Chapter XIV: Lincoln’s Inn Fields (2)

There is an agreement in all the stories of the duke, who was thirty years Secretary of State, and nearly ten years First Lord of the Treasury, “whether told,” says Macaulay, “by people who were perpetually seeing him in Parliament and attending his levées in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or by Grub Street writers, who had never more than a glimpse of his star through the windows of his gilded coach.”[720] Smollett and Walpole mixed in different society, yet they both sketch the duke with the same colours. Smollett’s Newcastle runs out of his dressing-room with his face covered with soapsuds to embrace the Moorish envoy. Walpole’s Newcastle pushes his way into the Duke of Grafton’s sick-room to kiss the old nobleman’s plaisters. “He was a living, moving, talking caricature. His gait was a shuffling trot, his utterance a rapid stutter. He was always in a hurry--he was never in time; he abounded in fulsome caresses and in hysterical tears. His oratory resembled that of Justice Shallow--it was nonsense effervescent with animal spirits and impertinence. ‘Oh yes, yes, to be sure--Annapolis must be defended; troops must be sent to Annapolis. Pray, where is Annapolis?’--‘Cape Breton an island! Wonderful! Show it me on the map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir, you always bring us good news. I must go and tell the king that Cape Breton is an island.’ His success is a proof of what may be done by a man who devotes his whole heart and soul to one object. His love of power was so intense a passion, that it almost supplied the place of talent. He was jealous even of his own brother. Under the guise of levity, he was false beyond all example.” “All the able men of his time ridiculed him as a dunce, a driveller, a child, who never knew his own mind for an hour together, and yet he overreached them all round.” If the country had remained at peace, this man might have been at the head of affairs till a new king came with fresh favourites and a strong will; “but the inauspicious commencement of the Seven Years’ War brought on a crisis to which Newcastle was altogether unequal. After a calm of fifteen years, the spirit of the nation was again stirred to its inmost depths.”

This is strongly etched, but Macaulay was too fond of caricature for a real lover of truth. Walpole, recounting this greedy imbecile’s disgrace, reviews his career much more forcibly, for in a few words he shows us how great had been the power which this chatterer’s fixed purpose had attained. The memoir-writer describes the duke as the man “who had begun the world by heading mobs against the ministers of Queen Anne; who had braved the heir-apparent, afterwards George I., and forced himself upon him as godfather to his son; who had recovered that prince’s favour, and preserved power under him, at the expense of every minister whom that prince preferred; who had been a rival of another Prince of Wales for the chancellorship of Cambridge; and who was now buffeted from a fourth court by a very suitable competitor (Lord Bute), and reduced in his tottery old age to have recourse to those mobs and that popularity which had raised him fifty years before.”

Lord Bute was mean enough to compliment the old duke on his retirement. The duke replied, with a spirit that showed the vitality of his ambition: “Yes, yes, my lord, I am an old man, but yesterday was my birthday, and I recollected that Cardinal Fleury _began_ to be prime-minister of France just at my age.”[721]

Newcastle House, now occupied by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, was, for forty years or more, inhabited by Sir Alan Chambre, one of King George III.’s judges. The society, then lodged in Bartlett’s Buildings, in Holborn, derived its first name from that place, and at Sir Alan’s death they purchased the house and site.

About the centre of the west side of the square, in Sir Alan’s time, lived the Earl and Countess of Portsmouth. The earl was half-witted, but was always well-conducted and quite producible in society under the guidance of his countess, a daughter of Lord Grantley.

Near Surgeons’ Hall, at the same epoch, lived the first Lord Wynford, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, better known as Serjeant Best. A quarrel between this irritable lawyer and Serjeant Wilde, afterwards Lord Chancellor Truro, one of the most stalwart gladiators who ever won a name and title in the legal arena, gave rise to an epigram, the point of which was--“That Best was wild, and Wilde was best.”

In 1774, when Lord Clive had rewarded Wedderburn, his defender, with lacs of rupees and a villa at Mitcham, the lawyer had an elegant house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, not far from the Duke of Newcastle’s,--“a quarter,” says Lord Campbell, “which I recollect still the envied resort of legal magnates.”

Wedderburn, afterwards better known as Lord Chancellor Loughborough, had a special hatred for Franklin, and loaded him with abuse before a committee of the Privy Council, for having sent to America letters from the Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, urging the Government to employ military force to suppress the discontents in New England.[722] The effect of Wedderburn’s brilliant oratory in Parliament was ruined, says Lord Campbell, by “his character for insincerity.”[723] When George III. heard of his death, he is reported to have said, “He has not left a greater knave behind him in my dominions;” upon which Lord Thurlow savagely said, with his usual oath, “I perceive that his majesty is quite sane at present.” Wedderburn was a friend of David Hume; his humanity was eulogised by Dr. Parr, but he was satirised by Churchill in the _Rosciad_.

Montague, Earl of Sandwich, the great patron of Pepys, lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, paying £250 a year rent.[724] Pepys calls it “a fine house, but deadly dear.”[725] He visits him, February 10, 1663-4, and finds my lord very high and strange and stately, although Pepys had been bound for £1000 with him, and the shrewd cit naturally enough did not like my lord being angry with him and in debt to him at the same time. The earl was a distant cousin of Pepys, and on his marriage received him and his wife into his house, and took Pepys with him when he went to bring home Charles II., when he was elected one of the Council of State and General at Sea. He brought the queen-mother to England and took her back again. He also brought the ill-fated queen from Portugal, and became a privy-councillor, and was sent as ambassador to Spain. He seems to have been not untainted with the vices of the age. He was in the great battle where Van Tromp was killed, and in 1668 he took forty-five sail from the Dutch at sea, and that is the best thing known of him. He died in 1672, and was buried in great state.

