Haunted London — Lincoln's Inn Fields Part 3

The gem of all the Soane treasures is an enormous transparent alabaster sarcophagus, discovered by Belzoni in 1816 in a tomb in the valley of Beban el Molook, near Thebes.

It is nine feet four inches long, three feet eight inches wide, two feet eight inches deep, and is covered without and within with beautifully-cut hieroglyphics.

It was the greatest discovery of the runaway Paduan Monk, and was undoubtedly the cenotaph or sarcophagus of a Pharaoh or Ptolemy.

It was discovered in an enormous tomb of endless chambers, which the Arabs still call “Belzoni’s tomb.

” On the bottom of the case is a full-length figure in relief, of Isis, the guardian of the dead.

Sir John Soane gave £2000 for this sarcophagus to Mr. Salt, Consul General of Egypt and Belzoni’s employer.

The raised lid is broken into nineteen pieces.

The late Sir Gardner Wilkinson considered this to be the cenotaph of Osirei, the father of Rameses the Great.

But the forgotten king for whom the Soane sarcophagus was really executed was Seti, surnamed Meni-en-Ptah, the father of Rameses the Great; he is called by Manetho Séthos.

[740] Dr. Lepsius dates the commencement of his reign B.

C.

1439. Dr. Brugsch places it twenty years earlier.

Mr. Sharpe, with that delightful uncertainty characteristic of Egyptian antiquaries, drags the epoch down two hundred years later.

Seti was the father of the Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites, and he made war against Syria.

His son was the famous Rameses.

All three kings were descended from the Shepherd Chiefs.

The most beautiful fragment in Karnak represents this monarch, Seti, in his chariot, with a sword like a fish-slice in one hand, while in the other he clutches the topknots of a group of conquered enemies, Nubian, Syrian, and Jewish.

The work is full of an almost Raphaelesque grace.

After this come some of Flaxman’s and Banks’s sketches and models, a cast of the shield of Achilles by the former, and one of the Boothby monument by the latter.

There is also a fine collection of ancient gems and intaglios, pure in taste and exquisitely cut, and a set of the Napoleon medals, selected by Denon for the Empress Josephine, and in the finest possible state.

We may also mention Sir Christopher Wren’s watch, some ivory chairs, and a table from Tippoo Saib’s devastated palace at Seringapatam, and a richly-mounted pistol taken by Peter the Great from a Turkish general at Azof in 1696. The latter was given to Napoleon by the Russian emperor at the treaty of Tilsit in 1807, and was presented by him to a French officer at St. Helena.

The books, too, are of great interest.

Here is the original MS. copy of the _Gierusalemme Liberata_, published at Ferrara in 1581, and in Tasso’s own handwriting; the first four folio editions of Shakspere, once the property of that great actor and Shaksperean student John Philip Kemble; a folio of designs for Elizabethan and Jacobean houses by the celebrated architect John Thorpe; Fauntleroy the forger’s illustrated copy of Pennant’s _London_, purchased for six hundred and fifty guineas; a Commentary on Paul’s Epistles, illuminated by the laborious Croatian, Giulio Clovio (who died in 1578), for Cardinal Grimani.

Vasari raves about the minute finish of this painter.

The pictures, too, are good.

There are three Canalettis full of that Dutch Venetian’s clear common sense; the finest, a view on the Grand Canal--his favourite subject--and “The Snake in the Grass,” better known as “Love unloosing the Zone of Beauty,” by Reynolds.

There is a sadly faded replica of this in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg.

This one was purchased at the Marchioness of Thomond’s sale for £500. The “Rake’s Progress,” by Hogarth, in eight pictures, was purchased by Sir John in 1802 for £598. These inimitable pictures are incomparable, and display the fine, pure, sober colour of the great artist, and his broad touch so like that of Jan Steen.

The Soane collection also boasts of Hogarth’s four “Election” pictures, purchased at Garrick’s sale for £1732 10s.

They are rather dark in tone.

There is also a fine but curious Turner, “Van Tromp’s Barge entering the Texel;” a portrait by Goma of Napoleon in 1797, when emaciated and haggard, and a fine miniature of him in 1814, when fat and already on the decline, both physically and mentally, by Isabey the great miniature-painter, taken at Elba in 1814. In the dining-room is a portrait of Soane by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and in the gallery under the dome a bust of him by Chantrey.

Sir John Soane was the son of a humble Reading bricklayer, and brought up in Mr. Dance’s office.

Carrying off a gold and silver medal at the Academy, he was sent as travelling student to Rome.

