[85] John Baptist Locatelli, a native of Verona, had his studio in Union Street, Tottenham Court Road, from 1776. He was befriended by Horace Walpole, with whom he quarrelled bitterly over a group representing Theseus offering assistance to Hercules. Walpole refused to take this work, although he had already paid the sculptor £350 on account, and was probably justified, since Nollekens said the group looked “like the dry skins of two brickmakers stuffed with clotted flocks from an old mattress.” Locatelli worked also for the brothers Adam, and he superintended the carving of the basso-relievos put up by Nollekens on the outside of the Sessions House, Clerkenwell Green. In 1796 he left England for Milan, where Buonaparte employed him and granted him a pension. (See Smith’s _Life of Nollekens_, 1829, pp. 119-123, and Thornbury’s _British Artists_, vol. ii. pp. 9-16). [86] Wilson, upon whom a note has been given under the year 1766, lived at No. 36 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, within a few minutes’ walk of this group of elms. He was accustomed of a fine evening, says Redgrave, to throw open his window and invite his friends to enjoy with him the glowing sunset behind the Hampstead and Highgate hills. Fitzroy Square was not begun until 1790-94. To-day the miles between Charlotte Street and these northern heights are filled by streets. Nevertheless, Hampstead church can still be seen from Charlotte Street, piercing the northern distance, and, but for the slight deflection of Rathbone Place, it would be visible from Oxford Street. John Constable afterwards lived in the same street. The elms under which Wilson and Baretti walked must have had their roots in the ground on which the east side of Cleveland Street is built. [87] It is difficult to form an idea of this instrument. It was beaten with a rolling-pin, and appears to have been used as a drum in such a way (according to the manner in which it was struck) as to produce something like notes. This is indicated in Bonnell Thornton’s burlesque, _Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day_, in which occur the well-known lines which amused Dr. Johnson:-- “In strains more exalted the salt-box shall join, And clattering and battering and clapping combine; With a rap and a tap while the hollow side sounds. Up and down leaps the flap, and with rattling rebounds.” The character of the neighbourhood round the “Farthing Pie House” (Portland Road Station) in Smith’s boyhood, may be judged by Smith’s statement in his _Vagabondiana_, that “when the sites of Portland Place, Devonshire Street, etc., were fields, the famous Tommy Lowe, then a singer at Mary-le-bone Gardens, raised a subscription, to enable an unfortunate man to run a small chariot, drawn by four muzzled mastiffs, from a pond near Portland Chapel, called Cockney Ladle, which supplied Mary-le-bone Bason with water, to the ‘Farthing Pie House’ … in order to accommodate children with a ride for a halfpenny.”