Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

There is no one whom we more readily or more completely identify with Leicester Square than Hogarth. He was born in the Old Bailey in 1697, close to old Leicester House, which, in Pennant’s days, was turned into a coach factory. His father was a schoolmaster, who is, perhaps, to be recognised in the following curious advertisement of the reign of Queen Anne; ‘At Hogarth’s Coffee House, in St. John’s Gate, the midway between Smithfield Bars and Clerkenwell, there will meet daily some learned gentlemen who speak Latin readily, where any gentleman that is either skilled in the language, or desirous to perfect himself in speaking thereof, will be welcome. The Master of the House, in the absence of others, being always ready to entertain gentlemen in that language.’ It was in the above Queen’s reign that Hogarth went, bundle in hand, hope in his heart, and a good deal of sense and nonsense in his head, to Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields, where he was ’prentice bound to Ellis Gamble, the silver-plate engraver. There, among other and nobler works, Hogarth engraved the metal die for the first newspaper stamp (‘one halfpenny’) ever known in England. It was in Little Cranbourne Alley that Hogarth first set up for himself for a brief time, and left his sisters (it is supposed) to succeed him there as keepers of a ‘frock shop.’ Hogarth studied in the street, as Garrick did, and there was no lack of masks and faces in the little France and royal England of the Leicester Fields vicinity. Much as Sir James Thornhill disliked his daughter’s marriage with Hogarth, he helped the young couple to set up house on the east side of Leicester Fields. Thornhill did not, at first, account his son-in-law a painter. ‘They say he can’t paint,’ said Mrs. Hogarth once. ‘It’s a lie. Look at that!’ as she pointed to one of his great works. Another day, as Garrick was leaving the house in the Fields, Ben Ives, Hogarth’s servant, asked him to step into the parlour. Ben showed David a head of Diana, done in chalks. The player and Hogarth’s man knew the model. ‘There, Mr. Garrick!’ exclaimed Ives, ‘there’s a head! and yet they say my master can’t paint a portrait.’ Garrick thought Hogarth had not succeeded in painting the player’s, whereupon the limner dashed a brush across the face and turned it against the wall. It never left Leicester Square till widow Hogarth gave it to widow Garrick.

It was towards the close of Hogarth’s career that James Barry, from Cork--destined to make his mark in art--caught sight of a bustling, active, stout little man, dressed in a sky-blue coat, in Cranbourne Alley, and recognising in him the Hogarth whom he almost worshipped, followed him down the east side of the square towards Hogarth’s house. The latter, however, the owner did not enter, for a fight between two boys was going on at the corner of Castle Street, and Hogarth, who, like the statesman Windham, loved to see such encounters, whether the combatants were boys or men, had joined in the fray. When Barry came up Hogarth was acting ‘second’ to one of the young pugilists, patting him on the back, and giving such questionable aid in heightening the fray as he could furnish in such a phrase as, ‘Damn him if I would take it of him! At him again!’ There is another version, which says that it was Nollekens who pointed out to Northcote the little man in the sky-blue coat, with the remark, ‘Look! that’s Hogarth?’

Hogarth seems to have been one of the first to set his face against the fashion of giving vails to servants by forbidding his own to take them from guests. In those days, not only guests but those who came to a house to spend money, were expected to help to pay the wages of the servants for the performance of a duty which they owed to their master. It was otherwise with Hogarth in Leicester Square. ‘When I sat to Hogarth’ (Cole’s MSS. collections, quoted in Cunningham’s ‘London’) ‘the custom of giving vails to servants was not discontinued. On taking leave of the painter at the door I offered the servant a small gratuity, but the man very politely refused it, telling me it would be as much as the loss of his place if his master knew it. This was so uncommon, and so liberal in a man of Hogarth’s profession at that time of day, that it much struck me, as nothing of the kind had happened to me before.’

Leicester Square will ever be connected with Hogarth at the _Golden Head_. It was not, at his going there, in a flourishing condition, but it improved. In the year 1735, in Seymour’s ‘Survey,’ Leicester Fields are described as ‘a very handsome open square, railed about and gravelled within. The buildings are very good and well inhabited, and frequented by the gentry. The north and west rows of buildings, which are in St. Anne’s parish, are the best (and may be said to be so still), especially the north, where is Leicester House, the seat of the Earl of Leicester; being a large building with a fair court before it for the reception of coaches, and a fine garden behind it; the south and east sides being in the parish of St. Martin’s.’

Next to this house is another large house, built by Portman Seymour, Esq., which ‘being laid into Leicester House, was inhabited by their present Majesties’ (George II. and Queen Caroline) ‘when Prince and Princess of Wales.’ It was then that it was called ‘the pouting place of princes.’ Lisle Street is then described as coming out of Prince’s Street, and runs up to Leicester Garden wall. Both Lisle and Leicester Streets are ‘large and well-built, and inhabited by gentry.’

In 1737 the ‘Country Journal, or Craftsman,’ for April 16, contained the following acceptable announcement: ‘Leicester Fields is going to be fitted up in a very elegant manner, a new wall and rails to be erected all round, and a basin in the middle, after the manner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to be done by a voluntary subscription of the inhabitants.’

