THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES / \ LONDON SOUVENIRS BY CHARLES W. HECKETHORN AUTHOR OF "THE SECRET SOCIETIES OF ALL AGES," " LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS," ETC. NEW YORK A. WESSELS COMPANY 1900 )4 3*1 CONTENTS I, II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. PACK GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY - 1 WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN - -12 OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES - 24 OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS - 35 FAMOUS OLD ACTORS - - - -47 OLD JUDGES AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS - 59 SOME FAMOUS LONDON ACTRESSES - - 71 QUEER CLUBS OF FORMER DAYS - - 82 CURIOUS STORIES OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE - 94 WITS AND BEAUX OF OLD LONDON SOCIETY - 105 LONDON SEEN THROUGH FOREIGN SPECTACLES - 117 OLD LONDON TAVERNS AND TEA-GARDENS I. THE GALLERIED TAVERNS OF OLD LONDON - 135 II. OLD LONDON TEA-GAKDENS - - -158 WILLIAM PATERSON AND THE BANK OF ENGLAND- 173 THE OLD DOCTORS - - - -184 THE LOST RIVERS OF LONDON - - - 2l6 ROGUES ASSORTED - - - - 253 BARS AND BARRISTERS - 265 THE SUBLIME BEEFSTEAKERS AND THE KIT-KAT AND ROTA CLUBS - - - - 285 HAMPTON COURT PALACE AND ITS MASTERS - 300 625922 LONDON SOUVENIRS i. GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY. PHILOSOPHERS may argue, and moralists preach, the former against the folly, and the latter against the wickedness of gambling, but, as may be expected, their remonstrances pass but as a gentle breeze over the outwardly placid ocean of play, causing the fishes — the familiars of the gambling world — lan- guidly to raise their heads, and mildly to inquire : ' What's all that row about ? Gambling is one of the strongest passions in the human breast, and no warning, no exhibition of fatal examples, will ever stop the in- dulgence in the excitement it procures. It assumes many phases ; in all men have undergone disastrous experiences, and yet they repeat the dangerous and usually calamitous experiments. In no undertaking has so much money been lost as in mining ; prizes have occasionally been drawn, but at such rare intervals as to be cautions rather than encouragements ; and yet, even at the present day, with all the experience of past 1 2 LONDON SOUVENIRS failures, sanguine speculators fill empty shafts with their gold, which is quickly fished up by the greedy promoters. Some of the now most respectable West End clubs originally were only gambling-hells. They are not so now ; but the improvement this would seem to imply is apparent only. Our manners have improved, but not our morals ; the table-legs wear frilled trousers now, but the legs are there all the same, even the blacklegs. But it is the past more than the present we wish to speak of. Early in the last century gaming was so prevalent that in one night's search the Leefs Jury of West- minster discovered, and afterwards presented to the justices, no fewer than thirty-five gambling-houses. The Society for the Reformation of Manners published a statement of their proceedings, by which it appeared that in the year beginning with December 1, 1724, to the same date in 1725, they had prosecuted 2,506 persons for keeping disorderly and gaming houses ; and for thirty-four years the total number of their prosecutions amounted to the astounding figure of 91,899. In 1728 the following note was issued by the King's order : ' It having been represented to his Majesty that such felons and their accomplices are greatly encouraged and har- boured by persons keeping night-houses . . . and that the gaming-houses . . . much contribute to the cor- ruption of the morals of those of an inferior rank . . . his Majesty has commanded me to recommend it, in his name, in the strongest manner to the Justices of the Peace to employ their utmost care and vigilance in the preventing and suppressing of these disorders, etc."' GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY 3 This warning was then necessary, though as early as 1719 an order for putting in execution an old statute of Henry VIII. had been issued to all victuallers, and others whom it might concern. The order ran : ' That none shall keep or maintain any house or place of un- lawful games, on pain of 40s. for every day, of forfeiting their recognisance, and of being suppressed ; that none shall use or haunt such places, on pain of 6s. 8d. for every offence; and that no artificer, or his journeyman, husbandman, apprentice, labourer, mariner, fisherman, waterman, or serving-man shall play at tables, tennis, dice, cards, bowls, clash, coiting, loggating, or any other unlawful game, out of Christmas, or then out of their master's house or presence, on pain of 20s. 1 There were thus many attempts at controlling the conduct of the lower orders, but the gentry set them a bad example. The Cocoa-Tree Club, the Tory choco- late-house of Queen Anne's reign, at No. 64, St. James's Street, was a regular gambling-hell. In the evening of a Court Drawing-room in 1719, a number of gentle- men had a dispute over hazard at that house ; the quarrel became general, and, as they fought with their swords, three gentlemen were mortally wounded, and the affray was only ended by the interposition of the Royal Guards, who were compelled to knock the parties down with the butt-ends of their muskets indiscrimi- nately, as entreaties and commands were disregarded. Walpole, in his correspondence, relates : ' Within this week there has been a cast at hazard at the Cocoa-Tree, the difference of which amounted to o£ J 180,000. Mr. O'Birne, an Irish gamester, had won =£1 00,000 of a young Mr, Harvey, of Chigwell, just started from a 1—2 4 LONDON SOUVENIRS midshipman into an estate by his elder brother's death. O'Birne said : " You can never pay me. 11 " I can, 11 said the youth ; " my estate will sell for the debt. 11 " No, 11 said O'Birne, " I will win ,£10,000 ; you shall throw for the odd £90,000." They did, and Harvey won. 1 It is not on record whether he took the lesson to heart. The house was, in 1746, turned into a club, but its reputation was not improved ; bribery, high play, and foul play continued to be common in it. Another chocolate-house was White's, now White's Club, St. James's Street. As a chocolate-house it was established about 1698, near the bottom of the west side of St. James's Street ; it was burnt down in 1773. Plate VI. of Hogarth's ' Rake's Progress ' shows a room full of players at White's, so intent upon play as neither to see the flames nor hear the watchmen bursting into the room. It was indeed a famous gambling and betting club, a book for entering wagers always lying on the table ; the play was frightful. Once a man dropped down dead at the door, and was carried in ; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or only in a fit ; and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed, saying it would affect the fairness of the bet. Walpole, who tells the story, hints that it is invented. Many a highwayman — one is shown in Hogarth's picture above referred to — there took his chocolate or threw his main before starting for business. There Lord Chesterfield gamed ; Steele dated all his love news in the Tatler from White's, which was known as the rendezvous of infamous sharpers and noble cullies, and bets were laid to the effect that Sir William Burdett, one of its GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY 5 members, would be the first baronet who would be hanged. The gambling went on till dawn of day ; and Pelham, when Prime Minister, was not ashamed to divide his time between his official table and the piquet table at White's. General Seott was a very cautious player, avoiding all indulgence in excesses at table, and thus managed to win at White's no less than £200,000, so that when his daughter, Joanna, married George Canning he was able to give her a fortune of £100,000. Another club founded specially for gambling was Al mack's, the original Brooks's, which was opened in Pall Mall in 1764. Some of its members were Macaronis, the fops of the day, famous for their long curls and eye-glasses. 'At Almack's,' says Walpole, ' which has taken the pas of White's . . . the young men of the age lose ,£10,000, £15,000, £20,000 in an evening.' The play at this club was only for rouleaux of £50 each, and generally there was £10,000 in gold on the table. The gamesters began by pulling off their embroidered clothes, and put on frieze garments, or turned their coats inside out for luck. They put on pieces of leather to save their lace ruffles ; and to guard their eyes from the light, and to prevent tumbling their hair, wore high-crowned straw hats with broad brims, and sometimes masks to conceal their emotions. Almack's afterwards was known as the ' Goose-Tree ' Club — a rather significant name — and Pitt was one of its most constant frequenters, and there met his adherents. Gibbon also was a member, when the club was still Almack's — which, indeed, was the name of the founder and original proprietor of the club. 6 LONDON SOUVENIRS Another gaming-club was Brooks's, which at first was formed by Almack and afterwards by Brooks, a wine-merchant and money-lender. The club was opened in 1778, and some of the original rules are curious : '21. No gaming in the eating-room, except tossing up for reckonings, on penalty of paying the whole bill of the members present. 30. Any member of this society that shall become a candidate for any other club (old White's excepted) shall be ipso facto excluded. 40. Every person playing at the new quinze-table shall keep fifty guineas before him. 41. Every person play- ing at the twenty-guinea table shall keep no less than twenty guineas before him. 1 According to Captain Gronow, play at Brooks's was even higher than at White's. Faro and macao were indulged in to an extent which enabled a man to win or to lose a con- siderable fortune in one night. George Harley Drum- mond, a partner in the bank of that name, played only once in his life at White's, and lost ,£20,000 to Brummell. This event caused him to retire from the bankimr-house. Lord Carlisle and Charles Fox lost enormous sums at Brooks's. At Tom's Coffee House, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, there was playing at piquet, and the club con- sisting of seven hundred noblemen and gentlemen, many of whom belonged to the gay society of that day (the middle of the last century), we may be sure the play was high. Arthur's Club, in St. James's Street, so named after its founder (who died in 1761), was a famous gambling centre in its day. A nobleman of the highest position and influence in society was detected in cheating at GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY 7 cards, and after a trial, which did not terminate in his favour, he died of a broken heart. This happened in 1836. The Union, which was founded in this century, was a regular gambling-club. It was first held at what is now the Ordnance Office, Pall Mall, and subsequently in the house afterwards occupied by the Bishop of Winchester. In the early days of this century the most notorious gambling-club was Crockford's, in St. James's Street. Crockford originally was a fishmonger, and occupied the old