the art of cultivating pleasant associations," and, with his example
before us, we will endeavour to recall some of those that are to be
met with on a walk from the Borough to St. James's, from one of the
poorest parts of our city to one of the richest. The Borough, dusty,
noisy, toil-worn as it is, is yet, he tells us, "the most classical
ground in the metropolis." From the "Tabard" inn--now only a memory,
though its contemporary, the "George," hard by, gives us some idea
of its look in mediæval times--there rode forth, one bright spring
morning, "Sir Jeffrey Chaucer" and "nyne and twenty" pilgrims "in a
companye ... to wenden on (a) pilgrimage to Caunterbury with ful devout
courage." A fellow-poet of Chaucer's, John Gower, lies buried close at
hand in Southwark Cathedral, "under a tomb of stone, with his image of
stone also over him." He was one of the earliest benefactors of this
church, then known as St. Mary Overy, and founded therein a chantry,
where masses should be said for the benefit of his soul. Stones in
the pavement of the choir likewise commemorate John Fletcher, Philip
Massinger, and Edmund Shakespeare, who lie in unmarked graves somewhere
within the precincts of the cathedral.
Not a stone's throw from the Borough is the Bankside, extending from
Blackfriars Bridge out beyond Southwark, a mean and dirty thoroughfare,
with the grey Thames on one side, and on the other dull houses, grimy
warehouses, and gloomy offices. How changed from the semi-rural resort
of Elizabethan days, when swans floated on the river, and magnificent
barges, laden with gaily dressed nobles and their attendants, were
continually passing by! Great must have been the pleasure traffic
then, for according to Taylor, "the Water Poet," who plied his trade
as waterman and wrote his verses on the Bankside in the early days of
Elizabeth's successor, "the number of watermen and those that live
and are maintained by them, and by the labour of the oar and scull,
between the bridge of Windsor and Gravesend, cannot be fewer than
forty thousand; the cause of the greater half of which multitude hath
been the players playing on the Bankside." Besides the players, the
brilliant band of dramatists who shed lustre on the reign of the maiden
Queen frequented it, not only on account of the pleasantness of its
situation, but because of the near proximity of the theatres, for the
Globe, the Rose, and the Hope all stood on the site now occupied by
the brewery of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins, while the Swan was not
far off. It is a well-authenticated fact that both Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson played at the Globe, and patronised the "Falcon" tavern,
the name of which still lingers in Falcon Dock and Falcon Wharf, Nos.
79 and 80, Bankside; and while in the meantime they were producing
their masterpieces, Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton were at the height
of their fame, Beaumont and Fletcher about to begin their career, and
Philip Massinger was newly arrived in town. Some of these Bankside
dramatists were well born and rich--such as Francis Beaumont, whose
father was a Knight and a Justice of the Common Pleas; and John
Fletcher, who was a son of the Bishop of London. Others were of
obscure birth and penniless--like Ben Jonson, who had been forced to
follow the trade of a bricklayer, and Dekker and Marston, whom he
twitted "with their defective doublet and ravelled satin sleeves," and
Philip Massinger, who in early days went about begging urgently for
the loan of £5. But whatever they had or lacked, certain it is that
their common art levelled all barriers between them, for though the
chief of all the friendships on the Bankside was that of Beaumont and
Fletcher--between whom was "a wonderful consimilarity of fancy ...
which caused the dearnesse of friendship between them so that they
lived together on the Bankside ... (and had) the same cloaths and
cloaks between them"--yet Massinger collaborated with Fletcher in at
least thirteen plays, with Dekker in one, and with Ford in two, while
Dekker was occasionally associated with Middleton, and Middleton with
Webster and Drayton. But the Elizabethan dramatists did not confine
themselves to the Bankside; on certain nights they repaired to the
"Mermaid" tavern, which used to stand on the south side of Cheapside,
between Bread and Friday Streets, to attend the meetings of the famous
Mermaid Club, said to have been founded by Sir Walter Raleigh. Here
were to be found Shakespeare, Spenser, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson,
Carew, Donne, and many others, in eager witty converse. Beaumont
well described the brilliancy of these gatherings in his poem to Ben
Jonson:--
"What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that everyone from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."
