Part 17

The Princess of Wales continued to maintain a sober and dignified court at Leicester House, and at Carlton House also. She was by no means forgotten. Young and old rendered her full respect. One of the most singular processions crossed the Fields in January 1756. Its object was to pay the homage of a first visit to the court of the Dowager Princess of Wales at Leicester House--the visitors being a newly-married young couple, the Hon. Mr. Spencer and the ex-Miss Poyntz (later Earl and Countess of Spencer). The whole party were contained in two carriages and a ‘sedan chair.’ Inside the first were Earl Cowper and the bridegroom. Hanging on from behind were three footmen in state liveries. In the second carriage were the mother and sister of the bride, with similar human adornments on the outside as with the first carriage. Last, and alone, of course, as became her state, in a new sedan, came the bride, in white and silver, as fine as brocade and trimming could make it. The chair itself was lined with white satin, was preceded by a black page, and was followed by three gorgeous lackeys. Nothing ever was more brilliant than the hundred thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds worn by the bride except her own tears in her beautiful eyes when she first saw them and the begging letter of the lover which accompanied them. As he handed her from the chair, the bridegroom seemed scarcely less be-diamonded than the bride. His shoe-buckles alone had those precious stones in them to the value of thirty thousand pounds. They were decidedly a brilliant pair. Public homage never failed to be paid to the Princess. In June 1763, Mrs. Harris writes to her son (afterwards first Lord Malmesbury) at Oxford: I was yesterday at Leicester House, where there were more people than I thought had been in town.’ In 1766 Leicester House was occupied by William Henry, Duke of Cumberland, the last royal resident of that historical mansion, which was ultimately demolished in the year 1806.

But there were as remarkable inhabitants of other houses as of Leicester House. In 1733 there came into the square a man about whom the world more concerns itself than it does about William Henry, and that man is William Hogarth.

There is no one whom we more readily or more completely identify with Leicester Square than Hogarth. He was born in the Old Bailey in 1697, close to old Leicester House, which, in Pennant’s days, was turned into a coach factory. His father was a schoolmaster, who is, perhaps, to be recognised in the following curious advertisement of the reign of Queen Anne; ‘At Hogarth’s Coffee House, in St. John’s Gate, the midway between Smithfield Bars and Clerkenwell, there will meet daily some learned gentlemen who speak Latin readily, where any gentleman that is either skilled in the language, or desirous to perfect himself in speaking thereof, will be welcome. The Master of the House, in the absence of others, being always ready to entertain gentlemen in that language.’ It was in the above Queen’s reign that Hogarth went, bundle in hand, hope in his heart, and a good deal of sense and nonsense in his head, to Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields, where he was ’prentice bound to Ellis Gamble, the silver-plate engraver. There, among other and nobler works, Hogarth engraved the metal die for the first newspaper stamp (‘one halfpenny’) ever known in England. It was in Little Cranbourne Alley that Hogarth first set up for himself for a brief time, and left his sisters (it is supposed) to succeed him there as keepers of a ‘frock shop.’ Hogarth studied in the street, as Garrick did, and there was no lack of masks and faces in the little France and royal England of the Leicester Fields vicinity. Much as Sir James Thornhill disliked his daughter’s marriage with Hogarth, he helped the young couple to set up house on the east side of Leicester Fields. Thornhill did not, at first, account his son-in-law a painter. ‘They say he can’t paint,’ said Mrs. Hogarth once. ‘It’s a lie. Look at that!’ as she pointed to one of his great works. Another day, as Garrick was leaving the house in the Fields, Ben Ives, Hogarth’s servant, asked him to step into the parlour. Ben showed David a head of Diana, done in chalks. The player and Hogarth’s man knew the model. ‘There, Mr. Garrick!’ exclaimed Ives, ‘there’s a head! and yet they say my master can’t paint a portrait.’ Garrick thought Hogarth had not succeeded in painting the player’s, whereupon the limner dashed a brush across the face and turned it against the wall. It never left Leicester Square till widow Hogarth gave it to widow Garrick.

