Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London

According to a note in his fragmentary autobiography, Hogarth conceived an early admiration for the paintings of Sir James Thornhill, and, somewhere about 1727, he joined the painting school that Sir James established in the Piazza, at the corner of James Street, Covent Garden. And Sir James soon seems to have taken a particular interest in his pupil, and had him as a frequent visitor to his house at 75 Dean Street, Soho; and on March 23rd, 1729, he eloped with his teacher’s daughter, and they were married at old Paddington Church. There are paintings and decorations still to be seen on the walls of the Dean Street house, in some of which Hogarth is believed to have had a hand.

After his marriage, Hogarth lived for a while at Lambeth; but it was not long before he was reconciled to his father-in-law. In 1730 he was engaged with Sir James Thornhill on their famous picture of “The House of Commons”; and a year later, when he was engraving his series of prints “The Harlot’s Progress,” he and his wife had apparently taken up quarters with Sir James in the Piazza.

“The Harlot’s Progress,” and the issue of “The Rake’s Progress” shortly afterwards, lifted Hogarth into fame. He began to move in better society, and was to be met with at the fashionable as well as at the Bohemian clubs of the day. He and Thornhill founded the Arts Club at the Turk’s Head, in Gerrard Street; and, after the latter’s death, he took over Thornhill’s art school, and transferred it to Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane. Occasionally he visited Richardson, the novelist, in Salisbury Court; and it was here he first made the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson. He struck up a friendship with Garrick, too, and painted several portraits of him, for one of which he received two hundred pounds; and with Fielding, of whom he has given us the only portrait we possess.

By 1733 Hogarth was prosperous enough to take the house in Leicester Square that was pulled down, in 1870, to furnish a site for the Archbishop Tenison School that has replaced it; and in 1749, “having sacrificed enough to his fame and fortune,” he purchased the villa at Chiswick as a summer holiday home, and became a familiar figure about the Chiswick lanes from time to time – “a blue-eyed, intelligent little man, with a scar over his right eye, and wearing a fur cap.” Allan Cunningham furnishes a more vivid description of his personal appearance in his Lives of the Painters, where he says he was “rather below the middle height; his eye was peculiarly bright and piercing; his look shrewd, sarcastic, and intelligent; the forehead high and round. He was active in person, bustling in manner, and fond of affecting a little state and importance. He was of a temper cheerful, joyous, and companionable, fond of mirth and good-fellowship.” Benjamin West called him a strutting, consequential little man; and, one way and another, we know that he was sturdy, obstinate, pugnacious, and that once he thrashed a ruffian whom he found maltreating the beautiful drummeress that he sketched in his picture of Southwark Fair. Possibly that scar over his right eye was a record of this chivalrous deed.

There are very few records of his home life, and these are of the homeliest, most ordinary sort. He was fond of smoking, and the arm-chair, in which he was wont to sit with his pipe, is still preserved at Chiswick. He had a favourite dog, a pet cat, and a bullfinch, which he buried in his Chiswick garden, commemorating them with tablets that have now vanished from the wall, the bird’s epitaph being “Alas, poor Dick!” and the dog’s, “Life to the last enjoyed, here Pompey lies” – which parodies a line in the Candidate, by that dissipated, brilliant satirist, Charles Churchill: “Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.”

The Candidate was published at the beginning of 1764, and on the 25th October of that year Hogarth died. Churchill had been a warm friend of his, but before the end had become one of his bitterest enemies – that enmity arising in this wise. In 1762 Hogarth published a political print called the Times, in which he supported the policy of Lord Bute, and ridiculed Pitt, Temple, and Wilkes. By way of retaliation, Wilkes wrote a scathing attack upon Hogarth in his paper, the North Briton, in which he made a sneering reference to Mrs. Hogarth. This stirred Hogarth to anger; and when Wilkes was presently arrested on a charge of high treason, he sat in court and sketched the prisoner, immortalising his villainous squint, and accentuating all the worst qualities in his features. On this print making its appearance, Churchill, a staunch friend and partisan of Wilkes, took up the cudgels, and scarified Hogarth without mercy in An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), praising his art, but pouring contempt upon his envy and self-esteem, and affecting to believe that he was in his dotage. He can laud the genius, he says, but not the man.

