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LONDON

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

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CLASSIC LONDON

LONDON

BY

SIDNEY DARK

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BY

JOSEPH PENNELL

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1924

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

SECTION PAGE

Introduction ix

I. Westminster Abbey i

II. Poets' Corner 7

III. Old Westminster 10

IV. The Clock Tower 13

V. The Foreign Office 16

VI. Whitehall Court 19

VII. St. James's Palace 22

VIII. Hanover Square 28

IX. Hyde Park 32

X. Piccadilly 35

XI. The Haymarket Theatre 42

XII. Trafalgar Square . . . . . .46

XIII. Charing Cross 50

XIV. Magnificent Kensington 54

XV. Cheyne Walk 59

XVI. Villiers Street 63

XVII. The Strand 70

XVIII. The Law Courts . 75

XIX. The Temple 77

XX. Lincoln's Inn 81

XXI. Fetter Lane ........ 84

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XXII. Fleet Street 87

XXIII. Ludgate Hili 93

XXIV. St. Paul's . . 96

XXV. St. Bartholomew's 10 1

XXVI. Cloth Fair 106

XXVII. The City Churches no

XXVIII. The Guildhall 115

XXIX. The Royal Exchange 119

XXX. Aldersgate Street 122

XXXI. Leadenhall Market 126

XXXII. The Post Office 131

XXXIII. The British Museum 136

XXXIV. Euston Station 139

XXXV. Bankside 142

XXXVI. The Tower Bridge 145

XXXVII. Whitechapel 151

XXXVIII. East London 155

XXXIX. The River 159

XL. Greenwich 164

XLI. The Crystal Palace 170

XLII. Hampton Court . 173

ILLUSTR

ATIONS

Classic London

West Front, Westminster . Poets' Corner, Westminster Cowley Street

The Cathedral, Westminster The Clock Tower . The Foreign Office . Whitehall Court St. James's Palace . Hanover Square Hyde Park Corner . Marble Arch . Piccadilly Circus Haymarket Theatre . Sunset, Trafalgar Square . Charing Cross Magnificent Kensington . Sloane Street Cheyne Walk . Shops, Villiers Street The New Strand . The Law Courts The Gate of the Temple . Lincoln's Inn Gateway Fetter Lane

Fleet Street, St. Dunstan's

Frontispiece

FACE PAGE

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8

10

12

. I4 . 16 20 22

. 28

• 32

• 34

• 38

• 42 . 46

• 50

• 54 . 56 . 60 . 64 . 70 . 76 . 78 . 82 . 84 . 88

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FACE PAGE

Ludgate Hill .......... 94

St. Paul's 96

Chapel St. Paul's 98

St. Paul's Churchyard . . . . . . .100

St. Bartholomew's . . . . . . . . .102

St. Bartholomew's Churchyard . . . . . . .104

Cloth Fair .......... 106

St. Michael Royal no

St. Augustine and St. Faith . . . . . . .112

The Guildhall 116

Portico, the Royal Exchange . . . . . . .118

New Broad Street .120

Aldersgate Street . . . . . . . .122

Leadenhall Market .126

The Post Office 132

British Museum Steps . . . . . . . -136

Euston ........... 140

Railway Arch, Bankside . . . . . . . .142

The Tower Bridge 146

Whitechapel High Street . . . . . . . .152

Butchers' Row, Whitechapel . . . . . . . 154

East London . . . . . . . . . .156

Shot Tower 158

Below Bridge .......... 160

Limehouse .......... 162

Greenwich .......... 166

Greenwich Observatory . . . . . . . .168

The Crystal Palace 170

Hampton Court, the Garden 174

The drawings illustrating this volume were made by Mr. Pennell in 1908, but have not been reproduced before.

INTRODUCTION

There are libraries of London books, but this is the one London book illustrated by Mr. Pennell. That is its reason and its justification. I have been much in the position of the dramatist hired to write a play round a poster, but, with a proper modesty, I have realised that the poster is too much for me. There is indeed no connection between illustration and letterpress except that they deal with the same scenes.

There are a dozen ways in which a London book can be written. My plan has been to go, one after the other, to the scenes made vivid by Mr. Pennell's genius, to con- jure up visions of the men and women whose lives have been associated with each place and to recall something of their past. Most of the fascination of every city is in its past. It must be dull and lonely to live in a new city, while to live in an old city like London is to enjoy the society of a very noble army of ghosts. It has been a fascinating adventure to follow in Mr. Pennell's foot- steps and mingle with the ghosts of London. I have not attempted to be comprehensive. I have only met the ghosts who interest me. I have only recalled the events that are important to me. I am conscious of the fact that I am far too prejudiced and far too lazy to write a reliable and all-inclusive reference book. Many of the great and good have passed me by unseen. But certainly, thanks to Mr. Pennell, I have had thrilling visions. I have seen old Talleyrand with his weary eyes looking out of the windows of a house at the corner of Brook Street and Hanover

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Square ; I have watched Ben Jonson busy with his trowel in the building of the gate of Lincoln's Inn ; I have seen Addison going to church at St. Mary Abbots ; I have followed Pepys in many of his cheery jaunts. The book is the story of my adventures.

London is a city of constant change. Hardly anything remains of Norman London. It is only by seeking diligently that it is possible to find a vestige of Chaucer's London. Even Dickens's London has almost disappeared, and in a few years the housebreaker and the juggler in reinforced concrete will have combined together to make Mr. Pennell's London a thing of the past. So it is good to have this series of drawings, which in their fine understanding are a revelation not only of the appearance but also of the spirit of the London that had learned just a little from the Boer War and was preparing for the great tragedy of our times. Mr. Pennell has obviously been moved by the beauty of London and has felt its mystery. London's beauty generally appeals more to the stranger within its gates than it does to the native of the city. To me, London is homely, comfortable, friendly, but never mysterious as Paris is mysterious. I see its beauty only rarely and I feel its strumpet's fascination, apparently so real to the foreigner, hardly at all.

Perhaps because it appears to be obvious, London is a very difficult city to know — a city of bewildering contrasts, often tragically monotonous in its mean ugliness, but with beauty hidden away in the most unlikely spots ; hard in its materialism, yet always genial ; vulgarly emphatic in its pleasures, but shyly modest in its good works ; a busy city, but, unlike Paris, busy against its will, working throughout the week merely in order to loaf on Saturday and Sunday ; a city without much tenacity of purpose, easily amused, easily bored, always running after some new thing ; at times " the stony-hearted stepmother" that De Quincey called it and George Gissing found it, but at times abounding in kindness ; a democratic city, because while it may often be

INTRODUCTION xi

purgatory for the unusual, it is comparative paradise to the simple rut of men. There are a dozen cities in London, but none the less London has its characteristic qualities to be discovered east and west, in slum and comfortable square. From Hampstead to Sydenham, from Chiswick to Canning Town, London is brave, good-tempered and humorous. It is a city of kings and great commercial magnates, but it is above all things the city of Sam Weller, and the spirit of Sam Weller remains the spirit of its people.

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WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Westminster Abbey is the one supremely beautiful thing that London possesses. Misused, choked with what William Morris called " the beastly monuments to fools and knaves/ ' a show place, alas, far more than a church, it stands austere in its beauty, a monument of the past, a pledge of the future. The spiritual history of mediaeval Europe is told by its cathedrals. Of them Hugo has said, " Time is the architect — and nation is the builder.' ■ They are the gifts to the world of the ages of faith. What have the ages of disbelief given comparable to them ? They were founded by the pious great ; they were built by the pious poor, each man giving of his best ; they are the result of the most magnificent and inspired co-operation that the world has ever known. There is something of comfort and explana- tion in the west front of the Abbey for the man troubled by modern chaos, perplexed by modern problems, making his way from the commonplace meaninglessness of Victoria Street (escaping maybe as by a miracle from death by a motor omnibus). Here is the soul of a real England — an England that was, an England that may be again.

Edward the Confessor, monarch and saint — a rare man, indeed — rosy-cheeked, with white hair and beard, spent the tenth of his substance in building the Collegiate Church of St. Peter at Westminster. He had vowed to make a pilgrimage to Rome, but his nobles insisted that his presence in his kingdom was necessary, and he was released from his vow on condition that he built a church in honour of St. Peter. He chose Westminster because near where the Abbey now stands a church dedicated to the Apostle had been built four hundred years before by the Saxon king,

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Sebert. St. Peter, so the legend runs, had bestowed his special favour on this church at Westminster. On the eve of the day fixed for its consecration, a stranger appeared on the river-bank at Lambeth and demanded to be ferried across. When he had landed, the ferryman was astounded to see a host of angels descending with flaming candles from the heavens and grouping themselves round the stranger, while he dedicated the church that had just been completed. Afterwards the stranger said to him, " I am Peter, keeper of the Keys of Heaven. I have consecrated my own church of St. Peter, Westminster, and have antici- pated the Bishop of London. For yourself, go out into the river ; you will catch a plentiful supply of fish whereof the larger part shall be salmon. This is only granted on two conditions — first, that you never fish again on Sundays ; secondly, that you pay a tithe of them to the Abbey of Westminster."

It is pleasant to think as one walks by the Thames at Westminster, watching the grubby, overloaded barges, that St. Peter once crossed from Lambeth and was ferried back again, and that, remembering the days when he himself fished on the Sea of Galilee, he did not forget the ferryman's reward. On the other hand, it is very aggravating to know that the now turgid river was once so well stocked with salmon ! Indeed, centuries after St. Peter's visit, salmon was so plentiful in the Thames that their masters were forbidden to give it to the London apprentices more than a certain number of times a week !

King Edward the Confessor knew the legend and believed it — as, indeed, I do — and it therefore seemed to him that Westminster was the fittest place for his great church to stand. He died eight days after it was finished. " St. Peter, his friend, opened the gate of Paradise, and St. John, his own dear one, led him before the Divine Majesty." He was first buried before the high altar. The corpse was removed to the shrine east of the altar by Henry III. Edward was the last but one of England's Saxon kings. His Westminster Abbey was a Norman church erected by a Saxon king, a suggestive fact since the two nations were destined in a few generations to become one. In the thirteenth century Henry III. pulled down the church that the Confessor had built, and rebuilt it. Of his rebuilding,

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the Confessor's chapel and the choir and transepts remain. The Jerusalem Chamber and part of the cloisters were built in the fourteenth century ; Henry VII.'s chapel was built in the seventeenth, and in the eighteenth Sir Christopher Wren tinkered and defaced.

All the world knows that for over six hundred years all the English kings have been crowned in Westminster on the sacred stone of Scone, purloined by Edward I. from Scotland. These wonderful colourful ceremonies have been described at one time or another by such varied observers as Pepys, Horace Walpole and Walter Scott. Where kings were crowned many kings lie buried — the Confessor, Henry III., Edward I., Edward III. and his good queen, Philippa of Hainault, Richard II., that artistic decadent, Henry V., " Harry of England,' ' the mean-souled Henry VII., the boy Edward VI. and his sisters the tragic Mary and subtle, masterful Elizabeth, James I., Charles II., William and Mary, stout good-tempered Queen Anne, little George II., the hero of Dettingen. At the dissolution of the monasteries the greedy thieves, whom Henry VIII. abetted, worked their sacrilegious will within the Abbey, naturally stealing silver plate with even greater zest than sacred relics. At the funeral of Queen Mary the burial rite of the Roman Church was celebrated in the Abbey for the last time.

Dean Stanley, that Victorian Erastian, joyed in the fact that Westminster Abbey has become a glorified graveyard, filled with monuments of the dead, some worthy of re- membrance, many not. He says that the Abbey " is not only Rheims Cathedral and St. Denys in one ; it is also what the Pantheon was intended to be to France, what the Valhalla is to Germany, what Santa Croce is to Italy." Steele and Addison and Charles Lamb and Washington Irving all anticipated the Dean in his satisfaction in the memorials. Westminster Abbey, indeed, moved Addison to appropriate graveyard reflections — " When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries and make our appearance together." With the American's characteristic reverence for the past, Washington Irving wrote : "In glancing over this scene, so strangely populous, yet where

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every form is so still and silent, it seems almost as if we were treading a mansion of that fabled city where every being has been suddenly transmuted into stone. " Despite Haw- thorne and the Dean, I confess that I resent the fact that the Abbey is primarily a cemetery, even though the cemetery be a Valhalla. It is true that to be buried in Westminster is an honour that has inspired the greatest of England's sons. The tomb of the Unknown Warrior is the nation's tribute to the simple soldiers whose valour won the war. " Victory or Westminster Abbey " was Nelson's cry at Trafalgar. But burial at Westminster is an honour that has fallen to many of the not too worthy, and I have con- siderable sympathy with Sir Godfrey Kneller, who declared with Teutonic bluntness, " By God, I will not be buried in Westminster ; they do bury fools there." Edward the Confessor and pious Henry III., " a short, stout and ungainly old man with a blinking left eye," intended a house for the worship of God, not for the burial of men.

My own interest is in the Abbey as a church, retaining its pre-Reformation independence, the Dean, as the Abbot before him, being in subjection neither to Bishop nor to Archbishop. The Abbots of Westminster ranked next after the Abbots of St. Albans. The distinction had its incon- venience, because each Abbot was compelled to travel to Rome for confirmation of his appointment and to revisit the Papal city every two years. This was particularly awkward for one Peter of Lewisham, who was too fat to make the journey and whose position was accordingly in constant jeopardy. During the Black Death the Abbot and twenty-six of his monks died and were buried beneath a large stone slab in the southern cloister. The one Abbot who rose to the rank of Cardinal was Simon Langham, who lived in the middle of the fourteenth century and left a huge fortune to the Abbey. Neither the Abbots nor the monks of Westminster played much part in English history. They were properly content to spend their lives in the service to which they were devoted.

The Abbey with thirty other English monasteries pos- sessed the right of sanctuary, a right not always regarded by the lawless nobles of the Middle Ages. Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV., took sanctuary at West-

WEST FRONT, WESTMINSTER

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minster, and it was here that poor little Prince Edward V. was born. Shelton, the first of the Poet Laureates, took refuge in the Abbey from the vengeance of Cardinal Wolsey, whom he had fiercely attacked. He was a poor enough poet, and Wolsey, who was a man of taste, was probably justified in his wrath. It was in his house at Westminster that the last Abbot spent four whole days with Sir Thomas More, urging him to admit the King's supremacy in the Church, and urging in vain.

The House of Commons had its first separate meeting in the Chapter House at Westminster, which the Abbot lent to the King for the use of the Commons on condition that the Crown should repair it. But the pious monks com- plained that their devotions were disturbed by the noise of the parliamentary discussions. Volumes would be required to recall all the great historical events that have happened within this famous church of St. Peter. It was here that with magnificent ceremony Wolsey received his Cardinal's hat, in a great assemblage that included eight abbots, to say nothing of earls and dukes and archbishops. It was here in the Almonry near the chapel of St. Anne that William Caxton set up the first printing-press in England. During the Commonwealth, Presbyterian ministers preached in the Abbey queer democratic sermons which gave joy to the gay heart of Dorothy Osborne, who records that one preacher declared " that if there were no kings, no queens, no lords, no ladies, no gentlemen or gentlewomen in the world, that it would be no loss at all to the Almighty." She adds : " This he said forty times, which made me remember it whether I would or not." Pepys, too, who often went to the Abbey, sometimes found amusement there. He writes in 1660 : " Before sermon I laughed at the reader, who in his prayer desired of God that He would imprint his word on the thumbs of our right hands and on the great right toes of our right feet. In the midst of the sermon some plaster fell from the top of the Abbey that made me and all the rest in our pew afraid, and I wished myself out." Evelyn's experiences were more pleasant. In 1661 he heard a sermon by Dr. Basire, a patriot, indeed ! Evelyn says : " He shew'd that the Church of England was for purity of doctrine, substance, decency and beauty the most perfect under Heaven ; that England was the very land of Goshen."

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The Church of England has few romantic records in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, while other great English cathedrals have been beautified and inspired by the Catholic revival, Westminster, overweighted by its monuments, nowadays attracts the curious rather than the devout.

There is a story, which always occurs to me when I am in Westminster Abbey, of a pious person who was discovered by an indignant verger kneeling to say his prayers. The verger tapped him on the shoulder and told him that he must not do that sort of thing in Westminster Abbey. " If we once allowed it," he added, " people would be praying all over the place."

So I go out and look up once more at the great west front which Mr. Pennell has so finely reproduced, and pray that the verger's fears may one day be realised, and that with appropriate ceremony and vestments and clouds of incense the Abbey will be restored to the Apostle and to his Master for whom it was designed.

II

POETS' CORNER

Poets' Corner is the eastern angle of the south transept of the Abbey. Here, as Addison said, " are many poets who have no monuments and many monuments which have no poets." Chaucer, the father of English poetry, was buried in the Abbey because he was a Court official and died near by. He was buried in 1400, and nearly two hundred years later he was followed by Spenser, at whose funeral a galaxy of Elizabethan poets, Jonson and Shakespeare among them, stood by the grave-side. In the succeeding years, Drayton — " I never heard of him before," Goldsmith said when he saw his monument — Ben Jonson, Cowley described with the proper exaggeration of the epitaph as " the fairest, sweetest flow'r that in the Muses' garden grew," and Dryden were buried in Poets' Corner, with many second- rate writers whose names are now forgotten. Addison was buried in the Abbey at midnight on January 26, 1719, after his body had lain in state in the Jerusalem Chamber. Never did there live " a fairer spirit." One recalls Macaulay's fine description of him : " The unsullied states- man, the accomplished scholar, the master of pure English eloquence, the consummate painter of life and manners . . . the great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it, who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy and virtue by fanaticism." Congreve, the witty profligate, followed Addison, and then, after a long interval, Dr. Johnson, with Burke among the pall-bearers. Sheridan lies near the Shakespeare statue, a poor enough thing erected in 1740. While he was dying

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in extreme poverty it was suggested that it would be well to pit " life and succour against Westminster Abbey and a funeral." Bulwer Lytton was buried in the Abbey, and Macaulay, who lies near Addison. Dickens is among the Abbey's mighty dead, mourned by the people as never a great writer was mourned before or since. Purcell, still the greatest name in English music, Handel and Isaac Newton (Voltaire was at his funeral) have their graves near by. Browning and Tennyson are in the literary Valhalla, and Milton, Pope, Goldsmith, Scott, Burns, Wordsworth, Southey and Thackeray have their memorials.

The omissions are, however, so many that Poets' Corner is really only a corner in English poets. There is no memorial of Marlowe or of Lovelace or Donne (a Dean as well as a poet) or Vaughan or Chatterton or, to come to the greatest, of Keats, Shelley or Byron, while memorials there are in plenty to poets of the calibre of Nicholas Rowe. It was natural, I suppose, that Byron, Macaulay's " most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century," should have been refused burial in the Abbey, the Deans of which have delighted to honour the futile and the commonplace. He was even (perhaps in this he was fortunate) denied a monument, the suggestion leading to a debate in the House of Lords, in which Brougham, that rough-tongued Whig, bitterly assailed one of the Bishops. But if not unreason- able religious feeling barred the Abbey to Byron and Shelley, how is it possible to explain the pagan pessimism of the lines on the tomb of Gay, the author of the " Beggar's Opera " :

Life is a jest, and all things show it ; I thought so once, and now I know it.

Garrick is buried near Poets' Corner, and one remembers that Charles Lamb was scandalised by discovering his monument. He says : " Though I would not go so far with some good Catholics abroad as to shut players alto- gether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalised at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer I found inscribed under this harlequin figure a farrago of false thoughts and nonsense."

POETS' CORNER, WESTMINSTER

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Alas, there are many false thoughts and much nonsense in Poets' Corner, to say nothing of the bad art, and, with William Morris, I look forward to the day when the interior of Westminster Abbey will be made beautiful by a great clearance " of the beastly monuments."

Ill

OLD WESTMINSTER

The City of Westminster stretches from the Thames on the south to Oxford Street on the north, and from Kensington on the west to the City of London on the east. It used to be said that London was the city for trade and Westminster for the Court, but modern Westminster is the city of opulent squares, theatres, the most modern of shops and stores, the King's palace and the Government's offices, and not a few slums tucked away behind the facade of wealth. It has its foreign quarter in Soho. It has its market at Covent Garden.

In his drawing, Old Westminster, Mr. Pennell shows us Cowley Street, within a stone's throw of the Abbey. The Westminster of outstanding interest is certainly within the precincts of the Abbey that gives the City its distinction. Cowley Street itself is named after Barton Booth of Cowley in Middlesex who was the original Cato in Addison's dreary play. Barton was a man of property, and his wife was at one time the mistress of the great Duke of Marlborough. It was natural, therefore, that he should be buried in the Abbey.

The oldest name in Westminster is Tothill, and Tothill Street remains. The Tothill Fields at one time covered a large area and included Vincent Square, where the West- minster boys now play cricket. On Tothill Fields the young men of Westminster practised archery on what was called the artillery ground, probably situated where Artillery Row now stands. There was a maze on Tothill Fields, and here the gentry came to play at bowls and golf and stow ball. Golf was played in Scotland as early as 1457, but it was unknown in England until James I., whose mother,

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OLD WESTMINSTER, COWLEY STREET

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OLD WESTMINSTER

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Mary Queen of Scots, played the game, came south. In a letter to Stella, Swift describes a duel fought in Tothill Fields in 171 1. A hundred years earlier, the gardens in the Fields were famous for their fine melons. In the eighteenth century the people of Westminster petitioned the Dean to allow horse-racing on Tothill Fields, and a four days' meeting was permitted on condition that the booths used for the sale of meat, drink and other less reputable purposes should be shut at a reasonable hour. Victims of the Great Plague were hastily buried in Tothill Fields. Pepys says, " I was much troubled this day to hear at Westminster how the officers do bury the dead in the open Tuttle - Fields, pretending want of room else- where.' '

The Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster now stands on part of Tothill Fields. The ground was bought by Cardinal Manning shortly before his death, and his successor, Cardinal Vaughan, decided that the Cathedral should be built in the early Christian Byzantine manner. Mr. John Francis Bentley was the architect. The founda- tion stone was laid in 1895. Mass was first celebrated in the Cathedral on Christmas Day, 1903.

Rochester Row is another street that suggests memories of old Westminster. It owes its name to the fact that after the Restoration the Deans of Westminster were frequently also the Bishops of Rochester. Horseferry Road in the same neighbourhood, known to most modern Londoners from the fact that they pay their gas bills there, led to the ferry which was the only means of communication with the Surrey side above London Bridge. The tolls belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and £3000 was paid to him as compensation when the first Westminster Bridge was built in the middle of the eighteenth century. Orchard Street stands where the Abbots of Westminster once grew their pear and apple trees ; near by it was Vine Street, now rechristened, the site of the monastery's vineyard. Palmer Street has a very pleasant history. At the end of the sixteenth century the Rev. Edwin Palmer founded a set of almshouses with a chapel and school. It became a small community with its own inn and shops, priding itself on its independence of its greater neighbour, Westminster. The Hotel Windsor stands on the site of what was once

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Palmer's village. In Duke Street, Westminster, Judge Jeffreys lived for a time. So did Matthew Prior, the poet, and years afterwards William Cobbett, the author of Rural Rides, a great, stubborn Englishman.

Smith Square is remarkable for the possession of St. John's Church, one of the most hideous ecclesiastical build- ings in the world. Dickens said with entire justice that it resembled " some petrified monster frightful and gigantic on its back and with its legs in the air." Gibbon and Keats both lived in Great College Street, and in what is now called Little College Street lived the brothers Wesley. Great Smith Street runs into Great Peter Street, and here the wanderer finds himself in the heart of Westminster's slums. Let it be accounted to them for righteousness' sake that in St. Anne's Lane, Henry Purcell, probably the greatest of English musical composers, and Robert Herrick, the poet, had their homes.

Westminster Bridge was first lighted with gas in 1814, after Napoleon's banishment to Elba. Byron remembered the glittering lights when he was living in exile on the Continent, and describing Don Juan's entry into London he writes :

The line of lights, too, up to Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and so forth, have a coruscation,

Like gold as in comparison to dross,

Match' d with the Continent's illumination.

But London's so well lit, that if Diogenes Could recommence to hunt his honest man,

'Twere not from want of lamps.

Much of old Westminster and much of its beauty have disappeared, but there is still enough of it to kindle intriguing memories.

THE CATHEDRAL

IV

THE CLOCK TOWER

We went on a little farther, and I looked to the right again, and said, in rather a doubtful tone of voice, " Why, there are the Houses of Parliament ! Do you still use them ? "

He burst out laughing, and was some time before he could control himself ; then he clapped me on the back and said :

" I take you, neighbour ; you may well wonder at our keeping them standing, and I know something about that, and my old kins- man has given me books to read about the strange game they played there. Use them ! Well, yes, they are used for a sort of subsidiary market, and a storage place for manure, and they are handy for that, being on the water-side."

So it is that William Morris, the Socialist poet and philosopher, contemptuously dismissed the Palace of West- minster in his News from Nowhere, his dream of a Socialist future when everything will be beautiful and everybody will be good. Morris had little belief in political democracy. He was a sentimental anarchist. As an artist he had an equal contempt for the palace itself, a building erected by Sir Charles Barry in 1840 at a cost to the nation of three million pounds. It is early Victorian in design, and as Mr. Augustus Hare naively says, " The style was much admired in the middle of the last century and has already ceased to be tolerated.' ' To Morris it was just " a silly old building. "

The Clock Tower, to which Mr. Pennell's genius has given a beauty that without him it would be hard to dis- cover, is three hundred and twenty feet high and forty feet square, and Big Ben, the famous clock, is thirty feet in diameter. Big Ben is the successor of the more famous Great Tom of Westminster which sounded the hours for

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four hundred years until the old royal palace was burned down in 1834. Great Tom once saved a man's life. A sentry was accused of having slept at his post. He declared, as proof that he was awake, that he had heard Great Tom strike thirteen at midnight. It was proved by other wit- nesses that this eccentricity had occurred, and the man was acquitted. When Parliament is sitting a light appears at the top of the Clock Tower to let London know that its legislators are busy, making the world safe for democracy.

It is interesting as one turns out of Whitehall and looks up to the Clock Tower, probably to discover whether one will or will not catch a train at Waterloo, to think of the statesmen and politicians who have also instinctively looked up to Big Ben on their way to the House of Commons, intent on serving their country or on securing their own careers. One thinks of the early days of the tower's history, of little Lord John Russell, the prim Whig, known to his own generation as " finality Jack " ; of Brougham, that restless inconstant politician with his prominent nose and tweed trousers, " forswearing like a chameleon every shade of opinion when for the moment he has ceased to wear it " ; of old Pam, dandy and statesman, who loved England and told the truth to princes ; of Benjamin Disraeli, that gorgeous political adventurer, the cynical loyalist who had an inexhaustible supply of flattery for a queen and genuine sympathy for the sufferings of her people ; of Gladstone, the fiercest political fighter in history, who imagined himself a hammer of the Lord, and was not. The shadows pass, a long procession, most of them now mere names, for the fame of politicians hardly exists longer than the fame of actors — Parnell, the cold, hard man who fought the might of England and would have beaten her if he had been as cold at heart as he looked and had not loved a woman as well as his country ; Lord Salisbury, large, ponderous, a good man with too much scorn in his heart for the rest of the world ; plain W. H. Smith, who started a great business and is mainly famous for inspiring W. S. Gilbert to write a great song ; Joseph Chamberlain with his orchid and eyeglass, a man made of metal all through, fine-tempered metal, but metal, a terrifying man preferring rather to hate than to love ; William Harcourt, Campbell-Bannerman, Heavens what ghosts they are ! Not only is it true that

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THE CLOCK TOWER

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THE CLOCK TOWER

15

their parts are played now by other players, but a new drama has been written which it would be hard for them to understand.

How often, too, must the living have glanced up at the Clock Tower — Lord Balfour, gently shuddering at other people's unnecessary energy ; Mr. Asquith hoping that he may continue to be Ciceronian ; Mr. Lloyd George thinking out new feats of wizardry ; Mr. Winston Churchill hesitat- ing which party he shall join next. And the new players ? The men from the mines and the cotton mills and the railway tracks and the office desks, the men who know the hard realities and are indifferent to convention and tradition, the men who have come and evidently have come to stay. I remember the advance guard, the arrival in the shadow of the Clock Tower of the late Keir Hardie escorted by brake-loads of charwomen from West Ham, a dreamer with wonderful eyes and a cloth cap. He has been followed by others less sentimental, less attractive maybe, infinitely more practical. Big Ben must look down upon them and wonder what is going to happen. Will they use the old machine, or will they scrap it ? Will the Mother of Parlia- ments bring forth a new and happier nation, or will she, as William Morris predicted, be condemned, and the place where Disraeli and Gladstone held combat be turned into a manure market ? Who can tell ? Certainly I cannot, — but William Morris was a poet, and poets are often the most reliable of prophets.