In 1791 he obtained a Government employment, in 1800 enlarged the Bank of England, and in 1806 became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy.

He built the Dulwich Gallery, and in 1826 the Masonic Hall in Great Queen Street.

In 1827 he gave £1000 to the Duke of York’s monument.

At the close of his life he left his collection of works of art, valued at £50,000, to the nation, and died in 1837,[741] leaving his son penniless.

In 1835 the English architects presented Sir John with a splendid medal in token of their approbation of his conduct and talents.

The Literary Fund Society, instituted in 1790, and incorporated in 1818, had formerly rooms at No. 4 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

The society was established in order to aid authors of merit and good character who might be reduced to poverty by unavoidable circumstances, or be deprived of the power of exertion by enfeebled faculties or old age.

George IV.

and William IV.

both contributed one hundred guineas a year to its funds, and this subscription is continued by our present Queen.

The society distributed £1407 in 1846. The average annual amount of subscriptions and donations is about £1100. The Literary Fund Society moved afterwards to 73 Great Russell Street.

Some years ago a split occurred in this society.

Charles Dickens and Mr. C. W.

Dilke, the proprietor of the _Athenæum_, objecting to the wasteful expense of the management, seceded from it; the result of this secession was the founding of the Guild of Literature, and the collection of £4000 by means of private theatricals--a sum which, unfortunately, still lies partly dormant.

The Fund is now domiciled in Bloomsbury.

Both Pepys and Evelyn praise the house of Mr. Povey in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a prodigy of elegant comfort and ingenuity.

The marqueterie floors, “the perspective picture in the little closet,” the grotto cellars, with a well for the wine, the fountains and imitation porphyry vases, his pictures and the bath at the top of the house, seem to have been the abstract of all luxurious ease.

Names were first put on doors in London in 1760, some years before the street-signs were removed.

In 1764 houses were first numbered; the numbering commenced in New Burlington Street, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the second place numbered.

In Carey Street lived that excellent woman Mrs. Hester Chapone, who afterwards removed to Arundel Street.

She was a friend of Mrs. Carter, who translated Epictetus, and of Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blue Stockings.

She was one of the female admirers who thronged round Richardson the novelist, and she married a young Templar whom he had introduced to her.

It was a love match, and she had the misfortune of losing him in less than ten months after their marriage.

Her celebrated letters on _The Improvement of the Mind_, published in 1773, were written for a favourite niece, who married a Westminster Clergyman and died in childbed.

Though Mrs. Chapone’s letters are now rather dry and old-fashioned, reminding us of the backboards of a too punctilious age, they contain some sensible and well-expressed thoughts.

Here is a sound passage:--“Those ladies who pique themselves on the particular excellence of neatness are very apt to forget that the decent order of the house should be designed to promote the convenience and pleasure of those who are to be in it; and that if it is converted into a cause of trouble and constraint, their husbands’ guests would be happier without it.

”[742] Gibbons’s Tennis Court stood in Vere Street, Clare Market; it was turned into a theatre by Thomas Killigrew.

Ogilby the poet, started a lottery of books at “the old theatre” in June 1668. He describes the books in his advertisements as “all of his own designment and composure.

” “The Duke’s Theatre” stood in Portugal Street, at the back of Portugal Row.

It was pulled down in 1835 to make room for the enlargement of the Museum of the College of Surgeons.

Before that it had been the china warehouse of Messrs. Spode and Copeland.

[743] There had been, however, frailer things than china in the house in Pepys’s time.

Here, the year of the Restoration, came Killigrew with the actors from the Red Bull, Clerkenwell, and took the name of the King’s Company.

Three years later they moved to Drury Lane.

Davenant’s company then came to Portugal Street in 1662, deserting their theatre, once a granary, in Salisbury Court.

They played here till 1671, when they returned to their old theatre, then renovated under the management of Charles Davenant and the celebrated Betterton, the great tragedian.

They afterwards united in Drury Lane, and again fell apart.

In 1695 a company, headed by Betterton, with Congreve for a partner, re-opened the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

It then became celebrated for pantomimes under Rich, the excellent harlequin.

On his removal to Covent Garden it was deserted, re-opened by Gifford from Goodman’s Fields, and finally ceased to be a theatre about 1737, so that its whole life did not extend to more than one generation.

Actresses first appeared in London in Prynne’s time.

Soon after the Restoration a lady of Killigrew’s company took the part of Desdemona.

In January 1661 Pepys saw women on the stage at the Cockpit Theatre: the play was Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggars’ Bush.

