Chapter XIV: Act III (9)

The first glimpse we have of Pepys and his father is pleasant enough. On the 26th January, 1659-60, he writes:—“Home from my office to my Lord’s lodgings, where my wife had got ready a very fine dinner, viz. a dish of marrow-bones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, a dish of fowl, three pullets, and a dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies, a dish of prawns, and cheese. My company was my father, my uncle Fenner, his two sons, Mr. Pierse, and all their wives, and my brother Tom.” The old man was still a tailor in the City, when his son, on the 12th of the following February, records:—“Walking with Mr. Kirton’s apprentice during evening church, and looking for a tavern to drink at, but not finding any we durst not knock: to my father’s,”—whom he found rejoicing that “the boys had last night broke Barebones’ windows.” Pepys was not ashamed of the old tailor, but, a fortnight later, took him with him “to Mr. Weddrington, at Christ’s College, who received me very civilly, and caused my brother to be admitted.” And indeed the old tailor saw very good company at home. In June, 1660, while yet in business, Pepys and his wife, on repairing thither, found “Sir Thomas Honeywood and his family were come of a sudden, and so we forced to be altogether in a little chamber, three stories high.” The old tailor moreover was a match-maker, in his way, for in August we find him “propounding Mr. John Pickering for Sir Thomas Honeywood’s daughter;” a propounding that was certainly made by one of the most singular of agents that ever undertook the business of the old firm of Cupid, Hymen, and Co. The father too appears to have been employed by the son; the latter got him to make “a black cloth coat out of a short cloak, to walk up and down in,” when London was in mourning, in September, for the Duke of Gloucester; and in October we find him again patronizing the paternal establishment, where he calls on a Sunday “to change my long black cloak for a short one (long cloaks being now quite out), but, he being gone to church, I could not get one.” When the old house was broken up, Pepys consented to take his sister from off the now ex-tailor’s hands. “I told him plainly,” he says, “that my mind was to take her not as a sister, but as a servant, which she promised me that she would, and with many thanks did weep for joy,” though it may have been for something else. Pepys was more generous to the old man himself. “My father,” he writes in December of this year, “did offer me six pieces of gold in lieu of six pounds that he borrowed of me the other day, but it went against me to take of him, and therefore did not.” He seems to have occasionally had a joyous dinner or two out of his ancient sire to compensate for the sacrifice. The death of Uncle Robert in the following year made a sort of country gentleman of our tailor, who needed the advancement, for the son, on balancing his father’s affairs as a tradesman, found £45 due to him, with debts to the same amount, and the balance of _zero_ showing all that he possessed of his own in the world; and yet the good old workman had sent his sons to college, and _that_ may account for his poverty. In his retirement the elder Pepys exercised his taste on alterations of his house at Brampton,—changes which his son speaks of as being “very handsome:” in other respects he was like great men in their retirement, and amused himself by writing letters, which appear to have been real “letters of news:” having his crosses however, as country gentlemen will have, and those chiefly from legal disputes touching his inheritance, which happily came, nevertheless, to a favourable conclusion. Pepys the junior warned Pepys senior against the sin of extravagance, and that with such unction that both counsellor and counselled and domestic listeners were melted to tears. The end of the advice thus given was that the sartorius emeritus should keep the expenses of himself and family “within the compass of £50 a year,”—no very princely income, it must be confessed, and one that ought to have saved them from the subsequent reproach of the official son, or rather of his lady wife, touching “the ill, improvident, disquiet, and sluttish manner that my father, and mother, and Poll do live in the country, which troubles me mightily, and I must seek to remedy it.” The remedy adopted to restore gentility to the hearth of the old tailor was one of some singularity. “All the morning,” says Pepys, under the date of September 4, 1664, “all the morning looking over my old wardrobe, and laying by things for my brother John and my father, by which I shall leave myself very bare of clothes, but yet as much as I need, and the rest could but spoil in the keeping.” Magnificent benevolence! But the old man doubtless looked modish in the son’s cast-off suit, and the influence it had on the locality is perhaps seen in the subsequent offer of marriage made to “Poll,” the tailor’s daughter, by one who had “seven score and odd pounds land per annum in possession, and expects £1000 in money upon the death of an old aunt.” This expectation was, I suppose, never realized, for “old aunts” are proverbially immortal, or given to cheat, after tormenting, their heirs, when they do condescend to pay the long-standing debt of nature. The wooer had however some positive advantages, for he possessed neither father, mother, sister, nor brother; and the value of such a man cannot be too strongly impressed upon speculating young ladies. To balance these advantages he had the slight drawback of being “a drunken, ill-favoured, ill-bred country fellow.” On the strength of a prospect of increased gentility, the elder Pepys, now half-blind and parcel-deaf, rode up to town on horseback, and saw the glories of the city, and had his picture taken, to hang in the dining-room of his illustrious son, who enthusiastically records of him that he loved that son, “and hath ever done so, and is at this day one of the most careful and innocent men in the world.” Pepys sent him back on a new horse, and with £20 for the general use of the family. “It rejoiceth my heart,” says the journalist, “that I am in a condition to do anything to comfort him,—he is such innocent company.” The old house of business in Fleet-street perished in the Great Fire; and up rode the ancient occupier of it on his new horse, to view the spot where he had long toiled and which he could no longer recognize. The journey was too much for the man of fine feeling, and he returned home only to wrestle with long illness; but we find him again in town in the following year, where, with his son and daughter-in-law, he dined at no less a table than “Sir W. Pen’s, which they invited us to out of respect to my father, as a stranger, though I know them as false as the devil himself.” By which remark we may see that society, two centuries ago, was not better than it is now, which must be a vast comfort to all who make the reflection. As Pepys records of his father that he was the simplest of men, we may fairly wonder that in the year of troubles, present and expectant, 1667, he entrusted the old gentleman and his own wife with the mission of privately burying his gold. “My father’s method made me mad,” says the son. “My father and my wife did it on Sunday, when they were gone to church, in open daylight, in the midst of the garden, where, for aught they knew, many eyes might see them.” But Pepys found remedy for this exquisite process; and he afterwards spent some happy hours in the low-roofed cottage at Brampton, wherein the secretary expected to pass his own days of retirement, and therefore loved to adorn it and to see it growing in prettiness.

