Note 21 — Chapter IV

Vincent de Cleve, facetiously nick-named among his associates, "Polly de Cleve," not from any effeminacy of character or manner, or his almost intolerable abuse of the King's English by the constant utterance of the most flagrant cockneyisms, but for his Marplot qualities, which ever prompted him to pry into everybody's business, and create by his interference the most vexatious mischief. He was an odd fish. Talent he had; he was no contemptible composer and musician, and in his office, as treasurer to the Wells for many years, strictly honest. Between Sadler's Wells and the Angel was an old building, immediately opposite Lady Owen's Almshouses, now also demolished, called Goose Farm; it belonged to Mr. Laycock, the cow-keeper of Islington; but had ceased to be a farm-house; and was divided into tenements; the first and second floors were each divided into two suites of apartments. On the first floor in that next the Wells, resided John Cawse, the artist, whose daughters subsequently distinguished themselves as vocalists of no common power, and made their début in 1820 at Sadler's Wells, where the late Mrs. Cawse was also an actress.

The suite next the Angel was occupied by the mother and sister of Charles and Thomas Dibdin; during the management of the Wells by the former, the sister, a short squab figure, generally the last among the figurantes, came on among villagers and mobs; but under other lessees was not employed, and died in Clerkenwell Poor-House. De Cleve occupied the rooms on the second floor above the Dibdins; but all have ceased to exist; and Joe, to use a common expression, outlived his enemy. A grave stone, laid flat, in the churchyard of St. Mary's, Lambeth, marks the spot where lie buried, Mrs. Frances De Cleve, who died in her thirtieth year, May 3, 1795; and her husband, the busy meddler, Vincent de Cleve, who died July 30, 1827, aged 67.