It was to Hogarth’s house Walpole went, in 1761, to see Hogarth’s picture of Fox. Hogarth said he had promised Fox, if he would only sit as the painter liked, ‘to make as good a picture as Vandyck or Rubens could.’ Walpole was silent. ‘Why, now,’ said the painter, ‘you think this very vain. Why should not a man tell the truth?’ Walpole thought him mad, but Hogarth was sincere. When, after ridiculing the opinions of Freke, the anatomist, some one said, ‘But Freke holds you for as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck,’ ‘There he’s right!’ cried Hogarth. ‘And so, by G----, I am--give me my time, and let me choose my subject.’

If one great object of art be to afford pleasure, Hogarth has attained it, for he has pleased successive generations. If one great end of art be to afford instruction, Hogarth has shown himself well qualified, for he has reached that end; he taught his contemporaries, and he continues teaching, and will continue to teach, through his works. But is the instruction worth having? Is the pleasure legitimate, wholesome, healthy pleasure? Without disparagement to a genius for all that was great in him and his productions, the reply to these questions may sometimes be in the negative. The impulses of the painter were not invariably of noble origin. It is said that the first undoubted sign he gave of having a master-hand arose from his poor landlady asking him for a miserable sum which he owed her for rent. In his wrath he drew her portrait _in caricatura_. Men saw that it was clever, but vindictive.

There is no foundation for the story which asserts of George II. that he professed no love for poetry or painting. This king has been pilloried and pelted, so to speak, with the public contempt for having an independent, and not unjustifiable, opinion of the celebrated picture, the ‘March to Finchley.’ Hogarth had the impertinence to ask permission that he might dedicate the work to the King, and the latter observed, with some reason, that the fellow deserved to be picketed for his insolence. When this picture was presented as worthy of royal patronage, rebellion was afoot and active in the north (1745). The Guards were sent thither, and Hogarth’s work describes them setting out on their first stage to Finchley. The whole description or representation is a gross caricature of the brave men (though they may have sworn as terribly then as they did in Flanders) whose task was to save the kingdom from a great impending calamity. All that is noble is kept out of sight, all that is degrading to the subject, with some slight exceptions, is forced on the view and memory of the spectator. It has been urged by way of apology for this clever but censurable work, that it was not painted at the moment of great popular excitement, but subsequently. This is nothing to the purpose. What is to the purpose is, that Hogarth represented British soldiers as a drunken, skulking, thieving, cowardly horde of ruffians, who must be, to employ an oft-used phrase, more terrible to their friends than their enemies. The painter may have been as good a Whig as the King himself, but he manifested bad taste in asking George II. to show favour to such a subject; and he exhibited worse taste still in dedicating it to the king of Prussia, as a patron of the arts. Hogarth was not disloyal, perhaps, as Wilkes charged him with being, for issuing the print of this picture, but it is a work that, however far removed from the political element now, could not have afforded much gratification to the loyal when it was first exhibited.

Hogarth died in Leicester Square in 1764, and was buried at Chiswick. There was an artist on the opposite side of the square who saw the funeral from his window, and who had higher views of art than Hogarth.

Towards the close of Hogarth’s career Joshua Reynolds took possession of a house on the west side of Leicester Square. In the year in which George III. ascended the throne (1760) Reynolds set up his famous chair of state for his patrons in this historical square.

It has been said that Reynolds, in the days of his progressive triumphs in Leicester Square, thought continually of the glory of his being one day placed by the side of Vandyck and Rubens, and that he entertained no envious idea of being better than Hogarth, Gainsborough, and his old master, Hudson. Reynolds, nevertheless, served all three in much the same way that Dryden served Shakespeare; namely, he disparaged quite as extensively as he praised them. Hogarth, on the east side of Leicester Square, felt no local accession of honour when Reynolds set up his easel on the western side. The new comer was social; the old settler ‘kept himself to himself,’ as the wise saw has it. ‘Study the works of the great masters for ever,’ was, we are told, the utterance of Sir Oracle on the west side. From the east came Hogarth’s utterance, in the assertion, ‘There is only one school, and Nature is the mistress of it.’ For Reynolds’s judgment Hogarth had a certain contempt. ‘The most ignorant people about painting,’ he said to Walpole, ‘are the painters themselves. There’s Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t’other day, he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar.’ Hogarth undoubtedly qualified his sense with some nonsense: ‘Talk of sense, and study, and all that; why, it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not painted better.’

It was at one of Reynolds’s suppers in the square that an incident took place which aroused the wit-power of Johnson. The rather plain sister of the artist had been called upon by the company, after supper, as the custom was, to give a toast. She hesitated, and was accordingly required, again according to custom, to give the ugliest man she knew. In a moment the name of Oliver Goldsmith dropped from her lips, and immediately a sympathising lady on the opposite side of the table rose and shook hands with Miss Reynolds across the table. Johnson had heard the expression, and had also marked the pantomimic performance of sympathy, and he capped both by a remark which set the table in a roar, and which was to an effect which cut smartly in three ways. ‘Thus,’ said he, ‘the ancients, on the commencements of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast betwixt them.’ The affair ends prettily. A few days after the ‘Traveller’ was published Johnson read it aloud from beginning to end to delighted hearers, of whom Miss Reynolds was one. As Johnson closed the book she emphatically remarked, ‘Well, I never more shall think Dr. Goldsmith ugly.’ Miss Reynolds, however, did not get over her idea. Her brother painted the portrait of the new poet, in the Octagon Room in the Square; the mezzotinto engraving of it was speedily all over the town. Miss Reynolds (who, it has been said, used herself to paint portraits with such exact imitation of her brother’s defects and avoidance of his beauties, that everybody but himself laughed at them) thought it marvellous that so much dignity could have been given to the poet’s face and yet so strong a likeness be conveyed; for ‘Dr. Goldsmith’s cast of countenance,’ she proceeds to inform us, ‘and indeed his whole figure from head to foot, impressed every one at first sight with the idea of his being a low mechanic; particularly, I believe, a journeyman tailor.’ This belief was founded on what Goldsmith had himself once said. Coming ruffled into Reynolds’s drawing-room, Goldsmith angrily referred to an insult which his sensitive nature fancied had been put upon him at a neighbouring coffee-house, by ‘a fellow who,’ said Goldsmith, ‘took me, I believe, for a tailor.’ The company laughed more or less demonstratively, and rather confirmed than dispelled the supposition.