Inigo Jones built only the west side of the square. No. 55 was the residence of Robert Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, a general of King Charles. It is described in 1708 as a handsome building of the Ionic order, with a beautiful and strong Court Gate, formed of six spacious brick piers, with curious ironwork between them, and on the piers large and beautiful vases.[726] The open balustrade at the top bore six urns.

The Earl of Lindsey was shot at Edgehill in 1642, when a reckless and intemperate charge of Rupert had led to the total defeat of the unsupported foot. His son, Lord Willoughby, was taken in endeavouring to rescue his father. Clarendon describes the earl as a lavish, generous, yet punctilious man, of great honour and experience in foreign war. He was surrounded by Lincolnshire gentlemen, who served in his regiment out of personal regard for him. He was jealous of Prince Rupert’s interference, and had made up his mind to die. As he lay bleeding to death he reproved the officers of the Earl of Essex, many of them his old friends, for their ingratitude and “foul rebellion.”[727]

The fourth Earl of Lindsey was created Duke of Ancaster, and the house henceforward bore that now forgotten name. It was subsequently sold to the proud Duke of Somerset, the same who married the widow of the Mr. Thynne whom Count Königsmarck murdered.

In the early part of George III.’s reign Lindsey House became a sort of lodging-house for foreign members of the Moravian persuasion. The staircase, about 1772, was painted with scenes from the history of the Herrnhuthers. The most conspicuous figures were those of a negro catechumen in a white shirt, and a missionary who went over to Algiers to preach to the galley-slaves, and died in Africa of the plague. There was also a painting of a Moravian clergyman being saved from a desert rock on which he had been cast.[728]

Repeated mention of the Berties is made in Horace Walpole’s pleasant _Letters_. Lord Robert Bertie was third son of Robert the first Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven. He was a general in the army, a colonel in the Guards, and a lord of the bedchamber. He married Lady Raymond in 1762, and died in 1782.

The proud Duke of Somerset, in 1748, left to his eldest daughter, Lady Frances, married to the Marquis of Granby, three thousand a year, and the fine house built by Inigo Jones in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he had bought of the Duke of Ancaster for the Duchess, hoping that his daughter would let her mother live with her.[729] In July 1779 the Duke of Ancaster, dying of drinking and rioting at two-and-twenty, recalls much scandal to Walpole’s mind. He had been in love with Lady Honoria, Walpole’s niece; but Horace does not regret the match dropping through, for he says the duke was of a turbulent nature, and, though of a fine figure, not noble in manners. Lady Priscilla Elizabeth Bertie, eldest sister of the duke, married the grandson of Peter Burrell, a merchant, who became husband of the Lady Great Chamberlain of England, and inherited a barony and half the Ancaster estate.[730] “The three last duchesses,” goes on the cruel gossip, “were never sober.” “The present duchess-dowager,” he adds, “was natural daughter of Panton, a disreputable horse-jockey of Newmarket. The other duchess was some lady’s woman, or young lady’s governess.” Mr. Burrell’s daughters married Lord Percy and the Duke of Hamilton.

In 1791 Walpole writes to Miss Berry to describe the marriage of Lord Cholmondeley with Lady Georgiana Charlotte Bertie: “The men were in frocks and white waistcoats. The endowing purse, I believe, has been left off ever since broad pieces were called in and melted down. We were but eighteen persons in all.... The poor duchess-mother wept excessively; she is now left quite alone,--her two daughters married, and her other children dead. She herself, I fear, is in a very dangerous way. She goes directly to Spa, where the new married pair are to meet her. We all separated in an hour and a half.”[731]

Alfred Tennyson in early life had fourth-floor chambers at No. 55, and there probably his friend Hallam, whose early death he laments in his _In Memoriam_ spent many an hour with him. There, in the airy regions of Attica, in a low-roofed room, the single window of which is darkened by a huge stone balustrade--a gloomy relic of past grandeur--the young poet may have recited the majestic lines of his “King Arthur,” or the exquisite lament of “Mariana,” and there he may have immortalised the “plump head-waiter of the Cock,” in Fleet Street. Mr. John Foster, the author of many sound and delightful historical biographies, had also chambers in this house.

No. 68, on the west side, stands on the site of the approach to the stables of old Newcastle House. Here Judge Le Blanc lived, and at his death the house was occupied by Mr. Thomas Le Blanc, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

At No. 33, on the same side as the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, dwelt Judge Park, a man much beloved by his friends; in his early days, as a young and poor Scotch barrister, he had lived in Carey Street till his house there was burnt down. He used to say that his great ambition in youth had been to one day live at No. 33 in the Fields, at that time occupied by Chief Justice Willis; but in later days, as a judge, leaving the former goal of his ambition, he migrated to Bedford Square, where he died.

Nos. 40 and 42, on the south side, form the Museum of the College of Surgeons, incorporated in 1800. The Grecian front is a most clever contrivance by Sir John Soane. The building contains the incomparable anatomical collection of the eminent John Hunter, bought by the Government for £15,000 and given to the College of Surgeons on condition of its being opened to the public. John Hunter died in 1793; and the first courses of lectures in the new building were delivered by Sir Everard Home and Sir William Blizard, in 1810. The Museum was built by Barry in 1835, and cost about £40,000.[732] It is divided into two rooms, the normal and abnormal. The total number of specimens is upwards of 23,000. The collection is unequalled in many respects; every article is authentic and in perfect preservation. The largest human skeleton is that of Charles O’Brien, the Irish giant, who died in Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, in 1783, aged twenty-two. It measures eight feet four inches. By its side, in ghastly contrast, is the bony sketch of Caroline Crachami, a Sicilian dwarf who died in 1824, aged ten years. There is also a cast of the hand of Patrick Cotter, another Irish giant, who measured eight feet seven and a half inches. Nor must we overlook the vast framework of Chunee, the elephant that went mad with toothache at Exeter Change, and was shot by a company of riflemen in 1826. The sawn base of the inflamed tusk shows a spicula of ivory pressing into the nervous pulp. Toothache is always terrible, but only imagine a square foot of it!

