Volume Ii Part 4 (2/2)

”It was Dryden who made Will's Coffee-house the great resort of the wits of his time.” (_Pope_ and _Spence_). The room in which the poet was accustomed to sit was on the first floor; and his place was the place of honour by fire-side in the winter; and at the corner of the balcony, looking over the street, in fine weather; he called the two places his winter and his summer seat. This was called the dining-room floor in the last century. The company did not sit in boxes, as subsequently, but at various tables which were dispersed through the room. Smoking was permitted in the public room: it was then so much in vogue that it does not seem to have been considered a nuisance. Here, as in other similar places of meeting, the visitors divided themselves into parties; and we are told by Ward, that the young beaux and wits, who seldom approached the princ.i.p.al table, thought it a great honour to have a pinch out of Dryden's snuff-box.

Dean Lockier has left this life-like picture of his interview with the presiding genius at Will's:--”I was about seventeen when I first came up to town,” says the Dean, ”an odd-looking boy, with short rough hair, and that sort of awkwardness which one always brings up at first out of the country with one. However, in spite of my bashfulness and appearance, I used, now and then, to thrust myself into Will's, to have the pleasure of seeing the most celebrated wits of that time, who then resorted thither. The second time that ever I was there, Mr.

Dryden was speaking of his own things, as he frequently did, especially of such as had been lately published. 'If anything of mine is good,' says he, ”tis _Mac-Flecno_; and I value myself the more upon it, because it is the first piece of ridicule written in heroics.' On hearing this I plucked up my spirit so far as to say, in a voice but just loud enough to be heard, 'that _Mac-Flecno_ was a very fine poem, but that I had not imagined it to be the first that was ever writ that way.' On this, Dryden turned short upon me, as surprised at my interposing; asked me how long 'I had been a dealer in poetry;' and added, with a smile, 'Pray, Sir, what is it that you did imagine to have been writ so before?'--I named Boileau's _Lutrin_, and Ta.s.soni's _Secchia Rapita_, which I had read, and knew Dryden had borrowed some strokes from each. ”Tis true,' said Dryden, 'I had forgot them.' A little after, Dryden went out, and in going, spoke to me again, and desired me to come and see him the next day. I was highly delighted with the invitation; went to see him accordingly; and was well acquainted with him after, as long as he lived.”

Will's Coffee-house was the open market for libels and lampoons, the latter named from the established burden formerly sung to them:--

”Lampone, lampone, camerada lampone.”

There was a drunken fellow, named Julian, who was a characterless frequenter of Will's, and Sir Walter Scott has given this account of him and his vocation:--

”Upon the general practice of writing lampoons, and the necessity of finding some mode of dispersing them, which should diffuse the scandal widely while the authors remained concealed, was founded the self-erected office of Julian, Secretary, as he calls himself, to the Muses. This person attended Will's, the Wits' Coffee-house, as it was called; and dispersed among the crowds who frequented that place of gay resort copies of the lampoons which had been privately communicated to him by their authors. 'He is described,' says Mr.

Malone, 'as a very drunken fellow, and at one time was confined for a liable.' Several satires were written, in the form of addresses to him as well as the following. There is one among the _State Poems_ beginning--

”'Julian, in verse, to ease thy wants I write, Not moved by envy, malice, or by spite, Or pleased with the empty names of wit and sense, But merely to supply thy want of pence: This did inspire my muse, when out at heel, She saw her needy secretary reel; Grieved that a man, so useful to the age, Should foot it in so mean an equipage; A crying scandal that the fees of sense Should not be able to support the expense Of a poor scribe, who never thought of wants, When able to procure a cup of Nantz.'

”Another, called a 'Consoling Epistle to Julian,' is said to have been written by the Duke of Buckingham.

”From a pa.s.sage in one of the _Letters from the Dead to the Living_, we learn, that after Julian's death, and the madness of his successor, called Summerton, lampoon felt a sensible decay; and there was no more that brisk spirit of verse, that used to watch the follies and vices of the men and women of figure, that they could not start new ones faster than lampoons exposed them.”