V

THE FOREIGN OFFICE

There are ghosts in plenty in Downing Street, to-day perhaps the most important street in London. " There is," said Theodore Hook, " a fascination in the air of this little cul-de-sac/ ' a street a hundred yards or so in length running from Whitehall to St. James's Park. No. 10, the home of the Prime Ministers, and, in recent times at least, of much political intrigue, is mean without if spacious within. It is on the north side of the street, overshadowed by the more modern buildings on the south, of which perhaps the Foreign Office is the most important. Robert Walpole lived in Downing Street, and his son Horace wrote some of his letters " in one of the charming rooms toward the Park." Smollett set up as a surgeon in Downing Street. Lord Chatham was carried there after his seizure in the House of Lords, and his son, the more famous second William, lived in Downing Street for years in an amazingly extravagant household which horrified Wilberforce by its recklessness. The butcher's bill for twenty-eight days amounted to as much as £29 !

The ghosts of the present Foreign Office are all of them comparatively recent, for the building is not sixty years old. It was finished in the last year of Gladstone's 1868 ministry, when Lord Clarendon was Foreign Secretary. Disraeli became Prime Minister in the next year, but he was already old and broken, no longer able to play the leading role in the international drama, and his Foreign Secretary was Lord Derby. Nevertheless, in the three years that he had still to live, Disraeli developed the Imperial foreign policy associated with his name, contriv- ing, among other things, to make the famous purchase of

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V

THE FOREIGN OFFICE

Suez Canal shares, and he must frequently have been busy with his subordinate at the Foreign Office. The relations 1 between the two men were not particularly cordial. It must have been difficult to be cordial with Lord Derby. ! In one of her letters Queen Victoria calls him " that very peculiar person Lord D." And Disraeli recorded that when he invited Derby to lunch " he replied that he never lunched, it prevented work." He is a hard man, indeed, who never lunches.

The men who have reigned at the Foreign Office since Disraeli have included Lord Granville, Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery, Lord Lansdowne, Sir Edward Grey, Lord Balfour, Lord Curzon, and now Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. It is impossible to think of the history of recent years with- out speculating as to what might have happened if other men had sat in the seat of authority and if other policies had been pursued. Lord Salisbury, for example, perhaps the most considerable of modern Foreign Ministers, carried on the Victorian tradition of British subservience to Ger- many. If there had been no such subservience, how different the history of modern Europe must have been ! It was only with the accession of Edward VII. that the Foreign Office became pro -French, for Liberals like Lord Rosebery had quite as strong German proclivities as Tories like Lord Salisbury. King Edward and Lord Lansdowne were the engineers of the Entente. And another interesting speculation occurs to one's mind. If there had been no Entente, would there have been a great European war ? Who can tell ?

Certainly the most dramatic meeting which can have taken place in the Foreign Office was that between Lord Grey and the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, before the war, both men dreading what they both felt was inevitable, the English Secretary hesitating, the German Ambassador only half informed.

Now the Foreign Office has surrendered to the new democracy. Lord Curzon, mentally and physically an aristocrat of aristocrats, cold, precise, traditional, has left the Foreign Office to be succeeded by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, a man of the people, a cautious enthusiast, inexperienced maybe in matters of diplomacy, but a Foreign Secretary with a unique knowledge of the minds

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of foreign peoples. The Foreign Office was aristocracy's last redoubt. The Diplomatic Service for years resisted the inroads of competitive examination and remained a comfortable refuge for well-born younger sons, difficult, indeed, for the man of undistinguished parentage to enter. So it may be said that few more revolutionary happenings have occurred in England than the arrival of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, a Scottish peasant's son, as Secretary of State. The old order, for all its good intentions, made for war. Will the new order make for peace ? As one walks along Downing Street and regards the formidable facade of the Foreign Office, one prays, but not with a faith that would remove mountains, that it may !

VI

WHITEHALL COURT

Whitehall Court belongs to the London that was modern until 1914. As is fitting in a building of which part is occupied by the National Liberal Club, it is square and solid. It is, in fact (and in certain ways which it would be cruel to recall), the monument of late Victorian Liberalism. Only an artist like Mr. Pennell could find in it a certain beauty. The dull and heavy respectability of Whitehall Court is, however, spiritually mitigated by the fact that Mr. H. G. Wells, the scientific Puck of modern literature, a man of imagination all compact, lives there when he is in London.

History delights in irony. The drab follows the picturesque. The flamboyant continually gives place to the dull. It is amusing to stand at the door of the National Liberal Club watching the pillars of Nonconformity and Free Trade hurrying in to their frugal lunches and to remember that the club stands near the western boundary of what was once the great palace of Whitehall, which occupied a large part of the ground between Charing Cross and Westminster. Nell Gwynne must have tripped in where National Liberals now heavily tread.

Here Wolsey lived with a household of eight hundred persons. After his disgrace, Henry VIII. took over the palace, greatly enlarged it, and in Whitehall he was secretly married to Anne Boleyn. Here Elizabeth lived, ceaselessly plotting for the greatness of England. There were deer in Whitehall park in Elizabeth's days, and Ben Jonson's masques were performed in the palace. To Whitehall James I. hurried from Scotland after Elizabeth's death, shortly afterwards commissioning Inigo Jones to build

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a new banqueting hall, to-day all that is left of the palace, and now used as the Royal United Service Museum. The wall of this banqueting hall was broken through that Charles I. might pass out " into the open street before Whitehall " to be beheaded by Giles Dekker.

Back to Whitehall came Charles II. after the Restoration with his retinue of sprightly ladies. The palace was fre- quently flooded by the Thames, and on one occasion the water invaded the kitchen of Lady Castlemaine, most arrogant of the mistresses of the king, and the mother of the first Duke of Grafton, and the chine of beef prepared for her royal lover's supper could not be roasted. Pepys was often at Whitehall, and he has left many descriptions of the life of the palace. Writing in July 1666 he says :

" By and by the King to dinner, and I waited there his dining ; but, Lord ! how little I should be pleased, I think, to have so many people crowding about me ; and, among other things, it astonished me to see my Lord Barkeshire waiting at table, and serving the King drink, in that dirty pickle as I never saw man in my life. Here I met Mr. Williams, who would have me to dine where he was invited to dine, at the Backestayres. So, after the King's meat was taken away, we thither ; but he could not stay, but left me there among two or three of the King's servants, where we dined with the meat that come from his table ; which was most excellent, with most brave drink cooled in ice, which, at this hot time, was welcome ; and I, drinking no wine, had metheglin for the King's own drinking, which did please me mightily."

Pepys was not easily shocked, but Evelyn was horrified by the Restoration Court. " I can never forget," he wrote, " the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, dis- soluteness and, as it were, total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day se 'night I was witness of."

With the coming of Dutch William the glory of White- hall departed, his precise and orderly mind revolting against the ramshackle palace and preferring the primness of Kensington.

The palace disappeared generations ago, and its place is taken by Government offices — and Whitehall Court. As one thinks of the past and of the present with its National

WHITEHALL COURT

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WHITEHALL COURT

21

Liberals and Mr. H. G. Wells planning the salvation of Europe, one wonders what next. There will come a time ; when Mr. Pennell's picture will be studied with the same interest that we give to pictures of Whitehall Palace, and then what will be standing in the place of this monster block of clubs and flats ? The glory has gone — Wolsey and Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, James of Scotland and the martyr Charles, Charles II. and his strumpets, English Nell, the only one of them whose name is remembered ! The drabness will pass, too, and what will follow ? Something finer, or something meaner ? In a happier world or a sadder ?

VII

ST. JAMES'S PALACE

Buckingham Palace is a reminder that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. St. James's Palace is a sugges- tion that a king's life has its compensations. It is impos- sible to imagine that any human being could want to live in so completely hideous a house as Buckingham Palace, and to pass it is to be moved to sincere sympathy for King George, particularly since the monstrous effigy of his grandmother was erected outside his windows. But I feel that to be a king and live in St. James's Palace with its attractive Tudor tidiness would be by no means insupport- able. It is a tribute to the taste of our sovereigns that they try to forget Buckingham Palace. Foreign ambassadors are accredited to " the Court of St. James," and State docu- ments regularly begin with the words, " Given at our Court of St. James."

There is history enough and to spare in St. James's Palace and the streets that lead to it ; indeed, it might be said that every paving stone of St. James's Street has a story to tell. " It makes life worth living," Sinclair Lewis, the American novelist, once said to me, " to walk down St. James's Street and look at St. James's Palace once a day. It helps one to forget so many things that one hates to remember."

Ghosts positively jostle one's elbow, and, added to its many other interests, St. James's Palace has a genuine ghost of its own. She — for the ghost is feminine — is the wraith of the Duchess of Mazarin, one of the many favourites of Charles II., who haunted, or perhaps still haunts, the Palace. Royal mistresses have indeed often been housed in St. James's, among them, the long, thin German

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ST. JAMES'S PALACE

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" Maypole " whom George I. brought with him from Hanover and afterwards created Duchess of Kendal.

The site of St. James's Palace was for many centuries occupied by a hospital dedicated to the Saint and originally established for " fourteen maidens that were leprous." Henry VIII. bought the hospital and built the Palace in the same year as he married Anne Boleyn. Their love-knots are still to be seen on the gateway and the letters H. A. are on the chimney-piece of the tapestry room. Henry's daughter, Mary I., died at St. James's. " The Queen abandoning her- self to despair told them that she should die though they were yet strangers to the cause of her death ; but if they would know it hereafter, they must dissect her, and they would find Calais at her heart ; intimating that the loss of that place was her death's wound." Both Charles II. and James II. were born in the Palace, and it was from it that Charles I. was taken to Whitehall to be beheaded. The son of James II., the Old Pretender, as Macaulay has called him, " the most unfortunate of princes," was born in St. James's Palace, his father's enemies declaring that he was smuggled into the Palace in a warming-pan. There is in existence an old plan with a dotted line showing how it was suggested that the trick was worked. Queen Anne did not really believe the legend, but she admitted that the Palace was " as much the properest place to act such a cheat in."

It was from St. James's Palace that James made his escape to France, and it was to the Palace that William of Orange came in 1688, filling the yards with his Dutch guards. " There I saw him," wrote Evelyn, " and several of my acquaintance did come over with him. He is very stately, serious and reserved." George I. was the last British sovereign to live permanently in St. James's Palace, though George IV. was born there. The first George's Teutonic thriftiness was outraged by an incident that happened on his first day in St. James's. He was told that the park with its walks and canals were all his. The next day, Lord Chetwynd, the ranger of the park, sent him a fine brace of carp. " And I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd 's servant for bringing me my own carp out of my own canal in my own park. This is a strange country." Queen Victoria was married in the

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Chapel Royal, St. James's, and George III., pious farmer George, used regularly to attend service there in the winter, although the chapel was bitterly cold, so cold indeed that the Queen and the rest of the Court refused to attend, and left the King and his Chaplain to " freeze it out together."

There is a story of one of George's many sons, those princes at whom Thackeray gibed, who had a habit of commenting audibly on the service. One Sunday morning after the reading of the seventh commandment, the Duke was heard to say : " Very proper, very proper, but damned difficult."

The eighteenth century is eminently the century of St. James's, though its romance belongs to an earlier age. It suggests the cold formality of the Georges, and its spirit is surely more kin to Johnson than to Pepys. St. James's Street is indeed the street of the Regency. I never walk down it without thinking of Charles James Fox, the hard liver and generous thinker on whom at least one prominent modern politician has obviously sought to model himself, just as I never pass the Palace walking into St. James's Park without thinking of Austin Dobson, the poet of the Georges and St. James's. Has he not written the lines :

The ladies of St. James's, They have their fits and freaks ; They smile on you— for seconds, They frown on you — for weeks.

St. James's Street is a street of clubs, White's, the most famous of them, being a development of a chocolate house which was first opened in 1698. It soon became a famous gaming-house, and, according to Swift, it was described by Robert Harley as " the bane of half the English nobility." White's Club dates from 1736, and for many years the gambling tradition was carried on. White's, indeed, is famous for the strange wagers recorded in its betting book. Horace Walpole says :

" They have put in the papers a good story made on White's. A man dropped down dead at the door was carried in ; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or not, and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed and said it would affect the fairness of the bet."

The Devonshire, on the other side of the street, was

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ST. JAMES'S PALACE

25

once the famous Crockford's, in the early days of the reign of Queen Victoria the most famous gambling house in London. After public gambling was prohibited by Act of Parliament, Crockford was kept on by the club — it was called the New Club — in a more or less honorary capacity. It had been his custom for many years to sit in the window of the club on the evening of Derby Day and to salute the drivers of the coaches as they came up St. James's Street from Epsom. He was very ill on the last Derby Day of his life, and died before the race was run. He had, however, backed the winner for a considerable sum of money, and in order that it might be supposed that he had lived until after the race, and that the winnings might be drawn by his family, his sons held up the dead body of their father in the window and moved his hand in salutation to the coaches in the ordinary way.

Byron lived at No. 8 St. James's Street when Childe Harold was published and gave him instant fame. Moore says : " In place of the desert which London had been to him but a few weeks before, he now not only saw the whole splendid interior of high life thrown open to receive him, but found himself, among its illustrious crowds, the most distinguished object." It was from St. James's Street that Byron went in 1809 to take his seat in the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor, Eldon, was an extreme Tory. The poet's friend, Dallas, has recorded :

" The Chancellor quitted his seat, and went towards him with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to welcome him ; and, though I did not catch his words, I saw that he paid him some compliment. This was all thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff bow, and put the tips of his fingers into the Chancellor's hand. The Chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat, while Lord Byron carelessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by the lords in opposition. When, on joining me, I expressed what I felt, he said : 4 If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party — but I will have nothing to do with them on either side. I have taken my seat, and now I shall go abroad.' We returned to St. James's Street, but he did not recover his spirits."

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Charles James Fox also lived in St. James's Street. In one of his letters Walpole says :

" As I came up St. James s Street I saw a cart and porters at Charles's door ; coppers and old chests of drawers loading. In short, his success at faro has awakened his host of creditors, but unless his bank had swelled to the size of the Bank of England it would not have yielded a sop for each. Epsom, too, had been unpropitious, and one creditor has actually seized and carried off his goods, which did not seem worth removing. As I returned, full of this scene, whom should I find sauntering by my own door but Charles ? He came up and talked to me at the coach- window on the Marriage Bill, with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened.' '

Both Fox and Byron were friends of Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, at whose famous breakfasts at 22 St. James's Place one might meet at one time or another, in addition to Fox and Byron, Burke, Talleyrand, Words- worth, Scott and Wellington. Fanny Kemble said of Rogers : " He certainly had the kindest heart and un- kindest tongue of any one I ever knew." He paid Sheridan's debts, he helped Tom Moore, he procured a pension for Cary, the translator of Dante, and a sinecure for Words- worth, and he lived long enough to recommend Tennyson as Poet Laureate. In his Recollections Rogers collected many of the interesting sayings of several of the famous men whom he knew. " I love establishments and love law ; but I detest the priests and the lawyers " is a characteristic saying of Fox. Talleyrand told Rogers that Napoleon always shaved himself. " A king by birth," said he, smiling, " is shaved by another. He who makes himself rot shaves himself." The Duke of Wellington related to Rogers the story of the founda- tion of the fortune of the Rothschilds. After the battle a messenger was sent to Louis XVIII., who was at Ghent, to tell him of the victory, and the King embraced the messenger, who was a Russian, in a bow-window facing the street :

" An Emissary of Rothschild was in the street ; and no sooner did he see these demonstrations than he took wing for London. Not a syllable escaped from his lips at Bruges, at Ostend or at Margate ; nor, till Rothschild had

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ST. JAMES'S PALACE

27

taken his measures on the Stock Exchange, was the in- telligence communicated to Lord Liverpool."

Pall Mall, another street of famous clubs, derives its name from the game of pall mall played with " malls, bowls and scoops.' ' Nell Gwynne lived in Pall Mall. Evelyn says :

" I thence walk'd with him (Charles II.) thro' St. James's Parke to the gardens, where I both saw and heard a very familiar discourse between (the King) and Mrs. Nellie, as they cal'd an impudent Comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and (the King) standing on ye greene walke under it. I was heartily sorry at this scene."

The great Duke of Marlborough built and lived in Marlborough House. Gainsborough lived in the western wing of Schomberg House, Lockhart at a house in Pall Mall where his father-in-law Scott stayed in 1826. Pall Mall was the first street in London to be lighted by gas.

VIII

HANOVER SQUARE

Thackeray has left us a deliciously satirical picture of George the First's arrival in England with " his faithful German chamberlains ; his German secretaries ; his negroes, cap- tives of his bow and spear in Turkish wars ; his two ugly, elderly German favourites, Mesdames of Kielmansegge and Schulenberg, whom he created respectively Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendal/ ' The strange retinue occurs to my mind whenever I walk across Hanover Square, and particularly the Duchess, " tall and lean of stature," and hence nicknamed the Maypole, and the Countess, " a large-sized noblewoman/ ' generally known as the Elephant.

Hanover Square recalls George I., a German king, who never was hypocrite enough to pretend to be an Englishman, because it was built in 171 8 and named after our first Hanoverian monarch. Fashionable London was already beginning to move westward when George arrived from Germany, though the district west of Regent Street was still spoken of as " suburban territories/ ' which were to be rapidly developed in the early years of the eighteenth cen- tury. A contemporary diarist wrote of the new London growing round him with far more enthusiasm than we can write of the new London created since the war. Writing of a walk towards Hyde Park he says : "In the tour I passed an amazing scene of new foundations, not of houses only, but as I might say of new cities, new towns, new squares and fine buildings, the like of which no city, no town, nay, no place in the world can show ; nor is it possible to judge where or when they will make an end or stop building." Of the new squares, Hanover Square was one of the first and remains one of the most attractive. " What

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29

do you think of Hanover Square ? " asks one of the char- acters in Swift's Polite Conversations. " Why, Sir John, London is gone out of town since you saw it."

Hanover Square is not too large — the large square rambles away any impression of individuality. It remains properly formal. Its suggestion of the era of the Georges is emphasised by the statue of William Pitt by Sir Francis Chantrey which was erected in 183 1 . It is not a particularly good statue — one does not expect good statues in London — but it is appropriate to its setting. Sir Francis Chantrey was the proper sculptor for Hanover Square. I, at least, am grateful for his Pitt (in Hanover Square), as we all should be grateful for the Chantrey Bequest that has provided the nation with a few good pictures, and a great many bad ones, all preserved with equal care in the Tate Gallery.

Hanover Square has had many famous inhabitants, among them two great sailors, Lord Anson, who defeated the French off Cape Finisterre, and Lord Rodney, who beat the French fleet in the West Indies in 1782. Both of them died in houses in the Square. Single-speech Hamilton, the model for all time for loquacious legislators, also died in Hanover Square. When Talleyrand came to England as French Ambassador after the Revolution of 1830, he lived in a house in Brook Street at the corner of Hanover Square, and in this placid retreat that amazing old sinner must have lived over again the events of his unparalleled career with its varying allegiance to Kings, Emperor and Republic.

Thomas Campbell, once judiciously described as " one of the most chaste of modern poets," whose famous " Mariners of England " has, alas, lost most of its significance since the invention of the aeroplane, lived for some time with Lord Minto at No. 20 Hanover Square, and in the Hanover Square Rooms on the east side, for years London's most popular concert hall, Johann Christian Bach, the son of the great Sebastian, gave several series of subscription concerts.

Nowadays Hanover Square has lost most of its glory, though it retains its attractive primness. It is no longer the home of peers nor, so far as I know, of poets, though Mr. Arnold Bennett carries on its literary tradition. Hanover Square is homely — pleasantly ugly, and the note of homely ugliness which carries with it the reminder of

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British prosperity and hums at you " Britons never will be slaves " is repeated when the Square is crossed and one is suddenly confronted by the portico of St. George's, where for generations every self-respecting peer was married. The love of the aristocracy for St. George's is evidence of the common Victorian horror of art, for St. George's is surely the ugliest church in the world ! The steeple placed above a Greek portico is an abomination. As Leigh Hunt said : " The finest steeple with a portico to it is but an excrescence, a horn growing out of the church's neck."

It is to me quite natural and proper that George Eliot, after the death of George Henry Lewes, with whom she had had an irregular connection for many years, should have selected St. George's, Hanover Square, to be married to the highly respectable Mr. J. W. Cross, and the solidity of St. George's would naturally attract the vigorous " no damn nonsense " Theodore Roosevelt, afterwards to be President of the United States, who was married there in 1886, describing himself in the register as " widower and ranch- man." But even St. George's has had at least one half- hour of romance. It was here in 1791 that the elderly Sir William Hamilton married the beautiful Emma Hart. Did ever woman have so amazing a life as Nelson's Emma ? The daughter of a blacksmith, entirely illiterate, she passed from one lover to another, beginning her amorous adventures when she was still a child. Romney was fascinated by her beauty, which his many portraits of her have immortalised. Charles Greville sold her to his uncle, William Hamilton, who took her with him to Naples, where he was British Minister. There the Queen was soon on terms of intimate friendship with the beautiful English adventuress, and, in order to make her position at Court possible, the marriage at Hanover Square took place during a visit to England. All the world knows the events that followed — Emma's ascendancy over the Queen of Naples, her personal inter- vention in the course of European affairs, her subjection of Nelson, the great sailor. Their connection became a European scandal, but to Nelson she was " my dearest beloved Emma and the true friend of my bosom," and she was foremost in his thoughts, she and his country, when he lay dying on board the Victory. Then the finale after her husband's and Nelson's death — years of extravagance and

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gambling, imprisonment for debt, and, finally, death in penury in Calais when she was barely fifty. The marriage at St. George's to her elderly diplomat must have seemed to the woman of twenty-six the culmination of her life. But how much was to follow of thrills and of pain !

In Hanover Square there is still sometimes a suggestion of romance, for, of an afternoon, elderly proconsuls, no longer prancing, may be met crossing the Square on their way to the Oriental Club. If they are imaginative — I fear that retired Indian officials rarely are — they may perhaps conjure up visions of Campbell, Anson and Rodney — may- be too of the beautiful Emma — and others of the dead who have walked there before them, and may imagine that Talleyrand looks out of his window at them with a cynical and rather weary smile.

IX

HYDE PARK

The Marble Arch is the northern end of Hyde Park, and Hyde Park Corner its southern end. From Hyde Park Corner one proceeds to the respectable dullness of Belgravia, comforted by Gilbert's assurance that " hearts just as pure and fair may beat in Belgrave Square as in the lowly air of Seven Dials.' ' The Marble Arch was originally a part of Bucking- ham Palace and was removed a generation or so ago. From the Marble Arch the traveller passes to the prosaic neigh- bourhood of the Edgware Road, about which no poet has ever sung. Hyde Park, part of the ancient manor of Hyde, belonged to the Abbey of Westminster, from which it was stolen by Henry VIII., that prince of royal thieves. In the time of Charles I. it was thrown open to the public. Charles I., obsessed though he was with the divine right of kings, had a proper consideration for the comfort of his people. When he was beheaded and Puritanism triumphed, the Park was sold for private uses. Such was the " de- mocracy " of the Commonwealth ! Evelyn bitterly com- plained that under Cromwell he had to pay a shilling for a coach and sixpence for a horse " to the sordid fellow who had purchased it of the State.' * Hyde Park was a fashion- able meeting-place as early as the time of Ben Jonson, who wrote :

Alas, what is it to his scene, to know How many coaches in Hyde Park did show Last Spring ?

Pepys makes frequent reference to Hyde Park. Once he went there by coach, " and saw a fine foot race three times round the park between an Irishman and Crow that was once my Lord Claypoole's footman." In 1669 he wrote

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in his Diary : " Thence to the Park, my wife and I ; and here Sir W. Coventry did first see me and my wife in a coach of our own." That was a great day for Pepys. De Grammont, wrriting about the same time, says : " Hyde Park every one knows is the promenade of London ; nothing was so much in fashion during the fine weather as this promenade which was the rendezvous of fashion and beauty.' ' Evelyn records that he went to Hyde Park to see a coach race. Millamant in Congreve's Way of the World says : " Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis ; nor go to Hyde Park together the first Sunday in a new chariot to provoke eyes and whispers ; and then never be seen there together again.' 1

Cromwell was often in Hyde Park. Once his horse ran away with him and nearly killed him. On another occasion George Fox, the Quaker, waylaid him and insisted on telling him of the persecution of his people and " how contrary this persecution was to Christ and His Apostles and to Christianity.' ' Duels were often fought in Hyde Park. In one famous duel in 171 2 between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, both combatants were killed. Fifty years later John Wilkes, the demagogue, was wounded in the stomach in a duel in Hyde Park with one Samuel Martin. Charles James Fox fought in the Park with Adam the nephew of the architect of the Adelphi. Horace Walpole was particularly pleased with this encounter. He says in one of his letters : "Of all duels on true or false record this was the most perfect. So much temper, sense, propriety, easy good humour and natural good nature on a base of firmness of spirit never were assembled."

The name Rotten Row is said to be derived from route du rot, the route of the kings from Westminster to the hunting forests. The Serpentine, the scene of vigorous if not too deft sculling, has its tragic memories, for there Harriet, Shelley's first wife, drowned herself in 181 6. It is the luck of Hyde Park that it has escaped only by a yard or two the possession of the Albert Memorial. The statue of Achilles near Hyde Park Corner, erected in honour of the Duke of Wellington by " the women of England " (poor misguided females), is, however, sufficiently appalling. Nowadays there are wondrous flower-beds in Hyde Park,

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charming glades, fashionable women, more or less inexpert equestrians and loquacious orators near the Marble Arch.

Hyde Park, indeed, plays a very important part in the democratic history of London. It is there that the gentle- man who is described in America as the " social kicker " lets off his steam, generally much to his relief and to no one else's harm. It has been an English habit, puzzling to foreigners, that whenever a number of citizens are annoyed by the Government they should march to Hyde Park, now to listen to fierce speakers, and in a more vigorous age to pull down the park railings.

All instinctive democratic movements have a very deep and sometimes mystical meaning, and such is the irony of human affairs that practical people like the English are always more mystical than imaginative people. It would seem that if there was a bad king at Buckingham Palace or, what is far more likely, a bad Prime Minister in Downing Street, popular indignation would be logically and force- fully expressed by breaking the windows of the Palace or of 10 Downing Street. The English prefer to pull down the railings in Hyde Park. That is a fine gesture, an expression of democratic power. It is also a practical hint to rulers to mend their ways lest the railings that had been pulled down should be thrown through their windows.

Plutocrats in the Row and proletarians at the Marble Arch ! The plutocrats are not very expert horsemen, the proletarians are rarely eloquent orators. But they are both very English.

MARBLE ARCH

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PICCADILLY

Piccadilly derives its name from Piccadilly House, which, in the middle of the seventeenth century, stood on the north-east corner of the Haymarket. It is described in Clarendon's History as " a fair house for entertainment and gaming with handsome gravel walks with shade and where were an upper and a lower bowling green whither very many of the nobility and gentry of the best quality resorted both for exercise and conversation." Sir John Suckling, the poet, often gambled at Piccadilly Hall, and on one occasion his sisters came to the gaming house and implored him to leave before he lost their portions as well as his own fortune. We remember Suckling by his charming

Why so pale and wan, fond lover ?

Prythee, why so pale ? Will, if looking well can't move her,

Looking ill prevail ?

Prythee, why so pale ?

There have been many guesses as to the derivation of the word " Piccadilly," some of them entirely fantastic. I incline to the belief that it is derived from " picadillo," the Spanish name for minced meat, and that this was the plat de la maison at Piccadilly Hall and gave it its name.

Piccadilly originally ran from the top of the Haymarket, across what is now Piccadilly Circus, to Sackville Street, the road westward from there to Devonshire House being called Portugal Street. Piccadilly Circus, or Regent s Circus as it used to be called, with its fountain designed by Gilbert, stands at the junction of Regent Street, Picca- dilly, Lower Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and

35

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Coventry Street. Shaftesbury Avenue is comparatively modern. It was completed in 1886, and was cut through a congeries of mean streets. At the corner of Great Windmill Street and Shaftesbury Avenue stands the Trocadero Restaurant, which used to be the famous Argyll Rooms, where the Philharmonic gave its early concerts and where Mendelssohn appeared in 1829. The Criterion Restaurant and Theatre were built in 1873 on tne of the White Bear Inn. Benjamin West, the American painter, who became President of the Royal Academy, slept at the White Bear Inn on the first night of his arrival in London. The Criterion was built by two Australians, Spiers and Pond. Christopher Pond, one of the partners, cultivated " literary " society, George Augustus Sala being one of his cronies, and he was something of a humorist. " Pond," said one of his clients to him one day, " that waiter of yours is a damned fool." " My dear friend," replied Pond, " he wouldn't be a waiter if he weren't."

Few London streets have as interesting a history as Piccadilly. Theodore Hook used to say that the London that mattered was bounded on the north by Piccadilly, on the south by Pall Mall, on the east by the Haymarket, and on the west by St. James's Street, and certainly all the streets in this small area bear the names of the great if not of the good. In Piccadilly itself every house tells a story. On the site of what is now the Piccadilly Hotel, the St. James's Hall used to stand, for many years London's chief concert hall, famous for the Monday " Pops," the haunt of the Victorian intellectuals, and for the Christy Minstrels. Wagner was once engaged by the Philharmonic Society to conduct a series of concerts in St. James's Hall, and he annoyed the precisians by conducting a Beethoven Sym- phony with no score on his desk. The Secretary remon- strated with him, and at the next concert, when another symphony was in the programme, Wagner had a score and turned over its leaves as he conducted. Afterwards, the secretary thanked him for submitting to the wishes of the London Committee, and the sardonic German showed him the score. It was Offenbach's " Tales of Hoffman."