Another favourite haunt of theirs was the "Boar's Head," which stood
on the spot now marked by the statue of William IV., at the junction
of Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street. At this tavern Falstaff and
Prince Hal concocted many of their wildest pranks. In later days the
Elizabethan poets and dramatists, led by Ben Jonson, went even further
afield--to the "Devil" tavern, which stood at No. 1, Fleet Street,
where they held their meetings in a room called the "Apollo," the chief
adornments of which, a bust of Apollo and a board with an inscription,
"Welcome to the oracle of Apollo," are still to be seen in an upper
room of Messrs. Child's Bank, which now occupies the site. Ben Jonson
tells us that "the first speech in my 'Catiline,' spoken to _Scylla's
Ghost_, was writ after I had parted with my friends at the 'Devil'
tavern; I had drank well that night, and had brave notions."
We have records of the deaths of two at least of these dramatists on
the Bankside--viz., that of Philip Massinger, who died "in his own
house, near the play-house on the Bankside," in 1639; and Fletcher,
"who dyed of the plague on the 19th of August, 1625." "The parish
clerk," says Aubrey, "told me that he was his (Fletcher's) Taylor, and
that Mr. Fletcher staying for a suit of cloathes before he retired into
the country, Death stopped his journey and laid him low there."
Cheapside, so named from the Chepe, or old London market, along the
south side of the site of which it runs, has been a place of barter
ever since the reign of Henry VI., when a market was held there daily
for the sale of every known commodity. It is easy to see where the
vendors of some of the articles had their stands by the names of the
surrounding streets--Bread Street, Fish Street, Milk Street, etc.
Later on the stalls were transformed into permanent shops, with a
dwelling-place for their owners above, and a fair-sized garden at the
back. Despite the commercial spirit that has always pervaded this
region, it has given birth to two famous poets--the sweet songster
Herrick, who sings in one of his poems of
"The golden Cheapside where the earth
Of Julia Herrick gave to me my birth,"
golden, perhaps, having reference to his father, who was a goldsmith;
and greater still, John Milton, who first saw the light in Bread
Street, at the sign of the "Spread Eagle," in a house which was
afterwards destroyed in the Great Fire. It must have been a house
of comfortable dimensions, for it covered the site now occupied by
Nos. 58 to 63, the business premises of a firm who exhibit a bust of
Milton, with an inscription, in a room on their top floor. Milton's
father, moreover, had grown rich in his profession, which was that of
a scrivener, had been made a Judge, and knighted five years before
the birth of his son, so it is evident the poet began life in easy
circumstances. He was baptised in All Hallows, a church in Bread Street
destroyed in 1897. In Bow Church there is a tablet in memory of Milton,
which was taken from All Hallows. When he was ten years of age he
began to go to Paul's School, which stood in those days on the east
side of St. Paul's Churchyard, between Watling Street and Cheapside.
Aubrey records that "when he went to schoole, when he was very young,
he studied very hard, and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or
one o'clock at night, and his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for
him, and at these years (ten) he composed many copies of verses which
might well have become a riper age." He continued at this school, the
old site of which is marked by a tablet on a warehouse, until he was
sixteen. Some twenty years later Samuel Pepys was a pupil at Paul's
School, and later on in life witnessed its destruction in the Great
Fire. Milton would seem to have always cherished a great affection for
the city, for after his return from his travels he seldom lived beyond
the sound of Bow Bells, once only venturing as far as Westminster;
and when he died he was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in the
same grave as his father. Indeed, the city proper was the birthplace
of several poets, for was not Pope born in Lombard Street, Gray in
Cornhill, and Edmund Spenser in East Smithfield, while Lord Macaulay
spent his earlier years in Birchin Lane?
[Illustration: CHEAPSIDE, WITH THE CROSS, AS THEY APPEARED IN 1660.]