” The prologue to “Othello” in 1660 contains the following line:[744]-- “Our women are defective and so sized, You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;

For, to speak truth, men act that are between Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen, With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant, That, when you call Desdemona, enter giant.

” The Puritans were now happily in the minority, and so the attempt succeeded.

Davenant did not bring forward his actresses till June 1661, when he produced his “Siege of Rhodes.

” Kynaston, Hart, Burt, and Clun, famous actors of Charles II.

’s time, were all excellent representatives of female characters.

It was at the Duke’s Theatre, in 1680, that Nell Gwynn who was present, being reviled by one of the audience, and William Herbert, who had married a sister of one of the king’s mistresses, taking up Nell’s quarrel--a sword fight took place between the two factions in the house.

This hot-blooded young gallant Herbert grew up to be Earl of Pembroke and first plenipotentiary at Ryswick.

The chief ladies at the Duke’s House were Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Davies, and Mrs. Saunderson.

The first of these ladies, generally known as “Roxalana,” from a character of that name in the “Siege of Rhodes,” resisted for a long time the addresses of Aubrey de Vere, the last Earl of Oxford, a wicked brawling roysterer, and a disgrace to his name, who at last obtained her hand by the cruel deception of a sham marriage.

The pretended priest was a trumpeter, the witness a kettle-drummer in the king’s regiment.

The poor creature threw herself in vain at the king’s feet and demanded justice, but gradually grew more composed upon an annuity of a thousand crowns a year.

[745] As for Mrs. Davies, who danced well and played ill, she won the susceptible heart of Charles II.

by her singing the song, “My lodging is on the cold, cold ground.

” “Through the marriage of the daughter of Lord Derwentwater with the eighth Lord Petre,” says Dr. Doran, “the blood of the Stuarts and of Moll Davies still runs in their lineal descendant, the present and twelfth lord.

”[746] Mrs. Saunderson became the excellent wife of the great actor Betterton.

For about thirty years she played the chief female characters, especially in Shakspere’s plays, with great success.

She taught Queen Anne and her sister Mary elocution, and after her husband’s death received a pension of £500 a year from her royal pupil.

In 1664 Pepys went to Portugal Street to see that clever but impudent impostor, the German Princess, appear after her acquittal at the Old Bailey for inveigling a young citizen into a marriage, acting her own character in a comedy immortalising her exploit.

In February 1666-7 Pepys goes again to the Duke’s Playhouse, and observes there Rochester the wit and Mrs. Stewart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond, the same lady whose portrait we retain as Britannia on the old halfpennies.

“It was pleasant,” says the tuft-hunting gossip, “to see how everybody rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond’s son, came into the pit, towards the end of the play, who was a servant to Mrs. Mallett, and now smiled upon her and she on him.

”[747] The same month, 1667-8, Pepys revisits the Duke’s House to see Etherege’s new play, “She Would if She Could.

” He was there by two o’clock, and yet already a thousand people had been refused at the pit.

The fussy public-office man, not being able to find his wife, who was there, got into an eighteenpenny box, and could hardly see or hear.

The play done, it being dark and rainy, Pepys stays in the pit looking for his wife and waiting for the weather to clear up.

And there for an hour and a half sat also the Duke of Buckingham, Sedley, and Etherege talking; all abusing the play as silly, dull, and insipid, except the author, who complained of the actors for not knowing their parts.

In May 1668 Pepys is again at this theatre in the balcony box, where sit the shameless Lady Castlemaine and her ladies and women; on another occasion he sits below the same group, and sees the proud lady look like fire when Moll Davies ogles the king her lover.

In another place he observes how full the pit is, though the seats are two shillings and sixpence a piece, whereas in his youth he had never gone higher than twelvepence or eighteenpence.

[748] Kynaston, the greatest of the “boy-actresses,” was chiefly on this stage from 1659 to 1699. Evadne was his favourite female part.

Later in life he took to heroic characters.

Cibber says of him: “He had something of a formal gravity in his mien, which was attributed to the stately step he had been so early confined to.

But even that in characters of superiority had its proper graces; it misbecame him not in the part of Leon in Fletcher’s ‘Rule a Wife,’ which he executed with a determined manliness and honest authority.

He had a piercing eye, and in characters of heroic life a quick imperious vivacity in his tone of voice that painted the tyrant truly terrible.

There were two plays of Dryden in which he shone with uncommon lustre; in ‘Arungzebe,’ he played Morat, and in ‘Don Sebastian’ Muley Moloch.