bulk-shop west of Temple Bar. But, having made money by betting, ' he gave up, 1 as a recent writer on ' The Gambling World 1 says, * selling soles and salmon, and went in for catching fish, confining his operations to gudgeons and flat-fish ' ; or, in other words, he estab- lished a gambling-house, first by taking over Watier's old club-house, where he set up a hazard bank, and won a great deal of money ; he then separated from his partner, who had a bad year and failed. Crockford removed to St. James's Street, where he built the magnificent club-house which bore his name. It was erected at a cost of upwards of ,£100,000, and, in its vast proportions and palatial decorations, surpassed anything of the kind ever seen in London. To support such an establishment required a large income ; yet Crockford made it, for the highest play was encouraged at his card-tables, but especially at the hazard -tables, where Crockford nightly took his stand, prepared for all comers. And he was successful, and became a millionaire. When he died he left £700,000, and he had lost as much in mining and other speculations. His 8 LONDON SOUVENIRS death was hastened, it is said, by excessive anxiety over his bets on the turf. He retired from the management of the club in 1840, and died in 1844. The club was soon after closed, and after a few years' 1 interval was re- opened as the Naval, Military, and Civil Service Club. It was then converted into dining-rooms, called the Wellington. Later on it was taken by a joint-stock company as an auction-room, and now it is again a club-house, known as the Devonshire Club. We referred above to Watier's Club. It was estab- lished in 1 807, at the instigation of the Prince of Wales, and high play was the chief pursuit of its members. ' Princes and nobles,' says Timbs in his ' Curiosities of London, 1 ' lost or gained fortunes amongst themselves. 1 But the pace was too fast. The club did not last under its original patronage, and it was then, when it was moribund, taken over by Crockford. At this club, also, macao was the favourite game, as at Brooks 1 s. One of the most objectionable results of promiscuous gambling is the disreputable company into which it often throws a gentleman. ' That Marquis, who is now familiar grown With every reprobate about the town. . . . Now, sad transition ! all his lordship's nights Are passed with blacklegs and with parasites. . . . The rage of gaming and the circling glass Eradicate distinction in each class ; For he who scarce a dinner can afford Is equal in importance with my lord.' This is just what happened when gambling-hells were openly flourishing in London, and what happens now, when gambling- clubs abound, and are almost daily GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY 9 raided by the police, when some actually respectable people are found mixed up with the rascaldom which supports these clubs. A perfect mania seems to have seized the lower orders of our day to gamble; but formerly, for instance, in Walpole's time, in the latter half of the last century, the upper classes were the worst offenders, of which the just-mentioned statesman and epistolary chronicler of small-beer, which, however, by long keeping has acquired a strong and lasting flavour, gives us many proofs. ' Lord Sandwich,' he reports, ' goes once or twice a week to hunt with the Duke [of Cumberland], and, as the latter has taken a turn of gaming, Sandwich, to make his court — and fortune — carries a box and dice in his pocket ; and so they throw a main whenever the hounds are at fault, upon every green hill and under every green tree. 1 Five years later, at a magnificent ball and supper at Bedford House, ' the Duke was playing at hazard with a great heap of gold before him. Somebody said he looked like the prodigal son and the fatted calf both. 1 Under such circumstances it could not fail that swindlers yar ex- cellence sometimes found their way among the royal and noble gamblers. There was a Sir William Burdett, whose name had the honour of being inscribed in the betting-room at White's as the subject of a wager that he would be the first baronet who would be hanged. He and a lady, ' dressed foreign, as a Princess \ e +1 ^ House of Brandenburg, 1 cheated Lord Castledurrow (Baron Ashbrook) and Captain Rodney out of a hand- some sum at faro. The noble victim met the Baronet at Ranelagh, and addressed him thus : ' Sir William, here is the sum I think I lost last night. Since then I 10 LONDON SOUVENIRS have heard that you are a professed pickpocket, and therefore I desire to have no further acquaintance with you. 1 The Baronet took the money with a respectful bow, and then asked his Lordship the further favour to set him down at Buckingham Gate, and without further ceremony jumped into the coach. Walpole writes to Mann, in 1750, that ' Jemmy Lumley last week had a party of whist at his own house : the combatants, Lucy Southwell, that curtseys like a bear, Mrs. Bijean, and Mrs. Mackenzy. They played from six in the evening till twelve next day, Jemmy never winning one rubber, and rising a loser of i?2,000. . . . He fancied himself cheated and would not pay. However, the bear had no share in his evil surmises . . . and he promised a dinner at Hampstead to Lucy and her sister. As he went to the rendezvous his chaise was stopped, and he was advised by someone not to proceed. But proceed he did, and in the garden he found Mrs. Mackenzy. She asked him whether he was going to pay, and, on his declining to do so, the fair virago took a horsewhip from beneath her hoop, and fell upon him with the utmost vehemence.'' Members of clubs were fully aware of the nefarious- ness of their devotion to gambling. When a waiter at Arthur's Club was taken up for robbery, George Selwyn said : ' What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate V Certes, some of the highwaymen in that prison were not such robbers and scoundrels as some of the aristocratic members of those clubs. When, in 1750, the people got frightened about an earthquake in London, predicted to happen in that year, ' Lady Catherine Pelham, 1 Walpole tells us, ' Lady James Arundel 1, and Lord and Lady Gal way ... go this GAMBLING-CLUBS AND HIGH PLAY 11 evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are going to play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back, I suppose, to look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish. 1 When the rulers of the nation on such an occasion, or any other occasion of public terror, possibly caused by their own mismanagement of public affairs, hypocritically and most impertinently ordered a day of fasting and humilia- tion, the gambling-houses used to be filled with officials and members of Parliament, who thus had a day off. There was one famous gambling-house we find we have not yet mentioned, viz., Shaver's Hall, which occupied the whole of the southern side of Coventry Street, from the Haymarket to Hedge Lane (now Oxenden Street), and derived its name from the barber of Lord Pembroke, who built it out of his earnings. Attached to it was a bowling-green, which sloped down to the south. The place was built about the year 1650, and the tennis-court belonging to it till recently might still be seen in St. James's Street. II. WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN. CERTAIN waves of sentiment or action, or both combined, have at various times passed over the face of European society. A thousand years ago the Old Continent went madly crusading to snatch the Holy Sepulchre from the grasp of the pagan Sultan, who, sick man as he is, still holds it. The movement had certain advantages : it cleared Europe of a good deal of ruffianism, which never came back, as it perished on the journey to Jerusalem, or very properly was killed off by the justly incensed Turks, who could not under- stand by what right these hordes of robbers invaded their country. Then another phase of society madness arose. Some maniac, clad in armour, on a horse similarly accoutred, would appear, and challenge everyone to admit that the Lady Gwendolyne Mousetrap, whom he kept company with, and took to the tea-gardens on Sundays, was the most peerless damosel, and that whoso doubted it, would not get off by paying a dollar, but would have to fight it out with him. Then another mailed and belted chap would jump up, and maintain that the Countess of Rabbit-Warren — who was the girl WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN 13 he was just then booming — was the finest woman going, and that that slut Gwendolyne Mousetrap was no better than she should be. Of course, as soon as the King and Court heard of the shindy between the two knights a day was appointed when they should fight it out, the combatants being enclosed in a kind of rat-pit, officially called lists, whilst the King, his courtiers and their gentle ladies looked at the sport ; and if one of the knights was killed, or perhaps both were killed, or at least maimed for life, the Lady Gwendolyne and the Countess of Rabbit- Warren, who, of course, both assisted at the spectacle, received the congratulations of the Court. Sometimes one of the knights would funk, and not come up to the scratch ; then he was declared a lame duck, and the lady whom he had left in the lurch and made a laughing-stock of would erase his name from her tablets, and shy the trumpery proofs of devo- tion he had given her, a worn-out scarf or Brummagem aigrette, out of an upper window. This was called the age of chivalry. Then a totally different eruption of the fighting mania — which is, after all, the universal principle in human action — took place. A vagrant scholasticus would appear in a University town, and announce that he was ready to hold a disputation with any professor, Doctor of Divinity, or Master of Arts, on any mortal subject, the more subtle, and the more incomprehensible, and the more mystical, the better. Thus, one such scholasticus got into the rostrum at Tubingen, and addressed his audience thus : ' I am about to propound three theses : the answer to the first is known to myself only, and not to you ; to the second, the answer is known neither to you nor to me ; to the 14 LONDON SOUVENIRS third, the answer is known to you only.' This was a promising programme, and, indeed, proved highly edify- ing. ' Now, the first question,' resumed the scholasticus, ' is this : Have I got any breeches on ? You don't know, but I do ; I have not. The second question, the answer to which is known neither to you nor to me, is : Shall I find in this town any draper willing to advance on credit stuff enough to make me a pair? And the third question, the answer to which is known to you only, is : Will any of you pay a tailor's wages to make me a pair? And now that the argument is clearly before you, we may proceed to the consideration of the parabolic triangulation of the binocular theorem ;' and then he would bewilder them with a lot of jaw-breaking words, which then, as now, passed for learning. This was called the age of scholasticism. It was succeeded by the Renaissance, which, after a good boil-up of its intellectual ingredients, settled down into a literary mud, an Acqui-la-Bollente, a Nile mud, pleasant to the soul, and fertilizing to the mind, the protoplasm