Eighteenth Century Vignettes

Considering its prolonged patronage by royalty, Leicester Fields does not seem to have been particularly favoured by distinguished residents. Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, once lived in Leicester Place, where in 1796 (on the east side) he built a little theatre, the Sans Souci; ⁵³ and Woollett, of whose velvety engravings Mr. Louis Fagan, not many years ago, prepared an exhaustive catalogue, had also his habitat in Green Street (No. 11), from the leads of which he was wont – so runs the story – to discharge a small cannon when he had successfully put the last touches to a 'Battle of La Hogue,' or a 'Death of General Wolfe.'

Allan Ramsay (in his youth), Barry, and John Opie all once lodged in Orange Court (now Street); and here – at No. 13 – was born, of a shoemaker sire and a mother who cried oysters, into a life of many changing fortunes, that strange Thomas Holcroft of the 'Road to Ruin.' In St. Martin's Street, next door to the Congregational Chapel on the east side, lived Sir Isaac Newton from 1710 until January 1725, or two years before his death at Kensington. Few traditions, however, connect the abstracted philosopher (he was nearing seventy when he came to the Fields) with the locality, beyond his visits to Princess Caroline at the great house opposite. ⁵⁴

But there was one member of his household, a few years later, who must certainly have added to the attractions of the ordinary two-storeyed building where he superintended the revision of the second and third editions of the 'Prineipia.' This was his kinswoman, – the 'jolie niece' of Voltaire, – the 'famous witty Miss Barton' of the 'Gentleman's Magazine.' At this date she was 'Superintendant of his domestick Affairs' to Charles, Earl of Halifax, who, dying in 1715, left her £5,000 and a house, 'as a Token' – so runs the bequest – 'of the sincere Love, Affection, and Esteem I have long had for her Person, and as a small Recompence for the Pleasure and Happiness I have had in her Conversation.' This, taken in connection with the fact that, since 1706, she had been in receipt of an annuity of £200 a year, purchased in her uncle's name, but for which Halifax was trustee, has led to the conclusion that the relation between the pair was something closer than friendship, and that, following other contemporary precedents, they were privately married. ⁵⁵ Be this as it may, Catherine Barton is also interesting as one of the group of gifted women to whom Swift extended the privilege of that half-patronising, half-playful, and wholly unconventional intimacy which is at once the attraction and the enigma of his relations with the other sex.

He met her often in London, though not as often as he wished. 'I love her better than any-one here,' he tells Stella in April, 1711, 'and see her seldomer.' He dines with her 'alone at her lodgings'; he goes with her to other houses; and, Tory though he has become, endures her vivacious Whiggery.

When, at Halifax's death, Catherine Barton, in all probability, returned to her uncle's house, Swift had already gone back to Ireland, and there is no reason for supposing that, although he had lodgings 'in Leicester Fields' in 1711, he ever visited his friend in St. Martin's Street. In August, 1717, Mrs. Barton married John Conduitt, M.P., Xewton's successor as Master of the Mint, and when in town continued to reside with her husband under Newton's roof. And though Halifax was dead, and Swift in exile, and Prior 'in the messenger's hand,' there can be little doubt that during her brief widowhood (?) and second wifehood, those friends who had clustered about the former toast of the Kit Cats must still have continued to visit her. The chairs of Lady Worsley and Lady Betty Germaine must often have waited in the narrow entrance to St. Martin's Street, while the ladies 'disputed Whig and Tory' with Mrs. Conduitt, or were interrupted in their tête-à-tête by Gay and his Duchess. After Sir Isaac – a long while after – the most notable tenant of the old house was Dr. Charles Burney, author of the 'History of Music,' and of Fanny Burney. Indeed, it was in this very building – with the unassuming little chapel on its right where 'Rainy Day' Smith had often heard Toplady preach – that a mere girl in her teens – no, ungallant Mr. Croker discovered her to have been actually a young woman of five-and-twenty – wrote that 'Evelina' which, in 1778, took the Town by storm. There were panelled rooms and a painted ceiling in the Newton-Burney house of yore, but it could scarcely be here that the little person whom in her graver moments Mrs. Piozzi nicknamed the 'Lady Louisa of Leicester Square' danced round an unmetaphoric mulberry tree with delight at her success in letters, for there are no traces of a garden. At present, in this quiet backwater of street traffic, where Burke and Johnson and Franklin and Reynolds all came formerly to visit their favourite authoress, nothing is discoverable but a dingy tenement with dusty upper windows, with a ground floor that is used as a day school, and a front of stucco'd red brick upon which the blue tablet of the Society of Arts has something of the forlorn effect of an order of merit upon a shoeblack.

