Volume Ii Part 2 (2/2)
There's a Danniell, a Samuel, a Sampson, an Abell; The first and the last write at the same table.
Then there's Virtue and Faith there, with Wylie and Rasch, Disagreeing elsewhere, yet at Lloyd's never clash, There's a Long and a Short, Small, Little, and Fatt, With one Robert Dewar, who ne'er wears his hat: No drinking goes on, though there's Porter and Sack, Lots of Scotchmen there are, beginning with Mac; Macdonald, to wit, Macintosh and McGhie, McFarquhar, McKenzie, McAndrew, Mackie.
An evangelized Jew, and an infidel Quaker; There's a Bunn and a Pye, with a Cook and a Baker, Though no Tradesmen or Shopmen are found, yet herewith Is a Taylor, a Saddler, a Paynter, a Smyth; Also Butler and Chapman, with b.u.t.ter and Glover, Come up to Lloyd's room their bad risks to cover.
Fox, Shepherd, Hart, Buck, likewise come every day; And though many an a.s.s, there is only one Bray.
There is a Mill and Miller, A-dam and a Poole, A Constable, Sheriff, a Law, and a Rule.
There's a Newman, a Niemann, a Redman, a Pitman, Now to rhyme with the last, there is no other fit man.
These, with Young, Cheap, and Lent, Luckie, Hastie, and Slow, With dear Mr. Allnutt, Allfrey, and Auldjo, Are all the queer names that at Lloyd's I can show.”
Many of these individuals are now deceased; but a frequenter of Lloyd's in former years will recognize the persons mentioned.
THE JERUSALEM COFFEE-HOUSE,
Cornhill, is one of the oldest of the City news-rooms, and is frequented by merchants and captains connected with the commerce of China, India, and Australia.
”The subscription-room is well-furnished with files of the princ.i.p.al Canton, Hongkong, Macao, Penang, Singapore, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Sydney, Hobart Town, Launceston, Adelaide, and Port Phillip papers, and Prices Current: besides s.h.i.+pping lists and papers from the various intermediate stations or ports touched at, as St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, etc. The books of East India s.h.i.+pping include arrivals, departures, casualties, etc. The full business is between two and three o'clock, p.m. In 1845, John Tawell, the Slough murderer, was captured at [traced to] the Jerusalem, which he was in the habit of visiting, to ascertain information of the state of his property in Sydney.”--_The City_, 2nd edit., 1848.
BAKER'S COFFEE-HOUSE,
Change-alley, is remembered as a tavern some forty years since. The landlord, after whom it is named, may possibly have been a descendant from ”Baker,” the master of Lloyd's Rooms. It has been, for many years, a chop-house, with direct service from the gridiron, and upon pewter; though on the first-floor, joint dinners are served: its post-prandial punch was formerly much drunk. In the lower room is a portrait of James, thirty-five years waiter here.
COFFEE-HOUSES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Of Ward's _Secret History_ of the Clubs of his time we have already given several specimens. Little is known of him personally. He was, probably, born in 1660, and early in life he visited the West Indies.
Sometime before 1669, he kept a tavern and punch-house, next door to Gray's Inn, of which we shall speak hereafter. His works are now rarely to be met with. His doggrel secured him a place in the _Dunciad_, where not only his elevation to the pillory is mentioned, but the fact is also alluded to that his productions were extensively s.h.i.+pped to the Plantations or Colonies of those days,--
”Nor sail with Ward to ape-and-monkey climes, Where vile mundungus trucks for viler rhymes,”
the only places, probably, where they were extensively read. In return for the doubtful celebrity thus conferred upon his rhymes, he attacked the satirist in a wretched production, int.i.tuled _Apollo's Maggot in his Cups_; his expiring effort, probably, for he died, as recorded in the pages of our first volume, on the 22nd of June, 1731. His remains were buried in the churchyard of Old St. Pancras, his body being followed to the grave solely by his wife and daughter, as directed by him in his poetical will, written some six years before. We learn from n.o.ble that there are no less than four engraved portraits of Ned Ward. The structure of the _London Spy_, the only work of his that at present comes under our notice, is simple enough. The author is self-personified as a countryman, who, tired with his ”tedious confinement to a country hutt,” comes up to London; where he fortunately meets with a quondam school-fellow,--a ”man about town,”
in modern phrase,--who undertakes to introduce him to the various scenes, sights, and mysteries of the, even then, ”great metropolis:”
much like the visit, in fact, from Jerry Hawthorn to Corinthian Tom, only antic.i.p.ated by some hundred and twenty years. ”We should not be at all surprised (says the _Gentleman's Magazine_,) to find that the stirring scenes of Pierce Egan's _Life in London_ were first suggested by more homely pages of the _London Spy_.”
