Haunted London — Charing Cross Part 2

On the 17th, Thomas Scot perished at the same place.

His last words were--“God engaged me in a cause not to be repented of--I say, in a cause not to be repented of.

” Jones and Scrope (both old men) were drawn in one sledge.

Their grave yet cheerful and courageous countenances caused great admiration and compassion among the crowd.

Observing one of his friend’s children weeping at Newgate, Colonel Jones took her by the hand.

He said, “Suppose your father were to-morrow to be King of France, and you were to tarry a little behind, would you weep so?

Why, he is going to reign with the King of kings.

” When he saw the sledge, he said, “It is like Elijah’s fiery chariot, only it goes through Fleet Street.

” The night before he suffered, he told a friend the only temptation he had was lest he should be too much transported, and so neglect and slight his life, so greatly was he satisfied to die in such a cause.

Another friend he grasped in his arms and said, “Farewell!

I could wish thee in the same condition as myself, that our souls might mount up to heaven together and share in eternal joys.

” To another friend he said, “Ah, dear heart!

if we had perished together in that storm going to Ireland, we had been in heaven to welcome honest Harrison and Carew; but we will be content to go after them--we will go after.

” It is added that “the executioner, having done his part upon three others that day, was so surfeited with blood and sick, that he sent his boy to finish the tragedy on Colonel Jones.

” Hugh Peters was much afraid while in Newgate lest his spirits should fail him when he saw the gibbet and the fire, but his courage did not fail him in that hour of great need.

On his way to execution he looked about and espied a man to whom he gave a piece of gold, having bowed it first, and desired him to carry that as a token to his daughter, and to let her know that her father’s heart was as full of comfort as it could be, and that before the piece should come into her hands he should be with God in glory.

While Cook was being hanged they made Peters sit within the rails to behold his death.

While sitting thus, one came to him and upbraided the old preacher with the king’s death, and bade him repent.

Peters replied, “Friend, you do not well to trample upon a dying man: you are greatly mistaken--I had nothing to do in the death of the king.

” When Mr. Cook was cut down and about to be quartered, Colonel Turner told the sheriff’s men to bring Mr. Peters nearer to see the body.

By and by the hangman came to him, rubbing his bloody hands, and tauntingly asked him, “Come, how do you like this--how do you like this work?

” To whom Mr. Peters calmly replied, “I am not, I thank God, terrified at it--you may do your worst.

” Being upon the ladder, he spoke to the sheriff and said, “Sir, you have here slain one of the servants of God before mine eyes, and have made me to behold it on purpose to terrify and discourage me, but God hath made it an ordinance to me for my strengthening and encouragement.

” When he was going to die, he said, “What, flesh!

art thou unwilling to go to God through the fire and jaws of death?

Oh!

this is a good day.

He is come that I have long looked for, and I shall soon be with Him in glory.

” And he smiled when he went away.

“What Mr. Peters said further it could not be taken, in regard his voice was low at the time and the people uncivil.

” In May 1685 that consummate scoundrel Titus Oates came to the pillory at Charing Cross.

He had been condemned to pay a thousand marks fine, to be stripped of his gown, to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn, from Aldgate to Newgate, and to stand in the pillory at the Royal Exchange and before Westminster Hall.

He was also condemned to stand one hour in the pillory at Charing Cross every 10th of August, and there an eye-witness describes seeing him in 1688. [377] In 1666 and 1667 an Italian puppet-player set up his booth at Charing Cross, and there and then probably introduced “Punch and Judy” into England.

He paid a small rent to the overseers of St. Martin’s parish, and is called in their books “Punchinello.

” In 1668 we learn that a Mr. Devone erected a small playhouse in the same place.

[378] There is still extant a song written to ridicule the long delay in setting up the king’s statue, and it contains an allusion to “Punch”-- “What can the mistry be, why Charing Cross These five months continues still blinded with board?

Dear Wheeler, impart--wee are all att a loss, Unless Punchinello is to be restored.