St. James's Church, on the other side of the street, was designed by Wren. James Gillray, the caricaturist, is buried there. The Albany was originally Melbourne House and

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37

was converted into chambers early in the last century. Byron wrote Lara while he was living at A. 2, the Albany. George Canning, the statesman, lived at A. 5. Canning was an enlightened Tory who suggested Roman Catholic emancipation and the rights of small nations, but who is nowadays remembered for his much quoted assertion : " I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the 01d.,, Lord Macaulay lived at different times in two separate sets of Albany Chambers, where he wrote the first half of his History. " Monk " Lewis, the author of perhaps the most famous of all shockers, lived at K.i for some years. Bulwer Lytton is another literary celebrity who lived in the Albany.

Burlington House, the home of the Royal Academy, belonged in the seventeenth century to the Earl of Burling- ton, whose son was a friend of Pope and Gay and Walpole and Handel, and a generous patron of the arts. On the second Lord Burlington's death the house passed into the possession of the Cavendishes, and in the later eighteenth century Whig party meetings were held there, attended by, among others, Burke and Fox and Sheridan. The house was bought by the nation in 1854.

The New White Horse Cellar is now Hatchett's Res- taurant. It was the most famous of all the coaching houses in the west end of London. There is an amusing descrip- tion of the White Horse Cellar in the Pickwick Papers :

" The travellers' room at the White Horse Cellar is of course uncomfortable ; it would be no travellers' room if it were not. It is the right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fire-place appears to have walked, accom- panied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is divided into boxes, for the solitary confinement of travellers, and is furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter ; which latter article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of the apartment.' '

Devonshire House, now abandoned and falling into decay, stood on the site of Hay Hill Farm. Berkeley House was first built on the site occupying the ground from Piccadilly to Berkeley Square. Evelyn said of this house, " It is very well built and has many noble rooms, but they are not very convenient." The present house was built for the third Duke of Devonshire in 1743. It was here that

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the famous Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, held her court, returning Fox to Parliament for Westminster with her smiles and kisses. A poet said of this election :

Array'd in matchless beauty, Devoirs fair

In Fox's favour takes a zealous part ; But oh ! where'er the pilferer comes beware,

She supplicates a vote and steals a heart.

In 1857 Lytton's play, " Not So Bad as We Seem," was acted at Devonshire House by a company of amateurs which included Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and John Tenniel.

Sir Francis Burdett, the Radical, and father of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, was living at 80 Piccadilly when he was arrested by the Serjeant-at-Arms for an alleged breach of the privileges of the House of Commons. For two days he barricaded himself in his house, spending his leisure reading the Magna Charta to his children.

81 Piccadilly was occupied by Watier's Club. Watier had been cook to George IV. when he was Prince of Wales, and his club was for a dozen years notable for its high gambling. Among its frequenters were Byron, and Beau Brummel who, in the manner of dandies, after a picturesque career in London, died in poverty at Caen in Normandy.

Palmerston lived at 94 Piccadilly and gave his famous parties there. If ever there was a typically impetuous Englishman, it was " Old Pam." Of all modern statesmen he was perhaps most popular among his fellow country- men, and he owed most of his popularity to the fact that he was so often pitted against Queen Victoria's precise German husband, who, until nearly the end of his life, suffered from an unpopularity that he certainly did not deserve.

Nathan Rothschild lived at 107 Piccadilly, a financier with a sense of humour. He told Spohr that the only music he cared for was the rattling of money. One day a foreign prince called to see him. Rothschild nodded casually and told him to take a chair. The prince repeated his name with emphasis. " I beg your pardon," said Rothschild, " take two chairs."

The Duke of Queensberry, disreputable, evil-living " Old Q.," lived at 138 Piccadilly. Leigh Hunt says :

" In the balcony of No. 138 Piccadilly, on fine days in

PICCADILLY CIRCUS

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PICCADILLY

39

summer, used to sit, some forty years ago, a thin, withered old figure, with one eye looking on all the females that passed him, and not displeased if they returned him whole winks for single ones. . . . He had been Prince of the Jockies of his time, and was a voluptuary and a millionaire. * Old Q.' was his popular appellation. He died at the age of eighty-six. We have often seen him in his balcony —

Sunning himself in Huncamunca's eyes,

and wondered at the longevity of his dissipation and the prosperity of his worthlessness. Stories were told of his milk baths, his inhaling the breath of dairymaids, and his getting up interludes of Paris and the Golden Apple, the part of Paris by himself. The last, it seems, was true. His dying bed was covered with billets-doux ; that is to say, with love-letters addressed (as Moliere has it) to the * sweet eyes of his money-box/ "

A groom on horseback always stood outside " Old Q.'s " window to carry his messages to any one he noticed in the street. He kept a physician in the house to whom he paid a heavy daily fee so long as he was well, but who was not to receive a shilling on his death. He was enormously rich and enormously selfish. The only good thing that can be said of him is that he fixed the stone stand that is still opposite his house in Piccadilly on which porters may rest their loads.

Lord Byron went to live at 139 Piccadilly in 181 5 and spent most of his married life there. Byron, the centenary of whose death has been celebrated this year, remains one of the tragic figures of the nineteenth century. He was the victim of an upbringing in an atmosphere of dull and repellent Puritanism that antagonised him against religion, and afterwards of the rakishness of the Regency which made vice fashionable and sneered at virtue as dull. Sir Walter Scott suggested to Byron that before his death he would find refuge, explanation and comfort in the arms of the Catholic Church. In his later days it almost seemed that this might have happened. But everything went awry for the unhappy poet, whose life, after so many sordid episodes, ended in an act of fine generous heroism.

In the days of my youth the Egyptian Hall stood on the

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south side of Piccadilly, almost opposite the end of Bond Street. It was opened in the year 1805 as Bullock's Liver- pool Museum, with a varied collection of attractions. The advertisements declared :

" This museum contains curiosities not only from Africa but from North and South America, amphibious animals in great variety, with fishes, insects, shells, zoophytes, minerals, etc., ad infinitum, besides the Pantherion intended to dis- play the whole of the known quadrupeds, in a state of preservation hitherto unattempted. For this purpose the visitor is introduced through a basaltic cavern, similar to the Giant's Causeway, or Fingal's Cave, in the Isle of Staff a, to an Indian hut. This hut is situated in a tropical forest, in which most of the quadrupeds described by naturalists are to be seen, with models from nature of the trees and other vegetable productions of the torrid climes, remarkable for the beauty of their fruit and foliage."

The Siamese twins were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, and so was General Tom Thumb, who was brought there by the famous Barnum. Artemus Ward gave his entertain- ment there, and it was for many years the home of Maskelyne and Cook's illusions.

The Haymarket, the other famous street abutting on Piccadilly Circus, has its own collection of interesting ghosts. Addison once lived there in an attic over a small shop. George Morland, one of the greatest of English landscape painters, was born there. Charles II. and his brother James often walked from Whitehall up the Haymarket to a tennis court which stood in what is now James Street. In the middle of the nineteenth century, before Acts of Parliament were passed regulating the hours of licensed houses, the Haymarket was the centre of London's rather dull debauchery.

Regent Street was built in 181 3 ; most of it has been pulled down in 1923. In Lower Regent Street, in the Gallery of Illustration, in its later years a club, and now demolished, Mr. and Mrs. German Reed gave their enter- tainment for many years, and here Gilbert first met Sullivan.

Since London was London all its notable citizens must have made their way across Piccadilly Circus, now vulgar-

PICCADILLY 41

ised by grotesque electric signs. " Farewell Piccadilly, good-bye Leicester Square " was the song of the Cockney soldier during the war, and Gilbert makes his aesthete sing :

Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the

high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand.

XI

THE HAYMARKET THEATRE

The Haymarket Theatre with its pillared portico is one of the few remaining relics of Regency London. It was built from designs of John Nash, whose Regent Street is no more, and the front of the theatre is almost exactly as it was when it was first opened to the public in 182 1. It was built on the site of an older playhouse, known as the Little House, opened exactly a hundred years earlier. The Little House has an interesting place in theatrical history because, owing to the production there of Fielding's caustic satires, an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding the production of any stage plays without the licence of the Lord Chamberlain. That law has never been revoked despite years of protest from self-respecting dramatists and advocates of the literary theatre. The British playwright has still to submit his manuscripts to a Court official and to pay for them to be read and approved or disapproved by the Lord Chamber- lain's reader of plays. The vagaries of the censorship have brought the eighteenth-century system into disrepute, but it continues. Thanks to the indignation caused by Fielding, Ibsen's " Ghosts," Mr. Bernard Shaw's " Widowers' Houses," and Brieux's " Les Avaries," have all been banned in England, and before it was allowed to be played here, " Les Demi-Vierges " had to change its name to " Maud."

Mozart played at the Little House in 1765, when he was eight, and in 1767 it was made a royal theatre. At that time the theatre was under the management of Samuel Foote, an amazing creature, who went on the stage after he had run through two fortunes, and who became famous mainly through his extraordinary power of mimicry. From

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THE HAYMARKET THEATRE 43

Foote the theatre passed to George Colman the elder, who dramatised " Tom Jones/' and in the manner of his age " adapted " Shakespeare for the stage; and from him to his son, George Colman the younger, another prolific dramatist. The only play of his which is remembered is " The Heir at Law," which gave the character of Dr. Pangloss to the stage.

In his later years George Colman, the younger, became play reader to the Lord Chamberlain, and was most punctilious in cutting out such words as " God " and " Heaven " from the manuscripts submitted to him.

The Haymarket Theatre, as we now know it externally, was opened in 1821 with the production of " The Rivals," and in 1825 tne famous play " Paul Pry " was produced there with Madame Vestris in the cast. Madame Vestris was a sister of the great Bartolozzi, and at the Haymarket she was paid the enormous salary in those days of £240 a week. She married Charles Mathews as her second hus- band. Benjamin Webster became manager of the theatre in 1837, and among the players who appeared under his management were Macready, Helen Faucit, a beautiful woman who married Sir Theodore Martin, the biographer of Prince Consort, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean and Samuel Phelps. Among the plays he produced was Lord Lytton's " Money."

Webster was followed by Buckstone, who was connected with the theatre until 1877. In Buckstone 's day the per- formances began at seven and were rarely over until mid- night. The two principal events of his management were the appearance of Sothern in the famous part of Dundreary, and the appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Kendal in several of Gilbert's early plays, including " Pygmalion and Galatea." In 1880 the Bancrofts began their connection with the Haymarket Theatre, and after they retired in 1885 it passed first to Herbert Tree and then to Cyril Maude and Frederick Harrison, the latter of whom still remains the manager of the house. On no other English stage except Covent Garden have so many famous actors stepped.

Madame Vestris married Charles Mathews some years after her Haymarket appearances and when she was nearing forty. She was a lady of many love affairs, and in his recollections the actor VandenhofF records a conversation

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that took place after her marriage between three of her rivals, Mrs. Glover, Mrs. Humby and Mrs. Orger. " They say," said Mrs. Humby, " that before accepting Mathews, Vestris made a full confession to him of all her lovers. What touching confidence." " What needless trouble," said Mrs. Orger. " What a wonderful memory," said Mrs. Glover. Macready, a vain, touchy, sensitive creature who despised the theatre and disliked all actors, had a particular objection to Madame Vestris and Charles Mathews, with whom he had many professional connections. In his diary he records a scene with Madame Vestris and her husband which lasted two or three hours. " On the lady's part much Billingsgate and false assertion; on his, much weak- ness and equivocation." But Macready must have been a hard man to act with. " Mother Shipton, by God ! " he once said to an unfortunate actor who came on the stage as Cardinal Campeius in " Henry VIII." Actors were not the only people he disliked. " What is there more vile and worthless than a newspaper writer ? " is another entry in his diary.

Charles Mathews was a very different type of man — a large-hearted, generous spendthrift. His managerial enter- prises with Madame Vestris generally ended in financial disaster, and he was more than once imprisoned for debt. He said himself of their management of Covent Garden : " The first season sowing ; the second season hoeing ; the third season owing." After the death of Madame Vestris, Mathews married an American woman who contrived to get his affairs into something like order.

Charles Kean, the son of the great Edmund Kean, was a little precise man, a model husband, devoted to his rather fearsome wife, known on the stage as Miss Ellen Tree, who was always most correctly dressed in a poke bonnet and a crinoline. Mrs. Kean was a tragic actress on and off the stage. On one occasion a young provincial actor who was to play Horatio to Kean's Hamlet had ordered some new silk tights for the occasion. They did not arrive in time, and he went to Kean's dressing-room to apologise for wearing rather worn woollen ones. He knocked at the door, and Mrs. Kean answered, asking him in a deep, tragic voice, " Well, sir ? " The young man haltingly explained the trouble. " I will," said the lady,

THE HAYMARKET THEATRE

" inform Mr. Kean of what you say." And the door was shut. After a while it was opened again and the lady said : " Under the circumstances, young gentleman, Mr. Kean will pardon you — but what will you say to One above ? " Perhaps the greatest achievement in the career of Charles Kean was his engagement of Ellen Terry, then a child, at the Princess's Theatre, Oxford Street.

How little the actor leaves behind him ! The record of a few eccentricities and maybe some kindliness and nothing more. His art dies with him. And this seems harder, not of the men of long ago who are just names to this genera- tion, but of the players of yesterday, of one's friends, of whom, as I write of the Haymarket, I think most of Herbert Tree, in many respects a player of genius, the kindest hearted of all eccentrics, of whom it was once said that he advertised everything except his good deeds.

As one stands under the unchanged portico of the Haymarket, Henley's lines come to one's mind :

Where are the passions they essayed,

And where the tears they made to flow ? Where the wild humours they portrayed

For laughing worlds to see and know ?

Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe ? Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall ?

And Millamant and Romeo ? Into the night go one and all.

XII

TRAFALGAR SQUARE

Trafalgar Square, as Mr. Pennell has realised, is far more attractive in the half lights than in the glare of the sun. Trafalgar Square should be a restful oasis in the desert of bustling streets. As a matter of fact, it is hard and ugly, a place where no man can rest. Yet in its way it is im- pressive, a reminder of some of the finer qualities of the nineteenth century, as the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial are the reminders of all that was worst in that age. Trafalgar Square is dominated by the Nelson Column. It is curious that in erecting a monument to the greatest of its heroes, England should have placed his effigy so high in the sky that no man can possibly see it except from an aeroplane. Nelson was intensely human. Few great fight- ing men have been less aloof. He was, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has pointed out, the supreme sentimentalist. And there he is left alone, a secular Simon Stylites, no man ever less resembling that saint. But perhaps it is as well that Nelson should be " skyed," for the statue has been well described as " the beau ideal of a Greenwich pensioner."

To cross Trafalgar Square is to realise what a fearful risk men run in serving England. Unless their descendants are very obstinate some awful statue is sure to be erected to their memory. Of all the penalties of greatness, London statues must surely be reckoned as among the most grievous. There is, however, in Trafalgar Square one statue with genuine human interest. George IV. was perhaps not quite so detestable as Thackeray painted him, and if he had few virtues he had few illusions. He realised that it was most unlikely that posterity would erect a statue in his honour, and, odd fellow that he was, yearning for a statue,

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SUNSET, TRAFALGAR SQUARE

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he erected one in Trafalgar Square during his own lifetime and partially at his own expense.

No place where men have lived and moved and had their being can be entirely without romance or without a suggestion of irony. Trafalgar Square is one of London's little ironies. Planned and constructed eighty years ago as a memorial of the greatness of England, it has become London's open-air forum, where enthusiastic ladies and gentlemen are permitted on occasion to preach revolution and to emphasise the joys of internationalism in defiance of Landseer's lions, those massive circus effigies. Here the Red Flag frequently wags. From the plinth of the Nelson column orators denounce institutions for which Nelson fought and died. And in a way it is all very appropriate and very English, for when the flags are furled up and the orators go home, nothing ever happens. Great Britain, like Trafalgar Square, is very solid, very massive, and very hard to move. It was in connection with one of these meetings of protest that years ago Trafalgar Square had its moment of romance when Mr. Cunninghame Graham, great traveller, fine writer and handsomest of revolutionists, chained him- self to the railings before Morley's Hotel and defied the London police. It was a splendid beau geste and Mr. Cunninghame Graham enjoyed it immensely. Unfortun- ately, the London police are horribly practical. They simply unchained the Scottish revolutionist and took him to Bow Street.

There is a fine description of Trafalgar Square on an autumn day in W. E. Henley's London Voluntaries :

Trafalgar Square

(The fountains volleying golden glaze)

Gleams like an angel-market. High aloft

Over his couchant lions in a haze

Shimmering and bland and soft,

A dust of chrysoprase,

Our Sailor takes the golden gaze

Of the saluting sun, and flames superb

As once he flamed it on his ocean round.

The National Gallery is the chief possession of Trafalgar Square. It is just a hundred years old, the beginning of the collection being made by the purchase for sixty thousand pounds of the pictures collected, with the help of Benjamin

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West and Thomas Lawrence, by Angerstein, a Russian merchant who lived in Pall Mall in a house that stood on a portion of the site of the Reform Club. In acquiring this collection, the House of Commons showed an en- thusiasm for art which it has rarely shown since, and the purchase was made in the face of considerable expert opposition. Constable denounced the whole idea of a National Gallery, declaring that with its institution " there will be an end of art in poor old England and she will become, in all that relates to painting, as much a nonentity as every other country that has one."

Twenty-three years after its opening, Ruskin described the National Gallery as a " European jest." But the collec- tion has grown with the years and, despite the constant hampering of Treasury officials, the purchases have generally been worthy, until now it may safely be said that the collec- tion of pictures in the British National Gallery is unrivalled in the world. There are three thousand five hundred works in the National Gallery, most of them of great value, a few of them bad. It is a misfortune that most of the bad pictures are so extraordinarily large. There are certain omissions, the saddest being that the Gallery does not own a Giotto,

. . . with his saints a-praising God That set us praising.

" Let everybody," as one of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's characters says, " be artistic in his own way," and, for me, the chief glory of the National Gallery is the wonderful collection of great altar-pieces exhibited together under the central dome. Here Raphael, Crivelli, Romanino, Schiavone and Marziale can be seen in something like their original setting, and the Gallery has the atmosphere and the serenity of a great church. As has been well said, " we lose the sense of mere earthly canvas and pigment, deft craftsmanship and scientific construction. These pictures glow with the spirit. Their painters had seen Heaven open."

On the north-east corner of Trafalgar Square stands the church of St. Martin 's-in-the-Fields, the parish church of the King. The present church was completed in 1726 and it is a typical eighteenth-century building. Jack Sheppard, the notorious highwayman, was buried in the churchyard

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of the old church, and Nell Gwynne was buried in the church itself. So was Rose, the famous gardener of Charles II., properly remembered because he contrived to grow pine- apples in England, and many men are famous for far less doughty deeds. The Thames-side watermen used to have the right to be buried in St. Martin's churchyard, and a portion of the burial ground was specially reserved for them.

St. Martin's has an interesting connection with the practice of the law. Francis Bacon was baptized there, and it used to be a custom when barristers were appointed King's Counsel for them to go to St. Martin's Church (I quote Lord Campbell), " pay their guinea and bring away a certificate of their having taken the Sacrament of the Last Supper according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England." Owing to the energy and devotion of its present vicar, St. Martin's has become one of the best known of London's central churches.

It is impossible not to associate every place that one knows well with one particular incident. Whatever may be the weather, when I walk across Trafalgar Square I always think of one broiling summer's day and a number of grubby little boys slithering quickly out of their ragged clothes and jumping into the fountains. They were promptly chased out of the water by a hot and weary policeman, but he was obviously performing an unpleasant duty while considerably envying the wet nakedness of the law-breaking children.

E

XIII

CHARING CROSS

In the year 1291, Eleanor, the wife of Edward I.," mulier piay modesta, misericors, Anglicorum omnium amatrix" died at Lincoln. Her body was brought to London for burial, and her husband erected a cross at every place where the body rested on the journey. There were twelve of these crosses, only three of which remain. The last was set up at Cherringe, a village just outside the borders of the city of Westminster. The statue of Charles I., which Mr. Pennell has drawn and which is one of the few really beautiful statues in London, was afterwards erected exactly on the spot where King Edward had raised his cross. The cross was pulled down by the iconoclasts of the Long Parliament with their curious hatred for the monuments of piety. It disappeared in 1647 and the statue of Charles I. was erected in 1674. ^n tne Years between, Charing Cross was selected as the execution place for the regicides who had contrived the Stuart king's death. The statue of Charles has a curious history. It is the work of a French sculptor called Hubert le Sceur, a pupil of John of Bologna, who came to this country about 1630. Le Soeur received from the Earl of Portland a commission to cast the figure of the King on horseback in yellow and red copper, his fee being settled at £600. It was the intention of Lord Port- land to erect this statue in the garden of his house at Roehampton, but it was not finished until the Civil War had broken out, and it was sold by the victorious Parliament to one John Rivet, a brazier, who lived in Holborn. Rivet contracted to break the statue in pieces, but being a man of taste and feeling, he carefully preserved it, and after the Restoration it was set up in its present position, Grinling Gibbons making the pedestal. John Rivet's loyalty had a

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CHARING CROSS

poor reward, for the statue which he had bought from the Puritans was taken from him by the Royalists without any repayment.

Charing Cross has been for generations the centre of London's life. " I think, " said Dr. Johnson, " the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross. " Ben Jonson 's mother took for her second husband a bricklayer, and went to live with him in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, and it was from here that the dramatist was sent daily to school in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. The first perform- ance of " Punchinello/ ' the Italian puppet play, took place near Charing Cross, and, as was natural from its central position, several taverns and coffee houses stood there, among them Cannon's Coffee House, The Hare Running over the Heads of Three Nuns, The Swan, and the Golden Cross. Ben Jonson was the author of a famous grace which ran :

Our King and Queen, the Lord God blesse,

The Palsgrave and the Lady Besse ;

And God blesse every living thing

That lives and breathes and loves the King.

God blesse the Councill of estate,

And Buckingham the fortunate.

God blesse them all, and keepe them safe,

And God blesse me, and God blesse Raph.

James I., before whom the grace was repeated, asked the poet who this Raph was, and was told that he was the drawer of the Swan Tavern by Charing Cross, who supplied very good canary. For his little joke Jonson received a reward of £100. Even in these days this would be a Kiplingesque payment for eight lines of verse, and it was a great sum indeed to have extracted from that thrifty Scot, King James.

The Golden Cross Hotel was perhaps the best-known coaching inn in the West End of London. It used to stand at the back of the statue of King Charles. Madame de Stael slept there when she came to London for the pious purpose of weeping over the tomb of Richardson, whose Clarissa had moved her sensitive soul. In David Copper- field Dickens wrote : " We went to the Golden Cross at Charing Cross. It is a mouldy sort of establishment in a close neighbourhood. A waiter showed me into the coffee

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room and a chambermaid introduced me to my small bed- chamber, which smelt like a hackney coach and was shut up like a family vault.' ' When the railways drove the coaches from the road, a poet lamented :

No more the coaches shall I see

Come trundling from the yard, Nor hear the horn blown cheerily

By brandy-bibbing guard.

Charing Cross station was built in 1863, and North- umberland Avenue was constructed eleven years afterwards. Charing Cross Hospital was founded over a hundred years ago. On one part of what is now the hospital, Charing Cross Theatre, afterwards called Toole's Theatre, used to stand. It was originally a chapel of the Fathers of the London Oratory, and it was here that, in 1850, Cardinal Newman delivered his famous lectures on " The Present Position of Catholics in England."

So time works its changes in a great city. On one site and within a man's lifetime, first a great ecclesiastic defend- ing his position with keen and subtle eloquence; then a great comedian, who among other things produced Sir J. M. Barrie's first play, " Walker, London," at this theatre; then a hospital. Newman's tall ascetic figure must have attracted attention as he made his way from Charing Cross to King William Street, where he established the Oratory five years after his conversion to Rome. Father Faber, the author of " Sweet Saviour, bless us ere we go," and many other hymns, was the first Superior. His King William Street lectures brought Newman a very peck of trouble. He was prosecuted for libel by an ex-Dominican and was fined £100, the legal expenses amounting to the colossal sum of £14,000. Those were the days of bitter anti- Catholic prejudice, and Newman's conviction was an evident miscarriage of justice. He was, indeed, an unhappy man vowed to misunderstanding and disappointment. Lytton Strachey says of him : " He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial world."

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Newman must often have passed the statue of King Charles in the tempestuous early days of his communion with Rome, and he must surely have understood that un- lucky monarch, not a wise man but assuredly a good man, and a king who died for his faith.

XIV

MAGNIFICENT KENSINGTON

The adjective is Mr. Pennell's. It is admirably apposite, even though the magnificence is now blurred by the Albert Memorial, the most hideous monument in the world. The Victorians were perhaps happier than we are, and they were certainly more prosperous, but the Albert Memorial is far too high a price to pay for happiness and prosperity. To an extent Kensington's glory has departed. Great men have lived in its streets, but now, many of its mansions are boarding houses. Thackeray and Macaulay are only memories. Mr. Chesterton, who was born in Kensington, now lives at Beaconsfield, but the Museum remains, a mighty and ever-growing treasure house, the younger sister of the British Museum, and almost as distinguished.

The centre of Kensington is the church of St. Mary Abbots. There was a church of St. Mary Abbots as long ago as the twelfth century. A new church was erected at the end of the seventeenth century, and the foundation stone of the present church was laid in 1870. Henry Cromwell, the youngest son of the Protector, was married at St. Mary Abbots, and Queen Anne was christened there. Addison was among its worshippers, and the Duchess of Kent was churched there after the birth of Queen Victoria. Wilber- force, Canning, Thackeray and Macaulay were attendants at its services.

Kensington is Thackeray's London. The novelist him- self went to live at 13 Young Street, Kensington Square, in 1846, with his two young children and a little black cat. In a letter to his mother he said :

" There are 2 capital bed-rooms & a little sitting room for you & G.P. — a famous bed-room for G.M. on the first

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MAGNIFICENT KENSINGTON 55

floor — 2 rooms for the children on second very airy and comfortable ; a couple of rooms big enough for servants, & 2 little ones quite large enough for me — There's a good study down-stairs & a dining room & drawing room, and a little court yard & garden and a little green house ; and Kensington Gardens at the gate, and omnibuses every 2 minutes. What can mortal want more ? "

He wrote Vanity Fair, Esmond and Pendennis in Young Street. Kensington is the scene of Esmond, and it will be remembered that Lady Castlewood lived in Kensington Square, close to the novelist's own house. Dickens wrote Edwin Drood at 5 Hyde Park Place.

Church Street, Kensington, which I love for its admir- able second-hand shops, was the home of David Wilkie the painter, and near by lived Jean Ingelow the poetess. Macaulay lived for three years in Holly Lodge at the end of Campden Hill Road. Isaac Newton died in Kensing- ton, and, of course, Pepys often went there. He records in his Diary that he took Mrs. Knipp " by coach 6s. 6d. to Kensington and there to the Grotto and had admirable pleasure with their singing and some fine ladies listening to us ; with infinite pleasure I enjoyed myself : so to the tavern there and did spend 16s. 6d. and the gardener 2s."

Kensington Palace is prim and tidy like the Dutch king, William III., who built it. Evelyn, who was almost as pre- cise as William himself, describes Kensington Palace as " a very swete villa," but he adds, " it is very noble but not great."

Queen Anne died in Kensington Palace, her last thoughts being for her brother, the unlucky Old Pretender. There is no doubt whatever that Queen Anne was a Jacobite, and it is possible that if she had lived a little longer England would have had no Hanoverian kings. Kensington Palace was the birthplace of Queen Victoria, and it was there that she was awakened early in the morning to be told that she was Queen of England, and where she held her first Council, astonishing Lord Melbourne, that sage and kindly worldling, by her self-possession.

Kensington Gardens is perhaps the most attractive of the London parks. As late as the end of the eighteenth century foxes were hunted in the gardens, and it is recorded that an unfortunate woman was awarded an annuity of £18

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because her husband was accidentally shot while the keepers were hunting foxes in Kensington Gardens. The hunting was evidently entirely unorthodox.

It was of Kensington Gardens that Matthew Arnold wrote :

Here at my feet what wonders pass, What endless, active life is here ! What blowing daisies, fragrant grass ! An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.

Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out, And, eased of basket and of rod, Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout.

I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd, Think sometimes, as I hear them rave, That peace has left the upper world, And now keeps only in the grave.

Yet here is peace for ever new. When I, who watch them, am away, Still all things in this glade go through The changes of their quiet day.

Then to their happy rest they pass. The flowers close, the birds are fed ; The night comes down upon the grass : The child sleeps warmly in his bed.

Calm soul of all things ! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give ! Calm, calm me more ! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.

The Palace Hotel stands on the site of the King's Arms mentioned by Thackeray in Esmond. Gore House that used to stand in Kensington Gore was for years the home of William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery enthusiast. Afterwards it passed into the possession of the beautiful Countess of Blessington. In the Rejected Addresses James Smith wrote :

The chains from which he freed the Blacks She rivets on the Whites.

