some of Shakespeare's _Plays_ appear to have been produced before
1593."
"Well," answered the Spirit, carelessly sticking his sword into
my nose and sitting on it, "what has age to do with genius? Has
not another poet said, 'He was not of an age, but for all time'?
Besides, the Scottish are a precocious people and byordinar'. And
furthermore, who told you that Drummond was born in '85?"
"English history says so."
"English history!" answered the Spirit, with a sneer; "try Scotch."
"But," I still objected, "if Shakespeare wrote nothing, why did
Ben Jonson, who knew him well, praise his wit and his 'gentle
expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it
was necessary he should be stopped'?"
"Well," said Roderick, "and who said that Shakespeare wrote
nothing? I only said he did not write Shakespeare's _Works_. But he
wrote other poetry--poetry which everybody knows--poetry as familiar
in every child's mouth as butterscotch. There is nothing finer of
its kind."
"It is strange," I muttered, "that I have never heard of it."
"What?" cried the Spirit, "never heard of 'Little Jack Horner'?
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie;
He pulled out a plum with his finger and thumb,
And said "What a good boy am I!"
"And is that Shakespeare's?" I exclaimed.
"And what for no'? It is a perfect specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon
English, without corrupt admixture of Norman or Roman words. It is
terse and dramatic. The very first line, in its revelation of the
hero's remote and solitary state, presents a powerful suggestion
of a contemplative character. His voracity, tempered by intense
conscientiousness, is indicated in a few clear, pertinent touches
that unmistakably betoken the master-hand. Yet the author's name
is lost in the dust of the centuries; it has eluded the vigilance
of antiquarian research. Only I am acquainted with the secret. If
you doubt it, turn the poem into an anagram, and the truth shall be
clear even to you."
"But," I began, "if"--
"Bah! Look at here!" cried Roderick, jumping to his feet and
brandishing his sword, "I came here to improve your mind; but if you
are not amenable to reason, it's no use talking. So get out of it,
ye puir, daft, gawkie Southron loon!"
And so saying, he struck me so terrible a blow across the nose with
his sword that I sneezed, and lo, behold! he was gone, and in the
place where he had been, was nothing but a great, busy, buzzing
moth, that hovered round my nose as though it had been a joy-beacon.
* * * * *
It was a strange experience. I don't know what to make of it. But
I don't think that Shakespeare was Bacon. And, as I hadn't the
slightest trace of headache when I awoke, I think that, after all,
the Scottish Spirit was right. Bacon hasn't a ham to stand on. Bacon
is smoked. To honest nostrils Bacon hereafter is rancid.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt henceforth as to the
authorship of "Little Jack Horner." Following Roderick's
instructions, I have taken the letters of the lines of that poem,
and have constructed with them an anagram which establishes beyond
possibility of dispute that Shakespeare wrote them.
I am prepared to prove it to the British Association, and defy
_The Daily Chronicle_. It is true the spelling is rather bad, but
Shakespeare's was notoriously beastly, so that is another proof in
my favour.
It is moreover a perfect anagram, in which each letter is used,
and used once only. The letters are L i t t l e j a c k
h o r n e r s a t i n a c o r n e r e a t i n g a
c h r i s t m a s p i e h e p u l l e d o u t a p l u m
w i t h h i s f i n g e r a n d t h u m b a n d s a i d
w h a t a g o o d b o y a m i.
Now, mark, hey presto! there's no deception; mix these letters and
form them into new combinations, and you evolve this remarkable,
startling, conclusive, and scientifically historical revelation:--
_=Mistir Shakesper aloan was the Lyturery
gent wich rote this Bootiful Pome in Elizabuth Raign, and Jaimce
had Damn Good Lauph.=_
Could anything be clearer?
FLEET STREET
When I go up that quiet cloistered court, running up like a
little secure haven from the stormy ocean of Fleet Street, and
see the doctor's gnarled bust on the bracket above his old hat,
I sometimes think the very wainscot must still be impregnated
with the fumes of his seething punch-bowl.
WASHINGTON IRVING.
My Bosom's Lord declares that it is more of a smell than a street;
but there is not a journalist of any literary pretension in Britain
who does not regard Fleet Street as the Mecca of his craft, and
instinctively turn his face towards it when he has occasion to say
his prayers.
It is the focus, the magnetic centre, and very heart of London's
Fairyland--the Capital of the Territory of Brick and Mortar Romance.
