by Walter Thornbury.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.2 #8 (Jun 1867).
II. Russell-square, Leicester-square, and Grosvenor-square
Russell-Square was built about 1804, and derives its name from the great Whig family that, much to Theodore Hook's disgust, dominated in this convenient and central neighbourhood. Westmacott's statue of Francis Duke of Bedford might be mistaken by a clever blunderer like our old friend Hajji Baba for the deity worshipped by the district; and a zealous Whig might almost be pardoned for burning joss-sticks at the base of the pedestal.
The houses at the south corner of Guildford-street, bracketed as it were for the observer by the long slate roof of the same elevation, mark out Baltimore House. To this place, in 1767, the infamous Lord Baltimore (the Colonel Charteris of his time) brought Miss Woodcock, a milliner who kept a shop on Tower-hill. Here the cruel scenes of Richardson's Pamela were reënacted; and she remained imprisoned till her lover discovered her, made signs to her that there was rescue at hand, and obtained a writ of habeas corpus from Lord Mansfield. Lord Baltimore was tried for the abduction at Kingston in 1768, but was unfortunately acquitted. That great Scotch lawyer and eloquent orator Wedderburne (Lord Chancellor Loughborough) afterwards lived in the house for many years.
No. 21 in this square is memorable as the residence of that benevolent and far-sighted man Sir Samuel Romilly. This was that large-hearted man who laboured from 1808 to 1818 to make our criminal code less sanguinary. Thoughtful people had grown heart-sick at seeing as many as twenty persons of all ages, from almost mere children to old men, hung in one morning outside a London prison. It was death to steal five shillings from the person; death to steal five shillings' worth of goods from a shop; death to steal twenty shillings' worth of property from a dwelling-house or a vessel lying in a navigable river; death to steal a strip of devil's-dust cloth from a bleaching ground. As late as 1785 no less than ninety-seven persons were executed in London alone for shoplifting. In a debate in 1816 Sir Samuel Romilly called attention to the terrible fact that at that moment a child not ten years of age lay in Newgate under sentence of death for shoplifting. On the 2d of November 1818 this good and useful man destroyed himself, four days only after the death of his wife, to whom he was deeply attached. His mind had latterly been much worn by unceasing mental labour and professional anxieties. When Lord Eldon came into court the next morning and saw Romilly's vacant seat, his eyes filled with tears. "I cannot stay here," he said; and, rising in agitation, he broke up the court. That same year Lord Ellenborough and Warren Hastings preceded, and Sir Philip Francis followed, Romilly to the grave.
At No. 65 Sir Thomas Lawrence lived for his last 25 years—1805 to 1830. It must be owned that there was something meretricious about Lawrence's style of painting. It was not solid and robust as that of Reynolds; it was courtly and pretty; it had not the large generous manner of the earlier age. The eyes of Lawrence's ladies are full of liquid light (Lawrence excelled in painting eyes); but there is always, to my mind, a Byronic glitter about them, a self-consciousness that is theatrical, and would be vulgar but for the exquisite art of the painter. His men are not so robust and manly as those of Reynolds; not so gallant as those of Vandyke; not so senatorial as those of Titian; not so full of intellect and genius as those of Raphael. Look at one of Titian's grand Venetians,—men whose brows are knitted with the dark secrets of the Piombi and the Pozzi, of the Council of Ten, and of the dungeons of the Inquisition. These men seem carved out of marble; Lawrence's are delicate statuettes of terra-cotta. True the men of the Regency were not much to paint. What could be done with Lord Yarmouth, Brummell, and such butterflies and dragon-flies of the day? He did not think out his men as his more strenuous predecessors did theirs.
