One figure especially I now recall—that of Sir Charles Wetherall, a fierce opponent of reform. Up he rose, violently gesticulating, his shirt very visible between his black waistcoat and dark nether garment.
The coronation of William IV. and Queen Adelaide indicated a change in that august ceremonial, which showed how reform touched royal pageantry. Though an instance of a double coronation, it came short of the elaborate display when the previous monarch sat alone in Edward’s chair. I saw the procession going down to Westminster, along a narrow street at Charing Cross—old-fashioned shabby shops standing where now you catch sight of palatial hotels—old Northumberland House, with its gardens, occupying the space now become a broad avenue. The beefeaters, the trumpeters, and the footmen in attendance upon the gaudy state-coach, with its royal occupants, were very picturesque. And what a crush there was to avoid the mob streaming down from the Haymarket!
All sorts of reports were afloat, tending to make the new king popular. It was said, that immediately after his accession, he came to town in the dickey of his carriage, and invited, after an unceremonious manner, his old naval friends to come and dine with him. A story went the round with rare applause that, after the defeat of the Reform Bill, when he wanted to dissolve Parliament, he said if the royal carriages could not be got ready, he would go in a hackney coach. How far such tales were true I do not know; but a nobleman, present at one of His Majesty’s dinner-parties at the Brighton Pavilion, told me that, on that occasion, the king toasted some of his guests in sailor fashion, and remarked that his seafaring pursuits had scarcely fitted him for a throne. Then, pointing to the queen, he added that for any improvement in his ways he was indebted to that good lady. The story raised him in my estimation and that of many others.
I must now turn from politics and royalty to what was more in my own way.
The Rev. Daniel Wilson, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, stood high amongst London Evangelicals as Vicar of Islington, and I sometimes heard him in his crowded church; but my great delight was to walk down to Camberwell to listen to Henry Melvill, then in the zenith of his popularity. His manner was peculiar—he had a curious shake of the head, and a strange inflection of voice at the end of a sentence, which kept up attention. As to style, he was artificial in the extreme; every paragraph seeming to be planned on the same model, ending with the words of his text as a well-turned climax. The preacher swept his auditors along with the force of a torrent from point to point. I heard him at Barnes, when he was advanced in life, deliver one of his old discourses, I should judge little, if at all, altered; but it lacked the fire of early days, and the congregation evinced little of the sympathy which seemed to quiver in London churches at the sound of his voice twenty or thirty years before.