I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the
Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river,
I had almost said--for in those young years, what was this king of
rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are
of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself
more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser,
where he speaks of this spot.
There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide;
Till they decayd through pride.
Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a
transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time--the
passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected
avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green
recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it,
which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden: that goodly
pile
Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,
confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more
fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful
Crown-office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the
stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely
trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham
Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places.
What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the
fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times!
to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who,
not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost
tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had
the now almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions,
seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take
their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding
correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line
steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to
detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or
the first arrests of sleep!
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead
and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with
the simple altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the
old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it
almost every where vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more
elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded
for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not
protracted after sun-set, of temperance, and good-hours. It was the
primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce
have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet
plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their
silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The
shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher
by the very occupation, provided it with mottos more touching than
tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by
Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of
herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for
they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy.
They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains and
sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes:
What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head.
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine.
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach.
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness.
The mind, that ocean, where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
How well the skilful gardener drew,
Of flowers and herbs, this dial new!
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
And, as it works, the industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers?[1]
The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast
vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Yet, where one
is left, as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House,
what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile! Four little winged
marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out ever
fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips, in the square of
Lincoln's-inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured. They are
gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by,
and these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children,
by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They
are awakening images to them at least. Why must every thing smack of
man, and mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is
there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's
heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments? The figures were
grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and
chatter about that area, less gothic in appearance? or is the splutter
of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as the
little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered?
They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and
the library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the
hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged
horse that stood over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed
those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of the
Paper-buildings?--my first hint of allegory! They must account to me
for these things, which I miss so greatly.
The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but
the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement
awful! It is become common and profane. The old benchers had it almost
sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They might
not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade.
You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them. We walk on
even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J----ll, ever
ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie
a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated
Thomas Coventry?--whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and
elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and
path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the
scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors,
who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his
insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His
growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth
or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most
repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors
of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He
took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under
the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat
red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by
adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace.
By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive
gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but
that and their benchership in common. In politics Salt was a whig,
and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter
cast out--for Coventry had a rough spinous humour--at the political
confederates of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom
of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel
Salt.
S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent
discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his
knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition
of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily
handed it over with a few instructions to his man Lovel, who was
a quick little fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the
light of natural understanding, of which he had an uncommon share.
It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere
trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a
minute--indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would
give him credit for vast application in spite of himself. He was not
to be trusted with himself with impunity. He never dressed for a
dinner party but he forgot his sword--they wore swords then--or some
other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him on
all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was
anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it.--He
was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day
of her execution;--and L. who had a wary foresight of his probable
hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him with great anxiety not
in any possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised
faithfully to observe the injunction. He had not been seated in the
parlour, where the company was expecting the dinner summons, four
minutes, when, a pause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked
out of window, and pulling down his ruffles--an ordinary motion with
him--observed, "it was a gloomy day," and added, "Miss Blandy must
be hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances of this sort were
perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time
a fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the
law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct--from
force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good
fortune among the female world,--was a known toast with the ladies,
and one or two are said to have died for love of him--I suppose,
because he never trifled or talked gallantry with them, or paid them,
indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a fine face and person, but
wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown them off with
advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre.--Not so, thought Susan
P----; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold
evening time, unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of B----d Row, with
tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had
died that day--he, whom she had pursued with a hopeless passion for
the last forty years--a passion, which years could not extinguish or
abate; nor the long resolved, yet gently enforced, puttings off of
unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished purpose. Mild
Susan P----, thou hast now thy friend in heaven!
Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He
passed his youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him early
those parsimonious habits which in after-life never forsook him; so
that, with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him he was
master of four or five hundred thousand pounds; nor did he look,
or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite
the pump in Serjeant's-inn, Fleet-street. J., the counsel, is doing
self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day.
C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above
a day or two at a time in the summer; but preferred, during the hot
months, standing at his window in this damp, close, well-like mansion,
to watch, as he said, "the maids drawing water all day long." I
suspect he had his within-door reasons for the preference. _Hic currus
et arma fuêre_. He might think his treasures more safe. His house had
the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close hunks--a hoarder rather
than a miser--or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who have
brought discredit upon a character, which cannot exist without certain
admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a
true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking
care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with the pounds,
upon a scale that leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an
immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 30,000_l_. at once in his
life-time to a blind charity. His house-keeping was severely looked
after, but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know who came
in and who went out of his house, but his kitchen chimney was never
suffered to freeze.
Salt was his opposite in this, as in all--never knew what he was worth
in the world; and having but a competency for his rank, which his
indolent habits were little calculated to improve, might have suffered
severely if he had not had honest people about him. Lovel took care of
every thing. He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser,
his friend, his "flapper," his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer.