“Freely let him wearThe wreath which Genius wove and planted there:Foe as I am, should envy tear it down,Myself would labour to replace the crown…Hogarth unrivalled stands, and shall engageUnrivalled praise to the most distant age.”

But for the man —

“Hogarth, stand forth – I dare thee to be triedIn that great Court where Conscience must preside;At that most solemn bar hold up thy hand;Think before whom, on what account you stand;Speak, but consider well; – from first to lastReview thy life, weigh every action past.Canst thou remember from thy earliest youth,And as thy God must judge thee, speak the truth,A single instance where, self laid aside,And Justice taking place of Fear and Pride,Thou with an equal eye didst Genius view,And give to Merit what was Merit’s due?Genius and Merit are a sure offence,And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.Is any one so foolish to succeed?On Envy’s altar he is doomed to bleed;Hogarth, a guilty pleasure in his eyes,The place of executioner supplies;See how he gloats, enjoys the sacred feast,And proves himself by cruelty a priest…Oft have I known thee, Hogarth, weak and vain,Thyself the idol of thy awkward strain,Through the dull measure of a summer’s day,In phrase most vile, prate long, long hours away,Whilst friends with friends all gaping sit, and gaze,To hear a Hogarth babble Hogarth’s praise…With all the symptoms of assured decay,With age and sickness pinched and worn away,Pale quivering lips, lank cheeks, and faltering tongue,The spirits out of tune, the nerves unstrung,The body shrivelled up, the dim eyes sunkWithin their sockets deep, thy weak hams shrunk,The body’s weight unable to sustain,The stream of life scarce trembling through the vein,More than half killed by honest truths which fell,Through thy own fault, from men who wished thee well —Canst thou, e’en thus, thy thoughts to vengeance giveAnd, dead to all things else, to malice live?Hence, dotard, to thy closet; shut thee in;By deep repentance wash away thy sin;From haunts of men to shame and sorrow fly,And, on the verge of death, learn how to die!”

Hurt and deeply mortified, a month later Hogarth satirised Churchill’s former connection with the Church and present loose living in a caricature which represented him as a bear wearing torn clerical bands, with ruffles on his paws, in one hand a pot of porter, and in the other a bundle of lies and copies of the North Briton. Garrick had heard that Churchill was making ready to issue that vitriolic satire of his, and hastened to beg him, “by the regard you profess to me, that you don’t tilt at my friend Hogarth before you see me. He is a great and original genius. I love him as a man, and reverence him as an artist. I would not for all the politics and politicians in the universe that you two should have the least cause of ill-will to each other. I am sure you will not publish against him if you think twice.” One could honour Garrick if it were for nothing else but that letter; but it was written in vain, and the exasperation and humiliation that Hogarth suffered under Churchill’s lash are said to have hastened his death. He had been broken in health and ailing all through the summer of 1764, but took several plates down to his Chiswick villa with him for retouching, and – possibly with some foreboding of his own approaching dissolution – drew for a new volume of his prints a tailpiece depicting “the end of all things.”

But he could not be satisfied to keep away from London, and on 25th October was conveyed from Chiswick to his house in Leicester Square, “very weak,” says Nichols, “but remarkably cheerful, and, receiving an agreeable letter from Dr. Franklin” (Benjamin Franklin was, by the way, dwelling at this time in Bartholomew Close; he did not remove to 7 Craven Street, Strand, until three years later), “he drew up a rough draft of an answer to it; but, going to bed, was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rang the bell with such violence that he broke it, and expired about two hours afterwards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who was called up on his being suddenly taken ill.”

He was buried in Chiswick Churchyard; and in 1771 his friends erected a monument over him, the epitaph on which was written by Garrick: —

“Farewell, great Painter of Mankind,Who reached the noblest point of Art,Whose pictured morals charm the Mind,And through the eye correct the Heart.If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay;If Nature touch thee, drop a tear;If neither move thee, turn away,For Hogarth’s honoured dust lies here.”

Garrick sent his verses to Dr. Johnson, who frankly criticised them, and offered him a revised version, the first lines of which were a distinct improvement: —

“The hand of Art here torpid liesThat traced the essential form of Grace;Here Death has closed the curious eyesThat saw the manners in the face.”…

Garrick preferred his own composition, slightly altered, as it now appears; but Johnson’s was certainly the better effort of the two.

