The Town Part 27

[244] Lounger's Common-Place Book, vol. ii., p. 141.

[245] "For," says the note, "while the mucilaginous qualities of porter may form one criterion of the nourishment it yields, it does not follow that mere nourishment is or ought to be the only consideration in a labouring man's use of malt liquor, or any other aliment. It is well known that flesh-meats yield chyle in greater abundance than any production of the vegetable kingdom; but Franklin would not have considered this any argument for living wholly upon meat. The fact is, that the stimulating quality of all fermented liquors (when moderately taken) is an essential part of the refreshment, and therefore of the strength they yield.

'We curse not wine--the vile excess we blame.'"

[To this Franklin might have answered, that the want of stimulus is generally produced by a previous abuse of it, and that the having recourse to fermented liquors is likely to continue the abuse, whatever may be said about moderation. The moderation is so difficult, that it is better to abstain than to hazard it. It is true (not to quote the words irreverently) "man does not live by bread alone," but by sociality and good-humour; and that even a little excess occasionally is not to be narrowly considered; but for the purposes of labour we may surely gather from the recorded experience of those who have laboured most, whether physically or mentally, first, that the more temperate our _habits_, the more we can perform; and, secondly, that an habitual abstinence from some kinds of refreshment is the only way to secure them.]

[246] Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1826, p. 31.

CHAPTER VII.

DRURY LANE, AND THE TWO THEATRES IN DRURY LANE AND COVENT GARDEN.

Craven House -- Donne and his vision -- Lord Craven and the Queen of Bohemia -- Nell Gwynn -- Drury Lane Theatre -- Its antiquity, different eras, and rebuildings -- The princ.i.p.al theatre of Dryden, Wycherley, Farquhar, Steele, Garrick, and Sheridan -- Old Drury in the time of Charles II. -- A visit to it -- Pepys and his theatrical gossip, with notes -- Hart and Mohun -- Goodman -- Nell Gwynn -- Dramatic taste of that age -- Booth -- Artificial tragedy -- Wilks and Cibber -- Bullock and Penkethman -- A Colonel enamoured of Cibber's wig -- Mrs.

Oldfield -- Her singular position in society -- Not the Flavia of the Tatler -- Pope's account of her last words probably not true -- Declamatory acting -- Lively account of Garrick and Quin by Mr. c.u.mberland -- Improvement of stage costume -- King -- Mrs. Pritchard -- Mrs. Clive -- Mrs. Woffington -- Covent Garden -- Barry -- Contradictory characters of him by Davies and Churchill -- Macklin -- Woodward -- Pantomime -- English taste in music -- Cooke -- Rise of actors and actresses in social rank -- Improvement of the audience -- Dr. Johnston at the theatre -- Churchill a great pit critic -- His Rosciad -- His picture of Mossop -- Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Suett -- Early recollections of a play-goer.

Drury Lane takes its name from "the habitation of the great family of the Druries," built, "I believe," says Pennant, "by Sir William Drury, knight of the garter, a most able commander in the Irish wars, who unfortunately fell in a duel with Sir John Burroughs, in a foolish quarrel about precedency. Sir Robert, his son, was a great patron of Dr. Donne, and a.s.signed to him apartments in his house. I cannot, learn into whose hands it pa.s.sed afterwards. During the time of the fatal discontents of the favourite, Ess.e.x, it was the place where his imprudent advisers resolved on such counsels as terminated in the destruction of him and his adherents."[247]

Drury House stood at the corner of Drury Lane and Wych Street, upon the ground now included in Craven Buildings in the one thoroughfare, and the Olympic Pavilion in the other.

Pennant proceeds to say, that it was occupied in the next century by "the heroic William Lord Craven, afterwards Earl Craven," who rebuilt it in the form standing in his time. He describes it as "a large brick pile,"--a public-house with the sign of the Queen of Bohemia,--a head which still mystifies people in some parts of the country. The remains were taken down in 1809, and the Olympic Pavilion built on part of the site. But the public-house was only a portion of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CRAVEN HOUSE.]

Who would suppose, in going by the place now, that it was once the habitation of wit and elegance, of a lord and a queen, and of more than one "romance of real life?" Yet the pa.s.senger acquainted with the facts can never fail to be impressed by them, especially by the romantic history of Donne. This master of profound fancies (whom Dryden p.r.o.nounced "the greatest wit, though not the best poet," of our nation) had in his youth led a gay imprudent life, which left him poor. He became secretary to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and fell in love with his lords.h.i.+p's niece, then residing in the house, daughter to a Sir George Moor or More, who, though Donne was of an ancient family, was very angry, and took the young lady away into the country.