Finally, the honest old tailor made a will, in which he wrote himself “Gentⁿ,” as though he were too modest to make the assertion in the full dignity of the complete word. And in this will, which could not have been drawn up by a lawyer, for it is easily understood and leaves no openings for legal objections, he bequeaths the lands and goods to which he succeeded at Brampton, to his son “Samuel Pepys, Esqʳᵉ.” He left seven pounds to the poor; ten pounds to each of his two grandsons; his largest silver tankard to Pauline,—an appropriate legacy, for “Pall” married the toper; a gold seal-ring to his son John; and if anything remained over and above these bequests, he left the same to be divided among his three children, amicably. He left no debts; and on that score, the honest old tailor of Brampton may rank before many a baron, who neither paid his tailor’s bills when living, nor left wherewith to honestly discharge them, after his decease.

If there was one thing Pepys loved best, next to good wine and good company, it was the stage. Let us see if we cannot find him a brother among the actors.

RICHARD RYAN, THE THEATRICAL TAILOR.

“Honest man;
Here’s all the words that thou art worth.”

DAVENPORT: _The City Nightcap_.

Dignum and Moses Kean, the latter the uncle of Edmund Kean, were one day standing employed in jovial converse under the Piazza in Covent Garden, when Charles Bannister passed by with a friend. Dignum and Moses had been but indifferent tailors, before the one turned vocalist and the other mimic. “I never see those two fellows together,” said Charles, “without thinking of one of Shakspeare’s plays.” “And which is that?” inquired his friend. “_Measure for Measure_,” said Charles.

It is a custom with some Arab tribes for a man, when he becomes a father, to take his name from his son. Thus the bachelor Mahmoud ben Youssef, or Mahmoud son of Joseph, if he marries, no sooner has a boy, whom we will call Taleb, then he becomes Mahmoud Abu Taleb, or Mahmoud father of Taleb. In some such fashion the poor tailor Aaron Kean has no other name in history than that of the father of Edmund,—the greatest of our actors since the days of Garrick. The family of the Trees has, from as humble a source, been as bountiful, in its way, to the stage.

The ever-youthful Harley,—who looks almost as young now as he did when in 1815 he first appeared in London, at the Lyceum, as Marcelli in ‘The Devil’s Bridge,’—is not far removed from the profession on which I have been touching. His sire was a draper, and he himself is said to have been initiated into the mysteries of stay-making, and to have tried those of physic and the law, ere he settled down to comic acting and delighting the town.

But I must go further back than this, for my illustration of one who passed from a humble calling to add dignity to and gain credit in the exercise of a difficult vocation. When the manager was busy “casting” a new tragedy called ‘Cato,’ written by a gentleman about town, whose name is connected with the ‘Spectator,’ and lives in the “Addison” roads and terraces about Kensington, there was some hesitation as to the actor who should represent Marcus. A youthful and aspiring player looked blushingly on as the hesitation occurred. “There is hope, ay, and promise too, in that blush,” said Addison; “Dick Ryan shall be my lover.” “Why, a year ago he was only a tailor,” whispered Booth, who played the principal character. “A London tailor,” said the manager, Syphax Cibber. “And a present pretty fellow,” murmured Maria Oldfield. “And _my_ Marcus,” said Addison, “or I do not make over the profits to the house.” And it was so. It may be a legitimate boast for the profession, that Addison selected a young tailor to play Marcus in his tragedy of ‘Cato,’ and that Garrick took from the same source some hints for the improvement of his Richard.

In the latter case, Garrick and Woodward went together to see Ryan’s Richard, thinking to be merry at witnessing such a character played by such a person. Ryan was then ungraceful in carriage, slovenly in style, and exceedingly ill-dressed; but Garrick discerned, in spite of all, some original ideas, to which he gave development, and therewith he struck out new beauties which he perhaps fairly claimed as his own. Foote alluded to this in a prologue spoke by him at Ryan’s benefit in 1754, in which he said, in allusion to Ryan himself,

“From him succeeding Richard took the cue;
And hence the style, if not the colour, drew.”

Garrick, however, was not generous enough to allow of the young tailor’s excellence; and in Bayes he used to caricature Ryan’s manner by delivering the passage beginning with

“Your bed of love from dangers will I free,”

in a sharp tone and lengthened, hesitating manner. Quin showed more regard for the ex-tailor, by giving his farewell performance on the Bath stage (in ‘Falstaff:’ Henry IV.), not for his own, but for Ryan’s benefit. This was in 1752. The receipts were so great, that Ryan applied to Quin, in a subsequent year, to repeat the performance. “I would play for you, if I could,” wrote the generous old fellow in reply, “but I will not _whistle_ Falstaff for you. I have willed you £1000. If you want money, you may have that; and so save my executors trouble.”

