THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE, CONTINUED).
On the Thames, off Somerset House, was a timber shed built on a strong
barge, and called “the Folly.” In William III.’s reign it was anchored
higher up the stream, near the Savoy. Tom Brown calls it “a musical
summer-house.” Its real name was “The Royal Diversion.” Queen Mary
honoured it with her presence.[141] It was at first frequented by “persons
of quality,” but latterly it became disreputable, and its orchestra and
refreshment alcoves were haunted by thieves, gamesters, and courtesans.
Near the Savoy stood the palace of the bishops of Carlisle, which was
obtained by exchange with Henry VIII. for Rochester Place at Lambeth. The
English sultan gave it to his lucky favourite, Bedford, who took it as his
residence. In the reign of James I. the Earl of Worcester bought it; and
in 1627 the Duke of Beaufort let it to Lord Clarendon, while his ill-fated
house was building in Piccadilly. It was then rebuilt on a smaller scale
by the duke, and eventually burnt down in 1695.[142] The present Beaufort
Buildings were then erected. Beaufort House, which occupies the site of
one in which Cardinal Beaufort died, is now a printing-office.
Blake, the mystical painter, died in 1828, at No. 3 Fountain Court, after
five years’ residence there. In these dim rooms he believed he saw the
ghost of a flea, Satan himself looking through the bars of the staircase
window, to say nothing of hosts of saints, angels, evil spirits, and
fairies. Here also he wrote verse passionate as Shelley’s and pure and
simple-hearted as Wordsworth’s. Here he engraved, tinted, railed at
Woollett, and raved over his Dante illustrations; for though poor and
unknown, he was yet regal in his exulting self-confidence. Here, just
before his death, the old man sat up in bed, painting, singing, and
rejoicing. He died without a struggle.[143]
The office of the _Sun_ is on this side the Strand. This paper was
established in 1792. Mr. Jerdan left the _Sun_ in 1816, selling his share
for £300. He had quarrelled with the co-proprietor, Mr. John Taylor, who
aspired to a control over him. In 1817 he set up the _Literary Gazette_,
the first exclusive organ of literary men.[144] The first editor of the
_Sun_ got an appointment in the West Indies. The paper was then edited by
Robert Clark, printer of the _London Gazette_, and afterwards by Jerdan,
assisted by Fladgate the facetious lawyer, Mulloch, and John Taylor. After
getting his sop in the pan of £300 a year from Government, that
low-principled satirist, Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar), wrote epigrams for it.
Fountain Court was in Strype’s time famous for an adjacent tavern from
which it derived its name. It was well paved, and its houses were
respectably inhabited.[145] The Fountain Tavern was renowned for its good
rooms, excellent vaults, “curious kitchen,” and old wine. The Fountain
Club, of which Pulteney was a member (circa 1737), held its meetings in
this tavern, to oppose that fine old Whig gentleman Sir Robert
Walpole.[146] Sir Charles Hanbury Williams thus mentions it in one of his
lampoons:--
“Then enlarge on his cunning and wit,
Say how he harangued at the Fountain,
Say how the old patriots were bit,
And a mouse was produced by a mountain.”
Here Pulteney may have planned the _Craftsman_ with Bolingbroke, and
perhaps have arranged his duel with Lord Hervey, the “Sporus” of Pope.
Dennis, the critic, mentions in his _Letters_ dining here with Loggen, the
painter, and Wilson, a writer praised by poor Otway in Tonson’s first
_Miscellany_. “After supper,” he says, “we drank Mr. Wycherly’s health by
the name of Captain Wycherly.”[147] This was the dramatist, the celebrated
author of _The Plain Dealer_ and _The Country Wife_.
The great room of the Fountain Tavern was afterwards Akermann’s well-known
picture shop; and is now Simpson’s cigar divan.
Charles Lillie, the perfumer recommended by Steele in the _Tatler_ (Nos.
92, 94), lived next door to the Fountain Tavern. He was burnt out and went
to the east corner of Beaufort Buildings in 1709. Good-natured Steele,
pitying him probably for his losses, praised his Barcelona snuff, and his
orange-flower water prepared according to the Royal Society’s receipt.
The Coal Hole, in this court, was so named by Rhodes, its first landlord,
from its having been originally the resort of coal-heavers. In his and
Edmund Kean’s time it was respectably frequented. It was once the
“Evans’s” of London, famous for steaks and ale; afterwards it sank to a
low den with _poses plastiques_ and ribald sham trials, that used to be
conducted by “Baron” Nicholson, a fat gross man, but not without a certain
unctuous humour, who is now dead.
Edmund Kean, always low in his tastes, used to fly the society of men like
Lord Byron to come hither and smoke and drink. The dress, the ceremony,
and the compulsory good behaviour of respectable society made him silent
and melancholy.[148] He used to say that noblemen talked such nonsense
about the stage, and that only literary men understood the subject.