In both these parts he had a fierce lion-like majesty in his port and utterance that gave the spectator a kind of trembling admiration.

”[749] Kynaston died in 1712, and left a fortune to his son, a mercer in Covent Garden, whose son became rector of Aldgate.

James Nokes was Kynaston’s contemporary in Portugal Street.

Leigh Hunt calls him something between Liston and Munden.

Dryden mentions him, in a political epistle to Southerne, as indispensable to a play.

Cibber says, “The ridiculous solemnity of his features was enough to have set the whole bench of Bishops into a titter.

” In his ludicrous distresses he sank into such piteous pusilanimity that one almost pitied him.

“When he debated any matter by himself he would shut up his mouth with a dumb, studious pout, and roll his full eye into a vacant amazement.

”[750] He died in 1692, leaving a fortune and an estate near Barnet.

But the great star of Portugal Street was Betterton, the Garrick of his age.

His most admired part was Hamlet; but Steele especially dilates on his Othello.

He acted his Hamlet from traditions handed down by Davenant of Taylor, whom Shakspere himself is said to have instructed.

Cibber says that there was such enchantment in his voice alone that no one cared for the sense of the words; and he adds, “I never heard a line in tragedy come from Betterton wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination, were not fully satisfied.

” This great man, who created no fewer than 130 characters, was a friend of Dryden, Pope, and Tillotson.

Kneller’s portrait of him is at Knowle;[751] A copy of it by Pope is preserved in Lord Mansfield’s gallery at Caen Wood.

When he died, in 1710, Steele wrote a “Tatler” upon him, in which he says “he laboured incessantly, and lived irreproachably.

He was the jewel of the English stage.

” He killed himself by driving back the gout in order to perform on his benefit night, and his widow went mad from grief.

Betterton acted as Colonel Jolly in Colman’s “Cutter of Coleman Street,” as Jaffier in Otway’s _chef d’œuvre_, as fine gentlemen in Congreve’s vicious but gay comedies, as a hero in Rowe’s flatulent plays, and as Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s great comedy.

Mrs. Barry was one of the best actresses in Portugal Street.

She was the daughter of an old Cavalier colonel, and was instructed for the stage by Rochester, whose mistress she became.

Dryden pronounced her the best actress he had ever seen.

Her face and colour varied with each passion, whether heroic or tender.

“Her mien and motion,” says Cibber, “were superb and gracefully majestic, her voice full, clear, and strong.

” In scenes of anger, defiance, or resentment, while she was impetuous and terrible, she poured out the sentiment with an enchanting harmony.

She was so versatile that she played Lady Brute as well as Zara or Belvidera.

For her King James II.

originated the custom of actors’ benefits.

After a career of thirty-eight years on the boards, she died at Acton in 1713. Kneller’s picture represents her with beautiful eyes, fine hair drawn back from her forehead, “the face full, fair, and rippling with intellect,”[752] but her mouth a little awry.

[753] Mrs. Mountfort also appeared in Portugal Street before the two companies united at Drury Lane in 1682. She was the best of male coxcombs, stage coquettes, and country dowdies, a vivacious mimic, and of the most versatile humour.

Cibber sketches her admirably as Melantha in “Marriage à la Mode:”--“She is a fluttering, finished impertinent, with a whole artillery of airs, eyes, and motions.

When the gallant recommended by her father brings his letter of introduction, down goes her dainty diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own attractions; then she launches into a flood of fine language and compliment, still playing her chest forward in fifty falls, and rising like a swan upon waving water; and to complete her impertinence, she is so rapidly fond of her own wit that she will not give her lover leave to praise it;[754] and at last she swims from him with a promise to return in a twinkling.

” The virtuous, good, and discreet Mrs. Bracegirdle was another favourite in Portugal Street.

For her Congreve, who affected to be her lover, wrote his Araminta and Cynthia, his Angelica, his Almeria, and his Millamant in “The way of the world.

” All the town was in love with her youth, cheerful gaiety, musical voice, the happy graces of her manner, her dark eyes, brown hair, and expressive, rosy-brown face.

Her Statira justified Nat Lee’s frantic Alexander for all his rant; and “when she acted Millamant, all the faults, follies, and affectation of that agreeable tyrant were venially melted down into so many charms and attractions of a conscious beauty.

” Mrs. Bracegirdle was on the stage from 1680 to 1707. She lived long enough to warn Cibber against envy of Garrick, and died in 1748. Three of Congreve’s plays, “Love for Love,” “The Mourning Bride,” and “The Way of the World,” came out in Portugal Street.

