Old and New London, A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. vol 4
Thornbury, Walter
1872-78
May Fair.
May Fair.
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This spot, which embraces in its somewhat vague and undefined area the present , , and and gardens, took its name, in the days of Edward I., from an annual fair, which that king privileged the hospital of St. James's to keep as has already been stated in our account of . Pepys speaks of it as St. James's Fair, a name which expresses it geographically with sufficient accuracy, at a time when all to the north and west of St. James's Hospital was an open field. | |
The following amusing notice of is quoted from Mackyn's Diary by Mr. Frost, in his as the earliest on record :--
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Beyond the fact that it was postponed for a few weeks or months in , on account of the plague, nothing more is recorded concerning this fair till , in which year, Mr. Frost tells us,
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It is to be hoped that the bad character of the fair, as given by the somewhat later, in | |
p.346 | the reign of Queen Anne, is a little exaggerated. The editor writes:-- As to the precise nature, however, of this diabolic ware and he does not enlighten us in detail. |
According to Mr. Frost, in his work quoted above, did not assume any importance till about the year , when the multiplication of shows of all kinds caused it to enlarge its sphere of attractions. he writes,
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he adds, The fair, on this occasion, drew together a large concourse of persons, and an attempt to exclude some young women of light character resulted in a riot. The young women, arrested for the purpose of being turned out, were rescued by some soldiers; a conflict ensued, other constables came up, and the element, of course, took part with the accused women. In the end constable was killed and others seriously injured. The man who actually dealt the fatal blow to the unfortunate constable managed to escape; but a butcher who had been active in the affray, was tried for his part in the affair, convicted, and hung at Tyburn. This tragical occurrence helped, no doubt, to bring the fair itself into discredit, especially among the respectable inhabitants of the neighbourhood of . | |
Pennant, who remembered the last describes the locality as A more minute description of the scene, evidently drawn from the life, is given by an antiquary named Carter, in the for . | |
this person tells us,
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writes Chambers, in his
A puppet-show, we may add, under the name of the Marionettes, was revived at St. James's Hall about the year . | |
At these annual gatherings in May Fair, too, was to be seen the eccentric vendor of gingerbread, whom we have mentioned in our account of the , and who figures in Hogarth's well-known picture of the at Tyburn, where he, in his ornamental dress, is seen in the crowd holding up a gingerbread cake in his hand and addressing the mob. Here, too, was to be seen a Frenchman, whose name has passed away, who submitted to the curious his wife's powers of physical endurance. Fragile and delicate as she appeared, she would (so it was | |
p.347 | stated) raise from the floor a blacksmith's anvil by the hair of her head, which she twisted round it; and then, lying down, she would have the anvil placed on her bosom, while a horse-shoe was forged upon it with the same heavy blows which may be heard and seen in a blacksmith's shop. |
In (vol. ii.) is preserved an advertisement of this fair from of the London papers of the time :--
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May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in it was an annual nuisance. | |
In , as we learn from the of in that year, The idea of a however, was never realised. | |
In recording the downfall of May Fair and of its doings, the announces that
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The fashionable locality now known as May Fair, in the days of George I. and George II., however, enjoyed, on other grounds than that of the annual fair, a celebrity almost unique, and rivalled only by the , of which we have already spoken. Here was a chapel for the celebration of private and secret marriages, which stood within a few yards of the present chapel in . It was presided over by a clergyman, Dr. George Keith, who advertised his business in the daily newspapers, and, in the words of Horace Walpole, made This worthy parson having contrived for a long time to defy the Bishop of London and the authorities of Church and State, was at length excommunicated for of the Church of which he was a minister; but he was impudent enough to turn the tables upon his superior, and to hurl a sentence of excommunication at the head of his bishop, Dr. Gibson, and the judge of the Ecclesiastical Court. Keith was sent to prison, where he remained for several years. His however, as he called it, continued to flourish under his curates, who acted as and the public was kept daily apprised of its situation and its tariff, as witness the following advertisement in the of :
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But the rank and fashion of May Fair did not care whether the fees demanded were high or low, provided they could get the marriage ceremony performed secretly and expeditiously, yet legally. writes Charles Knight, in
