Kent was originally a coach-painter in Yorkshire, and was patronised by the Queen, the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Burlington. He helped to adorn Stowe, Holkham, and Houghton. He was at once architect, painter, and landscape gardener. In the altar-piece, the vile drawing of which even Hogarth found it hard to caricature, the painter was said to have introduced portraits of the Pretender’s wife and children. The “blue print,” published in 1725, was followed by another representing Kent painting Burlington Gate. The altar-piece was removed, but the nobility patronised Kent till he died, twenty years or so afterwards. We owe him, however, some gratitude, if, according to Walpole, he was the father of modern gardening. The long-limbed picture caricatured by Hogarth was for some years one of the ornaments of the coffee-room of the Crown and Anchor in the Strand. Thence it was removed to the vestry-room of the church, over the old almshouses in the churchyard. After 1803 it was transported to the new vestry-room on the north side of the churchyard.[273] In the old church Sir Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, was baptized, 1563; as were Sir Charles Sedley, the delightful song-writer and the oracle of the licentious wits of his day, 1638-9; and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the son of that troublous spirit “Little Sincerity,” and himself the author of the _Characteristics_. The church holds some hallowed earth: in St. Clement’s was buried Sir John Roe, who was a friend of Ben Jonson, and died of the plague in the sturdy poet’s arms. Dr. Donne’s wife, the daughter of Sir George More, and who died in childbed during her husband’s absence at the court of Henri Quatre, was buried here. Her tomb, by Nicholas Stone, was destroyed when the church was rebuilt. Donne, on his return, preached a sermon here on her death, taking the text--“Lo! I am the man that has seen affliction.” John Lowin, the great Shaksperean actor, lies here. He died in 1653. He acted in Ben Jonson’s “Sejanus” in 1605, with Burbage and Shakspere. Tradition reports him to have been the favourite Falstaff, Hamlet, and Henry VIII. of his day.[274] Burbage was the greatest of the Shaksperean tragedians, and Tarleton the drollest of the comedians; but Lowin must have been as versatile as Garrick if he could represent Hamlet’s vacillations, and also convey a sense of Falstaff’s unctuous humour. Poor mad Nat Lee, who died on a bulk in Clare Market close by, was buried at St. Clement’s, 1692; and here also lies poor beggared Otway, who died in 1685. In the same year as Lee, Mountfort, the actor, whom Captain Hill stabbed in a fit of jealousy in Howard Street adjoining, was interred here.