Mountain Groundsel. _Senecio montanus._
Dedicated to _St. Innocent_.
[229] The _Parthenon_, a new musical work typolithographied, notices
this precocious musician on the authority of the German papers.
[230] These anecdotes of the present Mr. Samuel Wesley and his
deceased brother, Charles, are from the “_Biographical Dictionary of
Musicians_,” a work before quoted, and praised as a most pleasant
book.
~July 29.~
_St. Martha_ V. _Sts. Simplicius_ and _Faustinus_, brothers, and
_Beatrice_, their sister, A. D. 303. _St. William_, Bp. A. D. 1234.
_St. Olaus_, or _Olave_, king of Norway, A. D. 1030. _St. Olaus_, king
of Sweden.
[Illustration]
WATER IN WARM WEATHER.
_Fountains and Pumps._
By the process of boring, springs may be reached more expeditiously and
economically than by the old method of well digging. The expense of
boring from one to two hundred feet deep is little more than one-fourth
of digging, seventy feet is less than a fourth, thirty feet is less than
a fifth, and from ten to twenty feet it is not so much as a sixth. In
1821, the water for the fountain at Tottenham High Cross, represented in
the engraving, was obtained by boring to a depth of one hundred and five
feet, at the expense of the parish, for public accommodation. The water
rises six feet above the surface, and flowing over a vase at the top of
the column into a basin, as represented in the engraving, it pours from
beneath. The boring for this spring and the fountain were suggested by
Mr. Mathew, who first obtained water in Tottenham, by that method, and
introduced the practice there. The pillar was designed by Messrs. Mathew
and Chaplin, and executed by Mr. Turner of Dorset-street, Fleet-street,
the well known manufacturer of the cast iron pumps; and not to withhold
from him any of “his blushing honours,” be it noted that he was till
lately a common-councilman of the ward of Farringdon Without, where he
still maintains his reputation as a “cunning workman in iron,” and his
good name as a good pump-maker, and as a worthy and respectable man.
Public spirit should rise to the height of giving him, and others of the
worshipful company of pump-makers, more orders. Many places are sadly
deficient of pumps for raising spring-water where it is most wanted.
Every body cries out for it in hot weather, but in cool weather they all
forget their former want; and hot weather comes again and they call out
for it again in vain, and again forget to put up a public pump. At
Pentonville, a place abounding in springs, and formerly abounding in
conduits, all the conduits are destroyed, and the pumps there, in the
midst of that healthy and largely growing suburb, during the hot days of
July, 1825, were not equal to supply a tenth of the demand for water;
they were mostly dry and chained up during the half of each day without
notice, and persons who came perhaps a mile, went back with empty
vessels. So it was in other neighbourhoods. Well may we account for ill.
Mischievous liquors sold, in large quantities, at some places, for soda
water and ginger beer were drank to the great comfort of the
unprincipled manufacturers, the great discomfort of the consumers’
bowels, and the great gain of the apothecary.
Were the doings in the New River during summer, or one half of the
wholesale nuisances permitted in the Thames described, the inhabitants
of London would give up their tea-kettles. Health requires that these
practices should be abated, and, above all, a good supply of
spring-water. The water from pumps and fountains would not only adorn
our public streets and squares, but cool the heated atmosphere, by the
surplus water being diverted into the gutters and open channels.
Besides, if we are to have dogs, and a beast-market in the heart of the
metropolis, the poor overheated animals might by such means slake their
thirst from pure and refreshing streams. The condition wherein sheep and
cattle are driven for many miles before they reach the metropolis, is a
disgrace to the appellation assumed by men who see the cruelty, and have
power to remedy it; “a merciful man is merciful to his beast,” and he is
not a really merciful man who is not merciful to his neighbours’ beasts.
May these wants be quickly supplied. Give us spring water in summer; and
no more let
“Maids with bottles cry aloud for _pumps_.”