It was towards the close of Hogarth’s career that James Barry, from Cork--destined to make his mark in art--caught sight of a bustling,

## active, stout little man, dressed in a sky-blue coat, in Cranbourne

Alley, and recognising in him the Hogarth whom he almost worshipped, followed him down the east side of the square towards Hogarth’s house. The latter, however, the owner did not enter, for a fight between two boys was going on at the corner of Castle Street, and Hogarth, who, like the statesman Windham, loved to see such encounters, whether the combatants were boys or men, had joined in the fray. When Barry came up Hogarth was acting ‘second’ to one of the young pugilists, patting him on the back, and giving such questionable aid in heightening the fray as he could furnish in such a phrase as, ‘Damn him if I would take it of him! At him again!’ There is another version, which says that it was Nollekens who pointed out to Northcote the little man in the sky-blue coat, with the remark, ‘Look! that’s Hogarth?’

Hogarth seems to have been one of the first to set his face against the fashion of giving vails to servants by forbidding his own to take them from guests. In those days, not only guests but those who came to a house to spend money, were expected to help to pay the wages of the servants for the performance of a duty which they owed to their master. It was otherwise with Hogarth in Leicester Square. ‘When I sat to Hogarth’ (Cole’s MSS. collections, quoted in Cunningham’s ‘London’) ‘the custom of giving vails to servants was not discontinued. On taking leave of the painter at the door I offered the servant a small gratuity, but the man very politely refused it, telling me it would be as much as the loss of his place if his master knew it. This was so uncommon, and so liberal in a man of Hogarth’s profession at that time of day, that it much struck me, as nothing of the kind had happened to me before.’

Leicester Square will ever be connected with Hogarth at the _Golden Head_. It was not, at his going there, in a flourishing condition, but it improved. In the year 1735, in Seymour’s ‘Survey,’ Leicester Fields are described as ‘a very handsome open square, railed about and gravelled within. The buildings are very good and well inhabited, and frequented by the gentry. The north and west rows of buildings, which are in St. Anne’s parish, are the best (and may be said to be so still), especially the north, where is Leicester House, the seat of the Earl of Leicester; being a large building with a fair court before it for the reception of coaches, and a fine garden behind it; the south and east sides being in the parish of St. Martin’s.’

Next to this house is another large house, built by Portman Seymour, Esq., which ‘being laid into Leicester House, was inhabited by their present Majesties’ (George II. and Queen Caroline) ‘when Prince and Princess of Wales.’ It was then that it was called ‘the pouting place of princes.’ Lisle Street is then described as coming out of Prince’s Street, and runs up to Leicester Garden wall. Both Lisle and Leicester Streets are ‘large and well-built, and inhabited by gentry.’

In 1737 the ‘Country Journal, or Craftsman,’ for April 16, contained the following acceptable announcement: ‘Leicester Fields is going to be fitted up in a very elegant manner, a new wall and rails to be erected all round, and a basin in the middle, after the manner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to be done by a voluntary subscription of the inhabitants.’

It was to Hogarth’s house Walpole went, in 1761, to see Hogarth’s picture of Fox. Hogarth said he had promised Fox, if he would only sit as the painter liked, ‘to make as good a picture as Vandyck or Rubens could.’ Walpole was silent. ‘Why, now,’ said the painter, ‘you think this very vain. Why should not a man tell the truth?’ Walpole thought him mad, but Hogarth was sincere. When, after ridiculing the opinions of Freke, the anatomist, some one said, ‘But Freke holds you for as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck,’ ‘There he’s right!’ cried Hogarth. ‘And so, by G----, I am--give me my time, and let me choose my subject.’