Very curious too, are the jaw of the extinct sabre-toothed tiger, and the skeleton of a gigantic extinct Irish deer found under a bed of shell-marl in a peat bog near Limerick. The antlers are seven feet long, eight feet across, and weigh seventy-six pounds. The height of the animal (measured from his skull) was seven feet six inches. Amongst other horrors, there is a cast of the fleshy band that united the Siamese twins, and one of a woman with a long curved horn growing from her forehead. There are also many skulls of soldiers perforated and torn with bullets, the lead still adhering to some of the bony plates of the crania. But the wonder of wonders is the iron pivot of a trysail-mast that was driven clean through the chest of a Scarborough lad. The boy recovered in five months, and not long after went to work again. It is a tough race that rules the sea.

There are also fragments of the skeleton of a rhinoceros discovered in a limestone cavern at Oreston during the formation of the Plymouth Breakwater. In a recess from the gallery stands the embalmed body of the wife of Martin Van Butchell, an impudent Dutch quack doctor. It is coarsely preserved, and is very loathsome to look at. It was prepared in 1775 by Dr. W. Hunter and Mr. Cruikshank, the vascular system being injected with oil of turpentine and camphorated spirits of wine, and powdered nitre and camphor being introduced into the cavities. On the case containing the body is an advertisement cut from an old newspaper, stating the conditions which Dr. Van Butchell required of those who came to see the body of his wife. At the feet of Mrs. Van Butchell is the shrunken mummy of her pet parrot.

The pictures include the portrait of John Hunter by Reynolds, which Sharp engraved: it has much faded. There is also a posthumous bust of Hunter by Flaxman, and one of Clive by Chantrey. Any Fellow of the College can introduce a visitor, either personally or by written order, the first four days of the week. In September the Museum is closed. It would be much more convenient for students if some small sum were charged for admission. It is now visited but by two or three people a day, when it should be inspected by hundreds.

That great surgeon, John Hunter, was the son of a small farmer in Lanarkshire. He was born in 1728, and died in 1793. In early life he went abroad as an army-surgeon to study gunshot-wounds; and in 1786 he was appointed deputy surgeon-general to the army. In 1772 he made discoveries as to the property of the gastric juice. He was the first to use cutting as a cure for hydrophobia, and to distinguish the various species of cancer. He kept at his house at Brompton a variety of wild animals for the purposes of comparative anatomy, was often in danger from their violence, and as often saved by his own intrepidity. Sir Joseph Banks divided his collection between Hunter and the British Museum. Unequalled in the dissecting-room, Hunter was a bad lecturer. He was an irritable man, and died suddenly during a disputation at St. George’s Hospital which vexed him. His death is said to have been hastened by fear of death from hydrophobia, he having cut his hand while dissecting a man who had died of that mysterious disease. Hunter used to call an operation “opprobrium medici.”

In Portugal Row, as the southern side of the square used to be called, lived Sir Richard Fanshawe, the translator of the _Lusiad_ of Camoens, and of Guarini’s _Pastor Fido_. Sir Richard was our ambassador in Spain; but Charles, wishing to get rid of Lord Sandwich from the navy, recalled Fanshawe, on the plea that he had ventured to sign a treaty without authority. He died in 1666, on the intended day of his return, of a violent fever, probably caused by vexation at his unmerited disgrace. Sir Richard appears to have been a religious, faithful man and a good scholar, but born in unhappy times and to an ill fate. Charles I. had very justly a great respect for him. His wife was a brave, determined woman, full of affection, good sense, and equally full of hatred and contempt for Lord Sandwich, Pepys’s friend, who had supplanted her husband in the embassy.

On one occasion, on their way to Malaga, the Dutch trading vessel in which she and her husband were was threatened by a Turkish galley which bore down on them in full sail. The captain, who had rendered his sixty guns useless by lumbering them up with cargo, resolved to fight for his £30,000 worth of goods, and therefore armed his two hundred men and plied them with brandy. The decks were partially cleared, and the women ordered below for fear the Turks might think the vessel a merchant-ship and board it. Sir Richard, taking his gun, bandolier, and sword, stood with the ship’s company waiting for the Turks.[733] But we must quote the brave wife’s own simple words:--“The beast the captain had locked me up in the cabin. I knocked and called long to no purpose, until at length the cabin-boy came and opened the door. I, all in tears, desired him to be so good as to give me the blue thrum cap he wore and his tarred coat, which he did, and I gave him half-a-crown; and putting them on, and flinging away my night-clothes, I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s side, as free from fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the effect of that passion which I could never master. By this time the two vessels were engaged in parley, and so well satisfied with speech and sight of each other’s forces, that the Turks’ man-of-war tacked about and we continued our course. But when your father saw me retreat, looking upon me, he blessed himself and snatched me up in his arms, saying, ‘Good God! that love can make this change!’ and though he seemingly chid me, he would laugh at it as often as he remembered that journey.” This same vessel, a short time after, was blown up in the harbour with the loss of more than a hundred men and all the lading.[734]

This brave, good woman showed still greater fortitude when her husband died and left her almost penniless in a strange country. She had only twenty-eight doubloons with which to bring home her children, and sixty servants, and the dead body of her husband. She, however, instantly sold her carriages and a thousand pounds’ worth of plate, and setting apart the queen’s present of two thousand doubloons for travelling expenses, started for England. “God,” she says, in her brave, pious way, “did hear, and see, and help me, and brought my soul out of trouble.”

