LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS
Those persons upon whom the spirit of the past has power--and it has not
power upon every mind!--are aware of the mysterious charm that invests
certain familiar spots and objects, in all old cities. London, to
observers of this class, is a never-ending delight. Modern cities, for
the most part, reveal a definite and rather a commonplace design. Their
main avenues are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect their main
avenues. They are diversified with rectangular squares. Their
configuration, in brief, suggests the sapient, utilitarian forethought
of the land-surveyor and civil engineer. The ancient British capital, on
the contrary, is the expression--slowly and often narrowly made--of many
thousands of characters. It is a city that has happened--and the
stroller through the old part of it comes continually upon the queerest
imaginable alleys, courts, and nooks. Not far from Drury Lane Theatre,
for instance, hidden away in a clump of dingy houses, is a dismal little
graveyard--the same that Dickens has chosen, in his novel of _Bleak
House, _as the sepulchre of little Jo's friend, the first love of the
unfortunate Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped in the robes of
faded sorrow, and crowded into the twilight of obscurity by the
thick-clustering habitations of men.[1] The Cripplegate church, St.
Giles's, a less lugubrious spot and less difficult of access, is
nevertheless strangely sequestered, so that it also affects the
observant eye as equally one of the surprises of London. I saw it, for
the first time, on a gray, sad Sunday, a little before twilight, and
when the service was going on within its venerable walls. The footsteps
of John Milton were sometimes on the threshold of the Cripplegate, and
his grave is in the nave of that ancient church. A simple flat stone
marks that sacred spot, and many a heedless foot tramples over that
hallowed dust. From Golden Lane, which is close by, you can see the
tower of this church; and, as you walk from the place where Milton lived
to the place where his ashes repose, you seem, with a solemn,
awe-stricken emotion, to be actually following in his funeral train. At
St. Giles's occurred the marriage of Cromwell. squared I remembered--as I stood
there and conjured up that scene of golden joy and hope--the place of
the Lord Protector's coronation in Westminster Hall; the place, still
marked, in Westminster Abbey, where his body was buried; and old Temple
Bar, on which (if not on Westminster Hall) his mutilated corse was
finally exposed to the blind rage of the fickle populace. A little
time--a very little time--serves to gather up equally the happiness and
the anguish, the conquest and the defeat, the greatness and the
littleness of human life, and to cover them all with silence.
[1] That place has been renovated and is no longer a disgrace.
squared The church of St. Giles was built in 1117 by Queen Maud. It was
demolished in 1623 and rebuilt in 1731. The tomb of Richard Pendrell,
who saved Charles the Second, after Worcester fight, in 1651, is in the
churchyard.
But not always with oblivion. Those quaint churches, and many other
mouldering relics of the past, in London, are haunted with associations
that never can perish out of remembrance. In fact the whole of the old
city impresses you as densely invested with an atmosphere of human
experience, dark, sad, and lamentable. Walking, alone, in ancient
quarters of it, after midnight, I was aware of the oppressive sense of
tragedies that have been acted and misery that has been endured in its
dusky streets and melancholy houses. They do not err who say that the
spiritual life of man leaves its influence in the physical objects by
which he is surrounded. Night-walks in London will teach you that, if
they teach you nothing else. I went more than once into Brooke Street,
Holborn, and traced the desolate footsteps of poor Thomas Chatterton to
the scene of his self-murder and agonised, pathetic, deplorable death.
It is more than a century (1770), since that "marvellous boy" was driven
to suicide by neglect, hunger, and despair. They are tearing down the
houses on one side of Brooke Street now (1877); it is doubtful which
house was No. 4, in the attic of which Chatterton died, and doubtful
whether it remains: his grave--a pauper's grave, that was made in a
workhouse burial-ground, in Shoe Lane, long since obliterated--is
unknown; but his presence hovers about that region; his strange and
touching story tinges its commonness with the mystical moonlight of
romance; and his name is blended with it for ever.
Illustration: "Whitehall Gateway."
On another night I walked from St. James's Palace to Whitehall (the York
Place of Cardinal Wolsey), and viewed the ground that Charles the First
must have traversed, on his way to the scaffold. The story of the
slaughter of that king, always sorrowful to remember, is very grievous
to consider, when you realise, upon the actual scene of his ordeal and
death, his exalted fortitude and his bitter agony. It seemed as if I
could almost hear his voice, as it sounded on that fateful morning,
asking that his body might be more warmly clad, lest, in the cold
January air, he should shiver, and so, before the eyes of his enemies,
should seem to be trembling with fear. The Puritans, having brought that
poor man to the place of execution, kept him in suspense from early
morning till after two o'clock in the day, while they debated over a
proposition to spare his life--upon any condition they might choose to
make--that had been sent to them by his son, Prince Charles. Old persons
were alive in London, not very long ago, who remembered having seen, in
their childhood, the window, in the end of the Whitehall Banquet
House--now a Chapel Royal and all that remains of the ancient
palace--through which the doomed monarch walked forth to the block. It
was long ago walled up, and the palace has undergone much alteration
since the days of the Stuarts. In the rear of Whitehall stands a bronze
statue of James the Second, by Roubiliac (whose marbles are numerous, in
the Abbey and elsewhere in London, and whose grave is in the church of
St. Martin), one of the most graceful works of that spirited sculptor.