Ryan had years before this met with an accident, which is so characteristic of the times that I may here recount it without apology. It was an accident which made such services as those rendered him by Quin highly acceptable. He had been playing Scipio, in ‘Sophonisba,’ at Covent Garden, and was passing down Great Queen-street, about midnight, when one from among a group of footmen stepped off the pavement, followed him into the road, and, as the actor turned round, discharged a pistol close to his face, bidding him at the same time “Stand and deliver!” The robber plundered the player only of his sword, and _that_ he dropped in the street. As he was unbuckling it from Ryan’s side, the latter said, “Friend, you have killed me, but I forgive you.” The watch, too polite to intrude upon the pleasures of the thieves, picked up their victim, and conveyed him to the house of a neighbouring surgeon, who found that his patient had half his teeth shot out, and his face and jawbone much shattered. Of course, he was incapable of playing Loveless, in ‘Love’s Last Shift,’ as he was announced to do, on the 17th of the same month.

A benefit was got up for the wounded ex-tailor on the 19th. Everybody loved him, and public and players exerted themselves in his behalf. The play was ‘The Provoked Husband.’ Royalty patronized it; and many who could not attend, sent cheques on their bankers as their representatives. Ryan lay for some little time in a deplorable state, and it was very much doubted whether he would ever be able to articulate again. The public looked with sympathy upon their favourite actor; and when, on the 26th of the following month, April, he made his appearance in a new part, that of Bellair, in the ‘Double Deceit,’ great was the delight of the playgoers to find that “their esteemed Ryan,” as he was called, was little, if any, the worse in speech, spirits, or gracefulness, and that the footpad’s pistol had not destroyed the man for whom Garrick himself had shown respect, by at once imitating and caricaturing him. Ryan however never did perfectly recover, although he retained his position on the stage for many years longer.

It was probably more necessity than inclination that kept him on the stage till 1760, in which year he died, after playing the lovers in Tragedy and the fine gentlemen in Comedy for more than thirty years. The line which he took was subsequently ably filled by Charles Kemble, and for something like the same period. But Charles Kemble had, naturally, advantages which Ryan did not at first possess, and which he only slowly acquired. The former however was the subject of much critical ridicule when he first appeared, so awkward was he in spite of his natural advantages. If Ryan never became thoroughly graceful, he was always perfectly easy; and, notwithstanding a harsh and dissonant voice, he could, like Edmund Kean, so manage that organ as to create good effect out of its very defects. He had, with some slight extravagance, excellent judgement, sense, and feeling; and Johnson could not have said to the honest tailor turned actor, as he did sneeringly to Garrick, that Punch had _no_ feeling. In scenes where Comedy trenched upon the domain of the sister Muse by the exhibition of profound emotion, Ryan was very great; and probably no actor has so nearly resembled him in this respect as Mr. Robson, whose origin is as modestly respectable as Ryan’s was. They who can recollect Elliston, as he played, in his latter days, the genial Rover, may have some idea of what Ryan was, when he grew old, in Captain Plume,—namely, defiant of age, and full of the natural assumption of a spirit that seemed backed by the strength which was not there, but which had a substitute in irresistible goodwill.

The gay and graceful Woodward was a contemporary of Ryan’s; and though he was not originally a tailor, he was a pupil of “Merchant Tailors’,” and, if I mistake not, head scholar there in his youth. One good consequence resulting therefrom was, that Woodward never had a benefit without active and liberal patronage on the part of that establishment, which felt itself honoured at ranking so distinguished an actor among its celebrities; and distinguished indeed was Harry Woodward. Since his time the part of Bobadil has never been justly represented; it may be said to have died with him. At a period when correct costume was not cared for, he was ever careful regarding the proprieties of dress; and, more fortunate than Ryan, he sustained the assaults of Time without letting the consequent ravages be seen. Charles Mathews is, in many respects, exactly what Woodward is said to have been; but Woodward could play a far wider range of characters. His scamps were perfect for their cool impudence; his modern fops, for their brazen impertinence; his fops of earlier days, for their elegant rascality; his every-day simpletons, for their vulgar stolidity; his mock-brave heroes, for their stupendous but ever-suspected courage; and his Shakspearian light characters, for their truly Shakspearian spirit. He was gracefully shaped, and bore a serious dignity of countenance, but he was no sooner before the foot-lights than a ripple of funny emotion seemed to roll over his face; and this, with the tones of a capital stage voice, never failed to arouse a laughter which was inextinguishable until the green curtain separated the old pupil of Merchant Tailors’ from his ecstatic audience.

The younger Rich used, like Foote, to ridicule actors who had abandoned other professions for the stage, and generally on the ground of their ignorance. But neither Ryan the actual tailor, nor Woodward the “Merchant Tailor,” ever exhibited so much ignorance as Rich and Foote themselves. Rich always confounded the words _turbot_ and _turban_; and he was once heard to insist upon the necessity of “laying the _empharsis_ on the _adjutant_.” Foote had more wit than Rich, but not more wisdom. “I almost forget my own name,” said the latter, by way of apology for calling Foote by no other appellation than “Mr.” “Well,” remarked Foote, “I knew you couldn’t write your name, but I didn’t suppose you could forget it.” The latter displayed his own ignorance when he laughed at the idea of a ghost taking a corporal oath. He forgot that such an oath was so called because it was taken on the _corporale_, or cloth which covers the elements in the Sacrament.

But even tailors on the stage would be nothing if the poets did not write for them; and here is a poet-tailor to our hand, doing honour to two crafts.