”[379] The royal statue at Charing Cross is the work of Hubert Le Sœur, a Frenchman and a pupil of the famous John of Bologna, the sculptor of the “Rape of the Sabines” in the Loggia at Florence.

Le Sœur’s copy of the “Fighting Gladiator,” which is praised by Peacham in his “Compleat Gentleman,” once at the head of the canal in St. James’s Park, is now at Hampton Court.

Le Sœur also executed the monuments of Sir George Villiers, and Sir Thomas Richardson the judge, in Westminster Abbey.

The original contract for the brazen equestrian statue, a foot larger than life, is dated 1630. The sculptor was to receive £600. The agreement was drawn up by Sir Balthasar Gerbier for the purchaser, the Lord High Treasurer Weston.

Yet the existing statue was not cast till 1633, and the above-mentioned agreement speaks of it as to be erected in the Lord Treasurer’s garden at Roehampton; so that the agreement may not refer to the same work, although it certainly specifies that the sculptor shall “take advice of his Maj.

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.

”[380] The present statue was cast in 1633, on a piece of ground near the church in Covent Garden, and not being actually erected when the Civil War broke out, it was sold by the Parliament to John Rivet, a brazier, living at “the Dial, near Holburn Conduit,” with strict orders to break it up.

But the man, being a shrewd Royalist, produced some fragments of old brass, and hid the statue underground till the Restoration.

Rivet refusing to deliver up the statue after Charles’s return, a replevin was served upon him to compel its surrender.

The dispute, however, lasted many years, and he probably pleaded compensation.

The statue was erected in its present position about 1674, by an order from the Earl of Danby, afterwards Duke of Leeds.

Le Sœur died, it is supposed, before the statue was erected.

Horace Walpole, who praises the “commanding grace of the figure,” and the “exquisite form of the horse,”[381] incorrectly says, “The statue was made at the expense of the family of Howard, Lord Arundel, who have still the receipt to show by whom and for whom it was cast.

” There is still extant a very rare large sheet print of the statue, engraved in the manner and time of Faithorne, but without name or date.

The inscription beneath it describes the statue as almost ten feet high, and as “preserved underground,” with great hazard, charge, and care, by John Rivet, a brazier.

[382] John Rivet may have been a patriot, but he was certainly a shrewd one.

To secure his concealed treasure he had manufactured a large quantity of brass handles for knives and forks, and advertised them as being forged from the destroyed statue.

They sold well; the Royalists bought them as sad and precious relics; the Puritans as mementos of their triumph.

He doubled his prices, and still his shop was crowded with eager customers, so that in a short time he realised a considerable fortune.

[383] The brazier, or the brazier’s family, probably sold the statue to Charles II.

at his restoration.

The Parliament voted £70,000 for solemnising the funeral of Charles I. , and for erecting a monument to his memory.

[384] Part of this sum went for the pedestal, but whether the brazier or his kin were rewarded is not known.

Charles II.

probably spent most of the money on his pleasures.

There is a fatality attending the verses of most time-serving poets.

Waller never wrote a court poem well but when he lauded that great man, the Protector.

When the statue of “the Martyr” was set up, _fourteen years_ after the Restoration--so tardy was filial affection--Waller wrote the following dull and unworthy lines about the statue of a faithless king:-- “That the first Charles does here in triumph ride, See his son reign where he a martyr died, And people pay that reverence as they pass (Which then he wanted) to the sacred brass Is not th’ effect of gratitude alone, To which we owe the statue and the stone;

But Heaven this lasting monument has wrought, That mortals may eternally be taught Rebellion, though successful, is but vain, And kings so kill’d rise conquerors again.

This truth the royal image does proclaim Loud as the trumpet of surviving fame.

” Andrew Marvell, one of the most powerful of lampoon writers, and the very Gillray of political satirists, wrote some bitter lines on the statue of the so-called Martyr at Charing Cross, lines which in an earlier reign would have cost the honest daring poet his ears, if not his head.

There was an equestrian stone statue of Charles II.

at Woolchurch (Woolwich?

