Who, in London, a few years ago, did not know old Tom Gent, boozing Tom Gent, roguish Tom Gent, witty Tom Gent, Falstaff Tom Gent—a man who was supposed to have drunk more good wine and to have eaten more good dinners—without ever paying for them—than any individual of his time; a man who lived at the rate of £2,000 a year without having any visible means of existence, and, as far as could be discovered, without ever having a sovereign in his pocket?
For considerably more than a quarter of a century did this extraordinary genius live in Town and upon the Town; though how, or by what means or magic, it was seldom easy to discover. He may have got a good deal out of some of the greener members of the aristocracy; for without knowing anything of antiquities, curiosities, painting, or music, he set up for a virtuoso and connoisseur in all the fine arts, and enticed young noblemen and gentlemen into purchases of knicknacks and pictures, and into patronizing all manner of fiddlers, singers, dancers, and other stage actors and actresses.
For a long time he had fashionable apartments in St. James’s, and held levées which were attended by lords, baronets, squires of substance, citizens of good repute on Change, artists, Green Room people, poets, reviewers, and journalists.
The inexperienced applicants, fresh perhaps from the country, and eager for
money or for the fame
| 118 | TOM GENT | [CHAP. XII |
Some of these poor devils he rode very hard, and perhaps none harder than Joey Davis, the painter, known by the name of “Roman Davis,” but who would be more correctly designated as “witty Davis.” He sold one of Joey’s pictures, made him spend nearly all the proceeds in a tavern dinner to which the guests were nearly all invited by Tom, then got from him a picture as a present, and then made him paint his portrait in kit-cat size, which, being hung in Somerset House at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, would bring Joey hosts of sitters, and make him the fashionable portrait-painter of the day, and a rich man in no time. Moreover, Joey was always saying good things and making excellent jokes, and all these Gent purloined, and retailed at dinner-parties and all over the town as his own. Yet more, Tom dribbled poetry, and could make nothing of it; whereas Joey was quick and clever at verse-making, and could now and then turn off a more than respectable poem. Joey’s verses had the same fate as his jests—they were all stolen by Tom, who not only showed them, in manuscript, as his own, but now and then put them into print with his own name attached.
In the days of the Regency this modern Falstaff was very ambitious of getting the entrée, though only for once, at Carlton House. He thought this would give him an éclat, which he might turn to good account. The melancholy death of poor Princess Charlotte seemed to Tom to present an admirable opportunity.
He waddled to Davis’s studio,
bullied the picture he was painting, told him he would never succeed as
| CHAP. XII] | PRINCESS CHARLOTTE | 119 |
Davis did write the monody, and a very fair one it was. Gent was delighted. “Will you publish it, on your own account?” said he. “No,” said the painter, “I have no money to risk or to throw away.” “Will you send it to a magazine?” “I don’t know any editor.” “Will you send it to a newspaper?” “It is a great deal too long for that.” “Will you give it to me?” “Willingly, if you want it.” “Then the monody is mine. Now then, Joey, my boy! listen! The poem is mine, I am the author, don’t blab! I will make it find the way for me to the Regent; and when I get my foot on the ladder, won’t I pull you up after me, my boy!”
Davis could never have conceived it possible, but through Colonel MacMahon, or some other person about Court, the monody was laid before the Regent, and, shortly afterwards, Tom Gent, as its author, was presented to His Royal Highness.*
|
* “Lines suggested by the Death of the Princess Charlotte,” were published in 1817, with a clever etched portrait of Gent, |
| 120 | TOM GENT | [CHAP. XII |
Tom was wonderfully inflated by the honour, and spoke of it for a long time, in all places. But it did not put him upon the ladder of promotion, and if he derived other advantages from it, he did not share them with Joey Davis.
For years he kept reciting the “monody” as his own. It was a very long time after the visit to Carlton House, and after a “tiff” between the two, that Joey privately reminded him that he had written the verses. “You!” said Tom, in towering indignation, “you! You write that monody! It never was in you, you never could do anything like it! You never could come within a mile of it! I wrote the monody, and all the world knows it! I have printed it, I have circulated it! You will be taken for an arrant impostor if, at this distance of time, you pretend that it is yours!”
I once asked Davis what he said to this, and how he felt at it. “To tell you the truth,” said Joey, “I was so brow-beaten by his voice and manner, his rapidity of utterance, and his gesticulation, that I could hardly say a word; indeed, I almost began to doubt whether I had ever had anything to do with the composition of the verses. You must remember that Gent was then even more of a Falstaff than he is now, and that I was younger than I now am.
“But whether old or young, high or low, Gent could, on occasion, cajole, bamboozle, perplex, and brow-beat every man with whom he came in contact.
after J. P. Davis. Gent’s “Monody to the Memory of the Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan” was published in 1816. The copies in the London Library are presentation copies to Dawson Turner of Yarmouth, with autograph letters from T. Gent. In the letter inserted in the “Monody,” Gent writes: “It was suggested to me by a friend, on the death of Mr. Sheridan, that he thought he could put a copy of such a tribute to his memory into a channel that might eventually be of service to me. I confess I have not much reliance on any patronage arising from such a circumstance, yet, as the experiment only costs me a little of that leisure of which I have unfortunately too much, I thought it worth making.” |
| CHAP. XII] | A YARMOUTH BLOATER | 121 |
“Barry St. Leger, another barrister, a man of fashion, one who was thoroughly a man of the world, and who was quick, witty, and voluble, determined one night to resist Gent’s Falstaffisms, impudence, and paralyzing influence; but he was beaten, thoroughly discomfited, and obliged to succumb to the burly magician, like the rest of us. No! there was no resisting Tom Gent! Perhaps he carried the more weight with me as we were fellow-townsmen. I think that I never fairly made him wince but once—and that was when I called him a ‘Yarmouth bloater,’ and bloated he was, by that time. But, mercy on me! With what a torrent of vituperation, with what an endless string of nicknames, did he not repay me!”