PAUL WHITEHEAD, THE POET TAILOR.

“He lived a poet in this town
(If we may term our modern writers poets),
Sharp-witted, bitter-tongued, his pen of steel.
His ink was temper’d with the biting juice,
And extracts of the bitterest weeds that grew.
He never wrote but when the elements
Of fire and water tilted in his brain.”

HEYWOOD: _Fair Maid of the Exchange_.

Among the tailors who have been authors, Paul Whitehead takes a very respectable rank; which is more, I am sorry to say, than he does among men. The career of the two Whiteheads has a moral in it. William, the son of a Cambridge baker, was, like Paul, the tailor’s son, a most successful tuft-hunter; but then he hunted chiefly after patricians of principle,—of good principle. William was a gentle lad; he walked through the university of his native city with quiet credit, and passed into Lord Grey’s family as private tutor; where he taught mildly, and wrote classical tragedies of so soporific a nature, that the reading of them might safely be recommended to the sleepless by hypnologists. William the baker was a highly respectable and never-too-soon-to-be-forgotten individual.

It is otherwise with roystering Paul the tailor. Chapel-yard, Holborn, was the cradle (in 1709) of this boisterous and biting poet. His father would have been content to see him take measures to follow his example; but as Hervagault, the first pseudo-Dauphin, quitted his father’s board to make assault upon the throne of Capet, so Paul, backed by his friends, aimed at the realm of rhyme, and would wear his father’s coats, but would not make them. His sire apprenticed him to a mercer; the ambitious son went and entered himself at the Temple.

Paul was one of those daring wits whom profane men most admire; and as the young tailor’s style was one which had respect for neither Olympus nor the mortals, he became a laureate, like William the Baker, but not, like him, poet-laureate to the King.

Paul of Castle-yard was laureate to the “Bucks.” He was a member of the most reprobate clubs of the day. He was a member of the brotherhood of Medenham Abbey,—not of the pious and pot-heaving Cistercians, who gurgled their throats with good old wine, but of the God-denying and profligate crew that had Sir Francis Dashwood for their prior. Paul was the Parny of this and similar sets; and when his patrons required a lay against loyalty, a rhyme against royalty, a metrical kick at kings, songs against statesmen, or diatribes against dunces, the Muse of the tailor’s clever boy was ever ready for the nonce. For clever he was, despite the abuse of Churchill—himself very far from immaculate. If Paul was a reprobate, Churchill was that, and a parson to boot,—two professions which should never be united in one and the same individual. And yet Churchill wrote—

“May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)
Be born a Whitehead, and baptized a Paul!”

The man who wrote these lines was in every way inferior to him against whom they were levelled; certainly inferior to him in talent, though it perhaps may be conceded that he excelled him in vice, power of abuse, and ill-nature.

Paul the tailor was to Churchill, the reverend bruiser, what Cobbett was to Hunt. The first had argument in his assertions; the latter had as little logic as humanity. Paul, too, had taste, and imitated only models of the rarest beauty; and this imitation was better than a low originality without taste at all. His thoughts were marked by a manly strength, and his phrases abound in a rich vein of poetical expression. His quarry was folly wherever found, and particularly “the big, rich, mighty dunces of the State.” Not that dunces, as he said, were to be found there only:—

“Dulness no more roosts only near the sky,
But senates, drawing-rooms, with garrets vie;
Plump Peers and breadless bards alike are dull,
St. James’s and Rag Fair club fool for fool.”

And here is a pattern of the fashion after which Paul laid his yard about the ears of one who was “by birth a senator, by fate a fool:”—

“Full placed and pension’d, see Horatio stands!
Begrimed his face, unpurified his hands.
To decency he scorns all nice pretence,
And reigns firm foe to cleanliness and sense.
How did Horatio Britain’s cause advance!
How shines the sloven and buffoon of France!
In senates now, how scold, how rave, how roar,
Of treaties run the tedious train-trow o’er!
How blunder out whate’er should be conceal’d,
And how keep secret what should be reveal’d!
True child of dulness! see him, Goddess, claim
Power next thyself, as next in birth and fame.”

The author was a persecuted man, rather that he was considered a tailor, who had no authority to sit at home and comment on what was done “i’ the Capitol,” than that he was a satirist. Pope was more severe; but Pope was a gentleman, and was held unassailable. If Paul was prosecuted, it was that Pope, in the penalties inflicted on the humbler bard, might see the perils which did himself environ. Poor Paul nevertheless grumbled at being thus made a scapegoat, and he said thereupon:—

“Pope writes unhurt; but know ’tis different quite
To beard the lion, and to crush the mite.
Safe may he dash the statesman in each line;
Those dread his satire who dare punish mine!”

So wrote the Tory tailor who abused the Whigs, who were at that time most flourishing at court, and most arrogant in drawing-rooms. The day came when the Tories took root at court, and swaggered in saloons: and then, sooth to say, court life and lounging in boudoirs seemed no longer reprehensible in the eyes of the satirist. When he abused the throne, he never expected to be allowed to make a _congé_ at the foot of it. Benedick, in a similar style, when he abused matrimony, never expected to be a married man. And, besides, we may allow in well-abused Paul,—once pillowed on his sire’s sleeve-board,—the tergiversation of principle which was so coolly practised by such mighty fine gentlemen as Dryden, and that insufferably impudent and dishonest fop, Waller.

