Chapter XIV: Lincoln’s Inn Fields (3)

King’s College Hospital, which occupies a large portion of the southern side of Carey Street, is connected with the medical school of King’s College, and is supported by voluntary contributions. For each guinea a year a subscriber may recommend one in and two out patients. Contributors acquire the same right for every donation of ten guineas. Annual subscribers of three guineas, or donors of thirty guineas, are governors of the hospital. The house is surrounded by a population of nearly 400,000 persons, of whom about 20,000 annually receive relief. In one year 363 poor married women have been attended in confinements at their own houses.

The last memorial of a gay generation, passed like last year’s swallows, was a headstone that used to stand in the burial-ground belonging to St. Clement’s, now the site of King’s College Hospital. The slab rose from rank green grass that was sprinkled with dead cats, worn-out shoes, and fragments of tramps’ bonnets; in summer it was half hid by a clump of sunflowers.[760] It kept dimly alive the memory of Joe Miller, a taciturn actor, in whose mouth Mottley, the poet put his volume of jokes that had been raked from every corner of the town. Mottley was a place-seeker and a writer of stilted tragedies and a bad comedy, for whose benefit night Queen Caroline, wife of George II., condescended to sell tickets at her own drawing-room.[761] Miller appears to have been an honest, and stupid fellow, but some good sayings are embalmed in the rather coarse book which bears his name. His portrait represents Joe as a broad-nosed man with large saucer eyes, a big absurd mouth, and a look of comic stolid surprise. He died in 1738, and the Jest Book was published the year after, price one shilling.

Joe Miller made his first appearance on the stage in 1715, at Drury Lane, in Farquhar’s comedy of “A trip to the Jubilee.” He also played Clodpole in Betterton’s “Amorous Widow,” Sir H. Gubbin in Steele’s “Tender Husband,” La Foole in Ben Jonson’s “Epicene,” and above all Sir Joseph Whittol in Congreve’s “Old Bachelor.” Hogarth designed a benefit ticket for this play. As Ben in “Love for Love,” Cibber cut out Joe Miller. In 1721 Joe opened a booth at Bartholomew Fair with Pinkethman. His last great success was as the Miller in Dodsley’s farce of “The King and the Miller of Mansfield.” Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire thresher, afterwards a popular preacher, wrote his epitaph. Joe Miller’s monument is still carefully preserved in one of the rooms in King’s College Hospital. John Mottley, his editor, was the son of a Colonel Mottley, a Jacobite who followed James into France. His son was placed in the Excise Office, and grew up a place-hunter. He wrote a bad tragedy called “The Imperial Captives,” and was promised a commissionership of wine licenses by Lord Halifax, and a place in the Exchequer by Sir Robert Walpole, but received nothing from either. He compiled the Jest-Book, it is said partly from the recollection of the comedian’s conversations,[762] but it is doubtful if this is true. The compilation (once so useful to diners-out) went through three editions in 1739, and at about the thirteenth edition was reprinted, after thirty years, by Barker, of Russell Street, Covent Garden.[763]

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

The Black Jack public-house in Portsmouth Street was Joe Miller’s favourite haunt. Some paintings on its walls still testify to the occasional presence of artists of the last century. This inn used to be called “The Jump,” from that adroit young scoundrel Jack Sheppard having once jumped from one of its first-floor windows to escape the armed emissaries of that still greater thief, the thief-taker, Mr. Jonathan Wild.

When paviours dig deep under the Strand they find the fossil remains of antediluvian monsters. A church in the street bears a name that carries us back to the times of the Saxons and the Danes. In one lane there is a Roman bath, in another there are the nodding gable-ends of houses at which Beaumont and Fletcher may have looked, and which Shakspere and Ben Jonson must have visited. So the Present is built out of the Past. The Strand teems with associations of every period of history. The story of St. Giles’s parish alone should embrace the whole records of London vagrancy. The chronicle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields embraces reminiscences of half our great lawyers. In the chapter on St. Martin’s Lane I have been glad to note down some interesting incidents in the careers of many of our greatest painters. Long Acre leads us to Dryden, Cromwell, Wilson, and Stothard. At Charing Cross we have stopped to see how brave men can die for a good cause.

A thorough history of our great city, considered in every aspect, would almost be a condensed history of the world. I offer these pages to my readers only as a humble contribution to the history of London.

Our commercial wealth and the vastness of our maritime enterprise is shown in nothing more than by the distance from which we fetch our commonest articles of consumption--tea from China, sugar from the West Indies, coffee from Ceylon, oil from the farthest nooks of Italy, chocolate from Mexico. An Englishman need not be very rich in order to consume samples of all these productions of different hemispheres at a single meal.

In the same manner many books of far-divided ages have gone to form the patchwork of the present volume; I am like the merchant who sends his ships to collect in different harbours, and across wide and adverse seas, the materials that he needs. In this busy and overworked age there are many persons who have no time themselves to make such voyages, no patience to traverse such seas, even if they possessed the charts: it is for them I have written, and it is from them I hope for some kind approval.