In 1732 there must have been “high jinks” on foot from time to time at the Bedford Coffee House, Covent Garden. Now, where was the Bedford Coffee House? Was it at that Bedford Hotel, under the piazza, so unceremoniously elbowed by that monstrous glasshouse called the “Floral Hall”—the Bedford of which Mrs. Warner is so urbane a hostess? Or was it the “Bedford Head,” in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, a hostelry, where to this day a club of bookworm men meet to lay the dust of ancient lore with frugal libations, and talk about Hogarth, and Fielding, and Johnson, and the brave deeds and the brave men of the days that shall be no more? I confess that I incline to the “Bedford Head,” and that I have purposely avoided taking counsel of London antiquaries more learned than myself on the point, lest I should be undeceived. Moreover, Tothall lived at the corner of Tavistock Court, Tavistock Street, which, as everybody knows, is over against Maiden Lane. It was nearer to Leicester Fields, where Hogarth dwelt, than the Bedford under the piazza, and HOGARTH and TOTHALL, with THORNHILL, FORREST, and SCOTT, were the immortal FIVE who, on the morning of Saturday, the 27th of May, 1732, set out on a Kentish pilgrimage, of which the aim and end were “High Jinks.” A word as to the Pilgrims. A famous English writer in some lectures on the “English Humourists,” familiar to us all, has described the pilgrimage as that of a “jolly party of tradesmen engaged at high jinks.” Now with the exception of Tothall, who had been pretty nearly everything, and a woollen draper, among multifarious other callings,[17] the party were all professional men. What Hogarth was, you know. He had come to the days when he could wear his sword and bag. Thornhill was Sir James’s son and heir. He was afterwards sergeant-painter to the navy, and preserved a good estate in the west. Scott was a marine painter, said by Lord Orford to be second only to Vandevelde; and Forrest’s poetic narrative of the Tour, in “Hudibrastic verse,” is so fluent, and often so witty, as to show a capacity and a facility very uncommon in those days among tradesmen. The curiosity is that these five accomplished men should have taken delight in diversions of the plainest and most inelegant kind. As my author quoted above justly remarks, this was indeed a “jolly party of tradesmen,” at least, of merrymakers who behaved as we should expect tradesmen to do; but I suspect that the real London tradesman of the time would have been frightened out of his life at such wild doings; and that these jovial Kentish jinks were engaged in by the five Bedfordians through sheer humorous eccentricity, tinged by that inherent coarseness and love of horseplay of the age, which we discover, not only in such holiday jaunts, but in such almost inconceivable frolics as that of George the Second, the Duke of Montague, with Heidegger at the masquerade; the escapade of Lord Middlesex and his friends of the Calves’