One at least of Paul’s works led to a public demonstration of some importance; and I may as well notice it here as where it would otherwise as naturally come—under the head of “Masks.” Walpole, writing to Sir Horace Mann, in November, 1741, says:—“I believe I told you that Vernon’s birthday passed quietly; but it was not designed to be pacific, for at twelve at night, eight gentlemen, dressed like sailors, _and masked_, went round Covent Garden with a drum, beating for a volunteer mob; but it did not take, and they retired to a great supper, that was prepared for them at the Bedford Head, and ordered by Whitehead, the author of ‘Manners.’”

In this last piece the author had committed onslaught on some members of the House of Lords; the latter assembly summoned and imprisoned Dodsley the publisher, Whitehead himself having absconded. The publisher confessed that he had not read the tailor’s strains, but that, as the work was a satire, he had compelled the author to affix his name to the title-page, and take the responsibility. One of the libelled Lords, Essex, moved the discharge of Dodsley; and not only Whitehead, but Pope, was kept quiet by fear of prosecution.

Whitehead had already known what imprisonment was. He had, like many a foolish youth, been ambitious of maintaining an acquaintance with the actors, and he was particularly intimate with Fleetwood the manager. He had not read the admonitory remark of the Wise King, that he who goeth security for his neighbour shall smart for it; and the consequence of putting his name to a bond ultimately placed his person in bonds also, and he expiated in the Fleet his act of generous folly.

But he soon recovered from the effects of this. He was something of a beau, and he did what beaux were wont to do,—married an heiress. The lady was Anne Dyer, daughter of an Essex baronet, Sir Swinnerton Dyer. She was homely and somewhat imbecile, but she had ten thousand pounds,—“dix milles vertus en louis bien comptés,”—and Paul always regarded her as a woman who had rendered him some little service. As duty was then accounted of, this was acting with most singular uprightness.

He now took to what Mrs. Partington calls his “opium cum digitalis,” and ceased to publish, though not to write. His republican friends attacked him as a renegade; his royalist foes assailed him as an atheist; and Paul laughed at both. To show however that he had strength if he chose to exert it, he wrote his ‘Gymnasiad,’ a punching philippic against boxing; and he dedicated it to Boughton the “bruiser,”—and all this in the face of fashion, which then took prize-fighters by the arm, and walked with them in the Mall, proud of the acquaintance.

The atheistical gentleman who turned his satire from the Cabinet to the “ropes,” was well rewarded by Ministers; and Lord le Despenser gave Paul the post of Deputy-Treasurer of the Chamber, with £800 a year to reconcile the patriot to becoming a placeman. He now took his annual tours like a nobleman, and in the course of one of them he found himself at Deal. There, in a little literary circle, Mrs. Carter met him, to that pious and learned lady’s profound horror. She had scarcely patience to hear him read one of his productions; and she who had translated ‘Epictetus,’ in order to gain consolation from his philosophy for being the native of a place so dull, dreary, dirty, dear, and dismal as Deal, could hardly recall a maxim or two to her mind to fortify her against the annoyance of playing second fiddle to the atheistical son of an old London tailor!

Yet Paul was one of the finest of gentlemen in his way, and associated with the very finest of the same class. He not only had his country-house at Twickenham, but a coruscant circle about him of wits whose brilliancy was not considered as tarnished by the most mouldy blasphemy. He was, as I have said, the choice spirit of that club which met at Medenham Abbey. We are struck with a species of horror when we contemplate Augustus and his friends reclining at a banquet dressed out as, and named after, the gods whom they professed to adore. It was a thousand times worse with the atheistical wits who met at Medenham to drown themselves in drink, to wallow in every inconceivable extravagance of vice, and amid it all to laugh at Heaven’s lightning. To crown the horror, these exemplary individuals took the guise and names of the Apostles; and nude Marthas and Marys held the bowl to the lips of Simon Peter and of Jude. But enough of this awful habit of the day. Suffice it to say, that Paul Whitehead and Wilkes, the immaculate patriot, were the most licentious of these pseudo-apostles, and gloried in their shame.

The hour in which the former was called to answer for the crime, struck in 1774. Paul was then residing in Henrietta-street, Covent-garden; and, when he felt the hand of the Inevitable upon him, he burned all his erotic and infidel poetry, as if _that_ could hide his sins from the eye of his Judge. He added to this the heathenish folly of bequeathing his heart to Lord le Despenser. That exemplary nobleman accepted the legacy; and the precious bequest, solemnly inurned, was pompously borne to West Wycombe Church, attended by a procession of minstrels, singers, and admiring friends. As to the quality of the clergy present, it may be judged of by the fact that they stood unprotestingly by while the vocalists, engaged by the Medenham apostles, sang, with rapt expression, the following strophe:—

“From earth to heaven Whitehead’s soul is fled;
Refulgent glories beam about his head;
His Muse, concording with resounding strings,
Gives angels words to praise the King of Kings.”

When such things were sung of a Medenham apostle, in presence of an unprotesting clergy, we need not wonder that there were a few serious men, with a certain John Wesley at the head of them, anxiously seeking for a “method” to remedy the enormous evils of the times.

We perhaps have deferred too long to notice the establishment of which such men as Stow and Speed were members, and which has furnished many a scholar or gallant gentleman to illustrate arts or arms. Let us then say a word of honoured “Merchant Tailors’.”

MEMS. OF “MERCHANT TAILORS.”

“My heart is yours,
And you shall see it spring, and shoot forth leaves
Worthy your eye; and the oppressed sap
Ascend to ev’ry part, to make it green
And pay your love with fruit, when harvest comes.”