Poor Goldsmith’s weaknesses were a good deal played upon by that not too polite company. One afternoon, Burke and a young Irish officer, O’Moore, were crossing the square to Reynolds’s house to dinner. They passed a group who were gaping at, and making admiring remarks upon, some samples of beautiful foreign husseydom, who were looking out of the windows of one of the hotels. Goldsmith was at the skirt of the group, looking on. Burke said to O’Moore, as they passed him unseen, ‘Look at Goldsmith; by-and-by, at Reynolds’s you will see what I make of this.’ At the dinner, Burke treated Goldsmith with such coolness, that Oliver at last asked for an explanation. Burke readily replied that his manner was owing to the monstrous indiscretion on Goldsmith’s part, in the square, of which Burke and Mr. O’Moore had been the witnesses. Poor Goldsmith asked in what way he had been so indiscreet?

‘Why,’ answered Burke, ‘did you not exclaim, on looking up at those women, what stupid beasts the crowd must be for staring with such admiration at those _painted Jezebels_, while a man of your talent passed by unnoticed?’--‘Surely, my dear friend,’ cried Goldsmith, horror-struck, ‘I did not say so!’--‘If you had not said so,’ retorted Burke, ‘how should I have known it?’--‘That’s true,’ answered Goldsmith, with great humility; ‘I am very sorry; it was very foolish! I do recollect that something of the kind passed through my mind, but I did not think I had uttered it.’

It is a pity that Sir Joshua never records the names of his own guests; but his parties were so much swelled by invitations given on the spur of the moment, that it would have been impossible for him to set down beforehand more than the nucleus of his scrambling and unceremonious, but most enjoyable, dinners. Whether the famous Leicester Square dinners deserved to be called enjoyable, is a question which anyone may decide for himself, after reading the accounts given of them at a period when the supervision of Reynolds’s sister, Frances, could no longer be given to them. The table, made to hold seven or eight, was often made to hold twice the number. When the guests were at last packed, the deficiency of knives, forks, plates, and glasses made itself felt. Everyone called, as he wanted, for bread, wine, or beer, and lustily, or there was little chance of being served.

There had once, Courtenay says, been sets of decanters and glasses provided to furnish the table and enable the guests to help themselves. These had gone the way of all glass, and had not been replaced; but though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few, Courtenay admits that their shortcomings only enhanced the singular pleasure of the entertainment. The wine, cookery, and dishes were but little attended to; nor was the fish or venison ever talked of or recommended. Amidst the convivial, animated bustle of his guests, Sir Joshua sat perfectly composed; protected partly by his deafness, partly by his equanimity; always attentive, by help of his trumpet, to what was said, never minding what was eaten or drunk, but leaving everyone to scramble for himself. Peers, temporal and spiritual, statesmen, physicians, lawyers, actors, men of letters, painters, musicians, made up the motley group, ‘and played their parts,’ says Courtenay, ‘without dissonance or discord.’ Dinner was served precisely at five, whether all the company had arrived or not. Sir Joshua never kept many guests waiting for one, whatever his rank or consequence. ‘His friends and intimate acquaintance,’ concludes Courtenay, ‘will ever love his memory, and will ever regret those social hours and the cheerfulness of that irregular, convivial table, which no one has attempted to revive or imitate, or was indeed qualified to supply.’

Reynolds had a room in which his copyists, his pupils, and his drapery-men worked. Among them was one of the cleverest and most unfortunate of artists. Seldom is the name of Peter Toms now heard, but he once sat in Hudson’s studio with young Reynolds, and in the studio of Sir Joshua, as the better artist’s obedient humble servant; that is to say, he painted his employer’s draperies, and probably a good deal more, for Toms was a very fair portrait-painter. Peter worked too for various other great artists, and a purchaser of any picture of that time cannot be certain whether much of it is not from Toms’s imitative hand. Peter’s lack of original power did not keep him out of the Royal Academy, though in his day he was but a second-class artist. He belonged, too, to the Herald’s Office, as the painters of the Tudor period often did, and after filling in the canvasses of his masters in England, he went to Ireland on his own account and in reliance on the patronage of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Northumberland. Toms, however, found that the Irish refused to submit their physiognomies to his limning, and he waited for them to change their opinion of him in vain. Finally, he lost heart and hope. His vocation was gone; but in the London garret within which he took refuge he seems to have given himself a chance for life or death. Pencil in one hand and razor in the other, he made an effort to paint a picture, and apparently failed in accomplishing it, for he swept the razor across his throat, and was found the next morning stark dead by the side of the work which seems to have smitten him with despair.