Mrs. Hogarth retained possession of the Leicester Square house until her death in 1789, but she resided principally at Chiswick. Sir Richard Phillips saw her there, when he was a boy, and had vivid recollections of her as a stately old lady, wheeled to the parish church on Sundays in a bath-chair, and sailing in up the nave with her raised head-dress, silk sacque, black calash, and crutched cane, accompanied by a relative (the Mary Lewis who was with Hogarth when he died), and preceded by her grey-haired man-servant, Samuel, who carried her prayer-books, and, after she was seated, shut the pew door on her.

From 1824 to 1826 the Hogarth villa was inhabited by the Rev. H. F. Cary, the translator of Dante, who was one of Charles Lamb’s many friends, and wrote the feeble epitaph that is on his tomb at Edmonton.

CHAPTER V

GOLDSMITH, REYNOLDS, AND SOME OF THEIR CIRCLE

One of Sir James Thornhill’s illustrious sitters was Sir Isaac Newton, who lived within a stone’s throw of Hogarth’s London house, just round the corner out of Leicester Square, at No. 35 St. Martin’s Street. Here Sir Isaac made his home from 1720 to 1725. The red brick walls have been stuccoed over; and the observatory that the philosopher built for himself on the roof, after being turned into a Sunday-school, was removed about forty years ago, and helped to supply pews for the Orange Street Chapel that stands next door.

The greatest of Newton’s work was done before he set up in St. Martin’s Street, but he told a friend that the happiest years of his life had been spent in the observatory there. Though he kept his carriage, lived in some style, had half-a-dozen male and female servants, and was always hospitable, he was not fond of society, and talked but little in it. Johnson once remarked to Sir William Jones that if Newton had flourished in ancient Greece, he would have been worshipped as a divinity, but there was nothing godlike in his appearance. “He was a man of no very promising aspect,” says Herne; and Humphrey Newton describes his famous relative as of a carriage “meek, sedate, and humble; never seeming angry, of profound thought, his countenance mild, pleasant, and comely. He always kept close to his studies… I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime, thinking all hours lost that were not spent in his studies.” There are a good many stories told of his eccentricities and absent-mindedness. He would ride through London in his coach with one arm out of the window on one side and one out on the other; he would sometimes start to get up of a morning and sit down on his bed, absorbed in thought, and so remain for hours without dressing himself; and, when his dinner was laid, he would walk about the room, forgetting to eat it, and carelessly eat it standing when his attention was called to it. On one occasion, when he was leading his horse up a hill, he found, when he went to remount on reaching the top, that the animal had slipped its bridle and stayed behind without his perceiving it, and he had nothing in his hand but some of the harness. “When he had friends to entertain,” according to Dr. Stukeley, “if he went into his study to fetch a bottle of wine, there was danger of his forgetting them,” and not coming back again. And it is told of this same Dr. Stukeley that he called one day to see Newton, and was shown into the dining-room, where Sir Isaac’s dinner was in readiness. After a long wait, feeling hungry as well as impatient, Stukeley ate the cold chicken intended for his host, and left nothing but the bones. By-and-by Sir Isaac entered, made his greetings and apologies, and, whilst they were talking, drew a chair to the table, took off the dish-cover, and at sight of the bones merely observed placidly, “How absent we philosophers are! I had forgotten that I had dined!”

Later, this same house in St. Martin’s Street was occupied by Dr. Burney and his daughter Fanny, who wrote Evelina here.

Near by, in Leicester Square again, on the opposite side, and almost exactly facing Hogarth’s residence, was the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. From 1753 to 1761 Sir Joshua lived at 5 Great Newport Street, which was built in Charles II.’s days, and is still standing. It is now and has for a century past been occupied by a firm of art dealers; so that it happens from time to time that a picture of Reynolds’s is here put up for sale, “on the very spot where it was painted.” But in the crowning years of his career – from 1761 till his death, in 1792 – Sir Joshua dwelt at 42 Leicester Square, and what was formerly his studio there has been transformed into one of Messrs. Puttick and Simpson’s auction rooms. Here is Allan Cunningham’s description of it, and of the painter’s method of work: “His study was octagonal, some twenty feet long by sixteen broad, and about fifteen feet high. The window was small and square, and the sill nine feet from the floor. His sitters’ chair moved on castors, and stood above the floor about a foot and a half. He held his palette by the handle, and the sticks of his brushes were eighteen inches long. He wrought standing, and with great celerity. He rose early, breakfasted at nine, entered his study at ten, examined designs or touched unfinished portraits, till eleven brought him a sitter; painted till four, then dressed, and gave the evenings to company.”

