----“And is old Double dead? See, see, he drew a good bow; and dead!
he shot a fine shoot. John of Gaunt loved him well, and betted much
money on his head. Dead! he would have clapt in the clout at twelve
score, and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and a
half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see.”
Died at his house in Burbage-street, St. Giles’s, John Cavanagh, the
famous hand fives-player. When a person dies, who does any one thing
better than any one else in the world, which so many others are trying
to do well, it leaves a gap in society. It is not likely that any one
will now see the game of fives played in its perfection for many years
to come--for Cavanagh is dead, and has not left his peer behind him.
It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a
ball against a wall--there are things indeed that make more noise and do
as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and
answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and
throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has
ever played at it. It is the finest exercise for the body, and the best
relaxation for the mind.
The Roman poet said that “Care mounted behind the horseman, and stuck to
his skirts.” But this remark would not have applied to the fives-player.
He who takes to playing at fives is twice young. He feels neither the
past nor future “in the instant.” Debts, taxes, “domestic treason,
foreign levy, nothing can touch him further.” He has no other wish, no
other thought, from the moment the game begins, but that of striking the
ball, of placing it, of _making_ it! This Cavanagh was sure to do.
Whenever he touched the ball, there was an end of the chase. His eye was
certain, his hand fatal, his presence of mind complete. He could do what
he pleased, and he always knew exactly what to do. He saw the whole
game, and played it; took instant advantage of his adversary’s weakness,
and recovered balls, as if by a miracle and from sudden thought, that
every one gave for lost. He had equal power and skill, quickness and
judgment. He could either outwit his antagonist by finesse, or beat him
by main strength. Sometimes, when he seemed preparing to send the ball
with the full swing of his arm, he would, by a slight turn of his wrist,
drop it within an inch of the line. In general, the ball came from his
hand, as if from a racket, in a strait horizontal line; so that it was
in vain to attempt to overtake or stop it. As it was said of a great
orator, that he never was at a loss for a word, and for the properest
word, so Cavanagh always could tell the degree of force necessary to be
given to a ball, and the precise direction in which it should be sent.
He did his work with the greatest ease; never took more pains than was
necessary, and while others were fagging themselves to death, was as
cool and collected as if he had just entered the court.
His style of play was as remarkable as his power of execution. He had no
affectation, no trifling. He did not throw away the game to show off an
attitude, or try an experiment. He was a fine, sensible, manly player,
who did what he could, but that was more than any one else could even
affect to do. He was the best _up-hill_ player in the world; even when
his adversary was fourteen, he would play on the same or better, and as
he never flung away the game through carelessness and conceit, he never
gave it up through laziness or want of heart. The only peculiarity of
his play was that he never _volleyed_, but let the balls hop; but if
they rose an inch from the ground, he never missed having them. There
was not only no body equal, but nobody second to him. It is supposed
that he could give any other player half the game, or beat them with his
left hand. His service was tremendous. He once played Woodward and
Meredith together (two of the best players in England) in the
Fives-court, St. Martin’s-street, and made seven and twenty aces
following by services alone--a thing unheard of. He another time played
Peru, who was considered a first-rate fives-player, a match of the best
out of five games, and in the three first games, which of course decided
the match, Peru got only one ace.
Cavanagh was an Irishman by birth, and a house-painter by profession. He
had once laid aside his working-dress, and walked up, in his smartest
clothes, to the Rosemary Branch to have an afternoon’s pleasure. A
person accosted him, and asked him if he would have a game. So they
agreed to play for half-a-crown a game, and a bottle of cider. The first
game began--it was seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, all. Cavanagh
won it. The next was the same. They played on and each game was hardly
contested. “There,” said the unconscious fives-player, “there was a
stroke that Cavanagh could not take: I never played better in my life,
and yet I can’t win a game. I don’t know how it is.” However, they
played on, Cavanagh winning every game, and the bye-standers drinking
the cider and laughing all the time. In the twelfth game, when Cavanagh
was only four, and the stranger thirteen, a person came in, and said,
“What are you here, Cavanagh!” The words were no sooner pronounced than
the astonished player let the ball drop from his hand, and saying,
“What! have I been breaking my heart all this time to beat Cavanagh?”
refused to make another effort. “And yet, I give you my word,” said
Cavanagh, telling the story with some triumph, “I played all the while
with my clenched fist.”