Its enchanted courts are the inner sanctuary of Haunted London. It
is the most astonishing sensation to step out of the hum and moan
and fret of the rushing and turbulent City's most bustling and
roaring street, into the absolute, cloistered stillness of, for
instance, the Temple; where, within fifty yards of Fleet Street, you
may stand by Oliver Goldsmith's grave and hear no sound save the
cooing of pigeons and the splashing of a fountain.
Fleet Street's air is the quintessence of English History. From the
Plague and the Fire to the Jubilee Procession, everything has passed
here. All the literary eminence of the day comes to do business
here. These paving-stones have felt the weight of George R. Sims,
Clement Scott, Bernard Shaw, and the Poet Craig. It is the world's
main artery, the centre of the Empire's nervous system, the brain
and soul of England.
Be that as it may, I am conscious of an increase in my stature since
I became a part of Fleet Street--a stretching of my boots since I
began to walk in the footsteps of Swift, Steele, Pope, Goldsmith,
Johnson, and all the other giants whose seething punch-bowls have
impregnated the wainscot of the neighbouring taverns.
[Illustration: A BARBER'S SHOP IN 1492.]
The chief of the ghosts, of course, is the burly lexicographer--the
man with the inky ruffles, the dirty large hands, the shabby brown
coat, and shrivelled wig. Methinks I see him now, clinging to his
door in dingy Bolt Court, and waking the midnight echoes with his
Cyclopean laughter, as he listens to a parting from fluent Burke or
snuffy Gibbon.
There were no footpaths in Fleet Street in those days; spouts
projected the rain-water in streams from the house-tops, and there
were no umbrellas. The swinging of broad signs in high winds would
sometimes bring down a wall--an accident which killed, on one
occasion, in Fleet Street, "two young ladies, a cobbler, and the
king's jeweller."
And yet the daintiest and prettiest of women came tripping down
Fleet Street, and up the narrow court, to see the blustering,
pompous Lichfield bear; unless, indeed, Miss Burney, witty Mrs.
Montague, charming Miss Reynolds, and shrewd Miss Piozzi only called
to caress Hodge, the doctor's cat.
(Happy thought! who knows? MEM.: _We_ must get a cat.)
* * * * *
It was Dr. Johnson who set the excellent Fleet Street fashion of
tempering the fierce delights of literary achievement with staid and
lingering meditation in the pleasant taverns.
In fact, the Fleet Street taverns are visited by reverend pilgrims
to this day as monuments consecrate to the great lexicographer; and
at all times of the day one may find faithful congregations of Fleet
Street men of letters devoutly lingering there to pour out libations
to his glory.
It was at the Cheshire Cheese, whilst the chops hissed on the grid,
that Dr. Johnson was wont to snub Boswell, quiz Goldsmith, and
brutally beat down his opponents with his "Why, sir," "What, sir?"
and "What then, sir?"
"Here, sir," he himself admitted, "I dogmatise and am contradicted,
and I love this conflict of intellect and opinion." It was in
another tavern, up another narrow court, that the pompous author
of _Rasselas_ said to his delighted biographer, "Sir, give me your
hand; I have taken a liking to you." And it was under the influence
of this place that Boswell wrote:--
The orthodox High Church sound of the Mitre, the figure and
manner of the celebrated Dr. Johnson, the extraordinary power
and precision of his conversation, and the pride arising from
finding myself admitted as his companion, produced a variety of
sensations and a pleasing elevation of mind beyond what I had
ever before experienced.
Dear, garrulous, faithful old Bozzy! I have myself seen literary men
mentally elevated in the same hallowed atmosphere, but never have I
met any who expressed his emotions with nicer precision.
But the first and foremost to me of all Fleet Street's illustrious
ghosts--as actual and inevitable a feature of the famous
thoroughfare as the taverns, the restaurants, the overhanging signs,
the newspaper offices, the Griffin, and the Law Courts--is our old
friend and colleague the Bounder.
I cannot walk from Ludgate Circus to the Griffin without meeting
him. I see him stalking into Edwards', with solemn visage and
weighty stride, for the momentous function of dinner. I see him
with beaming countenance and abdominal "Haw, haw!" of full content,
nimbly stepping out of Bower's, his "percentage restored" and
his soul "satisfied in Nature." I see him striding gloomily with
downcast eyes, hands in fob, and bludgeon under his arm, oblivious
of the traffic and the world, wrestling in desperate conflict with
the reluctant Muses, for a happy phrase or eccentric rhyme.