And to the best of good company too. By day, the chariot of a duke or a marchioness might drive to his door, and return later to wait for his lordship or her ladyship, who was occupying the sitter’s chair, while Sir Joshua was busy at his easel; but of an evening he would have such men as Dr. Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, Garrick, Burke (who was living close at hand, in Gerrard Street) gathered about his dinner-table; for in spite of his deafness he was the very soul of sociability. He never got out of his naturally careless, Bohemian habits. He was the favourite portrait-painter of the fashionable world, but mixed with the aristocracy without apeing any of their etiquette. “There was something singular in the style and economy of Sir Joshua’s table that contributed to pleasantry and good-humour; a coarse, inelegant plenty, without any regard to order and arrangement,” according to Courtenay. “A table prepared for seven or eight was often compelled to contain fifteen or sixteen. When this pressing difficulty was got over, a deficiency of knives, plates, forks, and glasses succeeded. The attendance was in the same style; and it was absolutely necessary to call instantly for beer, bread, or wine, that you might be supplied with them before the first course was over. He was once prevailed on to furnish the table with decanters and glasses at dinner, to save time and prevent the tardy manœuvres of two or three occasional, undisciplined domestics. As these accelerating utensils were demolished in the course of service, Sir Joshua would never be persuaded to replace them. But these trifling embarrassments only served to enhance the hilarity and singular pleasure of the entertainment. The wines, cookery, and dishes were but little attended to; nor was the fish or venison ever talked of or recommended. Amidst this convivial, animated bustle among his guests, our host sat perfectly composed; always attentive to what was said, never minding what was ate or drunk, but left every one at perfect liberty to scramble for himself. Temporal and spiritual peers, physicians, lawyers, actors, and musicians composed the motley group, and played their parts without dissonance or discord.”

He was so imperturbable and easy-natured that Dr. Johnson said if he ever quarrelled with him he would find it most difficult to know how to abuse him; and even the sharp-tongued Mrs. Thrale praised his peaceful temper, and considered that of him “all good should be said, and no harm.” He shared Hogarth’s contempt for the old masters; but, unlike Hogarth, he was not loud and aggressive in his objections to them.

“When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.”

It was on Reynolds’s suggestion that he and Johnson founded, in 1763, what later became celebrated as the Literary Club. They held their first meetings at the Turk’s Head (where Hogarth and Thornhill had previously established their Art Club), and among the original members were Burke, Langton, Beauclerk, Goldsmith, and Sir John Hawkins. The latter, an arrant snob, objected to Goldsmith’s election on the ground that he was “a mere literary drudge,” but his protest carried no weight with the rest. Five years later, when, under the patronage of the king, Reynolds inaugurated the Royal Academy, Johnson was appointed its first Professor of Ancient Literature, and Goldsmith its first Professor of History, Reynolds himself being its first President – in which office, on his death in 1792, he was succeeded by Benjamin West. West was an American, and had won a considerable reputation in his own country before he came over and settled down in England. He was introduced to Johnson and Reynolds, and was for some time a neighbour of Sir Joshua’s, in Castle Street, Leicester Square. But he is more closely associated with the house that still stands at 14 Newman Street, Oxford Street, in which he lived and worked for forty-five years, and in which he died.

