Note 363 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 3)
Reading edition
Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818) was a virtuoso, and collector of natural history specimens. She kept house for her brother, Sir Joseph Banks, at 32 Soho Square, at the corner of Frith Street. Here Sir Joseph, who is mentioned by Smith elsewhere, gave his Sunday evening conversaziones, at which Cavendish and Wollaston were the prominent guests. Sir Henry Holland describes these evenings in his Recollections. Gifford of the Quarterly remarked to Moore, that the Banks’ mansion was to science what Holland House was to literature. Horace Walpole poked incessant fun at Sir Joseph’s curiosity about remote Atlantic islands, and Peter Pindar scribbled verses like this:—
“To give a breakfast in Soho, Sir Joseph’s bitterest foe Must certainly allow him peerless merit: Where on a wagtail and tom-tit He shines, and sometimes on a nit: Displaying powers few gentlemen inherit.”
The house was afterwards the home of the Linnæan Society, and is now the Hospital for Diseases of the Heart.