The step, however, was too late; for, the pa.s.sion being mutual, a private marriage had taken place. The upshot was, that Sir George would have nothing to say to the young couple, and that they fell into great distress. After a time, Sir Robert Drury, a man of large fortune, who possessed the mansion above described, invited Donne and his wife to live with him, and this too in a spirit that enabled all parties to be the better for it. But for this, and the curious story connected with it, we shall have recourse to the pages of our angling friend Walton, who was a good fellow enough when he was not "handling a worm as if he loved him."

"Sir Robert Drury," says Walton, "a gentleman of a very n.o.ble estate, and a more liberal mind, a.s.signed him and his wife an useful apartment in his own large house in Drury Lane, and not only rent free, but was also a cherisher of his studies, and such a friend as sympathised with him and his, in all their joy and sorrows.

"At this time of Mr. Donne's and his wife's living in Sir Robert's house, the Lord Hay was, by King James, sent upon a glorious emba.s.sy to the then French King, Henry IV., and Sir Robert put on a sudden resolution to accompany him to the French Court, and to be present at his audience there. And Sir Robert put on a sudden resolution to solicit Mr. Donne to be his companion in that journey. And this desire was suddenly made known to his wife, who was then with child, and otherwise under so dangerous a habit of body as to her health, that she professed an unwillingness to allow him any absence from her; saying, 'her divining soul boded her some ill in his absence,'

and, therefore, desired him not to leave her. This made Mr.

Donne lay aside all thoughts of his journey, and really to resolve against it. But Sir Robert became restless in his persuasions for it, and Mr. Donne was so generous as to think he had sold his liberty when he received so many charitable kindnesses from him, and told his wife so; who did, therefore, with an unwilling-willingness, give a faint consent to the journey, which was proposed to be but for two months; for about that time they determined their return. Within a few days after this resolve, the amba.s.sador, Sir Robert, and Mr. Donne, left London; and were the twelfth day got all safe to Paris. Two days after their arrival there, Mr. Donne was left alone in that room, in which Sir Robert, and he, and some other friends had dined together. To this place Sir Robert returned within half an hour; and as he left, so he found Mr. Donne alone; but in such an ecstacy and so altered in his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr.

Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr. Donne was not able to make a present answer; but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, 'I have seen a dreadful vision since I saw you: I have seen my dear wife pa.s.s twice by me in this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms: this I have seen since I saw you.' To which Sir Robert replied, 'Sure, sir, you have slept since I saw you; and this is the result of some melancholy dream, which I desire you to forget, for you are now awake.' To which Mr. Donne's reply was, 'I cannot be surer that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you; and am as sure, that at her second appearing she stopped and looked me in the face, and vanished.' Rest and sleep had not altered Mr.

Donne's opinion the next day; for he then affirmed this vision with a more deliberate, and so confirmed a confidence, that he inclined Sir Robert to a faint belief that the vision was true.

It is truly said, that desire and doubt have no rest; and it proved so with Sir Robert; for he immediately sent a servant to Drewry House, with a charge to hasten back, and bring him word, whether Mrs. Donne were alive; and, if alive, in what condition she was in as to her health. The twelfth day the messenger returned with this account:--That he found and left Mrs. Donne very sad, and sick in her bed; and that, after a long and dangerous labour, she had been delivered of a dead child. And, upon examination, the abortion proved to be the same day, and about the very hour, that Mr. Donne affirmed he saw her pa.s.s by him in his chamber.

"This is a relation," continues Walton, "that will beget some wonder, and it well may; for most of our world are at present possessed with an opinion, that visions and miracles are ceased. And, though it is most certain, that two lutes being both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other that is not touched, being laid upon a table at a fit distance will--like an echo to a trumpet--warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune; yet many will not believe that there is any such thing as the sympathy of souls; and I am well pleased that every reader do enjoy his own opinion. But if the unbelieving will not allow the believing reader of this story a liberty to believe that it may be true, then I wish him to consider, that many wise men have believed that the ghost of Julius Caesar did appear to Brutus, and that both St. Austin, and Monica his mother, had visions in order to his conversion. And though these, and many others--too many to name--have but the authority of human story, yet the _incredible_ reader may find in the sacred story, that Samuel, &c."[248]

We may here break off with the observation of Mr. Chalmers, that "the whole may be safely left to the judgment of the reader."[249] Walton says he had not this story from Donne himself, but from a "Person of Honour," who "knew more of the secrets of his heart than any person then living," and who related it "with such circ.u.mstance and a.s.severation," that not to say anything of his hearer's belief, Walton did "verily believe," that the gentleman "himself believed it."

The biographer then presents us with some verses which "were given by Mr. Donne to his wife at the time he then parted from her," and which he "begs leave to tell us" that he has heard some critics, learned both in languages and poetry, say, that "none of the Greek or Latin poets did ever equal."