), and the poet imagines the two horses, the one of stone and the other of brass, talking together one evening, when the two riders, weary of sitting all day, had stolen away together for a chat.

“WOOLCHURCH.

--To see Dei gratia writ on the throne, And the king’s wicked life says God there is none.

CHARING.

--That he should be styled Defender of the Faith Who believes not a word what the Word of God saith.

WOOLCHURCH.

--That the Duke should turn Papist and that church defy For which his own father a martyr did die.

CHARING.

--Tho’ he changed his religion, I hope he’s so civil Not to think his own father has gone to the devil.

” Upon the brazen horse being asked his opinion of the Duke of York, it replies with terrible truth and force:-- “The same that the frogs had of Jupiter’s stork.

With the Turk in his head and the Pope in his heart, Father Patrick’s disciple will make England smart.

If e’er he be king, I know Britain’s doom: We must all to the stake or be converts to Rome.

Ah!

Tudor!

ah!

Tudor!

of Stuarts enough.

None ever reigned like old Bess in her ruff.

* * * * * WOOLCHURCH.

--But can’st thou devise when kings will be mended?

CHARING.

--When the reign of the line of the Stuarts is ended.

” In April 1810 the sword, buckles, and straps fell from the statue.

[385] The king’s sword was stolen on the day on which Queen Victoria went to open the Royal Exchange.

London has its local traditions as well as the smallest village.

There is a foolish story that the sculptor of Charles I. and his steed committed suicide in vexation at having forgotten to put a girth to the horse.

The myth has arisen from the supposition of there being no girth, and retailers of such stories, Mr. Leigh Hunt included, did not take the trouble to ascertain whether there was or was not a girth.

Unfortunately for the story there is a girth, and it is clearly visible.

The pedestal, by some assigned to Marshal, by others to Grinling Gibbons, the great wood-carver, and a Dutchman by birth, is seventeen feet high, and is enriched with the arms of England, trophies of armour, cupids, and palm-branches.

It is erected in the centre of a circular area, thirty feet in diameter, raised one step from the roadway, and enclosed with iron rails.

The lion and unicorn are much mutilated, and the trophies are honeycombed and corroded by the weather.

It has not been generally observed that on the south side of the pedestal two weeping children support a crown of thorns, and that the same emblem is repeated on the opposite side, below the royal arms.

In 1727 (1st George II.

) that infamous rogue, Edmund Curll, the publisher of all the filth and slander of his age, stood in the pillory at Charing Cross for printing a vile work called _Venus in a Cloyster_.

He was not, however, pelted or ill-used; for, with the usual lying and cunning of his reptile nature, he had circulated printed papers telling the people that he stood there for daring to vindicate the memory of Queen Anne.

The mob allowed no one to touch him; and when he was taken down they carried him off in triumph to a neighbouring tavern.

[386] Archenholz, an observant Prussian officer who was in England in 1784, tells a curious anecdote of the statue at Charing Cross.

During the war in which General Braddock was defeated by the French in America, about the time when Minorca was in the enemy’s hands, and poor Byng had just fallen a victim to popular fury, an unhappy Spaniard, who did not know a word of English, and had just arrived in England, was surrounded by a mob near Whitehall, who took him by his dress for a French spy.

One of the rabble instantly proposed to mount him on the king’s horse.

The idea was adopted.

A ladder was brought, and the miserable Spaniard was forced upon its back, to be loaded with insults and pelted with mud.

Luckily for the stranger, at that moment a cabinet minister happening to pass by, stopped to inquire the cause of the crowd.

On addressing the man in French he discovered the mistake, and informed the mob.

They instantly helped the man down, and the minister, taking him in his coach to the Spanish ambassador, apologised in the name of the nation for a mistake that might have been fatal.

[387] In June 1731 Japhet Crook, _alias_ Sir Peter Stranger, who had been found guilty of forging the writings to an estate, was sentenced to imprisonment for life.

[388] He was condemned to stand for one hour in the pillory at Charing Cross.