The Kit-Cat Club was instituted in 1700, and died away about the year
1720. There were originally thirty-nine members, and they increased
gradually to the forty-eight whose portraits Kneller painted for their
secretary, Jacob Tonson, Dryden’s bookseller. Their earliest rendezvous
was at the house of a pastry-cook, one Christopher Cat, in Shire Lane,
near Temple Bar. When he grew wealthier, the club removed with him to the
Fountain Tavern in the Strand. The club derived its name from the
celebrated mutton pie,[149] which had been christened after its
maker.[150] The first members were those Whig patriots who brought about
the Revolution and drove out King James. Their object was the
encouragement of literature and the fine arts, and the diffusion of
loyalty to the House of Hanover. They elected their “toast” for the year
by ballot. The lady’s name, when chosen, was written on the club
drinking-glasses with a diamond. Among the more celebrated of the members
of this club were Kneller, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Addison, Garth, Steele,
Lord Mohun, the Duke of Wharton, Sir Robert Walpole, the Earl of
Burlington, the Earl of Bath, the Earl of Dorset, the Earl of Halifax, the
proud Duke of Somerset, and the Duke of Newcastle.
In summer the Club met at Tonson’s house at Barn Elms in Surrey, or at the
Upper Flask Tavern at Hampstead.[151] There seems to have been always some
doubt about the derivation of the name of the club; for an epigram still
extant, written either by Pope or Arbuthnot, attributes the name to the
fact of the members toasting “old Cats and young kits.” Mr. Defoe mentions
the landlord’s name as Christopher Catt,[152] while Ned Ward says that
though his name was Christopher, he lived at the sign of the Cat and
Fiddle.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was once brought by her father to this club when
a child, and made the toast for the year. “Petted, praised, fondled, and
fed with sweetmeats,” she used to say in her old age that it was the
happiest day of her life![153]
No. 59 is Coutts’s Bank. It was built for Mr. Coutts, in 1768, by the Adam
brothers--to whom we are indebted for the Adelphi. The old house of the
firm, of the date of Queen Anne, was situated in St. Martin’s Lane. The
present house contains some fine marble chimney-pieces of the Cipriani and
Bacon school. The dining-room is hung with quaint Chinese subjects on
paper, sent to Mr. Coutts by Lord Macartney, while on his embassy to
China, in 1792-95. In another room hang portraits of some early friends of
this son of Mammon, including Dr. Armstrong, the poet and physician,
Fuseli’s friend, by Reynolds. The strong rooms consist of cloistered
vaults, wherein the noblemen and rich commoners who bank in the house
deposit patents, title-deeds, and plate of fabulous value.
Mr. Coutts was the son of a Dundee merchant. His first wife was a servant,
a Lancashire labourer’s offspring. He had three daughters, one of whom
became the wife of Sir Francis Burdett, a second Countess of Guilford, and
a third Marchioness of Bute. On becoming acquainted with Miss Mellon, and
inducing her to leave the stage to avoid perpetual insults, Mr. Coutts
bought for her of Sir W. Vane Tempest, a small villa called Holly Lodge,
at the foot of Highgate Hill, for which he gave £25,000. His banking-house
strong rooms alone cost £10,000 building. The first deposit in the
enlarged house was the diamond aigrette that the Grand Signor had placed
in Nelson’s hat. Mr. Coutts, though very charitable, was precise and
exact. On one occasion, there being a deficit of 2s. 10d. in the day’s
accounts, the clerks were detained for hours, or, as is said, all night.
One of Coutts’s clerks, who took the western walk, was discovered to be
missing with £17,000.[154] Rewards were offered, and the town placarded,
but all in vain. The next day, however, the note-case arrived from
Southampton. The clerk’s story was, that on his way through Piccadilly,
being seized with a stupor, he had got into a coach in order to secure the
money. He had remained insensible the whole journey, and had awoke at
Southampton. Mr. Coutts gave him a handsome sum from his private purse,
but dismissed him.
Coutts’s Bank stands on nearly the centre of the site of the “New
Exchange.” When the Adelphi was built in Durham Gardens, Mr. Coutts
purchased a vista to prevent his view being interrupted, stipulating that
the new street leading to the entrance should face this opening; and on
this space, up to the level of the Strand, he built his strong rooms. Some
years after, wishing to enlarge them, he erected over the office a
counting-house and a set of offices extending from William Street to
Robert Street, and threw a stone bridge over William Street to connect the
front and back premises.
Mr. Coutts, late in life, married Harriet Mellon, who, after his death,
became the wife of the Duke of St. Albans, a descendant of Nell Gwynn,
that light-hearted wanton, whom nobody could hate. “Miss Mellon,” says
Leigh Hunt, “was arch and agreeable on the stage; she had no genius; but
then she had fine eyes and a good-humoured mouth.” The same gay writer
describes her when young as bustling about at sea-ports, selling tickets
for her benefit-night; but then, says the kindly apologist for everybody,
she had been left with a mother to support.[155]
Edmund Kean, the great tragedian, was lodging at 21 Cecil Street when,
poor and unknown, he made his first great triumph as Shylock, at Drury
Lane; a few days after, his mantelpiece was strewn with bank-notes, and
his son Charles was seen sitting on the floor playing with a heap of
guineas.[156] This great actor brought the theatre, in sixty-eight nights
of 1814, no less than twenty thousand pounds.
