply carved with foliage and flowers after the fashion of the doorways in Great Ormond Street; and, like Thornhill's house, it had a painted staircase. This, which represented figures viewing a procession, had been executed about 1732 by a French decorator named Clermont for the notorious empiric, Dr. John Misaubin, to whom, either ironically or in good faith, Fielding inscribed his version of Molière's 'Médecin malgré lui,' known as the 'Mock Doctor.' Misaubin was the son of a French pastor in Spitalfields, and, if we are to take Fielding seriously, a man of parts and hospitality. 'I'd send for Misaubin, and take his pill,' says Bramston's 'Man of Taste'; and, no doubt, a good many 'men of taste' knocked at the Doctor's Queen Anne portal in the Lane. The learned and platitudinous Dr. Trusler, who was briefed by Mrs. Hogarth, affirms that the 304 'meager figure' in Plate V. of the 'Harlot's Progress' is 'Dr. Mizebank, a foreigner.' If so, he cannot, as contended by other commentators, also be the bow-legged dwarf who is wiping his spectacles in the third picture of 'Marriage A-la-Mode.' But seeing that Misaubin died in 1734, it is quite possible that the scene of the Quack Doctor in Hogarth's masterpiece is laid at No. 96; and as he had an Irish wife, it is also possible that in the fierce virago with the hoop, 'spread out'--as Hazlitt says--'like a turkey-cock's feathers,' he was thinking of the Misaubin establishment.^[97] The doctor made a considerable fortune by his nostrums, a fortune which his grandson, after the manner of Hogarth's Rake, promptly squandered, ending his days in brief space, not in Bedlam, but in St. Martin's Workhouse. 305

Close upon No. 96, and turning to the left, came Cecil Court, a somewhat different place from the reputable paved passage, flanked with tall 'mansions,' which now leads from St. Martin's Lane to Charing Cross Road. It was in Cecil Court that Hogarth's mother, a majestic old lady, lived and died, her death being thus chronicled by the 'Gentleman's Magazine': '[June] 11 [1735] Mrs. Hogarth, Mother of the celebrated Mr. Hogarth, of a Fright occasioned by the Fire.' This conflagration, which took place on the 9th, must have been an event for Cecil Court, and was alleged to have been lighted by a certain brandy-selling Mrs. Calloway, who, having been served by her landlord with a notice to quit, determined in revenge to 'warm all her rascally Neighbours,' a resolution which she carried out in a very business-like manner. No fewer than fourteen houses were burned, and one belonging to John Huggins, Esq., late Warden of The Fleet, was 'greatly damaged.' For 'John Huggins, Esq.,' co-criminal with the infamous Bambridge of an earlier paper,^[98] there is little need of pity; but if it is to be inferred that his residence was in the Court itself, it seems clear 306 that the houses must have been of a superior class. Another resident in later years was the father of Wilkie's engraver, Abraham Raimbach; and in Cecil Court, as already stated,^[99] Raimbach himself was born. History has, however, recorded no other notable dwellers in Cecil Court, while concerning the next Court, St. Martin's, it is silent altogether. By this time (1899) the north-western side of St. Martin's Court has been pulled down, and those who seek to recognize in it the 'large handsome Court' of Strype with the 'good new-built Houses' and 'open Square in the Midst' must be endowed with exceptional powers of mental reconstruction. North of St. Martin's Court there are but two sites which concern this paper. One, where the Westminster County Court now stands, is that of the tavern known as New, or Young Slaughter's; the other, which must have been at the entrance to Cranbourn Street, was occupied by the more famous Old Slaughter's. In a house between these two lodged, from 1720 to 1725, that favourite of Addison and Steele, and laughing-stock of Pope and Gay, Ambrose Philips. 'Pastoral Philips,' in spite of what Swift called 307 his 'little flams on Miss Carteret,' has never ranked as a great poetical name, even among the easy eminences of the Georgian era; and certainly to have enriched the language with the epithet 'namby-pamby,' is scarcely the crown which a self-respecting bard should claim of Melpomene. Yet it is difficult not to remember that it was to see Nance Oldfield as 'Andromache' in Philips' 'borrowed play' of the 'Distrest Mother' that Sir Roger de Coverley went in state to Drury Lane Playhouse--a fictitious fact of far greater import than the unquestioned and unvarnished truth that John Kemble, long afterwards, acted its 'Orestes' in a costume borrowed from Talma. And though the sham eclogue which Gay laughed away in the 'Shepherd's Week,' is to-day only a little more forgotten than the 'Shepherd's Week' itself, the 'Persian Tales' which honest Philips did into English from Petis de La Croix were long among the popular stock of pedlars, and the delight, after M. Antoine Galland's 'Arabian Nights,' of generations of schoolboys. One cannot feel wholly ungrateful to the harmless verseman whose highest ambition went no higher--in his arch-tormentor's words--than--

308

But Ambrose Philips and his red stockings have broken the logical order of our progression, an accident which may perhaps justify the farther divergence of referring to Old Slaughter's coffee-house before speaking of its rival and successor, Young Slaughter's. Previous to 1842, when it was pulled down to make room for the prolongation of Cranbourn Street, Old Slaughter's stood close to the southern corner of Great Newport Street, and its number in the Lane was 75.^[100] From a sketch made by Mr. F. W. Fairholt in 1826, it must then have been a comfortable building with bow windows which looked down Long Acre. It dated as far back as 1692, when it was started by the Thomas Slaughter from 309 whom it derived its name, and who kept it for more than seven-and-forty years. Dryden was reported to have frequented it in its early days, and Pope. But its chief customers were the artist-folk of the Lane and its vicinity. Hither from Leicester Fields would come Hogarth, bragging of the new-old theories in the 'Analysis,' and scoffing at the 'grand contorno' of the virtuosi; hither Hayman, and the gold-chaser Moser, and Isaac Ware, the chimney-sweep-turned-architect who translated 'Palladio;' and (from his studio over the way) Roubillac, raving in broken English of the beauties of the Chevalier Bernini. Here, again, would be seen the shrewd Swiss enameller Rouquet, taking notes of the state of the Arts in England for the benefit of Marshal Belle-Isle; and Gravelot, who held that no Englishman could draw; and 'Friar' John Pine of the incised 'Horace,' who had a print-shop at No. 88. Luke Sullivan, the engraver of the 'March to Finchley,' M^cArdell the mezzo-tinter, and Richard Wilson from Covent Garden were also well-known visitors; while in later days, when evening drew on, and the last rays of light faded from the unfinished canvas, the tall ungainly figure of Wilkie would slip in quietly to a remote table and a hurried meal, at 310 which modest repast he would sometimes be joined by a noisier and more demonstrative companion, the Benjamin Robert Haydon, whose ambitious 'Curtius leaping into the Gulf' now adorns a London restaurant. Nor was there wanting a sprinkling of authors to carry on the traditions of Pope and Dryden, for Collins of the 'Odes' is reported to have used this time-honoured hostelry, and Goldsmith refers to its Orators in the 'Essays' as if his knowledge was experimental. Here, too (as everywhere), was to be found Johnson, studying spoken French from the mouths of the French frequenters of the place, and (as always) expressing his opinions in forcible language. The 'fasting Monsieurs'--so he calls them in his 'London'--disgusted him with their hare-brained and irresponsible frivolity. 'For anything I see,' he declared, confirming the previous verdict of a friend, 'foreigners are Fools!'

As already stated, Old Slaughter's came to an end in 1842, being then one hundred and fifty years old. It had attained the mature age of sixty-seven summers before its rival at No. 82, New or Young Slaughter's, came into existence--an existence brief in comparison and relatively undistinguished. Young Slaughter's legend seems 311 limited to the fact that, circa 1765, Smeaton, Solander, Banks, John Hunter, Captain Cook, and certain other scientific or literary men, used it for Club meetings. Upper St. Martin's Lane, as the part north of Long Acre is called, is barren of memories--at all events in the eighteenth century. But over-against Old Slaughter's on the east side was No. 70, where, in 1775, Nathaniel Hone, among other specimens of his skill, exhibited that irreverent picture of Sir Joshua as 'The Pictorial Conjuror displaying the whole Art of Optical Deception,' a composition which, in its first form, had the supplementary discredit of insulting Angelica Kauffmann. Below No. 70, at No. 63, was the entrance to the studio in which Roubillac took refuge after he had quitted Peter's Court, and from which, in 1762, he was buried in St. Martin's churchyard, his successor being his pupil, Nicholas Read, proficient in 'pancake clouds,' whose chief claim to remembrance lies in the tradition that he worked upon the shrouded figure of Death in Roubillac's monument to Mr. Nightingale and his wife in Westminster Abbey. After these the east side becomes uninteresting, except for the residence at No. 60 of Thomas Chippendale, 'Upholder,' whose name is probably better known 312 now than in his own day, though we still seem to be ignorant of the dates of his birth and death. It was from his St. Martin's Lane shop, in 1754, that he put forth his 'Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director,' a sumptuous series of one hundred and sixty copper-plates dedicated to the Earl of Northumberland, and even now not entirely eclipsed by the severer designs of Thomas Sheraton. Some of the courts and side streets may detain us for a moment. In New Street was the 'Golden Head,' from which in 1770, young Flaxman sent a modest 'Portrait of a Gentleman' as his first contribution to the Academy; and it was at the 'Pine Apple' in the same street that Johnson, on coming to town, was wont to seek refreshment. 'I dined (said he) very well for eight-pence, with very good company... Several of them had travelled. They expected to meet every day; but did not know one another's names. It used to cost the rest a shilling, for they drank wine; but I had a cut of meat for six-pence, and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a penny; so that I was quite well served, nay, better than the rest, for they gave the waiter nothing.' At the sign of 'The Cricket Bat' in Duke's Court, was one of the toy-shops where Boydell was in the habit of 313 exhibiting his etchings for sale, while in May's Buildings (where in later years the club called The Eccentrics held its sittings) there existed, according to Foote's 'Taste,' a manufactory of sham Rembrandts and Ostades which deceived the opulent amateur and filled the pockets of the Puffs and Carmines of the day. Probably it was the east side of the old thoroughfare which most merited the title we have borrowed from Allan Cunningham to head these desultory memoranda. If they are here brought to a close, it is by no means because the subject is exhausted, for opposite to the Church, and not far from the turnpike referred to at the beginning of this paper, stood the Watch- or Round-House, an institution which should assuredly be fruitful of anecdote. But even in topography one must draw the line somewhere, and we draw it at this favourite resort of the Georgian nobility and gentry. 'Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire.'