Hogarth's Captain Coram and Miss Fenton were to his work what Dryden's lashing satires were to Praed's graceful jingles. His large portraits (say, for instance, his empty full-length George the Fourth, at the Marquis of Bath's Wiltshire honse, Longleate) seem to us mere surface-work. Like a showy waistcoat, they evidently have false backs. Nor is his colour very sound and good. His faces seem leaden if you look at them after, for instance, that hearty, ruddy face of the Governor of Gibraltar by Reynolds, a face in whose veins the blood seems still to glow. For my part I would rather have even such pale, faded phantoms of Reynolds's as you see at Berkeley Castle, where many of the family portraits have grown bleached and jaundiced from the treacherous "vehicles" that Sir Joshua made use of in his restless endeavours at ideal excellence, than Lawrence's finest works—his young countesses, with eyes like antelopes, or his children, aristocratic, graceful, and self-conscious. The son of the landlord of the inn at Devizes lived in a flimsier age than that of Reynolds. His work was thinner, slighter, prettier, less substantial, and more hurried. The old collarless square-cut coats and deep-flapped waistcoats had yielded to swallow-tails and muslin bolster-cravats. Those external changes typified an alteration of mental condition. In a certain portrait by Velasquez that we saw in Spain, the buttons of the doublet were literally moulded in paint. They rose from the canvas as ordinary buttons would do on a real doublet, caught the same light, and threw the same shadows. Through all those long days of laborious painting the great artist had followed out his own aim of fitful colour, character, and effect. Every button had its own physiognomy. Had Lawrence the mental power, the energy, or the love of his art to have done this?
Lawrence was the son of a desultory, restless, rolling-stone of a man— clever, fickle, and improvident; who, brought up a lawyer, married the daughter of a clergyman, and became Supervisor of Excise at Bristol. There he took the White-Lion Inn, and afterwards the Bear at Devizes, a well-known posting-house on the Western road. We have passed a thousand times the house where the great painter was born. It was once, no doubt, handsome and respectable, and in a decent neighbourhood; but the tide moved westward, and it now adjoins the most dismal and vicious alleys of the lowest and poorest suburb of Bristol. In that part of St. Philip's, when we last saw it, eight or nine people were lying dead of cholera in a single house. When a postchaise stopped at the Bear, Allan Cunningham tells us that the gossipping, officious father, in his well-powdered wig and best black suit, used to step into the parlour with his courtliest bow, and ask the lady or gentleman whether his little boy should recite poetry or take their likeness. Some were worried with the intrusive landlord and his pretty, clever, polite boy, some amused.
When Lawrence pére failed, as he naturally would, and took his boy to Bath to study art under Prince Hoare, the lad was not long before he won the great silver-gilt palette of the Society of Arts, and at the age of ten began to paint historical pictures. The father, like many fathers who fail in life, now traded entirely on the success of his son. The landlord of the Bear had not become a great lawyer: he was too clever to collect customs from coffee-coloured West-India captains. He was not thrifty enough for a landlord, but there was still one pride left—dum spiro spero—and that was, he was the father of a genius: without him the genius would not have existed. It is wonderful how vain the father of a genius often is of himself. Getting by degrees the true showman's prudence, and full of his one great success in life, Lawrence's father in 1787 brought his clever son (born in 1769) to apartments in Leicester-square, to be near Reynolds, who was then at the top of the tree, his studio-doors thronged by the wise, the great, the rich, and the beautiful. Reynolds was a kind adviser to the young aspirant, who that very year began to exhibit at Somerset House. Soon Hoppner became his rival; but Lawrence went bland and smiling on his way through a grove of laurels, and pressed forward to fashion, wealth, and honour. No foolish aspirations for ideal excellence distracted him as they did Reynolds, who to the last struggled to be more than a face-painter and minister to wealth and vanity. Lawrence went on in his own graceful, bright way, and pleased George III., who never much cared for Reynolds, because he did not paint smooth and even like his protégé, dull intolerable West; and George IV. gave him princely commissions.