These lines are full of the wit that Dryden speaks of, horribly misused to obscure the most beautiful feelings. Some of them are among the pa.s.sages quoted in Dr. Johnson to ill.u.s.trate the faults of the metaphysical school. Mr. Chalmers and others have thought it probable, that it was upon this occasion Donne wrote a set of verses, which he addressed to his wife, on her proposing to accompany him abroad as a page; but as the writer speaks of going to Italy, which appears to have been out of the question in this two months' visit to Paris, they most probably belong to some other journey or intended journey, the period of which is unknown. The numbers of these verses are sometimes rugged, but they are full of as much nature and real feeling, as sincerity ever put into a true pa.s.sion. There is an awfulness in the commencing adjuration:--

"By our first strange and fatal interview, By all desires which thereof did ensue; By our long striving hopes; by that remorse Which my words' masculine persuasive force Begot in thee, and by the memory Of hurts which spies and rivals threaten me, I calmly beg: but by thy father's wrath, By all pains which want and divorcement hath, I conjure thee, and all the oaths which I And thou have sworn to seal joint constancy, I here unswear, and overswear them thus: Thou shalt not love by means so dangerous.

Temper, O fair Love! love's impetuous rage; Be my true mistress, not my feigned page.

I'll go; and by thy kind leave, leave behind Thee, only worthy to nurse in my mind Thirst to come back. O! if thou die before, My soul from other lands to thee shall soar: Thy (else almighty) beauty cannot move Rage from the seas, nor thy love teach them love, Nor tame wild Boreas' harshness: thou hast read How roughly he in pieces s.h.i.+vered Fair Orithea, whom he swore he loved.

Fall ill or good, 'tis madness to have proved Dangers unurged: feed on this flattery, That absent lovers one in the other be; Dissemble nothing, not a boy, nor change Thy body's habit, nor mind; be not strange To thyself only: all will spy in thy face A blus.h.i.+ng womanly discovering grace.

When I am gone dream me some happiness, Nor let thy looks our long-hid love confess; Nor praise nor dispraise me, nor bless nor curse Openly love's force; nor in bed fright thy nurse With midnight's startings, crying out, Oh! oh!

Nurse! oh, my love is slain! I saw him go O'er the white Alps alone; I saw him, I, a.s.sailed, taken, fight, stabbed, bleed, fall, and die.

Augur me better chance; except dread Jove Think it enough for me to have had thy love."

Drury House, when rebuilt by Lord Craven, took the name of Craven House. To this abode, at the restoration of Charles II., his lords.h.i.+p brought his royal mistress, the Queen of Bohemia, to whose interest he had devoted his fortunes, and to whom he is supposed to have been secretly wedded. She was daughter to James I., and, with the reluctant consent of her parents (particularly of her mother, who used to twit her with the t.i.tle of Goody Palsgrave), was married to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, for whom the Protestant interest in Germany erected Bohemia into a kingdom, in the vain hope, with the a.s.sistance of his father-in-law, of competing with the Catholic Emperor. Frederic lost everything, and his widow became a dependent on the bounty of this Lord Craven, a n.o.bleman of wealthy commercial stock, who had fought in her husband's cause, and helped to bring up her children. It is through her that the family of Brunswick succeeded to the throne of this kingdom, as the next Protestant heirs of James I. James's daughter, being a woman of lively manners, a queen, and a Protestant leader, excited great interest in her time, and received more than the usual portion of flattery from the romantic. Donne wrote an epithalamium on her marriage, in which are those preposterous lines beginning--

"Here lies a she sun, and a he moon there."

Sir Henry Wotton had permission to call her his "royal mistress,"

which he was as proud of as if he had been a knight of old. And when she lost her Bohemian kingdom, it was said that she retained a better one, for that she was still the "Queen of Hearts." Sir Henry wrote upon her his elegant verses beginning--

"You meaner beauties of the night,"

in which he gives a new turn to the commonplaces of stars and roses, and calls her

"Th'eclipse and glory of her kind."

It is doubtful, nevertheless, whether she was ever handsome. None of the Stuarts appear to have been so, with the exception of Henrietta, d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, who resembled, perhaps, her mother. Pepys, who saw the Queen of Bohemia at the Restoration, "thought her a very debonaire, but plain lady." This, it is true, was near her death; but Pepys was given to admire, and royalty did not diminish the inclination. Had her charms ever been as great as reported, he would have discovered the remains of them. It has been beautifully said by Drayton, that

"Even in the aged'st face, where beauty once did dwell, And nature, in the least, but seemed to excel, Time cannot make such waste, but something will appear To show some little tract of delicacy there."

