Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/150

Rh 1719–20, when he kept a coffee-house in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden.

Subsequently Leveridge was chiefly employed in the vocal entertainment given between the acts of plays, singing his own ballads and songs by Purcell and others. He represented Merlin, Pluto, Morpheus, Silenus, and other heavy parts in Rich's pantomimes from 1728 to 1732 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and from 1732 to 1751 at Covent Garden. His last benefit performance was advertised by him in verse to take place on 24 April 1751. He was then eighty-one. A subscription of one guinea per annum was opened in his behalf at Garraway's Coffee-house on 26 Oct. 1751 (Daily Advertiser, 26 Oct. 1751), and Leveridge was supported in his old age by his friends. He was a cheerful companion and a strictly honest man, and was in good spirits up to a few hours of his death on 22 March 1758. He had been nursed by an only daughter (London Chronicle), perhaps the Mrs. Parratt to whom he left all his effects, in a will proved a week after death, but signed in 1746.

There is an etched portrait of Leveridge by Dodd, after Frye; a mezzotint, oval, ‘O the Roast Beef of Old England,’ by A. Vandermyne, after F. Vandermyne; a mezzotint, square, holding music, by W. Pether, after T. Frye, printed on a reduced scale for ‘European Magazine,’ October 1793, and a print representing Leveridge and Pinkethman on a stage in Bartholomew Fair.

Leveridge used his deep bass voice without much art. Hawkins records that in 1730 100l. was offered for a wager by Leveridge to ‘sing a bass song with any man in England.’ But in 1724 he was called ‘Old Leveridge’ by Mrs. Pendarves; and to Burney's ear his style in 1744 seemed antediluvian.

Leveridge composed, besides the works noticed: 1. ‘Brittain's Happiness,’ an entertainment performed in the manner of an opera, 7 March 1704, at the Little Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. 2. ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’ a comic masque, composed ‘in the high style of Italy,’ and compiled from Shakespeare by Leveridge; Lincoln's Inn Fields, 21 Nov. 1716. Leveridge also published a collection of songs, with the music, in two small volumes 8vo, with frontispiece by Hogarth, 1727; and ‘A New Book of Songs,’ 1730. There is in the Music Catalogue of the British Museum Library a list of about one hundred of Leveridge's songs and dialogues, the best-known of which are ‘All in the Downs’ and ‘The Roast Beef of Old England.’

Oldys wrote in his notes to Langbaine's ‘Dramatick Poets’ (p. 277): ‘Dick Leveridge's History of the Stage and Actors in his own time, for these forty or fifty years past, as he told me he had composed it, is likely to prove, whenever it shall appear, a more perfect work’ (i.e. than Curll's). Of this history nothing further is known.

 LEVERTON, THOMAS (1743–1824), architect, born at Woodford in Essex and baptised at Waltham Abbey on 11 June 1743, was son of Lancelot Leverton, a builder. After learning his father's business, he became an architect, and was extensively employed in the erection of dwelling-houses in London and the country. He exhibited thirty-four designs in the Royal Academy between 1771 and 1803. His executed works include Woodford Hall, Essex, in 1771, now Mrs. Gladstone's Convalescent Home; Boyles, Essex, in 1776; Watton Wood Hall, Hertfordshire, in 1777; the Phœnix Fire Office, London, in 1787; Engine House, Charing Cross, about 1792; Riddlesworth Hall, Norfolk, in 1792; bank for Messrs. Robarts in Lombard Street in 1796 (since rebuilt); hall for the Grocers' Company in the Poultry, London, of which the first stone was laid on 30 Aug. 1798, and the work completed on 21 July 1802 (it was afterwards altered by Joseph Gwilt, [q. v.]); Scampston House, Yorkshire, in 1803; Marine Villa, at Lislee, co. Cork, in 1803. He also erected large premises for sugar-boilers in London and New York. In 1783 he received a government premium for designs for improved penitentiary houses. He and his pupil, Thomas Chawner, were architects in the department of land revenue of the office of works, and in that capacity submitted, in July 1811, a plan for the improvement of the crown property of Marylebone Park Farm (now Regent's Park); but the design of John Nash [q. v.] was preferred and executed.

Leverton was surveyor to the Phœnix Fire Insurance Company and to the theatres royal in London, and was justice of the peace for Surrey, Kent, Middlesex, and Westminster. He was twice married, first, in 1766, and afterwards, in 1803, to Mrs. Rebecca Craven of Blackheath. He died at 13 Bedford Square, London (a house he had erected for himself) on 23 Sept. 1824, and was buried in Waltham Abbey, where a monument by