_Memoranda of Mr. Thomson, the poet, collected from Mr. William
Taylor, formerly a barber and peruke-maker, at Richmond, Surrey, now
blind. September, 1791._
(Communicated by the Earl of Buchan.)
_Q._ Mr. Taylor, do you remember any thing of Thomson, who lived in
Kew-lane some years ago?
_A._ Thomson?--
_Q._ Thomson, the poet.
_A._ Ay, very well. I have taken him by the nose many hundred times. I
shaved him, I believe, seven or eight years, or more; he had a face as
long as a horse; and he sweated so much, that I remember, after walking
one day in summer, I shaved his head without lather by his own desire.
His hair was as soft as a camel’s; I hardly ever felt such; and yet it
grew so remarkably, that if it was but an inch long, it stood upright an
end from his head like a brush. (Mr. Robertson[440] confirmed this
remark.)
_Q._ His person, I am told, was large and clumsy?
_A._ Yes; he was pretty corpulent, and stooped forward rather when he
walked, as though he was full of thought; he was very careless and
negligent about his dress, and wore his clothes remarkably plain. (Mr.
Robertson, when I read this to him, said, “He was clean, and yet
slovenly; he stooped a good deal.”)
_Q._ Did he always wear a wig?
_A._ Always, in my memory, and very extravagant he was with them. I have
seen a dozen at a time hanging up in my master’s shop, and all of them
so big that nobody else could wear them. I suppose his sweating to such
a degree made him have so many; for I have known him spoil a new one
only in walking from London.
_Q._ He was a great walker, I believe?
_A._ Yes, he used to walk from Malloch’s, at Strand on the Green, near
Kew Bridge, and from London, at all hours in the night; he seldom liked
to go in a carriage, and I never saw him on horseback; I believe he was
too fearful to ride. (Mr. Robertson said he could not bear to get upon a
horse.)
_Q._ Had he a Scotch accent?
_A._ Very broad; he always called me Wull.
_Q._ Did you know any of his relations?
_A._ Yes; he had two nephews, (cousins,) Andrew and Gilbert Thomson,
both gardeners, who were much with him. Andrew used to work in his
garden, and keep it in order, at over hours; he died at Richmond, about
eleven years ago, of a cancer in his face. Gilbert, his brother, lived
at East Sheen, with one esquire Taylor, till he fell out of a
mulberry-tree and was killed.
_Q._ Did Thomson keep much company?
_A._ Yes; a good deal of the writing sort. I remember Pope, and
Paterson, and Malloch, and Lyttleton, and Dr. Armstrong, and Andrew
Millar, the bookseller, who had a house near Thomson’s, in Kew-lane. Mr.
Robertson could tell you more about them.
_Q._ Did Pope often visit him?
_A._ Very often; he used to wear a light-coloured great coat, and
commonly kept it on in the house; he was a strange, ill-formed, little
figure of a man; but I have heard him and Quin, and Paterson, talk
together so at Thomson’s, that I could have listened to them for ever.
_Q._ Quin was frequently there, I suppose?
_A._ Yes; Mrs. Hobart, his housekeeper, often wished Quin dead, he made
her master drink so. I have seen him and Quin coming from the Castle
together at four o’clock in a morning, and not over sober you may be
sure. When he was writing in his own house, he frequently sat with a
bowl of punch before him, and that a good large one too.
_Q._ Did he sit much in his garden?
_A._ Yes, he had an arbour at the end of it, where he used to write in
summer time. I have known him lie along by himself upon the grass near
it, and talk away as though three or four people were along with him.
(This might probably be when he was reciting his own compositions.)
_Q._ Did you ever see any of his writing?
_A._ I was once tempted, I remember, to take a peep; his papers used to
lie in a loose pile upon the table in his study, and I had longed for a
look at them a good while: so one morning while I was waiting in the
room to shave him, and he was longer than usual before he came down, I
slipped off the top sheet of paper, and expected to find something very
curious, but I could make nothing of it. I could not even read it, for
the letters looked like all in one.
_Q._ He was very affable in his manner?