It was after Napoleon's exile to Elba that the house in Russell-square became a meeting-place for emperors, kings, and heroes. George IV. gave Lawrence the order to paint the great potentates then in England: the handsome Alexander of Russia, the King of Prussia; that rough, cruel, stanch old hussar Blucher; and that Cossack chieftain Platoff, whose face Sir Walter Scott describes as seamed all over with a network of fine wrinkles,—were all at this house; and the Rev. Mr. Mitford describes seeing two dwarfish Cossack troopers of the Don, in their short cloaks and fur caps, seated on their little ponies at the door, keeping guard, the butts of their long lances, that had often drunk the blood of Frenchmen, resting on the pavement by their sides. The house is quiet enough now; no kings leave their cards there, no squadrons of Cossacks or of hussars gallop to the door: it can no longer crow over its neighbours; its knocker has almost forgotten the princely fingers that once lifted it.
But sternly back to our muttons. The Waterloo Gallery at Windsor still contains the stately pictures of the kings and generals that were once lifted through the very door at which we are halting; and the people's gallery still boasts those poetical chefs-d'œuvre of Sir Thomas—John Philip Kemble as Hamlet, noble Mrs. Siddons, and the courtly, calm old Quaker President of the Academy, Benjamin West. They are not Titians, but they are fine sound pictures, painted by an accomplished, graceful, and learned artist. Urbane, and in his very essence a courtly man of the world, Lawrence made a most dignified President of the Royal Academy, one who raised the art in the eyes of people who live for externals. We cannot expect to have Presidents every day like Reynolds; but the time may come when we may have men not fitted to clean Lawrence's brushes babbling in the stately chair that should be the reward of consummate genius, and of genius alone.
The one great mystery of Lawrence's life, and the cause of unceasing and insatiable curiosity among his contemporaries, was the fact of his incessantly working, yet never growing rich. Into what sieve of the Danaides did he, then, pour his princely earnings? He was a great collector of sketches by the old masters, but even a picture-dealer's pocket is not a mile deep. Lawrence gambled, said men at the clubs. But there is really no proof that he did, and he is known to have given up billiards because his good play led to his friends betting heavily on his game. The secret was, in fact, no secret. Early in life the true careless son of a squandering father had unluckily for himself planted his easel in a thicket of those nettles that are better known under the name of small debts. He began his London life by keeping two establishments, and he never got free from the Jewish bonds and fetters that followed such a premature and sanguine outlay. His heartless flirtation with women—more especially with Mrs. Siddons's niece, whose heart he is said to have broken by his neglect—it is not for us too sternly to condemn. A man's heart may suffer a great deal without breaking, and there were, we are inclined to think, grave faults on both sides. The butterfly man lived to repent, no doubt, as the gayest and most fascinating men often do, and to mourn the solitary home and the cheerless, lonely life that always await that great social criminal, the old regretful bachelor.
But we must hasten westward to Leicester-square. Leicester House stood at the north-east end of Leicester-square, New Lisle-street being built on the site of its gardens. It derived its name from the Earl of Leicester, the father of that stubborn republican Algernon Sydney, of the "handsome Sydney" of De Grammont, and of Lady Dorothy, the Sacharissa of Waller, the lady who, in despite of the poet's mellifluous verse, married the Earl of Sunderland.
"Give me but what this ribbon bound;
Take all the rest the sun goes round,"
were pretty lines, but they had one fault—they did not win the lady.