Steele, in the _Tatler_, No. 1, mentions “Love for Love” as being acted for Betterton’s benefit--Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Doggett taking parts.

He describes the stage as covered with gentlemen and ladies, “so that when the curtain was drawn it discovered even there a very splendid audience.

” “In Dryden’s time,” says Steele, “You used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands of every person you met [at the theatre]; now you have only a pack of cards, and instead of the cavils about the turn of the expression, the elegance of style and the like, the learned now dispute only about the truth of the game.

” Poor Mountfort, the most handsome, graceful, and ardent of stage lovers, the most admirable of courtly fops, and the best dancer and singer of the day, strutted his little hour in Portugal Street till run through the body by Lord Mohun’s infamous boon companion.

His career extended from 1682 to 1695. He was only thirty-three when he died.

The last proprietor of the theatre was Rich, an actor who, failing in tragedy, turned harlequin and manager, and became celebrated for producing spectacles, ballets, and pantomimes.

Under the name of Lun he revelled as harlequin, and was admirable in a scene where he was hatched from an egg.

Pope, always sore about theatrical matters, describes this manager’s pompousness in the _Dunciad_ (book iii.

):-- “At ease ’Midst storm of paper fierce hail of pease, And proud his mistress’ order to perform, Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

” Rich’s great success was the production of Gay’s _Beggars’ Opera_ in 1727-8. This piece brought £2000 to the author, and for a time drove the Italian Opera into the shade.

It ran sixty-three nights the first season, and then spread to all the great towns in Great Britain.

Ladies carried about the favourite songs engraved on their fan-mounts, and they were also printed on fire-screens and other furniture.

Miss Lavinia Fenton, who acted Polly, became the idol of the town; engravings of her were sold by thousands: her life was written, and collections were made of her jests.

[755] Eventually she married the Duke of Bolton.

Sir Robert Walpole laughed at the satire against himself, and “Gay grew rich, and Rich gay,” as the popular epigram went.

Hogarth drew the chief scene with Walker as Macheath, and Spiller as Mat o’ the Mint.

Swift was vexed to find his Gulliver for the time forgotten.

The custom of allowing young men of fashion to have chairs upon the stage was an intolerable nuisance to the actors before Garrick.

In 1721 it led to a desperate riot at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre.

Half-a-dozen beaux, headed by a tipsy earl, were gathered round the wings, when the earl reeled across the stage where Macbeth and his lady were then acting, to speak to a boon companion at the opposite side.

Rich the manager, vexed at the interruption, forbade the earl the house, upon which the earl struck Rich and Rich the earl.

Half-a-dozen swords at once sprang out and decreed that Rich must die; but Quin and his brother actors rushed to the rescue with bare blades, charged the coxcombs, and drove them through the stage-door into the kennel.

The beaux returning to the front, rushed into the boxes, broke the sconces, slashed the hangings, and threatened to burn the house; upon which doughty Quin and a party of constables and watchmen flung themselves on the rioters and haled them to prison.

The actors, intimidated, refused to re-open the house till the king granted them a guard of soldiers, a custom that has not long been discontinued.

It was not till 1780 that the habit of admitting the vulgar, noisy, and turbulent footmen gratis was abandoned.

[756] Macklin, afterwards the inimitable Shylock and Sir Pertinax, played small parts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre till 1731, when a short speech as Brazencourt, in Fielding’s “Coffee-house Politicians,” betrayed the true actor.

He lived till over a hundred, so long that he did not leave Covent Garden till after Braham’s appearance, and Braham many of our elder readers have seen.

[757] Macklin, an Irishman, and in early life a Dragoon officer, was irritable, restless, and pugnacious; he obtained his first triumph at Drury Lane, as Shylock in 1741. In stern malignity, no one has surpassed Macklin.

His acting was hard, but manly and weighty, though his features were rather rigid.

He naturally condemned Garrick’s action and gesture as superabundant.

His Sir Pertinax was excellent in its sly and deadly suppleness.

He was also admirable in Lovegold, Scrub, Peachem, Polonius, and many Irish characters.

Quin was at Portugal Street as early as 1718-19. There he first “delighted the town by his chivalry as Hotspur, his bluntness as Clytus, his fieriness as Bajazet, his grandeur as Macbeth, his calm dignity as Brutus, his unctuousness as Falstaff, his duplicity as Maskwell, and his coarse drollery as Sir John Brute.