The threadbare dictum of Terentianus Maurus touching books and their destinies, was never more exactly verified than by the story of the record which gives its title to the present paper. In the year 1757 was issued at Rotterdam, by J. and D. Beman and Son of that Batavian city, a little thick octavo of 552 pages, on poor paper with worse type, of which the following is the textual title: 'Mémoires d'un Protestant, Condamné aux Galères de France pour Cause de Religion; écrits par lui même: Ouvrage, dans lequel, outre le récit, des souffrances de l'Auteur depuis 1700 jusqu'en 1713; on trouvera diverses Particularités curieuses, relatives à l'Histoire de ce Temps-là, & une Description exacte des Galères & de leur Service.' In 1774 a second edition of the book was published at the Hague, to be followed four years later by a third. In the Rotterdam impression the names of some of the personages and localities had been simply indicated by initials; in the third issue of 1778--the 315 author having died not many months before--these particulars were inserted at full. It then appeared that the 'Memoirs'--concerning the authenticity of which, from internal evidence, there could never have been any reasonable doubt--were those of a certain Jean Marteilhe of Bergerac on the Dordogne, in the Province of Périgord in France, and that they had been edited and prepared for the press from Marteilhe's own manuscripts by M. Daniel de Superville--probably the second of that name, since Daniel de Superville, the elder, a notable personage among the leaders of the Reformed Church, had long been dead when the work appeared in its first form.^[101]

Circulating chiefly among the members of a proscribed community, and published in a foreign country, these remarkable autobiographical experiences, notwithstanding their three editions, had been practically lost sight of in France until some thirty years ago; and the account of their revival--as partly recorded in a lengthy note to the excellent 'Forçats pour la Foi' of M. A. Coquerel Fils--is sufficiently curious. About 1865, according to M. Coquerel, copies of the 316 volume were so rare as to be practically unobtainable. There was none in the Bibliothèque Nationale of France; and the only example known in Paris belonged to a Protestant banker, M. Félix Vernes, by whom it had been lent occasionally to historical students and connoisseurs. At Amsterdam there was a second copy in the library of M. Van Woortz, and it was believed that other copies existed in Holland. There was also, or at all events there is now, a copy at the British Museum. Meanwhile, the book had greatly impressed the fortunate few into whose hands it had come. Michelet, who makes mention of it both in his 'Louis XIV. et le Duc de Bourgogne,' and his 'Louis XIV. et la Révocation,' spoke of it in terms of the highest enthusiasm. It was written, he said, 'comme entre terre et ciel.' Why was it not reprinted? he asked. The reply lay no doubt in the difficulty of procuring a copy to print from; and its eventual reproduction was the result of an accident. In a catalogue of German books, M. François Vidal, pastor of the Reformed Church at Bergerac, came upon the title of a work purporting to relate the history of a fugitive Camisard. Himself a native of the Cevennes, and therefore specially interested in the subject, he sent for the volume, only to discover 317 that, instead of relating to the 'fanatics of Languedoc' (as Gibbon calls them), it was really an account of a Périgourdin Protestant who, after the Revocation, more than a century and a half earlier, of the Edict of Nantes, had fled from that very Bergerac in which he (M. Vidal) was then exercising his calling. He had seen some extracts from M. Vernes' copy of Marteilhe's 'Memoirs,' as those extracts had been made public in the Journal of an Historical Society (the 'Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme français), and he felt convinced that, notwithstanding certain (to him) transparent disguises of personages and localities, he was reading, in German, the story of Jean Marteilhe. He accordingly wrote, through the publisher of the German book, to its author, who proved to be the copious Dr. Christian Gottlob Barth, the founder of the Calwer Verlags-Verein in Wurtemburg, and a well-known writer on theological subjects. Dr. Barth informed M. Vidal that the material for the adventures of his supposititious Camisard, whom he had christened Mantal, had been derived from F. E. Rambach's 'Schicksal der Protestanten in Franckreich,' a work published at Halle in 1760, and alleged to be no longer procurable. Thereupon M. Vidal set about reconstructing 318 the history in the light of this discovery. He translated Barth's summary into French, restored to Marteilhe the name of which Barth, with nothing but initials in his source of information, had been ignorant, and then (having by good luck chanced upon a copy of the Rotterdam edition at Le Fleix, not many miles from Bergerac), incorporated with his version some of the more striking passages of the original record. Why he did not at once substitute that original for the summary, is, in all probability, to be explained by difficulties in the way of obtaining prolonged access to the Le Fleix copy. But the revelation of Marteilhe to France, even in mangled form, was still to be deferred. A portion of M. Vidal's book had no sooner made its appearance in 'L'Eglise Réformée,' a journal issued at Nîmes, than that journal was suddenly suppressed. In 1863 he therefore printed on his own account what he had written, in the form of a small 12mo pamphlet. One result of this publication--to which he still somewhat unaccountably gave the title of 'La Fuite du Camisard'--was to stimulate search for further copies of the original 'Memoirs,' another of which was found soon after in La Vendée, and was acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale. Finally, in 1865, the 319 Société des Écoles du Dimanche printed the complete text from the copy of M. Vernes with four fancy illustrations by the marine artist, Morel-Fatio,^[102] and a Preface and Appendices by M. Henri Paumier. Of this, four thousand copies were sold between 1865 and 1881, in which latter year a new and revised edition, with a second Preface by M. Paumier, was put forth. In the interim, an English version was published under the auspices of the Religious Tract Society, which, in addition to a translator's Preface, gave some further particulars respecting Marteilhe himself, said to be derived from an article in the 'Quarterly Review' for July, 1866, though they are there admittedly taken from M. Coquerel. To these again, some slight supplementary contributions were made by the French editor in his new and revised edition of 1881. The translation of the Religious Tract Society was also issued in New York in 1867 by Messrs. Leypoldt and Holt under the title of 'The Huguenot Galley-Slave.' 320

From what has been stated, it will be seen that, previously to the issue by the Société des Êcoles du Dimanche, no edition of the original 'Memoirs' had been published in France. But it will also be observed that, as early as 1760, or only three years after their first appearance in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, those 'Memoirs' had been incorporated in abridged form with Rambach's 'Schicksal der Protestanten in Frankreich.' What is perhaps even more remarkable is that--as M. Coquerel and the English translator of 1866 did not fail to point out--they had been translated earlier still in England, where, indeed, they appear to have attracted immediate attention in their first form, since the 'Monthly Review' for May, 1757, includes them in its Catalogue of Foreign Publications.' They must have been 'Englished' shortly afterwards, for, in February, 1758, Ralph Griffiths of the 'Dunciad' in Paternoster Row, the proprietor of the 'Monthly Review,' and Edward Dilly of the 'Rose and Crown' in the Poultry, issued conjointly, in two volumes 12mo, a version entitled 'The Memoirs of a Protestant, Condemned to the Galleys of France, for His Religion. Written by Himself.' To this followed upon the title-page a lengthy description of the contents, differing from that 321 of the French original, in so far as it laid stress upon the fact that the 'Protestant' was 'at last set free, at the Intercession of the Court of Great Britain';--and the work was further stated to be 'Translated from the Original, just published at the Hague [Rotterdam?], by James Wellington.'^[103] For this enigmatical 'James Wellington,' whose name as an author is otherwise entirely unknown to fame, it has long been the custom to read 'Oliver Goldsmith.' Goldsmith, in fact, was actually engaged as a writer-of-all-work upon the 'Monthly Review' when the Rotterdam edition was announced among its foreign books. To the same May number in which that announcement appeared, he supplied notices of Home's 'Douglas,' of Burke 'On the Sublime and Beautiful,' and of the new four-volume issue of Colman and Thornton's 'Connoisseur.' He continued to work for Griffiths' magazine until the September following, when, for reasons not now discoverable with certainty, he ceased his contributions to its pages.