He did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in any thing
without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost
too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He
resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever
have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant.
I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty.
A good fellow withal, and "would strike." In the cause of the
oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number
of his opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of
quality that had drawn upon him; and pommelled him severely with the
hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female--an occasion
upon which no odds against him could have prevented the interference
of Lovel. He would stand next day bare-headed to the same person,
modestly to excuse his interference--for L. never forgot rank, where
something better was not concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow
breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly
to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a
fine turn for humorous poetry--next to Swift and Prior--moulded heads
in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural
genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys,
to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility;
made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the
merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of
rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the
angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr.
Isaac Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his
old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad
stage of human weakness--"a remnant most forlorn of what he was,"--yet
even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite
Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes--"was upon the stage
nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At
intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up
a little boy from Lincoln to go to service, and how his mother cried
at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years'
absence, in his smart new livery to see her, and she blessed herself
at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was "her
own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I
have wished that sad second-childhood might have a mother still to lay
its head upon her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long time
after received him gently into hers.
With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon the terrace, most
commonly Peter Pierson would join, to make up a third. They did not
walk linked arm in arm in those days--"as now our stout triumvirs
sweep the streets,"--but generally with both hands folded behind them
for state, or with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane.
P. was a benevolent, but not a pre-possessing man. He had that in
his face which you could not term unhappiness; it rather implied
an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were colourless, even to
whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without his
sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he _did_ good
acts, but I could never make out what _he_ was. Contemporary with
these, but subordinate, was Daines Barrington--another oddity--he
walked burly and square--in imitation, I think, of Coventry--howbeit
he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he
did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian,
and having a brother a bishop. When the account of his year's
treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was
unanimously disallowed by the bench: "Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the
gardener, twenty shillings, for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my
orders." Next to him was old Barton--a jolly negation, who took upon
him the ordering of the bills of fare for the parliament chamber,
where the benchers dine--answering to the combination rooms at
college--much to the easement of his less epicurean brethren. I know
nothing more of him.--Then Read, and Twopenny--Read, good-humoured
and personable--Twopenny, good-humoured, but thin, and felicitous in
jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and
fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date)
and his singular gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump
regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts, like that of a
child beginning to walk; the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to
an inch. Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I could
never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to
answer the purpose any better than common walking. The extreme tenuity
of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising.
Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as
Brother Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were
spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears extremely,
when any thing had offended him. Jackson--the omniscient Jackson he
was called--was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing
more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. He was the
Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. I remember a
pleasant passage, of the cook applying to him, with much formality of
apology, for instructions how to write down _edge_ bone of beef in his
bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world did.
He decided the orthography to be--as I have given it--fortifying his
authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for
the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet perversely, _aitch_
bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape, and that of the
aspirate so denominated. I had almost forgotten Mingay with the iron
hand--but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some
accident, and supplied it with a grappling hook, which he wielded
with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute, before I was
old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember
the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking
person; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of
power--somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelo's
Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the
costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect
recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple.
Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like of you exist,
why exist they no more for me? Ye inexplicable, half-understood
appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist,
bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure
in my relation, who made up to me--to my childish eyes--the mythology
of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a
mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry
perish,--extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary
fabling,--in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a
well of innocent or wholesome superstition--the seeds of exaggeration
will be busy there, and vital--from every-day forms educing the
unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light,
when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and
materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood,
shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings
totally to fly the earth.
* * * * *
P.S. I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See
what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of
childhood! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor!
This gentleman, R.N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady
in child-bed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep
melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he never thoroughly
recovered. In what a new light does this place his rejection (O
call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P----, unravelling
into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring
character!--Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for
true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes,
not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of
history. He is no such honest chronicler as R.N., and would have done
better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent these
incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer--who
respects his old and his new masters--would but have been puzzled
at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not,
peradventure, of the license which _Magazines_ have arrived at in this
plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the
_Gentleman's_--his furthest monthly excursions in this nature having
been long confined to the holy ground of honest _Urban's_ obituary.
May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those columns
of unenvied flattery!--Meantime, O ye New Benchers of the Inner
Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the kindliest of human
creatures. Should infirmities over-take him--he is yet in green and
vigorous senility--make allowances for them, remembering that "ye
yourselves are old." So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge
and cognisance, still flourish! so may future Hookers and Seldens
illustrate your church and chambers! so may the sparrows, in default
of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks! so may
the fresh-coloured and cleanly nursery maid, who, by leave, airs her
playful charge in your stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing
curtsy as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion! so may the
younkers of this generation eye you, pacing your stately terrace, with
the same superstitious veneration, with which the child Elia gazed on
the Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before ye!
[Footnote 1: From a copy of verses entitled The Garden.]