LOVE TRICKS, _by Shirley, a pupil of M. T._

I regret to say it, but the Rev. H. B. Wilson, the reverend author of that half-hundredweight quarto which gives the history of the Merchant Tailors, and which the author hoped would find its way into our villages, is ashamed of the origin of his heroes. He has even enough of false pride to beg that writers will spell Merchant Ta_y_lors with a _y_, and not with an _i_! Tailors with an _i_, he says, may be mistaken for a trade; while Taylors with a _y_ may be taken for a name! So was Sir Piercie Shafton ever blushing at the idea of his father’s calling; and so do the Smiths with an _i_, fancy that they glide into gentility and euphony by becoming Smyths with a _y_.

How long the City guild of tailors has sustained a corporate dignity it would be hard to say; we know however that Edward I. confirmed the guild under their old name of “Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers.” Their symbolic shield bore a tent between two mantles, denoting that the honest men of the guild made cloaks for all customers, and tents for the royal army. Many a marquis has not half so delicate a device; and the _Mercatores Scissores_ have been worthily translated by those far less useful gentlemen,—the members of the College of Arms. The oath of the livery bound the new brother to the utmost possible respectability of life; but the oath was not broken when the taker of it, in a fit of enthusiastic pride, broke the head of a “Merchant Skinner” who dared claim precedency over the “Tailor.” A “bloody coxcomb” was too often the crest of the valiant Mercatores Scissores.

Of the members of the company, in the olden time, the most illustrious was Hawkwood, to whom I have assigned a chapter, as becoming his super-sartorial dignity. Here I will only briefly speak of the school, and the more illustrious men whom it has furnished to the public service. The latter are bound to drink the immortal memory of the royal founder of the “Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers.”

The school was established by the company in 1560-1, “for children of all nations and countries indifferently;” a liberal provision, which was contracted in 1731 by an order of court, whereby express exclusion was made of the children of Jews. Among the statutes, there is especial injunction that, “in the schoole, at noe time of the yere, they shall use tallow candle in noe wise, but wax candles only;” an injunction which shows less regard for grammar than gentility. The school rather tripped at the beginning; for though Mulcaster, the head master, was an accomplished scholar, the ushers brought with them from the north such a Bœotian accent, that the boys went home talking “broad Yorkshire!”

Mulcaster, the master, too could occasionally indulge in very harsh English of the vulgar tongue, abusing the “visitors” roundly,—a rudeness that ought not to have been seen at a school lit only with wax candles, and having six or seven and thirty scholarships at St. John’s. Mulcaster was a choleric man; but in his mastership of a quarter of a century he “turned out” four bishops. These, when boys, had been the widest awake, while the master slept; for, as Fuller tells us, “he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school, but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity, as soon as he to pardon. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.” In our days, Dr. Hessey can make good scholars by a more merciful and dignified process.

Wilkinson, the successor of Mulcaster, had the famous Whitelock for a pupil; and under the third master, Smith, we find at the school a boy named Juxon, who afterwards stood on the scaffold with Charles I., and smoothed the sovereign’s path from time into eternity. Boyle and Dee were also at this time young “Merchant Tailors,” whose subsequent manly merits reflected lustre on the old foundation. Smith’s successor, Haynes, was, like Mulcaster, rather ready with his tongue and heavy with his hand. He chastised unmercifully; and, on being menaced with complaint to the wardens, he was so audacious as to declare that he did not care a “phillip” for them. His ushers, too, appear to have been rough of speech; and “Bridewell rogue” was the tutorial epithet for a rebellious pupil. Haynes too was accused of encouraging little lotteries for his own profit, and not for the recreation of the pupils. “For,” says the complaint, “you suffer none to drawe any one lott, but those that bring xiiᵈ. or above. Your biggest lot is one grammer of xᵈ. which is the greate lott; the rest are ink-hornes, hobby-horses, gingerbread, paints, and puddings of very small value.” The master of Merchant Tailors’ is indignant thereat, and protests that not only is the matter one of pure entertainment, but that he makes nothing by it, and that he finds the drawers in “dyett bread, comfitts of all sorts, ffiggs, raysonnes, allmonds, stewed prunes, wiggs, beare, and some wine, and all kinds of ffrute, which the season of the yeare affordes.”

A story is told of one of Haynes’s pupils, which, like many other stories, has had different individuals for its hero. It is to this effect. A very proud and an intolerably ignorant gentleman was constantly boasting that he enjoyed the advantage of having been a member of both Universities. “You remind me,” said the old Merchant Tailors’ pupil, “of a circumstance worth narrating. I have two cows at home which calved at the same time. One calf died, but I let the other calf suck both the cows.” “Well,” said the member of two Universities, “what was the consequence?” “A prodigiously great calf indeed, Sir.”

For many years the scholastic portion of Merchant Tailors’ appears to have suffered by repeated visitations of the Plague. Then came the Great Rebellion, with a modifying of the rules, which were made excessively stringent, and under which the pupils were converted to as sour a series of classes as if they were enrolled in Dotheboys Hall. But then came the Restoration, and therewith relaxation; and the young “tailors” pushed up their beavers from off their eyes, turned up their lank hair into seductive curls, put their hands on their hips, and looked saucily at the maids of Cheapside. In the midst of it all burst forth the Great Fire; and the “tailors,” for a time houseless, got their lessons by fits and starts, till they were once more tabernacled, in high spirits, within a comfortable dwelling.