What appears to be the earliest ascription to his pen of the English version of the 'Memoirs' 322 of Marteilhe is to be found in the life prefixed by Isaac Reed to the 'Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell,' 1795. Here he is stated to have received twenty guineas for the work from Mr. Edward Dilly. The next mention of it occurs in the biographical sketch by Dr. John Aikin in the 'Goldsmith's Poetical Works' of 1805. Dr. Aikin says (p. xvi) that Goldsmith sold the book to Dilly for twenty guineas. Prior ('Life of Goldsmith,' 1837, i. 252) confirms this, upon the authority of Reed; and he further alleges, though without giving his authority, that Griffiths 'acknowledged it [the translation] to be by Goldsmith.' Forster follows suit (1848, p. 107; and 1877, i. 129) by stating that 'the property of the book belonged to Griffiths,' and that 'the position of the translator appears in the subsequent assignment of the manuscript by the Paternoster Row bookseller to bookseller Dilly of the Poultry, at no small profit to Griffiths, for the sum of twenty guineas.' Reed, it will be observed, says that Goldsmith received the twenty guineas; Aikin, that Goldsmith sold the book; Prior, as usual, writes so loosely as to be ambiguous, and Forster, although, in his last edition, he cites Reed and Aikin as his authorities, affirms that Griffiths sold it to Dilly. None of these statements would 323 seem to be exactly accurate. The translation of the 'Memoirs of a Protestant' was in reality sold by the author--much as, some years since, it was ascertained that the 'Vicar of Wakefield' was sold^[104]--in three separate shares. By the kindness of the late Mr. Edward Ford of Enfield, a devoted student of Goldsmith, the present writer was favoured with a transcript of Goldsmith's receipt for one of these shares from the hitherto unpublished original in Mr. Ford's possession.^[105] It runs as follows:

From this-document--the signature only of which is in the handwriting of the poet--two things are clear,--first, that Goldsmith himself sold the book to Dilly and two others, one being Griffiths, whose name is on the title-page; and, 324 secondly, that the translation was by Goldsmith and not by James Wellington.

But why, it may be asked, was the name of Wellington (an old Trinity College acquaintance of Goldsmith) put forward in this connection? The question is one to which it is not easy to give an entirely satisfactory answer. Mr. Forster, it is true, does not feel any difficulty in replying. 'At this point,' he says, 'there is very manifest evidence of despair.' But it is a characteristic of Mr. Forster's sympathetic and admirable biography that it occasionally appears to be written under the influence of preconceptions, and the evidence he mentions, however manifest, is certainly not produced. Mr. Forster fills the gap with eloquent disquisition on the obstacles in the path of genius, and so conducts his hero back to Dr. Milner's door at Peckham.^[106] How Goldsmith subsisted in the interval between his ceasing to write regularly for the 'Monthly Review' and 325 his return to his old work as an usher, is no doubt obscure. But it is probable that there was little variation in his manner of living, although his labours were not performed under surveillance in the Back Parlour of the 'Dunciad.' It has been discovered that about this time he was contributing portions of a 'History of Our Own Times' to the 'Literary Magazine;' and it is also conjectured that these were not his sole contributions to that and other periodicals. Moreover, the version of Marteilhe's 'Memoirs' must have been made in the last months of 1757, since the above receipt is dated January 11, 1758, and the book was published in the following February. In addition to this, he was again, by his own account, attending patients as a doctor. 'By a very little practice as a physician, and a very little reputation as a poet'--he tells his brother-in-law, Hodson, in December, 1757, 'I make a shift to live.' He was in debt, no doubt; but he had already, says the same communication, 'discharged his most threatening and pressing demands.' Upon the whole,--Mr. Forster's 'very manifest evidence' not being forthcoming,--it must be concluded that Goldsmith's position after ceasing to write for the 'Monthly Review' (though not for Griffiths) was much what it had 326 been before that event, perhaps even better, because he was more free; and this being so, we are driven to the commonplace and unheroic solution that, even in his Salisbury Square garret, he was too conscious of those higher things within him to care to identify himself with a mere imitation 'out of the French,' executed for bread, and not for reputation; and that he put Wellington's name to the book in default of a better. He gave evidence of his genius in his most careless private letter; he could not help it; but the man who subsequently refrained from signing the 'Citizen of the World,' may be excused from signing the translated 'Memoirs of a Protestant.'

That the translation produced under these conditions might have been better if the translator had taken more pains, is but to turn Goldsmith's bon mot against himself. 'Verbum verbo reddere' was scarcely his ambition, and those who wish for plain-sailing fidelity will do well, if they cannot compass the French original, to consult the rendering prepared for the Religious Tract Society.^[107] The chief merits of the version of 1758 327 are first, that it is a contemporary version, demonstrably from Goldsmith's pen; and secondly, that it is Goldsmith's earliest appearance in book-form. It is not only characterized by its writer's unique and peculiar charm, but it is as delightful to read as any of his acknowledged journey-work. Even Griffiths of the 'Dunciad,' who reviewed it himself in the 'Monthly Review' for May, 1758, cannot deny its merits in this respect. Speaking of the 'ingenious Translator,' he remarks that he 'really deserves this epithet, on account of the spirit of the performance, tho',' he adds, grudgingly, 'we have little to say in commendation of his accuracy.' Upon this latter count, it may be observed that in one instance, at least, inaccuracy is excusable. In telling, early in the book, the story of the abjuration by Marteilhe's mother of her Huguenot faith, Goldsmith makes her add to her declaration that she was 'compelled by Fear.' This is manifestly inexact, seeing that the French original runs: 'Elle ajouta ces mots: la Force me le fait faire, faisant sans doute allusion au nom du Duc' (i.e. the Duke de la Force). All this, as we know, must have been Greek to Goldsmith, because the names in the editio princeps of 1757, from which he was working, were not given at full. 328 But it must certainly be admitted that he deals freely with his text, occasionally suppressing altogether what he regards as redundant, and now and then inserting supplementary touches of his own. Speaking of the soup prepared in the gaol at Lille he says: 'Even Lacedæmonian black Broth could not be more nauseous.' There is nothing in the text of this classic dietary, and what is more, Marteilhe would scarcely have used the simile. Elsewhere the decoration is in what Matthew Arnold used to call the 'Rule Britannia' vein. Of the valiant captain of the 'Nightingale' who held his own so long against the galleys in that memorable engagement which plays such a moving part in Marteilhe's record, the writer says: 'Ce capitaine, qui n'avait plus rien à faire pour mettre sa flotte en sûreté, rendit son épée.' This Goldsmith translates: 'At last the captain gave up his Sword without further Parley, like a true Englishman, despising Ceremony, when Ceremony could be no longer useful.'

Dealing here rather with the story of the book than its contents, it would be beyond the purpose of our paper to linger longer upon the extraordinary interest and simple candour of Marteilhe's narrative. But the mention just made of the captain of the 'Nightingale' reminds us that 329 some further particulars respecting this obscure naval hero were not long since brought to light by Professor J. K. Laughton.^[108] His name (which Marteilhe had forgotten) was Seth Jermy, and he had served as a lieutenant at the battle of Barfleur. He became captain of the 'Spy' brigantine in January, 1697, and five years later was appointed to the command of the 'Nightingale,' a small 24-gun frigate, chiefly employed in convoying corn-ships and colliers between the Forth, the Tyne, the Humber, and the Thames. In this duty he was engaged up to the fight with the French galleys, which took place, not, as Marteilhe says, in 1708, but in 1707. In August, 1708, Captain Jermy returned from France on parole and was tried by court-martial for the loss of his ship. The following are the minutes of the trial from documents in the Public Record Office:

'At a court-martial held on board Her Majesty's ship the "Royal Anne" at Spithead, on Thursday, 23 Sep. 1708; Present: The Hon. Sir George Byng, Knight, Admiral of the Blue Squadron of her Majesty's fleet. . . .

'Enquiry was made by the Court into the 330 occasion of the loss of Her Majesty's ship the "Nightingale," of which Captain Seth Jermy was late commander, which was taken by six sail of the enemy's galleys off Harwich on 24 Aug. 1707. The court having strictly examined into the matter, it appeared by evidence upon oath that the "Nightingale" was for a considerable time engaged with a much superior force of the enemy, and did make so good a defence as thereby to give an opportunity to all the ships under his convoy to make their escape; and it is the opinion of the court that he has not been anyway wanting in his duty on that occasion; and therefore the Court does acquit the said Captain Jermy and the other officers as to the loss of Her Majesty's said ship "Nightingale."'

Beyond the fact that he was exchanged against a French prisoner a little later, served again, was superannuated, and died in 1724, nothing further seems to be known of Captain Jermy. But of the captain who succeeded him on the 'Nightingale' when that ship passed by capture into French hands--the infamous renegade whom Marteilhe calls '---- Smith,'--Professor Laughton supplies data which, since they are included only in one very limited edition of the 'Memoirs,' may here be briefly set down. After chequered 331 experiences in the service of Her Majesty Queen Anne, including a court-martial for irregularities while commanding the 'Bonetta' sloop, Thomas Smith, being then, according to his own account, a prisoner at Dunkirk, yielded to solicitations made to him, and entered the service of the King of France. In November, 1707, he was made commander of the captured 'Nightingale.' In the December following, being in company with another Dunkirk privateer, the 'Squirrel,' he was chased and taken by the English man-of-war 'Ludlow Castle,' Captain Haddock. Smith was brought to London, tried for high treason at the Old Bailey (2nd June, 1708), and found guilty. 'On 18^th June he was put on a hurdle and conveyed to the place of execution.... Being dead he was cut down, his body opened and his heart shown to the people, and afterwards burnt with his bowels, and his body quartered.' And thus Marteilhe, when he came to London in 1713 to thank Queen Anne for her part in his release, may well, as he avers, have seen Smith's mangled remains 'exposed on Gibbets along the Banks of the Thames.'

