Note 357 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 3)

In a letter dated January 24, 1816, in my possession, which was evidently intended to be sent as a circular to some of his stauncher patrons, Smith states that he had found the previous year very “unprofitable to the Arts,” and that owing to the great number of families who left England for France “last season” (i.e. after Waterloo), his income had been small. He has applied himself closely to his etching table, and is now able to lay before his correspondent the first three numbers of a small work at a remarkably cheap rate. This was his Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London, with Portraits of the Most Remarkable drawn from Life. The increase of beggars in London had engaged serious attention, and legislation was in the air. The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity was founded in 1818. Smith’s work is the artistic forerunner of Charles Lamb’s Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, written in 1822, when “the all-sweeping besom of sectarian reform” had done its work. The Herculean legless beggar whose portrait Lamb draws with so much gusto, appears in Smith’s gallery of etchings. But whereas Mr. E. V. Lucas identifies him as Samuel Horsey, I venture to think he was the beggar named John MacNally. Smith’s figure of Horsey hardly suggests a Hercules, nor does another portrait of him from Kirby’s “Wonderful and Scientific Museum.” I suggest that the beggar of whom Lamb wrote, in 1822, “He seemed earth-born, an Antæus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured; he was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble; the nature, which should have recruited his left leg and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules,” was identical with the beggar whom John Thomas Smith describes as an “extraordinary torso”: “His head, shoulders, and chest, which are exactly those of Hercules, would prove valuable models for the artist.” This Hercules is John MacNally. Were there two London legless beggars who could suggest to two minds such images of antique magnificence of physique? It is possible, but unlikely.