In Charles the Second's time that brave but unfortunate woman the Queen of Bohemia, driven from her dominions by the French dragoons, left her chivalrous friend the Earl of Craven's house in Drury-lane to die here. After this the palace became a mere sort of lodging-house for great people and ambassadors. The great Colbert came here, and Prince Eugene—der edle Ritter—the slayer of Turks and the last of the true Knights. Then the house got promoted, and became "the pouting-place of princes," as some wit of the day quaintly called it. George II., the coarse, brave, choleric king, lived here when prince; and after him there came to reside here, also in luxurious discontent, his untoward son, Frederick Prince of Wales, whose chief favourites were that absurd puffball of a man, whose very name seems a joke, Bubb Doddington—afterwards Lord Melcombe—and his dancing-master, who was his "counsellor and friend," if such a simpleton could have a friend. Here Frederick railed at his father and brave old Sir Robert Walpole, courted the people, neglected his wife, and made a supreme fool of himself generally. Yet this royal critic, bad as he could be, tried to patronise Dr. Johnson, rewarded Glover for his bad verses, honoured Pope with a visit, and made great professions to Gay. Good, honest, fat, careless Gay indeed laid himself out to please the prince, and in 1724 was invited to this house to read his now-forgotten tragedy of The Captives to the sensible princess. The hour came; the princess and ladies were in grave expectation. The flushed and nervous poet advanced with Ms. in hand, and in a tumult of reverence. At that moment a stool came in the way; the fat poet fell heavily forwards, and threw down with a bang a large gilt japan screen. The princess frowned, the ladies screamed and laughed, and still the tragedy was to be read. Well, even the best toadies must suffer; and, encouraged by the princess, Gay, still slow to learn court lessons, afterwards wrote his inimitable Fables for the young Duke of Cumberland. Bitter was Gay's disgust and disdain when he had to tell Pope, who really loved the petit bon homme, that his only reward had been the offer of the menial post of gentleman-usher to a child-princess. At length aroused, he produced The Beggars' Opera, and set the Thames on fire at last.
The Duke of Gloucester, Frederick's brother, afterwards lived here; then the house faded off into Sir Aston Lever's Museum, afterwards became a needlework exhibition, then a gymnasium and a café chantant. The adjoining house—Saville House—was burnt down in the Lord George Gordon riots by the frenzied Blue Cockades, who were seeking all through the town for those tolerant men who wished to relieve the persecuted Roman Catholics from their disabilities.
The floating foreign population of "Leycester Skevare" was well summarised by one of the most clever of modern burlesque writers as
"Prince, patriot, or prig."
A strange bearded, hydrophobic, scowling, suspicious race haunt the street that runs beside the blackened ruins of Saville House. Princes, spies, billiard-sharpers, poets, enthusiasts, assassins, theorists, fanatics, old soldiers, swindlers, dreamers, barons, thieves, and philosophers mingle together as they mingle may. It is a witches' caldron, that foreign boulevard of ours, and contains in its eddies all the elements of human life—Orsinis, Fieschis, André Chéniers, Lacenaires, ghowls, vampires, Phaetons, Amphions, perhaps some brooding young Frenchman, hereafter to be a Napoleon and the devastator of Europe, nay of the world. What a bal d'opéra this life is, till death strips off the masks, and shows us how phantasmagoric a bubble is the round world, and "all that it inhabit"! Not long before Orsini threw the glass shell full of fulminating mercury at Louis Napoleon's carriage, I happened to stroll one evening into a club which held its meetings on the first floor above Wyld's reading-room. It was a red republican debating-club, and the discussion soon grew hot and furious. Every form of political fanatic was to be seen there, from the old veteran plotter to the stripling recruit. The man who was speaking as I entered was a Parisian artisan, dirty, truculent, and savage; he leant on crutches, for he had been crippled at the barricades. His speech was a torrent of lava—a furious eruption of savage threats, mysterious prophecies, and scathing denunciations of the wily French Emperor. Probably among that bearded crowd sat Orsini with high forehead, dark-lantern eyes, full of imperturbable fixity of purpose. The chairman, looking like an old soldier of the Imperial Guard, had heavy eyes, long Quixotic face, and drooping white moustachios. This was Dr. Bernard, the friend of Orsini, who was afterwards tried for his share in the Italian's desperate conspiracy, and was no doubt deeply implicated in it, although he was acquitted. I have often thought that, perhaps, that very night the plot was brought to a climax, and the glass globes shaped and filled.