Marteilhe's story, it may be gathered, differs in some respects from the official account disinterred from the Public Records. But the 332 discrepancies are readily explained by the fact that much which he related must have been acquired at second hand. Speaking from his personal experience he is accurate enough. What is known of him and his book, beyond the date at which it closes, needs but few words. 'The author [of the "Memoirs"],' says Goldsmith in his Preface of 1757, 'is still alive, and known to numbers, not only in Holland but London;' and it is quite possible that in one or other of these places, Goldsmith himself may have seen and conversed with him. An Avertissement des Libraires prefixed to the Rotterdam edition, but not reproduced by Goldsmith or M. Paumier, is equally confirmatory of the authenticity of the book: 'Des Personnes de caractère, & dignes de toute créance, nous ont assurés, que cet Ouvrage à été véritablement composé par un de ces Protestans, condamnés aux Galères de France pour cause de Religion, & qui en furent délivrés par l'intercession de la Reine Anne d'Angleterre peu après la paix d'Utrecht. Les mêmes Personnes nous ont dit, qu'elles ont eu des liaisons personnelles avec l'Auteur; qu'elles ne doutent pas de sa bonne foi & de sa probité; & qu'elles sont persuadées, qu'autant que sa mémoire a pu lui rappeller les faits, cette Relation est exacte.' Opposite the word 'créance,' in the 333 British Museum copy, is written in an old hand, 'Mrs. Dumont & De Superville.' As Daniel de Superville Senior was dead in 1757, the De Superville here mentioned was no doubt his son of the same Christian name,--a doctor, who, as above suggested, was probably the editor of Marteilhe's manuscripts. After this come naturally the details given, from Coquerel and elsewhere, in M. Paumier's second Preface, and already referred to. Marteilhe, we learn, did not reside permanently in the Netherlands--'that Land of Liberty and Happiness,' as Goldsmith renders 'Ces heureuses Provinces'--but for some time was in business in London. He died at Cuylenberg, in Guelderland, on the 4th November, 1777, at the age of ninety-three. Little is known about his family; but it is believed that he had a daughter who was married at Amsterdam to an English naval officer of distinction, Vice-Admiral Douglas.

THE BURNING OF WHITEHALL.

The following extracts from the Marchmont MSS. ('Fourteenth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission,' Appendix, Part III. 1894, pp. 129-130, and 141) here reproduced by permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office, add further detail to the quotations from the Hope Johnstone MSS. already printed at pp. 214-215 of this book.

The Earl of Argyll to the Earl of Marchmont, London, 4th January, 1697-98: 'This minutte Whytehall is in fyre. All allmost looking to the watter syde is burnt down; how farr it will goe I know not.'

Mr. Robert Pringle, Under Secretary of State, to Lord Polwarth. Whitehall, 4th January, 1697[8]: '... Whilst I write to your lordship, Whythall is in flames and a verie dismal sight; the fire broke out about 3 in the afternoon, and hes alreadie consumed all the royal lodgings both on the water and privie garden....' 335

Sir James Ogilvie to the Earl of Marchmont, Whytehall, 5th January, 1698: 'I cannot writt this with myne [own hand], for I find my eyes waike with the sitting up the last night and looking on the fyre. All the palace of Whytehall, at least what was built by King Charles the Second and King James, is burned downe.'

The Earl of Tullibardine, n.d., says the fire 'burnt so violently that ther is nothing left on the side of the privy garden, nor next the water till near Scotland yard, so that the King's apartment, and the Queen's, the Chappell, Councel Chamber, guard hall, ... is burnt.'

And. Kineir to the Earl of Marchmont, Whitehall, 5th January, 1697-8: '... This flying packet will bring your Lordship an account of the unlucky occasion why we sent no packet last night, for truly this Court of Whitehall was all in flames at the time. All the royall apartments with the King's chappell and gward hall, the Duke of Shrewsbury's office, the Treasury Office, Council Chamber, the late King's new chappell, the long gallerys with Devonshire's, Essex's, and Villars's, and severall other lodgings are all consumed..... The best account we yet have of the occasion of it was the neglect of a lawndress in Colonel Stanley's lodgings near the river. There are five or six at least destroyed by it, but no persons of any note.'

N.B.--The titles of articles are in capitals.

Abbey, Mr. Edwin A., 303.

Abel, 70.

Abington, Mrs., 133.

Account of the Provinces of South Carolina and Georgia, Oglethorpe's, 10.

Achilles, Gay's, 287.

Addison, Life of, Aikin's, 85.

Addison, Joseph, 85, 104, 109, 110, 112, 259, 260.

Admiralty, The, 248.

Advice to Julia, Luttrell's, 221.

Agas's Map, 234, 236.

Aitken, Mr. George A., 86-114, 253.

Aikin, Dr. John, 323.

Albemarle, Monk, Duke of, 197, 198.

Albinus, 119.

Allen, Ralph, 131.

Ally Croaker, 45.

Almack's, 225.

Alvanley, Lord, 217.

Amatis, the Piedmontese, 11.

Anacréon, 186.

Animated Nature, Goldsmith's, 47.

Angelo, Henry or Harry, 61-84, 136.

Angelo's 'Reminiscences,' 61-84.

Angelo's Pic Nic, 84.

Annandale, Lord, 214.

Apology for Himself and his Writings, Steele's, 107.

Apothegms, Hawkins's, 162.

Appius and Virginia, Dennis's, 262.

Arabian Nights, Galland's, 308.

Arabian Nights, Forster's, 177.

Arbuthnot, Dr., 268, 269, 275, 279, 284, 287.

Archæologia, 207.

Archer, Lady, 80.

Architecture, Book of, Evelyn's, 197.

Argus; or, London Reviewed in Paris, Lewis Goldsmith's, 189.

Argyll, Fort, 13.

Argyll, John, Duke of, 23.

Arlington, Lord, 208.

Arts, Grub Street of the, The, 293-314.

Ashton, Mr. John, 296.

Astley, Philip, 63.

Aubrey de Vere, Recollections of, 187.

Austen, Jane, 84.

Autobiography, Bramston's, 202.

Author of 'Monsieur Tonson,' The, 115-136.

Bach, John Christian, 70.

Bach, John Sebastian, 70.

Ballad on a Wedding, Suckling's, 242.

Baller, Mrs., 288.

Baller, Rev. Joseph, 256.

Bambridge, Thomas, 6, 306.

Bambridge under Examination, Hogarth's, 8.

Banks, 312.

Bannister's Budget, 77.

Bannister, Jack, 77, 78.

Banqueting House at Whitehall, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213.

Baretti, 164.

Barrington, George, 123.

Barth, Dr. C. G., 318, 319.

Barrymore, Lord, 78, 79.

Bartolozzi, Francis, 70, 75, 303.

Bate, Parson, 73.

Bath, Lord, 118.

Battle of the Boyne, West's, 71.

Beauclerk, Lady Di, 303.

Beaumarchais, Caron de, 137.

Beaupré the dancer, 187.

Beauties of English Poesy, Goldsmith's, 47.

Beautiful Youth struck dead by Lightning, Goldsmith's epitaph on, 40.

Beaux' Stratagem, Farquhar's, 48, 133.

Bee, Goldsmith's, 53.

Bedford, Duke of, 120.

Beggar's Opera, Gay's, 281-5, 290.

Betterton, Thomas, 82.

Belinda, Miss Edgeworth's, 45.

Berkeley, Dr., 4, 110, 111.

Berkeley, Lord, 250.

Béranger, Pierre de, 179.

Bermudas, The, 245.

Bernini, 310.

Bewick, Thomas, 133.

Bickerstaffe, the dramatist, 247.

Binns, Mrs., 103.

Birkbeck Hill, Dr. George, 166-172.

Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 172.

Birth of the Squire, Gay's, 290.

Blackamoor wash'd White, Bate's, 73.

Black-Ey'd Susan, Gay's, 277.

Blackmore, Sir Richard, 92.

Blake (Blue-skin), 119.

Blake, William, 139, 282.

Blessington, Lady, 219.

Board of Trade, The, 207.

Board of Works, Metropolitan, The, 250.

Boerhaave, 119.

Boileau, M., 66.

Bolingbroke, Lord, 170, 267, 270.

Bonaparte family, The, 181.

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 180, 181, 186.

Boothby, Miss Hill, 162.

Boswell, James, 27, 72, 123.

Boswell, James, Junr., 151.

Boswelliana, 160, 165.

Boswell's Johnson, 137-172.

Boswell's Predecessors and Editors, 137-172.

Bowling Green at Whitehall, 201.

Boydell, John, 313.

Boydell's Shakespeare, 302.

Braganza, Catherine of, 203, 205, 211, 213.

Broome, William, 262.

Broughton, the prizefighter, 82, 299.

Brown, 'Capability,' 128.

Bruce, Mr. Henry, 3.

Brummell, Beau, 223.

Buckhorse, the boxer, 135.

Buckingham Court, 251.

Buckingham, Duke of, 249.

Buckinghamshire, Lady, 79.

Bull, Edward, 121.

Bunbury, Letter to Mrs., Goldsmith's, 44.

Burbage, Richard, 174.

Burke, Edmund, 123.

Burlington, Lord, 271, 276, 279.

Burnet, John, 173.

Burney, Edward, 177.

Burney, Fanny, 83.

Burnham Beeches, Luttrell's, 230.

Buxton Forman, Mr. H., 275.

Byron, Lord, 81, 126, 219.

Byron, Lady, 126.

Calloway, Mrs., 306.

Cambridge, Richard Owen, 124, 125.

Campbell, Dr. Thomas, 163, 164.

Canaletto, 70.

Captives, Gay's, 280.

Captivity, Goldsmith's, 44.

Carhampton, Earl of, 232.