In 1677 Lady Fanshawe took a house in Holborn Row, the north side of the square, and spent a year lamenting “the dear remembrances of her past happiness and fortune; and though she had great graces and favours from the king and queen and whole court, yet she found at the present no remedy.”[735]

Lord Kenyon lived at No. 35 in 1805. Jekyll was fond of joking about Kenyon’s stinginess, and used to say he died of eating apple-pie crust at breakfast to save the expense of muffins; and that Lord Ellenborough, who succeeded on Kenyon’s death to the Chief Justiceship, always used to bow to apple-pie ever afterwards which Jekyll called his “apple-pie-ety.” The princesses Augusta and Sophia once told Tom Moore, at Lady Donegall’s that the king used to play tricks on Kenyon and send the despatch-box to him at a quarter past seven, when it was known the learned lord was in bed to save candlelight.[736] Lord Ellenborough used to say that the final word in “Mors janua vitæ” was mis-spelled _vita_ on Kenyon’s tomb to save the extra cost of the diphthong.[737] George III. used to say to Kenyon, “My Lord, let us have a little more of your good law, and less of your bad Latin.”

Lord Campbell, who gives a very pleasant sketch of Chief Justice Kenyon, with his bad temper and bad Latin, his hatred of newspaper writers and gamblers, and his wrath against pettifoggers, describes his being taken in by Horne Tooke, and laughs at his ignorantly-mixed metaphors. He seems to have been a respectable second-rate lawyer, conscientious and upright. “He occupied,” says Lord Campbell, “a large gloomy house, in which I have seen merry doings when it was afterwards transferred to the Verulam Club.” The tradition of this house was that “it was always Lent in the kitchen and Passion Week in the parlour.” On some one mentioning the spits in Lord Kenyon’s kitchen, Jekyll said, “It is irrelevant to talk about the spits, for nothing _turns_ upon them.” The judge’s ignorance was profound. It is reported that in a trial for blasphemy the Chief Justice, after citing the names of several remarkable early Christians, said, “Above all, gentlemen, need I name to you the Emperor Julian, who was so celebrated for the practice of every Christian virtue that he was called Julian the Apostle?”[738] On another occasion, talking of a false witness, he is supposed to have said, “The allegation is as far from truth as ‘old Boterium from the northern main’--a line I have heard or met with, God knows where.”[739]

Lord Erskine lived at No. 36, in 1805, the year before he rose at once to the peerage and the woolsack, and presided at Lord Melville’s trial. He did not hold the seals many months, and died in 1823. This great Whig orator was the youngest son of the Earl of Buchan. He was a midshipman and an ensign before he became a student at Lincoln’s Inn. He began to be known in 1778; in 1781 he defended Lord George Gordon, in 1794 Horne Tooke, Hardy, Thelwall, and afterwards Tom Paine.

The house that contains the Soane Museum, No. 13 on the north side, was built in 1812, and, consisting of twenty-four small apartments crammed with curiosities, is in itself a marvel of fantastic ingenuity. Every inch of space is turned to account. On one side of the picture-room are cabinets, and on the other movable shutters or screens, on which pictures are also hung; so that a small area, only thirteen feet long and twelve broad, contains as much as a gallery forty-five feet long and twenty feet broad. A Roman altar once stood in the outer court.

It is a disgrace to the trustees that this curious museum is kept so private, and that such impediments are thrown in the way of visitors. It is open only two days a week in April, May, and June, but at certain seasons a third day is granted to foreigners, artists, and people from the country. To obtain tickets, you are obliged to get, some days before you visit, a letter from a trustee, or to write to the curator, enter your name in a book, and leave your card. All this vexatious hindrance and fuss has the desired effect of preventing many persons from visiting a museum left, not to the trustees or the curator, but to the nation--to every Englishman. In order to read the books, copy the pictures, or examine the plans and drawings, the same tedious and humiliating form must be gone through.

The gem of all the Soane treasures is an enormous transparent alabaster sarcophagus, discovered by Belzoni in 1816 in a tomb in the valley of Beban el Molook, near Thebes. It is nine feet four inches long, three feet eight inches wide, two feet eight inches deep, and is covered without and within with beautifully-cut hieroglyphics. It was the greatest discovery of the runaway Paduan Monk, and was undoubtedly the cenotaph or sarcophagus of a Pharaoh or Ptolemy. It was discovered in an enormous tomb of endless chambers, which the Arabs still call “Belzoni’s tomb.” On the bottom of the case is a full-length figure in relief, of Isis, the guardian of the dead. Sir John Soane gave £2000 for this sarcophagus to Mr. Salt, Consul General of Egypt and Belzoni’s employer. The raised lid is broken into nineteen pieces. The late Sir Gardner Wilkinson considered this to be the cenotaph of Osirei, the father of Rameses the Great. But the forgotten king for whom the Soane sarcophagus was really executed was Seti, surnamed Meni-en-Ptah, the father of Rameses the Great; he is called by Manetho Séthos.[740] Dr. Lepsius dates the commencement of his reign B.C. 1439. Dr. Brugsch places it twenty years earlier. Mr. Sharpe, with that delightful uncertainty characteristic of Egyptian antiquaries, drags the epoch down two hundred years later. Seti was the father of the Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites, and he made war against Syria. His son was the famous Rameses. All three kings were descended from the Shepherd Chiefs. The most beautiful fragment in Karnak represents this monarch, Seti, in his chariot, with a sword like a fish-slice in one hand, while in the other he clutches the topknots of a group of conquered enemies, Nubian, Syrian, and Jewish. The work is full of an almost Raphaelesque grace.

