Page 52 - An account of the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235. 1777 to 2012UGLE

52 An Account of the

In prose too, we have no writer of great note. Perhaps the most ambitious
was James Forbes (1810), who, after a successful and lucrative career as a young
man in the service of the Honourable East India Company, settled in England
in 1784, and spent his life between the education of his grandson, Charles de
Montalembert, the future historian of western monachism, and the publication
of sumptuous tomes illustrated from the 150 volumes of his own miscellaneous
sketches accumulated in India.
But instrumental music shows some notable names. Luigi Borghi, the fiddler-
composer, may have been an original member, and we have certainly amongst
others John Christian Bach (1778), son of the mighty John Sebastian, William
Cramer (1778), and Charles Frederick Abel (1778), all leaders of the London
musical world towards the end of the eighteenth century, and later Alessandro
,
Pezze (1859), the cellist, who succeeded Piatti at the Royal Academy of Music,
and Alfred Gilardoni (1859), an expert performer on the double bass, though the
connection of the last with the Lodge was transient; our well-remembered Bro.
Reid (1917) was a pianist above ordinary amateur standards, and is rumoured to
have transmitted his talent to a grandson hardly yet in his ‘teens.
Four men who afterwards joined the Lodge were original members of the
Royal Academy of Arts at its foundation in 1768, Cipriani and Bartolozzi (1777),
whom we have met with already in Chapter Two, Zoffany (1780), famed for his
portraits and conversation pieces, and Carlini (1778), one of the most celebrated
sculptors of his time.
Cipriani, whose versatility was remarkable, took an active part in making ready
the rooms at the newly-built Somerset House for the Academy Exhibition, first
held there in 1780.
With their exquisite mantel-pieces, delicate woodwork, and painted and
decorated ceilings, they remain substantially as he left them; but, divided by mean
wooden partitions and disfigured with a clutter of clerical furniture and fittings,
they show, like the stately court now degraded into a car-park, a characteristic
example of our British contempt for fitness and beauty.
One room has happily been cleared and restored to its original condition at the
instance of the Assistant Registrar-General, W. Bro. W. L. Rind, P.G.D., by whose