”[758] It was just before this, that locked in a room and compelled to fight, he had killed Bowen, who was jealous of his acting as Bajazet.

When Rich refused to give Quin more than £300 a year, he joined the Drury Lane company, where he instantly got £500 per annum.

When Rich grew wealthy enough to hire a new theatre in Covent Garden, he left Portugal Street.

Almost the last play acted there was “The Anatomist,” by Ravenscroft, a second-rate author of Dryden’s time.

The mob attributed the flight of Rich from the old theatre to the appearance of a devil during the performance of the pantomime of “Harlequin and Dr. Faustus,” a play in which demons abound.

The supernumerary spirit ascending by the roof instead of leaving by the door with his paid companions, was believed to have so frightened manager Rich that, taking the warning against theatrical profanity to heart, he never had the courage to open the theatre again.

[759] The legend is curious, as it proves that even in 1732 the old Puritan horror of theatricals had not quite died out, and that at that period the poorer part of the audience was still ignorant enough to attribute mechanical tricks to supernatural interference.

Garrick, in one of his prologues, speaks of Rich, under the name of Lun-- “When Lun appeared with matchless art and whim, He gave the power of speech to every limb;

Though masked and mute, convey’d his quick intent, And told in frolic gestures all he meant;

But now the motley coat and sword of wood Require a tongue to make them understood.

” Every motion of Rich meant something.

His “statue scene” and “catching the butterfly” were moving pictures.

His “harlequin hatched from an egg by sun-heat” is highly spoken of; Jackson calls it “a masterpiece of dumb show.

” From the first chipping of the egg, his receiving of motion, his feeling the ground, his standing upright, to his quick harlequin trip round the broken egg, every limb had its tongue.

Walpole says, “His pantomimes were full of wit, and coherent, and carried on a story.

” Yet Rich was so ignorant that he called a ‘turban’ a ‘turbot,’ and an ‘adjective’ an ‘adjutant.

’ Spiller, who died of apoplexy in Portugal Street, in 1729-30 as he was playing in the “Rape of Proserpine,” was inimitable in old men.

This was the year that Quin played Macheath for his benefit, and Fielding brought out his inimitable “Tom Thumb” at the Haymarket, to ridicule the bombast of Thomson and Young.

King’s College Hospital, which occupies a large portion of the southern side of Carey Street, is connected with the medical school of King’s College, and is supported by voluntary contributions.

For each guinea a year a subscriber may recommend one in and two out patients.

Contributors acquire the same right for every donation of ten guineas.

Annual subscribers of three guineas, or donors of thirty guineas, are governors of the hospital.

The house is surrounded by a population of nearly 400,000 persons, of whom about 20,000 annually receive relief.

In one year 363 poor married women have been attended in confinements at their own houses.

The last memorial of a gay generation, passed like last year’s swallows, was a headstone that used to stand in the burial-ground belonging to St. Clement’s, now the site of King’s College Hospital.

The slab rose from rank green grass that was sprinkled with dead cats, worn-out shoes, and fragments of tramps’ bonnets; in summer it was half hid by a clump of sunflowers.

[760] It kept dimly alive the memory of Joe Miller, a taciturn actor, in whose mouth Mottley, the poet put his volume of jokes that had been raked from every corner of the town.

Mottley was a place-seeker and a writer of stilted tragedies and a bad comedy, for whose benefit night Queen Caroline, wife of George II.

, condescended to sell tickets at her own drawing-room.

[761] Miller appears to have been an honest, and stupid fellow, but some good sayings are embalmed in the rather coarse book which bears his name.

His portrait represents Joe as a broad-nosed man with large saucer eyes, a big absurd mouth, and a look of comic stolid surprise.

He died in 1738, and the Jest Book was published the year after, price one shilling.

Joe Miller made his first appearance on the stage in 1715, at Drury Lane, in Farquhar’s comedy of “A trip to the Jubilee.

” He also played Clodpole in Betterton’s “Amorous Widow,” Sir H. Gubbin in Steele’s “Tender Husband,” La Foole in Ben Jonson’s “Epicene,” and above all Sir Joseph Whittol in Congreve’s “Old Bachelor.

” Hogarth designed a benefit ticket for this play.

As Ben in “Love for Love,” Cibber cut out Joe Miller.

In 1721 Joe opened a booth at Bartholomew Fair with Pinkethman.

His last great success was as the Miller in Dodsley’s farce of “The King and the Miller of Mansfield.

” Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire thresher, afterwards a popular preacher, wrote his epitaph.