Reynolds saw the ceremony of proclaiming George III. king in front of Savile House, where the monarch had resided while he was Prince of Wales. Into his own house came and went, for years, all the lofty virtues, vices, and rich nothingnesses of Reynolds’s time, to be painted. From his window he looked with pride on his gaudy carriage (the Seasons, limned on the panels, were by his own drapery man, Catton), in which he used to send his sister out for a daily drive. From the same window he saw Savile House gutted by the ‘No Popery’ rioters of 1780; fire has since swept all that was left of Page’s house on the north side of the Square; and in 1787 Reynolds looked on a newcomer to the Fields, Lawrence, afterwards Sir Thomas, who set up his easel against Sir Joshua’s, but who was not then strong enough to make such pretence. Some of the most characteristic groups of those days were to be seen clustered round the itinerant quack doctors--fellows who lied with a power that Orton, Luie, and even the ‘coachers’ of Luie, might envy. Leicester Square, in Reynolds’s days alone, would furnish matter for two or three volumes. We have only space to say further of Sir Joshua, that he died here in 1792, lay in state in Somerset House, and that as the funeral procession was on its way to St. Paul’s (with its first part in the Cathedral before the last part was clear of Somerset House) one of the occupants in one of the many mourning coaches said to a companion, ‘There is now, sir, a fine opening for a portrait-painter.’

While Reynolds was ‘glorifying’ the Fields, that is to say, about the year 1783, John Hunter, the great anatomist, enthroned science in Leicester Square. His house, nearly opposite Reynolds’s, was next door to that once occupied by Hogarth, on the east side, but north of the painter’s dwelling. Hunter was then fifty-five years old. Like his eminent brother, William, John Hunter had a very respectable amount of self-appreciation, quite justifiably.

The governing body of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital had failed, through ignorance or favouritism, to recognise his ability and to reward his assiduity. But John Hunter was of too noble a spirit to be daunted or even depressed; and St. George’s Hospital honoured itself by bestowing on him the modest office of house-surgeon. It was thirty years after this that John Hunter settled himself in Leicester Square. There he spent three thousand pounds in the erection of a building in the rear of his house for the reception of a collection in comparative anatomy. Before this was completed he spent upon it many thousands of pounds,--it is said ninety thousand guineas! With him to work was to live. Dr. Garthshore entered the museum in the Square early one morning, and found Hunter already busily occupied. ‘Why, John,’ said the physician, ‘you are always at work!’ ‘I am,’ replied the surgeon; ‘and when I am dead you will not meet very soon with another John Hunter!’ He accused his great brother William of claiming the merit of surgical discoveries which John had made; and when a friend, talking to him, at his door in the Square, on his ‘Treatise on the Teeth,’ remarked that it would be answered by medical men simply to make their names known, Hunter rather unhandsomely observed: ‘Aye, we have all of us vermin that live upon us.’ Lavater took correct measure of the famous surgeon when he remarked, on seeing the portrait of Hunter: ‘That is the portrait of a man who thinks for himself!’

After John Hunter’s death his collection was purchased by Government for fifteen thousand pounds. It was removed from Leicester Square to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to the College of Surgeons, where it still forms a chief portion of the anatomical and pathological museum in that institution. The site of the Hunterian Museum in Leicester Square has been swallowed up by the Alhambra, where less profitable study of comparative anatomy may now be made by all who are interested in such pursuit. A similar destiny followed the other Hunterian Museum--that established by William Hunter, in Great Windmill Street, at the top of the Haymarket, where he built an amphitheatre and museum, with a spacious dwelling-house attached. In the dwelling-house Joanna Baillie passed some of her holiday and early days in London. She came from her native Scottish heath, and the only open moor like unto it where she could snatch a semblance of fresh air was the neighbouring inclosure of Leicester Square! William Hunter left his gigantic and valuable collection to his nephew, Dr. Baillie, for thirty years, to pass then to the University of Glasgow, where William himself had studied divinity, before the results of freedom of thought (both the Hunters _would_ think for themselves) induced him to turn to the study of medicine. The Hunterian Museum in Windmill Street, after serving various purposes, became known as the Argyll Rooms, where human anatomy (it is believed) was liberally exhibited under magisterial license and the supervision of a severely moral police.

Leicester Square has been remarkable for its exhibitions. Richardson, the fire-eater, exhibited privately at Leicester House in 1672. A century later there was a public exhibition on that spot of quite another quality. The proprietor was Sir Ashton Lever, a Lancashire gentleman, educated at Oxford. As a country squire he formed and possessed the most extensive and beautiful aviary in the kingdom. Therewith, Sir Ashton collected animals and curiosities from all quarters of the world. This was the nucleus of the ‘museum’ subsequently brought to Leicester Fields. Among the curiosities was a striking likeness of George III. ‘cut in cannel coal;’ also Indian-ink drawings and portraits; baskets of flowers cut in paper, and wonderful for their accuracy; costumes of all ages and nations, and a collection of warlike weapons which disgusted a timid beholder, who describes them in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ (May 1773) as ‘desperate, diabolical instruments of destruction, invented, no doubt, by the devil himself.’ Soon after this, this wonderful collection was exhibited in Leicester House. There was a burst of wonder, as Pennant calls it, for a little while after the opening; but the ill-cultivated world soon grew indifferent to being instructed; and Sir Ashton got permission, with some difficulty, from Parliament, to dispose of the whole collection by lottery. Sir William Hamilton, Baron Dimsdale, and Mr. Pennant stated to the Committee of the House of Commons that they had never seen a collection of such inestimable value. ‘Sir Ashton Lever’s lottery tickets,’ says an advertisement of January 28, 1785, ‘are now on sale at Leicester House every day (Sundays excepted), from Nine in the morning till Six in the evening, at One Guinea each; and as each ticket will admit four persons, either together or separately, to view the Museum, no one will hereafter be admitted but by the Lottery Tickets, excepting those who have already annual admission.’ It is added that the whole was to be disposed of owing ‘to the very large sum expended in making it, and not from the deficiency of the daily receipts (as is generally imagined), which have annually increased; the average amount for the last three years being 1833_l._ per annum.’ It sounds odd that a ‘concern’ is got rid of because it was yearly growing more profitable!

