nter who
defeated a scheme of a general excise, was mayor. Barber erected the
monument to Butler, the poet, in Westminster Abbey, who, by the way, had
written a very sarcastic "Character of an Alderman." Barber's epitaph on
the poet's monument is in high-flown Latin, which drew from Samuel
Wesley these lines:--

"While Butler, needy wretch! was yet alive,
No generous patron would a dinner give.
See him, when starved to death, and turned to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown--
He asked for bread, and he received a stone."

In 1739 (George II.) Sir Micajah Perry (Haberdasher) laid the first
stone of the Mansion House. Sir Samuel Pennant (mayor in 1750), kinsman
of the London historian, died of gaol fever, caught at Newgate, and
which at the same time carried off an alderman, two judges, and some
disregarded commonalty. The great bell of St. Paul's tolled on the death
of the Lord Mayor, according to custom. Sir Christopher Gascoigne
(1753), an ancestor of the present Viscount Cranbourne, was the first
Lord Mayor who resided at the Mansion House.

In that memorable year (1761) when Sir Samuel Fludyer was elected, King
George III. and Queen Charlotte (the young couple newly crowned) came to
the City to see the Lord Mayor's Show from Mr. Barclay's window, as we
have already described in our account of Cheapside; and the ancient
pageant was so far revived that the Fishmongers ventured on a St. Peter,
a dolphin, and two mermaids, and the Skinners on Indian princes dressed
in furs. Sir Samuel Fludyer was a Cloth Hall factor, and the City's
scandalous chronicle says that he originally came up to London attending
clothier's pack-horses, from the west country; his second wife was
granddaughter of a nobleman, and niece of the Earl of Cardigan. His sons
married into the Montagu and Westmoreland families, and his descendants
are connected with the Earls Onslow and Brownlow; and he was very kind
to young Romilly, his kinsman (afterwards the excellent Sir Samuel). The
"City Biography" says Fludyer died from vexation at a reprimand given
him by the Lord Chancellor, for having carried on a contraband trade in
scarlet cloth, to the prejudice of the East India Company. Sir Samuel
was the ground landlord of Fludyer Street, Westminster, cleared away for
the new Foreign Office.

In 1762 and again in 1769 that bold citizen, William Beckford, a friend
of the great Chatham