One would have thought that all would have been harmony in the new house; but such was not the case. For some time, indeed, nobody could discover a grievance; but having looked everywhere to find one, and all in vain, recourse was had to religion, and of course a few were created _instanter_. Good, the master, continued to pray as heretofore in Latin. The boys roared out for plain English precations. The City took various sides of the question,—for, against, and a little of both languages. The Latinists at last prevailed, and the orthodox declared that the heel of the Apocalyptic Beast was on the brow of the scholars, and that the sun of England had set for ever. It is a sun however that hitherto has exhibited a great alacrity in rising again.

Of course the zealous party ousted Good in time. The members of it held that daily prayers and much devotion after a ceremonious manner savoured of Popery, and poor Good was turned out as a Papist; the boys marvellously improved, and became very remarkable for their habits of “profane swearing and debauchery, and misdemeanours.” St. Lawrence Pountney was imitating Whitehall. A good deal of irregularity prevailed throughout the periods of James II. and William and Mary. One instance may be cited, namely, that of treating the boys who missed their election to St. John’s College with canary and cake. It was like teaching them that drink was a solace for disappointment. To be sure they had a sermon first from the chaplain; but chaplains in those days were particularly addicted to punch.

See the consequence! The school-kitchen was enlarged; the boys were divided into the “table” and the “bench;” and, as an illustration of these jolly juvenile “tailors,” it may be stated that Sam Phillips, a “tailor” of the “table,” seduced little Will Nash, a “tailor” of the “bench,” and took him to taverns, and playhouses, and gaming-houses, and was tried for the same before the school authorities, who found him guilty indeed, but construed mild of human frailty, and condoned him on promise of his mending his naughty ways,—which he, like a gallant “tailor,” scorned to do, and turned out a reprobate accordingly.

Not that the pupils were generally reprobate, but the masters unwise, and regardless of their own regulations. Thus, when young Buckingham, who was a very worthy juvenile “Merchant Tailor,” wrote the play of Scipio Africanus, and had it represented, the masters, who denounced stage representations, suspended the duties of the school, and sent all the boys into the pit to clap the piece. It was like the British Senate solemnly adjourning, as both Houses once did, in order to see Master Betty play Hamlet.

But let me do all justice to the masters. If they turned their Christian pupils into the pit of a very licentious theatre (Lincoln’s Inn Fields), they exhibited their anxiety for pure morality by again turning all the Jewish pupils out of the school. Israel was their scapegoat.

Quin’s ‘Scipio’ inoculated the boys and masters too with a scenic furor; and the latter individuals consistently upheld the morals of the _alumni_ by permitting them to perform the most beastly of the beastly pieces of Terence,—the ‘Eunuchus.’ Thus Merchant Tailors’ sank or rose to the nasty practice of Westminster; and again I say, “See the consequence!” Garrick, who used to patronize the performances, enticed Silvester, who played in the epilogue to the ‘Phormio,’ to a wider stage; and Silvester’s readiness to play anything, from Hamlet to harlequin, was subsequently immortalized by Bannister, Junior, in the character of Sylvester Daggerwood.

Nor can excuse be taken under the plea that the masters only patronized the classic drama in a tongue defunct. One of the masters, himself a clergyman, the Rev. P. Townley, wrote one of the most lively farces in the English language, namely, ‘High Life below Stairs.’ This, too, was long before the Terence period of the Merchant Tailor plays. It has had two very lively results. Mrs. Abington’s Lady Bab fired many a “tailor” youth, and the whole piece caused an insurrection among the liveried gentlemen in the free list who waited for their masters in the Edinburgh gallery. As for Dublin, when _the_ Abington went there and played Kitty, the fashion of her cap set the whole town in a fever; and nothing else was seen on fashionable heads but one made after that illustrious fashion.

The matter was not mended at Merchant Tailors’ when musical performances were subsequently introduced, and the satires in Ruggles’s ‘Ignoramus’ were sung by the boys to sacred airs by Soper, by Hasse, and by Handel. The mothers of some of these lads had to regret, like Niobe, that the gods had made their children vocal. These operatic displays were ultimately suppressed.

Finally, under the mastership of Cherry, Townley’s successor, a scene of another description took place, which caused infinite commotion. When the French Revolution broke out, the “Tailors” became infected; and inscriptions scrawled on the walls of the school-passages proved how disloyalty pervaded the breasts of the youthful writers. But from writing they proceeded to action. On the 13th of January, 1796, the Queen’s birthday, a tricoloured flag was hoisted on the Tower Walls, where, strange enough, it was allowed to remain for three hours, side by side with the royal standard. The City burst forth into a tumult of indignation or delight. When the authorities, acting on information, proceeded to the fortress, the insulting emblem had disappeared; but it was traced to a hiding-place beneath the bed of the son of the Rev. Mr. Grose, assistant chaplain at Merchant Tailors’. The horrified sire burnt the rag of rebellion to ashes, while his son confessed his guilt, and implicated in the raising of the insurrectionary standard a fellow-pupil named Hayward, under whose suggestions young Grose professed to have acted. Their fellow-pupils showed the vigour of _their_ loyalty by nearly pounding Hayward to a pulpy consistence like that of the men whom Professor Whewell, as I have elsewhere noticed, concedes as possibly existing in the wide plane of Jupiter. The offenders were solemnly expelled; and since that period, the establishment has flourished in usefulness to the public and credit to its conductors.