Joe Miller’s monument is still carefully preserved in one of the rooms in King’s College Hospital.

John Mottley, his editor, was the son of a Colonel Mottley, a Jacobite who followed James into France.

His son was placed in the Excise Office, and grew up a place-hunter.

He wrote a bad tragedy called “The Imperial Captives,” and was promised a commissionership of wine licenses by Lord Halifax, and a place in the Exchequer by Sir Robert Walpole, but received nothing from either.

He compiled the Jest-Book, it is said partly from the recollection of the comedian’s conversations,[762] but it is doubtful if this is true.

The compilation (once so useful to diners-out) went through three editions in 1739, and at about the thirteenth edition was reprinted, after thirty years, by Barker, of Russell Street, Covent Garden.

[763] The Grange public-house close by, with its picturesque old courtyard, is mentioned by Davenant, in his “Playhouse to Let,” as an inn patronised by poets and actors.

The Black Jack public-house in Portsmouth Street was Joe Miller’s favourite haunt.

Some paintings on its walls still testify to the occasional presence of artists of the last century.

This inn used to be called “The Jump,” from that adroit young scoundrel Jack Sheppard having once jumped from one of its first-floor windows to escape the armed emissaries of that still greater thief, the thief-taker, Mr. Jonathan Wild.

When paviours dig deep under the Strand they find the fossil remains of antediluvian monsters.

A church in the street bears a name that carries us back to the times of the Saxons and the Danes.

In one lane there is a Roman bath, in another there are the nodding gable-ends of houses at which Beaumont and Fletcher may have looked, and which Shakspere and Ben Jonson must have visited.

So the Present is built out of the Past.

The Strand teems with associations of every period of history.

The story of St. Giles’s parish alone should embrace the whole records of London vagrancy.

The chronicle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields embraces reminiscences of half our great lawyers.

In the chapter on St. Martin’s Lane I have been glad to note down some interesting incidents in the careers of many of our greatest painters.

Long Acre leads us to Dryden, Cromwell, Wilson, and Stothard.

At Charing Cross we have stopped to see how brave men can die for a good cause.

A thorough history of our great city, considered in every aspect, would almost be a condensed history of the world.

I offer these pages to my readers only as a humble contribution to the history of London.

[Illustration: THE BLACK JACK, PORTSMOUTH STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.

] Our commercial wealth and the vastness of our maritime enterprise is shown in nothing more than by the distance from which we fetch our commonest articles of consumption--tea from China, sugar from the West Indies, coffee from Ceylon, oil from the farthest nooks of Italy, chocolate from Mexico.

An Englishman need not be very rich in order to consume samples of all these productions of different hemispheres at a single meal.

In the same manner many books of far-divided ages have gone to form the patchwork of the present volume; I am like the merchant who sends his ships to collect in different harbours, and across wide and adverse seas, the materials that he needs.

In this busy and overworked age there are many persons who have no time themselves to make such voyages, no patience to traverse such seas, even if they possessed the charts: it is for them I have written, and it is from them I hope for some kind approval.

APPENDIX.

“The West End seems to me one vast cemetery.

Hardly a street but has in it a house once occupied by dear friends with whom I had daily intercourse: if I stopped and knocked now, who would know or take interest in me?

_The streets to me are peopled with shadows: the city is as a city of the dead.

_”--SAMUEL ROGERS.

THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE).

--p. 25. “I often shed tears in the motley Strand for fulness of joy at such multitude of life.

”--CHARLES LAMB’S _Letters_, vol. i.

The Strand is three-quarters of a mile long.

Van de Wyngerede’s view, 1543, shows straggling houses on the south side, but on the north side all is open to Covent Garden.

There were three water-courses, crossed by bridges.

Haycock’s Ordinary, near Palsgrave Place, was much frequented in the seventeenth century by Parliament men and town gallants.

No. 217 was the shop of Snow, a wealthy goldsmith who withstood the South Sea Bubble without injury.

Gay describes him during the panic with black pen behind his ear.

He says to Snow-- “Thou stoodst (an Indian king in size and hue);

Thy unexhausted shop was our Peru.

” The Robin Hood Debating Society held its meetings in Essex Street.

Burke spoke here, and Goldsmith was a member.

The great Cottonian Library was kept in Essex House from 1712 to 1730, on the site of the Unitarian Chapel, built about 1774. Mr. Lindsey, Dr. Disney, Mr. Belsham (Priestley’s successor) preached here, and after Mr. Belsham the Rev. Thomas Madge.