How these lampoons were concocted we gather from Bays, in the _Hind and the Panther transversed_:--”'Tis a trifle hardly worth owning; I was 'tother day at Will's, throwing out something of that nature; and, i' gad, the hint was taken, and out came that picture; indeed, the poor fellow was so civil as to present me with a dozen of 'em for my friends; I think I have here one in my pocket.... Ay, ay, I can do it if I list, tho' you must not think I have been so dull as to mind these things myself; but 'tis the advantage of our Coffee-house, that from their talk, one may write a very good polemical discourse, without ever troubling one's head with the books of controversy.”

Tom Brown describes ”a Wit and a Beau set up with little or no expense. A pair of red stockings and a sword-knot set up one, and peeping once a day in at Will's, and two or three second-hand sayings, the other.”

Pepys, one night, going to fetch home his wife, stopped in Covent Garden, at the Great Coffee-house there, as he called Will's, where he never was before: ”Where,” he adds, ”Dryden, the poet (I knew at Cambridge), and all the Wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. Hoole of our College. And had I had time then, or could at other times, it will be good coming thither, for there, I perceive, is very witty and pleasant discourse. But I could not tarry; and, as it was late, they were all ready to go away.”

Addison pa.s.sed each day alike, and much in the manner that Dryden did.

Dryden employed his mornings in writing, dined _en famille_, and then went to Will's, ”only he came home earlier o' nights.”

Pope, when very young, was impressed with such veneration for Dryden, that he persuaded some friends to take him to Will's Coffee-house, and was delighted that he could say that he had seen Dryden. Sir Charles Wogan, too, brought up Pope from the Forest of Windsor, to dress _a la mode_, and introduce at Will's Coffee-house. Pope afterwards described Dryden as ”a plump man with a down look, and not very conversible;”

and Cibber could tell no more ”but that he remembered him a decent old man, arbitor of critical disputes at Will's.” Prior sings of--

”the younger Stiles, Whom Dryden pedagogues at Will's!”

Most of the hostile criticisms on his Plays, which Dryden has noticed in his various Prefaces, appear to have been made at his favourite haunt, Will's Coffee-house.

Dryden is generally said to have been returning from Will's to his house in Gerard-street, when he was cudgelled in Rose-street by three persons hired for the purpose by Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in the winter of 1679. The a.s.sault, or ”the Rose-alley Ambuscade,” certainly took place; but it is not so certain that Dryden was on his way from Will's, and he then lived in Long Acre, not Gerard-street.

It is worthy of remark that Swift was accustomed to speak disparagingly of Will's, as in his _Rhapsody on Poetry_:--

”Be sure at Will's the following day Lie snug, and hear what critics say; And if you find the general vogue p.r.o.nounces you a stupid rogue, d.a.m.ns all your thoughts as low and little; Sit still, and swallow down your spittle.”

Swift thought little of the frequenters of Will's: he used to say, ”the worst conversation he ever heard in his life was at Will's Coffee-house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to a.s.semble; that is to say, five or six men, who had writ plays or at least prologues, or had a share in a miscellany, came thither, and entertained one another with their trifling composures, in so important an air as if they had been the n.o.blest efforts of human nature, or that the fate of kingdoms depended on them.”

In the first number of the _Tatler_, Poetry is promised under the article of Will's Coffee-house. The place, however, changed after Dryden's time: ”you used to see songs, epigrams, and satires in the hands of every man you met; you have now only a pack of cards; and instead of the cavils about the turn of the expression, the elegance of the style, and the like, the learned now dispute only about the truth of the game.” ”In old times, we used to sit upon a play here, after it was acted, but now the entertainment's turned another way.”

The _Spectator_ is sometimes seen ”thrusting his head into a round of politicians at Will's, and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in these little circular audiences.” Then, we have as an instance of no one member of human society but that would have some little pretension for some degree in it, ”like him who came to Will's Coffee-house upon the merit of having writ a posie of a ring.” And, ”Robin, the porter who waits at Will's, is the best man in town for carrying a billet: the fellow has a thin body, swift step, demure looks, sufficient sense, and knows the town.”[15]

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