It is an establishment which, despite some drawbacks, has produced not a few eminent “Merchant Tailors.” I can cite but a few, and, among the many, name the good and modest Bishop Andrews, and the learned Dove, who in the reign of James preached the funeral sermon of Mary Queen of Scots, at Peterborough. Spenser the Greek scholar, and the three virtuous sons of the virtuous Sandys, Bishop of London; Fox, the son and biographer of the Martyrologist; Heth, who logically tranquillized the public in 1582, when Harvey of Cambridge informed the world that it was coming to an end; the pious Bowsfield and Gwinne, who renewed a love for Church music after the Reformation, were all “Merchant Tailors.” So too were those eminent Oxford men, Searchfield and Perin; Paddin, the physician at James’s death-bed; Ravens and Buckridge, Latewar, Whitelocke, and Boyle; Price, Tomson, and Lymby, Rawlinson, Rainsbee, Sansbury, Lauson, and Tuer; with Wren and Campin, who upheld the honour of Merchant Tailors’ at Cambridge. What they did in general learning, in divinity, poetry, or law, in the Hampton Court Conference, in the student’s closet, in ambassadorial councils or the tented field, behold, is it not written in the dictionaries of biographers?

To them may be added Hutton the controversialist, and the clever and profligate Hill, who lived an Epicurean and died a Romanist, and to whose opinions Ben Jonson alludes when he says:—

“Thou Atomi ridiculous,
Whereof old Democrite and Hill Nicholas,
One said, the other swore, the world consists.”

Glancing our eye adown the long roll, we distinguish the name of Whitelocke, who was indebted for much of his education to Laud, and who, when that prelate was in difficulty, refused to act on the committee whose members had determined to push that difficulty to death. Pious Juxon, the poetic Lodge, and honest Foster, the country clergyman,—who wrote a treatise called ‘_Hoplocrissma Spongus_, or a sponge to wipe away the weapon-salve, wherein is proved that the cure taken up among us by applying the salve to the weapon is magical and unlawful,’—these follow; and, not less honoured, succeed the names of Sutton and Buckland,—the first, zealous Reformer; the second, as zealous Romanist. To these may be added Wilde, the dramatist; Jones, the ornament of the English Benedictines; tuneful Shirley, a greater dramatist than Wilde; and Hutton, who was distinguished for his learning in French and Italian as well as in classical literature. Further we find Dr. Speed, the son of the chronologist; William Meaux or Meuse, who is described as having “entered in the physick line;” the loyal divines Walwyn, Good, and Edwards; and a host of men less known to fame, and who were expelled the University for being consistent in their political opinions. Calamy is a name not to be omitted; and Archdeacon Layfield is remembered as the clergyman who was punished for having the letters I. H. S. in his church, by being dragged in his surplice through the City, and who refused to pay either fifteen hundred pounds or five to save himself from being sold to the Algerines or the Plantations.

Snelling, the tragic writer; Howe, the naturalist; Frank Goldsmith, who wrote for love and not for hire; Gayten, pleasant author of ‘Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote;’ Hewit, the clergyman, executed for loyalty to the cause of Charles, and whom his old schoolfellow Wilde attended on the scaffold; and perhaps greater than all, Davenant the commentator, brother to the laureate, and son to Shakspeare’s melancholic host at Oxford, were others of the _alumni_ of our house.

Nor must I omit the name of Will Quarles; Calamy and Shirley, men even more noted, I have already incidentally mentioned: they both died within the same week, of fright caused by the Great Fire of London, a catastrophe which made a poet of another “Merchant Tailor,” the well-known Markland. Indeed a great many of the pupils became at least respectable poets, which is, after all, no great praise, as applied to the sons of song.

Pepys and Evelyn record no more interesting incidents connected with the Great Fire than are to be found in the reports, given by other writers, of the deaths of these two distinguished pupils of Merchant Tailors’. Shirley had exceeded by two years the allotted aggregate of “threescore years and ten” when he and his second wife, Frances, were driven from their habitation in Fleet-street. They took refuge from the flames in the neighbouring parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields. But so overcome were this much-tried and ancient pair, that they both died on the same day, and within a month of the great calamity. The hapless couple were buried in one grave in St. Giles’s, and became the associates of a goodly but silent company,—among others, Chapman, the poet, and translator of Homer, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury; a company that was afterwards enlarged by the mute presence of Charles the Second’s “Dick Penderell,” Andrew Marvell, the infamous Countess of Shrewsbury, who held Buckingham’s horse while the Duke slew her husband in a duel, and Sir Roger L’Estrange, who is called “the wit,” upon the principle of naming ill-painted animals on village sign-boards,—you would not have made the necessary discovery without the explanatory ‘legend.’

As for poor Calamy, he too died of the Fire. He was driven through the burning ruins, and so shocked was he at the sight of the destruction that had fallen on the great theatre of his popularity, that he never again quitted the room at Enfield, whither he was conveyed, but died on the day that Shirley and his wife were buried. Thus perished two of the greatest of the _alumni_ of whom Merchant Tailors’ can boast. To the roll of those pupils we will again resort.

First among them we find handsome Ezekiel Hopkins, with whom all the women were in love,—in love both with his preaching and his person. Oh, happy Ezekiel! cunning Hopkins! Presbyterian when Presbytery was in power; Independent when to be so was to be “No. 1;” and winning all hearts from the episcopal pulpit of St Mary’s, Exeter, and subsequently St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, when Episcopacy and Royalty walked hand-in-hand among the lieges. Excellent Ezekiel! But, if he had his conceits, his schoolfellow Webb had his hobby; and nothing could convince _him_ that the Chinese language was not the language spoken by Adam and Eve before the Fall.