Tom went one day, in a great hurry, to Knight’s shop or publishing office in Pall Mall
East. He was hard up for money, and wanted to bring out a volume of poems. He had so many
friends, he knew so many people, he was so extensively patronized, that he could easily
dispose of an edition; and even 750 copies at 10s. 6d. each, paper, printing, binding, and
advertising paid, would leave a pretty little margin of profit. “But where are the
poems?” asked Knight. “Here they
are,” said Tom, producing Davis’s “Monody” and a few wretched madrigals and
fugitive pieces which might have been written by himself—for though so witty with his
tongue, Gent was a dunce with the pen. “But,” said
Knight, “these will not make a volume; no, nor half a
volume! nor the fourth part of a volume!” “That’s just what it
is,” said Tom; “that’s just where I want
your assistance as a clever and much-attached friend. You know you love me,
Charlie! What a glorious time we had of it the other night at
the
| 122 | TOM GENT | [CHAP. XII |
Over luncheon, and a glass or two of sherry, Knight agreed to do his part, and a good deal more. Gent next found out Hill at his chambers in Chancery Lane, and booked him; and later in the day, with a beefsteak, a bottle of port, and a glass of gin and water, he removed the repugnance or reluctance of Joey Davis. In a very short time the volume appeared, bearing on the title-page: “Poems, by Thomas Gent, Gent.” I have not seen the book, this real curiosity of literature, for many a year, but I believe that not a sixth part of it was written by old Tom.
His verses may be known by Matthew Hill’s parody of them:
“Have you seen Distraction’s child Wandering on the Desert wild?” |
Whenever Tom arrived, which he never
did without having half a dozen or more young and frolicsome
| CHAP. XII] | A TRUE FALSTAFF | 123 |
“Well, Simpson,
fine night! Stars shine bright, Moon gives light. Are there many here to-night? Are the gardens filling, you old scarecrow?” |
Then, with a polite wave of his hat, the Vauxhall M.C. would say: “Distinguished visitor, great poet, most illustrious signor! the gardens are filling fast, and will fill the faster now that you are come! You will find an excellent lobster-salad in that corner box, near the Turkish kiosk!”
One of the principal occupations of Tom’s life was getting up dining clubs, arranging hotel or tavern dinners, or picnics in Richmond Park, dinners at the Star and Garter, or whitebait dinners at Greenwich or Blackwall. Though they got no money from him, nor ever expected any, he must, during his long career, have put a world of coins and cheques into the hands of tavern-keepers and landlords. They were not ungrateful for past favours, nor unmindful of the future benefits he might confer upon their houses, by making parties or getting up clubs; he had a knife and fork at nearly every noted establishment in London, and the bottle of wine was always forthcoming. He would very often consider himself entitled to take a friend or two with him.
The “Freemasons,” and those other great dinner-giving houses, had always such a larder!
Besides the profit they obtained, not from him, but by him, the worthy Bonifaces got a world of fun and laughter out of him. In this no man could be a truer Falstaff. Tom, like Sir John, was not only witty himself, but the cause of wit in others. He was accustomed to say, that if he could eat them, he could, in any one day, get half a dozen dinners in London, without paying, and with thanks for his company.
| 124 | TOM GENT | [CHAP. XII |
Yet for many years that he was leading this rollicking, feasting, drinking tavern-life, haunting playhouses and green rooms, Thomas Gent, Gent., had a very ladylike, charming, and perfectly well-conducted wife. This rare, excellent woman, never complaining, seemed to her death to be much attached to a man who, after all, must be called a bloated buffoon—a coarse, drunken Mephistopheles, a seducer of young men, a corrupter of other women’s husbands.
But there were more marvels yet in the life of this Yarmouth bloater.
When his first wife had been dead a good many years, when he was past the age of three score, when his hair was white rather than grey, he took to going to a church near Fitzroy Square, with no serious intent it is to be feared, and there struck up an acquaintance with one of the daughters of an eminent landscape-painter and Royal Academician, a well-educated, well brought-up, good-looking, graceful woman of about six or seven and twenty. He amused her by his wit and drollery, and ended by quite captivating her, or completely turning her head. “What can I do?” said Falstaff to Knight; “the girl will have me, the father can’t stop it, and I can’t help it. We must be married; and I, like Sir John, must try and live cleanly.”
He put another colouring on the business: according to him, he had
concerted no plan, had contemplated no advantages; he had turned the poor girl’s head
without wishing it, or thinking that he was doing it, and he would marry her only to
prevent worse consequences. Married they were; but I suspect that Tom, who for some two or three years had been getting out
at elbows, and who had been finding that his friends and boon companions were gradually
falling from him, either by death or through weariness of his jokes and of his society,
looked to his wife’s proficiency and ability as a portrait-painter for the means of
supplying in future his comforts and
| CHAP. XII] | HIS SECOND MARRIAGE | 125 |
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