As an instance of the way in which this marriage, not , worked in West-end society, let us take the following sketch from Horace Walpole in his best style :-- It is to be hoped that the union, thus hastily and thoughtlessly | |
| concocted and cemented, turned out a happy afterwards. | |
But the butterman's daughter was far from being the only person who found her way through this little chapel into the matrimonial Everybody has heard of the Miss Gunnings, whose beauty and attractions set the West-end in a perfect flame in the reign of George II., the eldest of whom was married to the Earl of Coventry. of these young ladies here went through the marriage ceremony, which gave her the coronet of a duchess. Horace Walpole thus records the fact in his gossiping letters, under date :--
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At last even the people of rank and the inhabitants of May Fair, grew frightened at their own practices; and, as a consequence, an Act was passed forbidding clandestine marriages. On the day previous to its coming into operation no less than marriages were registered here. The Act itself was passed in the previous year, though its operation was delayed till Lady-day, . During this period of suspense, Walpole writes to Montague:--
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Among the registers of , , are dingy volumes, marked
and respectively, containing such records as exist of about marriages which were performed by the Rev. Mr. Keith and other clergymen | |
| in the little chapel here. The entries in these volumes extend over nearly years; and there is a duplicate set in the Bishop of London's registry covering, probably, a somewhat larger period. | |
Dr. Keith himself was a clergyman from the north of the Tweed, but he had been driven from Scotland on account of his attachment to Episcopacy. He had set up a marriage office in the , but had been forced to abandon it. He found, however, a better opening here, and a richer class of customers. It is said that, in morning during the Whitsun holidays, he tied up in the silken bonds of matrimony a greater number of loving couples than had been married at any churches within the But this surely must have been an exaggeration. | |
While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, and by that means ingeniously contrived to turn the circumstance into an advertisement of his trade. At all events, here is a record of his proceedings taken from the of :-- Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by as quoted above. | |
In the for , are the following witty and satirical remarks of the then recent Act for preventing clandestine marriages, and its effects on Keith's chapel:-- Here follows a
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The concluding announcement in the article is as follows: | |
The following extracts, taken at random from the register-books at , above mentioned, will serve to show that the private marriages celebrated in Dr. Keith's little chapel were not confined to the lower or rougher element, but were often taken advantage of by the -- | |
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Of the lady whose name is contained in the lastmentioned entry we have already spoken. We may add, however, that she was the of fair sisters, of Irish extraction, without fortune, but closely related to the baronet of the same name. Miss Elizabeth Gunning was not content with a single dukedom, for, after the death of the Duke of Hamilton, she married John, Duke of Argyll, and was eventually created a peeress of Great Britain in her own right, as Baroness Sundridge and Hamilton. The last time she appeared at any public assembly was at a pic-nic ball at Marseilles, during a months' sojourn of the family in France in . With reference to that event, a writer of that period observes: Her elder sister, Maria, was the wife of George William, Earl of Coventry, and lived close by, in . | |
The marriages at May Fair Chapel, if not quite so loosely conducted as they were at the Fleet, were at least attended with the same evils, and afforded the same facilities for the accomplishment of forced and fraudulent unions. For instance, marriages could be antedated without limit, on payment of a fee, or not entered at all. Parties could be married without declaring their names. It was a common practice for women to hire temporary husbands at the Fleet, in order that they might be able to plead coverture to an action for debt, or to produce a certificate in case of their being . These hired husbands were provided by the parson for each; sometimes they were women. It appears that, for half-a-guinea, a marriage might be registered and certified that never took place. The marriage of the Hon. H. Fox, son of the Lord Holland, to the daughter of the Duke of Richmond, at the Fleet, in , and the increase of these irregular practices, led to the introduction of the Marriage Act. The interval between the passing of the bill and its coming into operation, as we have stated, afforded a rich harvest to the parsons of the Fleet and May Fair. In registerbook there are entered marriages which took place at the Fleet on the , the day previous to the Act coming into force. Clandestine marriages continued at the Savoy till , when a minister and his curate being transported, an effectual stop was put to them. | |
To return once more to Dr. Keith, we may add that, in spite of being a person of loose morals, and frequently performing the marriage service in a state of intoxication, he published at least religious treatise- He lived to be nearly , and died in . | |