In the narrow confines of Paternoster Row, where the tall fronts of
the houses are so close together that only a thin strip of sky is
visible between them, Charlotte Brontë and her sister Anne, fresh from
the rugged solitudes of their bleak Yorkshire moors, awoke on the
morning of their first visit to the great capital of which they had
so often dreamed, and, looking out of the dim windows of the Chapter
Coffee-house, saw "the risen sun struggling through the fog, and
overhead above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds ... a
solemn orbed mass dark blue and dim the dome" (of St. Paul's).
Fleet Street has always been the haunt of the "knights of the pen,"
and even in these modern days the names of newspapers stare at the
passer-by on every side, while at every step he jostles an ink-stained
satellite of some great journal. But although these ink-stained ones
are to be met with in Fleet Street at every hour of the day and night,
they do not live there like the writers of old time--Michael Drayton,
for instance, who "lived at ye baye-windowe house next the east end
of St. Dunstan's Church"; and Izaak Walton, who kept a linen-draper's
shop "in a house two doors west of the end of Chancery Lane," and on
his infrequent holidays went a-fishing in the River Lea at Tottenham
High Cross. Abraham Cowley, again, was born over his father's grocer's
shop, which "abutted on Sargeants' Inn," and here, as a little child,
he devoured the _Faerie Queen_, and was made "irrecoverably a poet."
James Shirley lived near the Inner Temple Lane; John Locke in Dorset
Court. In Salisbury Square, formerly Salisbury Court, Thomas Sackville,
first Earl of Dorset, the precursor of Spenser, John Dryden, and Samuel
Richardson, all had a residence at one time or another. Richardson
built a large printing establishment on the site now occupied by
Lloyd's newspaper offices, where he continued to carry on business many
years after he had removed his private residence to the West End. He
was buried, moreover, in St. Bride's Church in 1761, a large stone in
the nave between pews 12 and 13 recording the fact. But greatest and
most constant of Fleet Street habitués was Dr. Johnson. For ten years
he lived at 17, Gough Square, busy in an upper room upon his great
Dictionary. Here he lost his "beloved Tetty," to whose memory he ever
remained faithful. "All his affection had been concentrated on her. He
had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter." Although
twenty years his senior, with a complexion reddened and coarsened
by the too liberal use of both paint and strong cordials, yet "to
him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary." On
leaving Gough Square he lived for a few years in the Temple, where he
received his first visit from Boswell, and made the acquaintance of
Oliver Goldsmith. The latter was then living at 6, Wine Office Court,
Fleet Street, where Johnson, visiting him one morning in response
to an urgent message, found that "his landlady had arrested him for
his rent." He showed Johnson his MS. of the just-completed _Vicar of
Wakefield_, which he looked into, and instantly comprehending its
merit, went out and sold it to a bookseller for sixty pounds. In 1765
Johnson returned to Fleet Street, and lived for eleven years at 7,
Johnson's Court. Here Boswell dined with him for the first time on
Easter Day, 1773, and found to his surprise "everything in very good
order." Walking up the Court one day in company with Topham Beauclerk,
Boswell confessed to him that he "had a veneration" for it, because
the great doctor lived there, and was much gratified to learn that
Beauclerk felt the same "reverential enthusiasm." In later years
Dickens stole up this Court one dark December evening, and, with
beating heart, dropped his first original MS. into the letter-box
of _The Monthly Magazine_, the office of which stood on the site
now occupied by Mr. Henry Sell's premises. No. 8, Bolt Court, was
the next and last residence of Dr. Johnson; here, on December 13th,
1784, he met the inevitable crisis, for which he had always felt an
indescribable terror and loathing, and passed peacefully and happily
away. Johnson had always had a great predilection for club or tavern
life, partly because it enabled him to escape for a while from the
hypochondria which always dogged his footsteps. He loved nothing so
much as to gather kindred spirits around him and spend long evenings
in congenial conversation. He would sit, "the Jupiter of a little
circle, sometimes indeed nodding approbation, but always prompt on the
slightest contradiction to launch the thunders of rebuke and sarcasm."