Pepys saw the queen afterwards two or three times at the play, and does not record any alteration of his opinion. Her Majesty did not survive the Restoration many months. She quitted Craven House for Leicester House (afterwards Norfolk House, in the Strand,) seemingly for no other purpose than to die there; which she did in February 1661-2. Whether Lord Craven attended her at this period does not appear; but she left him her books, pictures, and papers. Sometimes he accompanied her to the play. She and her husband, King Frederick, appear to have been lively, good-humoured persons, a little vain of the royalty which proved such a misfortune to them. The queen had the better sense, though it seems to have been almost as much over-rated as her beauty. But all the Stuarts were more or less clever, with the exception of James II.

The author of a _History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in Yorks.h.i.+re_, gives it as a tradition, that Lord Craven's father, a lord-mayor, was born of such poor parents that they sent him when a boy by a common carrier to London, where he became a mercer or draper.

His son was a distinguished officer under Gustavus Adolphus, was enn.o.bled, attached himself to the King and Queen of Bohemia, and is supposed, as we have seen, to have married the king's widow. He was her junior by twelve years. He long resided in Craven House, became Colonel of the Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards, and was famed for his bustling activity. He so constantly made his appearance at a fire, that his horse is said to have "smelt one as soon as it happened."

Pepys, during a riot against houses of ill-fame (probably the houses in Whetstone Park, as well as in Moorfields, for he talks of going to Lincoln's Inn Fields to see the 'prentices,) describes his lords.h.i.+p as riding up and down the fields, "like a madman," giving orders to the soldiery. It was probably in allusion to this military vivacity that Lord Dorset says, in his ballad on a mistress,--

"The people's hearts leap, wherever she comes, And beat day and night, like my Lord Craven's drums."

When there was a talk in his old age of giving his regiment to somebody else, Craven said, that "if they took away his regiment they had as good take away his life, since he had nothing else to divert himself with." The next king, however, William III., gave it to General Talmash; yet the old lord is said to have gone on, busy to the last. He died in 1697, aged nearly 89 years. He was intimate with Evelyn, Ray, and other naturalists, and delighted in gardening. The garden of Craven House ran in the direction of the present Drury Lane; so that where there is now a bustle of a very different sort, we may fancy the old soldier busying himself with his flower-beds, and Mr.

Evelyn discoursing upon the blessings of peace and privacy.[250]

The only other personage of celebrity whom we know of as living in Drury Lane, is one of another sort; to wit, Nell Gwynn. The ubiquitous Pepys speaks of his seeing her there on a May-morning.

"May 1st, 1667. To Westminster, in the way meeting many milk-maids with garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them; and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodging's door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and boddice, looking upon one. She seemed a mighty pretty creature."

Lodgings in this quarter, though Nell lived there, must have been of more decent reputation than they became afterwards. It is curious that the old English word Drury, or Druerie, should be applicable to the fame we allude to. It has more or less deserved it for a long period, though we believe the purlieus rather warrant it now, than the lane itself. Pope and Gay speak of it. Pope describes the lane also as a place of residence for poor authors:--

"'Keep your piece nine years.'

'Nine years!' cries he, who high in Drury Lane, Lull'd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, Rhymes ere he wakes, and prints before term ends, Obliged by hunger and request of friends."

The existence of a theatre in Drury Lane is as old as the time of Shakspeare. It was then called the Phoenix; was "a private," or more select house, like that of Blackfriars; and had been a c.o.c.k-pit, by which name it was also designated. Phoenix generally implies that a place has been destroyed by fire, a common fate with theatres; but the first occasion on which we hear of the present one is the destruction of it by a Puritan mob. This took place in the year 1617, in the time of James; and was doubtless caused by the same motives that led to the demolition of certain other houses, which it was thought to resemble in fame. In Howe's Continuation of Stowe, it was called a "new play-house;" so that it had lately been either built or rebuilt. This theatre stood opposite the Castle tavern. There is still in existence a pa.s.sage, called c.o.c.kpit Alley, into Great Wild Street; and there is a Phoenix Alley, leading from Long Acre into Hart Street.

The Phoenix was soon rebuilt: and the performances continued till 1648, when they were again stopped by the Puritans who then swayed England, and who put an end to playhouses for some time. In the interval, some of the most admired of our old dramas were produced there, such as Marlowe's _Jew of Malta_; Heywood's _Woman killed with Kindness_; _The Witch of Edmonton_, by Rowley, Decker, and Ford; Webster's _White Devil_, or _Vittoria Colombona_, Ma.s.singer's _New Way to Pay Old Debts_, and indeed many others.[251] It does not appear that Shakspeare or his immediate friends had any pieces performed there. He was a performer in other theatres; and the pressure of court, as well as city, lay almost exclusively in their direction, till the growth of the western part of the metropolis divided it. The Phoenix known in his time was probably nearly as select a house as the Blackfriars. The company had the t.i.tle of Queen's Servants (James's Queen), and the servants of the Lady Elizabeth (Queen of Bohemia).