of diarists and letter-writers, of whom — to mention but three — Evelyn, Pepys, and Horace Walpole were pro- minent patterns in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies. It is with the latter, Horace Walpole, of Strawberry Hill, we are chiefly concerned. Horace Walpole, after enlarging a cottage into a Gothic castle, with lath and plaster, and rough-cast walls, and wooden pinnacles, filled it with literary and artistic treasures. But he also gathered around him a select social circle, which included Gairick, Paul Whitehead, General Conway, George Sehvyn, Richard Bentley, the poet Gray, Sir WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN 15 Horace Mann, and Lords Edgcumbe and Strafford. And of ladies there was no lack ; there were Mrs. Prit- chard, Kitty Give, Lady Suffolk, the Misses Berry, and — would you believe it ? — Hannah More ! It was the age for chronicling small-beer and home-made wine, gossip, scandal, and frivolity ; and Horace Walpole enjoyed existence as a cynical Seladon or platonic Blue- beard amidst this bevy of lively, gay-minded, frolicsome beauties, young and old. Happily, or unhappily, for him, he did not become acquainted with the Misses Berry before 1788, when he was seventy-one years of age. He took the most extraordinary liking to them, and was never content except when they were with him, or corresponding with him. When they went to Italy, he wrote to them regularly once a week, and on their return he installed them at Little Strawberry Hill, a house close to his own, so that he might daily enjoy their society. He appointed them his literary executors, with the charge of collecting and publishing his writings, which was done under the superintendence of Mr. Berry, their father, who was a Yorkshire gentleman. When Walpole had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford he made Mary, the elder of the two sisters, an offer of his hand. Both sisters survived him upwards of sixty years. Little Strawberry Hill, which we just mentioned as the residence of the Misses Berry, had, before their coming to live in it, been occupied by Kitty Give, the famous actress. Born in 1711, she made her first appearance on the stage of Drury Lane, and in 1732 she married a brother of Lord Give, but the union proved unhappy, and was soon dissolved. She quitted the stage in 1769, leaving a splendid reputation as an 16 LONDON SOUVENIRS actress and as a woman behind her, and retired to Little Strawberry Hill, where she lived in ease, surrounded by friends and respected by the world. Horace Walpole was a constant visitor at her house, as were many other persons of rank and eminence. It was said of her that no man could be grave when Kitty chose to be merry. But she must have been a woman of some spirit, too, for when it was proposed to stop up a footpath in her neighbourhood she placed herself at the head of the opponents, and defeated the project. She died suddenly in 1785, and Walpole placed an urn in the grounds to her memory, with the inscription : ' Here lived the laughter-loving dame ; A matchless actress, Clive her name. The comic Muse with her retired, And shed a tear when she expired.' The Mrs. Pritchard mentioned above was also an actress, of great and well-deserved fame. She lived at an origin- ally small house, called " Ragman's Castle," which she much improved and enlarged. It had, after her, various occupants, and was finally taken down by Lord Kil- morey during his occupancy of Orleans House, near which it stood. Another of the constant visitors at Strawberry Hill was Lady Suffolk, Pope's ' Chloe." 1 She was married to the Hon. Charles Howard, from whom she separated when she became the mistress of the Prince, afterwards George II., who, as Prince, allowed her i?2,000 a year, and as King d£3,200 a year, besides several sums at various times. He gave her ^12,000 towards Marble Hill, the mansion still facing the Thames, which became WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN 17 her residence. Her husband lived long enough to become Earl of Suffolk, and dying, left her free to marry, when she was forty-five, the Hon. George Berkeley, who died eleven years after. She survived him twenty-one years, and supplied her neighbour, Horace Walpole, with Court anecdotes and scandal during all that period. Walpole calls her remarkably 'genteel - ' — a favourite expression of his, though now so vulgar ! — and, in spite of her antecedents, she was courted by the highest in the land. Such were the morals of those days. According to Horace Walpole, her mental qualifications were not of a high order, but she was gentle and engaging in her manners, and she was a gossip with a good memory — and that answered her host's purpose admirably. Pope also made great use of her reminiscences. Like Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole liked to fill his house with a lot of female devotees ; but whilst Johnson seemed to prefer a parcel of disagreeable, ugly, and cantankerous women, always quarrelling among them- selves and with everybody else, Walpole liked his women to be young and fair, full of life and mirth. By what strange circumstance was the cynical and sarcastic Walpole led into a sort of friendship with the mild and pietistic Mrs. Hannah More ? It was in 1784 that this queer friendship began. It appears that about that date Hannah More had discovered at Bristol a milk woman who wrote verses, just such verses as Hannah More and Walpole — neither of whom had an idea of poetry — would consider wonderful. A subscription must be started for the benefit of the milkwoman, and Hannah More applied to Horace Walpole, who set up l 2 18 LONDON SOUVENIRS for a Maecenas, though he always expressed the utmost contempt for authors, for a contribution. Of course, Hannah More did not make this application without a dose of fulsome compliment to Horace Walpole's genius, and he went into the trap, subscribed, and expressed his admiration of the milkwomans poetry. The woman's name was Yearsley ; she was quite ready to receive the money, but, having evidently a very high opinion of her own doggerel, she refused to listen to the literary advice given to her by Horace Walpole and her patroness, with whom she very soon quarrelled. Walpole condoled with Hannah thus : ' You are not only benevolence itself, but, with fifty times the genius of Dame Yearsley, you are void of vanity. How strange that vanity should expel gratitude ! Does not the wretched woman owe her fame to you ? . . . Dame Yearsley reminds me of the troubadours, those vagrants whom I used to admire till I knew their history, and who used to pour out trumpery verses, and flatter or abuse, accordingly as they were housed and clothed, or dismissed to the next parish. Yet you did not set this person in the stocks, after pro- curing an annuity for her. 1 By this letter we see what were Horace Walpole's ideas of patronage : flattery and a pittance, independence and the stocks. Walpole was open to flattery. Dr. Johnson was not — at least, not from a woman ; he despised the sex too much to care for their praise. When Hannah More laid it on very thick in his case, he fiercely turned round on her and said : ' Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having." 1 And, with all his admiration for her character, Walpole could not help sneering at what WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN 19 he called her saintliness, and venting his sarcasm on her silly ' Coelebs in Search of a Wife," the absurdity of which has, indeed, been surpassed by a few modern novels of the same tendency. The last we hear of their friendship is that he made her a present of a Bible — fancy the satyr's leer with which he must have presented it to her ! She paid him out for the implied irony by wishing that he would read it. Among the ladies who were neighbours of Horace Walpole, we must not omit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived for some years in a house on the south side of the road leading to Twickenham Common. She may justly be considered as one of the witty, if not of the pretty, women of Walpole's time. He detested her. Probably he was somewhat jealous of her, for her letters from Constantinople on Turkish life and society earned her the sobriquet of the 'Female Horace Walpole. 1 He writes of her thus whilst she was living at Florence : 1 She is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze anyone. . . . She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled ; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, and partly covered with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney. 1 In another letter he describes her dress as consisting of ' a groundwork of dirt, with an embroidery of filthiness. 1 When he wrote of her then, she was about fifty years of age, and seems to have retained none of the beauty which distinguished her in her earlier years. She was not only coarse in 2—2 20 LONDON SOUVENIRS looks, but in her speech and writings, which shock modern fastidiousness. She was not the woman to please Horace Walpole, who, even when in the seventies, liked nothing better than acting as squire or cicerone to fine ladies. Lady Mary was not one of them. She was, in fact, what we now should call a regular Bohemian ; and was it to be wondered at? She had been intro- duced into that sort of life when she was a girl only eight years old by her own father, Evelyn, Earl of Kingston. He was a member of the Kitcat Club, whose chief occupation was the proposing and toasting the beauties of the day. One evening the Earl took it into his head to nominate his daughter. She was sent for in a chaise, and introduced to the company in dirty Shire Lane in a grimy chamber, reeking with foul culinary smells and stale tobacco-smoke, and elected by acclama- tion. The gentlemen drank the little lady's health up- standing ; and feasting her with sweets, and passing her round with kisses, at once inscribed her name with a diamond on a drinking - glass. 