UP TO LONDON 1882
About the middle of the night the great ship comes to a pause, off the
coast of Ireland, and, looking forth across the black waves and through
the rifts in the rising mist, we see the low and lonesome verge of that
land of trouble and misery. A beautiful white light flashes now and then
from the shore, and at intervals the mournful booming of a solemn bell
floats over the sea. Soon is heard the rolling click of oars, and then
two or three dusky boats glide past the ship, and hoarse voices hail and
answer. A few stars are visible in the hazy sky, and the breeze from the
land brings off, in fitful puffs, the fragrant balm of grass and clover,
mingled with the salt odours of sea-weed and slimy rocks. There is a
sense of mystery over the whole wild scene; but we realise now that
human companionship is near, and that the long and lonely ocean voyage
is ended.
Illustration: "Peveril Peak."
Travellers who make the run from Liverpool to London by the Midland
Railway pass through the vale of Derby and skirt around the stately Peak
that Scott has commemorated in his novel of Peveril. It is a more rugged
country than is seen in the transit by the Northwestern road, but not
more beautiful. You see the storied mountain, in its delicacy of outline
and its airy magnificence of poise, soaring into the sky--its summit
almost lost in the smoky haze--and you wind through hillside pastures
and meadow-lands that are curiously intersected with low, zigzag stone
walls; and constantly, as the scene changes, you catch glimpses of green
lane and shining river; of dense copses that cast their cool shadow on
the moist and gleaming emerald sod; of long white roads that stretch
away like cathedral aisles and are lost beneath the leafy arches of elm
and oak; of little church towers embowered in ivy; of thatched cottages
draped with roses; of dark ravines, luxuriant with a wild profusion of
rocks and trees; and of golden grain that softly waves and whispers in
the summer wind; while, all around, the grassy banks and glimmering
meadows are radiant with yellow daisies, and with that wonderful scarlet
of the poppy that gives an almost human glow of life and loveliness to
the whole face of England. After some hours of such a pageant--so novel,
so fascinating, so fleeting, so stimulative of eager curiosity and
poetic desire--it is a relief at last to stand in the populous streets
and among the grim houses of London, with its surging tides of life, and
its turmoil of effort, conflict, exultation, and misery. How strange it
seems--yet, at the same time, how homelike and familiar! There soars
aloft the great dome of St. Paul's cathedral, with its golden cross that
flashes in the sunset! There stands the Victoria tower--fit emblem of
the true royalty of the sovereign whose name it bears. And there, more
lowly but more august, rise the sacred turrets of the Abbey. It is the
same old London--the great heart of the modern world--the great city of
our reverence and love. As the wanderer writes these words he hears the
plashing of the fountains in Trafalgar Square and the evening chimes
that peal out from the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and he knows
himself once more at the shrine of his youthful dreams.
Illustration: "St. Paul's from Maiden Lane."
To the observant stranger in London few sights can be more impressive
than those that illustrate the singular manner in which the life of the
present encroaches upon the memorials of the past. Old Temple Bar has
gone,--a sculptured griffin, at the junction of Fleet Street and the
Strand, denoting where once it stood. (It has been removed to Theobald's
Park, near Waltham, and is now the lodge gate of the grounds of Sir
Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway trains dash over what was once St.
Pancras churchyard--the burial-place of Mary Wollstonecraft and William
Godwin, and of many other British worthies--and passengers looking from
the carriages may see the children of the neighbourhood sporting among
the few tombs that yet remain in that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's
Chop-House, intimately associated with the wits of the reign of Queen
Anne, has been destroyed. The ancient tavern of The Cock, immortalised
by Tennyson, in his poem of Will Waterproof's Monologue, is soon to
disappear,--with its singular wooden vestibule that existed before the
time of the Plague and that escaped the great fire of 1666. On the site
of Northumberland House stands the Grand Hotel. The gravestones that
formerly paved the precinct of Westminster Abbey have been removed, to
make way for grassy lawns intersected with pathways. In Southwark,
across the Thames, the engine-room of the brewery of Messrs. Barclay &
Perkins occupies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which most of
Shakespeare's plays were first produced. One of the most venerable and
beautiful churches in London, that of St. Bartholomew the Great,--a
gray, mouldering temple, of the twelfth century, hidden away in a corner
of Smithfield,--is desecrated by the irruption of an adjacent shop, the
staircase hall of which breaks cruelly into the sacred edifice and
impends above the altar. On July 12, 1882, the present writer, walking
in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,--the sepulchre of
William Wycherley, Robert Wilks, Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas
King, Samuel Butler, Thomas Southerne, Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne, Thomas
Davies, Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt, William Havard, and many
other renowned votaries of literature and the stage,--found workmen
building a new wall to sustain the enclosure, and almost every stone in
the cemetery uprooted and leaning against the adjacent houses. Those
monuments, it was said, would be replaced; but it was impossible not to
consider the chances of error in a new mortuary deal--and the grim
witticism of Rufus Choate, about dilating with the wrong emotion, came
then into remembrance, and did not come amiss.
Illustration: "The Charter House."
Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that even the relics of
the past are passing away, and that cities, unlike human creatures, may
grow to be so old that at last they will become new. It is not wonderful
that London should change its aspect from one decade to another, as the
living surmount and obliterate the dead. Thomas Sutton's Charter-House
School, founded in 1611, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were still
writing, was reared upon ground in which several thousand corses were
buried, during the time of the Indian pestilence of 1348; and it still
stands and nourishes--though not as vigorously now as might be wished.
Nine thousand new houses, it is said, are built in the great capital
every year, and twenty-eight miles of new street are thus added to it.
On a Sunday I drove for three hours through the eastern part of London
without coming upon a single trace of the open fields. On the west, all
the region from Kensington to Richmond is settled for most part of the
way; while northward the city is stretching its arms toward Hampstead,
Highgate, and tranquil and blooming Finchley. Truly the spirit of this
age is in strong contrast with that of the time of Henry the Eighth when
(1530), to prevent the increasing size of London, all new buildings were
forbidden to be erected "where no former hath been known to have been."
The march of improvement nowadays carries everything before it: even
British conservatism is at some points giving way: and, noting the
changes that have occurred here within only five years, I am persuaded
that those who would see what remains of the London of which they have
read and dreamed--the London of Dryden and Pope, of Addison, Sheridan,
and Byron, of Betterton, Garrick, and Edmund Kean--will, as time passes,
find more and more difficulty both in tracing the footsteps of fame, and
in finding that sympathetic, reverent spirit which hallows the relics of
genius and renown.
Illustration: "Church Steeple Centered on Moon"