The last house on the west side of Cecil Street was inhabited in 1706 by
Lord Gray, and in 1721-4 by the Archbishop of York. In the opposite house
lived for many years Major-General Sir William Congreve, the inventor of
the rockets which bear his name, and a great friend and companion of
George IV., to whom he is said to have borne a striking personal
resemblance. Sir William was a descendant of Congreve the dramatist; and
he was the inventor of a number of successful projects and contrivances,
among which may be mentioned the engines employed in dredging the Thames.
The east side of Cecil Street is in the Savoy precinct, the west in the
parish of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.
Dr. Wollaston was living in Cecil Street (No. 28) in the year 1800. This
eccentric philosopher, originally a physician, was born in 1766, and died
of brain disease in 1828. He discovered two new metals--palladium and
rhodium--and acquired more than £30,000, by inventing a plan to make
platinum malleable. He improved and invented the camera lucida, and was
the first to demonstrate the identity of galvanism and common
electricity. He carried on his experiments with the simplest instruments,
and never allowed even his most intimate friends to enter his laboratory.
When a foreign philosopher once called on him and asked to see his study,
he instantly produced, in his strange way, a small tray, on which were
some glass tubes and a twopenny blow-pipe. Once, shortly after inspecting
a grand galvanic battery, on meeting a brother philosopher in the street
he led him by the button into a mysterious corner, took from his pocket a
tailor’s thimble, poured into it some liquid from a small phial, and
instantly heated a platinum wire to a white heat.[157]
Salisbury Street, in the Strand, was originally built about 1678, but was
extensively rebuilt by Payne in the early part of the reign of George III.
Old Salisbury House stood on the sites of Salisbury and Cecil Streets,
between Worcester House, now Beaufort Buildings, and Durham House, now the
Adelphi. It was so called after Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and
Lord High Treasurer to James I., who died 1612. Queen Elizabeth was
present at the house-warming. This Cecil was the bad minister of a bad
king. He was Raleigh’s enemy and Bacon’s; he was the foe of reform, and
the friend of Spain, from whom he received bribes, and the slave of vice.
Bacon painted this vicious hunchback in his _Essay on Deformity_. The
house was divided subsequently into Great and Little Salisbury House--the
latter being let to persons of quality. About 1678 it was pulled down, and
Salisbury Street built; but it proved too steep and narrow, and was not a
successful speculation.[158] The other part, next to Great Salisbury House
and over the Long Gallery, was turned into the “Middle Exchange.” This
eventually gave way to Cecil Street,--a fair street, with very good
houses, fit for persons of repute.[159]
On the death of Sackville the poet, Cecil took the white staff, being
already Premier-Secretary. His ambition stretched into every department of
the State. “He built a new palace at Hatfield, and a new Exchange in the
Strand. Countesses intrigued for him. His son married a Howard, his
daughter a Clifford. Ambassadors started for Italy, less to see Doges and
Grand Dukes than to pick up pictures and statues, and bronzes and
hangings, for his vast establishment at Hatfield Chase. His gardeners
travelled through France to buy up mulberries and vines. Salisbury House,
on the Thames, almost rivalled the luxurious villas of the Roman
cardinals; yet, under this blaze of worldly success, Cecil was the most
miserable of men. Friends grudged his rise; his health was broken; the
reins which his ambition drew into his hands were beyond the powers of a
single man to grasp; and the vigour of his frame, wasted by years of
voluptuous licence, failed him at the moment when the strain on his
faculties was at the full.”[160]
In Little Salisbury House lived William Cavendish, third Earl of
Devonshire, and father of the first Duke of Devonshire, one of the leaders
of the great revolution that drove out the Stuarts. Two or three days
after the Restoration, King Charles, passing in his coach through the
Strand, espied Hobbes, that mischievous writer in favour of absolute
power, standing at the door of his patron the earl. The king took off his
hat very kindly to the old man, gave him his hand to kiss, asked after his
health, ordered Cooper to take his portrait, and settled on him a pension
of £100 a year. Hobbes had been an assistant of Bacon, and a friend of Ben
Jonson and of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He had taught Charles II.
mathematics, and corresponded with Descartes.
In the street standing on the site of Sir Robert Cecil’s house was the
residence of the famous Partridge, the cobbler, impudent sham-almanac
maker, and predecessor of our own Moore and Zadkiel, who had foretold the
death of the French king. To expose this noisy charlatan and upset his
ridiculous hap-hazard predictions, Swift with cruel and trenchant malice
reported and lamented his decease in the _Tatler_ (1708), to which he
contributed under the name of Bickerstaff. The article raised a laugh
that has not even quite died away in the present day. Partridge, furious
at his losses and the extinguishing of his ill-earned fame, knocked down a
hawker who passed his stall crying an account of his death. This happening
just as the joke was fading, revived it again, and finally ruined the
almanac of poor Partridge.[161] “The villain,” says the poor outwitted
astrologer, “told the world I was dead, and how I died, and that he was
with me at the time of my death. I thank God, by whose mercy I have my
being, that I am still alive, and, excepting my age, as well as ever I was
in my life.” He actually died in 1715.