Thirty-six thousand guinea-tickets were offered for sale. Only eight thousand were sold. Of these Mr. Parkinson purchased two, and with one of those two acquired the whole collection, against the other purchasers and the twenty-two thousand chances held by Sir Ashton. Mr. Parkinson built an edifice for his valuable prize in Blackfriars Road, and for years, one of the things to be done was ‘to go to the Rotunda.’ In 1806, the famous museum was dispersed by auction. The Surrey Institution next occupied the premises, which subsequently became public drinking-rooms and meeting place for tippling patriots, who would fain destroy the Constitution of England as well as their own.

But ‘man or woman, good my lord,’ let whosoever may be named in connection with Leicester Square, there is one who must not be omitted, namely, Miss Linwood. Penelope worked at her needle to no valuable purpose. Miss Linwood was more like Arachne in her work, and something better in her fortune. The dyer’s daughter of Colophon chose for her subjects the various loves of Jupiter with various ladies whom poets and painters have immortalised; and grew so proud of her work that, for challenging Minerva to do better, the goddess changed her into a spider. The Birmingham lady plied her needle from the time she could hold one till the time her ancient hand lost its cunning. At thirteen she worked pictures in worsted better than some artists could paint them. No needlework, ancient or modern, ever equalled (if experts may be trusted) the work of this lady, who found time to do as much as if she had not to fulfil, as she did faithfully, the duties of a boarding-school mistress. King, Queen, Court, and ‘Quality’ generally visited Savile House, Leicester Fields, where Miss Linwood’s works were exhibited, and were profitable to the exhibitor to the very last. They were, for the most part, copies of great pictures by great masters, modern as well as ancient. Among them was a Carlo Dolci, valued at three thousand guineas. Miss Linwood, in her later days, retired to Leicester, but she used to come up annually to look at her own Exhibition. It had been open about half a century when the lady, in her ninetieth year, caught cold on her journey, and died of it at Leicester in 1844. She left her Carlo Dolci to Queen Victoria. Her other works, sold by auction, barely realised a thousand pounds; but the art of selling art by auction was not then discovered.

In 1788, a middle-aged Irishman from county Meath, named Robert Barker, got admission to Reynolds, to show him a half-circle view from the Calton Hill, near Edinburgh, which Barker had painted in water-colours on the spot. The poor but accomplished artist had been unsuccessful as a portrait-painter in Dublin and Edinburgh. But he had studied perspective closely, an idea had struck him, and he came with it to Reynolds. The latter admired, but thought it impracticable. The Irishman thought otherwise. Barker exhibited circular views from nature, in London and also in the provinces, with indifferent success. At last, in 1793, on part of the old site of Leicester House, a building arose which was called the Panorama, and in which was exhibited a view of the Russian fleet at Spithead. The spectator was on board a ship in the midst of the scene and the view was all around him. King George and Queen Charlotte led the fashionable world to this most original exhibition. For many years there was a succession of magnificent views of foreign capitals, tracts of country, ancient cities, polar regions, battles, &c., exhibited; and ‘Have you been to the new panorama?’ was as naturally a spring question as ‘Have you been to the Academy?’ or the Opera? The exhibition of the ‘Stern Realities of Waterloo’ alone realised a little fortune, and ‘Pandemonium,’ painted by Mr. Henry Selous, was one of the latest of the great successes.

At the north-east corner of Leicester Square, the Barkers, father and son, achieved what is called ‘a handsome competency.’ At the death of the latter, Robert Burford succeeded him, and, for a time, did well; but ‘Fashion’ wanted a new sensation. The panoramas in Leicester Square and the Strand, admirable as they were, ceased to draw the public; and courteous, lady-like, little Miss Burford, the proprietress, was compelled to withdraw, utterly shipwrecked. She used to receive her visitors like a true lady welcoming thorough ladies and gentlemen. The end was sad indeed, for the last heard of this aged gentlewoman was that she was enduring life by needle-work, rarely got and scantily paid, in a lodging, the modest rent of which, duly paid, kept her short of necessary food. An attempt was made to obtain her election to the ‘United Kingdom Beneficent Association,’ but with what result we are unable to record.

Shadows of old Leicester Square figures come up in crowds, demanding recognition. They must be allowed to pass--to make a ‘march past,’ as it were; as they glide by we take note of Mirabeau and Marat, Holcroft, Opie, Edmund Kean, and Mulready, with countless others, to indite the roll of whose names only would alone require a volume.

_A HUNDRED YEARS AGO._

Perusing records that are a century old is something better than listening to a centenarian, even if his memory could go back so far. The records are as fresh as first impressions, and they bring before us men and things as they were, not as after-historians supposed them to be.