His Gargantuan figure is never absent from _my_ Fleet Street. Were
he to slap me on the back, I should say "Hello, Ned," as naturally
as if he had never left us.
Ah me! how we get carried away from those by whose side we would
have chosen to fight!
Happily, there is no settled sadness in the Bounder's ghost.
One of the earliest recollections I have of him is connected with a
_tête-à-tête_ dinner (the tater-tart came many years after) in one
of the Fleet Street taverns.
We had finished our ample meal, when in came my old friend Tom
Sutton, of the _Athletic News_, and seeing nothing but empty plates
before us, cheerily invited us to dine.
I was about to explain the situation, when the Bounder, to warn me
off, winking sideways, affably answered, "All right, old chap. I'll
have a steak and a tankard of stout."
This he consumed, together with several accessories and supplements
pressed upon his easy acquiescence by our genial host.
At last came the solemn moment
When the banquet's o'er,
The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.
Tom Sutton looked, and looked again, pulled his moustache, and
called the waiter.
"I say," he protested, "there's a mistake here. We haven't had all
this."
"Mistake, sir?" said the waiter. "No, dere vas no mistake, sir;
I haf charge for dat gentleman all his two dinner. Dat gentleman
always have two dinner sometimes. No mistake."
"Two dinners? Why"--
But at that moment Tom looked across the table, saw the Bounder's
huge frame shaking with inward chuckles, which rose to a roar as
their eyes met, and then he paid and said no more.
The Bounder was of course the Mentor who introduced me to Bower's.
I was "up" for a day, and of course we "signified the same in the
usual manner."
"Albert," said the Bounder, "bring me a glass of _my_ port--from
behind the glue-pot."
I said I would take the same, and put down half a crown.
Albert brought tenpence change.
As I counted it, I began, "I say, is this change"--
The Bounder, who had been watching, at once interrupted me. "Don't
expose your untutored provincial ignorance," he said; "tenpence a
time. Always have it with provincials. Tenpence left? Order another."
* * * * *
It was soon after the _Clarion_ removed its headquarters to London,
that I paid my first visit to the Cheshire Cheese, the primitive
tavern, with "nicely sanded floor," which, in a dingy Fleet Street
court, still rears its antique head in proud and successful defiance
of the gimcrack modern amply-mirrored restaurant.
It was a damp, cold, miserable November night, and I had been
tramping with the partner of my joys all day through slush and mire
in search of houses.
Looking in for letters at the _Clarion's_ gloomy little office in
Bouverie Street, I found Fay crouching disconsolately over a handful
of expiring embers in the grate.
He had been ill for many weeks, and had been reduced to a painful
diet of buns and milk, but yet, if he might not feast, he could
still take an interest in other people's feasting. Doctors could not
rob him of that comfort.
So he inquired with touching interest where we proposed to dine.
My Bosom's Lord, with native Cornish trend, asked where was food the
cheapest.
"Tut tut," said the Bounder. "Are you blessed with an appetite, yet
grudge its entertainment? Is dinner-time a time to think of thrift?
Go to, woman. Do you never give thanks? It is Saturday night. The
Cheshire Cheese pudding is now on. Take this poor victim of your
avarice to the Cheshire Cheese, and let him for once be decently
fed."
"All right," answered my frugal spouse; "if it's the Board's
orders, and the Board pays, I don't object," and with a laughing
"Good-night," she prepared to depart.
But as we were crossing the threshold the Bounder stopped me. "Are
you going to the Cheese?" he asked.
"I expect so."
"Hum! and I'm doomed to the bun-and-milk shop." His voice quivered
as he spoke. Then suddenly--"No, hang it! I'll come with you. That
doctor of mine is an ass. I'll try the pudding."
And he did--several times; though I, in robust health, could stomach
no more than one helping of the rich and bilious compound.
As we came out he walked on his heels and slapped his chest. "Haw!
haw!" he said, "I never felt better in my life. That doctor is an
ass. Bread and milk? Bah!" And he swaggered all the way down Fleet
Street.
On the next evening I found him crouching again over the little fire
in Bouverie Street. I could feel his "hump" as soon as I opened the
door. He was very bad.
"What's the matter, old chap? Don't you feel well?"
"No," he said, very ruefully; "I'm very bad. You know, I begin
to think my doctor is a fool. I've been trying this perishing
bread-and-milk diet for nearly two months, and, upon my word, I
never felt worse. Really, I've given this doctor a fair trial, but,
hang it all, the fellow does not understand me at all!"