A little beyond Cecil Street formerly stood Ivy Bridge, under which there
was a narrow passage to the Thames, once forming a boundary line between
the Duchy of Lancaster and the City of Westminster. Near Ivy Bridge stood
the mansion of the Earls of Rutland. Opposite this spot Old Parr had
lodgings when he came to court to be shown to Charles I., and died of the
visit. Parr was a Shropshire labourer. He was born in 1483, and died aged
152. His grandson lived to 120, and in the year of his death had married a
widow. Parr’s London lodging became afterwards the Queen’s Head
public-house.[162]
Mrs. Siddons was living at 149 Strand, during the time of her earlier
successes. Probably she returned there on that glorious October night of
1782, when she achieved her first great triumph in Southerne’s tragedy of
_Isabella_, when her younger son, who acted with her, burst into tears,
overcome by the reality of the dying scene. “I never heard,” she says,
“such peals of applause in all my life.” She returned home solemnly and
calmly, and sat down to a frugal, neat supper with her father and husband,
in silence uninterrupted, except by exclamations of gladness from Mr.
Siddons.
Durham Street marks the site of old Durham House, built by Hatfield,
Bishop of Durham, in 1345. In Henry IV.’s time wild Prince Hal lodged
there for some nights.
In the reign of Henry VIII. Bishop Tunstall exchanged the house with the
king for one in Thames Street. Here, in 1550, lodged the French
ambassador, M. de Chastillon, and his colleagues.
Edward VI. granted the house to his sister Elizabeth for life, and here
that princess bore the scorn and persecution of Bonner and his spies. On
Mary coming to the throne and finding Tunstall driven from the Strand and
without a shelter, she restored to him Durham House. This Tunstall led a
life of great vicissitudes. Henry VIII. had moved him from London to
Durham; Edward VI. had dissolved his bishopric altogether; Mary had
restored it; and Elizabeth again stripped him in 1559, the year in which
he died.
The virgin queen kept the house some time in her own tenacious hands, but
in 1583 granted it to Raleigh, whom she had loaded with favours, and who,
in 1591, was Captain of the Guard, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and
Lieutenant of Cornwall.
On the death of Queen Elizabeth Raleigh’s sun of fortune set for ever, and
that sly time-server Toby Matthew, Bishop of Durham, claimed the old town
house of the see, relying on Cecil’s help and King James’s dislike to the
great enemy of Spain. Sir Walter opposed him, but the king in council,
1603, recognised the claim, and stripped Raleigh of his possession. The
aggrieved man, in a letter of remonstrance to the Lord Keeper Egerton,
states that he had occupied the house about twenty years, and had expended
on it £2000 out of his own purse.[163] Raleigh did not die at Tower Hill
till 1618; but Durham House was never occupied again either by bishop or
noble, and five years after the stables of the house came down to make way
for the New Exchange.
In Charles I.’s reign the Earl of Pembroke bought Durham Yard from the
Bishop of Durham for £200 a year, and built a handsome street leading to
the river.[164] The river front and the stables remained in ruins till the
Messrs. Adam built the Adelphi on the site of Raleigh’s old turret study.
Ivy Street had been the eastward boundary of the bishop’s domain.[165]
The New Exchange was opened April 11, 1609, in the presence of King James
and his Danish queen. It was built principally through the intervention of
Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who lived close by. It was called by the king
“Britain’s Bourse,” but it could not at first compete with the Royal
Exchange. At the Restoration, however, when Covent Garden grew into a
fashionable quarter, the New Exchange became more frequented than
Gresham’s building in the city.
In the year 1653 (Cromwell), the New Exchange was the scene of a tragedy.
Don Pantaleon de Saa, brother of the Portuguese ambassador, quarrelled
with a gentleman named Giraud, who was flirting with the milliners, and
who had used some contemptuous expression. The Portuguese, bent on
revenge, hired some bravos, who the next day stabbed to death a gentleman
whom they mistook for Mr. Giraud. They were instantly seized, and Don
Pantaleon was found guilty and executed. Singularly enough, the intended
victim perished on the same day on the same scaffold, having in the
meantime been condemned for a plot against the Protector.
There are many legends existing about the New Exchange. Thomas Duffet, an
actor of Charles II.’s time, kept originally a milliner’s shop here. At
the Eagle and Child, in Britain’s Bourse, the first edition of _Othello_
was sold in 1622. At the sign of the “Three Spanish Gypsies” lived Thomas
Radford, who sold wash-balls, powder, and gloves, and taught sempstresses.