If one great object of art be to afford pleasure, Hogarth has attained it, for he has pleased successive generations. If one great end of art be to afford instruction, Hogarth has shown himself well qualified, for he has reached that end; he taught his contemporaries, and he continues teaching, and will continue to teach, through his works. But is the instruction worth having? Is the pleasure legitimate, wholesome, healthy pleasure? Without disparagement to a genius for all that was great in him and his productions, the reply to these questions may sometimes be in the negative. The impulses of the painter were not invariably of noble origin. It is said that the first undoubted sign he gave of having a master-hand arose from his poor landlady asking him for a miserable sum which he owed her for rent. In his wrath he drew her portrait _in caricatura_. Men saw that it was clever, but vindictive.

There is no foundation for the story which asserts of George II. that he professed no love for poetry or painting. This king has been pilloried and pelted, so to speak, with the public contempt for having an independent, and not unjustifiable, opinion of the celebrated picture, the ‘March to Finchley.’ Hogarth had the impertinence to ask permission that he might dedicate the work to the King, and the latter observed, with some reason, that the fellow deserved to be picketed for his insolence. When this picture was presented as worthy of royal patronage, rebellion was afoot and active in the north (1745). The Guards were sent thither, and Hogarth’s work describes them setting out on their first stage to Finchley. The whole description or representation is a gross caricature of the brave men (though they may have sworn as terribly then as they did in Flanders) whose task was to save the kingdom from a great impending calamity. All that is noble is kept out of sight, all that is degrading to the subject, with some slight exceptions, is forced on the view and memory of the spectator. It has been urged by way of apology for this clever but censurable work, that it was not painted at the moment of great popular excitement, but subsequently. This is nothing to the purpose. What is to the purpose is, that Hogarth represented British soldiers as a drunken, skulking, thieving, cowardly horde of ruffians, who must be, to employ an oft-used phrase, more terrible to their friends than their enemies. The painter may have been as good a Whig as the King himself, but he manifested bad taste in asking George II. to show favour to such a subject; and he exhibited worse taste still in dedicating it to the king of Prussia, as a patron of the arts. Hogarth was not disloyal, perhaps, as Wilkes charged him with being, for issuing the print of this picture, but it is a work that, however far removed from the political element now, could not have afforded much gratification to the loyal when it was first exhibited.

Hogarth died in Leicester Square in 1764, and was buried at Chiswick. There was an artist on the opposite side of the square who saw the funeral from his window, and who had higher views of art than Hogarth.

Towards the close of Hogarth’s career Joshua Reynolds took possession of a house on the west side of Leicester Square. In the year in which George III. ascended the throne (1760) Reynolds set up his famous chair of state for his patrons in this historical square.

It has been said that Reynolds, in the days of his progressive triumphs in Leicester Square, thought continually of the glory of his being one day placed by the side of Vandyck and Rubens, and that he entertained no envious idea of being better than Hogarth, Gainsborough, and his old master, Hudson. Reynolds, nevertheless, served all three in much the same way that Dryden served Shakespeare; namely, he disparaged quite as extensively as he praised them. Hogarth, on the east side of Leicester Square, felt no local accession of honour when Reynolds set up his easel on the western side. The new comer was social; the old settler ‘kept himself to himself,’ as the wise saw has it. ‘Study the works of the great masters for ever,’ was, we are told, the utterance of Sir Oracle on the west side. From the east came Hogarth’s utterance, in the assertion, ‘There is only one school, and Nature is the mistress of it.’ For Reynolds’s judgment Hogarth had a certain contempt. ‘The most ignorant people about painting,’ he said to Walpole, ‘are the painters themselves. There’s Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t’other day, he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar.’ Hogarth undoubtedly qualified his sense with some nonsense: ‘Talk of sense, and study, and all that; why, it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not painted better.’