The story which 1773 has left of itself is full of variety and of interest. Fashion fluttered the propriety of Scotland when the old Dowager Countess of Fife gave the first masquerade that ever took place in that country, at Duff House. In England, people and papers could talk or write of nothing so frequently as masquerades. ‘One hears so much of them,’ remarked that lively old lady, Mrs. Delany, ‘that I suppose the only method not to be tired of them is to frequent them.’ Old-fashioned loyalty in England was still more shocked when the Lord Mayor of London declined to go to St. Paul’s on the 30th of January to profess himself sad and sorry at the martyrdom of Charles I. In the minds of certain religious people there was satisfaction felt at the course taken by the University of Oxford, which refused to modify the Thirty-nine Articles, as more liberal Cambridge had done. Indeed, such Liberalism as that of the latter, prepared ultra-serious people for awful consequences; and when they heard that Moelfammo, an extinct volcano in Flintshire, had resumed business, and was beginning to pelt the air with red-hot stones, they naturally thought that the end of a wicked world was at hand. They took courage again when the Commons refused to dispense with subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, by a vote of 150 to 64. But no sooner was joy descending on the one hand than terror advanced on the other. Quid-nuncs asked whither the world was driving, when the London livery proclaimed the reasonableness of annual parliaments. Common-sense people also were perplexed at the famous parliamentary resolution that Lord Clive had wrongfully taken to himself above a quarter of a million of money, and had rendered signal services to his country!

Again, a hundred years ago our ancestors were as glad to hear that Bruce had got safely back into Egypt from his attempt to reach the Nile sources, as we were to know that Livingstone was alive and well and in search of those still undiscovered head-waters. A century ago, too, crowds of well-wishers bade God speed to the gallant Captain Phipps, as he sailed from the Nore on his way to that North-west Passage which he did not find, and which, at the close of a hundred years, is as impracticable as ever. And, though history may or may not repeat itself, events of to-day at least remind us of those a hundred years old. The Protestant Emperor William, in politely squeezing the Jesuits out of his dominions, only modestly follows the example of Pope Clement XIV., who, in 1773, let loose a bull for the entire suppression of the order in every part of the world. Let us not forget too, that if orthodox ruffians burnt Priestley’s house over his head, and would have smashed all power of thought out of that head itself, the Royal Society conferred on the great philosopher who was the brutally treated pioneer of modern science, the Copley Medal, for his admirable treatise on different kinds of air.

But there was a little incident of the year 1773, which has had more stupendous consequences than any other with which England has been connected. England, through some of her statesmen, asserted her right to tax her colonists, without asking their consent or allowing them to be represented in the home legislature. In illustration of such right and her determination to maintain it, England sent out certain ships with cargoes of tea, on which a small duty was imposed, to be paid by the colonists. The latter declined to have the wholesome herb at such terms, but England forced it upon them. Three ships, so freighted, entered Boston Harbour. They were boarded by a mob disguised as Mohawk Indians, who tossed the tea into the river and then quietly dispersed. A similar cargo was safely landed at New York, but it was under the guns of a convoying man-of-war. When landed it could not be disposed of, except by keeping it under lock-and-key, with a strong guard over it, to preserve it from the patriots who scorned the cups that cheer, if they were unduly taxed for the luxury. That was the little seed out of which has grown that Union whose President now is more absolute and despotic than poor George III. ever was or cared to be; little seed, which is losing its first wholesomeness, and, if we may trust transatlantic papers, is grown to a baleful tree, corrupt to the core and corrupting all around it. Such at least is the American view--the view of good and patriotic Americans, who would fain work sound reform in this condition of things at the end of an eventful century, when John Bull is made to feel, by Geneva and San Juan, that he will never have any chance of having the best argument in an arbitration case, where he is opposed by a system which looks on sharpness as a virtue, and holds that nothing succeeds like success.

Let us get back from this subject to the English court of a century since. A new year’s day at court was in the last century a gala day, which made London tradesmen rejoice. There were some extraordinary figures at that of 1773, at St. James’s, but no one looked so much out of ordinary fashion as Lord Villiers. His coat was of pale purple velvet turned up with lemon colour, ‘and embroidered all over’ (says Mrs. Delany) ‘with SSes of pearl as big as peas, and in all the spaces little medallions in beaten gold--_real solid_! in various figures of Cupids _and the like_!’

The court troubles of the year were not insignificant; but the good people below stairs had their share of them. If the King continued to be vexed at the marriages of his brothers Gloucester and Cumberland with English ladies, the King’s servants had sorrows of their own. The newspapers stated that ‘the wages of his Majesty’s servants were miserably in arrear; that their families were consequently distressed, and that there was great clamour for payment.’ The court was never more bitterly satirised than in some lines put in circulation (as Colley Cibber’s) soon after Lord Chesterfield’s death, to whom they were generally ascribed. They were written before the decease of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The laureate was made to say--

Colley Cibber, right or wrong,
Must celebrate this day,
And tune once more his tuneless song
And strum the venal lay.

Heav’n spread through all the family
That broad, illustrious glare,
That shines so flat in every eye
And makes them all so stare!

Heav’n send the Prince of royal race
A little coach and horse,
A little meaning in his face,
And money in his purse.

And, as I have a son like yours,
May he Parnassus rule.
So shall the crown and laurel too
Descend from fool to fool.

