says the poet. But he was weak, wilful, and, by his readiness to become a clergyman from a captain, perhaps not very principled. The truest love is the truest benevolence; it acquires an infinite patience out of the very excess of its suffering, and is content to merge its egotism in the idea of the beloved object. He that does not know this, does not know what love is, whatever he may know of passion. In Henrietta street Mrs Clive once resided. She was the favourite Nell of the stage in the Devil to Pay,' and similar characters; and, according to Garrick, there was something of the Devil to Pay in all her stage life. She might have been Macklin's sister for humour, judgment, and a sturdiness of purpose amounting to violence, not unmixed with generosity. The latter part of her life she spent in retirement at Strawberry hill, where she was a neighbour and friend to Horace Walpole, whose effeminacy she helped to keep on the alert. It always seems to us, as if she had been the man of the two, and he the woman. Henrietta street was most probably named after the queen of Charles I., and James street after her father-in-law. In both these streets lived the egregious almanack-maker and quack doctor, the butt of the wits of his time. He died in Salisbury street, Strand, which is the scene of his posthumous behaviour, his pretending to be alive, when Bickerstaff had declared him dead. Partridge had foretold the death of the French king. Swift, under the name of Bickerstaff, foretold Partridge's, and, when the time came, insisted he was dead. Partridge gravely insisted that he was alive. The wits, the friends of Swift, maintained the contrary, wondering at the dead man's impudence; and the whole affair was hawked about the streets, to the ludicrous distress of poor Partridge, who not only highly resented it, and repeatedly advertised his existence, but was fairly obliged to give up almanack making. "He per sisted, indeed, sturdily in his refusal to be buried till 1715; but he actually died as an almanackmaker in 1709, his almanack for that year being the last, and the only one he wrote after this odd misfortune befell him.*" The following are specimens of the way in which Partridge resisted his death and burial. In the almanack for 1709, he says, "You may remember there was a paper published predicting my death on the 29th of March, at night, 1708, and after that day was passed the same villain told the world I was dead, and how I died, and that he was with me at the time of my death. I thank God, by whose mercy I have my being, that I am still alive, and, excepting my age, as well as ever I was in my life, as I was on that 29th of March. And that paper was said to be done by one Bickerstaff, Esq., but that was a sham name, it was done by an impudent lying fellow. What will he But his prediction did not prove true. say to excuse that? for the fool had considered the star of my nativity, as he said. Why, the truth is, he will be hard put to it to find a salvo for his honour. It was a bold touch, and he did not know but it might prove true. "Feb. 1709. Much lying news dispersed about this time, and also scandalous pamphlets; perhaps we may have some knavish scribbler, a second Bickerstaff, or a rascal under that name for that villain, &c. It is a cheat, and he a knave that did it, &c. Bickerstaff, Esq., and others, to prevent the sale of of In James street, towards the beginning of the last private apartments of Queen Anne; though after Neen Ho Ga Prow, and Sa Ga Yean Qua Prah Ion of the Maqua's;-Elow Oh Kaom, and Oh Nee: Yeath Ion No Prow, of the river | Sachem, and the Ganajoh-hore Sachem. On the 18th of April 1710, according to Salmon, on the 19th according to Boyer, these four illustrious personages were con- : veyed in two of the Queen's coaches to St James's, by Sir Charles Cotterel, master of the ceremonies, and introduced to their public audience by the Duke of Shrewsbury, then Lord-Chamberlain. They made a speech by an interpreter, which Major Pidgeon, an officer who came over with them from America, read in English to her Majesty. "They had (they said) with one consent hung up the kettle and taken : up the hatchet, in token of their friendship to their great queen and her children, and had been, on the other side of the great water, a strong wall of security to their great queen's children, even to the lose of their best men. For the truth of what they affirmed, and their written proposals, they referred to Colonel Scuyder and Colonel Nicholson, whom they called, in their language, Brother Queder, and Anadgargaux, and, speaking of Colonel Vetch, they named him Anadiasia. world. They said they always con sidered the French as men of falsehood, and rejoiced in the prospect of the reduction of Canada; after which they should have free hunting, and a great trade with their great queen's children; and as a token of the sincerity of the six nations, in the name of all, they presented their great queen with the belts of wampum. They concluded their speech with recommending their very hard case to their great queen's gracious consideration, expressing their hopes of her favour, and requesting the mission of more of her children to reinforce and to instruct, for they had got, as they said, since their alliance with her children, some knowledge of the Saviour of the The curious may see this speech at full “It was conjectured that she might be the daugh- length, in the Annals of Queen Anne,' year 9th, ter of a Roman Catholic, who had consigned her to p. 191, et seq. 8vo. On the same day, according to Boyer, a royal messager of the Emperor of a convent, whence a brother