It was at one of Reynolds’s suppers in the square that an incident took place which aroused the wit-power of Johnson. The rather plain sister of the artist had been called upon by the company, after supper, as the custom was, to give a toast. She hesitated, and was accordingly required, again according to custom, to give the ugliest man she knew. In a moment the name of Oliver Goldsmith dropped from her lips, and immediately a sympathising lady on the opposite side of the table rose and shook hands with Miss Reynolds across the table. Johnson had heard the expression, and had also marked the pantomimic performance of sympathy, and he capped both by a remark which set the table in a roar, and which was to an effect which cut smartly in three ways. ‘Thus,’ said he, ‘the ancients, on the commencements of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast betwixt them.’ The affair ends prettily. A few days after the ‘Traveller’ was published Johnson read it aloud from beginning to end to delighted hearers, of whom Miss Reynolds was one. As Johnson closed the book she emphatically remarked, ‘Well, I never more shall think Dr. Goldsmith ugly.’ Miss Reynolds, however, did not get over her idea. Her brother painted the portrait of the new poet, in the Octagon Room in the Square; the mezzotinto engraving of it was speedily all over the town. Miss Reynolds (who, it has been said, used herself to paint portraits with such exact imitation of her brother’s defects and avoidance of his beauties, that everybody but himself laughed at them) thought it marvellous that so much dignity could have been given to the poet’s face and yet so strong a likeness be conveyed; for ‘Dr. Goldsmith’s cast of countenance,’ she proceeds to inform us, ‘and indeed his whole figure from head to foot, impressed every one at first sight with the idea of his being a low mechanic;

## particularly, I believe, a journeyman tailor.’ This belief was

founded on what Goldsmith had himself once said. Coming ruffled into Reynolds’s drawing-room, Goldsmith angrily referred to an insult which his sensitive nature fancied had been put upon him at a neighbouring coffee-house, by ‘a fellow who,’ said Goldsmith, ‘took me, I believe, for a tailor.’ The company laughed more or less demonstratively, and rather confirmed than dispelled the supposition.

Poor Goldsmith’s weaknesses were a good deal played upon by that not too polite company. One afternoon, Burke and a young Irish officer, O’Moore, were crossing the square to Reynolds’s house to dinner. They passed a group who were gaping at, and making admiring remarks upon, some samples of beautiful foreign husseydom, who were looking out of the windows of one of the hotels. Goldsmith was at the skirt of the group, looking on. Burke said to O’Moore, as they passed him unseen, ‘Look at Goldsmith; by-and-by, at Reynolds’s you will see what I make of this.’ At the dinner, Burke treated Goldsmith with such coolness, that Oliver at last asked for an explanation. Burke readily replied that his manner was owing to the monstrous indiscretion on Goldsmith’s part, in the square, of which Burke and Mr. O’Moore had been the witnesses. Poor Goldsmith asked in what way he had been so indiscreet?

‘Why,’ answered Burke, ‘did you not exclaim, on looking up at those women, what stupid beasts the crowd must be for staring with such admiration at those _painted Jezebels_, while a man of your talent passed by unnoticed?’--‘Surely, my dear friend,’ cried Goldsmith, horror-struck, ‘I did not say so!’--‘If you had not said so,’ retorted Burke, ‘how should I have known it?’--‘That’s true,’ answered Goldsmith, with great humility; ‘I am very sorry; it was very foolish! I do recollect that something of the kind passed through my mind, but I did not think I had uttered it.’

It is a pity that Sir Joshua never records the names of his own guests; but his parties were so much swelled by invitations given on the spur of the moment, that it would have been impossible for him to set down beforehand more than the nucleus of his scrambling and unceremonious, but most enjoyable, dinners. Whether the famous Leicester Square dinners deserved to be called enjoyable, is a question which anyone may decide for himself, after reading the accounts given of them at a period when the supervision of Reynolds’s sister, Frances, could no longer be given to them. The table, made to hold seven or eight, was often made to hold twice the number. When the guests were at last packed, the deficiency of knives, forks, plates, and glasses made itself felt. Everyone called, as he wanted, for bread, wine, or beer, and lustily, or there was little chance of being served.