Satire was, indeed, quite as rough in prose as it was sharp in song. One of the boldest paragraphs ever penned by paragraph writers of the time appeared in the ‘Public Advertiser’ in the summer of 1773. A statue of the King had been erected in Berkeley Square. The discovery was soon made that the King himself had paid for it. Accordingly, the ‘Public Advertiser’ audaciously informed him that he had paid for his statue, because he well knew that none would ever be spontaneously erected in his honour by posterity. The ‘Advertiser’ further advised George III. to build his own mausoleum for the same reason.

And what were ‘the quality’ about in 1773? There was Lord Hertford exclaiming, ‘By Jove!’ because he objected to swearing. Ladies were dancing ‘Cossack’ dances, and gentlemen figured at balls in black coats, red waistcoats, and red sashes, or quadrilled with nymphs in white satin--themselves radiant in brown silk coat, with cherry-coloured waistcoat and breeches. Beaux who could not dance took to cards, and the Duke of Northumberland lost two thousand pounds at quince before half a dancing night had come to an end. There was Sir John Dalrymple winning money more disastrously than the duke lost it. He was a man who inveighed against corruption, and who took bribes from brewers. Costume balls were in favour at court, Chesterfield was making jokes to the very door of his coffin; and he was not the only patron of the arts who bought a Claude Lorraine painted within the preceding half-year. The macaronies, having left off gaming--they had lost all their money--astonished the town by their new dresses and the size of their nosegays. Poor George III. could not look admiringly at the beautiful Miss Linley at an oratorio, without being accused of ogling her. It was at one of the King’s balls that Mrs. Hobart figured, ‘all gauze and spangles, like a spangle pudding.’ This was the expensive year when noblemen are said to have made romances instead of giving balls. The interiors of their mansions were transformed, walls were cast down, new rooms were built, the decorations were superb (three hundred pounds was the sum asked only for the loan of mirrors for a single night), and not only were the dancers in the most gorgeous of historical or fancy costumes, but the musicians wore scarlet robes, and looked like Venetian senators on the stage. It was at one of these balls that Harry Conway was so astonished at the agility of Mrs. Hobart’s bulk that he said he was sure she must be hollow.

She would not have been more effeminate than some of our young legislators in the Commons, who, one night in May, ‘because the House was very hot, and the young members thought it would melt their rouge and wither their nosegays,’ as Walpole says, all of a sudden voted against their own previously formed opinions. India and Lord Clive were the subjects, and the letter-writer remarks that the Commons ‘being so fickle, Lord Clive has reason to hope that after they have voted his head off they will vote it on again the day after he has lost it.’

When there were members in the Commons who rouged like pert girls or old women, and carried nosegays as huge as a lady mayoress’s at a City ball, we are not surprised to hear of macaronies in Kensington Gardens. There they ran races on every Sunday evening, ‘to the high amusement and contempt of the mob,’ says Walpole. The mob had to look at the runners from outside the gardens. ‘They will be ambitious of being fashionable, and will run races too.’ Neither mob nor macaronies had the swiftness of foot or the lasting powers of some of the running footmen attached to noble houses. Dukes would run matches of their footmen from London to York, and a fellow has been known to die rather than that ‘his grace’ who owned him should lose the match. Talking of ‘graces,’ an incident is told by Walpole of the cost of a bed for a night’s sleep for a duchess, which may well excite a little wonder now. The king and court were at Portsmouth to review the fleet. The town held so many more visitors than it could accommodate that the richest of course secured the accommodation. ‘The Duchess of Northumberland gives forty guineas for a bed, and must take her chambermaid into it.’ Walpole, who is writing to the Countess of Ossory, adds: ‘I did not think she would pay so dear for _such_ company.’ The people who were unable to pay ran recklessly into debt, and no more thought of the sufferings of those to whom they owed the money than that modern rascalry in clean linen, who compound with their creditors and scarcely think of paying their ‘composition.’ A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the virtues of Charles James Fox, who had none but such as may be found in easy temper and self-indulgence. He was now in debt to the tune of a hundred thousand pounds. But so once was Julius Cæsar, with whom Walpole satirically compared him. He let his securities, his bondsmen, pay the money which they had warranted would be forthcoming from him, ‘while he, as like Brutus as Cæsar, is indifferent about such paltry counters.’ When one sees the vulgar people who by some means or other, and generally by any means, accumulate fortunes the sum total of which would once have seemed fabulous, and when we see fortunes of old aristocratic families squandered away among the villains of the most villainous ‘turf,’ there is nothing strange in what we read in a letter of a hundred years ago, namely: ‘What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth! filled by nabobs and emptied by macaronies; a country over-run by horse-races.’ So London at the end of July now is not unlike to London of 1773; but we could not match the latter with such a street picture as the following: ‘There is scarce a soul in London but macaronies lolling out of windows at Almack’s, like carpets to be dusted.’ With the more modern parts of material London Walpole was ill satisfied. _We_ look upon Adam’s work with some complacency, but Walpole exclaims, ‘What are the Adelphi buildings?’ and he replies, ‘Warehouses laced down the seams, like a soldier’s trull in a regimental old coat!’ Mason could not bear the building brothers. ‘Was there ever such a brace,’ he asks, ‘of self-puffing Scotch coxcombs?’ The coxcombical vein was, nevertheless, rather the fashionable one. Fancy a nobleman’s postillions in white jackets trimmed with muslin, and clean ones every other day! In such guise were Lord Egmont’s postillions to be seen.