was so named from the ground landlord, George Augustus Curzon, Viscount Howe, ancestor of the present Earl Howe. In this street, in , died at No. , at the age of , Miss Mary Berry, of the Misses Berry who enjoyed for so many years the friendship of Horace Walpole; and, indeed, the lady to whom, when late in life he succeeded to the earldom of Orford, he made an offer of his hand and his coronet. She and her younger sister, Agnes, were the daughters of a Yorkshire gentleman, Mr. Robert Berry, who lived in , as already stated in our last chapter. Walpole met them when on a visit at Wentworth Castle, in Yorkshire, and the friendship there made proved a lasting . says Mr. Robert Chambers, in his
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The following epigram on the Misses Berry was written by Horace Walpole, on their paying a visit to his printing-press at Strawberry Hill, soon after their return from a visit to Italy and a stay at Rome:--
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[extra_illustrations.4.352.1] , the Court physician, during his long reign of successful practice, lived for many years in this street, as also did the Princess Sophia | |
p.352 | Matilda of Gloucester.. The name of Madame Vestris also appears as the occupier of No. , in the year . Here, too, Tobias Smollett was living, in -rate lodgings, when he heard the news of the victory of Culloden. |
Mr. Peter Cunningham enumerates, as residents of this street, Pope's Lord Marchmont, and Richard Stonehewer, the friend and correspondent of the poet Gray, at No. . In , Francis Chantrey was living in this street, before his marriage, while beginning to make his name famous as a sculptor. Whilst here, he received his great order, from Mr. Alexander, the architect. It was for colossal busts of Howe, St. Vincent, Duncan, and Nelson, for the Trinity House, with duplicates for the Royal Naval Asylum at Greenwich. He had already occupied rooms in , close by, where we find him in , when he sent his work for exhibition to the Royal Academy, of which he afterwards became so leading a member. | |
In the large house on the north side of the street, enclosed in its own grounds, and embowered in a grove of plane-trees, nearly opposite Curzon Chapel, lived Lord Wharncliffe, the great-grandson of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, and editor of her works. The house is still the property of his descendants. Curzon Chapel--a chapel of easeis a large, dull, brick building, on the south side; and it stands within a few yards of the spot whereon Dr. Keith's unlicensed chapel formerly flourished. | |
Hertford Street--a somewhat dull and heavy thoroughfare, running parallel with on its south side, and crossing the top of , which it connects with Park Lane--has long been of the most fashionable thoroughfares in this aristocratic neighbourhood, and is often mentioned as typical of the height of fashion in the days of William IV. and the early part of the reign of Queen Victoria. | |
In No. lived Dr. Jenner, for a few years, from , a man sadly in advance of his age, as may be inferred from the fact that, in spite of his wonderful discovery of vaccination, which arrested the ravages of the small-pox, he was unable to make a good professional connection at the West-end, and returned to Gloucestershire in disgust. His merits have been somewhat tardily acknowledged by the erection of a statue. The Earl of Liverpool, father of the prime minister, died here in . At No. lived, in the last century, Lord Sandwich, famous for his musical parties: the house was afterwards inhabited by General John Burgoyne, the unsuccessful hero of the American War; and subsequently, for a short time, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. At No. was living, in , Mr. H. B. Trelawny, Lord Byron's companion in his last expedition to Greece, and in whose arms the poet breathed his last. In this street resided the late Sir Charles Locock, Bart., the eminent physician-accoucheur to Her Majesty, who died in ; and that consummate lawyer and accomplished scholar, Sir Alexander Cockburn, the Lord Chief Justice of England. | |
But is rich also in its past memories of quite another kind. As nearly as possible on its site there stood, a couple of centuries ago, a public-house, with gardens attached, called from the diversion of duckhunting by spaniels which was carried on there. The fun was to watch the duck dive in order to escape from the dog's jaws; and it was quite a fashionable sport in the suburbs of London till the early part of the present century, when it was superseded by pigeon-shooting. Mr. Larwood, in his describes it as an oldfashioned wooden house, extensively patronised by the butchers, and other rough characters, during the time. The pond in which the sport took place was situated behind the house, and, for the benefit of the spectators, was boarded round to the height of the knee, in order to preserve the over-excited spectators from involuntary immersions. The pond, he adds,
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In the immediate neighbourhood of Curzon and Hertford Streets are a number of small and dingy streets and lanes, the names of which help to perpetuate the market formerly held here, such as , [extra_illustrations.4.352.2] , and Shepherd's Street. But this market, rural as the name may sound, is not so called from any pastoral associations, but from a certain Mr. Shepherd, or Sheppard, to whom once belonged the ground on which the was held. We fear, therefore, that all poetical thoughts of shepherds and shepherdesses going there a-Maying must be dismissed as baseless fictions. In , an insignificant thoroughfare between and , there was a riding-school; and in this street lived the noted