His wife, the daughter of John Clarges, a farrier in the Savoy before or
after Radford’s death, married General Monk, became the vulgar Duchess of
Albemarle, and was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey. At the sign of
the Fop’s Head lived, in 1674, Will Cademan, a player and
play-publisher.[166] Henry Herringham, the chief London publisher before
Dryden’s petty tyrant, Tonson, had his shop at the Blue Anchor in the
Lower Walk. Mr. and Mrs. Pepys frequented the New Exchange. Here the
Admiralty clerk’s wife had “a mind to” a petticoat of sarcenet bordered
with black lace, and probably purchased it. Here also, in April, 1664,
Pepys and his friend Creed partook of “a most delicate dish of curds and
cream.”[167] Both Wycherly and Etherege have laid scenes of their comedies
at the New Exchange; and here, too, Dryden’s intriguing Mrs. Brainsick
pretends to visit her “tailor” to try on her new stays.
This Strand Bazaar, in the time of William and Mary, was the scene of the
pretty story of the “White Widow.” For several weeks a sempstress appeared
at one of the stalls, clothed in white, and wearing a white mask. She
excited great curiosity, and all the fashionable world thronged her stall.
This mysterious milliner was at last discovered to be no less a person
than the Duchess of Tyrconnel, widow of Talbot, the Lord Deputy of Ireland
under James II. Unable to obtain a secret access to her family, and almost
starving, she had been compelled to turn shopwoman. Her relatives provided
for her directly the story became known.[168] This duchess was the Frances
Jennings mentioned by Grammont, and sister to Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough.
This long arcade, leading from the Strand to the water stairs, was divided
into four parts--the outward walk below stairs, the inner walk below
stairs, the outward walk above stairs, and the inner walk above stairs.
The lower walk was a place of assignations. In the upper walk the air rang
with cries of “Gloves or ribands, sir?” “Very good gloves or ribands.”
“Choice of fine essences.”[169] Here Addison used to pace, watching the
fops and fools with a kindly malice.[170] The houses in the Strand, over
against the Exchange door, were often let to rich country families, who
glared from the balconies and stared from the windows.[171]
Soon after the death of Queen Anne the New Exchange became disreputable.
No one would take stalls, so it was pulled down in 1737, and a frontage of
dwelling-houses and shops made to the Strand, facing what is now the
Adelphi Theatre. But we must return for a moment to old Durham House and a
few more of its earlier tenants.
In Henry VIII.’s time Durham House had been the scene of great banquets
given by the challengers after the six days’ tournament that celebrated
the butcher king’s ill-omened marriage with that “Flemish mare,” as he
used ungallantly to call Anne of Cleves. To these sumptuous feasts the
bruised and battered champions, together with all the House of Commons and
Corporation of London, were invited. To reward the challengers, among whom
was Oliver Cromwell’s ancestor, Dick o’ the Diamond, the burly king gave
them each a yearly pension of one hundred marks out of the plundered
revenues of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.
Later a mint was established at Durham House by Sir William Sherrington,
to aid the Lord Admiral Seymour in his treasonable efforts against his
brother, the Protector, who finally offered him up a victim to his
ambition. Sherrington, however, escaped, and worked the mint for the
equally unfortunate Protector.
But no loss of heads could warn the Strand noblemen. It was here that the
ambitious Duke of Northumberland married his son, Lord Guildford Dudley,
to poor meek-hearted Lady Jane Grey, who, the luckless queen of an hour,
longed only for her Greek books, her good old tutor Ascham, and the quiet
country house where she had been so happy. On that great day for the duke,
Lady Jane’s sister also married Lord Herbert, and Lord Hastings espoused
Lady Catherine Dudley. It was from Durham House that the poor martyr of
ambition, Lady Jane, was escorted in pomp to the Tower, which was so soon
to be her grave.
In 1560 Jean Nicot, a French ambassador, had carried tobacco from Lisbon
to Paris. In 1586[172] Drake brought tobacco from Raleigh’s colony in
Virginia. Raleigh was fond of smoking over his books. His tobacco-box
still existed in 1715; it was of gilt leather, as large as a muff-case,
and contained cases for sixteen pipes.[173] There is a doubtful legend
about Raleigh’s first pipe, the scene of which may be not unfairly laid at
Durham House, where Raleigh then lived.
One day his servant, bringing in a tankard of spiced ale as usual into the
turret study, found Raleigh (it is said) smoking a pipe over his folios.
The clown, seeing smoke issue in clouds from his master’s mouth, dropped
the tankard in a fright, and ran downstairs to shout to the family that
“master was on fire, and that he would be burnt to ashes if they did not
run directly to his help.”[174]
The stalwart, sour-faced Raleigh disported himself at Durham House in a
suit of clothes beset with jewels and valued at sixty thousand
pounds,[175] and in diamond court-shoes valued at six thousand six hundred
pieces of gold. Here he lived with his wife Elizabeth, and his two unlucky
sons Walter and Carew. Here, as he sat in his study in the little turret
that looked over the Thames,[176] he must have written against the
Spaniards, told his adventures in Virginia, and described his discovery of
the gold country of Guiana, his quarrel with Essex at Fayal, and the
capture of the rich caracks laden with gold, pearls, and cochineal.