Carleton's Memoirs, 91, 162.

Carlisle House (1), 68, 69, 71.

Carlisle House (2), 68.

Carlyle, Thomas, 152, 156, 168.

Carrington, Lord, 207.

Carruthers, Dr. Robert, 157.

Carteret, Miss, 308.

Carter, Mrs., 192.

Cartwright, John, 302.

Castell, Robert, 6.

Castlemaine, Lady, 198, 204, 206, 213.

Castle, Mr. Egerton, 82.

Catherine of Braganza, 203, 205, 211, 213.

Cato, Addison's, 31.

Catullus, Wilkes's, 124.

Cavallini, Pietro, 235.

Cecil Court, 174, 306, 307.

'Censorium,' Steele's, 108.

Centlivre, Mrs., 251.

Cipriani, J. B., 70, 75, 210.

Citizen of the World, Goldsmith's, 53.

Citizen, Murphy's, 188.

City Shower, Swift's, 256, 273.

Chalmers, Alexander, 152.

Chamberlain, The Lord, 200.

Chandos Street, 294.

Changes at Charing Cross, 233-252.

Chapel at Whitehall, 204, 206, 207.

Chapel Royal Choir Boys, 198.

Chapter of Accidents, Lee's, 132.

Charing Cross, 234, 237.

Charing Cross, Changes at, 233-252.

Charing Cross Road, 294, 306.

Charles I., 195, 197, 200.

Charles I., statue of, 233.

Charles II., 197, 198, 200, 203, 205, 206, 211, 213.

Chatham, Lord, 128.

Chatto and Windus, Messrs., 296.

Chaumette, P. G., 186.

Cheere, Henry, 298.

Cheselden, the anatomist, 117.

Chester, Col. J. L., 3.

Chesterfield, Lord, 165.

'Chevalier' Taylor, 116-20.

Chichester, Bishop of, 204.

Chiffinch, Mr., 203.

Chippendale, Thomas, 312.

Christie, Mr., the auctioneer, 1.

Christie's, 1, 171.

Christmas, Gerard, 241.

Churchill, Charles, 38, 119.

Clairon, Mlle., 49.

Clandestine Marriage, Garrick and Colman's, 49.

Clare, Lord, 29.

Clarendon, Lord, 269.

Cleveland, Duchess of, 206.

Clive, Catherine, 129, 131, 132.

Coan, the Norfolk dwarf, 135.

Cock and Pye Fields, 293.

Cock Lane Ghost, The, 242.

Cockpit, The, 197.

Colbert, Charles, Marquis de Croissy, 211.

Collins, William, 38, 311.

Company of Undertakers, Hogarth's, 117.

Concannon, Mrs., 80.

Conduit Street, 1.

Confederacy, Vanbrugh's, 78.

Confectionary, The, at Whitehall, 207.

Congreve, 91, 279.

Conscious Lovers, Steele's, 107.

Constant Couple, Farquhar's, 85.

Consultation of Physicians, Hogarth's, 117.

Cook, Captain, 312.

Cooke, Captain Henry, 198.

Cook, Henry, 68.

Cook, Lieut.-Col., 25.

Cook, William, 139, 140.

Coquerel, M., 316, 320, 334.

Corbould, the elder, 177.

Cornaro Family, Titian's, 242.

Cornelys, Mrs. Teresa, 68, 70, 135.

Cossack trowsers of 1820, 223.

Cosway, 297.

Council Office, The, 200.

Cousens, 173.

Coverley, Sir Roger de, 198, 266, 308.

Cowper, William, 39, 111.

Cozens, Alexander, 75.

Cradock, Joseph, 43.

Cranham Church, 3, 27.

Cranham Hall, 26, 28.

Cranbourn Street, 294, 307, 309.

Cravat of 1820, The, 223.

C'ribbee Islands, The, 245, 247.

Crisis, Steele's, 106, 107.

Crockford House, Luttrell's 217, 230.

Croker, J. W., 137, 152-157, 171,

Croker's Boswell and Boswell, Fitzgerald's, 159.

Cromwell, Henry, 261, 262, 271.

Cromwell, Oliver, 250.

Crosse, Mrs. Andrew, 232.

Cross's Menagerie, 245.

Cruikshank, George, 84.

Crundale, Richard de, 235.

Cumberland, Richard, 124, 125, 162.

Cumberland, Duke of, 71, 164, 209.

Curtius, Haydon's, 311.

Curll, Edmund, 240.

Cutts, John, Lord, 90.

Dalrymple, Sir David, 165.

Danckers, Henry, 212.

D'Arblay, Mme., 162.

Darien, 18.

David, Jacques Louis, 183.

Davies, Thomas, 142.

Death on the Pale Horse, West's, 184.

Debates in Parliament, Johnson's, 171.

Decoy in St. James's Park, The, 198.

Debtors' Prisons, Committee into, 6, 7.

Delaval, Lord, 68.

Denis Duval, Characters in Thackeray's, 72.

Dennis, John, 262.

D'Eon, Chevalier, 69, 84, 136.

Derry, Settlement of, 10.

Deserted Village, Goldsmith's, 41, 43, 44, 46, 54, 59.

Dessessarts, 187.

Devil Tavern, Temple Bar, 258.

Devone, M., 238.

Dials in the Privy Garden, 200.

Diary, Sidney's, 203.

Didon, Piccinni's, 186.

Dilly, Edward, 321, 324.

Dione, Gay's, 277.

Distressed Mother, Philips', 188, 308.

Dr. Johnson, His Friends and his Critics, Birkbeck Hill's, 165, 167.

Dodd, Dr., 73.

Dodd's Chapel, 164.

Donaldson, Mr., 136.

Double Transformation, Goldsmith's, 39.

Douglas, Vice-Admiral, 334.

Drummond's Bank, 251.

Drummer, Addison's, 86.

Dryden, John, 38, 171, 310.

Duchesnois, Mlle., 185, 187.

Duill, Mrs., 133.

Dugazon, 187.

Duke of York's Theatre, 298.

Dumont, M., 334.

Dunciad, Pope's, 137.

Duperrier, François, 206.

Dupont, Gainsborough, 173.

D'Urfey, Thomas, 266.

Dyer, 145.

Ebenezer, 14, 18, 21.

École? des Armes, Angelo's, 84.

Edward VI., Journal of, 204.

Edwin and Angelina, Goldsmith's, 43.

Election Entertainment, Hogarth's, 252.

Election of Gotham, Steele's, 95.

Elegy, Gray's, 38.

Ellis, Dr. Welbore, 89.

Elphinston, James, 142.

Elwin, Rev. Whitwell, 264.

English Engraver in Paris, An, 173-193.

Entraigues, Countess d', 186.

Epigrammatical Petition, Gay's, 269.

Epistle to a Lady, Gay's, 270.

Epistle to Bernard Lintott, Gay's, 258, 261.

Erskine, Boswell's Letters to, 167.

Essay on Man, Pope's, 53.

Essay on Plantations, Oglethorpe's, 10.

Evelina, Miss Burney's, 83.

Evelyn, John, 205, 211, 214, 238, 241.

Examiner, The, 259.

Fables, Dryden's, 303.

Fables, Gay's, 280, 291, 292.

Fairholt, F. W., 309.

Fair Penitent, Rowe's, 130.

False Delicacy, Kelly's, 50, 51.

Fan, Gay's, 264, 265.

Faro's Daughters, Gillray's, 80.

Farren, Miss, 132.

Fausse Agnès, La, Destouches', 188.

Fawcett, the comedian, 116.

Fenton, 262, 277.

Fenton, Lavinia, 282.

Fêtes of July, The, 180.

Fielding, 57.

Fife House, 207.

Finden, 173.

Fisher, 173.

Fisher's plan of Whitehall, 196, 201, 207.

Fitzgerald, Mr. Percy, 157, 159, 160, 172.

Fitzherbert, Mrs., 79.

Five Fields, The, 2, 135.

Flaxman, 176, 178, 313.

Fleet, Rules or Liberties of the, 6.

Foote, 67, 69.

Forçats pour la Foi, Coquerel's, 316, 320, 321.

Ford, Major, 97.

Ford, Mr. Edward, 324.

Ford, Mr. J. W., 324.

Ford, Parson, 163.

Ford, Sir Richard, 213.

Fortescue, William, 257.

Fortescue, Mrs., 288.

Forster, John, 325, 326.

Foundling Chapel, 164.

Four Stages of Cruelty, Hogarth's, 74.

Fox, C. J., 185.

Frederica, 13, 18.

Friends' Meeting House, 298.

Funeral, Steele's, 85, 93.

Fuseli, Henry, 127, 302, 303.

Fuite du Camisard, La, 319.

Gainsborough, 70, 173.

Galleries at Whitehall, 203.

Gardel, Mme., 187.

Gaelic Language, Shaw's, 142.

Garrick, 69, 129, 163, 175.

Garrick Theatre, 295.

Garrick, Mrs., 29, 65, 73.

Garrick's nephews, 65.

Gascoigne, Henry, 88.

Gattie, Henry, 116.

Gay, John, 38, 66, 185, 253-292.

Gay's Chair, Baller's, 255.

Gay, Thomas, 254, 256.

Gay, William, 253.

Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, Chippendale's, 313.

Genteel Style in Writing, Lamb's, 53.

George II., Walpole's. 170.

Georgia, charter for colonizing, 10.

Georgia, founding of, 10.

Georgia, colonization of, 11-27.

Gérard, 184.

Gibbon, Edward, 119.

Gibbons, Grinling, 195, 240.