From a certain memorable house (now forming the northern half of Sabloniére's Hotel) at the east of the square, whose door was once surmounted by a gilt bust, there often stepped forth into the light a certain little, keen-looking man in a sky-blue coat, with his cocked-hat tilted up so as to show a scar on his right temple. The name of that little, quick-eyed man was William Hogarth, the greatest satirist that ever painted. Here this sturdy, dogged son of the poor schoolmaster in the Old Bailey created all those wonderful types of vice and folly that live in the mind, as much realities as the Spendalls and Squanders and Altamonts and Lotharios and Littlebrains that we meet every afternoon in the Park or the Row. Before his hawk's-eye all the follies of the day passed in parade, and were jotted down for future punishment. In that house he drew the Rake surrounded by his train of toadies, parasites, and projectors; the detestable bow-legged quack doctor, with cunning malice in his wrinkled eyes; the fool's-capped Guards on their slovenly march through Finchley to that hot brush with the Highlanders on Culloden Heath; the sottish hags of Gin-lane, and the dreadful old lady with the one eye, who married the handsome young gentleman at Marylebone church; the mad gambler on his knees shouting curses; the shivering old Pharisee on her way to early service in Covent Garden; the pugilists with bald skulls barred with plaster; the dancing-masters all grimace, lace, and broken French. Thief, murderer, highwayman, bedlamite, parson, clerk, methodist, milkmaid, fiddler, turnkey, duellist, courtier, sailor, merchant, gamin, beadle—he knew them all, and painted them boldly as they were, leaving on each bad forehead his own broad-arrow brand.
It is Hogarth's statue that should adorn this square—Hogarth's, and no one else's. Half his life he was moving in this orbit. Close by here, in Cranbourne-street, this grandson of the Westmoreland yeoman was apprenticed to Mr. Ellis Gamble of the Golden Angel, to learn silver-plate engraving, and to engrave arms and ciphers on silver tankards and noblemen's sack-cups and salvers. From Leicester Fields, too, when he married by stealth the great Sir John Thornhill's pretty daughter, and remained for some time under the paternal ban, he describes himself as moping into the City with a copper-plate to illustrate Milton or Hudibras in his coat-pocket, and his hat pulled gloomily over his eyes. Ten guineas from the bookseller, and he would return, his hat cocked jauntily over his left eye, his sword swinging gaily at his heels, as, with Hayman or some other boon companion, he sallied off across the fields for a day's holiday at Highgate.
All Hogarth's friends must have passed under the shadow of that Golden Head on the north-east side of the square: the learned Hoadley; clever squinting Wilkes; robust ribald Churchill; poor Gardelle the miniature painter, one day to be hung for murder; bluff, benevolent, old Captain Coram, who built the Foundling; versatile Garrick, his face beaming with fun; that pleasant young Irish nobleman Lord Charlemont; Fielding the incomparable; grave thoughtful Richardson; Reynolds arid Gay, Horace Walpole and Quin; Boswell, Thornton, and Thompson of Exeter Change. Forth to Southwark fair and Mrs. Cornelys's masquerades, to Vauxhall and Drury-lane, has the little man, with the square broad brow, short thick nose, and droll ugly mouth, often wandered from this square; we should like to see a statue of the genius and of his pug-dog Trump take the place of that mutilated caricature of forgotten royalty, which now dominates over the nettles and old shoes, brickbats and old hats—the centre of a dismal enclosure which has become a cemetery for cats and a disgrace to London.