SLOANE STREET

MAGNIFICENT KENSINGTON

Was there ever a more wonderful woman ? The daughter of a small Irish landlord, she first married a drunkard who died a prisoner for debt in the King's Bench, and at the age of twenty-nine she became the wife of the Earl of Blessington. In four years they had spent all his fortune and were obliged to live on the Continent, where Lady Blessington became intimate with Byron and was mightily disappointed with his appearance. While she was away from England she met Count D'Orsay, the last of the dandies. D'Orsay married a daughter of Blessington 's by a former wife, soon separated from her and came back to England with Lady Blessington, with whom he lived until her death. Gore House was for years the centre of all that was dazzling and fascinating in London life. Dickens went there, and Disraeli and Macready and every one worth knowing, or rather every man worth knowing, for the ladies were " very few." The end came in 1849, when D'Orsay was obliged to fly to the Continent from his creditors, and the contents of Gore House were sold by auction for £13,385.

Holland House is the second of Kensington's famous houses. Addison died there in 17 19, and Lord Holland, the father of Charles James Fox, died there fifty-five years later. The famous George Selwyn had a particular fond- ness for seeing dead bodies. He called on Lord Holland during his last illness, and the dying man told his servant : " If Mr. Selwyn calls again show him up ; if I am alive I shall be glad to see him, and if I am dead he will be glad to see me." A few years later, in the days of the third Lord Holland, Holland House attained unrivalled splendour and fame. Sydney Smith declared that he had heard " five hundred travelled men assert that there was no such agree- able house as Holland House." Macaulay tells us of one evening there : " Wilkie gazed with modest admiration on Sir Joshua's Baretti, while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas to verify a quotation ; while Talleyrand related his conversations with Barras at the Luxembourg or his ride with Lannes over the Field of Austerlitz."

At Holland House in his great days one might meet Lord Eldon, the great Tory Chancellor, and Brougham, the freakish Whig, Byron and Washington Irving, Humphry Davy, Samuel Romilly, the law reformer, Tom Moore, the Irish poet, and the " sensitive " Madame de Stael.

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Magnificent Kensington indeed ! There is thrilling adventure for the imaginative in a walk westward from Knightsbridge. Sloane Street on the left is long and straight, and happy in so far as it has no history. It is named after Sir Hans Sloane, and was planned in 1780. At its southern end in Sloane Square stands the Court Theatre, where theatrical history was made when Mr. Granville Barker produced the Shaw plays. The only great figure associated with Sloane Street is Byron. When he was a sickly little boy of ten he was brought to London on the doctor's advice. His mother took apartments at Sloane Terrace, and there he spent his week-ends and holidays during the two years he was at school at Dulwich. Leaving Sloane Street one walks, with Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens on the right, conjuring up visions, until one has traversed the magnificence and arrived at the borders of plebeian workaday Hammersmith, now re- christened West Kensington, and coyly claiming relation- ship with its great neighbour.

XV

CHEYNE WALK

Cheyne Walk is the most aristocratic street in Chelsea. It has its literary traditions, else Chelsea would disown it. But its stately nouses fronting the river have nothing in common with the bobbed-haired young women and the young men in black flannel shirts who live in Chelsea's meaner streets, convinced that vers libre is poetry, that there is no art without eccentricity, that Chelsea is the London Quartier Latin and that it is still possible to live la vie de Boheme. There is nothing, indeed, remotely suggesting Henri Miirger in Cheyne Walk.

In the Manor House which stood on part of what is now Cheyne Walk, Anne of Cleves, the German wife chosen for Henry VIII. by Thomas Cromwell, died in her bed, which must have been a matter of congratulation for a princess married to that matrimonial enthusiast. Poor Anne was too ugly for Henry's taste, and she plays her part in English history because the King's resentment against the Minister who had brought her to England was one of the causes that brought about the downfall of Cromwell, the most unmitigated ruffian who ever held a high place in English government.

Thomas More lived in a house on the site of what is now called Beaufort Row, near the end of Cheyne Walk. There he lived his pleasant family life with his books and his friends, among them Erasmus, Dean Colet and Holbein, until he was taken away for execution in the Tower because he would not admit that the King was the supreme head of the Church. More was one of the few saints of the Re- naissance, a kindly, humorous scholar. His life at Chelsea was ideal. " I have given you kisses enough," he said to

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one of his daughters, " but stripes hardly ever." It was at Mores Chelsea house that Erasmus wrote his Praise of Folly. More's own Utopia is a plea for toleration and liberty, and for those yoked to " a life so wretched that even a plant's life seems enviable." Such a humanist could not be tolerated by Henry VIII. and Thomas Cromwell, and it was inevitable that he should be taken from Chelsea by river to the executioner's block.

Swan House, still to be seen in Cheyne Walk, is a reminder of the famous Swan Tavern where Pepys, who never missed a place of entertainment in London, used frequently to go. The Swan Tavern is mentioned by Marryat in his novel Jacob Faithful. But the most famous refreshment house that Cheyne Walk ever knew was Don Saltero's, which was opened in 1695 as a coffee house and a museum. Don Saltero's right name was Salter, and by trade he was a barber, who played the fiddle and was an excellent mixer of punch. The museum consisted of a number of curiosities, many of which were given to Salter by Sir Hans Sloane. Steele devoted one whole number of the Tatler to Don Saltero, Swift refers to him, Smollett mentions the museum in Peregrine Pickle, and Benjamin Franklin paid a visit to the coffee house when he first came to London.

In the eighteenth century Chelsea Manor passed into the hands of Sir Hans Sloane, the famous physician and collector who, among other things, was the first doctor on whom a hereditary title was bestowed. His name, nowa- days, belongs to several streets in Chelsea. It is to him that London owes the preservation of the attractive Apothe- caries' Garden, a few minutes' walk from Cheyne Walk. Chelsea has many cherished possessions — a Royal Hospital, red-coated pensioners, great artists, humorous eccentrics — but the Apothecaries' Garden is certainly among the choicest. The garden has an interesting history. In the reign of James I. the London apothecaries broke away from the great Grocers' Company and formed a society of their own. The grocers attempted to persuade the King not to grant them a charter. But James, albeit he has been described as " the wisest fool in Christendom," made the common-sense observation that " grocers are not competent judges of the practice of medicine," and the charter was

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granted. The first thing that the new Society did was to buy a State barge and to build a house for it on the river- side at Chelsea. The ground round the house was planted with fruit trees and herbs, and the Apothecaries ' Garden came into existence. The first gardener was one Thomas Johnson, who lives in history because at his shop in Snow- hill he sold, in 1633, the first bunch of bananas that London had ever seen.

Sir Hans Sloane came to the help of the apothecaries when they were in financial straits, and secured the garden for them for ever. The extent of their experiments in culture in the eighteenth century is indicated in a letter from Horace Walpole in 1742, in which he says : " I forgot to tell you that I have left a particular commission with my brother Ned, who is at Chelsea, to get some tea seed from the Physic Garden/ 1 The Apothecaries ' Garden no longer runs down to the river, but it is a delightful and most useful institution which supplies rare plants to schools and colleges all over the country.

Cheyne Walk owes its name to Charles, Viscount Cheyne, who was Lord of the Manor of Chelsea towards the end of the seventeenth century. Turner lived at 119, and died there in 1851. Daniel Maclise lived and died at No. 4, and ten years after his death George Eliot died in the same house. No. 16 will always be associated with the pre - Raphaelite movement, for it was the home of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Ford Madox Brown, William Morris and Edward Burne- Jones stayed with him there.

The waterside at Chelsea is no longer picturesque. The old wharves and water stairs have given place to a wide, modern, entirely unromantic embankment. Yet Chelsea has an air. Just as it is said that houses carry with them in a queer way the suggestion of men and women who have lived in them in days long ago, so neighbourhoods are spiritually affected by their inhabitants. It is impossible to walk along Cheyne Walk in the mood that one has in traversing Belgrave Square, with its oppressive, dull prosperity. Its atmosphere has been affected for all time by Turner and Burne- Jones and Rossetti, by Whistler, who lived round the corner in Tite Street, as well as by old Thomas More, who loved learning and friendship and his God most of all.

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A hundred yards or so away from the opulence of Cheyne Walk is the narrow Cheyne Row, the aspect of which suggests hard living and high thinking, because all the world knows that it was once the home of Thomas Carlyle. But it was also, for a while, the home of Leigh Hunt, Charles Dickens's Harold Skimpole, who certainly suggests neither. His household, Carlyle said, was " hugger-mugger unthrift and sordid collapse. " Dickens cruelly lampooned Leigh Hunt, and Carlyle naturally could not understand him, but Shelley described him " as one of those happy souls who are the salt of the earth/ ' He was certainly feckless and knew nothing of business, but who loves him any the less for that ? On one occasion George Smith, the head of the publishing house of Smith & Elder, paid Leigh Hunt a cheque for some contribution to Cornhill. " What am I to do with this little bit of paper ? " asked the poet. Smith took the cheque back and changed it for bank notes, which Hunt accidentally burnt. He came back to the publisher in a great state of mind, stopping on the way to buy a delightful little statuette of Psyche. Publisher and poet went together to the Bank of England to see what could be done, and Smith has left an account of what happened :

" They kept us waiting for some time, and Leigh Hunt, who had meanwhile been staring all round the room, at last got up, walked to one of the staid officials, and address- ing him said in wondering tones, * And do you sit here all day and never see the woods and the trees and the charming country ? ' Then, in tone of remonstrance, he demanded, * Are you contented with such a life ? 1 All the time he was holding the little naked Psyche in one hand, and with his long hair and flashing eyes made a surprising figure/ '

The good and the bad, the Carlyles and the Leigh Hunts, the feckless and the thrifty, live side by side in great cities, and life has its priceless variety.

XVI

VILLIERS STREET

It would be difficult to find a meaner street in London than Villiers Street, the west side of which is now completely taken up by Charing Cross railway station and the staircase leading to Hungerford Bridge, almost the only footbridge that now crosses the Thames. Certainly it is the measure of Mr. Pennell's genius that he can find interest in this tawdry thoroughfare along which crowds hurry night and morning to the District Railway station at its southern end.

Hungerford Market stood on the site now occupied by Charing Cross station. The market was built in 1680, rebuilt in 1831 and removed in i860. At the end of the seventeenth century Sir Christopher Wren was one of its proprietors. Shortly before the end of its history the original Gatti, the first of a family of famous London restaurateurs, opened a shop in Hungerford Market, where Londoners were for the first time served with chops and steaks and ices on marble-topped tables while sitting on plush-covered seats. The enterprise was a success, and Gatti sent to Switzerland for two of his nephews, who became his waiters, and two brothers called Monico, who came from the same Italian Swiss canton to become his cooks. The Gatti nephews afterwards founded Gatti 's Restaurant in the Strand on premises which had formerly been a waxwork show, and the Monicos started the Cafe Monico at Piccadilly Circus. Nothing, perhaps, in a city's history has a greater human interest than the development of its restaurants. Nowadays Italian eating places with plush seats and marble-topped tables are to be found all over London, and it is one of Villiers Street's few distinctions to have possessed the first.

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Drab as the street is to-day, it has its little history. Evelyn took a house in Villiers Street for the winter of 1683, and Richard Steele of Spectator and Tatler fame lived there from 1 72 1 to 1724. But if Villiers Street itself is dull, it has its great neighbour. It is near the western boundary of the Adelphi, one of the most interesting and distinctive of London's possessions. Durham House, the residence of the Bishop of Durham, occupied the whole site of the Adelphi from the fourteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth. In the reign of Henry VIII. Cuthbert Tunstall, the then Bishop of Durham, conveyed Durham House to the King in exchange for another house in Cold Harbour, now Upper Thames Street. Tunstall was one of the men of the new learning and the friend of Erasmus and Thomas More. Henry VIII. granted the house to the Earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne Boleyn, and Anne spent part of her childhood at Durham House. On one occasion the King ordered Wiltshire to entertain Cranmer, " to the intent he may bee there quiet to accomplish my request and let him lack neither bookes, ne anything requisite for his studies."

Edward VI. gave Durham House to his sister Elizabeth, and after her succession she gave it to Walter Raleigh, and it remained in his possession for twenty years. " After he came to his greatness," wrote Aubrey the antiquary, " he lived there or in some apartment of it. I well remember his study which was on a little turret that looked into and over the Thames and had the prospect which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world." Durham House and the little turret have disappeared, but the prospect is as pleasant as ever. I have written at length of Raleigh in another part of this book, and all that need be added here is that it is probable that it was in Durham House that his servant saw Raleigh smoking a pipe and threw a tankard of spiced ale over his master's head lest he should be burnt to death.

The stabling of Durham House faced the Strand, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was converted into what was called the New Exchange or the New Burse, which consisted of two rows of shops, one above the other. The first edition of " Othello " was published in 1622, six years after Shakespeare's death, at " The Eagle and Child " in Brittans Burse. The New Exchange is mentioned in the

SHOPS, VILLIERS STREET

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Spectator, where it is complained that young fops spend half their time buying gloves in the shops.

" It is no small Addition to the Calamity, that the Rogues buy as hard as the plainest and modestest Customers they have ; besides which, they loll upon their Counters half an Hour longer than they need, to drive away other Customers, who are to share their Impertinencies with the Milliner, or go to another Shop."

In the year 1 667 Pepys visited the office of the Commis- sioners for Accounts in Durham Yard, which had been part of the grounds of Durham House. In his diary he records :

" Presently I was called in, where I found the whole number of Commissioners, and was there received with great respect and kindness ; and did give them great satis- faction, making it my endeavour to inform them what it was they were to expect from me, and what was the duty of other people ; this being my only way to preserve myself, after all my pains and trouble. They did ask many ques- tions, and demanded other books of me, which I did give them very ready and acceptable answers to ; and, upon the whole, I do observe they do go about their business like men resolved to go through with it, and in a very good method, like men of understanding/ '

Godfrey Kneller, the German portrait painter, lived in Durham Yard when he first came to England, and Garrick in his early twenties was in partnership there with his brother as a wine merchant. Samuel Foote, Garrick 's bitter-tongued rival, used to say that he remembered David when he lived in Durham Yard, " with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar calling himself a wine merchant."

The New Exchange provided a scene in the life of a famous Restoration beauty. The Duchess of Tyrconnel, finding herself without any income after a long absence from England, hired one of the stalls " above stairs at the New Exchange in the Strand," where she sold " small articles of haberdashery." She wore a white dress and a white mask and was known as the white milliner. The Duchess of Tyrconnel was the famous Frances Jennings, sister-in-law of the Duke of Marlborough and one of the maids of honour at the Court of Charles II. Evelyn describes her as " a sprightly young lady," and Pepys tells of her mad freaks. She astounded de Grammont by her virtue and pride,

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successfully resisting the advances both of the King and his brother the Duke of York. He says in his memoirs :

" Although from her great vivacity one might suppose that she was not capable of much reflection, yet she had furnished herself with some very salutary maxims for the conduct of a young person of her age. The first was, that a lady ought to be young to enter the court with advantage, and not old to leave it with a good grace : that she could not maintain herself there, but by a glorious resistance, or by illustrious foibles ; and that in so dangerous a situation, she ought to use her utmost endeavours not to dispose of her heart, until she gave her hand."

Frances Jennings married as her second husband Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, who is so fiercely attacked by Macaulay in his history. After her adventure in the New Exchange, she was allowed to go to Dublin, where she died in 1 73 1 and was buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

By the year 1768 the whole of the streets on what had been Durham House had fallen into dreadful decay, and in that year the brothers Adam, two Scotch architects, obtained possession of the estate from the Duke of St. Albans and started to build what has since been called the Adelphi. They had to contend with many difficulties. They had to obtain a special act of Parliament. They were opposed by the usual vested interests that stand in the way of all city improvements. But they were Scotch and persistent. Their money failed before the scheme was completed, but they contrived to raise over two hundred thousand pounds by means of a lottery.

Horace Walpole described the Adelphi buildings as " warehouses laced down the seams like a soldier's frill in a regimental old coat." The Adams were continually attacked on account of their nationality. The following is a con- temporary lampoon :

Four Scotchmen, by the name of Adams, Who keep their coaches and their madams, Quoth John, in sulky mood, to Thomas, Have stole the very river from us ! O Scotland, long has it been said, Thy teeth are sharp for English bread ; What ! seize our bread and water too, And use us worse than jailors do : 'Tis true, 'tis hard ; 'tis hard 'tis true.

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Ye friends of George, and friends of James,

Envy us not our River Thames ;

Thy Princess, fond of raw-boned faces,

May give you all our posts and places ;

Take all to gratify your pride,

But dip your oatmeal in the Clyde.

The Society of Arts, which still has its home in John Street, Adelphi, first moved there in 1774. Samuel Johnson appeared before the Society of Arts, oddly enough making a speech on mechanics. The speech was not a success, Johnson himself admitting that " all my flowers of oratory forsook me."

Mr. Wilfred Whitten has called the Society of Arts " the whipper-in of the industrial age." He says :

" The Society, for example, has at one time or another set itself to increase the supply of pickled sturgeon at Billingsgate, to standardize the number of vibrations for the middle C of the pianoforte, to introduce public lava- tories to London, to stimulate the straw bonnet industry, to promote the cultivation of rhubarb, to find an invariable standard of weights and measures, to establish a botanic garden in the Bahamas, to improve medals, varnish, milk- cans, and the curing of herrings, to improve the four- wheeled cab, to fix memorial tablets, to instruct soldiers in shorthand, to provide English children with paint-boxes, to evolve an improved machine for slicing turnips, and to accomplish a thousand tasks as worthy in all the fields of art and industry."

David Garrick spent the last seven years of his life in a house on Adelphi Terrace, where Dr. Johnson often visited him, and there he died in 1779. Garrick 's funeral pro- cession must have been the most wonderful pageant that the Adelphi ever saw, as it wended its way from Adelphi Terrace by Adam Street into the Strand. I quote the description at length from the late Austin Brereton's History of the Adelphi :

" First of all, came four porters on horseback, their staffs, or wands of office, covered with black silk and scarves. Then came six other men, with mourning cloaks, followed by another official bearing a heavily-draped pennon. Then came other six men carrying a surcoat of arms, a helmet with crest, wreath, and mantlet. A state lid of

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black ostrich feathers, surrounded by escutcheons, immedi- ately preceded the hearse, which was ' full-dressed ' — that is to say, it bore at each corner and on the sides waving black ostrich plumes. A state-coach, empty, and with a page on each side, was followed by a mourning coach con- taining the clergy from St. Martin 's-in-the-Fields. Then came six more mourning coaches ' with the pall-bearers, two in each coach, six pages on each side. A ditto, with the chief mourners, a page on each side. A ditto, with three family ditto. A ditto, with three physicians. A ditto, with surgeon and apothecaries, a page on each side. A ditto, with Messrs. Sheridan and Harris, a page on each side. Three ditto, with a deputation of twelve gentlemen, performers from Drury-Lane theatre, three pages on each side. Two men in mourning, on horseback with cloaks, etc. Three ditto, with a deputation of twelve gentlemen, performers from Covent-garden theatre, three pages on each side. Two men in mourning, on horseback with cloaks, etc. Four mourning coaches, with the members of the literary club, four pages on each side. Two men in mourning, on horseback, with cloaks. Seven coaches with intimate friends of the deceased, seven pages on each side. Mr. Garrick's coach, empty. All the gentlemen's family coaches, empty.' The body was received at the great west door of the Abbey, about three o'clock, by the Bishop of Rochester, Dean of Westminster, who, attended by the clergy and choir, preceded the corpse up the centre aisle, during which time Purcell's funeral music was played and sung."

Johnson and Burke were among the mourners. Two years after her husband's death, Mrs. Garrick gave a dinner party in Adelphi Terrace, the guests including Johnson, Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Burney and Hannah More. Boswell records : " In addition to a splendid entertainment we were regaled with Lichfield ale which has a peculiar appropriate value."

In the summer of 1780 Dr. Graham, a Scottish quack, was living in the middle house on Adelphi Terrace. He called his house " The Temple of Health," where he advertised he had the honour " of explaining the true nature and effects of electricity, of air, music and magnetism when applied to the human body." " Vestina, the rosy

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goddess of health, " presided at the doctor's lectures, and Vestina was Emma Lyon, afterwards Emma Hamilton, Nelson's mistress.

Tom Hood lived in chambers at 2 Robert Street, Adelphi, where he was visited by Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. The Adelphi was very familiar to Dickens, and it was at Osborne's Hotel, now the Adelphi Hotel, that, at the end of the Pickwick Papers , Mr. Wardle found Mr. Snodgrass hiding in his bedroom, and was virtuously indignant until Mrs. Winkle put things right, and the evening ended as all evenings do in the Pickwick Papers.

Gibbon stayed at Osborne's Hotel when he came back from Switzerland with the completed manuscript of the Decline and Fall. So did George Crabbe, and in the same rooms the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands died of smallpox in 1824.

The Adelphi Arches are still under the Adelphi streets, dark and mysterious, as they have been called, a subter- ranean city. Thomas Hardy lived for a time in Adelphi Terrace when he was practising as an architect. Mr. Bernard Shaw and Sir James Barrie live there now, and on Adelphi Terrace is situated the Savage Club, the members of which strive hard to persuade themselves that Bohemian- ism has not yet gone down before the advance of a civilisa- tion that cares nothing for good cheer.

The Adelphi proper is bounded on the west side by Buckingham Street and York Buildings, and between them and Villiers Street used to stand York House, associated with Francis Bacon and the Duke of Buckingham, the bad genius of Charles I. York House has disappeared, but the beautiful water-gate, designed by Inigo Jones, remains. Pepys lived in Buckingham Street from 1684 to 1700.

When Peter the Great came to England in 1698, he stayed in a house overlooking the water-gate, where every night, when he returned home from the Deptford ship- yards, he refreshed himself with a pint of brandy seasoned with cayenne pepper. Rousseau and Hume once quarrelled in Buckingham Street.

What a medley of ghosts ! Bacon and Buckingham, Johnson and Garrick, Rousseau and Peter the Great, with the ubiquitous Pepys gossiping to them all.

XVII

THE STRAND

The new Strand of Mr. Pennell's drawing has already become the old Strand, for no street in London, with the exception of Regent Street, has been more affected by post- war destruction and rebuilding. The Strand, which runs eastwards from Charing Cross station to Temple Bar, has several curious characteristics. It does not, for example, contain one draper's shop. There is nowhere in the Strand where a woman can buy a reel of cotton or a yard of tape. It is a street of theatres, restaurants and innumerable hosiers. There must be twice as many hosiers in the Strand as in any other street in London of the same length. There are unfathomable mysteries in every city, and I have never been able to understand why the draper care- fully avoids the Strand, while hosiers flock to it in whole battalions.

Until the reign of Henry VIII. the Strand was an un- paved road between Westminster and London. In the days when it was unsafe for nobles to live outside the city walls, bishops, whose persons were sacred, could safely build their houses on this London- Westminster road. Eight of them, indeed, lived there at the time of the Reformation — the Bishops of Exeter, Bath, LlandafF, Chester, Carlisle, Durham, Worcester and the Archbishop of York. It is sad to note the too evident fact that the bishops did not leave the Strand any heritage of saintliness, though it still possesses two churches.

After the Reformation, the Protector, Somerset, built himself a palace on the site of the present Somerset House, and the great Lord Burghley lived on the site of the present Exeter Street.

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THE NEW STRAND

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The Strand acquired something like its present character in 1829. Coutts 's Bank, which represents high finance in the Strand, was established in the middle of the eigh- teenth century. The house was originally called Campbell & Coutts, and the male line of the Coutts became extinct in 1822. I have always liked to think of the precise noble- man who wrote to Messrs. Coutts to apologise for the fact that by inadvertence he had allowed his current account to fall below five hundred pounds, and that such a thing should never occur again.

The original Coutts, the son of a Lord Provost of Edinburgh, married the niece of a London banker, and the firm of Campbell & Coutts came into existence at 59 Strand in 1754. When Campbell died, the first Coutts took his brother Thomas into partnership, and the brother inherited the {whole business in 1778. Many stories are told of Thomas Coutts, known as " the richest man in London.' ' By his first wife he had three daughters, one of whom married Sir Francis Burdett, the father of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. His second wife was Harriot Mellon, the actress, to whom he left his fortune, and who after his death married the Duke of St. Albans. Sir Walter Scott spoke of her as " a kind friendly woman without either affectation or insolence in the display of her wealth,' ' but she was certainly ostentatious. Lockhart describes a visit that she paid to Scott at Abbotsford. She arrived with a train of three carriages, each drawn by four horses, and she was attended by her future husband, the Duke of St. Albans, one of his sisters, who acted as her lady-in-waiting, two physicians, and a host of servants, including two lady's maids. The Duchess left her whole fortune to her step- daughter, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. 59 Strand was on the south side. The Bank crossed the road some years ago, and the old premises are now pulled down. Coutts 's have had many famous customers, — Pitt, Walter Scott, Welling- ton, Nelson, Charles James Fox, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, to say nothing of all the English kings since George III.

For generations the Strand has been the centre of theatrical and Bohemian London. In it and near it were many famous taverns, including Simpson's, which still re- mains, and the Albion, situated a hundred yards or so to

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the north of the Strand, where Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins often dined in the fifties and sixties of last century. The Bohemianism of the street was emphasised by the fact that the Insolvent Debtors Court stood on the site after- wards occupied by the Strand Theatre and now by a Tube railway station. Thirty years ago there were seven theatres and one music-hall in the Strand. Nowadays there are five theatres and a monstrous cinema house.

The Adelphi was first opened in 1806, and was originally called the Sans Pareil. Some years later the famous play " Tom and Jerry " was produced there, and a few years afterwards Sir Walter Scott had a financial interest in the theatre, with the result that he lost nearly two thousand pounds. In its palmiest days the Adelphi was the home of robustious melodrama, and it was just outside its stage-door that William Terriss, the most famous of melodramatic heroes, was murdered.

At the Vaudeville, a little farther east, Sir Henry Irving made his first London success in 1870 as Digby Grant in James Albery's " The Two Roses." It was here, too, that the famous Victorian farce " Our Boys " was produced by three actors called Tom Thorne, David James and Henry Montague. David James was a Jew, and Montague had very impressive manners, and the trio were known on the stage as " the Jew, the Gent and the Gentile."

The first Lyceum Theatre was built in 1765, provided a miscellaneous entertainment, and was a sort of cross between a Mechanics' Institute and Madame Tussaud's. Charles Dibdin, the writer of sea songs, gave his musical entertainment in the original Lyceum. It is said that Dibdin 's sea ditties, " 'Twas in the Good Ship Rover," " Saturday Night at Sea," and the immortal " Tom Bowling," vastly stimulated the spirit of the navy during the French wars, and it is a historic fact that for his patriotic services Dibdin was given a Government pension of two hundred a year.

The Lyceum was burnt down and rebuilt in 1830. Part of the site of the new theatre had been occupied before by a menagerie. The genius of Sir Henry Irving has given the Lyceum Theatre a prominent place in theatrical records. He gave back dignity to the theatre, attracting to the Lyceum all the intellectuals of his time. Irving was indeed

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a great man. In his old age he was tremendously im- pressive. He had imagination and enthusiasm, and with them a more bitter sardonic wit than any other man whom I have known.

The Gaiety Theatre was first built in 1868 and rebuilt in 1903. In its early days it was largely associated with burlesques, those remarkable Victorian entertainments in which atrocious puns had so large a part. It was at the Gaiety that W. S. Gilbert's first serious comedy, " An Old Score/ ' and the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, " Thespis, or The Gods grown Old," were produced. It was at the Gaiety that Charles Mathews made his last appearances on the stage, and where Sarah Bernhardt was first seen in London. It was at the Gaiety in the nineties that musical comedy was invented, a fact for which there is perhaps no reason to be grateful, except that the musical comedies of a generation ago were one degree less banal than the revues of to-day.

On part of what is now the Gaiety site there used to stand the office of Household Words, of which Charles Dickens was the editor, and the Gaiety was the last theatre which Dickens visited. He went there in 1869 to see a play called " Uncle Dick's Darling." One of the characters, Mr. Chevenix, was played by Henry Irving, and Dickens saw in it a reflection of his own Mr. Dombey.

The Savoy Theatre was built in 1881 by Mr. D'Oyly Carte, particularly for the production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which had already established themselves in popular favour. Gilbert, as Mr. William Archer has said, restored the literary self-respect of the English stage," and since the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are now recognised as among the theatre's choicest possessions, the Savoy Theatre, where so many of them had their birth, has a position of the first importance among English playhouses.

The Tivoli was an " old-fashioned music-hall," with a performance lasting from eight till eleven, no one performer remaining for more than ten minutes or so on the stage. In my time the English music-hall has, I think, produced quite as much genuine histrionic ability as the theatre, if not more, and it is impossible not to feel regret for the passing of an institution in which artists like Dan Leno, Albert Chevalier and Marie Lloyd found their home. Alas, the

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old order changes, giving place to the new. The comic singer is ousted by the cinema.

Newspaper land, refusing to confine itself within its own Fleet Street, overflows into the Strand with the Morning Post, which generations ago was inspired by Lord Palmerston and now stands for die-hard Toryism. It used to extend still farther west to the office of the Globe, which now has disappeared.