* * * * *
Oh the gaps left by the passing years in a man's little circle of
friends!
Time was when the cordial hand-grip of friends met me in Manchester
at every corner, and almost every face in the streets was familiar.
I was there last Christmas, and I walked for half a day without a
welcoming voice or smiling countenance to greet me. I thought of
them that I had known, and walked with, and drank and eaten with
there, and desolation fell upon me. To stroll through the crowded,
bustling thoroughfare was like walking through a graveyard at
midnight. The buildings loomed upon my gaze like monuments of the
departed; and the only inhabitants I saw were spectres of the dead.
It was holiday time, and the passers-by were many. Their laughter
sounded in my ears like the sobbing of wind through willows.
Then I fell into a cluster of survivors from the fray, a band of
staunch and hearty friends of old, who took me by the hand and
"trated me dacent."
"Well, I am glad to see you," said one; then another, then another,
and all together in lusty chorus.
That was good.
Then they began to talk. "Do you remember being here with Tom Sutton
on such a night? Ah, poor old Tom! His death was an awful shock!"
And, "You heard how Jones's two boys went down in the pleasure
yacht? Jones has been out of his wits ever since."
And so on, and so on, till I rejoiced to hear the signal of parting.
We'll have no more of these reminiscences of graves and worms and
epitaphs. "Some grief shows much of love; but much of grief shows
still some want of wit."
LONDON'S GROWTH
Why, how nowe, Babell, whither wilt thou build?
I see old Holbourne, Charing Cross, the Strand,
Are going to St. Giles' in the Field.
St. Katerne, she takes Wapping by the hand,
And Hogsdon will to Hygate ere't be long.
London has got a great way from the streame.
I think she means to go to Islington,
To eat a dish of strawberries and creame.
THOMAS FREEMAN (1614).
"Hogsdon" has come to Hygate long since, as our friend Cartmel,
wearily pedalling his bicycle through the up-piled accumulation of
dingy streets that divide his slum from my elevated fastness, can
sadly testify.
Where will "she" be a hundred years hence?
Where when "she" is finished?
I wonder.
James I. predicted that London would shortly be England and England
would be London. Yet London in his time was literally the village
that modern facetiousness calls it.
Little more than fifty years ago a magazine writer, bewailing
London's vastness, declared that it must on no account be permitted
to grow larger. The population was then less than a million and a
half.
[Illustration: WHITEHALL IN THE REIGN OF JAMES I.]
The monstrous growth which has taken place since then and the
stupendous rate of present increase fill the thoughtful observer
with dread. The problems of communication and distribution grow year
by year more complicated and difficult. The congestion of clever
men attracted from all parts of the country by the glitter of the
capital, impoverishes the provinces, and fills London with starving
unemployed talent, much of which gradually degenerates into hopeless
drunkenness, or still more degraded flunkeyism. The surplus artists,
sculptors, writers, and actors stagnating and rotting in London
would, and should, set up throughout the counties living, healthy,
beneficial schools of art, culture, and general enlightenment.
The only comfort visible in the actual distortion is, that by its
wholesale exaggeration of the evils afflicting the whole country,
it will the more speedily bring a breakdown of the whole system,
and so precipitate its own cure. Through the growth of population
between 1866 and 1891 the "value" of land in London increased by
£110,000,000. Ground in the City is sold at the rate of ten guineas
per superficial foot. £16,000,000 a year is drawn as rent of land
whose agricultural value is about £16,000 a year. That is to say,
the people of London have to pay £50 every year for what would have
cost, but for their own industry, only one shilling.
But these are matters for discussion in weightier works than mine.
Here I merely skim the surface, and catch the superficial fact.
For instance, I observe that London's growth is steadily destroying
London's picturesqueness. The embowered palaces of dukes and earls
are giving place, more or less, to workmen's model dwellings; and
the spots, such as Charing Cross and Tower Hill, where kings and
princes were formerly decapitated in a gentlemanly way, never rise
nowadays beyond the breaking of the crowns of rude and clamorous
agitators.
Nowhere, in short, is Democracy advancing so visibly as in London;
nowhere is it so manifestly pushing back, and crawling over, and
supplanting Aristocracy.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE IN SOUTHWARK.]
Southwark's palaces have been famous for hundreds of years. St.