A far greater contemporary painter, who moved on the fringes of Sir Joshua’s circle, was Gainsborough. That he did not come familiarly into the circle, and sometimes make one of the memorable company that gathered round Reynolds’s dinner-table, was owing to some lack of geniality in himself, that kept him from responding to Sir Joshua’s friendly advances. He came from Bath to London in 1774, when he was forty-seven years of age, took a studio at Schonberg House, Pall Mall, and it was not long before celebrities and leaders of fashion were flocking to it to sit for their portraits, and he was recognised as a successful rival of Reynolds. Reynolds was so far from feeling jealousy or resentment that he promptly paid his popular rival a visit; but Gainsborough did not trouble himself to return the call. No doubt it was to some extent owing to Reynolds, too, that in the year of his appearance in London he was elected to the council of management of the Royal Academy; but he ignored the honour, did not attend any meetings, and sent nothing to the exhibition. Reynolds was frankly outspoken in his admiration of Gainsborough’s work, and was even anxious to have his own portrait painted by him. After some delay appointments were fixed, and Sir Joshua duly went to Schonberg House, and the painting was commenced. But after the first sitting he was taken ill; and when, on his recovery, he wrote to tell Gainsborough that he was ready to come again, he received no reply, and the portrait had to remain an unfinished sketch.

His coldness to Reynolds is inexplicable, for he was a kindly-disposed man, and sociable. He kept almost open house in Pall Mall, and such jovial spirits as the Sheridans, Colman, and Garrick were among the constant guests at his table.

The year after Gainsborough’s coming to London, Sheridan’s Rivals was produced at the Covent Garden Theatre, to be followed two years after by The School for Scandal. Before he was out of his twenties Sheridan had finished his career as a dramatist, turned to politics, and was one of the most brilliant of Parliamentary orators, still remaining principal proprietor of Drury Lane Theatre. All his life he was living beyond his income, borrowing, getting into debt, and dodging duns and bailiffs with the gayest imperturbability. Everybody liked him, and was susceptible to his charm. Wherever the wits foregathered, he was the best drinker, the best talker, and the wittiest among them. Byron writes of him in his Diary: “What a wreck that man is! and all from bad pilotage; for no one had ever better gales, though now and then a little too squally. Poor dear Sherry! I shall never forget the day he and Rogers and Moore and I passed together; when he talked and we listened, without one yawn, from six till one in the morning.” In a letter to Moore, Byron records a dinner at which Sheridan, Colman, and a large party were present, and at the finish, when they were all the worse for drink, “Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.”

This was in October 1815, and 14 Savile Row is the house at which Sheridan was thus deposited by his noble friend. He was then an old man of sixty-four, and a year later he died there, five thousand pounds in debt, and only saved, by the emphatic intervention of the doctor who was attending him, from being arrested by bailiffs as he lay dying, and carried off to a sponging-house in his blankets.

The year that brought Gainsborough to London (1774) was also the year of Goldsmith’s death; and I want to get back to Goldsmith for a little, in this chapter, and to say something of Richardson. For it is curiously interesting to note how the lives of all these famous men, though there was little enough in common between some of them, met at certain points and established certain connecting links between them; so that it is possible, as Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, to trace a sort of genealogy of such acquaintanceships, such notable meetings and touchings of “beamy hands,” coming down in an unbroken line from Shakespeare to our own day.

Thus, Hogarth first met Johnson in Richardson’s parlour at Salisbury Court; and, in 1757, Goldsmith was employed by Richardson, and worked on his printing premises, in the same court, as reader and corrector to the press; and these, and most of the other immortals named in this chapter – including Sheridan, though he was then so young a man that he outlived them all, and counts among the friends of Lord Byron – have a common link in Dr. Johnson, who was so great a Londoner that he must needs have a chapter presently to himself, or one that he shall share with none but the inevitable Boswell.

Whilst Goldsmith was working as one of his employees, Richardson was not only a prosperous printer, he was already the most popular novelist of his day. Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison had carried his fame throughout the kingdom and beyond it, and were drawing rapturous admiration and tears of sentiment from countless admirers in France as well as in England; and, as befitted a man of his means and eminence, he had supplemented his house off Fleet Street with a country residence at Parson’s Green, where he died in 1761. Down to 1754, however, his country house was The Grange, at North End, Fulham, then a pretty, old-world spot, – “the pleasantest village within ten miles of London.” And it was here that all his novels were written; for he took The Grange in 1738, and Pamela appeared in 1740, and Sir Charles Grandison in 1753. Here, too, he used to give large literary parties, to which Johnson occasionally went with Boswell. But whatever other authors were there, you may safely depend that Fielding was never among the guests; for with all his high morality Richardson was intolerably self-complacent and vain, and never forgave Fielding for burlesquing Pamela as “Shamela,” and parodying her impossible virtues in Joseph Andrews.