Hogarth was the first painter who tossed away the old ideal and carried the principles of the Dutch painters into modern life. He first wrote a novel in paint, and told a story of his own times. He was Punch and the Illustrated News; but he was also Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray. He painted Sir Robert Walpole to-day, and Sarah Malcolm, the murderess, to-morrow: all that was human interested him. He began by laughing at Pope; he ended by defying Wilkes. The reign of George the Second lives still on his canvas. He was a thrifty and hospitable man, a kind husband, a sincere friend, and an indulgent master. He was one of the greatest observers that ever viewed this vast kaleidoscope called London. He had deep pathos and infinite drollery; he was deficient in the sense of beauty, it must be allowed; and yet there are one or two sweet primrose faces among his ribald crowds. That exquisite critic Charles Lamb says, in his own charming way, that the simple face of the sleeping child in the arms of its mother seems to tranquillise all the noise and drunken clamour of the slovenly march to Finchley. A very pure happy face, too, always seems to us that of the merchant's daughter, which leans towards her betrothed lover, the good apprentice, and looks over the hymn-book they are both holding. A calm and tranquil love is expressed by the very turn of the head; only compare it with that hideous face, spotted with patches, which in another picture leeringly greets the pretty little gosling of a country girl who has just alighted from the carrier's wagon. Very beautiful too is the refined face of the strolling actress who beats the drum in the foreground of Southwark fair. It is interesting also to remember, as we look at that pleasant sunny countenance, that it was this poor girl whom Hogarth's stout arm rescued from the brutal insolence of a strolling manager. There can be no statue in London more deserved than the one of Hogarth that we have proposed for Leicester-square. What did the Duke of York, the Stylites of St. James's Park with a bill-file coming through his stony skull, do for England, except fritter away her brave armies, and squander her money? Yet here is a man who has left behind him immortal warnings and great teachings, statueless. Well! here is a square especially consecrated to his memory. Let those who love art give a penny each, and the good work could be done to-morrow.
Another great painter also lived in this square. At No. 47, on the west side, worthy Sir Joshua Reynolds resided from 1761 till his death in 1792. Through that door elephantine Johnson must have rolled a thousand times with Boswell, watchful and wistful, at his heels, Sterne joked dangerously, Percy quoted old ballads, Gibbon talked Roman Empire, and Goldsmith bantered. All the great and wise and good of George the Third's reign have passed through that portal: handsome old Lord Mansfield the wise, Warton the poet, Warren Hastings, dull Lord Anson, Burke, Lord Heathfield, the beautiful Miss Gunnings, Nelly O'Brien, and many other Thaises and Laises. There in his octagonal studio, under one small north-light, Sir Joshua stood at his easel, day after day and year after year, painting, now the famous Marquis of Granby, flaming scarlet, now the intellectual sensitive face of the poet Beattie. We all know Sir Joshua's face, with the pleasant blunt features, the beaming spectacles, and the bushy white wig. His frilled shirt and lapelled waistcoat are familiar to us all. We even remember the prominent veins on his full forehead, and the Michael-Angelo seal dangling at his watch-ribbon. Somewhat jealous of Gainsborough and Ramsay, and strongly objecting to Barry's violent temper, Reynolds was still an equable, courteous, sensible man, beloved by the Johnson set, and deservedly so, we may be sure, for no sham affability or false timeserving could have deceived men like Burke and Gibbon. He did some harm to English art by encouraging sham ideal and generalisation, but still it must be allowed that he was the greatest of modern portrait-painters. His heads have a grace, charm, and variety, above all a dignified thoughtfulness that has been indeed seldom found since. People complain that he sold them dissolving views; but then when his pictures do keep well, how mellow, transparent, rich, and sunny they are! We like to think of the grand coaches and the sedan-chairs stopping at the door of No. 47; and Miss Burney, her head a mountain of powdered hair, which set off her fine eyes, or Goldsmith's "Jessamy Bride," tripping out, as that honest old servant Ralph Kirkman throws open the door and says: "Sir Joshua is at home, ma'am."
