Page:Angelo's Pic Nic.djvu/18

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

THE ANGELO FAMILY recent times of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this family, like many other families of noble origin, had become identified with the trading and commercial classes, so that now, I understand, the name Tremamondo is not to be found on any existing roll of Italian nobility. And the earliest member of the family to settle in England, in or immediately after the year 1758, seems to have been fully conscious of that fact; because when he first burst upon the highly conventional world of George II.'s reign, in all the glory of his fame and skill as a matchless fencer and rider, he appears to have been curiously oblivious of his own patronymic, and to have used by preference that of his mother, who was a Malevolti, a member of that once famous family of Siena. Thus in his marriage register he is entered as Domenico Angelo Malevolti. Again, his son Henry, the subject of this notice, in the record of his baptism, is stated to be son to Angelo Domenico Malevolti; and later on, when he was one of the best known men in London, the inscription engraved on the three-bottle silver goblet which was given to him by Garrick was, " Pegno d' ami- cizia di David Garrick al suo amico Angelo Malevolti." Evern in his son Henry's account of him he figures gloriously as Dominico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo. But a different story presents itself when we turn to the Rate-books of St James, Westminster, and of St Anne's, Soho. In those formal business documents the name Malevolti does not come in at all. In them he is entered as Dominico Angelo Tremamondo, or else as Domenick Angelo merely. Again, when he witnesses his daughter Caroline's marriage, in 1785, he writes his own name D. Angelo Tremamondo. Yet again, when witnessing the marriage-register of his daughter Catherine, in 1790, he writes the name simply as Dom Angelo. In the midst of all this