Turning out of St. Martin's Street on the north another tablet is discernible in the angle of the Fields to the right upon the comparatively modern red brick façade of another school, known as Archbishop Tenison's. Here, at one of the many signs of the 'Golden Head,' lived William Hogarth. * The golden head in his case was rudely carved by himself out of pieces of cork glued together, and represented Van Dyck. To this, says Nichols, succeeded a head in plaster; and this again, when Nichols wrote in 1782, had been replaced by a bust of Newton. About the interior of the house very little seems to be known, but, as it was rated to the poor in 1756 at £60, it must have been fairly roomy. In the later days, when it formed part of the Sablonière Hotel, before the hotel made way for the existing school, there were traditions of a studio, probably far less authentic than those of Sir Isaac's ob* There was even another, in Hogarth's day, in the Fields itself. 'At the Golden Head.' on the south side (Hogarth's was on the east), lived Edward Fisher, the mezzotint engraver, to whom we owe so many brilliant plates after Reynolds.

Not many years after Hogarth first took the house, the square was laid out (it had long been railed in), and he is said to have been often seen walking in the inclosure, wrapped in his red roquelaure, with his hat cocked on one side like Frederick the Great. His stables, when he set up the fine coach which Charles Catton decorated for him with the famous Cyprian crest that figures at the bottom of 'The Bathos,' were in Nag's Head Yard, Orange Street. He had – as we know – a country box at Chiswick; but he was at home in Leicester Fields. His friends were about him. Kind old Captain Coram had lodgings somewhere in the neighbourhood; Pine, the 'Friar Pine' of 'Calais Gate,' lived in St. Martin's Lane; beyond that, in Covent Garden and its vicinity, were George Lambert the scene painter, Saunders Welch the magistrate, Richard Wilson, Fielding, and a host of intimates. It was in Leicester Fields that Hogarth died. He had been driven there from Chiswick on the 25th October, 1764, cheerful, but very weak. 'Receiving an agreeable letter from the American Dr. Franklin,' says Nichols, [he] 'drew up a rough draught of an answer to it; but going to bed, he was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rung his bell with such violence that he broke it, and expired about two hours afterwards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who was called up on his being taken suddenly ill. He is buried in Chiswick churchyard, where some years subsequently a monument was erected to his memory, with a well-known epitaph by Garrick. After Hogarth's death his widow continued to keep up the 'Golden Head,' and Mary Lewis sold his prints there. Richard Livesay, the engraver, was one of Widow Hogarth's lodgers, and the Scotch painter, Alexander Runciman, was another. If the house had any further notable occupants, they may be forgotten.

Mrs. Hogarth herself died in 1789. Six years before her death she had a next-door neighbour in the Fields, who, in his way, was as illustrious as Hogarth or Reynolds. This was John Hunter, who, in 1783, became the tenant of No. 28, ⁵⁶ and at once began extending it backward towards Castle Street (now the Charing Cross Road) to receive his famous museum of Comparative and Pathological Anatomy.

Hogarth had then been dead for nearly twenty years; and it is unlikely that the painter knew much of the young surgeon who was subsequently to become so celebrated; but he was probably acquainted with his brother, William Hunter of Covent Garden, who attended Fielding in 1754. William Hunter had just died when John Hunter came to Leicester Fields. He lived there ten years in the height of his activity and fame, and it was during this period that Reynolds painted that portrait of him in a reverie (now in the Council Room of the College of Surgeons), which was engraved by William Sharp. He survived Sir Joshua but one year.