He used frequently to play matches at Copenhagen-house for wagers and
dinners. The wall against which they play is the same that supports the
kitchen-chimney, and when the wall resounded louder than usual, the
cooks exclaimed, “Those are the Irishman’s balls,” and the joints
trembled on the spit!
Goldsmith consoled himself that there were places where he too was
admired: and Cavanagh was the admiration of all the fives-courts where
he ever played. Mr. Powell, when he played matches in the court in St.
Martin’s-street, used to fill his gallery at half-a-crown a head, with
amateurs and admirers of talent in whatever department it is shown. He
could not have shown himself in any ground in England, but he would have
been immediately surrounded with inquisitive gazers, trying to find out
in what part of his frame his unrivalled skill lay.
He was a young fellow of sense, humour, and courage. He once had a
quarrel with a waterman at Hungerford-stairs, and they say, “served him
out” in great style. In a word, there are hundreds at this day, who
cannot mention his name without admiration, as the best fives-player
that perhaps ever lived (the greatest excellence of which they have any
notion)--and the noisy shout of the ring happily stood him instead of
the unheard voice of posterity.
The only person who seems to have excelled as much in another way as
Cavanagh did in his, was the late John Davies, the racket-player. It was
remarked of him that he did not seem to follow the ball, but the ball
seemed to follow him. Give him a foot of wall, and he was sure to make
the ball. The four best racket-players of that day were Jack Spines, Jem
Harding, Armitage, and Church. Davies could give any one of these two
hands a time, that is, half the game, and each of these at their best,
could give the best player now in London the same odds. Such are the
gradations in all exertions of human skill and art. He once played four
capital players together, and beat them. He was also a first-rate
tennis-player, and an excellent fives-player. In the Fleet or King’s
Bench, he would have stood against Powell, who was reckoned the best
open-ground player of his time. This last-mentioned player is at present
the keeper of the Fives-court, and we might recommend to him for a motto
over his door,--“Who enters here, forgets himself, his country, and his
friends.” And the best of it is, that by the calculation of the odds,
none of the three are worth remembering!
Cavanagh died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, which prevented him
from playing for the last two or three years. This, he was often heard
to say, he thought hard upon him. He was fast recovering, however, when
he was suddenly carried off to the regret of all who knew him.
Jack Cavanagh was a zealous Catholic, and could not be persuaded to eat
meat on a Friday, the day on which he died. We have paid this willing
tribute to his memory.
“Let no rude hand deface it,
And his forlorn ‘_Hic Jacet_.’”
_Fives-play_ from the year 1780 was a chief diversion at
Copenhagen-house, particularly while Mrs. Harrington remained the
landlady. She was careless of all customers, except they came in shoals
to drink tea in the gardens and long room up stairs, or to play at
fives, skittles, and Dutch pins, and swill and smoke. The house was
afterwards kept by a person named Orchard, during whose time the London
Corresponding Society, in 1795, held meetings in the adjacent
fields.[198] In 1812, it was proposed by a company of projectors to
bring sea-water through iron pipes “from the coast of Essex to
_Copenhagen fields_,” and construct baths, which, according to the
proposals, would yield twelve and a half per cent. on a capital of
200,000_l._; but the subscription was not filled up, though the names of
several eminent physicians sanctioned the undertaking, and the project
failed.[199]
After Orchard’s tenancy, Copenhagen-house was kept by one Tooth, who
encouraged brutal sports for the sake of the liquors he sold. On a
Sunday morning the fives-ground was filled by bull-dogs and ruffians,
who lounged and drank to intoxication; so many as fifty or sixty
bull-dogs have been seen tied up to the benches at once, while their
masters boozed and made match after match, and went out and fought their
dogs before the house, amid the uproar of idlers attracted to the “bad
eminence” by its infamy. This scene lasted throughout every Sunday
forenoon, and then the mob dispersed, and the vicinity was annoyed by
the yells of the dogs and their drunken masters on their return home.