The Strand is a street of many restaurants, (jatti's was once a waxwork show. Romano's, founded by a particu- larly shrewd Italian, was in the eighties and nineties of last century the favourite resort of theatrical and journalistic Bohemians, feckless folk, the males of them generally alcoholic enthusiasts. Simpson's retains something of the character of the old-fashioned English tavern, eschewing kickshaws and confining itself to roast and boiled. The two great Strand hotels, overwhelming in their gorgeous modernity, have no interest and suggest no dream.

Of the two Strand churches, the most western, St. Mary-le- Strand, was consecrated in 1723, and was built by the architect of St. Martin 's-in-the- Fields. Pope says in his Dunciad —

Amid that area wide they took their stand, Where the tall Maypole once o'er-looked the Strand. But now (so Anne and piety ordain), A church collects the saints of Drury Lane.

St. Clement Danes has a much longer history. Accord- ing to Stow the church derives its name from the fact that a Danish king was buried in it. The present church was built in 1680 and restored in 1879. Evelyn calls it " that prettily built and contrived church, " and Dr. Johnson regularly attended its services, sitting near the pulpit in the north gallery. The fact is commemorated by a particularly futile statue of Johnson, behind the railings at the church's eastern end.

During his stay in England — 1 726-1 729 — Voltaire lodged over a French barber's in Maiden Lane, just north of the Strand. From there he wrote to Swift and visited Congreve in his house in Surrey Street on the Strand's south side.

XVIII

THE LAW COURTS

It is singularly appropriate that the Law Courts — " a massive pile," as the house agents would say, at the extreme eastern end of the Strand — should be externally not without a certain dignity, but internally a maze of tortuous passages and dark corners. The style of the building, which was finished in 1883, is described as " early continental Gothic," whatever that may be. As you enter by the broad entrance into the central hall, the building's spaciousness and fine lines impress you and you say, " Here's dignity, here's a proper home for justice." Then you turn to the right or to the left and find yourself in dingy corridors that at once suggest meanness and intrigue and silly subtlety, and if you have, for your sins, experience of the ways of lawyers and the pitfalls of the law, you will instinctively feel that the architect builded better than he knew. The maze of the law courts, the scared appearance of litigants and witnesses, the hard indifference of the counsel, the perkiness of lawyers' clerks, the kin of the persistent Mr. Guppy, all suggest to me that the lawyer would find no place in a sane society, for to the layman it appears that the chief business of the lawyer is to twist the law either into ineffec- tiveness or into gross injustice. Beneficent legislation is devised and placed on the Statute Book, but rarely does its administration carry out its intentions. The lawyer sees to that. It would be a thousand times better, too, for the litigant, if judge and counsel were not bound together by the ties of a common profession, and if the layman was not the obvious sport of the expert. The condemnation of the administration of justice in England lies in the fact that it is commonly and properly considered sheer madness to bring actions in the law courts unless you are compelled. Litigation

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is grossly expensive. Decisions depend far too much on the temper and character of the judge. But perhaps it is all for the best, because a greater confidence in the law courts would certainly lead to an increase in quarrels and disputes.

The practice of the law appears to lead either to brazen bullying — Serjeant Buzfuz still has a large practice at the Bar — or to dried-up mustiness. The late Charles Gill was once standing outside the Law Courts with the late Montagu Williams, both of them lawyers who, as by a miracle, had contrived to retain a measure of their humanity. Two Lords of Appeal, prematurely old gentlemen with parchment faces, drove by in a brougham, wrapped up in heavy rugs. " That, Charles/ ' said Williams, " is what they call success in life."

The Law Courts are just over forty years old, and they possess no ghosts of the smallest interest to me. I cannot think of a single spirit of recently departed judges or counsel with which it would please me to converse . Westminster Hall , however, that noble Norman building in which justice was administered before the Law Courts were built, has many fine associations. Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were con- demned to death at Westminster Hall, as were Strafford and Charles I., and it was the scene of the trial of those great and good men, the seven bishops. Before their removal in 1883, there were in Westminster Hall at its western end, the Court of Queen's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Wards and Liveries, and the Court of Requests. Before 1883 the Chancery Courts sat in Lincoln's Inn Hall, as all readers of Bleak House will remember, and certain other causes were tried in the city. For example, that famous trial of Bardell v. Pickwick was heard in the Guildhall.

It was convenient for the public, and to a much larger extent for the lawyers, that the Courts should all be housed under one roof in a building close to the Inns of Court, and it is, I admit, pleasant for the monotony of modern costume to be broken in the Strand by hurrying lawyers in wigs and bands. But I dread experts, and legal experts most of all. Peter the Great was amazed when he saw the number of lawyers in Westminster Hall. " I have only two lawyers in all my kingdom/' he said, " and when I get home I intend to hang one of them." Not without reason was Peter called the Great.

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XIX

THE TEMPLE

It is one of the ironies of London that the precedent-loving lawyer, the most prosaic of men, should have toiled with his dull briefs for centuries in one of the most romantic spots in the whole city. The Temple was from 1184 to 13 13 the home of the Knights Templars, the warrior monks, unmatched in history for courage and for pride, who were the bulwark of Europe against the Moslems both in the Near East and in Spain. Ten years after the suppression of the Templars, the Temple was leased to the students of the Common Law, and in the reign of James I. the pro- perty was made over to the Benchers of the two societies of the Inner and the Middle Temple and their successors for ever. The chief relic of the Knights Templars is the Temple Church, which just escaped from the Great Fire, the flames almost reaching its eastern walls. Alas, for the vandalism of our immediate ancestors, the Temple Church was spoiled a hundred years ago by abominable restorations.

The entrances to the Inner and Middle Temples are almost side by side. The Middle Temple entrance was erected by Wren, the Inner Temple entrance, drawn by Mr. Pennell, is older. It was built in the reign of James I. It was Shakespeare, or whoever else wrote the first part of " King Henry VI.," who made the Temple Gardens the scene of the brawl between Plantagenet and Somerset that was the beginning of the Wars of the Roses.

This brawl to-day, Grown to this faction in the Temple garden, Shall send, between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night.

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Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remem- bered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities. The unpopularity of lawyers is no new thing. In the second part of " King Henry VI./ ' in the scene between Jack Cade and his associates, occur the lines :

Dick. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Cade. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment ? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man ? Some say, the bee stings : but I say, 'tis the bee's wax, for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

It was to the Inns of Court that Cade directed his followers, and in another popular revolt Wat Tyler burnt the lawyers' books in Fleet Street. Apart altogether from law and lawyers, and the names of few of them are any- thing more than names, the Temple has a host of interest- ing associations. Dr. Johnson lived in what is now called Johnson's Buildings from 1760 to 1765. Boswell visited him there. He says :

" 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 the 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 particulars were forgotten the moment he began to talk."

In 1775 Charles Lamb was born at 2 Crown Office Row. The iron gates, which are dated 1730, leading to the gardens opposite the house are exactly as they were when Lamb was a small boy. He himself has said : "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 place ?— these are my oldest recollections." To Charles Lamb the Temple was the most delightful place In London. In February 1801 he went with his sister Mary to live at 16 Mitre Court Buildings, and they stayed in the Temple for sixteen years. In a letter written to Manning he said :

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" When you come to see me, mount up to the top of the stairs. I hope you are not asthmatical — and come in flannel for it's pure airy up there. And bring your glass, and I will show you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river, so as by perking up upon my haunches, and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the King's Bench Walks as I lie in my bed." Mary Lamb loved the Temple. " I wish to live and die in the Temple where I was born/' she said, but in 1817 she and her brother were forced to move to Great Russell Street owing to the bad state of their rooms. Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, " I thought we could never have been torn up from the Temple. In- deed it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth now 'tis out and I am easy. We never can strike root so deep in any other ground."

Goldsmith lived at 2 Brick Court, over the chambers of Sir William Blackstone, the famous lawyer, where he died in 1774. Eighty years afterwards Thackeray had chambers in the same house. He writes in his English Humourists : " 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 all men was dead within the black oak door." Goldsmith had lived before at 3 King's Bench Walk, where Sir Joshua Reynolds dined with him one night in 1765.

George Canning had chambers in Paper Buildings, and Samuel Rogers, the banker poet, lived there before removing to St. James's Place, the scene of his famous breakfasts. Chaucer was a student at the Middle Temple, so, at one time or another, were Sir Walter Raleigh, John Ford the dramatist, Congreve, Edmund Burke, Sheridan and Tom Moore, a wondrous company if one could have met them all together. Dickens, who knew the Temple well, placed one of his few effective love scenes by the Temple fountain. After Mr. Pecksniff had been found out and, as he said, had been struck by old Martin " with a walking-stick, which I have every reason to believe has knobs upon it, on that delicate and exquisite portion of the human anatomy, the

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brain," Ruth Pinch and John Westlock took a walk by the Temple fountain :

" Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion came towards it.

" And why they came towards the Fountain at all is a mystery ; for they had no business there. It was not in their way. It was quite out of their way. They had no more to do with the Fountain, bless you, than they had with — with love, or any out of the way thing of that sort.

" It was all very well for Tom and his sister to make appointments by the Fountain, but that was quite another affair. Because, of course, when she had to wait a minute or two, it would have been very awkward for her to have had to wait in any but a tolerably quiet spot ; and that was as quiet a spot, everything considered, as they could choose. But when she had John Westlock to take care of her, and was going home with her arm in his (home being in a different direction altogether), their coming anywhere near that Fountain, was quite extraordinary.' '

So in the Temple, though lawyers have been there for so many centuries, we can forget them and their parchments that Jack Cade hated and the briefs that so often cause confusion, and recall the Templars and honest old Johnson, and Goldsmith and gentle Charles Lamb, and little Ruth Pinch. It seems to me, indeed, that no London scene is quite complete unless it carries with it some touch of the magic of Dickens, the greatest Londoner of them all.

XX

LINCOLN'S INN

Great lawyers have for generations passed in and out of the gateway of Lincoln's Inn, but to me the Inn is most closely associated with poor, crazy Miss Flite, the victim of the dilatoriness of the Court of Chancery, which Dickens pilloried in Bleak House, The Court of Chancery is no longer dilatory, but Miss Flite still haunts Lincoln's Inn. In the Temple, law may be exciting and thrilling. In its chambers barristers consult with solicitors concerning murders and other human occurrences. But Lincoln's Inn is the home of the conveyancer, often musty-looking and generally with a musty soul. There is a fine passage in Bleak House which summarises the spirit of the Inn :

" It is night in Lincoln's Inn — perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day — and fat candles are snuffed out in offices, and clerks have rattled down the crazy wooden stairs, and dispersed. The bell that rings at nine o'clock, has ceased its doleful clangour about nothing ; the gates are shut ; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a mighty power of sleep, keeps guard in his lodge. From tiers of staircase windows, clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a fathomless pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at the stars. In dirty upper casements, here and there, hazy little patches of candle light reveal where some wise draughtsman and conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of real estate in meshes of sheepskin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of sheep to an acre of land. Over which bee-like industry, these benefactors of their species linger yet, though office-hours be past ; that they may give, for every day, some good account at last."

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Lincoln's Inn is chock-full of literary associations. On the gateway in Chancery Lane, through which Mr. Stephen McKenna, who lives in the Inn, frequently passes, Ben Jonson worked as a bricklayer with a trowel in one hand and a Horace in the other. Afterwards " some gentlemen, pitying that his parts should be buried under the rubbish of so mean a calling, did of their own bounty manumize him freely to follow his own ingenious inclinations.' 9 Thomas More, wittiest of the saints, was a student of Lincoln's Inn ; so was Dr. Donne, poet and Dean of St. Paul's, whose sermons are sufficient to prove that the com- bination of gloominess and deans is by no means modern.

Lincoln's Inn was closely associated with the Puritan revolution. William Prynne, the fiercely fanatic author of Histriomastix, was a bencher and was buried in Lincoln's Inn chapel. His book is dedicated to the " Right Christian Generous Young Gentlemen Students of the 4 Famous Innes of Court and Especially Those of Lincoln's Inne." Another Puritan student was Colonel Hutchinson, the Memoirs of whose life written by his wife are among the most interesting human documents of the seventeenth century. Rarely has a woman raised a more enduring monument to a man's memory. " A naked undressed narrative speaking the simple truth of him, will deck him with more substantial glory, than all the panegyrics the best pen could ever con- centrate to the virtues of the best men." Hutchinson found the study of the law unpleasant and contrary to his genius, and so a century afterwards did Horace Walpole, who was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 175 1. " I never went thither," he says, " not caring for the profession." There is a tradi- tion that Oliver Cromwell was a student at Lincoln's Inn, and his dull son Richard certainly studied there. Matthew Hale, who defended both Archbishop Laud and Strafford, and who was afterwards Chief Justice, was a member of Lincoln's Inn. A voluminous writer, he is eulogised by Cowper in The Task :

Immortal Hale ! for deep discernment praised, And sound integrity, not more than famed For sanctity of manners undefiled.

Pitt and Canning were both Lincoln's Inn students. So was David Garrick, the actor, anticipating H. B. Irving in deserting the brief for the buskin.

LINCOLN'S INN GATEWAY

LINCOLN'S INN »3

A great and interesting procession has passed through the Lincoln's Inn gateway^ in Chancery Lane, over which hovera thf ghost of Ben )onson with pm*^** hnnW and the entrance from Lincoln s Inn fields mat Ml - Pennell l£s drawn. But in Lincoln's Inn I remember Miss Flite best of all.

XXI

FETTER LANE

Fetter Lane is a narrow, grubby and busy thoroughfare, and it is pleasant to remember, as one makes one's way with many jostlings from Fleet Street to Holborn, that Fetter Lane was once the site of one of London's most famous gardens. It belonged to Gerard, the Elizabethan naturalist, and in Fetter Lane he grew daffodils, and violets, and gillyflowers, and rosemary and thyme. No gardener was ever a greater enthusiast. He says in his famous Herbal : " What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants as with a robe of embroidered works, set with Orient pearls and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels ? But these delights end with the outward senses. The principal delight is of the mind, singularly enriched with the knowledge of these invisible things, setting forth to us the wisdom and ad- mirable workmanship of Almighty God."

Gerard was a barber-surgeon, but he was more interested in gardening than in his own profession. He was for a time a neighbour of Shakespeare, and it is more than likely that Shakespeare often walked with Gerard in the Fetter Lane Garden, and that he may have learnt from him the herb lore that is so evident in his plays. In his Herbal Gerard gives a fascinating list of the wild flowers that grew in London in Tudor times. There was bugloss to be picked in Piccadilly, mullein at Highgate, the yellow pimpernel at Highgate and Hampstead, sagittaria in the Tower Ditch, white saxifrage at Islington, water ivy at Bermondsey, and dozens of other wild flowers that have disappeared not only from London but from England.

To-day Fetter Lane certainly does not suggest wild

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flowers, but when one remembers that they grew there generations ago, one feels that its ugliness has been forced upon it against its better nature. According to Stow, Fetter Lane derived its name from the fact that it was the home of the Feuters, the idle people. It was apparently the Grosvenor Square of the fourteenth century. Strafford, who lives in history from the policy of " Thorough/ ' which was finally his own undoing, had a house in Fetter Lane, and so had that unattractive Puritan, Praise-God Barebone. Dryden lived there, as did Tom Paine, the author of The Rights of Man. In the life of Lord Eldon, the great Tory Lord Chancellor, there is a story which reminds us of the inconveniences of the " good old days." Lord Eldon and his brother were staying at the White Horse at the Holborn end of Fetter Lane and one night went to Drury Lane Theatre. He records : " There were then few hackney coaches and we got both into one sedan chair. Turning out of Fleet Street into Fetter Lane there was a sort of contest between our chairmen and some persons who were going up Fleet Street whether they should first pass Fleet Street, or we in our chair first get out of Fleet Street into Fetter Lane. In the struggle the sedan chair was overset with us in it."

Fetter Lane used to own a garden ; now it owns a Record Office, a modern building of dignity and a certain beauty, that houses the original documents in which the history of England may be read. The Record Office stands on the site of the Rolls Chapel, which was rebuilt by Inigo Jones, and in which at one time or another Dr. Donne, Butler the frigid theologian and Burnet the eager Whig politician preached their sermons. While the Rolls Chapel was used for religious purposes, the Master of the Rolls sometimes held his Court in it, and there, too, were stored documents of great value. The records of the Chancery Court were kept in presses underneath the worshippers' seats. The Public Record Office was finished in 1899, and it now contains all the national archives that were previously kept in the Tower, the Chapter House, Westminster Abbey, and in dozens of other places. In the Record Office, one may find the original Domesday Book, and letters of Chaucer, the Black Prince, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Essex, Raleigh, Nelson, and Napoleon. Here too are the originals

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of all the treaties between England and foreign powers, the log-books of the ships of the Royal Navy, the despatches of Marlborough, Wellington and other great generals. Here are the State papers of Wolsey and Thomas Crom- well, and the confessions of many traitors including Guy Fawkes. Here too is one of the few magnificent statues that London possesses, the effigy and tomb of Dr. John Yonge, Master of the Rolls in the reign of Henry VIII., executed by the Italian sculptor Torrigiano. And here in this fine building lawyers come every day to discover the rights of property in an age which thinks so much more of the rights of men, and industrious old gentlemen endeavour to find honourable pedigrees for profiteers.

Certainly the new Record Office is a monument of interest, but when I walk up Fetter Lane (I do it as rarely as possible) I prefer to think of Gerard strolling with Shakespeare along the paths of his garden, showing the poet his violets and his gillyflowers, his rosemary and his thyme.

XXII

FLEET STREET

Sir Philip Gibbs has called Fleet Street the ' ' Street of Ad venture.' ' It might well be called the Street of Tragedy. Since Robert Pynson, Caxton's apprentice, set up a printing press at Temple Bar in 1492, and produced the first book printed in London away from Westminster, Fleet Street has been intimately associated with books and newspapers. Almost all London newspapers are now published either in the Street itself or in some of the side turnings that run off it. Fleet is the Street of the journalist, and failure is easier and more common in journalism than in any other profession. It rejects the commonplace and breaks the weak, and the tragedies of Fleet Street, petty tragedies but pitiful, would fill many volumes — heart-breaks following high hopes, struggles with poverty, the scenes of which move from the barred doors of newspaper offices to dull little suburban villas with half-filled larders.

No street in London has a more interesting history. It was here, in the reign of Charles I., that Francis Child, in the accepted manner of the industrious apprentice, married his rich master's daughter and founded the famous Child's Bank, which counted among its early customers Charles II., Nell Gwynne, Pepys and Dryden. When Nell Gwynne died, by the way, she owed her bankers £6900, from which fact it is clear that overdrafts are not a modern institution. Hoare's Bank now stands on the site of the Mitre Tavern, where Johnson was oft^n to be found. At the Devil Tavern, which was next door to Child's Bank, Ben Jonson and his cronies used to meet, and years afterwards Swift and Addison dined there, to be followed in after years by Dr. Johnson, who remains the greatest of Fleet Street worthies. The last of the old Fleet Street taverns, the

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Cock, which stood on the north side of the street, was pulled down in 1886. It will be remembered that domestic trouble occurred when the amorous Pepys took the pretty Mrs. Knipp to the Cock and " was mighty merry till almost midnight. "

Goldsmith lived in Wine Office Court near the Cheshire Cheese Tavern, where hero-worshipping Americans gaze at the seat reputed to have been regularly occupied by Dr. Johnson. It was in Wine Office Court that Johnson and Goldsmith first met. The friendship between the two men was very real. It is possible, as Boswell suggests, that Goldsmith, a sensitive excitable Irishman, was sometimes a little jealous of Johnson's fame, but to no man was the literary dictator so sympathetic and helpful. Leslie Stephen well described him as " a rough but helpful elder brother," and Goldsmith's famous " he has nothing of the bear but his skin " shows that he thoroughly appreciated his friend's character. Johnson's appreciation of Goldsmith's literary genius was unbounded. " He was a man," he said, " who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any other man could do." In the riot of conversation that surrounded Johnson, Goldsmith could only play an ineffective part. " He wrote like an angel but talked like poor Poll," said Garrick, but he was perhaps the most lovable man in the Johnson circle. Austin Dobson has left an admirable summary of his character :

" He had been an idle, orchard-robbing schoolboy ; a tuneful but intractable sizar of Trinity ; a lounging, loiter- ing, fair-haunting, flute-playing Irish * buckeen.' He had tried both Law and Divinity, and crossed the threshold of neither. He had started for London and stopped at Dublin ; he had set out for America and arrived at Cork. He had been many things — a medical student, a strolling musician, a corrector of the press, an apothecary, an usher at a Peckham * academy.' Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly wasted his time. And yet, as things fell out, it is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experiences were not of more service to him than any he could have obtained if his progress had been less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expectations of his family, he would probably have remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking out his ' forty pounds a year ' by farming a field or two, migrating

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contentedly at the fitting season from the * blue bed to the brown/ and (it may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon the tradition of some youthful couplets to a pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. As it was, if he could not be said ' to have seen life steadily, and seen it whole/ he had, at all events, inspected it pretty narrowly in parts ; and, at a time when he was most impressible, had preserved the impress of many things which, in his turn, he was to re-impress upon his writings. 1 No man ' — says one of his biographers — * ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith/ To his last hour he was drawing upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of that * unhallowed time ' when, to all appearance, he was hopelessly squandering his opportunities

Izaak Walton lived for eight years in Fleet Street, where he had an ironmongery shop near the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West. Baxter used to preach in the old church. It is interesting to recall that St. Dunstan's marks the western limit of the Great Fire of London.

Izaak Walton was born in 1593 and died in 1683. He thus lived in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., under the Commonwealth, and under Charles II. He was a High Churchman and a Royalist, but his peaceful life was passed through all these political changes in perfect tran- quillity and in apparent content. After he had settled in Fleet Street, he became on terms of close friendship with Dr. Donne, the poet, who was then Vicar of St. Dunstan's- in-the-West and afterwards became Dean of St. Paul's. Walton's life in Fleet Street was marred by much domestic trouble. While he was living there he lost seven children, his wife and his mother-in-law. He left Fleet Street in 1644 and retired from trade. He married again, in 1646, a lady " of n.uch Christian meekness/' and seven years after- wards, when he was sixty, he published his famous Compleat Angler. The last years of his life were spent in Winchester. In his will, written shortly before his death, Walton pro- fessed his attachment to the Anglican Church, though he had had " a very long and very trew friendship for some of the Roman Church," and declared that he had acquired his fortune " neither by falsehood or flattery or the extreme crewelty of the law of this nation." Andrew Lang says of him :

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" Without ambition, save to be in the society of good men, he passed through turmoil, ever companioned by content. For his existence had its trials ; he saw all that he held most sacred overthrown ; laws broken up ; his king publicly murdered ; his friends outcasts ; his worship proscribed ; he himself suffered in property from the raid of the Kirk into England. He underwent many bereave- ments ; child after child he lost, but content he did not lose, nor sweetness of heart, nor belief. His was one of those happy characters which are never found disassociated from unquestioning faith."

Walton lives in English literary history as the gentle fisherman who seems to have been, perhaps, more en- thusiastic than skilful. He loved fishes though he caught them. " God is said to have spoken to a fish,,, he once said, " but never to a beast." This reminds one that Johnson laughed at Goldsmith because he admired the skill with which the little fishes talked in the fable, and that Goldsmith retorted, " Why, Dr. Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think, for if you were to make little fishes talk they would talk like whales." In a letter written to Coleridge in 1796, Lamb said :

" Among all your quaint readings did you ever light upon Walton's Compleat Angler ? I asked you the question once before ; it breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity and simplicity of heart ; there are many choice old verses interspersed in it ; it would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read it ; it would Christianise every discordant angry passion ; pray make yourself acquainted with it."

St. Bride's Church, on the other side of the street, was rebuilt by Wren after the fire. Milton lodged for a while in a house in St. Bride's Churchyard, and here Samuel Richardson, the industrious little bookseller who wrote Clarissa Harlowe, lies buried. There is a story told that after his death, Madame de Stael, who fully shared the almost hysterical eighteenth-century admiration for Richardson's writing, came specially to London to weep on his tomb, and that she was found by the sexton weeping on the wrong tomb, that of another Richardson who was a Smithfield butcher. Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins's father was among the recent vicars of St. Bride's.

Praise-God Barebone was a Fleet Street leather seller.

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Michael Drayton the poet, and James Shirley the drama- tist, both lived in Fleet Street. Pope was often to be seen in Robinson's bookshop on the west side of the gateway leading down to Inner Temple Lane. John Murray, the first, started his famous publishing house at No. 32 Fleet Street. Byron often came there, and there Wilkie first met Sir Walter Scott. Childe Harold was published while Murray was still in Fleet Street, but Scott and Byron did not meet until he had moved to Albemarle Street. The following is an entry in Murray's diary :

" 181 5, Friday, April 7. — This day Byron and Walter Scott met for the first time and were introduced to each other by me. They conversed together for nearly two hours. There were present at different times Mr. Gifford, James Boswell, William Sotheby, Robert Wilmot, Richard Heber and Mr. Dusgate."

The Duke of Wellington used often to go to Peers Tavern to read the newspapers, and Chaucer once thrashed a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street and was fined two shillings for the offence. So the centuries jostle one another as one walks from Temple Bar to Ludgate Circus.

For many years Fleet Street was famous for its wax- works exhibitions. They are mentioned in the Tatler and the Spectator, and one of them existed as late as 1850.

East of the Temple the White Friars' monastery was founded in 1231. After the dissolution of the monasteries this part of London became the haunt of rascaldom, its Alsatia and place of sanctuary, where criminals were free from the officers of the law. Fleet Street itself has some- times had its own criminals, among them the notorious Jack Sheppard. In Carmelite Street, on the site that once was a monastery and afterwards the hiding-place of thieves, the offices of the Daily Mail now stand.

The Street of Adventure, the Street of the Press ! Many years of my own life were spent in Fleet Street, and many memories has it left me. The roistering days are no more, or perhaps I think they are because I am older, and certainly journalism is a harder and more strenuous business than it was twenty-five years ago. I have seen many strange sights in Fleet Street, but none stranger or more memorable than Mr. Chesterton one evening reading the proof of his Daily News article under a Fleet Street

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lamp-post and chortling with glee at his own jokes. It is good indeed that the modern Fleet Street should be associated in one's mind with Mr. Chesterton, since of all the Fleet Street ghosts, one thinks most often of Dr. Johnson walking from his house in Gough Square, now a dull museum, attended by the faithful Boswell. Boswell records : " We walked in the evening in Greenwich Park. He asked me, I suppose by way of trying my disposition, * Is not this very fine ? ' Having no exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, and being more delighted with the busy hum of men, I answered, * Yes, very, but not equal to Fleet Street.' Said Johnson, 4 You are right, sir/ "

XXIII

LUDGATE HILL

If one were asked to find in London a striking proof of the soulless materialism that accompanied Victorian prosperity, one might well select the railway bridge across Ludgate Hill. St. Paul's Cathedral, Wren's masterpiece, is a splen- did English creation, massive and solid in its impressive dignity — I do not agree with Mr. Wells that it is the most beautiful building in the city — and it was truly Victorian to allow a hideous railway bridge to mar its main approach in order that passengers might be carried less than half a mile farther into the heart of London.

The old Lud Gate, from which Ludgate Hill has its name, stood half-way up the hill at the corner of the street that is still called Creed Lane. In mediaeval times the monks attached to the Cathedral started their outdoor pro- cessions here by reciting the Creed. The Ave Maria was chaunted in what is now Ave Maria Lane ; the Paternoster was said in Paternoster Row, and the prayers were finished in Amen Corner, nowadays a quiet oasis where the Dean and Canons of St. Paul's have their houses in the midst of bustling streets mainly devoted to the book trade. These streets are all on the north side of Ludgate Hill, as is Stationers' Hall, built in 1670 after the Great Fire on the site of a former hall of a much earlier date. Samuel Richardson, the bookseller novelist, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and his portrait now hangs in the hall. The Archbishop of Canterbury used to be the patron of the Company, and before the Reformation it exercised a very real censorship of books, heretical volumes being burned in the Company's garden.

The monastery of the Dominicans or Black Friars stood

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on the south side of what is now Ludgate Hill, east of the present Blackfriars Station. St. Dominic was a contem- porary of St. Francis, and the Dominican Order grew out of a band of preachers who joined the saint in his unsuccess- ful attempt to convert the Albigenses from the error of their ways. It may incidentally be pointed out that the Albigenses are quite wrongfully regarded as a sort of pre-Reformation Protestants. They were, as a matter of fact, Manichaeans, that is to say they believed that all matter is evil. Modern teetotallers are also Manichaeans in so far as they believe that matter in a bottle is essentially evil. The Dominican Friars first came to England in 1221 and established a house at Oxford. They first settled in London in Lincoln's Inn, and in 1275 they established the Black Friars' monastery on the site of what is now Printing House Square, the office of the Times newspaper. The divorce proceedings against Catherine of Aragon were heard in the great hall of the monastery, and after the dissolution it was here that Shakespeare built a playhouse where he produced " Henry VIII.," the trial scene of Catherine being acted on the very spot where it had actually taken place. Van Dyck, the painter of the Stuart kings, had his studio at Blackfriars. It was at Blackfriars that David Copperfield began to earn his living at the age of ten as " a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby."