The estate of Durham Place was purchased from the Earl of Pembroke, about
1760, by four brothers of the name of Adam, sons of an architect at
Kirkaldy, who were patronised by the handsome and much-abused Earl of
Bute, and who built Caen Wood House, near Hampstead, afterwards the wise
Lord Mansfield’s. Robert, the ablest of the brothers, had visited Palmyra,
and was supposed from those gigantic ruins to have borrowed his grand
spirit of construction, as well as much of that trivial ornament which he
might surely have found nearer home. When the brothers Adam began their
work, Durham Yard (the court-yard of Raleigh’s old house) was a tangle of
small sheds, coal-stores, wine-vaults, and lay-stalls. They resolved to
leave the wharves, throw some huge arches over the declivity, connect the
river with the Strand, and over these vaults erect a series of well-built
streets, a noble river terrace, and lofty rooms for the newly-established
Society of Arts.
In July 1768,[177] when the Adelphi Buildings were commenced, the Court
and City were at war, and the citizens, wishing to vex Bute, applied to
Parliament to prevent the brothers encroaching on the river, of which
sable stream the Lord Mayor of London is the conservator, but not the
purifier; but they lost their cause, and the worthy Scotchmen
triumphed.[178]
The Scotch are a patriotic people, and stand bravely by their own folk.
The Adams sent to Scotland for workmen, whose labours they stimulated by
countless bagpipes; but the canny men, finding the bagpipes played their
tunes rather too quick, threw up the work, and Irishmen were then
employed. The joke of the day was, that the Scotchmen took their bagpipes
away with them, but left their _fiddles_![179]
The Adelphi at once became fashionable. Garrick, then getting old, left
his house in Southampton Street to occupy No. 5, the centre building of
the terrace, and lived there till his death in 1779. Singularly enough,
this great and versatile actor had, on first coming to London with his
friend Johnson, started as a wine merchant below in Durham Yard. Here he
must have raved in “Richard,” and wheedled as Abel Drugger; and in the
rooms at No. 5 half the celebrities of his century must have met. He died
in the “first floor back,” and his widow died in the same house as long
after as 1822. The ceiling in the front drawing-room was painted by
Antonio Zucchi. A white marble chimney-piece in the same room is said to
have cost £300.[180] Garrick died after only nine years’ residence in the
new terrace; but his sprightly widow, a theatrical critic to the last,
lived till she was past ninety, still an enthusiast about her husband’s
genius. The first time she re-opened the house after Davy’s death, Dr.
Johnson, Boswell, Sir Joshua, Mrs. Carter, and Mrs. Boscawen were present.
“She looked well,” says Boswell; “and while she cast her eyes on her
husband’s portrait, which was hung over the chimney-piece, said, that
death was now the most agreeable object to her.” Worthy woman! and so she
honestly thought at the time; but she lived exactly forty-three years
longer in the same house.
If there is a spot in London which Johnson’s ghost might be expected to
revisit, it is that quiet and lonely Adelphi Terrace. At night no sound
comes to you but a shout from some passing barge, or the creak of a ship’s
windlass. Here Johnson and Boswell once leant over, looking at the Thames.
The latter said, “I was thinking of two friends we had lost, who once
lived in the buildings behind us, Beauclerk and Garrick.” “Ay, sir,”
replied Johnson, seriously, “and two _such_ friends as cannot be
supplied.” This is a recollection that should for ever hallow the Adelphi
Terrace to us.
The Beauclerk above mentioned was one of the few rakes whom Johnson loved.
He was a friend of Langton, and as such had become intimate with the great
doctor. Topham Beauclerk was a man of acute mind and elegant manners, and
ardently fond of literature. He was of the St. Albans family, and had a
resemblance to swarthy Charles II., a point which pleased his elder
friend. The doctor liked his gay, young manner, and flattered himself much
as women do who marry rakes, that he should reform him in time.
“What a coalition!” said Garrick, when he heard of the friendship; “why, I
shall have my old friend to bail out of the Round House.” Beauclerk, says
Boswell, “could take more liberties with Johnson than any one I ever saw
him with;”[181] but, on the other hand, Beauclerk was not spared. On one
occasion Johnson said to him, “You never open your mouth, sir, without an
intention to give pain, and you have often given me pain--not from the
power of what you said, but from seeing your intention.” At another time
he said, “Thy body is all vice, and thy mind all virtue.”
When the Adelphi was building, Garrick applied for the corner house of
Adam Street for his friend Andrew Beckett, the bookseller in the Strand,
and he obtained it. In this letter he calls the architects “the dear
Adelphi,” and the western house “the corner blessing.” Garrick’s house was
for some years occupied by the Royal Literary Fund, but is now a Club.