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Seamore Place is the name of a .row of handsome but somewhat old-fashioned mansions, which occupy a sort of at the western end of . They are only in number, and their chief fronts look westward over . In of them, [extra_illustrations.4.353.1] , with her daughter and her son-in-law, Count D'Orsay, re. sided during a part of her widowhood, from about | |
p.353 | to , surrounded by all the fashionable butterflies of the world of , whose admiration she so much courted. Whilst living here, too, she followed her bent by penning and sending some of her best known contributions to the literature of the day. We shall have to speak of her career hereafter, when we come to Gore House, between and Kensington. Here, too, at time, resided Lord Normanton. |
, which runs out of northwards to , was so called out of compliment to the great, or rather the polite, Lord Chesterfield, whose grounds it bounded on the east. In this street lived Brummell for some years, after his retirement from the army, and while he still basked in the sunshine of royal favour among the circle of the Prince of Wales at Carlton House. Here, consequently, the Prince would frequently come of a morning in order to see the make his toilette, and to learn the art of tying his neckerchief. And here the Prince would continue to sit so late into the evening that he would send his horses home from the door, and insist on taking a quiet chop or steak with his host, but with no intention of returning home till he was half-seas over, and the streaks of early morning were appearing in the sky. | |
Here, too, was living, in , the gallant admiral, the Earl of Dundonald, formerly known as Lord Cochrane, when his name was formally restored to his rank in the navy and to the roll of the Knights of the Order of the Bath, by an order of the Queen in Council; and from this street he dated his letter of thanks to Mr. Douglas Jerrold for having advertised that tardy act of justice in the public press. | |
At No. in this street lived that amiable, talented, and eccentric personage, Mr. J. W. Ward, afterwards Mr. Canning's Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and eventually known as Lord Dudley; and No. was for many years the residence of Sir Robert Adair, the distinguished diplomatist. He died here in . In this street, too, at No. , has lived, for upwards of years, the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the poetess. By birth a Miss Caroline Sheridan, of beautiful grand-daughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in early life she married the Hon. George C. Norton, a brother of the late Lord Grantley. She contributed to the annuals from a date prior to her marriage, and is known to the world as the authoress of several poems, which have taken a high stand in English literature, among which should be mentioned based on the legend of the Wandering Jew,
and the
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The next turning on the east of is , where the ever youthful widow of the last Viscount Saye and Sele died in , at the age of , a lady about as celebrated as Queen Elizabeth for her fondness for dancing, in which she indulged almost to the last week of her long life. She was supposed to be the original of the Viscountess delineated in Hogarth's print of the It may be added that here, too, Lord John Russell was living in , whilst M.P, for South Devon and for Stroud. | |
, to which we now turn, stands at the junction of South Audley and Curzon Streets, and was built on ground belonging to Curzon, Earl Howe, by Isaac Ware, the same who edited for Philip, Earl of Chesterfield. From of Lord Chesterfield's dated and from a quotation in No. of the , we get a fair account of the house when newly built. In the former his lordship writes: The writer in the says: The columns of the screen facing the court-yard, and also the spacious marble staircase, | |
p.354 | were brought from Canons, near Edgware, the mansion of the Duke of Chandos, which was pulled down in the year , and the costly materials dispersed by auction. Among the historic relics which found a place here was a lantern of copper gilt, for eighteen candles, which was bought at the sale at Houghton, Sir Robert Walpole's seat. An amusing story is told with reference to the portraits of Lord Chesterfield's ancestors, which hung upon the walls of the library. As a piece of satire on the boast of ancestry so common at that time in great families, his lordship, it is said, placed among these portraits old heads, which he inscribed and Surely no could beat that. |
In this splendid mansion was-or, rather, so it was reported-doomed to be abolished; but it was purchased by a City merchant, Mr. Charles Magniac. Although it is no longer inhabited by the family of the noble earl whose name it bears, its walls still remain, and doubtless its interior is but little altered in its general appearance from what it was in the above year, when the following description was written :-- | |
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The old earl, it would seem, was fond of the repose which his garden and court-yard afforded; for the late Earl of Essex, who died in , the husband of Kitty Stephens, used to say that he remembered, as a boy, seeing the courtly old earl sitting on a rustic seat in front of his mansion, and basking in the sun. | |