He was then seated in an elbow-chair; the common hangman cut off both his ears with an incision knife, and then delivered them to Mr. Watson, a sheriff’s officer.

He also slit both Crook’s nostrils with a pair of scissors, and seared them with a hot iron, pursuant to the sentence.

A surgeon attended on the pillory and instantly applied styptics to prevent the effusion of blood.

The man bore the operations with undaunted courage.

He laughed on the pillory, and denied the fact to the last.

He was then removed to the Ship Tavern at Charing Cross, and thence taken back to the King’s Bench prison, to be confined there for life.

[389] This Crook had forged the conveyance, to himself, of an estate, upon which he took up several thousand pounds.

He was at the same time sued in Chancery for having fraudulently obtained a will and wrongfully gained an estate.

In spite of losing his ears, he enjoyed the ill-gained money in prison till the day of his death, and then quietly left it to his executor.

He is mentioned by Pope in his 3d epistle, written in 1732. Talking of riches, he says-- “What can they give?

--to dying Hopkins heirs?

To Chartres vigour?

Japhet nose and ears?

”[390] It was in this essay that, having been accused of attacking the Duke of Chandos, Pope first began to attack vices instead of follies, and, in order to prevent mistakes, boldly to publish the names of the malefactors whom he gibbeted.

Crook had been a brewer on Tower Hill.

The 2d George II.

, c. 25, made forgery a felony; and the first sufferer under the new law was Richard Cooper, a Stepney victualler, who was hanged at Tyburn, in June 1731, six days only after the older and luckier thief had stood in the pillory.

In 1763 Parsons, the parish-clerk of St. Sepulchre’s, and the impudent contriver of the “Cock Lane ghost” deception, mounted here to the same bad eminence.

Parsons’s child, a cunning little girl of twelve years, had contrived to tap on her bed in a way that served to convey what were supposed to be supernatural messages.

It proved to be a plot devised by Parsons out of malice against a gentleman of Norfolk who had sued him for a debt.

This gentleman was a widower, who had taken his wife’s sister as his mistress--a marriage with her being forbidden by law--and had brought her to lodge with Parsons, from whence he had removed her to other lodgings, where she had died suddenly of small-pox.

The object of Parsons was to obtain the ghost’s declaration that she had been poisoned by Parsons’s creditor.

The rascal was set three times in the pillory and imprisoned for a year in the King’s Bench.

The people, however, singularly enough, did not pelt the impudent rogue, but actually collected money for him.

There is a rare sheet-print of Charing Cross by Sutton Nicholls, in the reign of Queen Anne.

It shows about forty small square stone posts surrounding the pedestal of the statue.

The spot seems to have been a favourite standing-place for hackney coaches and sedan chairs.

Every house has a long stepping-stone for horsemen at a regulated distance from the front.

In 1737 Hogarth published his four prints of the “Times of the Day.

”[391] The scene of _Night_ is laid at Charing Cross; it is an illumination-night.

Some drunken Freemasons and the Salisbury “High-flyer” coach upset over a street bonfire near the Rummer Tavern, fill up the picture, which is curious as showing the roadway much narrower than it is now, and impeded with projecting signs above and bulkheads below.

The place is still further immortalised in the old song-- “I cry my matches by Charing Cross, Where sits a black man on a black horse.

” In a sixpenny book for children, published about 1756, the absurd figure of King George impaled on the top of Bloomsbury Church is contrasted with that of King Charles at the Cross.

“No longer stand staring, My friend, at Cross Charing, Amidst such a number of people;

For a man on a horse Is a matter of course, But look!

here’s a king on a steeple.

”[392] It was at Robinson’s coffee-house, at Charing Cross, that that clever scamp, vigorous versifier, and, as I think, great impostor, Richard Savage, stabbed to death a Mr. Sinclair in a drunken brawl.

Savage had come up from Richmond to settle a claim for lodgings, when, meeting two friends, he spent the night in drinking, till it was too late to get a bed.

As the three revellers passed Robinson’s, a place of no very good name, they saw a light, knocked at the door, and were admitted.