had released her and Morocco, Elhadge Guzman, was likewise introduced supported her in privacy. She was buried at St by the Duke of Shrewsbury to a private audience, Paul's, Covent garden." Perhaps she had some and delivered letters to the Queen from Mula Ishmael, connexion with Queen Anne's brother, the Prehis master; the same emperor, probably, who sent tender. an ambassador to our court in 1706, mentioned the Tatler,' No. 130, and note, vol. iii, p. 44. The Indian Kings continued about a fortnight longer in London, during which time they were hospitably entertained by some of the lords commissioners of the Admiralty, by the Duke of Ormond, and several persons of distinction. They were carried to see 6 In King street lived the father of Arne and Mrs be « Whereas, it has been industriously given out by from the account of them in this paper: Tee Yee • Account of John Partridge, in the Appendix to the Tatler, vol. iv. p. 613. • Anecdotes, Manners, and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century,' vol. i, p. 407. Dr Flamstead's house and the mathematical instruments in Greenwich Park, and entertained with the sight of the principal curiosities in and about the metropolis; then conveyed to Portsmouth through Hampton Court and Windsor, and embarked with Colonel Francis Nicholson, commander-in-chief of the forces appointed to the American service, on board the Dragon, Captain Martin, Commodore, who, with about eighteen sail under his convoy, sailed from Spithead on the 18th of May, and landed their Majesties safe at Boston, in New England, July 15, 1710."* Their names are like a set of yawn's and sneezes. Young Arne, who was born in King street, was a musician against his father's will, and practised in the garret, on a muffled spinnet, when the family had He was sent to Eton, which was gone to bed *Tatler,' ut supra, vol. iii, p. 397. probably of use to him in confirming his natural refinement, but nothing could hinder his devoting himself to the art. It is said the old man had no suspicion of his advancement in it, till, going to a concert one evening, he was astonished to see his son exalted, bow in hand, as the leader. Seeing the praises bestowed on him, he suffered him to become what nature designed him for. Arne was the most flowing, Italian-like musician of any we have had in England; not capable of the grandeur and profound style of Purcell, but more sustained, continuous, and seductive. His Water parted' is a stream of sweetnes; his song, 'When daisies pied,' truly Shaksperian, full of archness and originality. Like many of his profession, who feel much more than they reflect, he became, in some measure, the victim of his sense of beauty, being excessively addicted to women. His sister, Mrs Cibber, whose charming performances on the stage we have before noticed, did not escape without the reputation of a like tendency; but she had a bad husband (the notorious Theophilus Cibber); and on the occasion that gave rise to it, is understood to have been the victim of his mercenary designs. Southampton street we have noticed in speaking of the Strand. Godfrey's, the chemist's, in this street, is an establishment of old standing, as may be seen by the inscription over the door. A hundred years ago, Mr Ambrose Godfrey, who lived here, proposed to extinguish fires by a new method of "explosion and suffocation;" that is to say a mixture of water and gunpowder. Tavistock street (where Lord Sandwich first saw Miss Ray) was once the great emporium of millinery and mantua-making. Macklin died there. He lived many years in Wyld street. In Maiden lane, Voltaire lodged, when in England, at the sign of the White Peruke, probably the house of a fashionable French peruquier. In Swift's Works' (vol. xx, of the duodecimo edition, p. 294,) there is a letter to him, in English, by Voltaire, and dated from this house. The English seems a little too perfect. There is another following it which looks more authentic. But there is no doubt that Voltaire, while in England, made himself such a master of the language, as to be able to and have not stood their ground. Voltaire left England with such a mass of subscriptions for his 'Henriade,' as laid the foundation of his fortunes, and with great admiration of English talent and genius, particularly that of Newton and Locke, which, with all his insinuations about our poetry, he took warm pains to extend, and never gave up. He was fond to the last of showing he had not forgotten his English. Somebody telling him that Johnson had spoken well of his talents, he said, in English "He is a clever fellow;" but the gentleman observing that the doctor did not think well of his religion, he added, "a superstitious dog." During his residence in Maiden lane, there is a story of Voltaire's having been beset, in one of his walks, by the people, who ridiculed him as a Frenchman. He got upon the steps of a door-way and harangued them in their own language in praise of English liberty and the nation; upon which, the story adds, they hailed him as a fine fellow, and carried him to his lodgings on their shoulders. The treatment of foreigners at this time in the streets of London (and every foreigner was a Frenchman), was very much the reverse of what the inhabitants took it for. Thanks to the progress of knowledge, nations have learnt to understand one another's common cause better, and to suspect that the most ridiculous thing they could do is to forget it. Long Acre is a portion of the seven acres before mentioned. The great plague of London began there in some goods brought over from Holland; but as that calamity made its principal