After this come some of Flaxman’s and Banks’s sketches and models, a cast of the shield of Achilles by the former, and one of the Boothby monument by the latter. There is also a fine collection of ancient gems and intaglios, pure in taste and exquisitely cut, and a set of the Napoleon medals, selected by Denon for the Empress Josephine, and in the finest possible state. We may also mention Sir Christopher Wren’s watch, some ivory chairs, and a table from Tippoo Saib’s devastated palace at Seringapatam, and a richly-mounted pistol taken by Peter the Great from a Turkish general at Azof in 1696. The latter was given to Napoleon by the Russian emperor at the treaty of Tilsit in 1807, and was presented by him to a French officer at St. Helena. The books, too, are of great interest. Here is the original MS. copy of the _Gierusalemme Liberata_, published at Ferrara in 1581, and in Tasso’s own handwriting; the first four folio editions of Shakspere, once the property of that great actor and Shaksperean student John Philip Kemble; a folio of designs for Elizabethan and Jacobean houses by the celebrated architect John Thorpe; Fauntleroy the forger’s illustrated copy of Pennant’s _London_, purchased for six hundred and fifty guineas; a Commentary on Paul’s Epistles, illuminated by the laborious Croatian, Giulio Clovio (who died in 1578), for Cardinal Grimani. Vasari raves about the minute finish of this painter.

The pictures, too, are good. There are three Canalettis full of that Dutch Venetian’s clear common sense; the finest, a view on the Grand Canal--his favourite subject--and “The Snake in the Grass,” better known as “Love unloosing the Zone of Beauty,” by Reynolds. There is a sadly faded replica of this in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. This one was purchased at the Marchioness of Thomond’s sale for £500. The “Rake’s Progress,” by Hogarth, in eight pictures, was purchased by Sir John in 1802 for £598. These inimitable pictures are incomparable, and display the fine, pure, sober colour of the great artist, and his broad touch so like that of Jan Steen.

The Soane collection also boasts of Hogarth’s four “Election” pictures, purchased at Garrick’s sale for £1732 10s. They are rather dark in tone. There is also a fine but curious Turner, “Van Tromp’s Barge entering the Texel;” a portrait by Goma of Napoleon in 1797, when emaciated and haggard, and a fine miniature of him in 1814, when fat and already on the decline, both physically and mentally, by Isabey the great miniature-painter, taken at Elba in 1814. In the dining-room is a portrait of Soane by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and in the gallery under the dome a bust of him by Chantrey.

Sir John Soane was the son of a humble Reading bricklayer, and brought up in Mr. Dance’s office. Carrying off a gold and silver medal at the Academy, he was sent as travelling student to Rome. In 1791 he obtained a Government employment, in 1800 enlarged the Bank of England, and in 1806 became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. He built the Dulwich Gallery, and in 1826 the Masonic Hall in Great Queen Street. In 1827 he gave £1000 to the Duke of York’s monument. At the close of his life he left his collection of works of art, valued at £50,000, to the nation, and died in 1837,[741] leaving his son penniless. In 1835 the English architects presented Sir John with a splendid medal in token of their approbation of his conduct and talents.

The Literary Fund Society, instituted in 1790, and incorporated in 1818, had formerly rooms at No. 4 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The society was established in order to aid authors of merit and good character who might be reduced to poverty by unavoidable circumstances, or be deprived of the power of exertion by enfeebled faculties or old age. George IV. and William IV. both contributed one hundred guineas a year to its funds, and this subscription is continued by our present Queen. The society distributed £1407 in 1846. The average annual amount of subscriptions and donations is about £1100. The Literary Fund Society moved afterwards to 73 Great Russell Street. Some years ago a split occurred in this society. Charles Dickens and Mr. C. W. Dilke, the proprietor of the _Athenæum_, objecting to the wasteful expense of the management, seceded from it; the result of this secession was the founding of the Guild of Literature, and the collection of £4000 by means of private theatricals--a sum which, unfortunately, still lies partly dormant. The Fund is now domiciled in Bloomsbury.

Both Pepys and Evelyn praise the house of Mr. Povey in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a prodigy of elegant comfort and ingenuity. The marqueterie floors, “the perspective picture in the little closet,” the grotto cellars, with a well for the wine, the fountains and imitation porphyry vases, his pictures and the bath at the top of the house, seem to have been the abstract of all luxurious ease.

Names were first put on doors in London in 1760, some years before the street-signs were removed. In 1764 houses were first numbered; the numbering commenced in New Burlington Street, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the second place numbered.

In Carey Street lived that excellent woman Mrs. Hester Chapone, who afterwards removed to Arundel Street. She was a friend of Mrs. Carter, who translated Epictetus, and of Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blue Stockings. She was one of the female admirers who thronged round Richardson the novelist, and she married a young Templar whom he had introduced to her. It was a love match, and she had the misfortune of losing him in less than ten months after their marriage. Her celebrated letters on _The Improvement of the Mind_, published in 1773, were written for a favourite niece, who married a Westminster Clergyman and died in childbed. Though Mrs. Chapone’s letters are now rather dry and old-fashioned, reminding us of the backboards of a too punctilious age, they contain some sensible and well-expressed thoughts. Here is a sound passage:--“Those ladies who pique themselves on the particular excellence of neatness are very apt to forget that the decent order of the house should be designed to promote the convenience and pleasure of those who are to be in it; and that if it is converted into a cause of trouble and constraint, their husbands’ guests would be happier without it.”[742]

Gibbons’s Tennis Court stood in Vere Street, Clare Market; it was turned into a theatre by Thomas Killigrew. Ogilby the poet, started a lottery of books at “the old theatre” in June 1668. He describes the books in his advertisements as “all of his own designment and composure.”