_A._ O yes! he had no pride; he was very free in his conversation and
very cheerful, and one of the best natured men that ever lived.
_Q._ He was seldom much burthened with cash?
_A._ No; to be sure he was deuced long-winded; but when he had money, he
would send for his creditors, and pay them all round; he has paid my
master between twenty and thirty pounds at a time.
_Q._ You did not keep a shop yourself then at that time?
_A._ No, sir; I lived with one Lander here for twenty years; and it was
while I was apprentice and journeyman with him that I used to wait on
Mr. Thomson. Lander made his majors and bobs, and a person of the name
of Taylor, in Craven-street, in the Strand, made his tie-wigs. An
excellent customer he was to both.
_Q._ Did you dress any of his visitors?
_A._ Yes; Quin and Lyttleton, sir George, I think he was called. He was
so tender-faced I remember, and so devilish difficult to shave, that
none of the men in the shop dared to venture on him except myself. I
have often taken Quin by the nose too, which required some courage, let
me tell you. One day he asked particularly if the razor was in good
order; and protested he had as many barbers’ ears in his parlour at
home, as any boy had of birds’ eggs on a string; and swore, if I did not
shave him smoothly, he would add mine to the number. “Ah,” said Thomson,
“Wull shaves very well, I assure you.”
_Q._ You have seen the “Seasons,” I suppose?
_A._ Yes, sir; and once had a great deal of them by heart. (He here
quoted a passage from “Spring.”) Shepherd, who formerly kept the Castle
inn, showed me a book of Thomson’s writing, which was about the
rebellion in 1745, and set to music, but I think he told me not
published. (I mentioned this to Mr. Robertson, but he thought Taylor had
made small mistake; perhaps it might be some of the patriotic songs in
the masque of Alfred.)
_Q._ The cause of his death is said to have been by taking a boat from
Kew to Richmond, when he was much heated by walking?
_A._ No; I believe he got the better of that; but having had a batch of
drinking with Quin, he took a quantity of cream of tartar, as he
frequently did on such occasions, which, with a fever before, carried
him off. (Mr. Robertson did not assent to this.)
_Q._ He lived, I think, in Kew Foot-lane?
_A._ Yes, and died there; at the furthest house next Richmond Gardens,
now Mr. Boscawen’s. He lived sometime before at a smaller one higher up,
inhabited by Mrs. Davis.
_Q._ Did you attend on him to the last?
_A._ Sir, I shaved him the very day before his death; he was very weak,
but made a shift to sit up in bed. I asked him how he found himself that
morning. “Ah, Wull,” he replied, “I am very bad indeed.” (Mr. Robertson
told me, he ordered this operation himself as a refreshment to his
friend.)
Taylor concluded by giving a hearty encomium on his character.
This conversation took place at one of the alcoves on Richmond-green,
where I accidentally dropped in. I afterwards found it was a rural
rendezvous for a set of old invalids on nature’s infirm list; who met
there every afternoon, in fine weather, to recount and comment on the
“tale of other times.”
I inquired after Lander, and Mrs. Hobart, and Taylor, of Craven-street,
but found that none of them were surviving. Mrs. Hobart was thought to
have a daughter married in the town, called Egerton; but it was not
likely, from the distance of time, that she could impart any thing new.
Taylor told me, the late Dr. Dodd had applied to him several years ago
for anecdotes and information relative to Thomson.
Park Egerton, the bookseller, near Whitehall, tells me, that when
Thomson first came to London, he took up his abode with his predecessor,
Millan, and finished his poem of “Winter” in the apartment over the
shop; that Millan printed it for him, and it remained on his shelves a
long time unnoticed; but after Thomson began to gain some reputation as
a poet, he either went himself, or was taken by Mallet, to Millar in the
Strand, with whom he entered into new engagements for printing his
works; which so much incensed Millan, his first patron, and his
countryman also, that they never afterwards were cordially reconciled,
although lord Lyttleton took uncommon pains to mediate between them.
[440] It appears that this gentleman was very intimate with the author
of the “Seasons,” but we know nothing farther respecting him.
* * * * *