At George’s Coffee-house, now 213 Strand, Foote describes the town wits meeting in 1751. Shenstone was a frequenter of this house, and came here to read pamphlets--the subscription being one shilling.

The Grecian Coffee-house was used by Goldsmith and the Irish and Lancashire Templars.

Milford Lane was so named from an adjacent ford over the Thames.

A windmill stood near St. Mary’s Church, temp.

James I. Sir Richard Baker, the worthy old chronicler whom Sir Roger de Coverley so admired, lived in this lane in 1632-9. The old houses were taken down in 1852. No. 191 was the shop of William Godwin, bookseller, the author of _Caleb Williams_, and the friend of Lamb and Shelley.

--Strype mentions the Crown and Anchor Tavern.

Here, in 1710, was instituted the Academy of Ancient Music.

Here, on Fox’s birthday, in 1798, 2000 guests were feasted.

Johnson and Boswell occasionally supped here, and here the Royal Societies were held.

In Surrey Street, in a large garden-house at the east end fronting the river, lived the Hon. Charles Howard, the eminent chemist who discovered the process of sugar-refining _in vacuo_.

At No. 169, now the Strand Theatre, Barker, an artist, exhibited the panorama--his own invention--suggested to him when sketching under an umbrella on the Calton Hill.

No. 217, now a branch of the London and Westminster Bank, was formerly Paul, Strahan, and Bates’s,[764] who in 1858 disposed of their customers’ securities to the amount of £113,625, and were sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude.

The drinking fountain opposite St. Mary’s Church is a product of a most useful association.

The first fountain erected under its auspices was opened in April 1859, by Lord John Russell, Lord Carlisle, and Mr. Gurney.

--At No. 147 was published the _Sphinx_, and Jan.

2, 1828, No. 1 of the _Athenæum_.

No. 149 is the shop once belonging to Mr. Mawe, the mineralogist, who was succeeded by James Tennant, Professor of Mineralogy at King’s College.

At No. 132 Strand (site of Wellington Street), the first circulating library in London was started by a Mr. Wright, in 1740. Opposite Southampton Street, from 1686 to late in the last century, lived Vaillant, the eminent foreign bookseller.

No. 143 was the site of the first office of the _Morning Chronicle_ (Perry succeeding Woodfall in 1789).

Lord Campbell and Hazlitt were theatrical critics to this paper.

Mr. Dickens was a parliamentary reporter, Mr. Serjeant Spankie an editor, Campbell the poet a contributor.

On Perry’s death, in 1821, it was purchased by Mr. Clement for £42,000. The _Mirror_, the first cheap illustrated periodical was also published at this office.

At No. 1 lived Rudolph Ackermann, the German printseller, who introduced lithography and annuals.

He illuminated his gallery when gas was a novelty.

Aaron Hill was born in a dwelling on the site of the present Beaufort House; Lord Clarendon lived here while his unlucky western house was building; and here, in 1660, the Duke of York married the chancellor’s daughter.

The York Buildings Water Company failed in 1731. Hungerford Hall and its panoramic pictures were burnt in 1854. At No. 18 Strand, in 1776, the elder Mathews the comedian was born; Dr. Adam Clarke and Rowland Hill used to visit his father, who was a religious bookseller.

No. 7 Craven Street (Franklin’s old house) was long occupied by the Society for the Relief of Persons imprisoned for Small Debts.

In Northumberland Court, once known as “Lieutenants’ Lodgings,” Nelson once lodged.

NORFOLK STREET.

--p. 44. Mr. Dickens has sketched Norfolk Street in his own inimitable way.

“Norfolk is a delightful street to lodge in, provided you don’t go lower down (Mrs. Lirriper dates from No. 81); but of a summer evening, when the dust and waste paper lie in it, and stray children play in it, and a kind of gritty calm and bake settles on it, and a peal of church-bells is practising in the neighbourhood, it is a trifle dull; and never have I seen it since at such a time, and never shall I see it ever more at such a time, without seeing the dull June evening when that forlorn young creature sat at her open corner window on the second, and me at my open corner window (the other corner) on the third.

”[765] THE STRAND THEATRE.

--p. 53. The Strand Theatre, No. 169, formerly called Punch’s Playhouse, was altered in 1831 for Rayner, the low comedian, and Mrs. Waylett, the singer.

Here were produced many of Douglas Jerrold’s early plays.

Under Miss Swanborough’s management, Miss Marie Wilton, arch and witty as Shakspere’s Maria, delighted the town.