“The Duke’s Theatre” stood in Portugal Street, at the back of Portugal Row. It was pulled down in 1835 to make room for the enlargement of the Museum of the College of Surgeons. Before that it had been the china warehouse of Messrs. Spode and Copeland.[743] There had been, however, frailer things than china in the house in Pepys’s time. Here, the year of the Restoration, came Killigrew with the actors from the Red Bull, Clerkenwell, and took the name of the King’s Company. Three years later they moved to Drury Lane. Davenant’s company then came to Portugal Street in 1662, deserting their theatre, once a granary, in Salisbury Court. They played here till 1671, when they returned to their old theatre, then renovated under the management of Charles Davenant and the celebrated Betterton, the great tragedian. They afterwards united in Drury Lane, and again fell apart. In 1695 a company, headed by Betterton, with Congreve for a partner, re-opened the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It then became celebrated for pantomimes under Rich, the excellent harlequin. On his removal to Covent Garden it was deserted, re-opened by Gifford from Goodman’s Fields, and finally ceased to be a theatre about 1737, so that its whole life did not extend to more than one generation.

Actresses first appeared in London in Prynne’s time. Soon after the Restoration a lady of Killigrew’s company took the part of Desdemona. In January 1661 Pepys saw women on the stage at the Cockpit Theatre: the play was Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggars’ Bush.” The prologue to “Othello” in 1660 contains the following line:[744]--

“Our women are defective and so sized,
You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;
For, to speak truth, men act that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
That, when you call Desdemona, enter giant.”

The Puritans were now happily in the minority, and so the attempt succeeded. Davenant did not bring forward his actresses till June 1661, when he produced his “Siege of Rhodes.” Kynaston, Hart, Burt, and Clun, famous actors of Charles II.’s time, were all excellent representatives of female characters.

It was at the Duke’s Theatre, in 1680, that Nell Gwynn who was present, being reviled by one of the audience, and William Herbert, who had married a sister of one of the king’s mistresses, taking up Nell’s quarrel--a sword fight took place between the two factions in the house. This hot-blooded young gallant Herbert grew up to be Earl of Pembroke and first plenipotentiary at Ryswick.

The chief ladies at the Duke’s House were Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Davies, and Mrs. Saunderson. The first of these ladies, generally known as “Roxalana,” from a character of that name in the “Siege of Rhodes,” resisted for a long time the addresses of Aubrey de Vere, the last Earl of Oxford, a wicked brawling roysterer, and a disgrace to his name, who at last obtained her hand by the cruel deception of a sham marriage. The pretended priest was a trumpeter, the witness a kettle-drummer in the king’s regiment. The poor creature threw herself in vain at the king’s feet and demanded justice, but gradually grew more composed upon an annuity of a thousand crowns a year.[745]

As for Mrs. Davies, who danced well and played ill, she won the susceptible heart of Charles II. by her singing the song, “My lodging is on the cold, cold ground.” “Through the marriage of the daughter of Lord Derwentwater with the eighth Lord Petre,” says Dr. Doran, “the blood of the Stuarts and of Moll Davies still runs in their lineal descendant, the present and twelfth lord.”[746]

Mrs. Saunderson became the excellent wife of the great actor Betterton. For about thirty years she played the chief female characters, especially in Shakspere’s plays, with great success. She taught Queen Anne and her sister Mary elocution, and after her husband’s death received a pension of £500 a year from her royal pupil.

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

In February 1666-7 Pepys goes again to the Duke’s Playhouse, and observes there Rochester the wit and Mrs. Stewart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond, the same lady whose portrait we retain as Britannia on the old halfpennies. “It was pleasant,” says the tuft-hunting gossip, “to see how everybody rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond’s son, came into the pit, towards the end of the play, who was a servant to Mrs. Mallett, and now smiled upon her and she on him.”[747]

The same month, 1667-8, Pepys revisits the Duke’s House to see Etherege’s new play, “She Would if She Could.” He was there by two o’clock, and yet already a thousand people had been refused at the pit. The fussy public-office man, not being able to find his wife, who was there, got into an eighteenpenny box, and could hardly see or hear. The play done, it being dark and rainy, Pepys stays in the pit looking for his wife and waiting for the weather to clear up. And there for an hour and a half sat also the Duke of Buckingham, Sedley, and Etherege talking; all abusing the play as silly, dull, and insipid, except the author, who complained of the actors for not knowing their parts.

In May 1668 Pepys is again at this theatre in the balcony box, where sit the shameless Lady Castlemaine and her ladies and women; on another occasion he sits below the same group, and sees the proud lady look like fire when Moll Davies ogles the king her lover. In another place he observes how full the pit is, though the seats are two shillings and sixpence a piece, whereas in his youth he had never gone higher than twelvepence or eighteenpence.[748]

Kynaston, the greatest of the “boy-actresses,” was chiefly on this stage from 1659 to 1699. Evadne was his favourite female part. Later in life he took to heroic characters. Cibber says of him: “He had something of a formal gravity in his mien, which was attributed to the stately step he had been so early confined to. But even that in characters of superiority had its proper graces; it misbecame him not in the part of Leon in Fletcher’s ‘Rule a Wife,’ which he executed with a determined manliness and honest authority. He had a piercing eye, and in characters of heroic life a quick imperious vivacity in his tone of voice that painted the tyrant truly terrible. There were two plays of Dryden in which he shone with uncommon lustre; in ‘Arungzebe,’ he played Morat, and in ‘Don Sebastian’ Muley Moloch. In both these parts he had a fierce lion-like majesty in his port and utterance that gave the spectator a kind of trembling admiration.”[749] Kynaston died in 1712, and left a fortune to his son, a mercer in Covent Garden, whose son became rector of Aldgate.