'Pleasure, 1 she says, ' was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my whole life did I pass so happy an evening.'' Of course, the child could not perceive the hideousness of the whole proceeding and its surroundings : if the kisses were seasoned with droppings of snuff from the noses above, which otherwise were not always very clean — even at the beginning of this century Lord Kenyon, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was an utter stranger to the luxury of a pocket-handkerchief, and had no delicacy about avowing it — it did not detract from the sweetness of the bon-bons with which she was regaled. WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN 21 The founder of the Blue-Stocking Club, Mrs. Montagu, nee Elizabeth Robinson, was another of Walpole's witty and handsome lady friends. As a girl she was lively, full of fun, yet fond of study. In 1742 she was married to Edward Montagu, M.P., a coal-owner of great wealth. As a girl the Duchess of Portland had called her ' La Petite Fidget 1 ; but after her marriage she became more sedate, and a great power in the literary world. She established the Blue-Stocking Club, of which herself, Mrs. Vesey, Miss Boscawen, Mrs. Carter, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Pulteney, Mr. Stillingfleet, and Horace Walpole were the first members. The name originally came from Venice, where, in 1400, the Academical Society (Idle calze had been established, whence the name was transferred to similar associations in France, there called Bus Bleus, and from the latter country it was introduced into England. Mrs. Montagu, having been left a widow with P7,000 a year, built herself a mansion, standing in a large garden at the north-west corner of Portman Square, and there the Blue-Stocking Club continued to hold its meetings for a number of years, including all the persons of her time who were celebrated in art, science, or literature, among whom may be mentioned Boswell and Johnson, the latter of whom, in the presence of ladies, somewhat modified his bearish habits. Mrs. Montagu died in 1800, and the house she had built eventually became the town residence of Viscount Portman. Of course, Horace Walpole was acquainted with the Misses Gunning — ' those goddesses,' as Mary Montagu styled them. They were nieces of the first Earl of Mayo, and so got a ready introduction into London society, 22 LONDON SOUVENIRS which literally went raving mad about them. Horace Walpole tells us that even the ' great unwashed ' followed them in crowds whenever they appeared in public : there must have been an extraordinary appreciation of beauty in the rabble — and what a rabble of ruffians it was ! — of those days. But London then was no bigger than a provincial town, compared with what it is now. The two ladies speedily found husbands : the Duke of Hamilton married Elizabeth, the younger, after an evening spent in the society of the sisters and their mother at Bedford House, and was in such a hurry about it that he would wait for neither licence nor ring, and, after with some difficulty satisfying the scruples of the parson called upon to celebrate the extempore cere- mony, they were married with the ring of a bed-curtain, at half an hour after twelve at night, at Mayfair Chapel. Three weeks afterwards Lord Coventry married her sister, Maria. The Duke of Hamilton dying in 1758, six years after the strange nuptials in Mayfair Chapel, the widow in the following year married Jack Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll. Lady Coventry did not wear her coronet long ; in 1760 she died, it is said, in consequence of her excessive use of white paint. Her sister, ' twice duchessed/ survived her many years. We have far from exhausted the list of the ladies distinguished for wit and beauty who figure in Horace Walpole's ' Letters,' but our space is exhausted. We cannot, however, conclude without a few words on the ' Letters ' in question. Their chief value consists in the lively descriptions of public events; not as dry and cold history records them, but by letting us have peeps behind the scenes, so as to see the wire-pullers, the WITTY WOMEN AND PRETTY WOMEN 23 secret machinery, which set in motion the actors on the political and social stage. They show us lords and ladies in their negliges, and how the conceit of a hairdresser, or the caprice of a lady's-maid, may make or mar the destinies of a nation. This copious letter-writing forms indeed an era in our literary history which will never return or be renewed ; the prying reporter and the irre- pressible interviewer now supply all the world with what the letter-writer communicated to a few friends only. This present age may be called the Age of Reminiscences: everybody is writing his ; of making books there is no end ! A III. OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES. COMPARATIVELY small room, considering it was one for public use, with clingy walls, a grimy ceiling, a sanded floor, boxes with upright backs and narrow seats, wooden chairs, liquor-stained tables, lighted up in the evening with smoky lamps or gutter- ing candles, the whole room reeking with tobacco like a guard-room — such was the coffee-house of the later Stuart and the whole Georgian periods. Its distinc- tive article of furniture was spittoons. In such dens did the noblemen, in flowing wigs and embroidered coats, parsons in cassocks and bands, physicians in sable suits and tremendous perukes, together with broken-down gamesters, swindlers, country yokels, and out-at-elbows literary and theatrical adventurers, meet, not only for pleasure, but for business too. Dr. Rad- cliffe, who in 1685 had the largest practice in London, was daily to be seen at Garraway's, now demolished, its site being included in Martin's bank ; and another favourite resort of doctors hereby was Batson's, where, as the ' Connoisseur ' says, ' the dispensers of life and death flock together, like birds of prey watching for OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES 25 carcases. I never enter this place but it serves as a memento mor'i to me. . . . Batson's has been reckoned the seat of solemn stupidity. 1 Coffee-houses, indeed, had their distinct sets of cus- tomers. St. Paul's, for instance, was patronized by the clergy, both by those with fat livings and by ' battered crapes, 1 who plied there for an occasional burial or sermon. Dick's was frequented by members of the Temple, with whom, in 1737, Mrs. Yarrow and her daughter, who kept the house, were great favourites ; wherefore, when the Rev. James Miller brought out a comedy, called ' The Coffee-House, 1 in which the ladies were thought to be indicated — the engraver having un- fortunately fixed upon Dick's Coffee - House as the frontispiece scene — the Templars attended the first representation, and hissed the piece off the boards. Button's, in Covent Garden, was the resort of Addison and Steele, of Pope and Swift, of Savage and Davenant — in fact, of the wits of the time. At this house was the lion's head through whose mouth letters were dropped for the Tailers and Spectators. The head was afterwards transferred to the Bedford Coffee-House, under the Piazza, and eventually, in 1827, was pur- chased by the Duke of Bedford, and is now at Woburn Abbey. Bedford's was the successor of Button's, and is described in the 'Memoirs' of it as having been sig- nalized for many years as ' the emporium of wit, the seat of criticism, and the standard of taste.' In 1659 was founded the Rota Club by James Charrington, a political writer, and its members met at Miles's, in Old Palace Yard. Pepys attended one of its meetings on January 10, 1659-60. It was a kind of debating- 26 LONDON SOUVENIRS society for the dissemination of Republican opinions. Coffee-houses, indeed, at that period became important political institutions. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper then existed ; in consequence, these houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion vented itself, and so threatening to the Court did, in course of time, their influence appear, that on Decem- ber 29, 1675, the King and his Cabal Ministry issued a proclamation for shutting up and suppressing all coffee- houses, ' because in such houses, and by occasion of the meeting of disaffected persons in them, diverse false, malicious, and scandalous reports were devised and spread abroad, to the defamation of his Majesty's Government, and to the disturbance of the quiet and peace of the realm.' The opinions of the judges were taken on this ridiculous edict, and they sapiently reported 'that retailing coffee might be an innocent trade, but as it was used to nourish sedition, spread lies, and scandalize great men, it might also be a common nuisance. 1 On a petition of the merchants and retailers of coffee and tea, permission was granted to keep open the coffee-houses until June 24 next, under an admonition that ' the masters of them should prevent all scandalous papers, books, and libels from being read in them.*' This, of course, was a huge joke on the part of the Cabal, who thus constituted the con- coctors and dispensers of ' dishes , — to use the hideous word then employed — of coffee and tea censors and licensers of books, and judges of the truth or falsehood of political opinions and intelligence. After that no more was heard of the matter, and the coffee-houses remained political debating clubs, as is proved by the OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES 27 remarks on them in the Spectator and similar publica- tions. See, for instance, Nos. 403, 476, 481, 521, etc. The first London coffee-house was set up by one Bowman, coachman to Mr. Hodges, a Turkey mer- chant. Others say that Mr. Edwards brought over with him a Ragusa servant, Pasqua Rosee, who was associated with Bowman in establishing the first coffee- house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill. But the partners soon quarrelled. They parted, and Bowman opened a coffee-house in St. Michael's Churchyard, from which we may infer that the public took to the new drink. Rosee issued handbills headed : ' The vertue of the coffee-drink. First made and publicly sold in England by Pasqua Rosee, at the sign of his own head."' The original of one of them is preserved in the British Museum. It is generally said that the second coffee-house in London was that established as the Rainbow (now a tavern) in Fleet Street, by one Farr, a barber, in the year 1657. In the Mercurius Politicus of September 30, 1658, an advertisement ap- peared, setting forth the virtues of the then equally new beverage, namely, tcha, or tay, or tee, which was sold at the Sultaness Head Cophee-house, in Sweeting's Rents, by the Royal Exchange. We thus see that as early as 1658 there were already three coffee-houses in London. But coffee met with opponents. The vintners called it ' sooty drink '; lampooners said it undermined virile power, and that to drink it was to ape the Turks and insult one's canary - drinking ancestors. Farr, the founder of the Rainbow, already mentioned, was indicted for ' making and selling a sort of liquor, called coffee, whereby in making it he 28 LONDON SOUVENIRS annoyed his neighbours by evil smells, and for keeping of fire for the most part night and day, to the great danger and affrightment of his neighbours. 1 But Fan- stood his ground, and in time became a person of importance in the parish, and coffee-houses multiplied. Cornhill and its purlieus were full of them. There were the Great Turk, Sword Blade, Rainbow, Garra- way, Jerusalem, Tom's, and Weston's Coffee-Houses in Exchange Alley alone ; in St. Michael's Alley, close by, there were, besides Rosee's, Williams's, and other coffee- houses. They also, as we have seen, had been estab- lished further west than the City, and they were also, as already mentioned, places of rendezvous, where appointments were made, where lawyers met clients, and doctors patients, merchants their customers, clerks their masters, where farce - writers, journalists, poli- ticians, and literary hacks went to pick up ideas, and, as it was then called, watch, and if they could, catch the humours of the town. The Spectator, in his very first number, acknowledges his indebtedness to coffee- houses. ' There is no place of general resort, 1 he says, ' wherein I do not often make my appearance. Some- times I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at Will's (on the north side of Russell Street, at the corner of Bow Street), and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences. Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child's (St. Paul's Churchyard), and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Postman, overhear the conversation of every table in the room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James's (the famous Whig coffee-house from the time of Queen Anne to late in the reign of George III.), OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES 29 and sometimes join the little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. 1 There was another Will's in Serle Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, which was also a haunt of the Spectator, as were the other coffee-houses in that neighbourhood. He says in his ninety-ninth number : ' I do not know that I meet in any of my walks objects which move both my spleen and laughter so effectually as these young fellows at the Grecian, Squire's, Searle's, and all other coffee- houses adjacent to the law, who rise early for no other purpose but to publish their laziness. 1 It appears that it was usual to resort to the coffee-house as early as six o'clock in the morning. In ' Mosers Vestiges, 1 Will's is thus referred to : ' All the beaux that used to breakfast in the coffee-houses and taverns appendant to the Inns of Court struck their morning strokes in an elegant deshabille, which was carelessly confined by a sash of yellow, red, blue, green, etc., according to the taste of the wearer. The idle fashion was not quite worn out in 1765. We can remember having seen some of these early loungers in their nightgowns, caps, etc., at Will's, Lincoln's Inn Gate, about that period. 1 But the coffee-houses were not all for beer and skittles only. In the City especially, the business of the City, and of England, in fact, was transacted in them. Mer- chants and other business people, professional men, brokers, agents, had not then their private offices, which could only be reached through the ante-den of quill- driving cerberi, vidgo clerks. All the transactions of daily life were then largely carried on in public, as they are in all communities, until they arrive at a high state 30 LONDON SOUVENIRS of civilization. Even now among the peasantry of various European countries a man cannot have his child christened without the ceremony being rendered a public spectacle. And so here in England, in the barbarous days of dingy and musty coffee-houses, they were con- sulting-rooms, offices, counting-houses, auction-rooms, and shops. When the business was done, or in order to further it, refreshments of all sorts were handy, for the coffee-house did not confine itself to that innocent beverage, but supplied stronger stuffs ; it was, in fact, a tavern, and many of the houses, now openly so called, were formerly coffee-houses. And the business trans- acted at them was, as may be imagined, of the most varied character. Agents for the purchase or sale of estates, houses and other property, instead of seeing people at their offices, met them at coffee-houses. Thus one Thomas Rogers advertised that he gave attendance daily at the Rainbow by the Temple ; on Tuesdays at Tom's, by the Exchange, and on Thursdays at Will's, near Whitehall, for transacting agency business. This was legitimate enough, but what of the sale of human flesh at a coffee-house ? In 1708 an advertisement appeared : ' A black boy, twelve years of age, fit to wait on a gentleman, to be disposed of at Denis's Coffee- house, in Finch-lane. 1 And again, in 1728 : ' To be sold, a negro boy, aged eleven years. Enquire at the Virginia Coffee-house, Threadneedle-street. 1 Sometimes the keeper of the coffee-house sold goods on account of others ; thus from an advertisement in the Postman, January, 1705, we learn that Mr. Shipton, at John's Coffee-house, in Exchange Alley, sold someone's famous razor strops. The landlords of those places, indeed, seem OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES 31 to have been very accommodating, especially in the taking in of letters, thus anticipating the practice of modern newspaper shops. And they were not squeamish as to the advertisements, answers to which were to be sent to them. Thus a gentleman (?) in the General Advertiser, October, 1745, expressed a wish to hear from a lady he had seen in one of the left-hand boxes at Drury Lane, and who seemed to take particular notice of a gentleman who sat about the middle of the pit (the advertiser, of course). Letter to be left for ' P. M. F.\ at the Portugal Coffee-house, near the Exchange. In 1762 a young man advertised for his mother, ' who, in 1740, resided at a certain village near Bath, where she was delivered of a son, whom she left with a sum of money under the care of a person in the same parish, and promised to fetch him at a certain age, but has not since been heard of ... if living, she is asked to send a letter to " J. E.", at the Chapter Coffee-house, St. Paul's Churchyard . . . this advertisement is published by the person himself [i.e., the son, born near Bath] not from motives of necessity, or to court any assistance (he being by a series of happy circumstances possessed of an easy and independent fortune)." It would, I fancy, be difficult at the present day to find anyone, having a reputation of any note to keep up, willing to receive answers to such an advertisement, which, if it was not a fraud, looked terribly like an attempt at one. It happened in those days, as it occasionally does how, that the estates of gentlemen who married late in life passed away to remote branches ; the ' young gentleman ' had no doubt reflected on this subject. The Turk's Head seems, to judge by advertisements, to have been somewhat 32 LONDON SOUVENIRS heathenish. Here is another advertisement, also from the Morning Post, answers to which it took in : ' Whereas there are ladies, who have ^2,000, ^3,000, or i?4,000 at their command, and who, from not knowing how to dispose of the same to the greatest advantage . . . afford them but a scanty maintenance . . . the advertiser (who is a gentleman of independent fortune, strict honour and character, and above reward) acquaints such ladies that if they will favour him with their name and address ... he will put them into a method by which they may, without any trouble, and with an absolute certainty, place out their money, so as to pro- duce them a clear interest of 10 or 12 per cent. . . . on good and safe securities. Direct to " R. J., 11 Esq., at the Turk's Head Coffee-house, Strand. 1 We pity any lady who fell into the clutches of this ' gentleman of independent fortune ' ! And how the Turk's Head must have grinned when answers to ' R. J. 1 arrived ! About the same time a gentleman advertised that he knew a method, which reduced it almost to a certainty to win a considerable sum by insuring numbers in the lottery. For ten guineas the gentleman was prepared to ' discover the plan. 1 Answers to be sent to the York Coffee-house, St. James's Street. Another gentleman is willing to lend oC3,000 to anyone having sufficient interest to procure him a Government appointment, worth i?200 or / J 300 per annum. Answers to this were to be sent to the Chapter Coffee-house, St. Paul's. To some of the coffee-houses it would seem porters were attached, ready to run errands for customers, or the outside public ; some of them seem to have earned a reputation of a certain character. Thus Cynthio {Spec- OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES 33 tator, No. 398) employs Robin, the porter, who waits at Will's Coffee-house, to take a letter to Flavia. ' Robin, you must know, 1 we are told, ' is the best man in the town for carrying a billet ; the fellow has a thin body, swift step, demure looks, sufficient sense, and knows the town . . . the fellow covers his knowledge of the nature of his messages with the most exquisite low humour imaginable ; the first he obliged Flavia to take was by complaining to her that he had a wife and three children, and if she did not take that letter, which he was sure there was no harm in, but rather love, his family must go supperless to bed, for the gentleman would pay him according as he did his business.'' He would seem to have been a mild Leporello. We find the cheapness of living at coifee-houses fre- quently extolled in the publications and conversations of the day in which they were most flourishing. An Irish painter, whom Johnson knew, declared that £30 a year was enough to enable a man to live in London, without being contemptible. He allowed dCIO for clothes and linen. He said a man might live in a garret at Is. 6d. a week ; few people would inquire where he lodged, and if they did, it was easy to say : ' Sir, you will find me at such and such a place , — just as nowadays impecunious swells, who live in garrets, manage to keep up their club subscription, and give as their address that of the club. By spending threepence at a coffee-house, John- son's Irish painter further argued, a man might be for some hours every day in very good company ; he might dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread-and-milk for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt day the painter went out to pay visits, as Swift also did. 3 34 LONDON SOUVENIRS With regard to the persons employed in a coffee- house, we learn from one advertisement : ' To prevent all mistakes among gentlemen of the other end of the town, who come but once a week to St. James's Coffee- house, either by miscalling the servants, or requiring such things from them as are not properly within their respective provinces, this is to give notice that Kidney, keeper of the book-debts of the outlying customers, and observer of those who go off without paying, having resigned that employment, is succeeded by John Sowton, to whose place of caterer of messages and first coffee- grinder William Bird is promoted, and Samuel Bardock comes as shoe-cleaner in the room of the said Bird.' Well, the coffee-houses are things of the past ; a few survive as taverns. What may be considered as their successors are called coffee-shops, patronized by working- men chiefly, but the ' humours ' are of the tamest description ; they may supply statistics to temperance apostles, but no literary entertainment to the public. IV. OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS. SOMEBODY has said that, on making inquiry after a man you have not seen for a number of years, you may find him either in the hulks or in Parlia- ment. This somebody evidently was a bit of a philo- sopher, who knew how to put the possibilities of human life in a nutshell. He understood that the same cause may have totally different effects : the same heat which softens lead hardens clay, the same abilities which may send a man to penal servitude may elevate him to the dignity of an M.P. And thus it happened that some queer people got into Parliament, which, no doubt, was the fact which gave rise to somebody's wise saw, and which was not to be wondered at in the good old days, before Reform and Corrupt Practices Prevention Acts, and similar humbugging interferences with the liberty of the subject, were dreamt of. In those good old days of rotten and pocket boroughs men had Parliamentary honours thrust upon them nolcntes volentes. Thus, a noble lord, who owned several such boroughs, was asked by the returning officer whom he meant to nominate. Having no eligible candidate at hand, he named a waiter 3—2 36 LONDON SOUVENIRS at White's Club, one Robert Mackreth ; but, as he did not happen to be sure of the Christian name of his nominee, the election was declared to be void. Nothing daunted, his lordship persisted in his nomination. A fresh election was therefore held, when, the name of the waiter having been ascertained, he was returned as a matter of course, and Robert Mackreth, Esq., took his seat in St. Stephen's. This was possible in the days of Eldon and Perceval ; in fact, in the early part of this century, 306 members, more than half of the House of Commons, were returned by 160 persons, and in 1830 it was admitted that, though there were men of ability in the Cabinet, such as Brougham, Lansdowne, Melbourne, Palmerston, the members of the House were 'persons of very narrow capacities, of small reputation for talent, and without influence with the people." 