" Murdstone and Grinby 's trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet-ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put on the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one."

There is a legend that Ludgate derives its name from a British King Lud who flourished nearly a century before the birth of Christ. The gate marked the boundary of the

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City of London from very early days. It was rebuilt in 121 5 and again in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when it was ornamented with the statues of Lud and his two sons and of the Queen. The gate was finally taken down in 1761. The statue of Queen Elizabeth was then placed in front of St. Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street, where it still may be seen, but poor King Lud and his sons were bundled into the City bone-house until some kind soul found them a refuge in St. Dunstan's Lodge, Regent's Park, made famous by the late Sir Arthur Pearson's work for blinded soldiers. For many years there was a debtors' prison at Ludgate, and an ordinance published during the year when Sir Richard Whittington was Lord Mayor of London quaintly orders " that the said Gate of Ludgate shall be a Prison from henceforth, to keep therein all citizens and other reputable persons whom the Mayor, Aldermen, Sheriff or Chamberlain of the City shall think proper to commit and send to the same." Sir Richard Whittington lived in the early years of the fifteenth century and was one of London's great merchant statesmen. He built Newgate Gaol, and added to St. Bartholomew's hospital, Christ's Hospital and the Guildhall. Alas (for it grieves me when busybodies prove that old legends are inventions) ! he was never a poor apprentice, he never heard the bells on High- gate Hill bidding him to turn again, and it is quite likely that he never had a cat. There is a grain of comfort in the fact that he was Lord Mayor three times.

Nowadays, despite the grandeur of St. Paul's, Ludgate Hill is over-bustling and unimpressive, but it is pleasant to think of Shakespeare hurrying up the hill to rehearsals at his own theatre ; of the precise Evelyn, the diarist, staying when in London " at the Hauk and Pheasant on Ludgate Hill " ; of seventeenth-century ladies shopping there when it was London's Regent Street.

XXIV

ST. PAUL'S

The solid, unimaginative, sometimes truculent prosperity of Great Britain is broad-based on the City of London. In the heart of the City stands St. Paul's Cathedral, magnificent in its dingy grandeur. St. Paul's does not suggest to me dreams or fantasy or mysticism. It is a monument of solid, immovable faith. I am among those who dream of the days when the great English cathedrals will again be filled with priests and gorgeous vestments, the singing of the Mass and the sweet odour of incense. Already at Win- chester and Chester the people of England may worship much as their fathers worshipped, with dignified and sug- gestive ritual and ceremony, and the Catholic revival is having its influence in other cathedrals. St. Paul's is, however, the only cathedral in England that is essentially and for all time Protestant. I am sensitive in these matters, but, so far as I am concerned, a Baptist minister might preach from its pulpit and I should make no protest. St, Paul's suggests the comprehensiveness of an empire, not the natural and proper exclusiveness of a religion.

On the site where Wren built his church after the Great Fire there first stood, so it is said, a temple dedicated to Diana. This gave place in a.d. 6io to a Christian church. The building of the old cathedral began just after the Norman Conquest and was not completed for two hundred years. It must have been a magnificent building, erected in the Golden Age of Europe, in the era of faith. Old pictures show that it had a graciousness, the suggestion of reaching towards the skies just as the present St. Paul's suggests a firm grip on the earth. It was in old St. Paul's before its completion that King John made his kingdom over to Pope Innocent and received it back as a papal

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vassal. It was at St. Paul's that John Wycliffe was tried for heresy ; it was in St. Paul's that the citizens of London paid homage to the great King Edward IV. after the battle of St. Albans. It was in St. Paul's that Jane Shore was ordered to do penance in a white sheet, " the gaze of the people flushing her pale cheek with exquisite colour." In 1505 Dean Colet, one of the few fine, unselfish Renaissance figures, became Dean of St. Paul's. Colet was the friend of More and Erasmus, and the founder of St. Paul's School, now near Hammersmith.

The pulpit at Paul's Cross was a sort of national forum. Famous preachers came from all parts of the world to preach there, the sermons being often listened to by the King and his Court. The Lord Mayor of London was required to provide for these preachers " sweet and con- venient lodgings with fire, candles and all other neces- saries." It was from Paul's Cross that Papal bulls were read and excommunications declared. Kings were pro- claimed there and traitors sometimes denounced. Exalted sinners made their penances at Paul's Cross and heretics made their recantations, but, as Dean Milman recalled with considerable satisfaction, the Cross never had martyrdoms. The final act of the drama of heresy was always played at Smithfield.

The Reformation brought turmoil to St. Paul's. At the Cross Catholics and Protestants preached against each other, and there were wrangles inside its sacred walls. Dean Milman says that Sunday after Sunday the Cathedral was thronged, not with decent and respectable citizens, but with a noisy rabble, many of them boys, come to hear and enjoy the unseemly harangues. In 1561 old St. Paul's was seriously injured by fire, and it was never properly restored. It was entirely destroyed by the Fire of London. Dry den's lines are familiar :

The daring flames peep'd in and saw from far The awful beauties of the sacred quire, But since it was profan'd by civil war, Heaven thought it fit to have it purged by fire.

The profanation occurred during the Commonwealth, when soldiers and their horses were quartered in the Cathedral.

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After the Reformation, indeed, the old Cathedral had almost entirely lost its sacred character and had become a mere meeting-place, where lawyers waited for their clients and where gallants endeavoured to attract the notice of their ladies. Ben Jonson, it will be remembered, has laid a scene of his " Every Man out of his Humour " in St. Paul's. Part of the nave was used as a market, where there were sold not only food-stuffs, but also horses and mules, and John Evelyn has described the Cathedral as a den of thieves. The choir of the new Cathedral was consecrated in 1697, in the reign of William and Mary. The Cathedral was not completed until Wren was seventy-eight. It was paid for by a special tax levied on coal brought into the City of London.

The interior of St. Paul's is cold, bare and colourless. It has none of the romance of Westminster Abbey, and it certainly does not inspire to penitence and prayer. The chapels, one of which Mr. Pennell has drawn, suffer badly for want of light, and it would be idle to suggest that they have any great beauty or attraction. Yet everything in St. Paul's has its dignity. There is nothing that jars. The great building is consistent. In it there is the continual emphasis of solidity and character. But with all its grandeur there is none of the fascinating colour of St. Peter's at Rome, none of the beauty of any of the Gothic cathedrals. St. Paul's is not cumbered with gravestones as Westminster is, but, appropriately since it is the Imperial Cathedral, it shelters the bodies or contains the monuments, usually meretricious and often ludicrous, to the memory of the Empire's great fighting men, of Wellington and Nelson, of St. Vincent and Rodney, of Sir John Moore and " Lucknow " Lawrence. Literature is represented by Dr. Johnson, who was a regular communicant at the Cathedral; art by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Turner ; philanthropy by John Howard, the Quaker crusader against prison abuses ; the Church by John Donne, Dean and poet, Milman, Dean and historian, Heber, whom Thackeray described as " good divine, a charming poet and beloved parish priest, " and Liddon, greatest of modern preachers. Wren, Landseer the animal painter, and George Cruikshank are buried in the Cathedral. St. Paul's contains no memorial of Marlborough and none of Dean Colet, truly amazing omissions.

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Large as it is, St. Paul's is little more than one-third of the size of St. Peter's at Rome, and it is smaller than the cathedrals of Milan, Seville and Florence. St. Paul's moved Hawthorne to that intense admiration that he always felt for everything that was characteristically British :

" St. Paul's appears to me unspeakably grand and noble, and the more so from the throng and bustle continually going on round its base, without in the least disturbing the sublime repose of its great dome, and indeed of all its massive height and breadth. Other edifices may crowd close to its foundation and people may tramp as they like about it ; but still the great cathedral is as quiet and serene as if it stood in the midst of Salisbury Plain. There cannot be anything else in its way so good in the world as just this effect of St. Paul's in the very heart and densest tumult of London. It is much better than staring white ; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery of black."

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ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD

Before the Great Fire, St. Paul's Churchyard, now the home of the wholesale draper, was mostly inhabited by stationers. The first editions of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were published at the Sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul's Churchyard. The first edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor was published at the Flower de Luce and the Crown ; the first edition of The Merchant of Venice at the Green Dragon ; the first edition of Richard III. at the Angel ; the first edition of Richard II. at the Fox ; the first edition of Troilus and Cressida at the Spread Eagle ; the first edition of Titus Andronicus at the Gun, and the first edition of King Lear at the Red Bull. These were the signs of the St. Paul's Churchyard bookshops.

After the fire the stationers and publishers moved to Paternoster Row, where they still are. A few, however, remained. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield was sold for sixty guineas to Newbery, whose shop was on the north side of the Churchyard. There is a curious reference to St. Paul's Churchyard during the Commonwealth in a manuscript in the British Museum :

May 27, 165 1 : — Forasmuch as the Inhabitants of Paul's Church- yard are much disturbed by the souldiers and others, calling out to passingers and examining them (though they goe peaceably and civilly along), and by playing at nine pinnes at unseasonable houres ; These are therefore to command all souldiers and others whom it may concern, that hereafter there shall be no examining and calling out to persons that go peaceably on their way, unlesse they do approach their Guards, and likewise to forbeare playing at nine pinnes and other sports, from the hours of nine of the clocke in the evening till six in the morning, that so persons that are weake and indisposed to rest, may not be disturbed. Given under our hands the day and yeare above written. JOHN BARKESTEAD.

BENJAMIN BLUNDELL.

The Chapter House, on the northern side, was recently let to a bank in order that the Chapter might have sufficient money to retain the famous choir.

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ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S

The Church of St. Bartholomew the Great is, with the exception of the chapel in the Tower, the oldest church in London. As it exists to-day, it consists of the choir and transepts of the church of the Priory of St. Bartholomew, founded by one Rahere in the eleventh century. The First Crusade was preached while Rahere was a boy. His was the age of chivalry and the troubadours, and he possessed the qualities of his time. Although not of noble birth, by his address as a courtier and his gifts as a musician, Rahere attached himself to the Court of Henry L, the youngest son of William the Conqueror, whose name, Henry Beau- clerk, indicates his love of learning and the polite arts. A chronicler tells us that Rahere, " amongst the joyful noise of that tumultuous court drew to himself the hearts of many and was foremost in mirthful shows, in banquets, in plays and in other courtly trifling. Thus he became known to the King and great men, gentles and courtiers and was familiar and friendly with them." Henry's gay Court became sad and gloomy when the King's only son was drowned when the White Ship was wrecked in 1120, and this catastrophe first turned Rahere 's thoughts to religion. Leaving the Court he made a pilgrimage to Rome, where he fell ill and thought that his last hour had come. In his distress he made a vow that if he recovered he would, on his return to England, build a hospital for the poor and devote the rest of his life to their service. One night, during the return journey, he had a vision. A four-footed winged beast carried him to a high place where he saw a deep pit into which he feared that he would be cast. In his terror a stately figure appeared to him and said, " Oh,

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man, what wilt thou do for him who saves thee from the peril that threatens thee ? " Rahere replied that he would do all that he could. Then the apparition said, " I am Bartholomew, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, who am come to succour thee, and to show thee the hidden mysteries. By command of the Trinity on High, I have chosen a place at Smithfield, in London, where in my name thou shalt build a church and it shall be a house of God, a tabernacle of the Lamb, and a temple of the Holy Ghost. Of this work thou shalt be the servant and I the lord."

After the vision Rahere hastened to England, eager to obey the saint's command. The King gave him a grant of land at Smithfield, the highest part of which had been a place of execution, while the rest, " right unclean it was," was covered with pools of stagnant water. Rahere dressed in workman's clothes and went through the city urging the faithful to join him. The fervour of his preaching and the sanctity of his life persuaded both simple labourers and well-born youths to help him in clearing the land and building the church. The work of piety, born in faith, to become a refuge for the afflicted for centuries to come, was completed, and the church was founded " in the year from the Incarnation of the same Lord and Saviour, 1123." The church and the other buildings became a Priory of Augustinian Canons, with Rahere as its first Prior.

The first establishment of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine in England was at Colchester, and St. Bartholo- mew's Priory came into being thirty years later. Rahere and his companions, in their black cassocks and white rochets, spent their days tending the sick, who made their way to the Priory on foot, on mules and sometimes by barges from the Thames by way of the Fleet River. Medical treatment was a strange thing in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century one of the Canons was thrown by his horse on his head. The right side of his head was injured and he became paralysed in the left side of his body. The Master " ordered the Canon's head to be shaved, rubbed oil of roses and a quart of warm vinegar on to the scalp, powdered it, and bound it up with a cloth soaked in oil and vinegar, and then thoroughly bandaged the head in linen, covering the whole with a lambskin. Twice a day he rubbed his neck and spine with ointment. Next day

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the patient opened his mouth, but the physician refused to give him food. The patient spoke imperfectly on the third day and rather better on the fourth day, when he swallowed a little warm drink. He took some chicken broth on the sixth day and thenceforward grew gradually stronger." The Master afterwards advised him " to eat the brains of fowls and kids so as to repair the damage done to his own."

The church was not completed until the middle of the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth century a Chantry Chapel and a Lady Chapel were added. The dissolution of the monasteries brought the beneficent services of the Augustinian Canons to an end. After some hesitation Henry VIII. granted the hospital to the citizens of London. For years there had been no one to help the helpless, and the streets were filled with the sick, for whom there was no shelter. The greater part of the Priory with the Lady Chapel was sold for a song to Richard Rich, an admirable name for one of Cromwell's followers, for Rich certainly became richer. For a while during the reign of Queen Mary, Church and Priory were again occupied by the religious, the Dominicans moving from their monastery which stood near the north end of Blackfriars Bridge. Their stay, however, only lasted for a year or two and came to an end with the accession of Queen Elizabeth. Rich and his successors pulled down the Priory building and part of the church in order to build new houses for the new rich, and in a few years the church had fallen into such a dilapidated state that it seemed likely to disappear. For centuries, indeed, it suffered from neglect and desecration until, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a series of restorations was begun, the last completed in 1896.

The little of the church that is left is a thing of appealing beauty, bringing back memories of Rahere and the other pious, and calling to mind the fact that in the neighbour- ing hospital the sick have been cared for almost continually for eight hundred years. The present church, which Mr. Pennell has drawn, occupies part of the nave of the old building. A mutilated portion of this nave is within the building.

For a few years after the dissolution of the monasteries, Smithfield, round which nowadays are so many of London's

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most interesting historic buildings, was what house agents call " a desirable residential district, " but, both before and since, its reputation has not been of the best. In the early Middle Ages murderers were hanged at Smithfield. It was in Smithfield that Wat Tyler was struck down by Sir William Walworth. He was carried into the hospital and laid in the chamber of the Master, but the Lord Mayor caused him to be taken out again into the street, where he was beheaded. The Smithfield martyrs were burned just outside St. Bartholomew's.

Tournaments were often held in the open space, now the market, before St. Bartholomew's. There is some- thing very attractive in the following :

" One winter's day at the end of January 1442, a challenge was done in Smithfield within the lists before King Henry Vlth between Sir Philip la Beaufe of Aragon, Knight, and John Astley, an esquire of the King's house- hold. They came to the field all armed, the Knight with his sword drawn, the Esquire with his spear, which spear he cast against the Knight, but the Knight avoided it with his sword and cast it to the ground. Then the Esquire took his axe and smote many blows on the Knight and made him let fall his axe and brake up his visor three times and would have smote him on the face with his dagger for to have slain him, but that the King cried ' Hold ' and so they were departed. And when the said John had done (his feat of arms) it pleased the King of his highness to make him a knight the same day and gave him a hundred marks for the term of his life."

Smithfield has been a market for centuries. " Where's Bardolph ? " asks FalstafT of the page-boy. " He is gone into Smithfield to buy your Worship a horse." In Oliver Twist Dickens has a description of Smithfield Market as it existed in the early years of the Victorian era :

" It was market morning. The ground was covered nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire ; a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep ; tied up to posts by the gutter-side were long lines

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of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers and vaga- bonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass : the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing of plunging oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths and quarrelling on all sides ; the ringing of bells, the roar of voices that issued from every public-house ; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping, and yelling ; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market ; and the unwashed, un- shaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng ; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.''

In Bartholomew Close, a square occupying part of the old Priory's ground, Milton lived for some months in 1660, the Close being " a place of retirement and abscondence." Le Soeur the sculptor modelled his statue of Charles I. that is now at Charing Cross in the Close. Benjamin Franklin worked there as a journeyman printer, and Hogarth was born there and was baptized in the church.

XXVI

CLOTH FAIR

Cloth Fair is a reminder of the great Bartholomew Fair, and was once the centre for French and Flemish merchants settled in London.

The mediaeval fairs nearly always had a triple attrac- tion, religious, commercial and dramatic, and in this re- spect the famous Bartholomew Fair followed the general rule. Before Rahere founded the Priory, a fair which was called King's Market had been regularly held near Smith- field, and after the foundation of the Priory the traders in the King's Market were joined by the pilgrims to the shrine of St. Bartholomew, and Bartholomew Fair began its seven centuries of fame. The fair was proclaimed on the eve of the feast of St. Bartholomew and lasted for three days. It was a cloth market above everything else, and booths within the Priory Churchyard were hired by cloth manu- facturers from all over England, as well as by the London drapers.

Again, like all mediaeval fairs, Bartholomew Fair had its own Court of Justice, which punished persons who dis- obeyed the rules of the Fair, and which decided disputes between buyers and purchasers. The Court was called the Pie Powder — Pied-Poudre — and was held at the " Hand and Shears " in Cloth Fair, and was the most expeditious Court in the kingdom.

While the pilgrims were praying before the shrine and the traders were bargaining in their booths, jugglers and actors and minstrels and acrobats were performing on the outskirts of the crowds. It must have been an amazing and many-coloured scene. The late Henry Morley says, in his Memoirs of St. Bartholomew Fair :

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" Thus we have in the most ancient times of the Fair, a church full of worshippers, among whom were the sick and maimed, praying for health about its altar ; a graveyard full of traders, and a place of jesting and edification, where women and men caroused in the midst of the throng ; where the minstrel and the story-teller and the tumbler gathered knots about them ; where the sheriff caused new laws to be published by loud proclamation in the gathering places of the people ; where the young men bowled at nine-pins, while the clerks and friars peeped at the young maids ; where mounted knights and ladies curveted and ambled, pedlars loudly magnified their wares, the scholars met for public wrangle, oxen lowed, horses neighed, and sheep bleated among their buyers ; where great shouts of laughter answered to the * Ho ! Ho ! ' of the devil on the stage, above which flags were flying, and below which a band of pipers and guitar bearers added music to the din.

" That stage also, if ever there was presented on it the story of the Creation, was the first Wild Beast Show in the Fair ; for one of the dramatic effects connected with this play, as we read in ancient stage direction, was to represent the creation of beasts by unloosing and sending among the excited crowd as great a variety of strange animals as could be brought together, and to create the birds by sending up a flight of pigeons. Under foot was mud and filth, but the wall that pent the city in shone sunlight among the trees, a fresh breeze came over the surrounding fields and brooks, whispering among the elms that overhung the moor glitter- ing with pools, or from the Fair's neighbour, the gallows. Shaven heads looked down on the scene from the adjacent windows of the buildings bordering the Priory enclosure, and the poor people, whom the friars cherished in their hospital, made holiday among the rest. The curfew bell of St. Martin's-le-Grand, the religious house to which William the Conqueror had given with its charter the adjacent moorland, and within whose walls there was a sanctuary for loose people, stilled the hum of the crowd at nightfall, and the Fair lay dark under the starlight. "

After the Reformation and the dissolution of the mon- asteries the religious aspect of Bartholomew Fair was lost, and with the passing of the monks the traditional restraint that had ensured a certain measure of decency and order

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came to an end. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Fair's importance as a cloth market considerably declined, and the old-time mysteries with their religious motives gave way to the performance of regular drama. The mounte- banks and the conjurers remained, and one of the attractions during the latter part of the sixteenth century was a tent in which the rabble hunted unfortunate rabbits for the special delectation of the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen of London.

Ben Jonson has described the Fair, as it existed in his time, in his play, " Bartholomew Fair," and a generation later Evelyn was shocked by the excesses that took place during the fortnight to which the Fair had been extended. Pepys frequently mentions the Fair, the delights of which pleased his simple pleasure-loving heart. In one entry in his diary he records seeing Lady Castlemaine, the famous mistress of Charles II., visiting a puppet show in the Fair, with " the street full of people expecting her," just as if she were a modern professional beauty. In Pepys's time the shows at the Fair included wild beasts, dwarfs, tight-rope dancing, Punch and Judy shows and the performance of plays and operas. Puppet plays were particularly popular, and so great was the attraction of the Fair that the public theatres were always closed during Fair time, the actors finding it more profitable to perform in the booths. During Bartholomew Fair an ox was always roasted whole, and roast pig was among the luxuries sold to the people. The Bartholomew pigs were denounced by the Puritans and the eating was described as " a species of idolatry." Never- theless, these Bartholomew pigs remained popular until the beginning of the eighteenth century.

In the British Museum there is a Bartholomew Fair play-bill of the time of Queen Anne, advertising the per- formance of " A little opera called ' The Old Creation of the World Newly Revived,' with the addition of * The Glorious Battle obtained over the French and Spaniards by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough/ " Between these two plays there were dances and acrobatic feats, and the entertainment concluded with " The Merrie Humours of Sir John Spendall and Punchinello." Our ancestors cer- tainly had their money's worth at Bartholomew Fair. Edmund Kean, before he became famous, frequently acted at Bartholomew Fair.

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The Fair was often marked by considerable disorder regularly contrived by journeymen tailors, whose habit it was to assemble at the " Hand and Shears " and to indulge in a mild sort of riot, which the authorities were quite unable to suppress.

On September 2 the Lord Mayor with his officers and trumpeters proceeded in state to the Fair, stopping on the way at Newgate Gaol, where the keeper of the prison pro- vided him with " a cool tankard of wine, nutmeg and sugar." The Fair was formally proclaimed by the Lord Mayor, and the City Treasurer paid a fee of three and sixpence to the Rector of St. Bartholomew the Great for making the proclamation in his parish.

The Fair grew smaller year by year. In 1830 there were two hundred booths for toys and gingerbread, and Richardson's Show and Womb well's Menagerie were among the attractions. In 1840 the City Corporation bought the ground on which the Fair was held, and in order to bring it to an end it limited the Fair to one day, and refused to allow booths to be set up except on exorbitant terms. In 1849 tne Fair consisted of nothing but one or two ginger- bread stalls, a few fruit barrows, one puppet show and gambling tables where one could play for nuts. The Fair was proclaimed for the last time in 1855.

XXVII

THE CITY CHURCHES

Mediaeval London was a city of churches. The area of the City is about a square mile. In the fourteenth century, when the population was between forty and fifty thousand, the City possessed one hundred and twenty -six parish churches. Eighty -six churches were burnt during the Great Fire. Before the Reformation there were at least five monastic establishments within the City boundaries — the Dominicans or Black Friars, whose monastery, as I have already said, stood where Printing House Square now is ; the Augustinian Friars at St. Bartholomew's and also in a house near Bishopsgate, which gave its name to Austin Friars — the Dutch Church in Austin Friars is the nave of the Old Priory Church ; the Grey Friars or Franciscans in Newgate Street — Christ's Hospital, the Blue Coat School, occupied t\e site of the monastery ; the Benedictine nuns in Bishopsgate, the Church of St. Helen is the old Priory Church, and the Poor Clares near Tower Hill. The Poor Clares were known as Minoresses, hence the name Minories belonging to the street running from Aldgate to Tower Hill.

The oldest parish church in the City of London is St. Bartholomew the Great, though the crypt of Bow Church in Cheapside is still older. St. John in the Tower is also older than St. Bartholomew's, but the Tower is outside the borders of the City. Southwark Cathedral, beautifully restored, a magnificent example of Norman architecture, is also just without the City. In the City nowadays there are nine churches that were built before the Great Fire ; of these All Hallows Barking possessed a shrine to Our Lady, erected by Edward I., which was an object of great devotion. The church only just escaped destruction in the Great

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THE CITY CHURCHES

in

Fire. Pepys watched the fire from the top of Barking steeple, " and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw." William Penn the Quaker was baptized at All Hallows, and the bodies of Fisher and of Laud rested there after their execution on Tower Hill near by. In St. Andrew Undershaft, built in the reign of Henry VIII., and recently restored, John Stow, the historian, of London, lies buried. He was a tailor by trade and lived near Aid- gate Pump. Stow records that St. Andrew Undershaft was built by the parishioners, " every man putting to his helping hand, some with their purses, others with their bodies/ ' The fine co-operation in church building that existed in the Middle Ages continued till the Reformation, to be destroyed with many other fine things by that cata- clysm. St. Giles Cripplegate was first built in Norman times and rebuilt in the sixteenth century. Milton and his father and Martin Frobisher, the Elizabethan sailor, are buried in this church. Frobisher, who, unlike most of the sixteenth - century sailors, came from the North and not from the West, was born in Yorkshire, and it was to the North that he made his voyages, sailing from Blackwall on three occasions to discover the north-west passage to India and Cathay. He commanded The Triumph in the fight against the Armada. In the chapter in Westward Ho ! in which Charles Kingsley describes the English sea captains gathered together on Plymouth Hoe, he tells us that Martin Frobisher and John Davis were " sitting on the bench smoking tobacco from long silver pipes." After the destruction of the Armada, Frobisher commanded fleets that cruised off the Spanish coast. He was wounded in 1594 in a fight off Brest, and died at Plymouth.

Pepys used to worship at St. Olave's, Hart Street, sitting in the Admiralty pew in the gallery, which he entered by a private door. The other pre-Wren churches are St. Ethel- burga, Bishopsgate, St. Helen, Bishopsgate, St. Katherine Cree and the Dutch Church in Austin Friars.

Thirty-five churches destroyed in the Great Fire were not rebuilt. Eighteen churches built by Wren have since been destroyed, and the City still possesses thirty-two of Wren's churches. Fifteen churches have been built in the City of London since Wren, four of which have been destroyed. Before the Reformation, church building was

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co-operative, the common expression of a common piety. After the Reformation it became individualistic. Mr. Cope Corn ford says :

" The churches and civic buildings of Wren and of those who followed him are the work of one man. Gone is the mediaeval craftsman with his Guild ; disbanded com- panies of master-masons and artificers in wood and iron ; vanished the rich and learned bishops with whom the crafts- men worked, making real the Bishop's dream in their own way, each man loving his task. In their room had come the architect, the master - designer, whose single brain planned the building from foundation to copestone, as an organic whole, and the tribes of hired workmen who carried into execution drawings in whose makings they had no part. Nevertheless, in Wren's time, the old tradition of the craftsmen still survived, so that the great architect was well served, and his detail was wrought with the per- sonal touch inspiring the classical convention with life and charm.' '

Christopher Wren was an amazing person. He died in 1723, in his ninety-first year. His father was appointed Dean of Windsor by Charles I. Christopher was educated at Westminster and Wadham College, Oxford, where he was visited by Evelyn, who speaks of him as " that miracle of a youth, Mr. Christopher Wren, nephew of the Bishop of Ely." When he was twenty-four he was appointed Professor of Astronomy in Gresham College and, five years before the Great Fire, he accepted the Savilian Professor- ship of Astronomy at Oxford. The greatest of all English architects was never bred to be an architect. Four days after the Great Fire ended, Wren brought to Charles II. his designs for a new London. Had his plans been accepted, London would have been a great city indeed. Mr. Wilfred Whitten, keenest of London's enthusiasts, tells us :

" Piazzas like that of Covent Garden, would have been general. The Thames Embankment would have been fore- stalled by two centuries between London Bridge and the Temple, and along this great river-quay would now rise in a long succession the halls of the ancient City Companies. It was a glorious plan and would have made London the city of cities. Wren was great enough to see it wrecked

ST. AUGUSTINE AND ST. FAITH

THE CITY CHURCHES

"3

without loss of heart ; he turned faithfully from the ideal to the possible."

During the next fifty years Wren built St. Paul's Cathedral and over fifty City churches. He rebuilt the Customs House, the Monument, the College of Physicians and thirty City Companies' Halls. He designed Green- wich Hospital and Chelsea Hospital, and built Drury Lane Theatre. He enlarged Hampton Court Palace and com- pleted Westminster Abbey. It has been said of him :

" It may be said, not we think without some element of truth, that the translators of the Bible fixed the measure of English language and Shakespeare that of English poetry. We may draw the irresistible parallel and add that, as the mediaeval craftsmen gave us English building, so Wren gave us English architecture. He has been pruned down and refined upon, that is all. He will never be superseded so long as the art he made more glorious lives on in this country. His City churches are so many embodiments of the ideal City church. His Orangery is the prototype of all Orangeries. His plan for the rebuilding of London is London at its best. His character must have been com- parable to that of the most deeply cherished heroes of our history ; his wit and wisdom must have exceeded those of many."