is of the few private houses in London which M. Grossley, in his allows to be equal to the hotels of the nobility in Paris. After it was sold to Mr. Magniac, as above stated, that gentleman considerably curtailed the grounds in the rear, and erected a row of handsome buildings overlooking , to which has been given the name of . | |
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, was the son of Philip, Earl, and of Lady Elizabeth Savile, daughter of the Marchioness of Halifax. His grandmother superintended his education till his eighteenth year, when he went to Cambridge. After his university career he spent a few years in foreign travel, mixing freely with the best society of the chief Continental towns, and at the Hague, adding to his many accomplishments the pernicious vice of gaming. While at Paris he received his final polish under the tuition of the beauties of that place, and, no doubt, gained much of the experience which forms the ground-work of the advice, which he afterwards transcribed in his for the very questionable benefit of his son. | |
Before the death of his father, he sat in the as representative of Cornish boroughs, St. Germains and Lostwithiel, and became a distinguished speaker; and after his accession to the title, in , and his consequent removal to the Upper House, he soon obtained some slight celebrity as an orator. His Court favour varied greatly. During the life of George I., he was appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales; but on that prince's accession as George II., he was greatly disappointed by the absence of that royal favour which he conceived he had a right to expect. He was, however, in the following year appointed Ambassador to Holland, where he greatly distinguished himself by his diplomatic talent; and it was at the expiration of his years of service there that, on his return to England, he was appointed Lord Steward of the Household; but having joined a strong opposition against Walpole, and incurring the decided enmity of the king, he was dismissed from this situation with marks of strong resentment. There are various stories as to the radical cause of the king's dislike to the brilliant statesman, but probably any of them would have been sufficient to create, at the least, a decided coldness. Archdeacon Coxe's version of it is confirmed by Walpole, who was concerned in it, in his memoir of George II.; but there is a discrepancy as to dates, and a tone of improbability about some of the details, which throw more than a shadow of | |
p.357 | doubt over the whole. Briefly, it runs to the following effect: that Chesterfield had ardently desired the post of Secretary of State, and an arrangement had been made in his favour; upon which he had an audience of the Queen, to which he was introduced by Walpole, and immediately after paid a longer visit to Lady Suffolk, then reigning favourite, than was approved of by the Queen, who thereupon procured that his appointment should not take place. Here it may be remarked that Chesterfield had been intimately acquainted with Mrs. Howard long before she had attracted the notice of Queen Caroline or George II.; and further, that, having been created Countess of Suffolk in , and thus set at her ease as to money matters, she was well disposed to leave the Court, but did not do so till , years after the dismissal of Chesterfield, to which Archdeacon Coxe represents her retirement as the ominous preliminary! Walpole relates a similar parallel indiscretion of Chesterfield's; and it appears that it was not till years before the earl's death that he was informed, by Horace Walpole himself, that the cause of his disgrace was his having offended the Queen by paying court to Lady Suffolk. Be this as it may, there was another and more probable cause for the royal dislike, which lay in his marriage with the daughter of George I. and the Duchess of Kendal, Melosina de Schulenburg, created, in her own right, Countess of Walsingham, and considered, as long as her father lived, of the wealthiest heiresses in the kingdom. George I. opposed the inclinations of his tall, dark-haired, and graceful daughter, in consequence of Chesterfield's notorious addiction to gambling; but, a very few months after Chesterfield's dismissal from court, Lady Walsingham became Lady Chesterfield. Her husband's house in was next door to the Duchess of Kendal's, whose society he much frequented; and it was she who- suggested legal measures respecting a will of the late king, which George II. was said to have suppressed and destroyed, and by which, as the duchess alleged, a splendid provision had been made for Lady Walsingham; and at last, rather than submit to a judicial examination of the affair, George II. compromised the suit by a payment of to the Earl and Countess of Chesterfield. These things were not likely to smooth the way for the ex-Lord Steward's return to St. James's; nor was it facilitated by his inveterate habit of ridiculing and disparaging the Electorate and all its concerns, which he continued to his dying day. |
His marriage took place in ; years after, in , he commenced building the as he described it, in May Fair. When the famous boudoir of blue damask and gold, of which much has been said, and more hinted, was finished, and to which Madame de Monconseil contributed the magnificent to be placed on each side of the costly mantelpiece, the lordly owner took possession of the house, a year before the other rooms were finished, their slow progress greatly vexing him. In his lordship was admitted a member of the Cabinet, and in the next year appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. years later we find the earl retiring from the office of principal Secretary of State, to which the king had been constrained, by his undoubted talent, to appoint him; and thus at the early age of , he resigned finally the cares of official life. He was, nevertheless, still an active member of the Upper House, and among the measures with which his name is identified are some of historical importance. In spite of much opposition, within and without of the House, he carried the Bill for the Reform of the Calendar, and gave us the which set our calculation of the year in harmony with that of the rest of Western Europe. | |