It was a cold, raw, November night; and hearing that the company in the parlour were about to leave, and that there was a fire there, they pushed in and kicked down the table.

A quarrel ensued, swords were drawn, and Mr. Sinclair received a mortal wound.

The three brawlers then fled, and were discovered lurking in a back-court by the soldiers who came to stop the fray.

The three men were taken to the Gate House at Westminster, and the next morning to Newgate.

That cruel and bullying judge, Page, hounded on the jury at the trial in the following violent summing up:--“Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a very great man, a much greater man than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he wears very fine clothes, much finer than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he has abundance of money in his pocket, much more money than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but, gentlemen of the jury, is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that Mr. Savage should therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of the jury?

” The verdict was of course “Guilty,” for these homicides during tavern brawls had become frightfully common, and quiet citizens were never sure of their lives.

Sentence of death was recorded against him.

Eventually a lady at court interceded for the poet, who escaped with six months’ imprisonment in Newgate, which he certainly well deserved.

There is every reason to suppose from the researches of Mr. W.

Moy Thomas, that Savage was an impostor.

He claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield by Lord Rivers.

The lady had an illegitimate child born in Fox Court, Gray’s Inn Lane in 1697; but this child, there is reason to think, died in 1698. [393] Savage imposed on Dr. Johnson and other friends with stories of being placed at school and apprenticed to a shoemaker in Holborn by his countess mother, until among his nurse’s old letters he one day accidentally discovered the secret of his birth.

There is no proof at all of his being persecuted by the countess, whose life he rendered miserable by insults, lampoons, abuse, slander, and begging letters.

Pope has embalmed Page in the _Dunciad_ just as a scorpion is preserved in a spirit-bottle:-- “Morality by her false guardians drawn, Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn, Gasps as they straighten at each end the cord, And dies when Dulness gives her _Page_ the word.

”[394] And again, with equal bitterness and truth, in his _Imitations of Horace_:-- “Slander or poison dread from Delia’s rage, Hard words or hanging if your judge be Page.

” This “hanging judge,” who enjoyed his ermine and his infamy till he was eighty, first obtained preferment by writing political pamphlets.

He was made a Baron of the Exchequer in 1718, a Justice of the Common Pleas in 1726, and in 1727 transferred to the Court of King’s Bench.

Page was so illiterate that he commenced one of his charges to the grand jury of Middlesex with this remarkable statement: “I dare venture to affirm, gentlemen, on my own knowledge, that England never was so happy, both _at home and abroad_, as it now is.

” Horace Walpole mentions that when Crowle, the punning lawyer, was once entering an assize court, some one asked him if Judge Page was not “just behind.

” Crowle replied, “I don’t know, but I am sure he never was just before.

”[395] The various mews, now stables, about London, derive their name from the enclosure where falcons in the Middle Ages were kept to mew (_mutare_, Minshew) their feathers.

The King’s Mews stood on the site of the present Trafalgar Square.

In the 13th Edward II.

John de la Becke had the custody of the Mews “apud Charing, juxta Westminster.

” In the 10th Edward III.

John de St. Albans succeeded Becke.

In Richard II.

’s time the office of king’s falconer, a post of importance, was held by Sir Simon Burley, who was constable of the castles of Windsor, Wigmore, and Guilford, and also of the royal manor of Kennington.

This Sir Simon had been selected by the Black Prince as guardian of Richard II.

, and he also negotiated his marriage.

One of the complaints of Wat Tyler and his party was that he had thrown a burgher of Gravesend into Rochester Castle.

The Duke of Gloucester had him executed in 1388, in spite of Richard’s queen praying upon her knees for his life.

At the end of this reign or in the first year of Henry IV.

, the poet Chaucer was clerk of the king’s works and also of the Mews at Charing; and here, from his fluttering, angry little feathered subjects, he must have drawn many of those allusions to the brave sport of hawking to be found in the immortal _Canterbury Tales_.

The falconry continued at Charing till 1534 (26th Henry VIII.