Gillray, James, 175.

Girodet, 184.

Goddess of Reason, The, 166.

Golden Cross, The, 144.

Goldsmith and Parnell, Poems of, 323.

Goldsmith House, 325.

Goldsmith, Lewis, 189.

Goldsmith, Life of, Forster's, 323.

Goldsmith, Life of, Prior's, 323.

Goldsmith, Oliver, 28, 29, 31, 33-60, 122, 139, 163, 242, 264, 311.

Goldsmith's Poems and Plays, 33-60.

Goodall, 173.

Good-Natur'd Man, Goldsmith's, 48, 50-53.

Gordon Riots, 174, 175.

Goschen, Mr., 290.

Goujon, Jean, 179.

Grafton, Duke of, 200.

Granby, Marquis of, 81, 299, 300.

Grant, Sir Archibald, 8.

Grant, Col. Francis, 138.

Gray, Thomas, 38, 153.

Gravelot, 310.

Great Hall at Whitehall, 204.

Great Newport Street, 301, 302, 309.

Grecian Coffee House, 163.

Green Chamber at Whitehall, 203.

Green, Valentine, 173.

Greville, 217.

Griffiths, Ralph, 321, 328.

Gros, 184.

Grosvenor, Lady, 164.

Grub Street of the Arts, The, 293-314.

Guardian, The, 105.

Guérin, 184.

Grumbler, Goldsmith's, 58.

Gwinett, Ambrose, 246.

Gwydyr House, 196.

Gwynn, the painter, 84.

Hackman, Rev. James, 74.

Hall, Francis, 200.

Hall, John, 71, 175.

Handel, Roubillac's, 296.

Hampton Court, 209, 210.

Harrison, Major-General, 237.

Handsome Housemaid, Foote's, 56.

Hanmer, Miss, 254.

Hanmer, Rev. John, 256.

Harcourt, Lord, 276.

Harcourt, Sir William, 290.

Harley, 98, 198.

Harlot's Progress, Hogarth's, 305.

Hartshorne Lane, 235.

Hastings, Lady Elizabeth, 16.

Haunch of Venison, Goldsmith's, 44.

Hawkins, Sir John, 43, 144, 145, 146.

Haydon, B. R., 311.

Hayman, 77, 81, 297, 298, 299, 300, 310.

Hayman, Mrs., 300.

Hazlitt, 305.

Heath, 173.

Hebrides, Journal of a Tour to the, Boswell's, 143, 147, 148, 155, 156.

Hedge Lane, 234.

Hemings' Row, 244, 294.

Herbert, Rev. Henry, 11.

Hermit, Goldsmith's, 43, 53.

Hervart, M. and Mme. de, 286.

Hervey, Captain Augustus, 64.

Hervey, John Lord, 282.

Hill, Aaron, 257.

Hill, Dr. G. Birkbeck, 166, 172.

Hillispilli, the Creek War Captain, 14.

Hills, Henry, 257.

History of the Reformation, Burnet's, 204.

Hogarth, Mrs., 304, 306.

Hogarth, William, 63, 178, 282, 297, 305.

Holbein's Gate, 197, 208, 209.

Holcroft, Thomas, 190.

Holland, Lord, 217.

Hone, Nathaniel, 312.

Hook, Theodore, 81.

Horace, Maittaire's, 255.

Horace, Pine's, 310.

Horse Guards, 194, 195, 207.

Horse Guards Avenue, 195, 207.

Horse Guards Yard, 198, 207.

Howard, Mrs., 284.

Howe, Lord, 76.

Huggins, John, 306.

Huguenot Galley Slave, The, 320.

Human Life, Rogers's, 231.

Hummums, The, 163.

Humphry, Ozias, 127.

Hunter, John, 312.

Hyde, Lady Catherine, 278.

Hyde, Lady Jane, 268, 278.

Hyde, Mr., 201.

Importance of Dunkirk consider'd, Steele's, 106.

Importance of the 'Guardian' considered, Swift's, 106.

Impressment for the Navy, 9.

Ingres, 184.

Ireland, John, 176.

Ireland, Samuel, 2.

Irene, Johnson's, 130.

Iris, Goldsmith's lines to, 40.

Iron Chest, Colman's, 175.

Irving, Washington, 243.

Isabey, the miniaturist, 183.

Jackson, the prizefighter, 82.

James II., 195, 210.

James Street, 297.

Jansen, Bernard, 241.

Jardin des Plantes, 182.

Jeffery, 217.

Jekyll, 217.

Jermy, Captain Seth, 330-1.

Jervas, Charles, 278, 279.

Jesse, J. Heneage, 209.

Joannis Philippi Angli Responsio, Milton's, 251.

John Gay, 253-292.

Johnson, Dr., 1, 4, 28, 31, 35, 50, 56, 72, 122, 128, 289, 304, 311, 313.

Johnson, Anecdotes of, Piozzi's, 143, 144.

Johnson, Boswell's, 138, 149.

Johnson, Boswell's (Globe Edition), 172.

Johnson, Boswell's (Birkbeck Hill's Edition), 166-172.

Johnson, Boswell's (Reynolds Edition), 166.

Johnson, Elizabeth, 64.

Johnson, Life of, Cook's, 139, 140.

Johnson, Life of, Hawkins's, 144-146.

Johnson, Life of, Murphy's, 162.

Johnson, Life of, Towers's, 146.

Johnson, Memoirs of, Shaw's, 142.

Johnson, Memoir of, Tyers's, 140.

Johnsonian Miscellanies, Birkbeck Hill's, 172.

Johnsoniana, Mrs. Napier's, 162.

Jonson, Ben, 211, 235.

Jordaens, 210.

Jordan, Mrs., 133.

Journal of a Tour to Corsica, Boswell's (Birkbeck Hill's Edition), 167.

Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Fielding's, 170.

Journey through England, Mackay's, 196.

Journey to Exeter, Gay's, 271, 272.

Journey to the Western Islands, Johnson's, 164.

Justice, Palais de, 191.

Kauffmann, Angelica, 242, 312.

Kean, Charles, 136.

Kean, Edmund, 82, 83.

Keble, William, 257.

Keith, Marshal, 118.

Kemble, Charles, 134.

Kemble, John, 133, 175, 188, 308.

Kemble, Stephen, 133.

Kelly, Hugh, 123.

Kenney, James, 228.

Kent, William, 194.

Kéroualle, Louise Renée de, 201, 203.

Keys, Dr., 63.

Kind der Liebe, Das, Kotzebue's, 136.

King, Dr., 117.

King's Gate, 208.

King Street, 197, 208.

Kirke, Mrs., 198.

Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 99, 301.

Ladies Library, Steele's, 108.

Lady's Last Stake, Hogarth's, 252.

La Fontaine, 119, 286.

Lais, François, 186.

Lallah Rookh, Moore's, 231.

Lamb, Charles, 192, 293, 298.

La Monnoye, 40.

Landor, W. S., 113.

Laporte, 188.

Latest Life of Steele, The, 85-114.

Lauderdale, Earl of, 201.

Lauderdale, Earl of, 231.

Laughton, Prof. J. K., 330.

Layer, Counsellor Christopher, 119.

Lays, François, 186.

Letters, Johnson's (Birkbeck Hill's), 172.

Letters to Julia, Luttrell's, 216-232.

Letters to Julia, Luttrell's, 217.

Letter to Lord Halifax, Addison's, 41.

Le Imaginator, Alexander, 236.

Lenoir, Alexandre, 192.

Le Sœur, Herbert, 239.

Liar, Foote's, 78.

Life of the Chevalier John Taylor, 118.

Lilly, William, 237.

Lincoln, Earl of, 279.

Linnæus, 119.

'Lion d'Argent' at Calais, 192.

Lisburn, Lord, 46.

Liston, 175.

Literary Illustrations, Nichols', 138.

'Little Dickey' (Henry Norris), 85.

Little St. Andrew Street, 293.

Liviez, M., 66.

Lives of the Poets, Theophilus Cibber's, 162.

Lloyd, Robert, 240.

Locker Lampson, F., 230.

Locket's Ordinary, 251.

Lockhart, 155.

Logicians Refuted, 39.

London and Wise, Nurserymen, 212.

London County Council, 250, 252.

London, Johnson's, 28, 311.

London, Pennant's, 209.

Long Acre, 293, 294, 309.

Longfellow, 39.

Lord Keeper's Office at Whitehall, 200.

Lort, Michael, 138.

Louisa, Princess, 281.

Loutherbourg, Philip de, 70.

Louvre, The, 182, 185.

Lovers' Vows, Inchbald's, 136.

Lowe, Mauritius, 162.

Lowndes, Thomas, 83.

Lucas's Foot, 91.

Lucas, Lord, 93.

Luck, Robert, 254.

Luttrell, Colonel, 232.

Luttrell, Henry, 136, 216.

Luttrell's Letters to Julia, 216-232.

Lying Lover, Steele's, 94.

Lyra Elegantiarum, Locker Lampson's, 230.

Macaulay, Lord, 85, 152, 156, 159.

M^cArdell, 173, 310.

Mackintosh, 217.

Macklin, Charles, 130.

Maclean, James, 136.

Macpherson, James, 142.

Madame Blaize, Goldsmith's, 40.

Mad Dog, Goldsmith's, 40.

Maginn, 246.

Maillard, Mlle., 186.

Mainwaring, Arthur, 98.

Mallet, David, 169.

Malone, 143, 144, 145, 147, 150, 151, 152, 154.

