Here was formerly held in a
night-cellar, the celebrated Beggars' Club, at which the dissolute Lord
Barrymore and Colonel George Hanger, afterwards Lord Coleraine, are said
to have often officiated as president and vice-president, attended by
their profligate companions, and surrounded by the most extraordinary
characters of the times; the portraits and biography of whom may be seen
in Smith's 'Vagabondiana,' a very clever and highly entertaining work.
It was on this spot that George Parker collected his materials for
'Life's Painter of Variegated Characters,' and among its varieties, that
Grose and others obtained the flash and patter which form the cream of
their humorous works. Formerly, the Beggars' ordinary, held in a cellar
was a scene worthy ~29~~of the pencil of a Hogarth or a Cruikshank;
notorious impostors, professional paupers, ballad-singers, and blind
fiddlers might here be witnessed carousing on the profits of mistaken
charity, and laughing in their cups at the credulity of mankind; but
the police have now disturbed their nightly orgies, and the Mendicant
Society ruined their lucrative calling. The long table, where the
trenchers consisted of so many round holes turned out in the plank, and
the knives, forks, spoons, candle-sticks, and fire-irons all chained
to their separate places, is no longer to be seen.
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