London has but one fountain; it is in the Temple: you pass it on the way
from Essex-street, or “the Grecian” to Garden-court. It is in the space
at the bottom of the first flight of stone steps, within the railings
enclosing a small, and sometimes “smooth shaven green,” the middle
whereof it adorns, surrounded, not too thickly, by goodly trees and
pleasant shrubs. The jet proceeds from a copper pipe in the middle of a
stone-edged basin, and rises to its full height of at least nine feet,
if water from the cock by the hall with which it communicates is not
drawing; when that process is going on the jet droops, and seems dying
away till the drawing ceases, and then the “Temple Fountain” goes up
again “famously.”
There _was_ a fountain in the great square of Lincolns Inn, but it had
ceased to play “in my time.” I only remember the column itself standing
there
“For ornament, _not_ use,”
with its four boys blowing through shells.
In the Kent-road, on the left hand from the Elephant and Castle towards
the Bricklayers Arms, there is a fountain in a piece of water opposite a
recently built terrace. A kneeling figure, the size of life, blows water
through a shell; it is well conceived, and would be a good ornament were
it kept clean and relieved by trees.
A “professional” gentleman who to the “delightful task” of improving
country residences by laying out grounds in beautiful forms, has added
the less “cheerful labour” of embodying others’ theories and practice in
an “Encyclopædia of Gardening,” views a fountain as an essential
decoration where the “ancient” style of landscape is introduced in any
degree of perfection.[231] As the first requisite, he directs attention
to the obtaining a sufficiently elevated source or reservoir of supply
for the jets, or projected spouts, or threads of water. Some are
contrived to throw the water in the form of sheaves, fans, and showers,
or to support balls; others to throw it horizontally or in curved lines,
but the most usual form is a simple opening to throw the jet or spout
upright. Mr. L. judiciously rejects a jet from a naked tube falling from
the middle of a basin or canal on a smooth surface as unnatural, without
being artificially grand. Grandeur was the aim of the “ancient”
gardener, and hence he made a garden “after nature,” look as a garden of
nature never did look. Mr. L. suggests that “the grandest jet of any is
a perpendicular column, issuing from a rocky base on which the water
falling produces a double effect both of sound and visual display.”
In the “Century of Inventions of the Marquis of Worcester,” explained
and illustrated by Mr. Partington, there is mention by the marquis of
“an artificial fountain, to be turned like an hour glass by a child, in
the twinkling of an eye, it yet holding great quantities of water, and
of force sufficient to make snow, ice, and thunder, with the chirping
and singing of birds, and showing of several shapes and effects usual to
fountains of pleasure.” Mr. Partington observes on this, that “how a
fountain of water can produce snow, ice, thunder, and the singing of
birds, is not easy to comprehend.”
Sir Henry Wotton discoursing on architecture remarks thus:--“Fountains
are figured, or only plain watered works; of either of which I will
describe a matchless pattern. The first, done by the famous hand of
Michael Angelo da Buonaroti, is the figure of a sturdy woman, washing
and winding linen clothes; in which act she wrings out the water that
made the fountain; which was a graceful and natural conceit in the
artificer, implying this rule, that all designs of this kind should be
proper.[232] The other doth merit some larger expression: there went a
long, straight, mossie walk of competent breadth, green and soft under
foot, listed on both sides with an aqueduct of white stone, breast-high,
which had a hollow channel on the top, where ran a pretty trickling
stream; on the edge whereof were couched very thick, all along, certain
small pipes of lead, in little holes; so neatly, that they could not be
well perceived, till by the turning of a cock, they did sprout over
interchangeably, from side to side, above man’s height, in forms of
arches, without any intersection or meeting aloft, because the pipes
were not exactly opposite; so as the beholder, besides that which was
fluent in the aqueduct on both hands in his view, did walk as it were
under a continual bower and hemisphere of water, without any drop
falling on him; an invention for refreshment, surely far excelling all
the Alexandrian delicacies, and pnuematicks of Hero.”[233] An invention
of greater solace could not have been desired in the canicular days, by
those who sought shelter from the heat; nor more coveted by any than by
him, who is constrained to supply the “every-day” demand of “warm”
friends for this little work--no “cool” task!
* * * * *