And the man who did this prodigious quantity of work was modest, retiring and of spotless integrity. Steele wrote a fine description of him in the Tatler :

" Nestor's modesty was such, that his Art and Skill were soon disregarded for want of that Manner with which Men of the World support and assert the Merits of their own Performances. Soon after this instance of his Art, Athens was, by the treachery of its Enemies, burnt to the Ground. This gave Nestor the greatest Occasion that ever Builder had to render his Name immortal, and his Person venerable, for all the new City rose according to his Dis- position, and all the Monuments of the Glories and Dis- tresses of that People were executed by that sole Artist ; nay, all their Temples as well as Houses, were the effects of his Study and Labour ; insomuch that it was said by an old Sage, ' Sure, Nestor will now be famous, for the Habitations of the Gods, as well as of Men, are built by his Contrivance.'

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" But this bashful quality still put a Damp upon his great Knowledge which has as fatal an Effect upon Men's Reputations as Poverty ; for, as it was said, * the poor Man by his wisdom delivered the City, yet no Man remembered that same poor Man/ So here we find the modest Man built the City, and the modest Man's Skill was unknown."

Of the Wren churches that remain to us Mr. Pennell has selected St. Michael Paternoster Royal and St. Augustine and St. Faith for illustration. The name St. Michael Paternoster Royal is derived from two lanes which intersect a little west of Cannon Street Station — Paternoster and Royal, which is a corruption of La Riole, the name of a village near Bordeaux, the headquarters of the French wine trade being in this ward of the City. St. Augustine and St. Faith is in Watling Street. The two parishes were united after the Great Fire, and the present church was built by Wren in 1683.

Of the City churches generally there is little more of interest to record. Hazlitt was married in St. Andrew's, Holborn, Charles Lamb being his best man and Mary Lamb a bridesmaid. In a letter to Southey, Lamb said :

" I was at Hazlitt 's marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet I can read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings. The realities of life only seem the mockeries.' '

Shelley was married to Mary Wollstonecraft in St. Mary, Bread Street, in 181 6, and Keats was baptized in St. Botolph Bishopsgate, one of the post-Wren churches, in 1795.

XXVIII

THE GUILDHALL

The City of London supplies a fascinating combination of unqualified and almost blatant modernity and ancient picturesque dignity. Elderly gentlemen whose appearance and mentality are branded deep with the brand of the suburb, when they become Common Councillors and Aldermen, dress themselves in mediaeval robes and play their part in ancient ceremonies with dignity and an air. To attend a City ceremony, to watch the wealthy and perhaps rather over-fed burgesses raised to high traditional position, not by a destiny that disregards the appropriate, but as the heirs of the ages, is to realise how unnecessary has been the loss of the picturesque in our everyday life. If Mr. Smith, the wholesale stationer, and Mr. Brown, the importer of bananas, are splendid merchant princes inside the Guildhall, why should they be drab and negligible when they go out into Cheapside ? Every craft should have its uniform. When that happens, every craft will regain its dignity.

To me the pageantry of the City has a delight that does not belong to the pageantry of the Court. In particular, I love the City Remembrancer with a great love, and my joy in him would be much less if I had the smallest idea what he had to remember. His gown is an inspiration, his hat is a delight. I recall one international function at the Guildhall when I endeavoured, quite unsuccessfully, to explain in French to an inquisitive Paris journalist who and what the Remembrancer was.

The City is practical. Every ceremony is followed by a luncheon. That is right and proper. The City is English, and the English, as Dickens knew, love a feast. In this, too,

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the City is at least partially Christian, for feasting engenders fellowship. It would be wholly Christian if to the frequent feast it added the occasional fast, for it is the fast that gives the feast its spiritual significance. The City luncheons and dinners are solid and ample. That is also perfectly proper. The citizen should not ape the courtier, and the only hateful bourgeois is the bourgeois who deserts the bourgeoisie. The City eats well, and the City loves money, but it does not forget the higher things — perhaps it keeps a Remembrancer lest it should forget. The Guildhall itself is the home of a magnificent library. The City finances schools, finds the money for London's most important markets, and, so far as it is possible, prevents the great struggling city that sur- rounds it from being poisoned by reckless importers of bad food. The City of London is indeed a great national institution, and it is great because it is little. The Lord Mayor is a splendid personage, and he is splendid because he is generally simple.

The whole tradition and pageant hanging round the Guildhall, which Mr. Pennell has drawn so beautifully, is a proof that man is a child of his clothes. Put a little man into fine clothes, and, supposing that they fit him — that is a most important point — he becomes a great man. In other words, all men, even Common Councillors, are the children of God. So to the Guildhall, where Liverymen and Common Councillors meet, admirably to carry on public business, to eat admirable banquets and to welcome foreign potentates with civic splendour !

It is said that an ancient Guildhall stood on the present site as early as the time of Edward the Confessor. A Guildhall was rebuilt in 141 1, and was tinkered, repaired and adorned until the present building emerged in 1789. Mark the date ! The Guildhall, the great emblem of British prosperity, and the French Revolution appeared in the world together ! There are in the hall of the Guildhall effigies of two famous giants, Gog and Magog. They are made of wood and are hollow within. Most giants are. They or their forebears stood at the entrance of London Bridge to welcome Henry V. many a year ago. They were on London Bridge again to welcome Philip of Spain, and they were at Temple Bar to welcome Elizabeth. Since then, in the Guildhall, they have welcomed a never-ending

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procession of the great. Gog and Magog have no politics. They are fierce to look upon, but they are made of harmless wood, and welcoming is their trade. How admirably in this they represent the spirit of a commercial city.

November 9 is the great day in the Guildhall's year. Then the Lord Mayor entertains His Majesty's Ministers and speeches are made, and the City feels that it really is the City. Pepys was invited to the 9th of November ban- quet in 1663 and was by no means pleased with the fare. He records, " To Guildhall, and up and down to see the tables ; where under every salt there was a bill of fare, and at the end of the table, the persons proper for the table. Many were the tables, but none in the hall but the Mayor's and the Lords of the Privy Council that had napkins or knives, which was very strange. I sat at the Merchant Strangers' table ; where ten good dishes to a messe, with plenty of wine of all sorts ; but it was very unpleasing that we had no napkins nor change of trenchers, and drunk out of earthen pitchers and wooden dishes.' '

The Guildhall used to contain a beautiful chapel dedi- cated to St. Mary Magdalen. For some reason this was pulled down in 1822. Until then a special service was always held in this church before the Lord Mayor's feast, and probably prayers were offered that the citizens might be saved from indigestion and all plethoric evils. Grace before meat is a delightful reminder of the dignity of feasting, and I would that the chapel of St. Mary Magdalen may yet be restored.

The Guildhall has been the scene of tragedy as well as of good cheer. It was here that Anne Askew was tried for heresy and sentenced to be burned ; it was here that the Jesuit Garnett was wrongfully accused of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. Surrey, the dainty Tudor poet, Cranmer, Lady Jane Grey and Edmund Waller, the Cavalier poet, were all tried at the Guildhall. At the Guildhall, too, a jury moved by the eloquence of Serjeant Buzfuz con- demned Mr. Pickwick to pay £750 damages to Mrs. Bardell.

The Guildhall contains monuments to the famous whom the City has delighted to honour — Chatham, Pitt, Nelson — and it houses an extremely bad portrait of George III.

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with an inscription which seems to me to epitomise the proper bourgeois admiration of that most bourgeois king :

" GEORGE THE THIRD "

Born and bred a Briton ; endeared to a Brave, Free, and Loyal People by his Public Virtues, by his pre-eminent Example of Private Worth in all the Relations of Domestic Life, by his uniform Course of unaffected Piety, and entire Submission to the Will of Heaven.

There have been many worse men than " Farmer George " ; and it is nice of the City to forget that his Tory obstinacy cost England the North American colonies.

PORTICO, ROYAL EXCHANGE

XXIX

THE ROYAL EXCHANGE

Sir Thomas Gresham, who built the original Royal Ex- change, was a typical Tudor merchant adventurer, except that he exploited the European instead of following the fashion of the age that immediately followed him of sub- sidising the Devonshire buccaneers, who stole from the Spaniards what the Spaniards had stolen from the unfor- tunate inhabitants of South America. Sir Thomas was a son of a Lord Mayor of London, who was himself a Knight, and was sent to Caius College, Cambridge. Soon after leaving the University he married a rich widow and went to live in the Low Countries. In those days the pound sterling was almost as wobbly in its value as the franc is nowadays, but Sir Thomas, by methods which have been rudely described as ingenious but arbitrary and unfair, contrived to force up the value of the pound on the Bourse at Antwerp to such an extent that King Edward VI.'s advisers were able to discharge all their debts. This naturally made him popular with the Government, and he was resourceful enough to retain his popularity through the reigns of Catholic Mary and Protestant Elizabeth. In 1565 Gresham obtained the consent of the Corporation of London to build an Exchange where foreign and English merchants could meet and bargain in something like comfort. Before the building was erected, as Stow tells us, these meetings took place in an open narrow street, and the merchants had to do business in all sorts of weather, heat or cold, sun or rain.

Gresham, who, in the proper merchant's manner, always had an eye for profits, contrived to derive a yearly income of £700, no inconsiderable sum in those days, from the

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shops that he let in the Exchange, which was opened by Elizabeth in 1571. We are told that " the milliners and haberdashers in that place sold mouse traps, bird-cages, shoeing-horns, lan thorns and Jew's trumps, etc. There were also at that time that kept shops in the upper pawn of the Royal Exchange, armourers that sold both old and new armour, apothecaries, booksellers, goldsmiths and glass-sellers. "

This first Exchange was ornamented with statues of all the English sovereigns. After the execution of Charles I., his statue was thrown down and the words exit tyrannus regum ultimus were inscribed on the pedestal, which is proof that a man may be a good merchant and a bad prophet.

In its early days the Exchange wTas frequented by merchants from Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, Paris and even from Venice, the different dresses showing the nation- ality of the traders. Gresham's Exchange was destroyed in the Great Fire, and Pepys records that only the statue of Sir Thomas was saved from the flames. A second Exchange, much on the same lines, was soon afterwards erected, and this in its turn was burnt down in 1838. The present building was opened by Queen Victoria in 1844, and incidentally it contains one of the worst among the many existing bad statues of that monarch.

Nowadays half of the Exchange is used as the offices of certain assurance companies, and the other half by Lloyd's. Lloyd's, as all the world knows, is an association of marine underwriters, and its story is rather an interest- ing one. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Edward Lloyd had a coffee-house in Tower Street and afterwards removed to Abchurch Lane in Lombard Street. This coffee-house was the favourite meeting-place of shipowners, and many ships changed hands on Lloyd's premises. In 1696 he started Lloyd's News, which was intended to furnish all possible intelligence of the move- ment of ships. Lloyd's is mentioned both in the Tatler and the Spectator, and it was the scene of wild gambling at the time of the South Sea Bubble. The present society was founded in 1770.

Of the Royal Exchange as a building there is nothing to say. It fits well into its environment. It has the solidity of the Mansion House on its left, and suggests the certainty

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of adding to the bullion in the vaults of the Bank of England on its right.

In the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange is New Broad Street, the subject of another of Mr. Penneirs draw- ings, a narrow, depressing thoroughfare, running from Liverpool Street Station towards the Bank, in these days generally encumbered with motor omnibuses, between which elegantly dressed and hatless Stock Exchange clerks dodge at the imminent peril of their lives. The Stock Exchange is near by. To me its proceedings are " wropt in mystery,' ' and I confess that I am as puzzled as Mr. Weller senior as to how and why things go up and down in the City. There are no ghosts of any interest in New Broad Street, but in Old Broad Street, Alexander Pope, the father of the poet, traded as a merchant.

XXX

ALDERSGATE STREET

The streets of the City of London are terrifying in their daytime rush and bustle, but they are thrilling and romantic in their evening emptiness. Nowhere during working hours is the present more insistent — a materialistic present in an unnecessary hurry, terribly busy with things that perhaps really do not matter very much after all. Here in the City you can hear the dull, tireless throb of the machine of buying and selling and exchanging that dominates and directs the life of the modern world. It is all very harassing, and, in a sense, very menacing, and it is a relief to me to know that I need only meet it in most infrequent visits. In all this, Aldersgate Street is like most other of the City streets, blatant in its modernity, and, remembering all its ancient history, suggesting Gog and Magog dressed up in ready-made suits bought from a Jewish cash tailor. But in the evenings, when bankers and captains of industry have gone home, maybe to try and be human, and underpaid clerks have escaped to their suburbs, eager to forget the City and all its ways, then Aldersgate Street, with the other City streets, is fuller, perhaps, of romantic shades than the thoroughfares of any other part of London.

Aldersgate is one of the four oldest of the City gates. Its name is Saxon and the gate must have stood there long before William and his Normans crossed the Channel. It was through Aldersgate that James I. rode when he came south to try and rule the kingdom of Elizabeth, and his Scotch heart must have beat with joy as he rode along Aldersgate with its rows of fine houses and attractive inns. What a city for a Scotsman to sack ! Before the coming of James, Foxe, whose stories of the martyrs gave me sleepless

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nights in my youth, often stayed in Aldersgate with his printer. Years earlier still, in what is now Trinity Court, beyond the Church of St. Botolph, stood the house of the Brothers of the Holy Trinity, established by Henry VI., a king soon to be acclaimed a saint, and suppressed during the reign of Edward VI. Thanet House, one of Inigo Jones's mansions, stood on the east side of Aldersgate Street. In the later seventeenth century it belonged to the Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke, the Radical philosopher, the father of European democracy, often stayed with Shaftesbury at Thanet House, and the Duke of Monmouth, the unlucky illegitimate son of Charles II., was once hidden there. Another great mansion, Lauderdale House, the residence of the Duke of Lauderdale, one of the scoundrelly ministers of the Merry Monarch, stood on the same side of Aiders- gate Street, and opposite was Petre House where Richard Lovelace the poet —

I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not honour more

— was imprisoned during the Commonwealth. Every one knows the jingle —

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell, The reason why I cannot tell ; But this alone I know full well, I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

Few of us know who wrote it. The author was a certain Tom Brown, and he died in Aldersgate Street in 1704. Aldersgate Street, indeed, brings many tags of poetry to one's mind, for, of the Shaftesbury who lived in Shaftesbury House and entertained Locke, Dryden wrote :

For close designs and crooked councils fit, Sagacious, bold, and truculent of wit ; Restless, unfixed in principles and place, In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace.

Pepys, of course, went along Aldersgate Street, but not with his usual zest, for he records, " I saw the limbs of some of our new traitors set upon Aldersgate, which was a sad sight to see."

There were many famous coaching inns in old Alders-

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gate, most of the coaches from the north naturally arriving there. Gay wrote to Swift on hearing of his arrival from Dublin, " To our great joy you have told us your deafness left you at the inn in Aldersgate Street ; no doubt your ears knew there was nothing worth hearing in England/ 1

The greatest of all the Aldersgate Street ghosts is John Milton, who in 1640 went to live in " a pretty garden house in Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry and therefore the fitter for his turn by reason of the privacy.' ' To this house three years later he brought his first wife, Mary Powell, a merry child of seventeen, whom the grave poet bored to death. She was Royalist and he was Puritan, at least in politics, and they soon parted, though after two years Mary returned to Aldersgate Street, just before Milton removed to the Barbican. If the fact that it was the home of the great seventeenth-century poet gives Aldersgate an unexpected dignity, another event that happened there gives the street its romance. John Wesley wrote in his journal under the date Wednesday, May 24, 1738 :

" In the evening I went, very unwillingly, to a Society in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Luther's Preface to the Epistle of the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed ; I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. I began to pray with all my might for all those who had in an especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all what I now first felt in my heart."

Aldersgate thus saw the beginning of Wesleyanism, one of the most interesting and important of modern religious movements, with a sociological interest arising from the fact that, in the dark days in the beginning of the industrial era, Wesley's wandering preachers played the same part in the lives of the oppressed poor as the hedge priests had played centuries before.

All streets lead somewhere, and sometimes at the end of the street its greatest interest is discovered. Aldersgate Street leads to the Goswell Road, and it was in Gos- well Road that Mr. Pickwick lodged with Mrs. Bardell, a

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circumstance which led to the most famous of all breach of promise cases.

And so in the evening in Aldersgate Street, while one thinks of Milton and Wesley and of King James with greed in his eye, and Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet one thinks too of Mr. Pickwick tripping along m his neat black gaiters.

XXXI

LEADENHALL MARKET

Leadenhall Market is the oldest market in London, and it is probable that in the time of the Romans ancient Britons bought poultry exactly on the site where modern Londoners buy poultry to-day. Leadenhall derives its name from the old Manor House of Ledene Halle, so called because its roof was covered with lead, a rare thing in the fourteenth century. It passed into the possession of Sir Richard Whittington in 1408, and through that famous Lord Mayor it became the property of the Corporation of London. Years before, however, it had become a market, for a proclamation issued in 1345 directs that strangers, that is to say, persons not Freemen of the City, bringing poultry into the City may only sell in the Leaden Hall. If they sold their poultry elsewhere, they ran the risk of for- feiture and imprisonment. On the other hand, the Free- men were forbidden to sell their poultry in the Leaden Hall and were ordered to expose it in the street that is still called the Poultry. City residents were not allowed to purchase from the Leaden Hall stalls after prime was rung at the Church of St. Paul, that is to say, after six o'clock in the morning. This enactment shows that our ancestors were early risers. Nowadays one of the most beneficent works of the Corporation of London is the care it takes to ensure that food sold in the City markets, and indeed all food brought into the Port of London, is sound and wholesome. This good work has been going on for centuries, for as long ago as 1357 it was ordained that any persons selling poultry " that is rotten or stinking " in Leaden Hall Market should suffer " imprisonment of his body."

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The fourteenth-century trader was not allowed to settle the prices of his goods. They were fixed by authority. In an ordinance issued in 1384 the maximum prices were as follows :

" The best cygnet was to be sold for fourpence ; the best heron, sixteenpence, and the best egret, eighteenpence ; the best goose, capon, or hen for sixpence, but the best pullet for twopence. The best rabbit with the skin, fourpence, and no foreigner shall sell any rabbit without the skin. For a river mallard (wild duck) not more than threepence may be taken, for a dunghill mallard (tame duck), twopence halfpenny ; teal, twopence. The best snipe must be sold for a penny ; woodcock or plover for threepence ; the best partridge for fourpence ; curlew, sixpence ; whilst for the best pheasant twelvepence might be demanded — a proof that it was a rare bird in those days. For a bittern, or a brewe (whatever bird that might be), the extreme price of eighteenpence might be demanded. A dozen pigeons were to be sold for eightpence ; four larks for one penny ; a dozen thrushes for sixpence ; a dozen finches for a penny."

It must have been pleasant to buy partridges for four- pence, but one regrets to find that our ancestors devoured thrushes and finches.

Cheese and butter as well as poultry were sold in the Leaden Hall market, and in the sixteenth century cutlery must have been regularly sold there, because a contemporary author says, " This argument cuts like a Leadenhall knife. " The Manor House and the market were destroyed in the Great Fire, and afterwards there was erected a large build- ing of freestone wherein, Strype says, " is kept a market one of the greatest, the best and the most general for all pro- visions in the City of London, nay of the kingdom." Here were sold beef and veal and mutton and fish and poultry and vegetables. In the nineteenth century Leadenhall became the market for live birds and also for dogs and cats, the last being sold mainly to the skippers of rat-haunted ships.

The old market was pulled down in 1880 and the present undistinguished building erected in its place. There is not, perhaps, much romance in food markets themselves, although it is curious to note how one particular trade has

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been carried on in the same place for so long a time. But if Leadenhall Market has little romance, it is good to remember that within a stone's throw of the gateway that Mr. Pennell has drawn there stood, until 1862, East India House, the offices of the East India Company, where Charles Lamb spent thirty-three years of his life making up for coming late by going away early.

For me the figure of gentle Elia haunts the neighbour- hood of Leadenhall. He is its patron saint. Charles Lamb was seventeen when, in 1792, he entered the office of the East India Company. He received no salary at all until 1795, when he was paid £40. This sum was raised to £70 in the next year. De Quincey called on him at his office in 1804, and in his London Reminiscences has left us a picture of Lamb at work. He says : " The seat upon which he sat was a very high one ; so absurdly high, by the way, that I can imagine no possible use or sense in such an altitude, unless it were to restrain the occupant from playing truant at the fire by opposing Alpine difficulties to his descent.' ' De Quincey suggests that for Lamb " to have sat still and stately upon this aerial station " when he called would have had " an air of ungentlemanly assump- tion/ ' and he describes how Lamb laboriously climbed down from his perch. In 1809, after seventeen years' service, Lamb was paid a salary of £160 a year. This was increased in 181 5 to £480, and when he retired, in 1825, his salary was £730. He received a pension of £450 a year from the East India directors. To Lamb the office was always a prison. He wrote in 1822, " Thirty years have I served the Philistines and my neck is not subdued to the yoke." And two years later he wrote, " I wish I were a caravan driver or penny post man to earn my bread in air and sunshine." He was often very much overworked. The office hours were nominally from nine to three, but he sometimes worked until eleven at night and never left till four. " Time that a man may call his own is his life," he said, " and hard work and thinking about it taints even the leisure hours, stains Sunday with workday contemplations." His retirement at the age of fifty gave him, at least at the beginning, unqualified joy. He said to Crabb Robinson, " I have left the damned India House for ever. Give me joy." But Mr. E. V. Lucas suggests that it would have

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been better for Lamb if he had continued to submit to the discipline which daily attendance at an office entailed. The East India Company was a great trading concern, and the accounts were kept in the department in which Lamb worked. He loathed the merchants and the merchandise. He said :

" These * merchants and their spicy drugs ' which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius ! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I ' engross ' when I should pen a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffick, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization and wealth and amity and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe — and rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks. "

Lamb was very popular with his fellow clerks, and in 1805 a party of them went to Drury Lane to applaud the first performance of his unsuccessful play, " Mr. H." There are many stories told of Lamb at India House. One day the head of a department said to him, " Pray, Mr. Lamb, what are you about ? " " Forty next birthday/ ' said Lamb. " I don't like your answer," said the Chief. " Nor I your question," was Lamb's reply. Once, having been away a whole day without leave, he explained that on going through Leadenhall Market he had been threatened by a butcher, and was afraid to stay in the neighbourhood. The East India Company has passed away, but Lamb's memory is cherished in the India Office in Whitehall, where his portrait hangs on the walls, and there is carefully preserved there a copy of a publication called Tables of Simple Interest, on the fly-leaf of which Lamb wrote, " The interest of this book, unlike the generality which we are doomed to peruse, rises to the end." Lamb died at Edmonton in 1834. Landor wrote of him :

He leaves behind him, freed from griefs and years,

Far worthier things than tears. The love of friends without a single foe :

Unequall'd lot below !

Lamb is not the only great writer who is associated

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with East India House. James Mill and his greater son, John Stuart Mill, were both clerks there, and so was Thomas Love Peacock, the poet, and the father-in-law of George Meredith. Peacock entered the India House in 1 8 19, and he and Lamb must have met. There is a story that they once sat opposite each other at a public dinner. Between them was a salad bowl on the top of which was a hard-boiled egg. " What kind of egg is that ? " asked Peacock. " The kind of egg that a drunken peacock would lay," was Lamb's reply. Incidentally we may remember that Gibbon's great-grandfather was a Leaden- hall Street draper, and his grandmother was the daughter of a Leadenhall Street goldsmith.

XXXII

THE POST OFFICE

Mr. Pennell's drawing of the old General Post Office might lure to columns of statistics — the numbers of letters posted, the numbers of telegrams despatched, the number of tele- phone calls (with the number of " wrong numbers "), the weight of parcels carried through the post, the amount of money deposited in the Post Office Savings Bank, with comparative figures to show how the Post Office business has increased, and so on, and so on. But statistics are never amusing and generally misleading. Arithmetic, too, is the enemy of romance, and there is genuine human romance in a post office. Who can tell what the postman's bag is bringing to any of us — good tidings, or bad, the disappointment of our hopes, the confirmation of our fears, maybe some unexpected good fortune, if we are young, possibly a love letter, whatever age we are, most certainly a bill.

It is said that the art of letter-writing is dead. But the manufacture of letters (a very different thing) ever increases. The typewriter has killed letter-writing as a form of literary art, though many of the busiest literary men still write many letters with their own hand. Possibly volumes of " life and letters " will be rarer in the future, and, on the whole, that will be no great loss. On the other hand, to refer to one example, there must be many hundreds of Mr. Bernard Shaw's letters in existence, clamouring for publication. Years ago Mr. Shaw had a habit of covering postcards with fine manuscript writing, much in the manner of the strange geniuses who write the Lord's Prayer on a threepenny bit, and a photograph of one of these postcards is the obvious frontispiece for Mr. Shaw's collected letters.

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His handwriting is even smaller than Mr. Wells's, whose letters with his own humorous illustrations are quite sure to appear in volume form as soon as the breath is out of his body, if not before.

Most people write letters because the letters must be written — answers to invitations, promises to pay at the end of the month, congratulations to one's aunt on her seventieth birthday. The letters that are best to read are the letters that are written for fun. Letter-writing was one of W. S. Gilbert's favourite amusements. Perhaps the best and most characteristic letter printed in his recent biography is the following :

My dear Cousin Mary — -Did you know Mabel Turner ? She was married yesterday to Dugdale of the 18th Hussars, with much pomp and ceremony. I can't understand why so much fuss is made over a partnership, or rather I don't understand why the process should not be applied to all partnerships. It seems to me that the union (say) of Marshall & Snelgrove might, and should, have been celebrated in the same fashion. Marshall waiting at the altar for Snelgrove to arrive (dressed in summer stock remnants), a choir to walk in front of Snelgrove chanting, a Bishop and a Dean (and also a Solicitor) to ratify the deed of partnership, and a bevy of coryphee fitters- on to strew flowers in their path. It is a pretty idea, and invests a contract with a solemnity not to be found in a solicitor's or conveyancer's chambers. — Always, my dear Cousin, affly. yours.

Henry James was a great letter-writer, and his letters are as characteristic as his novels. For instance, the following passage in a letter addressed to Mr. Hugh Walpole in the autumn of 19 14 :

" London is of course under all our stress very interest- ing, to me deeply and infinitely moving — but on a basis and in ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of insignificance. People ' meet ' a little, but very little, every social habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and utter mistakers (mis- takers, I mean, about the decency of things) ; and for myself, I confess, I find there are very few persons I care to see — only those to whom and to whose state of feeling I am really attached. Promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably on my nerves. Depths

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of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in un- thinkable conditions almost, are magnificently doing the thing."

A certain formality is essential to good letter-writing, and casualness has become our habit, thanks to the telegraph and the telephone. Possibly the casual letter was made fashionable by Lord Beaconsfield, whose delightfully intimate letters are the chief charm of the final volumes of his biography.

A learned Judge lamented the other day that|it was his duty in breach of promise cases to peruse love letters not intended for public reading. I have always tnought the publication of love letters in rather doubtful taste. Certainly Froude remains among the unforgivable sinners. Still the spiritual history of an epoch can often be read in love letters. The letters written by Sir Robert Peel to Miss Julia Floyd, whom he afterwards married, supply a vivid picture of the excessive propriety that was the reaction from the manners of the Regency. There is one letter that gives me particular joy :

My dearest Julia — As I write to you before I have done anything or seen anything, you must not be disappointed. I might supply the want of other materials by impassioned declarations of my love and admiration of you, but such declarations are so easily made and so often insincere, and I am so satisfied that they are unnecessary to convince you of the ardour and the constancy of my attachment to you, that I purposely avoid them. You told me to write to you with the same freedom and unreserve as if I were speaking to you, and I have a double reason for doing so as I thus consult my own inclinations and obey your injunctions.

We arrived here last night before six, having very narrowly escaped the misfortune of being detained at Petworth, where all was bustle and confusion on account of the Sussex election, and nothing but the kindness of the Committee of one of the candidates enabled us to proceed.

We are about a quarter of a mile from the sea, with an imperfect view of it. It is in vain for me to wish that you were here, but I cannot see the tide receding and a fine hard sand left by it without thinking of the happiness I should have in riding or walking with you upon it. God grant you may have occasion to fulfil your promise of writing to me ! If you have, do not forget it. Adieu, my dearest Julia. — Ever most affectionately yours,

Robert Peel.

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Commercial letters are not calculated to be thrilling, but why do educated persons become illiterate when they address letters from city offices ? Postcards are an abomination. Telegrams I dread. I cannot explain why, but I always expect good news in a letter and bad news in a telegram.

Byron, says Lord Ernie, is, with the exception of Mrs. Carlyle, the last of great letter-writers. His letters are an autobiography, a sincere revelation of himself. Of these, his answer to Mr. John Murray, to whom he had sent the first two cantos of Don Juan, is particularly characteristic :

" So you and Mr. Foscolo, etc., want me to undertake what you call ' a great work ' (?) an Epic poem, I suppose, or some such pyramid. I'll try no such thing ; I hate tasks. And then ' seven or eight years ' ! God send us well this day three months, let alone years. If one's years can't be better employed than in sweating poesy, a man had better be a Ditcher. And works, too ! — is Childe Harold nothing ? You have so many ' Divine ' poems, is it nothing to have written a Human one ? Without any of your worn-out machinery. Why, man, I could have spun the thoughts of four Cantos of that poem into twenty, had I wanted to bookmake, and its passions into as many modern tragedies. Since you want length, you shall have enough of Juan, for I'll make 50 Cantos."