Manley, Mrs., 96, 97, 98, 108.

Man of Taste, Bramston's, 304.

Mansfield Park, Austen's, 136.

Mapp, Mrs. Sarah, 117.

Marchi, Giuseppe, 301.

Marengo, Bonaparte's Arab, 181.

Marlborough, Henrietta, Duchess of, 283, 285.

'Marquis of Granby' Inn, 300.

Marriage A-la-Mode, Hogarth's, 297.

Mars, Mlle., 188.

Marteilhe, Jean, 316-334.

Marteilhe's Memoirs, 315-334.

Massareene, Lord, 68.

Matthews, the actor, 116, 175.

May's Buildings, 300, 314.

Mazarin, Duchess of, 206.

Memoirs, Marteilhe's, 315-334.

Memoirs d'un Protestant, Marteilhe's, 315-334.

Memoirs of a Protestant, Marteilhe's, 315-334.

Ménagiana, 39.

Menzel, 14.

Metastasio, 119.

Mews Gate Public House, 246.

Mews Gate, Upper and Lower, 246.

Mews, King's or Royal, 244, 245.

Michelet, 317.

Mitchel, the banker, 75.

Mildmay, Carew Harvey, 2.

Milner, Dr., 325.

Milton, John, 250.

Minor, Foote's, 78.

Misaubin, Dr. John, 304, 305.

Miscellany, Lintott's, 261.

Mock Doctor, Fielding's, 304.

Mohocks, Gay's, 262.

Moira, Lord, 76.

Monarch, Angelo's horse, 70.

Moncrieff, the dramatist, 116.

Monsey, Dr. Messenger, 122.

Monmouth, Duke of, 198.

Monmouth, Duchess of, 268.

Montorgueil, Rue, 179.

'Monsieur Tonson,' The Author of, 115-136.

Montgomery, Philip, Earl of, 248.

Monvel, 187.

Moore, Arthur, 180.

Moore, Thomas, 217, 230, 231, 232.

More, Hannah, 29, 30, 162.

Morel-Fatio, M., 320.

Morley, Prof. Henry, 166.

Morning, Swift's, 273, 274.

Morning's Walk from London to Kew, Phillips's, 186.

Morris, Mr. Mowbray, 172.

Moser, Michael, 297, 310.

Motte, M. de la, 72.

Motet, the fencer, 67.

Murray, Mr. John, 82, 282.

Murray, Sir Robert, 200.

Napier, Mrs., 141, 144.

Napier, Rev. A., 141, 157, 160, 165.

National Gallery, 244, 247.

National Portrait Gallery, 244.

Neapolitan Club, 74.

Nelson's Column, 247.

New Bath Guide, Anstey's, 44, 45.

Newport Street, 294.

New Simile, Goldsmith's, 39.

New Street, 313.

Nightingale Monument, 312.

'Nightingale,' The Captain of the, 329, 330, 331.

Night, Hogarth's, 251.

Nightmare, Fuseli's, 302.

Night Thoughts, Young's, 38.

Nivernais, Duke de, 61.

Noctes Ambrosianæ, 219.

Nollekens, 297.

Normanby, Marquis of, 197.

Norris, Henry, 85.

Northcote, 128, 170, 176.

North, Mr. Robert, 16.

Northampton House, 241.

Northumberland, Algernon Percy, Earl of, 241.

Northumberland Avenue, 293.

Northumberland, Duke of, 242.

Northumberland, Henry Howard, Earl of, 241.

Northumberland House, 233, 234, 241, 243, 293.

Northumberland Street, 235.

Oates, Titus, 240.

Œdipus and his Daughters, Fuseli's, 302.

Ogilvie, Sir James, 214, 336.

Oglethorpe, General James Edward, 1-32.

Oglethorpe, Sir Theophilus, 5.

Oglethorpe, Mrs., 26.

Oldfield, Mrs., 308.

Old Whitehall, 194-215.

Oldys, William, 120.

Opera, The Grand, 186.

Opie, 127, 176, 178, 190.

Ophthalmiater, 117.

Orange Coffee House, 83.

Ormond, Duke of, 88, 90, 198.

Osbaldeston, Simon, 249.

Osborn, Mrs., 278.

Ossian controversy, 142.

Owen of Glassalt, 99, 100.

Oxford, Lord, 268, 269.

Paine, Thomas, 190, 191.

Paladin of Philanthropy, A, 1.

Palmer, Jack, 134.

Palmer, Mrs., 237.

Pantheon, The, 164.

Paoli, General, 69.

Parliament Street, 194, 209.

Parnell, Goldsmith's Life of, 41.

Parr's Bank, 295.

Parr, Dr., 122, 123.

Parsons of the Cock Lane Ghost, 240.

Pass at St. Martin's Lane, 294, 313.

Pasquin, Fielding's, 50.

Paumier, M. H., 320, 333, 334.

Payne, Tom, 246.

Peckham Academy, 325.

Pelham, Henry, 170.

Pelham, Ode on Mr., Garrick's, 169.

Pembroke and Montgomery, Earl of, 197.

Pembroke, Henry Herbert, Earl of, 63, 89.

Pepys, Samuel, 212, 227.

Percy, 138, 145, 162, 242, 247.

Perceval, Sir John, 110.

Persian Tales, Philips's, 208.

Peterborough, Lord, 30, 31, 201.

Peters, Rev. M. W., 127.

Petits-Augustins, Couvent des, 192.

Peters Court, 295, 296, 297, 298, 301, 312.

Petis de la Croix, 308.

Philanthropy, A Paladin of, 1.

Philips, Ambrose, 265, 266, 307, 308, 309.

Physicians, College of, 247.

Piazza in Covent Garden, 164.

Pictorial Conjurer, Hone's, 312.

Pindar, Peter, 75, 124, 125, 127, 132.

'Pine Apple' in New Street, 315.

Pine, John, 310.

Pic Nic Society, The, 79.

Piozzi, Mrs., 143, 144, 162.

'Plagiary, Sir Fretful,' 125.

Poems and Plays, Goldsmith's, 33-60.

Poems (1720), Gay's, 276.

Poems for Young Ladies, Goldsmith's, 43.

Poetical Miscellany, Steele's, 265.

Poetry, Essay on, Temple's, 265.

Polite Learning, Goldsmith's, 37, 41, 49, 53.

Pöllnitz, 118.

Polly, Gay's, 283-285.

Pope, Alexander, 17, 29, 38, 39, 119, 137, 170, 261, 262, 266, 275, 276, 279, 280, 283, 287, 289, 310.

Portland, Earl of, 215.

Portsmouth, Duchess of, 201, 203, 206.

Powell, Mr., 52, 304.

Publick Spirit of the Whigs, Swift's, 106.

Pulteney, 276.

Pulchinello's booth, 238.

Purdon, Epitaph on, Goldsmith's, 40.

Practice of Christianity, Wilson's, 21.

Præterita, Ruskin's, 171.

Present State of Wit, Gay's, 259, 261.

Préville, the actor, 67.

Prince Arthur, Blackmore's, 260.

Pritchard, Mrs., 129.

Prior, Matthew, 251.

Privy Council Office, The, 198.

Privy Garden, The, 200, 201.

Privy Stairs, 205, 213.

Procession, Steele's, 90.

Pryor, Samuel, 251.

Psalmanazar, George, 171.

Pyne, W. H. (Ephraim Hardcastle), 81, 244, 299.

Queen Anne, Burton's, 255

Queensberry, Charles, Duke of, 66, 254, 278, 284, 285.

Queensberry, Duchess of, 66, 278, 284, 285, 288.

Quin, James, 130, 131.

'Quisquilius' (Baker), 176.

Raimbach, Abraham, 173-193, 307.

Raimbach, Eliza, 193.

Ramble from Richmond to London, Steele, 294.

Ramsay, Allan, 297.

Ranelagh, 164.

Rawlins, Sophia, 303.

Raymond, Mr. Samuel, 163.

Rayner, William, 254.

Reay, Martha, 74.

Read, Nicholas, 312.

Records of My Life, Taylor's, 121.

Redas, the fencer, 83.

Reed, Isaac, 323.

Reflections on the French Revolution, Burke's, 128.

Reliques of Ancient Poetry, Percy's, 43.

Reminiscences, Angelo's, 61-84.

Regicides, The, 237, 238.

Retaliation, Goldsmith's, 44.

Revolution of 1688, Fox's, 185.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 128, 145, 149, 151, 162, 170, 171, 174, 297, 300, 301.

Reynolds, Frances, 301, 302.

Rhenish Wine House, 251.

Rich, Christopher, 95.

Rich, Manager, 282, 285.

Richmond Terrace, 196, 201.

Rivals, Sheridan's, 57.

'Rivella' (Mrs. Manley), 96.

Rivett, John, 239.

Robe Chamber at Whitehall, 203.

Robespierre, 183.

Rogers, Samuel, 1, 217, 218, 219.

Rose, Dr., of Chiswick, 64.

Rose, John, 212.

Roubillac, 66, 296, 297, 298, 310, 312.

Roustan, The Mameluke, 181.

Rouquet, 310.

Rubens, P. P., 210.

Rudd, Mrs. Margaret, 72.

Rummer Tavern, 251.

Rupert, Prince, 201.

Rural Sports, Gay's, 263, 264.

Ruskin, 171.

Rowlandson, Thomas, 75, 76, 83, 84.

Rowley, 245.

Royal Academy, 297.

Royal United Service Institution, 195.

Sabines, The, David's, 183.

Sailor's Advocate, Oglethorpe's, 9.