), when the king’s fine stabling, with many horses and a great store of hay, being destroyed by fire, the Mews was rebuilt and turned into royal stables, in the reigns of Edward VI.

and Mary.

[396] M.

St. Antoine, the riding-master, whose portrait Vandyke painted, performed his caracoles and demi-tours at the Mews.

Here Cromwell imprisoned Lieut.

-Colonel George Joyce, who, when plain cornet, had arrested the king at Holmby.

An angry little Puritan pamphlet of four pages, published in 1659, gives an account of Cromwell’s troubles with the fractious Joyce, and how he had resolved to cashier him and destroy his estate.

The colonel was carried by musqueteers to the common Dutch prison at the Mews, and seems to have been much tormented by Cavalier vermin.

There he remained ten days, and was then removed to another close room, where he fell sick from the “evil smells,” and remained so for ten weeks, refusing all the time to lay down his commission, declaring that he had been unworthily dealt with, and that all that had been sworn against him was false.

There was at the Mews gate a celebrated old book shop, opened in 1750 by Mr. Thomas Payne, who kept it alive for forty years.

It was the rendezvous of all noblemen and scholars who sought rare books.

It may be remarked, by the way, that booksellers’ shops have always been the haunts of wits and poets.

Dodsley, the ex-footman, gathered round him the wisest men of his age, as Tonson had also done before him; while, as for John Murray’s back parlour, it was in Byron’s and Moore’s days a very temple of the Muses.

In Charles II.

’s time the famous but ugly horse Rowley lived at the Mews, and gave a nickname to his swarthy royal master.

In 1732 that impudent charlatan, Kent, rebuilt the Mews, which was only remarkable after that for sheltering for a time Mr. Cross’s menagerie, when first removed from Exeter Change in 1829. The National Gallery, one of the poorest buildings in London (which is saying a good deal), was built between 1832 and 1838, from the designs of a certain unfortunate Mr. Wilkins, R. A.

It is not often that Fortune is so malicious as to give an inferior artist such ample room to show his inability.

The vote for founding the Gallery passed in Parliament in April 1824. The columns of the portico were part of the screen of Carlton House--interesting memorials of a debasing regency, and, if possible, of a worse reign.

The site has been called “the finest in Europe:” it is, however, a fine site, which is more than can be said of the building that covers it.

The front is 500 feet long.

In the centre is a portico, on stilts, with eight Corinthian columns approached by a double flight of steps; a low squat dome not much larger than a washing basin; and two pepper-castor turrets that crown the eyesore of London.

Though on high ground--very high ground for a rather flat city--the architect, pinched for money, contrived to make the building lower than the grand portico of St. Martin’s Church, and even than the houses of Suffolk Place.

One of the last occasions on which William IV.

appeared in public was in 1837, before the opening of the first Academy Exhibition here in May.

The good-natured king is said to have suggested calling the square “Trafalgar,” and erecting a Nelson monument.

A subscription was opened, and the Duke of Buccleuch was appointed chairman.

The square was commenced in 1829, but was not completed till after 1849. The Nelson column was begun in 1837, and the statue set up in November 1843. Three premiums were offered for the three best designs, and Mr. Railton carried off the palm.

Upwards of £20,480 were subscribed, and, £12,000 it was thought would be required to complete the monument.

[397] It was originally intended to expend only £30,000 upon the whole.

[398] Alas for estimates so sanguine, so fallacious!

the granite work alone cost upwards of £10,000. Mr. Railton chose a column, after mature reflection; although triumphal columns are bad art, and the invention of a barbarous people and a corrupt age.

[399] He rejected a temple, as too expensive and too much in the way;

a group of figures he condemned as not visible at a distance; he finally chose a Corinthian column as new, as harmonious, and as uniting the labours of sculptor and architect.

The column, with its base and pedestal, measures 193 feet.

The fluted shaft has a torus of oak leaves.