What glorious pictures, scattered to the four winds now (we came upon such a one the other day in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg), were conceived and painted at No. 47! The infant "Hercules strangling the Snake" (for the Empress Catherine); the "Puck on the Mushroom" (painted from a dead child); the "Ugolino" of Dante (from a coal-heaver); the "Cardinal Beaton" (now at Dulwich); the "Muscipula" (arch child with a mouse-trap); Sterne's portrait, with his finger on his rounded brow; Mrs. Siddons on her throne; Nelly O'Brien in the round straw hat; gallant Lord Ligonier leaning against his horse; Garrick wavering between Tragedy and Comedy; Dr. Johnson beating down buzzing Boswell with an iron-bound elenchus.
Come and look in at those windows in the quiet dusk of a May evening, when the new-lit lamps give scarcely more light than primroses in a hazel-wood; and you may almost fancy you see one of Sir Joshua's pleasant, ill-managed, scrambling parties, more a picnic than a dinner. Peers, artists, poets, lawyers, actors, musicians, metaphysicians, scramble for food, chat, laugh, and wrangle. The host is a conciliatory, unaffected, admirable old bachelor; most sociable and full of anecdote after his hard day's work.
Goldsmith blunders, rambles, and shouts with laughter; Beauclerc is dry as the finest old sherry; Boswell praises the port as he drinks deep; Johnson says beef-steak pie is a good thing if it ever got cold (he has burnt his gobbling and voracious mouth); Burke soars over the Indian empire, and passes a thousand rajahs in review before him; Gibbon tells a story of some antiquary having just found Essex's celebrated ring concealed in the drawer of an old cabinet; Reynolds chats about the Vatican or Florence, and flourishes his ear-trumpet like a mistaken bugle. Of all delightful feasts and symposia of the world, from Plato's Banquet downwards, through all the good eating and fun of Athenæus, no evenings could have much surpassed those at No. 47. When the candles came, the great lexicographer rolled like a leviathan into an ocean of glorious talk; stunned a disputant with every "Why, sir?" or "No, sir!" and slew an antagonist every time he rolled his head and exclaimed, "Sir, you don't see the thing clearly. You are obscure, sir. You are not profound. A moment ago your arguments were clear, sir; but then they were only clear because they were shallow."
The last day came, when Hogarth was lifted into his carriage at the Golden Head, and driven off slowly to paint "the end of all things," and die at his Chiswick house. The day came too to Reynolds. It was a July day, sad in spite even of the lavish sunshine, when Sir Joshua sighed, and, laying down his brush beside a blurred portrait, said mournfully, "I know that all things on earth must come to an end, and now I am come to mine."
A day or two after, he is seen, dejected, almost blind, groping round the railings in the square in search of a pet canary that had strayed. A few weeks more, and he lies calm and pale in his black-velvet-lined coffin in Somerset House; Burke his friend, and Barry his rough enemy, Boswell and Langtof, Kemble, John Hunter, Townley, and Angerstein are looking at their dead friend ere the lid be closed for ever; and someone in a low tearful whisper repeats Goldsmith's lines:
"Still born to improve us in every part,
His pencil our faces, his manners our heart."
Reynolds and Hogarth, these are the two intellectual deities we worship in Leicester-square; their names live while all the people in stars and garters, the pickthanks, the things of silk, the coloured bubbles, the Bubb-Doddingtons, the frequenters of Leicester House, and the toadies of Frederick Prince of Wales, are forgotten, and will remain forgotten.
Next door to Hogarth that great surgeon, John Hunter, lived (we believe from 1783 till his sudden death in 1793). In a building behind the house, erected in 1785 at an expense of 8000l., this acute-minded discoverer stored that fine museum, now at the College of Surgeons in Lincoln's-inn-fields. This collection, increased by the kindness of Sir Joseph Banks, cost him 90,000 guineas. No giant or pumpkin-headed child died in England but the little arrogant man bought the body. It is here that his gay wife's incessant music-parties vexed the soul out of this great surgeon, who is said on one or two occasions, at his return home from the hospitals, to have bundled the whole fashionable world out of the house neck and crop, to their infinite discomfiture.