The chronicle of fashion is dazzling with the record of the doings of the celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. At her house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, were held the assemblies which were scornfully called ‘blue-stocking’ by those who were not invited, or who affected not to care for them if they _were_. Mrs. Delany, who certainly had a great regard for this ‘lady of the last century,’ has a sly hit at Mrs. Montagu in a letter of May 1773. ‘If,’ she writes, ‘I had paper and time, I could entertain you with Mrs. Montagu’s room of Cupidons, which was opened with an assembly for all the foreigners, the literati, and the macaronies of the present age. Many and sly are the observations how such a _genius_, at her age and so circumstanced, could think of painting the walls of her dressing-room with bowers of roses and jessamine, entirely inhabited by little Cupids in all their little wanton ways. It is astonishing, unless she looks upon herself as the wife of old Vulcan, and mother to all those little Loves!’ This is a sister woman’s testimony of a friend! The _genius_ of Mrs. Montagu was of a higher class than that of dull but good Mrs. Delany. The _age_ of the same lady was a little over fifty, when she might fittingly queen it, as she did, in her splendid mansion in Hill Street, the scene of the glories of her best days. The ‘circumstances’ and the ‘Vulcan’ were allusions to her being the wife of a noble owner of collieries and a celebrated mathematician, who suffered from continued ill-health, and who considerately went to bed at _five_ o’clock P.M. daily!

The great subject of the year, after all, was the duping of Charles Fox, by the impostor who called herself the Hon. Mrs. Grieve. She had been transported, and after her return had set up as ‘a sensible woman,’ giving advice to fools, ‘for a consideration.’ A silly Quaker brought her before Justice Fielding for having defrauded him. He had paid her money, for which she had undertaken to get him a place under government; but she had kept the money, and had not procured for him the coveted place. Her impudent defence was that the Quaker’s immorality stood in the way of otherwise certain success. The Honourable lady’s dupes believed in her, because they saw the style in which she lived, and often beheld her descend from her chariot and enter the houses of ministers and other great personages; but it came out that she only spoke to the porters or to other servants, who entertained her idle questions, for a gratuity, while Mrs. Grieve’s carriage, and various dupes, waited for her in the street. When these dupes, however, saw Charles Fox’s chariot at Mrs. Grieve’s door, and that gentleman himself entering the house--not issuing therefrom till a considerable period had elapsed--they were confirmed in their credulity. But the clever hussey was deluding the popular tribune in the house, and keeping his chariot at her door, to further delude the idiots who were taken in by it. The patriot was in a rather common condition of patriots; he was over head and ears in debt. The lady had undertaken to procure for him the hand of a West Indian heiress, a Miss Phipps, with 80,000_l._, a sum that might soften the hearts of his creditors for a while. The young lady (whom ‘the Hon.’ never saw) was described as a little capricious. She could not abide dark men, and the swart democratic leader powdered his eyebrows that he might look fairer in the eyes of the lady of his hopes. An interview between them was always on the point of happening, but was always being deferred. Miss Phipps was ill, was coy, was not ‘i’ the vein’; finally she had the smallpox, which was as imaginary as the other grounds of excuse. Meanwhile Mrs. Grieve lent the impecunious legislator money, 300_l._ or thereabouts. She was well paid, not by Fox, of course, but by the more vulgar dupes who came to false conclusions when they beheld his carriage, day after day, at the Hon. Mrs. Grieve’s door. The late Lord Holland expressed his belief that the loan from Mrs. Grieve was a foolish and improbable story. ‘I have heard Fox say,’ Lord Holland remarks in the ‘Memorials and Correspondence of Fox,’ edited by Lord John (afterwards Earl) Russell, ‘she never got or asked any money from him.’ She probably knew very well that Fox had none to lend. That he should have accepted any from such a woman is disgraceful enough: but there may be exaggeration in the matter.

Fox--it is due to him to note the fact here--had yet hardly begun seriously and earnestly his career as a public man. At the close of 1773 he was sowing his wild oats. He ended the year with the study of two widely different dramatic parts, which he was to act on a private stage. Those parts were Lothario, in ‘The Fair Penitent,’ and Sir Harry’s servant, in ‘High Life below Stairs.’ The stage on which the two pieces were acted, by men scarcely inferior to Fox himself in rank and ability, was at Winterslow House, near Salisbury, the seat of the Hon. Stephen Fox. The night of representation closed the Christmas holidays of 1773-4. It was Saturday, January 8, 1774. Fox played the gallant gay Lothario brilliantly; the livery servant in the kitchen, aping his master’s manners, was acted with abundant low humour, free from vulgarity. But, whether there was incautious management during the piece, or incautious revelry after it, the fine old house was burned to the ground before the morning. It was then that Fox turned more than before to public business; but without giving up any of his private enjoyments, except those he did not care for.

The duels of this year which gave rise to the most gossip were, first, that between Lord Bellamont and Lord Townshend, and next the one between Messrs. Temple and Whately. The two lords fought (after some shifting on Townshend’s side) on a quarrel arising from a refusal of Lord Townshend, in Dublin, to receive Bellamont. The offended lord was badly shot in the stomach, and a wit (so called) penned this epigram on the luckier adversary:--

Says Bell’mont to Townshend, ‘You turned on your heel,
And that gave your honour a check.’
‘’Tis my way,’ replied Townshend. ‘To the world I appeal,
If I didn’t the same at Quebec.’