Old and New London, Volume I: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its PlacesThornbury, Walter
History
Old and New London, Volume I: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places
Thornbury, Walter
London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- History
In Castle Street (an offshoot of Fetter Lane), in 1709-10 (Queen Anne),
at the house of his father, a master tailor, was born a very small poet,
Paul Whitehead. This poor satirist and worthless man became a Jacobite
barrister and protege of Bubb Doddington and the Prince of Wales and his
Leicester Fields Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called
"Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the
Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He
appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous
Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at
Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood,
where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life
Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a
villa on Twickenham Common, where Hogarth used to visit him. If
Whitehead is ever remembered, it will be only for that splash of vitriol
that Churchill threw in his face, when he wrote of the turncoat,--
"May I--can worse disgrace on manhood fall?--
Be born a Whitehead and baptised a Paul."
It was this Whitehead, with Carey, the surgeon of the Prince of Wales,
who got up a mock procession, in ridicule of the Freemasons' annual
cavalcade from Brooke Street to Haberdashers' Hall. The ribald
procession consisted of shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps, in carts drawn
by asses, followed by a mourning-coach with six horses, each of a
different colour. The City authorities very properly refused to let them
pass through Temple Bar, but they waited there and saluted the Masons.
Hogarth published a print of "The Scald Miserables," which is coarse,
and even dull. The Prince of Wales, with more good sense than usual,
dismissed Carey for this offensive buffoonery. Whitehead bequeathed his
heart to Earl Despenser, who buried it in his mausoleum with absurd
ceremonial.
At Pemberton Row, formerly Three-Leg Alley, Fetter Lane, lived that very
indifferent poet but admirable miniature-painter of Charles II.'s time,
Flatman. He was a briefless barrister of the Inner Temple, and resided
with his father till the period of his death. Anthony Wood tells us that
having written a scurrilous ballad against marriage, beginning,--
"Like a dog with a bottle tied close to his tail,
Like a Tory in a bog, or a thief in a jail,"
his comrades serenaded him with the song on his wedding-night. Rochester
wrote some vigorous lines on Flatman, which are not unworthy even of
Dryden himself,--
"Not that slow drudge, in swift Pindaric strains,
Flatman, who Cowley imitates with pains,
And drives a jaded Muse, whipt with loose reins."
We find Dr. Johnson quoting these lines with approval, in a conversation
in which he suggested that Pope had partly borrowed his "Dying
Christian" from Flatman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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