The capital is copied from the fine example of Mars Ultor at Rome; from it rises a circular pedestal wreathed with laurel, and surmounted by a statue of Nelson, eighteen feet high, and formed of two blocks of stone from the Granton quarry.

The great pedestal is adorned with four bassi-relievi, eighteen feet square each, representing four of Nelson’s great victories.

It is difficult to say which is tamest of the four.

That of “Trafalgar” is by Mr. Carew; the “Nile,” by Mr. Woodington; “St. Vincent,” by Mr. Watson; and “Copenhagen,” by Mr. Ternouth.

The pedestal is raised on a flight of fifteen steps, at the angles of which are placed couchant lions from the designs of Sir Edwin Landseer.

They are forged out of French cannon.

The capital is of the same costly material, which, considering the brave English blood it has cost, should have been painted crimson.

Many years passed by after the commission was given to Sir Edwin Landseer before they were placed _in situ_.

The cocked hat on Mr. Baily’s statue has been somewhat unjustly ridiculed, and so has the coil of rope or pigtail supporting the hero.

The bronze equestrian statue of George IV.

, at the north-east end of the square, is by Chantrey.

It was ordered by the king in 1829. The price was to be 9000 guineas, but the worthy monarch never paid the sculptor more than a third of that sum; the rest was given by the Woods and Forests out of the national taxes, and the third instalment in 1843, after Chantrey’s death, by the Lords of the Treasury.

It is a sprightly and clever statue, but of no great merit.

It should have been paid for by William IV.

, just as the Nelson statue should have been erected by Parliament, the honour being one due to Nelson from an ungrateful nation.

This statue of George IV.

was originally intended to crown the arch in front of Buckingham Palace--an arch that cost £80,000, and that was hung with gates that cost 3000 guineas.

The so-called Chartist riots of 1848 were commenced by boys destroying the hoarding round the base of the Nelson monument.

The fountains in the centre of the Square are of Peterhead granite, and were made at Aberdeen.

They are mean, despicable, and unworthy of the noble position which they occupy.

Some years ago there was a fuss about an Artesian well that was to feed these stone punch-bowls with inexhaustible gushes of silvery water.

This supply has dwindled down to a sort of overflow of a ginger-beer bottle once a day.

I blush when I take a foreigner to see Trafalgar Square, with its squat domes, its mean statues, its tame bassi-relievi, and its disgraceful fountains.

I will not trust myself to criticise the statues of Napier and Havelock.

The figures are poor, and unworthy of the fiery soldier and the Christian hero they misrepresent.

They should be in the Abbey.

Why has the Abbey grown, like the Court, less receptive than ever?

What passport is there into the Abbey, where such strange people sleep, if the conquest of Scinde and the relief of Lucknow will not take a body there.

But to return to the National Gallery.

Mr. G.

Agar-Ellis, afterwards Lord Dover, first proposed a National Gallery in Parliament in 1824; Government having previously purchased thirty-eight pictures from Mr. Angerstein for £57,000. This collection included “The Raising of Lazarus,” by Del Piombo.

It is supposed that Michael Angelo, jealous of Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” helped Sebastian in the drawing of his cartoon, which was to be a companion picture for Narbonne Cathedral.

It was purchased from the Orleans Gallery for 3500 guineas.

[400] In 1825 some pictures were purchased for the Gallery from Mr. Hamlet.

These included the “Bacchus and Ariadne” of Titian, for £5000. This golden picture (extolled by Vasari) was painted about 1514 for the Duke of Ferrara.

Titian was then in the full vigour of his thirty-seventh year.

[401] In the same year “La Vierge au Panier” of Correggio was purchased from Mr. Nieuwenhuy, a picture-dealer, for £3800. It is a late picture, and hurt in cleaning.

It was one of the gems of the Madrid Gallery.

In 1826, Sir George Beaumont presented sixteen pictures, valued at 7500 guineas.

These included one of the finest landscapes of Rubens, “The Chateau,” which originally cost £1500, and Wilkie’s _chef-d’œuvre_, that fine Raphaelesque composition, “The Blind Fiddler.

”