Wyld's Globe was too purely instructive ever to become a national resort, and it has passed away, the dreadful eyesore that it was! The mutilated statue of George II. now reigns supreme over an arid waste—a cats' paradise, varied by old shoes and oyster-shells. This statue (lately the subject of a most daring practical joke) was, in its prime, a thing to be talked about. It came about 1754 from Canons, the seat of the great Duke of Chandos, an imperial person in his day, and drawn at full length by Pope in his best verse.
On the left hand of dingy St. Martin's-street (south side of Leicester-square) is a dark, dismal house, with a slate-covered turret, where Sir Isaac Newton once lived, and, soaring from the dirt and dinge—"fumum strepitumque"—of London, pondered over the mysteries of the worlds that fill the night thick as motes in the sun. Dr. Burney lived here afterwards, and gave his grand musical parties; and here his clever daughter, Fanny, wrote Evelina, the novel that Dr. Johnson so raved about; and left home at last to become entangled in the vexatious duties of a court-attendant.
Now, with a long stride westward, let us pass on to Grosvenor-square, which Pope mentions as early as 1716. It derived its name, Mr. Cunningham tells us, from Sir Richard Grosvenor, fourth baronet (of the Gros-Veneurs), who died in 1732. That arrogant, virulent friend of Pope's, Bishop Warburton, lived in this spot; here he propounded his paradoxes, and reviled methodists, Wilkites, infidels, and indeed anybody that differed from him. Thrale, the great brewer, who with his generous hospitality at Streatham cheered the melancholy of his friend Dr. Johnson, died in this square in 1781. At No. 30 John Wilkes died. The distiller's son, thin, squinting, lisping, yet delightful, after all his duels and political squabbles and sedition, came here and ended his days as a quiet Constitutionalist, active against the Lord George Gordon rioters. Wilkie's patron and Haydon's horror, Sir George Beaumont, lived at No. 29. Here he talked his pleasant platitudes about high art, and. descanted over the Claudes that he used to carry about with him in his carriage. "I see no brown in grass," said Constable to him one day in the country, laying an old Cremona on the dazzlingly-green lawn, to prove that the old masters were darker than they should be. But Sir George's mind was not original; and he went on with his brown trees and his receipt for composition, till Turner came and painted as Claude should have done, and put twenty miles' more landscape within the four sides of a frame than Lorraine ever could pack in.
No. 39 Grosvenor-square is a house indissolubly connected with the memory of the Cato-street conspiracy, 23d of February 1820. The conspirators—of whom the chief was Thistlewood, ex-ensign in a West-India regiment and a disgraced gambler of infamous character, who had dabbled in the Spa-field troubles, and in all the dangerous seditions of the day, with his lieutenants, Ings a savage pork-butcher, a man of colour, and a cobbler—met in a loft over a stable in Cato-street (now Homer-street), Edgeware-road. They were armed with pikes, pistols, swords, and hand-grenades; and were to rush into Lord Harrowby's, directly Thistlewood rang the bell with a pretended letter. Some of them were to guard the kitchen-stairs and the area, to keep back the servants; while the rest were to enter the dining-room, and slay all the cabinet-ministers that day invited to dinner. Ings carried two bags; one intended to contain Lord Sidmouth's, the other Lord Castlereagh's head, which were to be put on pikes, and carried before the conspirators through the streets. They were then to seize the cannon of the City Light Horse in Gray's-inn-lane, fire some houses near there, and then march on the Bank and the Mansion House. The Bow-street runners surprised them as they were arming, and secured the ringleaders. Thistlewood, however, ran Smithers, one of the officers, through, and escaped. He was soon after captured, and with his coadjutors, Ings, Brunt, Tidd, and Davidson, hung at the Old Bailey; and afterwards clumsily beheaded, much to the disgust and horror of the crowd.
Such are a few of the chief associations of one of our fashionable squares.