ravages in the city, we shall speak of it under another head. During the battles of the Whigs and Tories, Long Acre was famous for its Mug-houses, where beer-drinking clubs were held, and politics "sung or said." Cheapside was another place of celebrity for these meetings. There is a description of them in a Journey through England in 1724, quoted by Mr Malcolm in his Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century.' "Gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen," says the account, "used to meet in a great room, seldom under a hundred. "They had a president, who sat in an arm chair some steps higher than the rest of the company, to A harp played all the time at the lower end of the room, and every now and then one or other of the company rose and entertained the rest with a song, and (by the by) some were good masters. Here was nothing drank but ale, and every gentleman had his separate mug, which he chalked on the table where he sate as it was brought in; and every one retired when he pleased, as from a coffee-house. the riots, till at last the parliament was obliged by law to put an end to this city strife, which ad this good effect, that, on pulling down the mug-houses in Salisbury court, for which some boys were hanged on this act, the city has not been troubled with them since*." Per One of the mistresses, whom Prior celebrates under the name of Chloe, and compares to Venus and Diana, lived in Long Acre, and was the wife, some say, of a common soldier, others of a cobler, others of the keeper of an alehouse. haps she was all these, or there were three mistresses whose alliances were confounded. Spence says that the ale-house keeper was the first husband, and the cobler the second. "Everybody knows," says Pope, "what a wretch she was." And again :"Prior was not a right good man. He used to bury himself, for whole days and nights together, with a poor mean creature, and often drank hard. He turned from a strong Whig (which he had been when most with Lord Halifax) to a violent Tory; and did not care to converse with any Whigs after, any more than Rowe did with Tories."+ "I have been assured," says Pope's friend, Richardson, the painter, "that Prior, after having spent the evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, would go and smoke a pipe, and drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier and his wife, in Long Acre, before he went to bed." After the poet's death, Arbuthnot says something to the same effect'; but forget what. None of the wits of that time seem to have known much about love as a sentiment. There is no end of the misconceptions of what is called love. Prior would probably have retorted upon Pope, that his own taste was not very delicate; and upon Arbuthnot, that the doctor was a sensualist in his way, and of a lower order. § He would have quoted Propertius, Raphael, and others, for the impartiality of his taste; and the woman, though in low life, might have had wit and beauty. The secret of these inequalities has been explained by Fielding.¶ Sir Joshua Reynolds lived successively in St Martin's lane, and on the north side of Great Newport street, before he settled finally in Leicester square. In Newport street was born the celebrated Horne Tooke, the son of a poulterer in the adjoining market; which made him say, that his father was a "Turkey merchant." He was, perhaps, the hardest headed man that ever figured in the union of literature and politics; meaning, by that epithet, the power to discuss, and impenetrability to objection. He "The rooms were always so diverted with songs, died at his house at Wimbledon, and was buried at and drinking from one table to another one another's Ealing. His history trenches too closely on the healths, that there was no room for anything that politics of our own day, to allow us to expatiate upon it in a work expressly devoted to the past. *Anecdotes, Manners,' &c. ut supra vol. iii, p. 239. write in it with singular correctness for a foreigner. keep the whole room in order. He was then young. He had been imprisoned in the Bastile for a libel; came over here, on his release procured many subscriptions for the Henriade; published, in English An Essay on Epic Poetry,' and remained some years, during which he became acquainted with the principal men of letters, Pope, Congreve, and Young. He is said to have talked so indecently at Pope's table (probably no more than was thought decent by the belles in France), that the good old lady, the poet's mother, was obliged to retire. Objecting, at Lord Chesterfield's table, to the allegories of Milton, Young is said to have accosted him in the well known couplet : Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, But this story has been doubted. Young, though could sour conversation. "One was obliged to be there by seven to get room, and after ten the company were for the most part gone. "This was a winter's amusement agreeable enough to a stranger for once or twice, and he was well diverted with the different humours when the mugs overflow. Tories had so much the better of the friends to the "On King George's accession to the throne, the Protestant succession, that they gained the mobs on all public days to their side. This induced this set of gentlemen to establish mug-houses in all the corners of this great city, for well affected tradesmen to meet and keep up the spirit of loyalty to the Protestant succession, and to be ready upon all tumults to join their forces for the suppression of the Tory mobs. Many an encounter they had, and many were + Spence, ut supra, pp. 2 and 49. In Johnson's Life of Prior. |