There was not much expense attached to these gatherings, for it is
recorded of one of the clubs he founded that the outlay was not to
exceed sixpence per person an evening, with a fine of twopence for
those who did not attend. Among the Fleet Street haunts thus frequently
resorted to by Dr. Johnson and his friends were the "Cocke," patronised
in former years by Pepys, and in later years by Thackeray, Dickens,
and Tennyson; the "Cheshire Cheese," the only house of the kind which
remains as it was in Dr. Johnson's day; the "Mitre," also formerly
patronised by Pepys; and the "Devil," where the poets laureate had been
wont to repair and read their birthday odes. St. Clement Danes, too, is
connected with Johnson, for, in spite of his love of festivity, he was
devout, and regularly attended this church, occupying pew No. 18 in the
north gallery, now marked by a brass plate. Boswell records that "he
carried me with him to the church of St. Clement Danes, where he had
his seat, and his behaviour was, as I had imagined to myself, solemnly
devout."
One more memory of Fleet Street before we leave it, in connection
with Dick's Coffee-house, which used to stand at Nos. 7 and 8. In
December, 1763, the poet Cowper, then a student in the Inner Temple,
was appointed Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords. Delicate,
shy, intensely sensitive, and with a strong predisposition to insanity,
the dread of these onerous public duties disturbed the balance of
his morbid brain. His madness broke out one morning at Dick's, as he
himself afterwards narrated. He said:
"At breakfast I read the newspaper, and in it a letter,
which the further I perused it the more closely engaged my
attention. I cannot now recollect the purport of it; but
before I had finished it, it appeared demonstratively true to
me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author appeared
to be acquainted with my purpose of self-destruction, and
to have written that letter on purpose to secure and hasten
the execution of it. My mind probably at this time began to
be disordered; however it was, I was certainly given to a
strong delusion. I said within myself, 'Your cruelty shall be
gratified, you shall have your revenge,' and flinging down the
paper in a fit of strong passion, I rushed hastily out of the
room, directing my way towards the fields, where I intended
to find some lane to die in, or if not, determined to poison
myself in a ditch, when I could meet with one sufficiently
retired."
This paroxysm ended in Cowper trying to hang himself, but, the rope
breaking, he went down to the Thames to the Custom House Quay and
threatened to drown himself. This attempt, however, also failed, and
friends interfering, he was removed to an asylum, where he remained
eighteen months.
From Fleet Street it is but a step to the Temple, with its grey quiet
corners full of echoing memories, stretching back even to the days of
Shakespeare, whose _Twelfth Night_ was performed before an audience
of his contemporaries in the self-same Middle Temple Hall that still
confronts us. The names of Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, John Gower,
Thomas Shadwell, William Wycherley, Nicholas Rowe, Francis Beaumont,
William Congreve, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Day, Tom Moore, Sheridan,
George Colman, jun., Marston, and Ford, are all upon the Temple rolls
and each must in his day have been a familiar figure among the ancient
buildings. But Charles Lamb is the presiding genius of the place.
"I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the
Temple," he tells us. "Its church, its halls, its garden, its
fountains, its river ... these are my oldest recollections.
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
gardens, that goodly pile ... 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.... A man would give something to have
been born in such a place."
When Lamb was twenty-five years of age he went back to live in the
Temple, at 16, Mitre Court Buildings, in an "attic storey for the air."
His bed faced the river, and by "perking on my haunches and supporting
my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see,"
he wrote to a friend, "the white sails glide by the bottom of King's
Bench Walk as I lie in my bed." Here he passed nine happy years, and
then, after a short stay in Southampton Buildings, he returned to the
Temple for the second time, to 4, Inner Temple Lane, fully intending
to pass the remainder of his life within its precincts. His new set of
chambers "looked out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare
Court, with three trees and a pump in it." But fate intervened, and
he and his sister soon after left the Temple, never to return. It was
no easy parting, however, for he wrote in after years, "I thought we
never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly
wrench.... We never can strike root so deep in any other ground."