There had once, Courtenay says, been sets of decanters and glasses provided to furnish the table and enable the guests to help themselves. These had gone the way of all glass, and had not been replaced; but though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few, Courtenay admits that their shortcomings only enhanced the singular pleasure of the entertainment. The wine, cookery, and dishes were but little attended to; nor was the fish or venison ever talked of or recommended. Amidst the convivial, animated bustle of his guests, Sir Joshua sat perfectly composed; protected partly by his deafness, partly by his equanimity; always attentive, by help of his trumpet, to what was said, never minding what was eaten or drunk, but leaving everyone to scramble for himself. Peers, temporal and spiritual, statesmen, physicians, lawyers, actors, men of letters, painters, musicians, made up the motley group, ‘and played their parts,’ says Courtenay, ‘without dissonance or discord.’ Dinner was served precisely at five, whether all the company had arrived or not. Sir Joshua never kept many guests waiting for one, whatever his rank or consequence. ‘His friends and intimate acquaintance,’ concludes Courtenay, ‘will ever love his memory, and will ever regret those social hours and the cheerfulness of that irregular, convivial table, which no one has attempted to revive or imitate, or was indeed qualified to supply.’

Reynolds had a room in which his copyists, his pupils, and his drapery-men worked. Among them was one of the cleverest and most unfortunate of artists. Seldom is the name of Peter Toms now heard, but he once sat in Hudson’s studio with young Reynolds, and in the studio of Sir Joshua, as the better artist’s obedient humble servant; that is to say, he painted his employer’s draperies, and probably a good deal more, for Toms was a very fair portrait-painter. Peter worked too for various other great artists, and a purchaser of any picture of that time cannot be certain whether much of it is not from Toms’s imitative hand. Peter’s lack of original power did not keep him out of the Royal Academy, though in his day he was but a second-class artist. He belonged, too, to the Herald’s Office, as the painters of the Tudor period often did, and after filling in the canvasses of his masters in England, he went to Ireland on his own account and in reliance on the patronage of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Northumberland. Toms, however, found that the Irish refused to submit their physiognomies to his limning, and he waited for them to change their opinion of him in vain. Finally, he lost heart and hope. His vocation was gone; but in the London garret within which he took refuge he seems to have given himself a chance for life or death. Pencil in one hand and razor in the other, he made an effort to paint a picture, and apparently failed in accomplishing it, for he swept the razor across his throat, and was found the next morning stark dead by the side of the work which seems to have smitten him with despair.

Reynolds saw the ceremony of proclaiming George III. king in front of Savile House, where the monarch had resided while he was Prince of Wales. Into his own house came and went, for years, all the lofty virtues, vices, and rich nothingnesses of Reynolds’s time, to be painted. From his window he looked with pride on his gaudy carriage (the Seasons, limned on the panels, were by his own drapery man, Catton), in which he used to send his sister out for a daily drive. From the same window he saw Savile House gutted by the ‘No Popery’ rioters of 1780; fire has since swept all that was left of Page’s house on the north side of the Square; and in 1787 Reynolds looked on a newcomer to the Fields, Lawrence, afterwards Sir Thomas, who set up his easel against Sir Joshua’s, but who was not then strong enough to make such pretence. Some of the most characteristic groups of those days were to be seen clustered round the itinerant quack doctors--fellows who lied with a power that Orton, Luie, and even the ‘coachers’ of Luie, might envy. Leicester Square, in Reynolds’s days alone, would furnish matter for two or three volumes. We have only space to say further of Sir Joshua, that he died here in 1792, lay in state in Somerset House, and that as the funeral procession was on its way to St. Paul’s (with its first part in the Cathedral before the last part was clear of Somerset House) one of the occupants in one of the many mourning coaches said to a companion, ‘There is now, sir, a fine opening for a portrait-painter.’