James Nokes was Kynaston’s contemporary in Portugal Street. Leigh Hunt calls him something between Liston and Munden. Dryden mentions him, in a political epistle to Southerne, as indispensable to a play. Cibber says, “The ridiculous solemnity of his features was enough to have set the whole bench of Bishops into a titter.” In his ludicrous distresses he sank into such piteous pusilanimity that one almost pitied him. “When he debated any matter by himself he would shut up his mouth with a dumb, studious pout, and roll his full eye into a vacant amazement.”[750] He died in 1692, leaving a fortune and an estate near Barnet.

But the great star of Portugal Street was Betterton, the Garrick of his age. His most admired part was Hamlet; but Steele especially dilates on his Othello. He acted his Hamlet from traditions handed down by Davenant of Taylor, whom Shakspere himself is said to have instructed. Cibber says that there was such enchantment in his voice alone that no one cared for the sense of the words; and he adds, “I never heard a line in tragedy come from Betterton wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination, were not fully satisfied.” This great man, who created no fewer than 130 characters, was a friend of Dryden, Pope, and Tillotson. Kneller’s portrait of him is at Knowle;[751] A copy of it by Pope is preserved in Lord Mansfield’s gallery at Caen Wood. When he died, in 1710, Steele wrote a “Tatler” upon him, in which he says “he laboured incessantly, and lived irreproachably. He was the jewel of the English stage.” He killed himself by driving back the gout in order to perform on his benefit night, and his widow went mad from grief. Betterton acted as Colonel Jolly in Colman’s “Cutter of Coleman Street,” as Jaffier in Otway’s _chef d’œuvre_, as fine gentlemen in Congreve’s vicious but gay comedies, as a hero in Rowe’s flatulent plays, and as Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s great comedy.

Mrs. Barry was one of the best actresses in Portugal Street. She was the daughter of an old Cavalier colonel, and was instructed for the stage by Rochester, whose mistress she became. Dryden pronounced her the best actress he had ever seen. Her face and colour varied with each passion, whether heroic or tender. “Her mien and motion,” says Cibber, “were superb and gracefully majestic, her voice full, clear, and strong.” In scenes of anger, defiance, or resentment, while she was impetuous and terrible, she poured out the sentiment with an enchanting harmony. She was so versatile that she played Lady Brute as well as Zara or Belvidera. For her King James II. originated the custom of actors’ benefits. After a career of thirty-eight years on the boards, she died at Acton in 1713. Kneller’s picture represents her with beautiful eyes, fine hair drawn back from her forehead, “the face full, fair, and rippling with intellect,”[752] but her mouth a little awry.[753]

Mrs. Mountfort also appeared in Portugal Street before the two companies united at Drury Lane in 1682. She was the best of male coxcombs, stage coquettes, and country dowdies, a vivacious mimic, and of the most versatile humour. Cibber sketches her admirably as Melantha in “Marriage à la Mode:”--“She is a fluttering, finished impertinent, with a whole artillery of airs, eyes, and motions. When the gallant recommended by her father brings his letter of introduction, down goes her dainty diving body to the ground, as if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own attractions; then she launches into a flood of fine language and compliment, still playing her chest forward in fifty falls, and rising like a swan upon waving water; and to complete her impertinence, she is so rapidly fond of her own wit that she will not give her lover leave to praise it;[754] and at last she swims from him with a promise to return in a twinkling.”

The virtuous, good, and discreet Mrs. Bracegirdle was another favourite in Portugal Street. For her Congreve, who affected to be her lover, wrote his Araminta and Cynthia, his Angelica, his Almeria, and his Millamant in “The way of the world.” All the town was in love with her youth, cheerful gaiety, musical voice, the happy graces of her manner, her dark eyes, brown hair, and expressive, rosy-brown face. Her Statira justified Nat Lee’s frantic Alexander for all his rant; and “when she acted Millamant, all the faults, follies, and affectation of that agreeable tyrant were venially melted down into so many charms and attractions of a conscious beauty.” Mrs. Bracegirdle was on the stage from 1680 to 1707. She lived long enough to warn Cibber against envy of Garrick, and died in 1748.

Three of Congreve’s plays, “Love for Love,” “The Mourning Bride,” and “The Way of the World,” came out in Portugal Street. Steele, in the _Tatler_, No. 1, mentions “Love for Love” as being acted for Betterton’s benefit--Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Doggett taking parts. He describes the stage as covered with gentlemen and ladies, “so that when the curtain was drawn it discovered even there a very splendid audience.” “In Dryden’s time,” says Steele, “You used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands of every person you met [at the theatre]; now you have only a pack of cards, and instead of the cavils about the turn of the expression, the elegance of style and the like, the learned now dispute only about the truth of the game.”

Poor Mountfort, the most handsome, graceful, and ardent of stage lovers, the most admirable of courtly fops, and the best dancer and singer of the day, strutted his little hour in Portugal Street till run through the body by Lord Mohun’s infamous boon companion. His career extended from 1682 to 1695. He was only thirty-three when he died.