Saviour's Church, where the bones of Fletcher and Massinger and
Edmond Shakespeare are laid, was built on the site of a church built
before the Norman Conquest, from the profits of a ferry across
the Thames. Anne Boleyn had an abode here, and hither rode the
enterprising Royal Henry to walk and talk with her. Elizabeth came
by water with the French Ambassador to see the bull-baiting in the
building near the Globe Theatre.
A famous old London tavern, the Tabard, from which Chaucer's
nine-and-twenty pilgrims started on their journey, stood near London
Bridge within living memory. In Southwark too, until our time, stood
the galleried inn where Mr. Pickwick discovered Sam Weller. In fact,
Southwark was, until our time, full of historical associations, and
once ranked amongst London's most fashionable suburbs. Now it is a
labyrinth of slums, and Barclay & Perkins' brewery occupies the
site of the Bankside Globe Theatre.
[Illustration: THE STRAND, 1660.]
The narrow thoroughfares between the Strand and the river, where
modern provincial visitors have their caravanserais, rustled
once with fashionable satins and groaned under the weight of
gilded coaches. Here dwelt dukes and earls and the pick of our
nobility. Mark Twain, in _The Prince and the Pauper_, has
pictured for us a Royal river pageant, such as many bright and
flashing eyes must have beheld from the windows and steps of the
palaces that lined the Strand or Middlesex bank of the Thames
between London and Westminster, for the king's town residence
stood hard by in Whitehall; and thence to his country palace at
Greenwich--Elizabeth's favourite "Manner of Pleasaunce"--the richly
caparisoned and silk-canopied State barges fluttered splendidly.
[Illustration: THE STRAND, 1660.]
Now the stateliest craft that ride the Cockney surge are the rackety
penny packet and dingily plebeian coal barge.
Soho, the dingy resort of foreign refugees, was formerly a district
of great mansions, glimpses of whose former grandeur can still be
distinguished beneath their present grime.
James the First's unlucky son, Henry, Raleigh's friend and the
people's favourite, built himself a mansion in Gerrard Street,
behind the site of the present Shaftesbury Theatre. Dryden lived in
the same street, and here stood Dr. Johnson's favourite club, the
Turk's Head.
Charles the Second's "natural" son, the Duke of Monmouth, the
ill-starred, ambitious soldier who figures as the hero of Dryden's
"Absalom," and who was beheaded, at the third stroke of the axe,
on Tower Hill, had a palace in Soho Square where now stand gloomy
warehouses; and in the same square, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Gilbert
Burnet, and George Colman the Elder, formerly made history and
literature where Crosse & Blackwell now make pickles.
The whole district is, as Bottom might have said with more than
usual accuracy, "translated." It is become the stronghold and
fastness of the foreigner and of his cheap and excellent restaurants.
Nowhere in the world are cheaper or more varied dinners to be had.
The odours of the fried fish of Jerusalem here mingle with the
perfume of the sauerkraut of Germany, and the cheeses of France
and Italy; and over all, blending them into one harmonious whole,
serenely soars the powerful aroma of triumphant garlic.
This is but one of the phases of an amazing latter-day development
of the Restaurant in London.
[Illustration: WHITEFIELD'S TABERNACLE: TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD IN
1736.]
Shall I ever forget the horror of the first dinner I ever had in
England? The Gargantuan slabs of semi-raw beef, and the bitter,
black, treacly "porter," seemed to my mind certain signs that I had
fallen among a race of savages and cannibals. But now, instead
of the mean, dingy, dirty, fly-blown chop-houses that formerly
mocked and balked London's appetite, we have a collection of marble
palaces, in which daintily prepared repasts are retailed at lower
prices than were formerly charged for the chop-houses' superannuated
chunks of brutal flesh.
The Adelaide Gallery, one of the largest of these restaurants, has
taken the place of a most respectable Gallery of Practical Science,
and the Oxford Street store of the most democratic of wine-importers
grows its cobwebs in what, fifty years ago, was accounted one of
the most fashionable resorts in Europe. "Two thousand persons of
rank and fashion," as I read in an old magazine, "assembled in
the splendid structure" at its opening. And it _was_ a splendid
structure then, for the architect had introduced niches containing
statues of "the heathen deities," with "Britannia, George III., and
Queen Charlotte" thrown in! And now, I presume, they are thrown
out--or rounded off into a perfectly harmonious circle perhaps, by a
supplemental and complementary statue of Ally Sloper.