1 However, the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, and pocket boroughs were abolished. There had been thirty- seven places returning members with constituencies not exceeding fifty electors, and fourteen of those places had not more than twenty electors. There were three boroughs each containing only one =£?10 householder. One of the boroughs only paid in assessed taxes ^3 9s., another £16 8s. 9d., a third =£40 17s. Id. But, luckily for the public, the Reform Bill did not abolish the fun of the flags, music, beer, and jokes of elections. The delicate attentions which could still be paid to candidates remained in full swing. Thus, we remember an election in the Isle of Wight : The father of one of the candidates for Parliamentary distinction, in the Conservative in- terest, had, in his youthful days, married a lady who, in a peripatetic manner, dealt in oysters. His rival, a OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS 37 Radical, paid him the compliment of sending him daily barrows and truck-loads of oyster-shells, which were, with his kind regards, discharged in front of the hotel where his committee was established, and from whose windows he addressed the electors. It was splendid fun, and calculated to impress the intelligent foreigner. It showed how highly the British public appreciated their elective franchise. Pleasantries had, indeed, always been the rule at election-time. When Fox, in 1802, canvassed Westminster, he asked a shopkeeper on the opposite side for his vote and interest, when the latter produced a halter, and said that was all he could give him. Fox thanked him, but said he could not think of depriving him of it, as no doubt it was a family relic. At an election at Norwich in 1875 the committee-room of the Conservative candidate was attacked, but the agent kept up the fire and had red-hot pokers ready, which, stand- ing at the top of the stairs, he offered to his assailants, but they would not take them ! In the same town the Liberals held a prayer-meeting, at which the Conserva- tives presented each man with one of Moody and Sankey's hymn-books, with something between the leaves. In fact, the Reform Bill had not made elections pure. William Roupell obtained his seat for Lambeth by the expenditure of £1 0,000, 'and, 1 said a man well able to judge of the truth of his assertion, 'if he were released from prison (to which he was sent for life for his forgeries) and would spend another ^10,000, he would be re- elected, in spite of his having proved a criminal."' Money carried the day at elections. According to a speech made by Mr. Bright at Glasgow in 1866, a member had told him that his election had cost him 38 LONDON SOUVENIRS £9,000 already, and that he had £3,000 more to pay. At a contest in North Shropshire in 1876, the expenses of the successful candidate, Mr. Stanley Leighton, amounted to £1 1,727, and of the defeated candidate, Mr. Mainwaring, to £10,688. At the General Election of 1880, in the county of Middlesex, the expenses of the successful candidates, Lord George Hamilton and Mr. Octavius Coope, were £11,506. The cost of the Gravesend election, and the petition which followed and unseated the candidate returned, was estimated at £20,000. But the most expensive contest ever known in electioneering was that for the representation of Yorkshire. The candidates were Viscount Milton, son of Earl Fitzwilliam, a Whig ; the Hon. Henry Lascelles, son of Lord Harewood, a Tory ; and William Wilber- force, in the Dissenting and Independent interest. The election was carried on for fifteen days, Mr. Wilberforce being at the head of the poll all the time. It terminated in his favour and in that of Lord Milton. The contest is said to have cost the parties near half a million pounds. The expenses of Wilberforce were defrayed by public subscription, more than double the sum being raised within a few days, and one moiety was afterwards returned to the subscribers. When Whitbread, the brewer, first opposed the Duke of Bedford's interest at Bedford, the Duke informed him that he w r ould spend £50,000 rather than that he should come in. Whit- bread replied that was nothing, the sale of his grains would pay for that. Now, John Elwes, the miser, knew better than that. Though worth half a million of money, he entered Parliament, by the interest of Lord Craven, at the expense of Is. 6d., for which he had a OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS 39 dinner at Abingdon. From 1774 he sat for the next twelve years for Berkshire, his conduct being perfectly independent, and in his case there had been no bribery that could be brought home to him. He was a great gambler, and, after staking large sums all night, he would, in the morning, go to Smithfield to await the arrival of his cattle from his farms in Essex, and, if not arrived, would walk on to meet them. He wore a wig ; if he found one thrown away into the gutter, he would appropriate and wear it. In those days members occa- sionally wore dress-swords at the House. One day a gentleman seated next to Elwes was rising to leave his place, and just at that moment Elwes bent forward, so that the point of the sword the gentleman wore came in contact with Elwes's wig, which it whisked off and earned away. The House was instantly in a roar of laughter, whilst the gentleman, unconscious of what he had done, calmly walked away, and Elwes after him to recover his wig, which looked as if it was one of those he had picked up in the gutter. Bribes were expected and given, as we have seen. Of course, the thing was not done openly. Tricks were practised, understood by all parties. The agent would sit in a room in an out-of-the-way place. A voter would come in ; the agent would say, ' How are you to-day P 1 and hold up three fingers. ' I am not very well, 1 the answer would be, when the agent would accidentally hold up his hand, upon which the voter would say that he thought fresh air would do him good, and look out of the window as if examining the sky. In the mean- time the agent would place five sovereigns on the table, and also go to look at the weather. His back being 40 LONDON SOUVENIRS turned to the table, the voter would quietly slip the cash into his pocket, and, saying ' Good-morning,' 1 take his departure. And how could any bribery be proved ? But occasionally the people expecting bribes were nicely taken in. Lord Cochrane, when he first stood for Honiton, refused to give bribes, and the seat was secured by his opponent, who gave £5 for every vote. On this Cochrane sent the bellman round to announce that he would give to every one of the minority who had voted for him 10 guineas. At the next election no questions were asked, and Cochrane was returned by an over- whelming majority. Those who had voted for him then intimated that they expected some acknowledgment for their support. He declined to give a penny, and when he was reminded that, after the former election, he had given 10 guineas to every one of the minority, he coolly replied that this was for their disinterestedness in refusing his opponent's £5, and that to pay them now would be acting in violation of his principle not to bribe. And the disinterested voters marched off with faces as long- as those of horses. The Reform Bill of 1832, which was highly objection- able to old-fashioned Conservatives, was accused by them of having introduced some very queer and curious members into the House. Through this Bill the bone- grubber, as Raike calls him, W. Cobbett, was returned for Oldham, and Brighton, under the very nose of the Court, returned two rampant Radicals, who openly talked of reducing the allowance made to the King and Queen. Nay, John Gully, a prize-fighter, was returned to the House for Pontefract, and was re-elected at the next election. He at one time kept the Plough Inn in OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS 41 Carey Street, which was pulled down just before the erection of the new Law Courts. Eventually he resigned his seat on account of ill-health, as he averred ; but as he became a great patron of racing, and was a constant attendant at the various race-courses, his ill-health was probably only a pretence for quitting a sphere for which he felt himself unfit. On his first election the following epigram appeared against him : ' If anyone ask why should Pontef ract sully Its name by returning to Parliament Gully, The etymological cause, I suppose, is He's broken the bridges of so many noses.' Another member who may be reckoned among the curiosities who have sat in the House was William Roupell. He was the illegitimate son of Richard Palmer Roupell, a wealthy lead merchant, who invested a large sum in the purchase of land, to which he gave the name of the Roupell Park Estate. William was his favourite son, though he had other legitimate children ; and it was not till a few days before his father's death that he learnt the secret of his own birth. The former had made a will, by which he left this property to William, on condition of his making annual payments to his brothers and sisters ; but as this would have brought to light the forgeries he had already com- mitted during his father's lifetime, to the amount of about dfl 50,000, he, on his father's death, managed to get hold of the will, which eventually he destroyed, substituting a forged one, leaving all to his wife and William ; and the latter quickly persuaded his mother to confer the greater part of the estates on him by deed 42 LONDON SOUVENIRS of gift. He soon obtained the social position the great wealth he now possessed usually commands; he stood for Lambeth, and by the expenditure of i?l 0,000, as already mentioned, he obtained the seat. But Roupell was not only a rogue, but a fool. By gambling and extravagance he soon ran through the fortune he had obtained by crooked means. Finding the detection of his crimes inevitable, he fled to Spain, but eventually returned, and gave himself up to justice, confessing the forgeries he had committed. Of course, the persons who had purchased property then became aware that the deeds by which they held it were worthless. The court considered his offences so serious that in 1862 it condemned him to penal servitude for life ; but he was released after an imprisonment of fourteen years. In 1876 he left Portland a free man again. But it is with Roupell as a member of Parliament we are chiefly concerned. In that capacity he did not shine. He remained in the House long enough to prove that he was disqualified to represent a large borough like Lambeth. He took no part in the debates, nor did he appear to be able to grapple with and master any question connected with politics. Being asked one evening at the Horns, when meeting his constituents, why he did not speak in the House of Commons, he replied : ' Because I do not want to make a fool of myself. 