The last proprietor of the theatre was Rich, an actor who, failing in tragedy, turned harlequin and manager, and became celebrated for producing spectacles, ballets, and pantomimes. Under the name of Lun he revelled as harlequin, and was admirable in a scene where he was hatched from an egg.

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

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

Rich’s great success was the production of Gay’s _Beggars’ Opera_ in 1727-8. This piece brought £2000 to the author, and for a time drove the Italian Opera into the shade. It ran sixty-three nights the first season, and then spread to all the great towns in Great Britain. Ladies carried about the favourite songs engraved on their fan-mounts, and they were also printed on fire-screens and other furniture. Miss Lavinia Fenton, who acted Polly, became the idol of the town; engravings of her were sold by thousands: her life was written, and collections were made of her jests.[755] Eventually she married the Duke of Bolton. Sir Robert Walpole laughed at the satire against himself, and “Gay grew rich, and Rich gay,” as the popular epigram went. Hogarth drew the chief scene with Walker as Macheath, and Spiller as Mat o’ the Mint. Swift was vexed to find his Gulliver for the time forgotten.

The custom of allowing young men of fashion to have chairs upon the stage was an intolerable nuisance to the actors before Garrick. In 1721 it led to a desperate riot at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. Half-a-dozen beaux, headed by a tipsy earl, were gathered round the wings, when the earl reeled across the stage where Macbeth and his lady were then acting, to speak to a boon companion at the opposite side. Rich the manager, vexed at the interruption, forbade the earl the house, upon which the earl struck Rich and Rich the earl. Half-a-dozen swords at once sprang out and decreed that Rich must die; but Quin and his brother actors rushed to the rescue with bare blades, charged the coxcombs, and drove them through the stage-door into the kennel. The beaux returning to the front, rushed into the boxes, broke the sconces, slashed the hangings, and threatened to burn the house; upon which doughty Quin and a party of constables and watchmen flung themselves on the rioters and haled them to prison. The actors, intimidated, refused to re-open the house till the king granted them a guard of soldiers, a custom that has not long been discontinued. It was not till 1780 that the habit of admitting the vulgar, noisy, and turbulent footmen gratis was abandoned.[756]

Macklin, afterwards the inimitable Shylock and Sir Pertinax, played small parts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre till 1731, when a short speech as Brazencourt, in Fielding’s “Coffee-house Politicians,” betrayed the true actor. He lived till over a hundred, so long that he did not leave Covent Garden till after Braham’s appearance, and Braham many of our elder readers have seen.[757]

Macklin, an Irishman, and in early life a Dragoon officer, was irritable, restless, and pugnacious; he obtained his first triumph at Drury Lane, as Shylock in 1741. In stern malignity, no one has surpassed Macklin. His acting was hard, but manly and weighty, though his features were rather rigid. He naturally condemned Garrick’s action and gesture as superabundant. His Sir Pertinax was excellent in its sly and deadly suppleness. He was also admirable in Lovegold, Scrub, Peachem, Polonius, and many Irish characters.

Quin was at Portugal Street as early as 1718-19. There he first “delighted the town by his chivalry as Hotspur, his bluntness as Clytus, his fieriness as Bajazet, his grandeur as Macbeth, his calm dignity as Brutus, his unctuousness as Falstaff, his duplicity as Maskwell, and his coarse drollery as Sir John Brute.”[758] It was just before this, that locked in a room and compelled to fight, he had killed Bowen, who was jealous of his acting as Bajazet. When Rich refused to give Quin more than £300 a year, he joined the Drury Lane company, where he instantly got £500 per annum.

When Rich grew wealthy enough to hire a new theatre in Covent Garden, he left Portugal Street. Almost the last play acted there was “The Anatomist,” by Ravenscroft, a second-rate author of Dryden’s time.

The mob attributed the flight of Rich from the old theatre to the appearance of a devil during the performance of the pantomime of “Harlequin and Dr. Faustus,” a play in which demons abound. The supernumerary spirit ascending by the roof instead of leaving by the door with his paid companions, was believed to have so frightened manager Rich that, taking the warning against theatrical profanity to heart, he never had the courage to open the theatre again.[759] The legend is curious, as it proves that even in 1732 the old Puritan horror of theatricals had not quite died out, and that at that period the poorer part of the audience was still ignorant enough to attribute mechanical tricks to supernatural interference.

Garrick, in one of his prologues, speaks of Rich, under the name of Lun--

“When Lun appeared with matchless art and whim,
He gave the power of speech to every limb;
Though masked and mute, convey’d his quick intent,
And told in frolic gestures all he meant;
But now the motley coat and sword of wood
Require a tongue to make them understood.”

Every motion of Rich meant something. His “statue scene” and “catching the butterfly” were moving pictures. His “harlequin hatched from an egg by sun-heat” is highly spoken of; Jackson calls it “a masterpiece of dumb show.” From the first chipping of the egg, his receiving of motion, his feeling the ground, his standing upright, to his quick harlequin trip round the broken egg, every limb had its tongue. Walpole says, “His pantomimes were full of wit, and coherent, and carried on a story.” Yet Rich was so ignorant that he called a ‘turban’ a ‘turbot,’ and an ‘adjective’ an ‘adjutant.’

Spiller, who died of apoplexy in Portugal Street, in 1729-30 as he was playing in the “Rape of Proserpine,” was inimitable in old men. This was the year that Quin played Macheath for his benefit, and Fielding brought out his inimitable “Tom Thumb” at the Haymarket, to ridicule the bombast of Thomson and Young.