Dr. King, in (), says that the earl resigned his employment of Secretary of State because he adds,
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It was during Lord Chesterfield's last brief tenure of the seals of office that Dr. Johnson's eagerly-sought introduction to him took place. The then unknown author, whose dictionary, now a great fact, was then merely an idea floating in the brain of an apparently ordinary mortal, waited in the ante-room of the Secretary of State, and when, having seen Colley Cibber preferred before him, he was admitted, he received, besides approval of his plan, a donation of guineas! Not many months before he had received guineas for And many years after, | |
p.358 | he remarked to Boswell:
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writes Boswell, in his
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continues Boswell, His expression to Boswell concerning Lord Chesterfield, upon this occasion, was:
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Dr. Johnson appeared to have had a remarkable delicacy with respect to the circulation of this letter; for Dr. Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, informed Boswell that, having many years ago pressed him to be allowed to read it to the Lord Hardwicke, who was very desirous to hear it (promising at the same time that no copy of it should be taken), Johnson seemed much pleased that it attracted the attention of a nobleman of such a respectable character; but, after pausing some time, declined to comply with the request, saying, with a smile, or words to this purpose. | |
Dr. Adams expostulated with Johnson, and suggested that his not being admitted when he called on him, to which Johnson had alluded in his letter, was probably not to be imputed to [extra_illustrations.4.358.1] ; for his lordship had declared to Dodsley that And in confirmation of this, he insisted on Lord Chesterfield's general affability and easiness of access, especially to literary men. : : This, as Dr. Adams well observed, was of those happy turns for which Johnson was so remarkably ready. | |
Johnson having now explicitly avowed his opinion of Lord Chesterfield, did not refrain from expressing himself concerning that nobleman with pointed freedom. said he,
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Johnson's remark on Lord Chesterfield's --a natural son, of course, for the title passed at his death to a cousin--is well known to most readers of modern literature:
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Of Lord Chesterfield we are told by the Hon. G. Agar-Ellis, afterwards Lord Dover, in the that But the of these assertions is surely an:exaggeration; and as to the latter character, Lord Chesterfield's treatment of Dr. Johnson, in his own courtly mansion, was not very much like that of the courteous and kindly Maecenas to the poet Horace. | |
A good story is told by Mr. Frost, in his respecting Lord Chesterfield. His lordship once made a wager with Heidigger, a Swiss by birth, and by office Master of the Revels, and who had the reputation of being that he could find an uglier person in the course of a week. The days elapsed, and Lord Chesterfield lost his wager. | |
of his lordship's most familiar acquaintances was the elder brother of the Lord Rokeby, called on account of his height, and to distinguish him from Sir Thomas Robinson, Lord Grantham. Hawkins relates how that Lord Chesterfield It was on his request for an epigram that Lord Chesterfield made the distich:-- and it was he to whom he said in his last illness, Lord Chesterfield was very short. Sir Thomas did not long survive his witty friend, and died in . | |
Lord Chesterfield had but child--the illegitimate son, Philip Stanhope, to whom his famous were addressed; and he, after disappointing Chesterfield's expectations, was carried oft in the prime of life. The aged peer survived him some years, and died in , almost an octogenarian. | |
Lord Chesterfield's wit did not die with him, for even his will contained a grim satire on the Dean and Chapter of , some of whose lands, adjoining , were taken by the earl, after a hard bargain, for the purpose of forming . The substance of the clause in the will referred to is to the effect that, if his as he calls him, Philip Stanhope, should at any time indulge in horse-racing, or the keeping of race-horses or hounds; or if he should reside for night at Newmarket during the time of the races there, or should lose in any day the sum of by gambling, then he should forfeit and pay out of his estate the sum of , As his death took place before that of the earl, the Dean and Chapter could have no claim upon the estate of the as the contingent interest never accrued in their favour. | |
Footnotes: [] See p. 100, ante. [] See Vol. II., pp. 411-413. [extra_illustrations.4.352.1] Sir Henry Halford [extra_illustrations.4.352.2] Shepherd's Market [extra_illustrations.4.353.1] Lady Blessington [] See Gentleman's Magazine. vol. lxi., p. 394. [extra_illustrations.4.358.1] Lord Chesterfield |