There was also a common field, east of the house, wherein bulls were
baited; this was called the bull-field. These excesses, although
committed at a distance from other habitations, occasioned so much
disturbance, that the magistrates, after repeated warnings to Tooth,
refused him a license in 1816, and granted it to Mr. Bath, the present
landlord, who abated the nuisance by refusing to draw beer or afford
refreshment to any one who had a bull-dog at his heels. The bull-field
has since been possessed and occupied by a great cow-keeping landlord in
the neighbourhood, though by what title he holds it is not known,
certainly not by admission to it as _waste_ of the manor. This field is
close to the mud cottage hereafter mentioned in Hagbush-lane, an ancient
way to Highgate-hill.
* * * * *
Near the spot at which Hagbush-lane comes out into the Holloway-road to
Highgate, the great lord Bacon met with the cause of his death, in a way
not generally known. He was taking an airing in his coach, on a
winter-day, with Dr. Witherborne, a Scotchman, physician to James I.,
and the snow laying on the ground. It occurred to lord Bacon that flesh
might be preserved in snow as well as in salt; resolving to try the
experiment, they alighted from the carriage, and going into a poor
woman’s cottage at the foot of Highgate-hill, they bought a hen; his
lordship helped to stuff the body with snow, which so chilled him that
he fell ill, and could not return to his lodgings; he therefore went to
the earl of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where a bed was warmed for him
with a pan of coals; but the bed not having been lain in for about a
year before was damp, and so increased his disorder that in two or three
days he died.
* * * * *
It is not to defame so great a man, the greatest of modern times, but
merely to illustrate his well-known attachment to particular
_favourites_, that a paper is here for the first time printed. It is a
bill of fees to counsel, upon an order made in the court of chancery by
lord Bacon, as keeper of the great seal, during the first year he held
it. From this it appears that counsel had been retained to argue a
demurrer, on the first day of Michaelmas term, 1617; and that the
hearing stood over till the following Tuesday, before which day “one of
my lord-keeper’s _favourites_” was retained as other counsel, and,
“_being_ one of my lord-keeper’s _favourites_,” had a double fee for his
services. The mention of so extraordinary a fact in a common bill of
costs may perhaps justify its rather out-of-the-way introduction in this
place. The paper from whence it is here printed, the editor of the
_Every-Day Book_ has selected from among other old unpublished
manuscripts in his possession, connected with the affairs of sir Philip
Hoby, who was ambassador to the emperor of Germany from Henry VIII., and
held other offices during that reign.
(COPY.)
_Termino Micalis_, 1617.
To Mr. Bagger of the Iner-Temple, Councellor, the firste day
of the Tearme, for attending at the Chancery barr, to
mayntain o^{r}. demurrer against S^{r}. Tho. Hoby, by my Lo:
Keeper’s order, that daye to attend the Corte, w^{ch}. herd
noe motions that daye, but deferd it of until Tusday
following xxii. s.
Uppon Tusdaye following wee had yonge Mr. Tho: Finch, and Mr.
Bagger, of our Councell, to attend there to mayntaine the
same demurrer, and the cause be cancelled; Upon (which) my
Lo: Keeper ordered, that he refferred the cause to be heard
before S^{r}. Charles Cesér King, one of the docters of the
Chancery, to make a reporte unto his Lo: of the Cause, that
his Lo: might better consider, whether the demurrer should
stand good, or noe:--Mr. Tho: Finch his fee, _being one of
my Lo: favourites, had_ 44_s._