Garrick promised the brothers, if the request was granted, to make the
shop, as old Jacob Tonson’s once was, the rendezvous of the first people
in England. “I have,” he says, “a little selfishness in this request. I
never go to coffee-houses, seldom to taverns, and should constantly (if
this scheme takes place), be at Beckett’s at one at noon and six at
night.”[182]
Garrick was a frequent visitor at the house of Mr. Thomas Beckett, the
bookseller, in Pall Mall, and he obtained the appointment of sub-librarian
at Carlton Palace for the son Andrew, who had written a comedy on the
_Emile_ of Rousseau at the age of fourteen, and produced a poem called
_Theodosius and Constantia_. For nearly ten years he wrote for the British
and Monthly Reviews. He was born in 1749, and died in 1843. His most
useful work is called _Shakspere Himself Again_, in which he released the
original text from much muddy nonsense of commentators. He complained
bitterly of Griffiths, of the _Monthly Review_, having given him only £45
for four or five years’ work--280 articles, produced after reading and
condensing 590 volumes; Mr. Griffiths’ annual profit by the _Monthly_
being no less than £2000.
Into a house in John Street the Society of Arts, established in 1753 by
Mr. Shipley, an artist, moved, about 1772. This society still give
lectures and rewards, and does about as much good as ever it did. Art
must grow wild--it will not thrive in hot-houses. The great room is still
adorned with the six large pictures illustrating the “Progress of
Society,” painted by poor, half-crazed Barry, the ill-educated artist,
who, too proud to paint cabinet pictures, could yet paint nothing larger
sound or well.
Shipley, who established the society of Arts in imitation of one already
established at Dublin, was originally a drawing-master at Northampton.
From its commencement in 1753-4 to 1778 the society distributed in
premiums and bounties £24,616. A year after its foundation Josiah Wedgwood
began to infuse a classical and purer taste among the proprietors of the
Staffordshire potteries,[183] and employed Flaxman to draw some of his
designs, and was the first to improve the shape and character of our
simplest articles of use.
Mr. Shipley was a brother of the Bishop of St. Asaph, and had studied
under a portrait-painter named Phillips. In 1738 the Society of Arts voted
their founder a gold medal for his public spirit. His school was continued
by a Mr. Pars. He died, aged upwards of ninety, in 1784.[184]
Nollekens, the sculptor, learned drawing there, and Cosway, afterwards the
fashionable miniature-painter, was the errand-boy. The house was
subsequently inhabited by Rawle, the antiquary, a friend of fat, coarse,
clever Captain Grose.[185]
Dr. Ward, the inventor of “Friar’s Balsam,” a celebrated quack doctor
ridiculed by Hogarth, left his statue by Carlini to the Society of Arts.
The doctor allowed Carlini £100 a year, so that he should work at this
statue for life.[186]
This Joshua Ward, celebrated for his drop and pill, by which and his
balsam he made a fortune, was the son of a drysalter in Thames Street.
Praised by General Churchill and Lord Chief Baron Reynolds, he was called
in to prescribe for King George. The king recovering in spite of the
quack, “Spot” Ward was rewarded by a solemn vote of a credulous House of
Commons, and he obtained the privilege of being allowed to drive his
carriage through St. James’s Park. Ward is conspicuous in one of Hogarth’s
caricatures by a claret mark covering half his brazen face.
The housekeeper at the Society of Arts in Haydon’s time (1842) remembered
Barry at work on the frescoes that are so deficient in colour and taste,
but show such a fine grasp of mind. She said his violence was dreadful,
his oaths horrid, and his temper like insanity. In summer he came at five
and worked till dark; he then lit his lamp and went on etching till eleven
at night. He was seven years at his task. Burke and Johnson called once;
but no artist came to see him. He would have almost shot any painter who
dared to do so. He had his tea boiled in a quart pot, dined in Porridge
Island, and took milk for supper.[187]
Years after Barry lay in state in the great room which his own genius had
adorned, and was buried in the Abbey; but few of the Academicians attended
his funeral. The Adelphi pictures have been recently lined and restored.
Barry having vainly attempted to decorate St. Paul’s, executed the
paintings now at the Society of Arts for his mere expenses, but
eventually, one way and another, cleared a considerable sum by them. He
painted them, as he said, to prove that Englishmen had a genius for high
art, music, and other refinements of life. They are fairly drawn, often
elegantly and reasonably well grouped, but bad in colour. The
heterogeneous dresses are jumbled together with bad taste--Dr. Burney in a
toupee floats among water-nymphs, and William Penn’s wig and hat are
ludicrously obtrusive. The perspective is often “out,” and the attitudes
are stiff; still, historically speaking, the pictures are large-minded and
interesting; and, in spite of his faults, one likes to think of the brave
Irishman busy on his scaffold, railing at Reynolds and defying everybody.
Barry was really a self-deceiver, like Haydon, and aimed far beyond his
powers.