The figure is finely modelled. The face is dejected and full of
reproach. The right hand points, with a truncheon, toward the earth. It
is impossible to mistake the ruminant, melancholy meaning of this
memorial; and equally it is impossible to walk without both thought that
instructs and emotion that elevates through a city which thus abounds
with traces of momentous incident and representative experience.
The literary pilgrim in London has this double advantage--that while he
communes with the past he may enjoy in the present. Yesterday and to-day
are commingled here, in a way that is almost ludicrous. When you turn
from Roubiliac's statue of James your eyes rest upon the retired house
of Disraeli. If you walk in Whitehall, toward the Palace of Westminster,
some friend may chance to tell you how the great Duke of Wellington
walked there, in the feebleness of his age, from the Horse Guards to the
House of Lords; and with what pleased complacency the old warrior used
to boast of his skill in threading a crowded thoroughfare,--unaware that
the police, acting by particular command, protected his revered person
from errant cabs and pushing pedestrians. As I strolled one day past
Lambeth Palace it happened that the palace gates were suddenly unclosed
and that His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury came forth, on
horseback, from that episcopal residence, and ambled away towards the
House of Lords. It is the same arched portal through which, in other
days, passed out the stately train of Wolsey. It is the same towered
palace that Queen Elizabeth looked upon as her barge swept past, on its
watery track to Richmond. It is for ever associated with the memory of
Thomas Cromwell.
Illustration: "Lambeth Palace."
In the church, hard by, rest the ashes of men distinguished in the most
diverse directions--Jackson, the clown; and Tenison, the archbishop, the
"honest, prudent, laborious, and benevolent" primate of William the
Third, who was thought worthy to succeed in office the illustrious
Tillotson. The cure of souls is sought here with just as vigorous energy
as when Tillotson wooed by his goodness and charmed by his winning
eloquence. Not a great distance from this spot you come upon the college
at Dulwich that Edward Alleyn founded, in the time of Shakespeare, and
that still subsists upon the old actor's endowment. It is said that
Alleyn--who was a man of fortune, and whom a contemporary epigram styles
the best actor of his day--gained the most of his money by the
exhibition of bears. But, howsoever gained, he made a good use of it.
His tomb is in the centre of the college. Here may be seen one of the
best picture-galleries in England. One of the cherished paintings in
that collection is the famous portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, of
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse--remarkable for its colour, and
splendidly expositive of the boldness of feature, brilliancy of
countenance, and stately grace of posture for which its original was
distinguished. Another represents two renowned beauties of their
day--the Linley sisters--who became Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickel. You
do not wonder, as you look on those fair faces, sparkling with health,
arch with merriment, lambent with sensibility, and soft with goodness
and feeling, that Sheridan should have fought duels for such a prize as
the lady of his love; or that those fascinating creatures, favoured
alike by the Graces and the Muse, should in their gentle lives have
been, "like Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable." Mary, Mrs. Tickel,
died first; and Moore, in his _Life of Sheridan, _has preserved a lament
for her, written by Eliza, Mrs. Sheridan, which--for deep, true sorrow
and melodious eloquence--is worthy to be named with Thomas Tickel's
monody on Addison or Cowper's memorial lines on his mother's picture:--
"Shall all the wisdom of the world combined
Erase thy image, Mary, from my mind,
Or bid me hope from others to receive
The fond affection thou alone couldst give?
Ah no, my best beloved, thou still shalt be
My friend, my sister, all the world to me!"
Precious also among the gems of the Dulwich gallery are certain
excellent specimens of the gentle, dreamy style of Murillo. The pilgrim
passes on, by a short drive, to Sydenham, and dines at the Crystal
Palace--and still he finds the faces of the past and the present
confronted, in a manner that is almost comic. Nothing could be more
aptly representative of the practical, ostentatious phase of the spirit
of to-day than is this enormous, opulent, and glittering "palace made of
windows." Yet I saw there the carriage in which Napoleon Buonaparte used
to drive, at St. Helena--a vehicle as sombre and ghastly as were the
broken fortunes of its death-stricken master; and, sitting at a table
close by, I saw the son of Buonaparte's fiery champion, William Hazlitt.
Illustration: "Dulwich College."
It was a gray and misty evening. The plains below the palace terraces
were veiled in shadow, through which, here and there, twinkled the
lights of some peaceful villa. Far away the spires and domes of London,
dimly seen, pierced the city's nightly pall of smoke. It was a dream too
sweet to last. It ended when all the illuminations were burnt out; when
the myriads of red and green and yellow stars had fallen; and all the
silver fountains had ceased to play.
Illustration: "The Crown Inn, Dulwich."