CHAPTER THE NINTH.

66 THE ROYAL CHAPLAIN."

As chaplain, he now had chambers in the palace; and, almost at the outset, the indiscreet chaplain's head gave way. Tea-parties were given under the royal roof, and a little scandal went round, that the divine received lady friends at these entertainments. This was no very heinous dereliction; but it showed that, in a worldly sense, young Mr. Dodd, like poor Yorick, "carried not one ounce of ballast." By-andby, when it came to be his turn to perform the service, his approach was heralded by the "rustling of silk," and a general atmosphere of clergymanical dandyism, to the grievous confusion of "old Groves," the royal "Table-decker." These were straws; but they were

significant straws.

The degree of M.A. was scarcely of sufficient glory for the Chaplain to his Majesty; so, in 1766, he went down to Cambridge, and came up the Reverend William Dodd, LL.D., and then he launched himself fairly upon town. He first stopped in Pall-Mall, the street where Mr. Sterne first stayed when he came up. He had, besides, a country house at Ealing; and,

E

where he had before kept a modest chariot, he now burst forth in all the majesty of a coach. The excuse for this extravagance was the benefit of his pupils, who had now increased in number and quality. Besides young Stanhope, a youth of about ten or eleven years old, he had a young boy named Ernst, to both of whom he seems to have been attached. The latter obtained a post in some foreign station; and long after, the luckless Doctor looked back piteously to the happy days when he was directing their studies:

Ah! my lov'd household! ah, my little round

Of social friends! well do you bear in mind
Those pleasing evenings, when, on my return-
Much wished return-serenity the mild,

And cheerfulness the innocent, with me
Entered the happy dwelling! Thou, my Ernst,
Ingenuous youth, whose early spring bespoke
Thy summer, as it is, with richest crops
Luxuriant waving. Gentle youth, canst thou
Those welcome hours forget?

To young Stanhope, too, he addressed a similar

apostrophe, which, on the ground of the old connexion, should have been more fruitful in result than "the windage" of a mere burst of poetry:

Or thou-O thou!

How shall I utter from my beating heart,

Thy name so musical, so heavenly sweet

Once to these ears distracted! Stanhope, say

Canst thou forget those hours when clothed in smiles
Of fond respect, thou and thy friend have strove
Whose little hands should readiest supply
My willing wants-officious in your zeal
To make the Sabbath evenings, like the day,
A day of sweet composure to my soul?

The youth who bore the "name so musical, so heavenly

sweet," and who was so dutiful in the little household, was later to stand up in a crowded court, and convict his tutor of an offence for which the penalty was death.

When the Magdalen Society was getting its rules into shape, it was thought advisable to have royal patronage, and accordingly the secretary and treasurer, with the Reverend Doctor Dodd, waited on her Majesty with the rules; on which she allowed herself to be named "Patroness" of the Institution.* Later on he edited the hymns and prayers for the use of the society, and this production was "submitted" to Bishop Porteous for approbation.†

He had now moved to Southampton-row, Bloomsbury; was writing in the Public Ledger, where he was allowed to spread his adulation of his patron, Doctor Squire, with a broad trowel. In that journal he published the "Visitor," a sort of weekly essay, afterwards gathered up into a two-volume sheaf; and was receiving a hundred a year for what he contributed to the pious Christian Magazine. Of that journal he was now, or a little later, sole editor. He was getting ready a new edition of "Locke's Common-Place Book"-for his name brought money to the booksellers. But so dramatic a preacher should surely have a house of his own; and the young Doctor, without a living, and who appealed at spasmodic intervals for a charity, ought to have had a private stage for himself. A curious circumstance, which occurred about this time, might be said to have suggested the idea.

* MS. Registers.

† Ibid.

Mrs. Dodd, the verger's daughter-though penniless when she married-obtained a sort of accidental dowry later. A lady, to whom she had been a kind of companion, left her one thousand five hundred pounds when she died, which was supplemented by another fortuitous contribution. Mrs. Dodd was at an auction, when a cabinet was put up, for which she began to bid. A lady of quality was also anxious to secure it; and when Mrs. Dodd discovered who was her opponent, she made a low courtesy, and withdrew. The lady of quality-possibly as frantic as Goldsmith's "old deaf dowager," at the auction which Mrs. Croker had been attending-was so pleased with this forbearance, that she came up to her, and begged the pleasure of a better acquaintance. The better acquaintance produced this fruit-that shortly after the grateful lady presented her with a lottery ticket, which, on being drawn, came out a prize of one thousand pounds.

This windfall our Doctor wisely determined to lay out in erecting a little private temple for his own performances. He entered into a sort of partnership with a builder; a plot of ground was secured in Pimlico, profitably close to the royal palace; and very shortly a chapel-of-ease rose, to which was given the name of Charlotte Chapel, in compliment to the reigning queen. He had great expectations from this pious speculation-for speculation it was; and it became, as might be imagined, a fashionable Sunday place of prayer. Four pews were set apart for the queen and her household. He had a highly fashionable congregation:

Pleasing, persuasive Patterns-Athole's Duke,
The polished Hervey, Kingston the humane,

Aylesbury and Marchmont, Romrey all revered,

as he could pompously enumerate them, thinking over his Court Calendar when he lay under sentence of death in Newgate. The sermons of the Reverend Doctor became very popular, and Nichols, the indefatigable gleaner of anecdotes, who often went to hear him preach, says he listened to him with delight.

By a sort of hereditary infamy, this chapel passed, within the memory of the present generation, to another occupant of the same tone and manners as the unlucky founder, and whose career, though ending not so fatally, was to the full as discreditable.

Here he was fortunate enough to light on a useful clerical assistant, the Reverend Weedon Butler, who, from this time until the death of the luckless proprietor of the Pimlico chapel, clung to him through all his fortunes; and it is one of the redeeming circumstances in this strange character that he was able to attach, at least, this one faithful heart. This was a young man whom he "took up" to be his amanuensis and general assistant in his literary work. He was originally intended for the law, but was induced by his patron to go into the church; and when the new chapel was opened, he became the reader, and alternate celebrant with Doctor Dodd. He had a brother, who was captain of the William Pitt, "extra" East Indiaman, which ship "foundered with all her crew, during a tremendous gale at midnight, off Algoa-Bay, after firing several half-minute signal-guns." He "reached the goal of immortality before his elder brother," said an obituary notice of the day.