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
Charles Lamb, who was born in Crown Office Row, in his exquisite way has
sketched the benchers of the Temple whom he had seen pacing the terrace
in his youth. Jekyll, with the roguish eye, and Thomas Coventry, of the
elephantine step, the scarecrow of inferiors, the browbeater of equals,
who made a solitude of children wherever he came, who took snuff by
palmfuls, diving for it under the mighty flap of his old-fashioned red
waistcoat. In the gentle Samuel Salt we discover a portrait of the
employer of Lamb's father. Salt was a shy indolent, absent man, who
never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his sword. The day of
Miss Blandy's execution he went to dine with a relative of the
murderess, first carefully schooled by his clerk to avoid the
disagreeable subject. However, during the pause for dinner, Salt went to
the window, looked out, pulled down his ruffles, and observed, "It's a
gloomy day; Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." Salt
never laughed. He was a well-known toast with the ladies, having a fine
figure and person. Coventry, on the other hand, was a man worth four or
five hundred thousand, and lived in a gloomy house, like a strong box,
opposite the pump in Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street. Fond of money as he
was, he gave away L30,000 at once to a charity for the blind, and kept a
hospitable house. Salt was indolent and careless of money, and but for
Lovel, his clerk, would have been universally robbed. This Lovel was a
clever little fellow, with a face like Garrick, who could mould heads in
clay, turn cribbage-boards, take a hand at a quadrille or bowls, and
brew punch with any man of his degree in Europe. With Coventry and Salt,
Peter Pierson often perambulated the terrace, with hands folded behind
him. Contemporary with these was Daines Barrington, a burly, square man.
Lamb also mentions Burton, "a jolly negation," who drew up the bills of
fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dined; thin, fragile
Wharry, who used to spitefully pinch his cat's ears when anything
offended him; and Jackson, the musician, to whom the cook once applied
for instructions how to write down "edge-bone of beef" in a bill of
commons. Then there was Blustering Mingay, who had a grappling-hook in
substitute for a hand he had lost, which Lamb, when a child, used to
take for an emblem of power; and Baron Mascres, who retained the costume
of the reign of George II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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