At the outset of the work we have a description--not a very flattering one, certainly--of a common coffee-house of the day, one of the many hundreds with which London then teemed. Although coffee had been only known in England some fifty years, coffee-houses were already among the most favourite inst.i.tutions of the land; though they had not as yet attained the political importance which they acquired in the days of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, some ten or twelve years later:--
”'Come,' says my friend, 'let us step into this coffee-house here; as you are a stranger in the town, it will afford you some diversion.'
Accordingly in we went, where a parcel of muddling muckworms were as busy as so many rats in an old cheese-loft; some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, some smoking, others jangling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot [schuyt], or a boatswain's cabin. The walls were hung round with gilt frames, as a farrier's shop with horse-shoes; which contained abundance of rarities, viz., Nectar and Ambrosia, May-dew, Golden Elixirs, Popular Pills, Liquid Snuff, Beautifying Waters, Dentifrices, Drops, and Lozenges; all as infallible as the Pope, 'Where every one (as the famous Saffolde has it) above the rest, Deservedly has gain'd the name of best:' every medicine being so catholic, it pretends to nothing less than universality. So that, had not my friend told me 'twas a coffee-house, I should have taken it for Quacks' Hall, or the parlour of some eminent mountebank. We each of us stuck in our mouths a pipe of sotweed, and now began to look about us.”
A description of Man's Coffee-house, situate in Scotland-yard, near the water-side, is an excellent picture of a fas.h.i.+onable coffee-house of the day. It took its name from the proprietor, Alexander Man, and was sometimes known as Old Man's, or the Royal Coffee-house, to distinguish it from Young Man's and Little Man's minor establishments in the neighbourhood:--
”We now ascended a pair of stairs, which brought us into an old-fas.h.i.+oned room, where a gaudy crowd of odoriferous _Tom-Essences_ were walking backwards and forwards with their hats in their hands, not daring to convert them to their intended use, lest it should put the foretops of their wigs into some disorder. We squeezed through till we got to the end of the room, where, at a small table, we sat down, and observed that it was as great a rarity to hear anybody call for a dish of _Politician's porridge_, or any other liquor, as it is to hear a beau call for a pipe of tobacco; their whole exercise being to charge and discharge their nostrils, and keep the curls of their periwigs in their proper order. The clas.h.i.+ng of their snush-box lids, in opening and shutting, made more noise than their tongues. Bows and cringes of the newest mode were here exchanged, 'twixt friend and friend, with wonderful exactness. They made a humming like so many hornets in a country chimney, not with their talking, but with their whispering over their new _Minuets_ and _Bories_, with their hands in their pockets, if only freed from their snush-box. We now began to be thoughtful of a pipe of tobacco; whereupon we ventured to call for some instruments of evaporation, which were accordingly brought us, but with such a kind of unwillingness, as if they would much rather have been rid of our company; for their tables were so very neat, and s.h.i.+ned with rubbing, like the upper-leathers of an alderman's shoes, and as brown as the top of a country housewife's cupboard. The floor was as clean swept as a Sir Courtly's dining-room, which made us look round, to see if there were no orders hung up to impose the forfeiture of so much Mop-money upon any person that should spit out of the chimney-corner. Notwithstanding we wanted an example to encourage us in our porterly rudeness, we ordered them to light the wax-candle, by which we ignified our pipes and blew about our whiffs; at which several Sir Foplins drew their faces into as many peevish wrinkles, as the beaux at the Bow-street Coffee-house, near Covent-garden did, when the gentleman in masquerade came in amongst them, with his oyster-barrel m.u.f.f and turnip-b.u.t.tons, to ridicule their fopperies.”
A cabinet picture of the Coffee-house life of a century and a half since is thus given in the well-known _Journey through England_ in 1714: ”I am lodged,” says the tourist, ”in the street called Pall Mall, the ordinary residence of all strangers, because of its vicinity to the Queen's Palace, the Park, the Parliament House, the Theatres, and the Chocolate and Coffee-houses, where the best company frequent.
If you would know our manner of living, 'tis thus: we rise by nine, and those that frequent great men's levees, find entertainment at them till eleven, or, as in Holland, go to tea-tables; about twelve the _beau monde_ a.s.semble in several Coffee or Chocolate houses: the best of which are the Cocoa-tree and White's Chocolate-houses, St. James's, the Smyrna, Mrs. Rochford's, and the British Coffee-houses; and all these so near one another, that in less than an hour you see the company of them all. We are carried to these places in chairs (or sedans), which are here very cheap, a guinea a week, or a s.h.i.+lling per hour, and your chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice.
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