1 Next morning the Times made merry with this confession. He was consequently regarded as a cipher, but he was supported by his supposed wealth. But soon suspicious murmurs began to be heard, and he prepared for his flight to Spain ; and he decamped without making any application for the Chiltern OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS 43 Hundreds, so that for a considerable time his place in Parliament could not be filled up. Advertisements in GaUgnani apprised him of the omission, and at length the application was made. He did not meet with much pity, either from the public or the press ; squibs without end appeared against him in the papers. We append a specimen of a short one : 1 Now, the Lambeth folks this wealthy gent As their member did decide on, But little they knew he'd happened to do Some things he didn't oughter ; For he'd forged a will and several deeds. . . . ' And the public said : " Well, this here Roupell Has got no more than he oughter." So there was an end of the wealthy gent As was member from over the water.' Lambeth appears to have been unfortunate in the selection of its Parliamentary candidates. In 1852 the parochial party, wishing for a local man, formed them- selves into a committee to secure the election of Mr. Joseph Harvey, of Lambeth House, a drapery estab- lishment in the Westminster Bridge Road. Mr. Harvey had never taken an active part in public matters ; his tastes lay not that way. He shrank from public life, and had no training or aptitude for addressing large meetings. However, he was forced forward ; but when he spoke at the Horns — the speech was written for him by someone else — his total in- capacity for the position thrust on him became so apparent that he gave up the contest, but not before he had afforded plenty of food to the squib-writers. Parliament is not above the use of nicknames, either 44 LONDON SOUVENIRS by way of praise or in scorn. Cobbett\s talent for fastening such names on anyone he disliked was very great. He invented ' Prosperity Robinson,' ' iEolus Canning,'' ' Pink-nosed Liverpool, 1 ' unbaptized, button- less blackguards,'' or Quakers. Lord Yarmouth, from the colour of his whiskers, and from the place which gave him his title, was known as ' Red Herrings. 1 Lord Durham so often opposed his colleagues in the Cabinet that he was called the ' Dissenting Minister. 1 Thomas Duncombe was so popular that he was always spoken of as ' Honest 1 or ' Poor 1 Tom ; his French friends called him ' Cher Tonne.' John Arthur Roe- buck had a habit of bringing forward, in a startling way, facts he had got hold of, and thus raising opposition ; and from a passage in a speech he made at the Cutlers 1 Feast, at Sheffield, in 1858, obtained the nickname of 'Tear 'em.' He had just paid a visit to Cherbourg, and returned home with feelings very unfriendly to the then ruler of France, to which he gave expression at the feast, excusing himself at the same time for using such language towards a neighbour by saying : ' The farmer who goes to sleep, having placed the watch-dog, Tear 'em, over his rick-yard, hears that dog bark. He bawls out of the window : " Down, Tear 'em, down I 11 And Tear 1 em does not again disturb his sleep, till he is woke up by the strong blaze of his corn and hay ricks. I am Tear "em. Beware ! Cherbourg is a standing menace to England. 1 Michael Angelo Taylor was known by the sobriquet of ' Chicken 1 Taylor. On some points of law he had answered the great lawyer Bearcroft, but not without apologizing for his ven- turing, he being but a chicken in the law, on a fight OLD M.P.S AND SOME OF THEIR SAYINGS 45 with the cock of Westminster Hall. Charles Wynn was brother to Sir Watkin Wynn, and from a peculi- arity in the utterances of the latter, and the shrillness of Charles's voice, the two went by the nicknames of ' Bubble and Squeak." Sir Watkin was also known as ' Small Journal 1 Wynn, from his extensive knowledge of Parliamentary rule. William Cowper, falsely accused of having married a second wife whilst his first was still alive, was known as ' Will Bigamy." 1 Strangers formerly were not allowed to be present at the deliberations of the House ; now they are admitted to the Strangers"' Gallery, but never to the floor of the House. Yet sometimes there will be an intruder. Once Lord North, when speaking, was interrupted by the barking of a dog which had crept in. He turned round, and said : ' Mr. Speaker, I am interrupted by a new member. 1 The dog was driven out, but got in again, and recommenced barking, when Lord North, in his dry way, said : ' Spoke once." 1 We are near the limits of our space. Let us con- clude with recording a few of the strange designations given to Parliaments. The Parliament de la Bonde was a Parliament in the reign of Edward II., to which the Barons came armed against the Spencers, with coloured bands, or ' bonds, 1 upon their sleeves, by way of distinction. The Diabolical Parliament was one held at Coventry in the thirty-eighth year of Henry VI.'s reign, and in which Edward, Earl of March, afterwards King, and several of the nobility, were attainted. The Unlearned Parliament, held at Coventry in the sixth year of the reign of Henry IV., was so called by way of derision, because, by a special precept to the sheriffs 46 LONDON SOUVENIRS in their several counties, no lawyers were to be admitted thereto. The Insane Parliament, which was held at Oxford in the forty-first year of the reign of Henry III., obtained this name from the extraordinary proceedings of the Lords, who came with great retinues of armed men, ' when contention grew very high, and many things were enacted contrary to the King's prerogative. 1 We might add to the list, but the gas is being turned off; so vale! V. FAMOUS OLD ACTORS. / ""]i~" v HERE is a boom just now in the theatrical world. -*■ New theatres are springing up, not only in London proper, but in all its suburbs, yet it is only history repeating itself. From 1570 to 1629 no less than seventeen playhouses had been built in London, and London then extended only from the Tower to Westminster, and from Oxford Street to Blackman Street in the Borough. The first London theatre was the Fortune,* opened about the year 1600, a large round, brick building between Whitecross Street and Golding — now Golden — Lane, which was burnt down on December 9, 1621 . The town was then full of actors, for besides those playing at the various theatres, there were royal comedians. Many noblemen kept companies of players, nay, the lawyers acted in the Inns of Court, and there were actors of note among them. But the inevitable reaction ensued. Amidst the storms of the Revolution the stage was neglected. Even Shakespeare * The Curtain is said to have been erected in 1570, on the site of the present Curtain Road, but the date is doubtful, and it was more of an inn than a playhouse. 48 LONDON SOUVENIRS had to take a back-seat till Garrick brought him into fashion again, though it is chiefly to the learned and enthusiastic criticism and appreciation of German students of Shakespeare that the revival of his plays on the stage is due. His reputation was ' made in Ger- many ,' and the Germans we have to thank for a Shake- speare who is presentable to a modern audience, which the original writer was not ; his plays were only fit to be acted before the savages who delighted in bull and bear baiting. This estimate of the Shakespearian drama is not in accordance with the prevailing sentiment, but we have a right to our opinions and the courage to express them. However, this is only incidental to our theme, which deals more with actors and acting than with the plays they took parts in. There is a general opinion abroad that the realistic play is of quite modern date, probably brought on the stage in * LTAssommoir. 1 In a publication of July, 1797, I find it stated that 'our managers some time ago conceived it would be proper to introduce realities instead of fictions. Hence we have seen real horses and real bulls on the stage, gracing the triumphal entry of some hero. Hence, too, real water has been supplied in such quantities that Harlequin's leap into the sea would now really be no joke. . . . The introduction of water will, no doubt, facilitate the introduction of real sea-fights, provided we can get real admirals and sea- men.'' But the writer seems to have been oblivious of the fact that, in the middle of the last century, already the water of the New River had been carried under the flooring of Sadler's Wells Theatre, the boards being removed, for the exhibition of aquatic performances. FAMOUS OLD ACTORS 49 And as to this century, long before the more recent realistic plays, we have seen in the sixties a real cab with a real horse brought on to the stage to give the heroine, who is about to elope, the opportunity of uttering the pun : ' Now, four-wheeler, wo P (for weal or woe !). And a very good pun it is. The formation of the English drama is chiefly due to the ' Children of Paul, 1 or pupils of St. Paul's School, in those days nicknamed the 'Pigeons of St. Paul. 1 The dramatic celebrity of these juvenile performers goes back as far as the year 1378. Originally they confined themselves to ' moralities, 1 but in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, before whom they acted on various occasions, they appeared in the regular drama with considerable applause. They exhibited burlesque interludes and farcical comedies. Their schoolroom, which stood behind the Convocation House near St. Paul's, was their stage ; but about the year 1580 the citizens, bent on driving all players out of the city, caused it to be removed. The plague had, as usual, caused great ravages in London, and it was thought that the actors were great means of spreading it, wherefore their performances were altogether prohibited. When the ' Children of Paul 1 performed out of their own premises, it was generally the Blackfriars Theatre they resorted to. When they performed in the school-house the admission was 2d. This charge was made to keep the company select, and according to a passage in ' Jacke Drum's Entertainment, 1 first printed in 1601, it was select : ' Sir Edward : I saw the " Children of Paul's " last night, and troth, they pleased me prettie, prettie well. The apes in time will do it handsomely. 4 50 LONDON SOUVENIRS ' Planet : I like the audience that frequenteth there with much applause. A man shall not be choked with the stench of garlick, nor be passed to the barmy jacket of a beer brewer. 