It was in a poor shoemaker’s small window in Long Acre,--half of it devoted to boots, half to pictures--that poor starving Wilson’s fine classical landscapes were exposed, often vainly, for sale. Here, from his miserable garret in Tottenham Court Road, the great painter, peevish and soured by neglect, would come swearing at his rivals Barret and Smith of Chichester. I can imagine him, with his tall, burly figure, his red face, and his enormous nose, striding out of the shop, thirsting for porter, and muttering that, if the pictures of Wright of Derby had fire, his had air. Yet this great painter, whose works are so majestic and glowing, so fresh, airy, broad, and harmonious, was all but starved. The king refused to purchase his “Kew Gardens,” and the very pawnbrokers grew weary of taking his Tivolis and Niobes as pledges, far preferring violins, flat-irons, or telescopes. It was in Long Acre that that delightful idyllic painter, Stothard, was born in 1755. His father, a Yorkshireman, kept an inn in the street.[520] Sent for his health into Yorkshire, and placed with an old lady who had some choice engravings, he began to draw. The first subject that he ever painted was executed with an oyster-shell full of black paint, borrowed from the village plumber and glazier. This little man was the father of many a Watteau lover and tripping Boccaccio nymph. That genial and graceful artist, who illustrated Chaucer, _Robinson Crusoe_, and _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, had the road to fame pointed out to him first by that little black man. On the accession of King George I. the Tories had such sway over the London mobs, that the friends of the Protestant succession resolved to found cheap tavern clubs in various parts of the City in order that well-affected tradesmen might meet to keep up their spirit of loyalty, and serve as focus-points of resistance in case of Tory tumults. Defoe, a staunch Whig, describes one of these assemblies in Long Acre, which probably suggested the rest. At the Mughouse Club in Long Acre, about a hundred gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen met in a large room, at seven o’clock on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in the winter, and broke up soon after ten. A grave old gentleman, “in his own grey hairs,”[521] and within a few months of ninety, was the president, and sat in an “armed” chair, raised some steps above the rest of the company, to keep the room in order. A harp was played all the time at the lower end of the room, and every now and then one of the company rose and entertained the rest with a song. Nothing was drunk but ale, and every one chalked his score on the table beside him. What with the songs and drinking healths from one table to another, there was no room for politics or anything that could sour conversation. The members of these clubs retired when they pleased, as from a coffee-house.