It was when Dr. Johnson had a set of chambers on the first floor of No.
1, Inner Temple Lane, that Boswell first went to see him. Boswell wrote:
"He received me very courteously, but it must be confessed
that his apartment, furniture, and morning dress were
sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very
rusty, he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig which
was too small for his head, his shirt-neck and knees of his
breeches were loose, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up,
and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But
all these slovenly peculiarities were forgotten the moment
that he began to talk."
Boswell, indeed, conceived so violent an admiration for him that he
took rooms in Farrar's Buildings in order to be near him. Oliver
Goldsmith seems to have followed his example, for he went to lodge
first in 2, Garden Court, and afterwards in 2, Brick Court, on the
right-hand side, looking out over the Temple Garden. Thackeray, who,
years afterwards, lodged in the same set of rooms, wrote:
"I have been many a time in the Chambers in the Temple which
were his, and passed up the staircase, which Johnson and Burke
and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind
Goldsmith--the stair on which the poor women sat weeping
bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous
of men was dead within the black oak door."
A stone slab with the inscription, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith," was
placed on the north side of Temple Church, as near as possible to the
spot where he is supposed to have been buried.
No. 2, Fountain Court, was the last house of William Blake, the
poet-painter, the seer of visions, who had a set of rooms on the first
floor, from whence a glimpse of the river was to be obtained. It was
very poorly furnished, though always clean and orderly, and decorated
only with his own pictures, but to the eager young disciples who
flocked around him it was "the house of the Interpreter." When he lay
there upon his death-bed, at the close of a blazing August day in 1827,
beautiful songs in praise of his Creator fell from his lips, and as
his wife, his faithful companion of forty-five years of struggle and
stress, drew near to catch them more distinctly, he told her with a
smile, "My beloved! they are not mine! no, they are not mine!"
Passing out into the Strand, we are confronted by the Law Courts. In
former days this site was occupied by a network of streets, one of
which was Shire Lane, where the members of the Kit Cat Club first held
their gatherings, and toasted Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when, as a
child of seven, enthroned on her proud father's knee, she spent "the
happiest hour of her life," overwhelmed with caresses, compliments,
and sweetmeats. The famous "Grecian" stood in Devereux Court, and the
"Fountain" where Johnson, on his first arrival in London, read his
tragedy _Irene_ to his fellow-traveller Garrick, on the site since
occupied by Simpson's for several generations. The Strand "Turk's Head"
was at No. 142, and patronised by Johnson, because "the mistress of
it is a good civil woman and has not much business"; and the "Coal
Hole," immortalised by Thackeray as the "Cave of Harmony" in _The
Newcomes_, where Terry's Theatre now uprears its front. But the chief
literary association of the Strand is that of Congreve, who spent
his last years in Surrey Street, "almost blind with cataracts," and
"never rid of the gout," but looking, as Swift wrote to Stella, "young
and fresh and cheerful as ever." He had always been a favourite with
society, and Surrey Street was thronged by his visitors, among whom
were four of the most beautiful women of the day--Mrs. Bracegirdle,
Mrs. Oldfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Henrietta Duchess of
Marlborough. Voltaire, too, who greatly admired his work, sought him
out when staying at the "White Peruke," Covent Garden, and was much
disgusted by the affectation with which Congreve begged to be regarded
as a man of fashion, who produced airy trifles for the amusement of his
idle hours. "If you had been so unfortunate as to have been a _mere_
gentleman," said Voltaire, "I should never have taken the trouble of
coming to see you." In spite of the looseness of his life, Congreve had
early acquired habits of frugality, and continuing to practise them
when the need for economy had disappeared, he contrived to amass a
fortune of £10,000, which, on his death in 1789, he bequeathed to the
Duchess of Marlborough, his latest infatuation. This sum, which would
have restored the fallen fortunes of his nearest relatives, was a mere
nothing to the wealthy beauty, who expended it in the purchase of a
magnificent diamond necklace, which she continually wore in memory of
the dead dramatist.