The house of Reynolds was at the opposite side of the Square, at No. 47, now Puttick and Simpson's auction rooms. He occupied it from 1760 to 1792. We are accustomed to think of Hogarth and Reynolds as contemporaries. But Reynolds was in the pride of his prime when he came to Leicester Fields, while Hogarth was an old and broken man, whose greatest work was done. Apart from this, there could never have been much real sympathy between them. Hogarth, whose own efforts as a portrait-painter were little appreciated in his life time, must have chafed at the carriages which blocked up the doorway of his more fortunate brother; while Reynolds, courtly and amiable as he was, capable of indulgence even to such a caricaturist as Bunbury, could find for his illustrious neighbour, when he came to deliver his famous Fourteenth Discourse, no warmer praise than that of 'successful attention to the ridicule of life.' These things, alas! are the commonplaces of literature and art. It is pleasanter to think of No. 47 filled with those well-known figures of whom we read in Boswell and Madame D'Arblay; – with Burke and Johnson and Goldsmith and Gibbon and Garrick; – with graceful Angelica, and majestic Siddons, and azure-stockinged Montagu; – with pretty Nelly O'Brien and charming Fanny Abington; – with all the crowd of distinguished soldiers, sailors, lawyers and literati who by turns filled the sitter's chair ⁵⁷ in the octagonal painting-room, or were ushered out and in by the silver-laced footmen.

Then there were those wonderful disorderly dinners, where the guests were so good and the feast so indifferent; where there were always wit and learning, and seldom enough of knives and forks; where it was an honour to have talked and listened, and no one remembered to have dined. Last comes that pathetic picture of Sir Joshua, when his sight had failed him, wandering sadly in the inclosure with his green shade over his eyes, and peering wistfully and vainly for the lost canary which had been wont to perch upon his finger.

When Reynolds died, Burke wrote his eulogy in the very house where his body lay. The manuscript (which still exists) was blotted with its writer's tears. Those royal periods in which the great orator spoke of his lost friend are too familiar to quote. But after Sir Joshua, the interest seems to fade out of the Fields, and one willingly draws one's pen through the few remaining names that are written in its chronicles.

NOTES:

Note 1, p. 91. – A house called Fordhook. This description is, alas! no longer accurate; and the spot from which Fielding set out for Lisbon in June, 1754, is now covered by 'commodious villas.'

Note 2, p. 139. – A writer of comedy with the pencil. This happy characterization was first used by Arthur Murphy in the Gray's Inn Journal for 9th February, 1754.

Note 3, p. 141. – The original No. 17 of the 'North Briton.' Since the above was written, my faith in this relic has been rudely shaken. In looking over a collection of Hogarthiana, temporarily at the British Museum, I came upon another copy of the paper also purporting to be the 'identical' No. 17, etc. Which is the real Simon Pure? Mr. Standly's copy (his Catalogue says at p. 84) was given by Mrs. Hogarth to [Samuel] Ireland. But this second copy I saw, also emanated from that not wholly unimpeachable source. Collectors will please sympathise.

Note 4, p. 211. – Bronze statue of King James the Second. This statue, first placed in Whitehall Gardens on the 31st December, 1686 (Bramston's Autobiography, 1845, p. 253), was transferred in 1897 to an inclosure at the side of Gwydyr House. The present writer well remembers its forlorn departure, prone on a trolly, with one leg stiffly extended. It has again been moved; and now stands at the back of the Admiralty, where it will doubtless give rise to fresh traditions as to the site of the execution of Charles I.

Note d, p. 219. – Ink-bottles… dangling from their button-holes. Flaxman, when he lived in Poland Street, used, in his capacity of parish officer, to collect the watch rates. On these occasions he always wore an ink-bottle at his buttonhole. Johnson also bustled about thus accoutred at the sale of Thrale's brewery (Birkbeck Hill's Boswell, 1887, iv. 87).

Note G, p. 324. – Hogarth's… gold ticket. This is now in the possession of Mr. Fairfax Murray, who bought it at the Forman sale. But recent authorities doubt if the design was Hogarth's own.

Note 7, p. 349. – Her Majesty's 'Yatcht' 'Fubs.' This absurd name, according to a writer in Notes and Queries for 6th October, 1883, had been given to Queen Anne's royal yacht by Charles II., in honour of 'Madam Carwell,' who was 'fubsy' or plump.

Note 8, p. 372. – Danced round an unmetaphoric mulberry tree. Miss Burney's historic performance took place, as a matter of fact, at Chessington, the Surrey hermitage of her friend and critic, 'Daddy' Crisp. It was the uncontrollable outcome of her exhilaration at the praise which, she was informed, Dr. Johnson had bestowed upon her first novel, Evelina. 'It gave me such a flight of spirits, that I danced a jig to Mr. Crisp, without any preparation, music, or explanation – to his no small amazement and diversion (Diary, etc., of Madame D'Arblay, 1904-5, i. 49).

THE END