1 The stage did not attain a dignified position till the time of Shakespeare. He and his fellow-actors — Burbage, Heminge, Condell, Taylor, Kemp, Sly — ennobled it, and since then the roll of English actors who have gained distinction on the boards is very long, and our limited space allows us to refer to but a few of them, and then only to some characteristic traits. Let us commence with a defence of Garrick's conduct towards Johnson. When the latter was preparing his edition of ' Shakespeare, 1 Garrick offered him the use of his choice library. But, entering the room, he found Johnson, according to his usual habit, pulling the books off the shelves, breaking their backs, more easily to read them, and throwing them carelessly on the floor. Garrick naturally grew very angry, for which he has been much abused, charged with ' having acted in abominably bad taste . . . without any true gentle- manly feeling . . . that knowing his friend's character . . . Garrick ought to have been prepared for any slight unfavourable consequences. He ought to have known that much might be excused in so great a man, 1 etc. Now, this is most undeserved censure on a man of greater parts than Johnson ever could boast of. The only thing he ever wrote which will live is his Dictionary. As to his greatness, if unabashed bounce and a dictatorial jaw constitute greatness, he certainly, judging him by Bozzy's account, could lay claim to such. Garrick's generosity induced him to offer a bear the use of his FAMOUS OLD ACTORS 51 books. Still, he had a right to expect that even a bear, who professed to admire and practise literature, would know how to treat books. But the bear remained a bear everywhere. He treated Mr. Thrale's books no better. But Garrick was generous in other ways. He was often visited at his villa, near Sunbury, by a gentle- man with whom he used to have lone; and violent argu- ments on various matters, the visitor generally differing from, and contradicting, his host. One day Garrick, at the gentleman's request, readily lent him i?100. Their discussions continued, but the visitor was no longer so violent in his arguments, nor did he contradict Garrick as he had done formerly. On one occasion, when Garrick had reintroduced an argument his friend had always violently combated, but now mildly conceded, Garrick, who liked a lively discussion, jumped up and exclaimed : ' Pay me my hundred pounds, or contradict me I 1 Garrick's generous nature broke forth in that exclamation, and he did not wish his friend to feel under an obligation. That his character was gentle and chivalrous is proved by the fact that his wife and he were considered the fondest pair ever known, though the lady was a woman with plenty of spirit. Her letter of remonstrance against Keaifs Abel Drugger was brief: ' Dear Sik, — You don't know how to play Abel Drugger. 1 To which Kean courteously, yet wittily, replied : ' Dear Madam, — I know it." 1 She must have been very sprightly, too, for when at the age of ninety-eight, and about two months before her death (November, 1822), she visited Westminster Abbey, she asked the clergyman who attended her if there would be room for her by the side of her David — ' not, 1 she said, ' that I think I am 4—2 52 LONDON SOUVENIRS likely soon to require it, for I am yet a mere girl P She was a Viennese danseuse, Madame Violette, when Garrick married her, and Horace Walpole reports that it was whispered at the time that she had been sent over to England by no less a person than the Empress-Queen, Maria Theresa, to be out of the way of that somewhat jealous lady's husband. Apprehensive that he might be ridiculed for marrying a dancer, Garrick got some friend to satirize him publicly beforehand. But we have seen that the marriage turned out a very happy one. Garrick had been the pupil of Johnson, when the latter kept, or attempted to keep, a school near Lichfield, and he and his two fellow-pupils (he never had more than two) used to peep through the keyhole of his bedroom that they might turn into ridicule the doctor's awkward fondness for Mrs. Johnson, who was by many years her husband's senior, and elephantine in her figure, with swollen cheeks and a red complexion, produced by paint and the liberal use of cordials. In after-years Garrick used to exhibit her, by his exquisite talent of mimicry, so as to excite the heartiest bursts of laughter. This may seem ungenerous, but Johnson paid Garrick back in the same coin. Vexed at Garrick's great success in his profession, he made it his business always to express the greatest contempt for actors. Quin, the contemporary of Garrick, and his rival, was employed by Prince Frederick to instruct the Royal children in elocution, and when he was informed of the graceful manner in which George III. had delivered his first speech from the throne, he proudly said : ' Aye, it was I who taught the boy to speak . 1 Quin could be witty. Disputing concerning the execution of Charles L, FAMOUS OLD ACTORS 53 and his opponent asking, ' But by what laws was he put to death P 1 Quin replied : ' By all the laws he had left them. 1 When playing at Bath, he was at an evening party, where the transmigration of souls was being discussed. A lady, remarkable for the whiteness of her neck and bust, asked him what animal he would wish to be transformed into. Quin, looking sharply at a fly then travelling over her white neck, with an arch glance at her, said : ' A fly !' On another occasion to Lady Berkeley, a celebrated beauty, he said : ' Why, your ladyship is looking as charming as the spring. 1 The season was spring, but the day was raw and cold, and Quin, seeing he had paid the lady but a poor com- pliment, corrected himself by adding : ' Or, rather, I wish the spring would look a little more like your lady- ship. 1 In Clare Street, Clare Market, there is a public-house called the Sun. John Rich, the harlequin and lessee of the Duke's Theatre in Portugal Street (long since taken down), returning from the theatre in a hackney-coach, ordered to be driven to the Sun. On arriving there, he jumped out of the coach, and through the window into the public-house. The coachman thought his fare was a 'bilk*; but whilst he was still looking up and down the street, Rich again jumped into the coach, and told the driver to take him to another public-house. On reaching it, Rich offered to pay the coachman, but the latter refused the money, saying : ' No, none of your money, Mr. Devil ; though you wear shoes, I can see your hoofs '; and he drove off' as quickly as possible. The theatre called the Duke's Theatre, in Portugal Street, was rebuilt by Christopher Rich, the father of 54 LONDON SOUVENIRS the above-mentioned John, but he died before the building was quite finished, and it was opened by John ; and it is in this theatre that the modern stage took its rise, and here the earliest Shakespearian re- vivals took place. Quin was one of the performers there ; and there the ' Beggar's Opera ' was first pro- duced, and acted on sixty-two nights in one season, causing the saying that it made Gay rich and Rich gay. The opera was written under the auspices of the Duchess of Queensberry, who agreed to indemnify Rich in all expenses if the daring speculation should fail. Rich, in 1731, built himself a new theatre — the Covent Garden Theatre — on a site granted by the Duke of Bedford, at a ground-rent of i?100 per annum. When a new lease was granted, in 1792, the ground-rent was raised to £94:0 per annum. When Thomas Killigrew was manager of the theatre in Bear Yard, Clare Market, he was a great favourite with Charles II. This King at times showed great indiffer- ence to the business of the State, and refused to attend the Council. One day, when he had been long ex- pected, Lord Lauderdale went to his apartments, but was refused admission. His lordship complained to Nell Gwynne, upon which she wagered him £100 that the King; would that evening attend the Council. Then she sent for Killigrew, and asked him to dress as if for a journey, and to enter the King's rooms without ceremony, with further instructions what he was to do then. As soon as the King saw him, he said : ' What, Killigrew ! Where are you going ? Did I not give orders that I was not to be disturbed T FAMOUS OLD ACTORS 55 ' I don't mind your orders, and I am going as fast as I can. -1 ' Why, where are you going P 1 'To hell,' replied the jester in a sepulchral tone. ' What are you going to do there ?' asked the King, laughing. ' To fetch back Oliver Cromwell, to take some care of the national affairs, for I am sure your Majesty takes none.'' And the King went to the Council. Another famous comedian of that day was Joe Haines, who was an Oxford M.A., but a scamp of the first order, who managed to cheat even the rector of the Jesuit College in Paris out of cP40 by a pretended note from the Duke of Monmouth. Not long after, meeting with a simple-minded clergyman, he told him that he was one of the patentees of Drury Lane, and appointed him his chaplain, instructing him at the same time to go to the theatre with a large bell, to ring it, and call out : ' Players, come to prayers P Which the clergyman did, till he found he had been hoaxed. In the reign of James II., this Haines turned Roman Catholic, and told Sunderland that the Virgin Mary had appeared, and said to him : ' Joe, arise P To this Sunderland dryly replied that she should have said ' Joseph, 1 if only out of respect for her husband. The greatest actor at the time of Charles II. was undoubtedly Thomas Betterton. He joined the com- pany of Sir William Davenant in 1662. Pepys fre- quently went to see him. In those days the pay of actors was not what it is now ; Betterton, in spite of the position he held in public estimation, never had 56 LONDON SOUVENIRS more than =£5 a week, including £1, by way of pension, to his wife, who retired in 1694. In 1709 he took a benefit, at which the money taken at the doors was £15, but he received also more than £4*50 in compli- mentary guineas ; and in the following year he had another benefit, by which he netted about iP^OOO. Of course, according to modern notions, these are but small receipts ; but they are better than what seems to have been the standard of theatrical payments in 1511 — judging from a bill of that year, without name of place where the acting took place, but which states that it was performed on the feast of St. Margaret (July 20). According to legend, the devil, in the shape of a dragon, swallowed St. Margaret, but she speedily made her escape, and was thus considered to possess great powers of assisting women in childbirth. The bill runs thus : ' To musicians, for three nights, £0 5s. 6d. ; for players in bread and ale, £0 3s. Id. ; for decorations, dresses, and play-books, £1 0s. Od. ; to John Hobbard, priest, and author of the piece, £0 2s. 8d. ; for the place in which the presentation was held, £0 Is. Od for furniture, £0 Is. 4d. ; for fish and bread, £0 0s. 4d for painting three phantoms and devils, i?0 0s. 6d and for four chickens for the hero, £0 0s. 4d.'' We see here the author received only 2s. 8d. for writing the play. Matters have improved since then ; Sheridan realized i?3,000 by the sale of his altered play of ' Pizarro.'' In the early part of this century authors of successful pieces received from the theatre from o^250 to d^SOO, and from the purchaser of the copyright for publication from d(?100 to