[226] The Garrat mock elections have often been described. Garrat was a rural spot between Wandsworth and Tooting. A committee organised to protect the village common from encroachments developed into a roaring municipal farce which was repeated after every General Election. The publicans of the southern villages willingly subscribed to the carnival, and reaped handsome profits; while Foote spread the fame and vogue of the elections by his farce _The Mayor of Garrat_. A mock knighthood was given, as a matter of course, to each mayor on his election. The first recorded mayor was Sir John Harper, a retailer of brick-dust, and the next, the most famous of all, Sir Jeffery Dunstan, a humorous vagabond whose ostensible trade was in old wigs. He was constantly portrayed, or used as the basis of caricature. In one print he is seen standing on a stool, asking “How far is it from the first of August to Westminster Bridge?” “Sir Jeffery” used his tongue with great freedom, and the authorities were so destitute of humour as to arrest him and obtain his imprisonment. The next Mayor of Garrat was Sir Harry Dinsdale. He was born in Shug Lane, Haymarket, in 1758, and appears to have haunted the Soho neighbourhood, for he married a woman out of St. Anne’s workhouse. He died in 1811. [227] It must have been from his house No. 37, on the north side of Gerrard Street, now a restaurant, but retaining its old appearance and marked by a commemorative tablet, that Burke went to Westminster Hall on May 10, 1787, to impeach Warren Hastings. Of Burke’s life in Gerrard Street we have no nearer glimpse than that given by Smith. [228] General John Money (1752-1817) was one of the earliest of English aeronauts. It was in an ascent from Norwich, July 22, 1785, that he was carried out to sea, where he “remained for seven hours struggling with his fate” before he was rescued.--Philip Reinagle, R.A. (1749-1833), was an animal, landscape, and dead game painter. Examples of his landscape work are at South Kensington. [229] The Charles Greville here referred to was an early patron of Lawrence at Oxford, when the artist was a mere boy; also of Romney, whose portrait of Wortley Montague, the eccentric pseudo-Turk, he both bought and copied. [230] Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), who married Emma Hart, Nelson’s Lady Hamilton, was a keen archæologist, and made a magnificent collection of Greek vases, which he sold to the British Museum. He purchased the Barberini, or “Portland,” vase from Byres, the architect, and sold it for 1800 guineas to the Duchess of Portland, in the sale of whose property it was bought by the family in 1829 for £1029. On February 7, 1745, after its acquisition by the British Museum (Montagu House), it was wantonly broken in pieces by a visitor named William Lloyd, who was sentenced to a fine or imprisonment. The fine was paid anonymously.