At Osborne’s Hotel, in John Street, the King and Queen of the Sandwich
Islands resided while on a visit to England in the reign of George IV. A
comic song written on their arrival was once popular, though now
forgotten; and Theodore Hook produced a quaint epigram on their death by
small-pox, the point of which was, that one day Death, being hungry,
called for “two Sandwiches.” The epigram was not without the unfeeling wit
peculiar to that heartless lounger at the clubs, who spent his life
amusing the great people, and who died at last a worn-out spendthrift,
_sans_ character, _sans_ everything.
Of all London’s charlatans, perhaps the most impudent was Dr. Graham, a
Scotchman, whose brother married Catherine Macaulay, the author of a
forgotten History of England, much vaunted by Horace Walpole. In or about
1780 this plausible cheat opened what he called a “Temple of Health,” in a
central house in the Adelphi Terrace. His rooms were stuffed with glass
globes, marble statues, medico-electric apparatus, figures of dragons,
stained glass, and other theatrical properties. The air was drugged with
incense and strains of music. The priestess of this temple was said to be
no less a person than Emma Lyons, afterwards Lady Hamilton, the fatal
Cleopatra of Lord Nelson. She had been first a housemaid and afterwards a
painter’s model. She was as beautiful as she was vulgar and abandoned. The
house was hung with crutches, ear-trumpets, and other trophies.[188] For
one night in the celestial bed, that secured a beautiful progeny, this
impostor obtained £100; for a supply of his elixir of life £1000 in
advance, and for his earth-baths a guinea each. Yet this arrant knave and
hypocrite was patronised by half the English nobility. Archenholz, a
German traveller, writing about 1784, describes Dr. Graham and his £60,000
celestial bed. He dilates on the vari-coloured transparent glasses, and
the rich vases of perfume that filled the impudent quack’s temple, the
half-guinea treatises on health, the _moonshine_ admitted into the rooms,
and the divine balm at a guinea a bottle.
A magneto-electric bed, to be slept in for the small sum of £50 a night,
was on the second floor, on the right hand of the orchestra, and near the
hermitage. Electricity and perfumes were laid on in glass tubes from
adjoining reservoirs. The beds (there were two or three at least) rested
on six massy transparent columns. The perfumed curtains were of purple and
celestial blue, like those of the Grand Turk. Graham was blasphemous
enough to call this chamber his “Holy of Holies.” His chief customers were
captains of privateers, nabobs, spendthrifts, and old noblemen. The farce
concluded in March 1784, when the rooms were shut for ever, and the temple
of Apollo, the immense electrical machine, the self-playing organ, and the
celestial bed, were sold in open daylight by a ruthless auctioneer.[189]
Bannister “took off” Graham in a farce called _The Genius of Nonsense_,
produced at the Haymarket in 1780. His satin sofas on glass legs, his
celestial bed, his two porters in long tawdry greatcoats and immense
gold-laced cocked hats, distributing handbills at the door, while his
goddess of health was dying of a sore-throat from squalling songs at the
top of the staircase, were all hit off by a speaking harlequin, who also
caricatured the doctor’s sliding walk and bobbing bows. The younger Colman
and Bannister had been to the Temple of Health on purpose to take the
quack’s portrait.[190]
Mr. Thomas Hill, the fussy, good-natured Hull of Theodore Hook’s _Gilbert
Gurney_, lived for many years and finally died in the second floor of No.
1 James Street, Adelphi. He was the supposed prototype of the obtrusive
Paul Pry. It was Hill’s boast always to have what you wanted. “Cards, sir?
Pooh! pooh! Nonsense! thousands of packs in the house.” Liston made the
name of Paul Pry proverbial and world-wide.
The names of the four Scotch brothers, John, Robert, James, and William
Adam, are preserved by the existing Adelphi Streets. When will any of our
streets be named after great thinkers? It is a disgrace to us to allow new
districts to be christened, without Government supervision, by worthless,
ignoble, and ridiculous names, confusing in their vulgar repetition.
Indifferent kings, and nobles not much better, give their names to half
the suburbs of London, while Shakespere is unremembered by the builders,
and Spenser and Byron have as yet no brick-and-mortar godchildren.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSES ON THE SITE OF WELLINGTON STREET, 1742.]
The eldest of the brothers, Robert Adam, died in 1792, and was buried in
the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. His pall was supported by the Duke
of Buccleuch, the Earl of Coventry, the Earl of Lauderdale, Lord Stormont,
Lord Frederick Campbell, and Mr. Pulteney.
It was told as a joke invented against that fat butt, Sir William Curtis,
that at a public dinner some lover of royalty and Terence proposed the
healths of George IV. and the Duke of York as “the Adelphi,” upon which
the alderman, who followed with the next toast, determining that the East
should not be far behind the West, rose and said that “as they were now on
the subject of streets, he would beg to propose Finsbury Square.” But,
after all, why should we laugh at the poor alderman because he did not
happen to know Greek? That surely is a venial sin.
And here, retracing our steps, we must make an episode and turn back down
the Savoy.
[Illustration: THE SAVOY FROM THE THAMES, 1650.]