St. Augustine, 18, 22, 23, 25.

St. Antoine, M., 245.

Saint Huberty, Mme., 186.

St. James's Park, 196.

St. James's Palace, 197.

St. Martin's Lane, 293-314.

St. Martin's Lane Academy, 296, 297.

St. Martin's Lane, Upper, 312.

St. Martin's Church, 314.

St. Martin's Court, 307.

St. Martin's Free Library, 295.

St. Simon's Island, 13, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24.

Salzburg Protestants, The, 13.

Sandby, Thomas, 209.

Sandwich, Lord, 212.

Satchell, Miss, 133.

Savage, Richard, 109, 110.

Savannah, 12, 18.

Saxe, Marshal, 118.

Schicksal der Protestanten in Franckreich, Raimbach's, 318, 321.

Scotland Yard, 196, 206.

Scottish Office, 207.

Scribleriad, Cambridge's, 125.

Scriblerus Club, 268.

Scurlock, Miss Mary (Mrs. Steele), 98, 99.

Scurlock, Mrs., 101, 102.

Senauki, wife of Tomo Chichi, 14.

Sentimental Comedy, 49, 53, 54.

Sermons, Foster's, 165.

Siddons, Mrs., 126, 133.

Sigismunda, Hogarth's, 252.

Slaughter, Thomas, 309.

Slaughter's, Old, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312.

Slaughter's, Young or New, 307, 309.

Sleeping Congregation, Hogarth's, 267.

Sleep Walker, Lady Craven's, 79.

Sloane, Sir Hans, 18.

Smeaton, 312.

Smirke, 177.

Smirke, Sir Robert, 211.

Smirke, Sydney, 207.

Smith, Adam, 162.

Smith, Sydney, 217.

Smith, Captain Thomas, 331-332.

Shaw, Rev. William, 142.

Shepherd's Week, Gay's, 265-268, 308.

Sheppard, Jack, 118, 240.

She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith's, 55-58, 59, 60.

Sheraton, Thomas, 313.

Sheridan, R. B., 69, 125, 175, 176.

Sheridan, Tom, 69, 78.

Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, Collier's, 94.

Shuter, Edward, 80.

Society of Artists, 252.

Soubise, Lady Queensberry's black, 75.

South, Robert, 204.

South American Ode, Goldsmith's, 40.

Spectator, The, 104, 105, 259, 260.

Spirit of Johnson, Morley's, 166.

Splendid Shilling, Philips's, 258.

Spring Gardens, 196, 198, 234, 248, 249.

Spunging-houses, 6.

Stage, The, Taylor's, 134.

Steevens, George, 176, 276.

Steele, 85-114, 259, 260, 294, 295, 308.

Steele, Life of, Aitken's, 86-114.

Steele, Mrs., 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107.

Steele, Richard, the elder, 88.

Steele, The Latest Life of, 85-114.

Stillingfleet, Edward, 204.

Stone Gallery at Whitehall, 201, 202.

Storace, Stephen, 175, 176.

Stothard, Thomas, 173.

Stratford Jubilee, The, 65.

Stretch, Margaret, 97.

Strolling Actresses, Hogarth's, 303.

Strype, John, 293, 294, 295.

Stubbs, George, 70.

Suffolk House, 241.

Sullivan, Luke, 310.

Sunderland, Lady, 203.

Superville, Daniel de, 316.

Superville, M., 334.

Sussex, Duke of, 74.

Suspicious Husband, Hoadly's, 163.

'Suspirius,' Johnson's, 52.

Swift, Jonathan, 104, 109, 137, 257, 259, 264, 273, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 287, 288.

Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's, 218.

Symes, Elinor, 88.

Taine, H., 286.

Tales of the Genii, Cooke's, 176.

Talking Oak, Tennyson's, 44.

Talma, 188.

Taste, Foote's, 68, 314.

Tatler, The, 104, 259, 260.

Taylor, John (1), 116-20.

Taylor, John (2), 120.

Taylor, John (3), 120-1.

Taylor, John Stirling, 121.

Tedder, H. R., 138, 159.

Teillagory, 62.

Temple, 150, 160.

Tender Husband, Steele's, 85, 94, 95.

Tennis Court, 198.

Thackeray, 185, 309.

Theatre at Whitehall, 203.

Théâtre de la Republique, 185.

Théâtre de la Republique et des Arts, 186.

Théâtre Français, 185.

Théâtre, Picart's, 188.

Theodore of Corsica, 119.

'Thomas Paine Exhibition,' The, 191.

Thomson, James, 251.

Thornhill, Sir James, 8, 298, 299, 300, 304.

Thrale, Mrs., 144, 147.

Three Hours after Marriage, Gay's, 275.

Threnodia Augustalis, 44.

Thurston, John, 177.

Tickell, Thomas, 265.

Titania, Fuseli's, 303.

Tilt Yard, 198, 207.

Titi, History of Prince, 162.

Tofts, Mary, 118.

Tom Jones à Londres, Desforges, 189.

Tom Jones, Poinsinet's, 189.

Tomo-Chichi, King of Yamacrow, 14, 15.

Tooanahowi, 14, 15.

Tom's Coffee-house, 296.

Town Talk, Steele's, 96.

Trafalgar Square, 294.

Trafalgar Square Theatre, 298.

Traveller, Goldsmith's, 36, 41, 44, 46, 47, 59, 138.

Travels, Hentzner's, 210.

Travels and Adventures of the Chevalier John Taylor, 118.

Travels in France, Hollcroft's, 190.

Treasury, The, 198, 200.

Treatise on Human Knowledge, Berkeley's, 110.

Tree, Ellen, 136, 231.

Tree, Maria (Mrs. Bradshaw), 136.

Tremamondo, D. A. M., 61-84.

Tribunat, Palais du, 189.

Trivia, Gay's, 245, 273-275.

Trotter, Thomas, 139.

Trusler, Dr., 304.

Tuileries, The, 180.

Tullibardine, Earl of, 214.

Turner, J. M. W., 173, 178.

Tyers, Jonathan, 140, 299.

Tyers, Tom, 140, 141, 162.

Underhill, John, 253, 263, 264.

Union Club, 235.

Vane Room at Whitehall, 203.

Vanity Fair, Thackeray's, 309.

Van Nost, John, 298.

Van Nost of Piccadilly, 298.

Van Woortz, M., 317.

Vauxhall Gardens, 296, 298, 299.

Vidal, François, 317, 318.

Venetian Senators, Evelyn's, 242.

Vernet, Carle, 183.

Vernet, Horace, 183.

Venice Preserved, Otway's, 131.

Verelst, William, 14.

Vernes, M. Felix, 317, 318.

Vestris, the elder, 187.

Vetusta Monumenta, 209.

Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith's, 43, 47, 59.

Village Politicians, Wilkie's, 193.

Viner, Sir Robert, 239.

Vitruvius Britannicus, Campbell's, 194.

Voltaire, 119.

Wake, Dr., Archbishop of Canterbury, 15.

Walesby, F. P., 152.

Wales, Diary of a Tour in, Johnson's, 158.

Walker, Dr. Thomas, 88.

Waller, Edmund, 233, 236.

Wallingford House, 248, 249.

Walpole, Horace, 8, 29, 30, 119, 131, 132, 153, 212, 242, 303.

Walpole, Sir Robert, 279, 282.

Warburton, Bishop, 131.

Ward, Dr. Joshua, 117.

Wardrobe at Whitehall, The, 206.

Ware, Isaac, 310.

Warton, Joseph, 31.

Watson, 173.

Watch-House, St. Martin's, 314.

Wesley, Charles, 17, 19.

Wesley, John, 17, 19-20.

West, Benjamin, 127, 176, 178, 184.

Westall, Richard, 176.

Welcome from Greece, Gay's, 291, 292.

Western Islands, Journey to the, Johnson's, 147.

West Indian, Cumberland's, 54.

Westminster County Court, 307.

Westminster, Smith's, 209.

Weston, Lord High Treasurer, 239.

Wenzel, Baron de, 120.

Wife of Bath, Gay's, 264.

Wild, Jonathan, 119.

Wilkes, John, 69, 124.

Wilkie, Sir David, 173, 193, 307, 310.

Wilkins, William, 247.

William, Fort, 24.

Willington, James, 322, 325, 327.

Willmore, J. T., 173.

Wills, W. H., 89.

Wilson, Dr. (the Manx bishop), 21.

Wilson, Richard, 77, 127, 173, 297, 310.

Wine and Walnuts, Pyne's, 244.

Wine Cellar at Whitehall, 207.

What D'ye Call It, Gay's, 271.

Whitefield, George, 20, 25.

Whitefoord, Caleb, 124.

Whitehall, Burning of, 335-336.

Whitehall Court, 194, 207.

Whitehall Gardens, 196.

Whitehall, Old, 194-215.

Whitehall Palace Stairs, 203, 204, 206.

Whitehall Yard, 207.

Woffington, Mrs. Margaret, 62.

Wolcot, Dr., 124.

Woodward, Henry, 163.

Woollett, William, 173, 175.

Word to the Wise, Kelly's, 54.

Worlidge, Thomas, 120.

Wortley-Montagu, Lady Mary, 276.

Wright, Richard, of Lichfield, 162.

Wright, Mr. Robert, 3.

York, Duke of, 203, 204.

Zoffany, 70, 71, 297.

THE COMPLETE ESSAYS OF AUSTIN DOBSON

[The end of A Paladin of Philanthropy by Henry Austin Dobson]