If he had lived, he might have kept his word, but he died before Don Juan was finished.

The English Post Office, which has its centre at St. Martin 's-le- Grand, is a monument of efficiency. The per- fection of its organisation is inhuman, otherwise, I suppose, our telegrams would be received late and our letters would never be delivered. And perhaps that would not matter so much as we think. Anyway, if efficiency is the goal of modern life, the State has nothing to learn from the private individual, and he who prays for efficiency need not tremble at Socialism.

St. Martin 's-le-Grand, where the Post Office has been established for over a hundred years, was originally a monastic foundation with the right of sanctuary. In the Middle Ages when a criminal was being escorted from Newgate for execution on Tower Hill, if he could possibly slip away from his gaolers and get inside the gates of St. Martin's he was safe. This right of sanctuary remained

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THE POST OFFICE

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when the college was pulled down after the dissolution of the monasteries, and St. Martin 's-le-Grand was for years inhabited by a colony of counterfeiters whom the authorities had no power to arrest. Their privileges were taken away from them in the reign of James I., but St. Martin's con- tinued to be an Alsatia for debtors until the reign of William III. That grim Dutchman was not likely to have much sympathy with the Micawbers of his time, and in 1697 " all such sanctuaries or pretended sanctuaries " were finally suppressed.

And now on the spot where counterfeiters made false coin in safety and where debtors were free from their creditors, wireless messages are sent to Timbuctoo.

XXXIII

THE BRITISH MUSEUM

The British Museum fills some people with pride. Charles Kingsley declared that in the British Museum and the National Gallery the Englishman may proudly say, " What- ever my coat or my purse, I am an Englishman and there- fore I have a right here." I never feel like that. The exterior of the Museum, the subject of Mr. Pennell's drawing, always fills me with a feeling that is half sadness and half terror. I never dare go in. I hurry by with averted face because I remember that up those steps and through the entrance hall there is an immense library under a dome in which are gathered tens of thousands of books, and I know full well that it would not have mattered in the least if eighty per cent of them had never been written. So great a library collected, not by the enthusiasm of the scholar, but by a law that compels the publishers to send copies of all that they publish to be stored on shelves and subse- quently in cellars, is a stupendous monument of the waste of human energy that fills Mr. H. G. Wells with despair.

Think of the ink used to no purpose ; think of the type- writers tapped for hours so that banality may be stored in a museum ! I know that there are many other things besides books in the British Museum. I know that there is a mummy whose maleficent influence ensures swift punish- ment for those who write or speak disrespectfully of her. I know that there are Elgin marbles and great treasures of art and beauty brought from India and Rome and Ephesus — the sculptures of Assyria and Egypt and Babylon ; collec- tions of porcelain and pottery, of jewels and gems and bronzes, and Heaven knows what beside. I know all this. My better nature tells me that here is a wonderful national collection, unrivalled in any other city of the world, which,

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like Charles Kingsley, I ought to study and enjoy. I know that I ought to walk up the steps with my head held high, murmuring,

For he might have been a Roosian, A French or Turk or Proosian,

Or perhaps Itali-an ! But in spite of all temptations To belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman.

But somehow I cannot do it. As soon as I get within sight of the British Museum I forget the Elgin marbles, the Assyrian inscriptions, the wonderful treasures from Greece and Rome, and I remember only that every day dozens and dozens of idiotic novels are solemnly handed over to the Chief Librarian, who must, I am sure, sigh sadly as he hands them over to one of the assistant librarians, who carries them to a nice dry cellar where they are preserved in order that future generations may know the rubbish that was written and read in England in the twentieth century. I feel that it is altogether wrong, for every generation must wish that its successors should think well of it. Why should we compel posterity to despise us ? But perhaps, and there is a gleam of hope, perhaps the novels are not preserved at all. Perhaps the Chief Librarian only pretends, and when The Sin of Christopher and My Gorilla Uncle are duly receipted, they are at once cast into the furnace in order that the industrious old gentlemen who sit hour after hour in the reference library may be com- fortably warmed at a minimum of expense to the nation. I hope that this is true, but I shall never really be quite sure, and I shall continue to tremble as I pass the Museum to wander in the Bloomsbury squares, once the home of wit and rank, and now mainly occupied by boarding-houses at which earnest students from the East are entertained at a very moderate cost.

In Tavistock House in Tavistock Square Dickens wrote the first part of Bleak House. It was an appropriate neigh- bourhood for the great imaginative indictment of English legal proceedings to be commenced in, for Bloomsbury has many legal associations. Lord Mansfield, Lord Ellen- borough and Sir Samuel Romilly, the bravest of legal reformers, all lived in Russell Square, and readers of

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Pickwick will remember that Mr. Perker, Mr. Pickwick's lawyer, lived in Montague Place. There on one occasion he gave a dinner-party, his guests " comprising Mr. Snicks, the Life Office Secretary, Mr. Prosee, the eminent Counsel, three solicitors, one Commissioner of bankrupts, a Special Pleader from the Temple, a small-eyed peremptory young gentleman, his pupil, who had written a lively book about the law of Demises with a vast quantity of marginal notes and references ; and several other eminent and dis- tinguished personages.' ' Colley Cibber, the eighteenth- century dramatist, lived in Southampton Street. " I could not bear such nonsense/' said Johnson of one of his odes, and Fielding trounces him for his mutilation of Shakespeare. It was Cibber who added the line,

Off with his head, so much for Buckingham,

to " Richard III.," and it must be admitted that its theatrical effectiveness has brought down the house for generations.

Bloomsbury has always been a well-mannered neigh- bourhood, and it is not altogether surprising to learn that Lord Chesterfield once lived in Russell Square. So did Sir Richard Steele of Tatler fame. Two poets, William Cowper and Thomas Gray, lived in Southampton Row ; Thackeray lived in Great Coram Street in his struggling days. William Morris, poet and craftsman, lived in Great Ormond Street when he first married, and two years later he opened his first shop in Red Lion Square. In a circular he stated, "It is believed that good decoration, involving rather the luxury of taste than the luxury of costliness, will be found to be much less expensive than is generally sup- posed." The shop was moved to Queen Square in 1865. Compare the ugliness of the Victorian household with its antimacassars and wax flowers with an ordinary English interior to-day, and it is possible to have some idea of the debt that we owe to William Morris.

The literary note of Bloomsbury is emphasised by Mudie's Library at its southern boundary. Mudie's, by the way, was once a publishing house and issued the first English edition of the poems of James Russell Lowell. Good books, indeed, have been written and published in Bloomsbury, but I never can forget those thousands of bad books in the British Museum cellars.

XXXIV

EUSTON STATION

The Euston Road is the most depressing thoroughfare in central London, more depressing and far less human than the Bethnal Green Road, itself hardly to be described as a Cheerful Way. If there is any one who lives in the Euston Road who could possibly live anywhere else, he is certainly a super-eccentric. In this lugubrious thoroughfare are to be found several monumental masons (tombstones suit the Euston Road), the offices of a great trade union, melancholy gardens and three of London's largest terminal railway stations. The position of these stations is evidence of the Englishman's queer habit of showing his worst side to the world. I can imagine the stranger arriving at Euston Station, walking out into Euston Road, exclaiming, " So this is London ! " and immediately going home again. But London is not unique in choosing odd positions for its railway stations. Is not the Gare du Nord in Paris near the top of the Rue La Fayette, the longest, the cobbliest and the least attractive street in the city ? It requires faith, indeed, to arrive at the Gare du Nord and still to believe that Paris is a gay city. How much kinder is the Roman, who has built his central railway station in a beautiful square !

Railway stations are rarely cheerful places. Certainly Euston is not cheerful, but Mr. Pennell has done well to include it among his London drawings, because it repre- sents, with the Albert Memorial, the solidity, unhampered by imagination, of the Victorian era. It is earlier than the Albert Memorial. It was built one year after Queen Victoria's accession, and long before her husband arrived in England to dower us with the Crystal Palace. When Euston Station was built, Queen Victoria was still, as Mr. Strachey reminded us, in her skittish period. " She laughs

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in real earnest," wrote Creevey in his journal, " opening her mouth as wide as it can go, showing not very pretty gums. . . . She eats quite as heartily as she laughs, I think I may say she gobbles. . . . She blushes and laughs every instant in so natural a way as to disarm anybody." If Victoria were taken to see Euston Station with its Doric archway, it must have been a warning to her that her laughing and gobbling days were to be short, and that her reign was to be of the solidest.

Euston Station was originally the terminus of the Lon- don and Birmingham Railway. The comparatively un- sophisticated Londoner of eighty years ago was immensely pleased with the new building. In a publication called The Companion to the Athenaeum, published in 1839, tnere is a lyrical description of the beauty of the building. The writer says, "As a specimen of Greek architecture, this structure has not only the merit of being upon a grander scale than anything of the kind yet attempted in this country, it is also free from any adulteration of style by the admixture of features which, however well they may be designed in themselves, almost invariably detract more or less from classicality of design." Some years afterwards another writer suggested that Euston Station " must be an abomina- tion to Mr. Ruskin." It probably was. In addition to the Doric portico, the great feature of Euston is its central hall, with its Ionic columns, its statues and its panels.

There is very little local history to distract one in hurrying for a train at Euston, and it is inconceivable that any one should ever go there for any other purpose. The site of the station was once a nursery garden. Flowers bloomed where nowadays excursion trains depart. Few celebrities have chosen the neighbourhood for their residence, though, in a house that once stood where part of Euston Station now is, the famous Peter Pindar lived, a sage person who urged his friends to the use of pale brandy and flannel and was the author of the couplet :

Say would you long the shafts of death defy, Pray keep your inside wet, your outside dry.

William Michael Rossetti, the brother of Gabriel and Christina, once lived at 56 Euston Road. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century feminist,

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whose daughter married Shelley, lived in Euston Square, and in the square too a certain Mr. Aders entertained celebrities a hundred years ago. Crabb Robinson says in his Diary :

" Went to a large musical party at Aders' in Euston Square. . . . Wordsworth, Monkhouse, and their ladies, the Flaxmans, Coleridge and Rogers with some friends. I noticed a great difference in the enjoyment of the music which was first rate. Wordsworth declared himself per- fectly delighted and satisfied but he sat alone and silent, and his face covered, and was generally supposed to be asleep. Flaxman, too, declared he could not endure fine music for long. It exhausted him. But Coleridge's enjoy- ment was lively and openly expressed.' '

It is amusing to consider the possible adventures that a railway station offers, the places for which one can buy a ticket, supposing that one has the money and the leisure, and then to imagine what may happen at the end of the journey. From Euston one can travel to North Wales and learn something of the geographical and racial factors that made Mr. Lloyd George the arbiter of Europe. Or one. can take train to Holyhead and thence to Dublin and dis- cover what life is like in a Free State. Or to Liverpool and thence to America and prohibition. Or to the Lake District to think of Wordsworth and, if one is censorious, to shudder over his recently discovered peccadillo with a French lady. Or to Carlisle and thence, if one is a Socialist, to Glasgow, or if one is a plutocrat, to the moors. But Euston is over-generous in its offer of adventure. There is danger in too wide a range of choice. One has a sort of fear that one would be sure to choose wrong at Euston and would find oneself at Wigan.

Railway stations, and Euston certainly among them, are good places to get away from. They are gloomy places to which to return. It is not the railway train that has killed the romance of travel, but the railway station. A journey by train through a new country often gives one splendid thrills, but the arrival at one's destination is a gloomy episode. A thorough reform of railway stations — beauty at the termini — would do more to make modern life really happy than many more materialistic proposals.

Journeys end in lovers' meetings," says the poet. But surely not at Euston if the lovers are wise !

XXXV

BANKSIDE

Bankside is that part of Southwark that lies between Blackfriars Bridge and Barclay's Brewery. It was old London's " fun city," the fun often degenerating into cruelty and profligacy. The Bear Garden was at Bankside, and bear-baiting was a favourite amusement both of the gentle and the simple until the Revolution. The popular day for bear-baiting was Sunday (London was not always Puritan), and during a Sunday performance in 1583 one of the amphitheatres fell down and many of the audience were killed. Stow sententiously calls this accident " a friendly warning to such as more delight in the cruelties of beasts than in the works of mercy which ought to be the Sabbath Day's exercise." Elizabeth was not above watching the bear-baiting, and both Pepys and Evelyn often visited the Bear Garden. Pepys, of course, enjoyed himself hugely. He once saw in the Bear Garden a fierce fight between watermen and butchers, and he says, " It was pleasant to see, but that I stood in the pit and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt. At last the people broke up and so I away." Evelyn, on the other hand, considered bear-baiting a rude and dirty pastime.

On Bankside near the Bear Garden were the Stews, eighteen licensed houses of ill -fame. In the fifteenth century these houses belonged to the famous William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, who leased them from the Bishop of Winchester. Wat Tyler and his Kentish peasants sacked the Stews. This probably enraged Wal- worth more than Tyler's treason to the King, and may have been the reason why he dragged Wat from the sanctuary of St. Bartholomew's to kill him in Smithfield.

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On Bankside were the four Elizabethan theatres, the Hope, the Rose, the Swan and the Globe. The Globe Theatre was built in 1599 by Richard Burbage, the actor, and from then until Shakespeare's professional retire- ment, it was occupied by the actor-poet's company, and it was here that his later plays were produced. In 1601 friends of Essex, who was charged with treason to the Queen, endeavoured to save him by stirring up revolution in London, and they bribed a member of Shakespeare's company to persuade him to revive " Richard II.," in the hope that the scene in which the King is killed would encourage a demonstration against Elizabeth.

The Globe held an audience of two thousand, the prices of the seats varying from twopence to half-a-crown. The average daily receipts were about twenty-five pounds, and Sir Sidney Lee says that Shakespeare drew at the lowest estimate more than five hundred pounds a year from the theatre. He must, of course, have acted at the Globe, though little is known of the parts that he played. Accord- ing to a contemporary he " did act exceedingly well," and it is known that he played the ghost in " Hamlet " and Adam in ' ' As You Like It."

Both Beaumont and Fletcher lived on Bankside, near the Globe, as did Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, who was part-proprietor of the Rose Theatre. But Shakespeare never seems to have lived in Elizabethan theatre-land.

What manner of man was he, the greatest of all modern poets, as he walked with Gerard in his Fetter Lane garden or rehearsed his company at Bankside ? What was he like in his manner as he lived ? The most attractive picture and the most human comes from the pen of Mr. Frank Harris. Shakespeare, he says, was " delicate in body and over excitable, yielding and irresolute in character ; with too great sweetness of manners and inordinately given to the pleasures of love." Mr. Harris adds :

" I picture him to myself very like Swinburne — of middle height or below it, inclined to be stout ; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to reverence and quick, pointed chin ; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to kisses or gay ironic laughter ; an exceedingly sensitive,

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eager speaking face that mirrors every fleeting change of emotion. ... I can see him talking, talking with extreme fluency in a high tenor voice, the reddish hair flung back from the high forehead, the eyes now dancing, now aflame, every feature quick with the ' beating mind.' "

Bankside has fallen from its high — and its low — estate. Shakespeare has gone (to be honoured near by at the Old Vic). So have the Stews !

XXXVI

THE TOWER BRIDGE

The Tower Bridge is the latest of London's bridges across the Thames. It was begun in 1886 and completed in 1894. It is fascinating to watch the great drawbridges being raised to allow ocean-going vessels to pass along the road that leads from London to the ends of the earth, but the Tower Bridge is too young to have a history and too utilitarian to suggest romance.

If that be true of the bridge, it is magnificently untrue of the Tower from which it takes its name. Nowhere is there enshrined more of the history of the English kings, though of the history of the English people the Tower has little to tell. Indeed, so far as I know, the only occasion when the people forcibly entered within its walls was in 1 38 1, when Wat Tyler led his Kentish peasants inside the precincts, dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury from the altar in St. John's chapel, and struck off his head on Tower Hill.

The Norman Keep of the Tower, still solid and impress- ive in its strength, was built by William the Conqueror in 1078. William had a double object : to guard his new capital from possible foreign invasion and to overawe its Saxon citizens. His architect was one Gundulf, a monk, and, judging from his name, a Saxon, who also built part of Rochester Cathedral. Subsequent kings added towers and walls, a large part of the work being accomplished by Henry III., that master builder, to whom we owe much of Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle.

The Tower consists of the Norman Keep, the wall round the Inner Ward with its twelve towers, among them the Bloody Tower, the outer fortifications, and the moat.

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From its beginning the Tower was a State prison and, until the Commonwealth, a palace. In it the State jewels are guarded by the Yeomen of the Guard, that picturesque link between Tudor and twentieth-century England. The Yeomen of the Guard, the Beef-eaters, are of course all old soldiers. It will be remembered that Gilbert made them sing :

Tower Warders,

Under orders, Gallant pikemen, valiant sworders !

Brave in bearing,

Foemen scaring, In their bygone days of daring !

Ne'er a stranger

There to danger — Each was o'er the world a ranger ;

To the story

Of our glory Each a bold contributory !

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the Royal Mint was in the Tower. The Tower has stood grim and strong for a thousand years, though it narrowly escaped destruction by bombs from German aeroplanes during the war.

There are ghosts enough to choose from in the Tower, of princes and prelates, soldiers and statesmen, patriots and intriguing courtiers. Many of them were taken into the Tower to die, others for imprisonment and subsequent release. Some are good to remember, others may well be forgotten, for of the princes of the past there are but few who matter to the present.

In the early years of the fifteenth century James I. of Scotland, who altogether spent seventeen years in imprison- ment in England, was held prisoner in the Tower. James was a poet as well as a king, and, in the Tower, he wrote " The Kingis Quair," the Chaucerian poem in which he tells the story of his courtship of Lady Jane Beaufort. Another royal poet was a prisoner in the Tower at the same time, Charles of Orleans, captured by the English at the battle of Agincourt and a prisoner in England for twenty- five years. Charles of Orleans is honoured among French poets as the master of the rondel, as Francois Villon, the thief (poetry knows nothing of rank), is the prince of all

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ballad makers. Robert Louis Stevenson has a charming paper on the prince, who survives " in a few old songs.' '

Henry VI., most pious of kings, and soon, after many years, to be canonised by Rome, was murdered in the Tower by Gloucester, afterwards Richard III. It would seem that it was inevitable in the fifteenth century for a king who was also a saint to meet a violent death. According to Shakespeare, St. Henry (I am anticipating Rome) was a man of spirit. There is certainly point and vehemence in his denunciation of his murderer :

The owl shriek'd at thy birth, an evil sign ;

The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time ;

Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees !

The raven rock'd her on the chimney's top,

And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.

The murderous Richard III. has many connections with the Tower. It was here that at his order his brother, Clarence, and the little princes, Edward V. and his baby brother, were put to death.

The Tower looms large in the history of Henry VIII. In it More and Fisher were imprisoned before being be- headed on Tower Hill, More humorous and Fisher saintly to the last. When More was deprived of his books and ink and paper, he carefully covered over the windows of his cell and sat in darkness. " When all the wares are gone," he said, " the shop windows should be shut up." Old Fisher, bravest of bishops and martyrs, wakened at five to be told that he was to be executed at nine, said to the Lieutenant : " Let me, by your patience, sleep an hour or two, for I have slept very little this night ; and yet, to tell true, not from any fear of death, I thank God, but by reason of my great weakness and infirmity." Stubborn was the Tudor king and stubborn were the men who opposed his will , and stubborn , too , were the women . The aged Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, sent to the block for denying the royal supremacy, refused to bend her head. " So should traitors die and I am none," she said.

In 1536 Anne Boleyn, after her short spell of glory, passed through the Traitors' Gate, hysterically crying, laughing and praying, to be tried within the Tower itself, her uncle being among her judges, and to be executed.

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Katherine Howard, the fifth Queen, whose story Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer has told so well, followed her a few years later.

In the reign of Queen Mary, Wyatt, one of the knightly poets of the Tudor age, was imprisoned for treason in the Tower. There is a peculiar charm in the sixteenth-century love poems, these lines of Wyatt 's for instance :

Mistrust me not, though some there be That fain would spot my steadfastness : Believe them not, since that ye see The proof is not as they express.

Forsake me not, till I offend ;

Destroy me not, till that I swerve : But since ye know what I intend,

Disdain me not, that am your own.

Elizabeth was sent to the Tower by her sister on Palm Sunday 1554. The tide was out, and she had to scramble to dry land through the mud, protesting that she was no traitor, " but as true a woman to the Queen's Majesty as any now living/ ' Elizabeth was two months in the Tower, and it is not surprising to learn that she was an extremely troublesome prisoner. After her release Elizabeth wrote with a diamond on a glass window at Woodstock :

Much suspected of me, Nothing proved can be, Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.

Pathetic Lady Jane Grey, a Tudor blue-stocking em- broiled in political intrigue against her will, met her death in the Tower ; and Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer (for the last of whom I can profess no admiration) slept in the Tower before being taken to Oxford to be burnt as heretics.

Elizabeth sent Essex, the favourite fallen through pre- sumption, to the Tower and ordered his execution, despite the pleadings of Francis Bacon. She said afterwards to the Due de Biron : " Notwithstanding his engaging in open revolution, he might still, by submission, have obtained my pardon, but neither his friends nor his relations could prevail upon him to ask it."

After being robbed by James I. to enrich one of his greedy creatures, Walter Raleigh spent thirteen years in the

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Bloody Tower, writing his history of the world, and then was executed as a sop to Spain, with whom James I. was eager to establish good relations. Raleigh's courage never deserted him, though his patience sometimes did, particu- larly with the Lieutenant, whom he denounced as " that beast Waad." He made a long speech on the scaffold, protesting his loyalty as an Englishman, and then calmly prepared to die. I quote from Major Martin Hume :

" ' I have a long journey to go,' he said, as he put off his long velvet gown and satin doublet, and then he asked the headsman to let him see the axe. ' Dost thou think I am afraid of it ? ' Then, smiling as he handed it back, he said to the Sheriff, ' This is sharp medicine, but it is a sound cure for all diseases.' When he was asked which way he would lie upon the block, he replied, ' So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lies.' Then, at two strokes, the wise white head fell, and one of the brightest geniuses that England ever saw was offered up a fruitless sacrifice to the cause of an impossible alliance with the power whose arrogance he had dared to withstand. He had made the fatal mistake of supposing that the high-handed traditions of Elizabeth maintained their potency under the sway of James."

Felt on, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham at Portsmouth, thus supplying Alexandre Dumas with some of the incidents of The Three Musketeers (how better could a man serve his kind ?), was imprisoned in the Tower, as were (so the great follow the little) Strafford and Laud, the martyr of the English Church. Monmouth, the unlucky illegitimate son of Charles II., and his judge, Bloody Jeffreys, followed each other within a few years. Jeffreys tried to escape from England after the Revolution, but was recog- nised at Wapping by an attorney whom he had bullied in his Court of Chancery, and was taken to the Tower, where he died a natural death a few months later.

The event in the Tower history that most stirred the people of London was the committal to imprisonment there, in 1688, of Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the six other bishops who refused to obey James II. and read the Declaration of Indulgence in their churches. England was growing weary of King James, and the bishops were popular heroes. They were taken to the Tower by barge

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from Westminster. The whole river was alive with boats. Macaulay says :

" Many clashed into the stream, and, up to their waists in ooze and water, cried to the holy fathers to bless them. All down the river, from Whitehall to London Bridge, the royal barge passed between lines of boats, from which arose a shout of ' God bless your Lordships.' The King, in great alarm, gave orders that the garrison of the Tower should be doubled, that the Guards should be held ready for action, and that two companies should be detached from every regiment in the kingdom, and sent up instantly to London. But the force on which he relied as the means of coercing the people shared all the feelings of the people. The very sentinels who were posted at the Traitors' Gate reverently asked for a blessing from the martyrs whom they were to guard."

William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, was im- prisoned for a while in the Tower for having published what was alleged to be a blasphemous pamphlet. Lord George Gordon, whose crazy Protestantism was the cause of the Gordon riots, was one of the last prisoners of the Tower. His fate, it will be remembered, is told by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge. One of the most romantic incidents in the Tower's long history is the escape of Lord Nithsdale, who was imprisoned with the Earl of Derwentwater and Viscount Kenmure after the Jacobite rising of 171 5. With the help of his wife Nithsdale escaped, dressed as a woman, and lived for many years afterwards in safety in Rome.

There are within the precincts two ancient churches, St. John's, the oldest church in London, and St. Peter ad Vincula. There is, said Macaulay, no sadder spot on earth than St. Peter ad Vincula. Here are buried before the high altar, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, Jady Jane Grey and Essex, the Countess of Salisbury and the Duke of Monmouth, fifteen in all of the victims of intrigue and tyranny. The noblest are not buried in St. Peter — neither More, nor Fisher, nor Laud ; nor the meanest, Thomas Cromwell, who taught Henry VIII. Machiavellian statecraft, who robbed the poor of their religion, and who established in England a reign of terror such as it has never known before or since.

XXXVII

WHITECHAPEL

When you pass Aldgate Station, going eastward, you are in a foreign city. Butcher's Row, on the right-hand side, is entirely un-English in its appearance. The London County Council tramcars that pass in front of it appear intruders. The meat sold in Butcher's Row is Kosher. The names over the shops suggest Lodz rather than London. Passing the corner of Commercial Road, the wayfarer reaches the Whitechapel High Street, the main road of London's Ghetto. Here again five out of six of the names on the shops are the names of Polish Jews. From Aldgate to Stepney and even beyond, Yiddish is spoken as frequently and even, perhaps, more frequently than English. White- chapel is indeed a city largely inhabited by people entirely different in appearance and mind from the Englishman. Its foreign aspect is increased by the occasional timid figures of Lascar sailors who wander from the docks along the Commercial Road within the boundaries of London's Jewry. Yet the Lascar is to me not so essentially foreign as the Jew. The individual Jew may be accepted as a man and a brother, but the Jews in bulk as they live in White- chapel are disturbing in their obvious difference from their neighbours. They are a people apart, strong, stubborn, unabsorbable. As Mr. Belloc says :

4 4 It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, that they alone have maintained, whether through the special action of Providence or through some general biological or social law of which we are ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally unfailing differentiation between themselves and the society through which they ceaselessly move."

To the north of the High Street lie Petticoat Lane, the

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scene of a famous Sunday morning market, un-English and un-Christian, where bargains are to be bought and where slop clothes are sold on barrows, and Wentworth Street, where fowls are sold alive to be killed according to the Jewish ritual. Petticoat Lane was originally called Hog Lane. In the reign of James I. the Spanish Ambassador lived there, and Ben Jonson refers to it as a suburb. Some of the Huguenot silk-weavers, driven out of France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settled in Hog Lane. To the south, Jewry, which is always extending its boun- daries, now reaches almost to Chinatown. Commercial Road belongs to it. The parish of St. Augustine's, Stepney, famous for its beautiful church, hardly possesses a Christian parishioner.

Whitechapel is a grubby but not unprosperous city, except among its Christian inhabitants, with little of the grinding poverty of neighbouring Bethnal Green and Hoxton ; a city where the Jew, in many cases just come from the ghettoes of eastern Europe, works with inhuman industry and retains his orthodoxy till with prosperity comes a migration to Canonbury or Bayswater, and religious in- difference. In nothing, perhaps, is the Jewish particularism more apparent than in the fact, so evident in Whitechapel, that he can be dirty and prosperous. Dirt among London's native population is the evidence of dire poverty. An increase of wages, in the great majority of cases, with the consequent increase in self-respect, means an increase in the expenditure on soap. Compare the home of the regularly employed artisan with the home of the casual dock labourer ! But the Ghetto remains grimy even when the Jewess is bejewelled. Mr. Zangwill has called New York the " melting-pot " — I suppose the term applies to a smaller extent to Whitechapel — where the Jew is Westernised and absorbed. But there is force in Mr. Henry Ford's epigram :

" It is all very well to talk of the melting-pot, but so far from the Jews melting in that pot, it looks as though they wanted to melt the pot itself."

It is not without significance, by the way, that in the Jewish burial-ground in Whitechapel lies the body of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the first of the English line of his house, and the greatest of our conquerors.

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There are fine churches in Whitechapel, and in the High Street is the London Hospital, one of the most wonderful of all London's many agencies of benefi- cence. These are reminders that one is still in London and in England, though the fact is sometimes hard to believe.

It is only within the last two generations that White- chapel has become the land of the Jew. In an earlier time it was the land of the rough. At the City end of White- chapel there is still a hay market where hay carts assemble, adding considerably to the congestion of the traffic. Years ago this was the largest hay and straw market in the king- dom. North of this market, in a district which has been largely cleared away, was a host of foul streets, described by Dickens in more than one of his novels, the homes of the worst rascaldom in London. A Whitechapel " bird " in those days was a slang expression for a ruffian of the lowest stamp. In the middle of the last century it was a regular custom for a beast to be driven from Smithfield Market and for these " birds " to hunt it through the streets of Whitechapel, towards Stepney.

From Whitechapel the stage coaches used to start for the eastern counties. Mr. Pickwick often travelled over its cobble stones. In the churchyard of St. Mary White- chapel was buried, in 1649, one of the many men supposed to have been the executioner of Charles I.

Whitechapel finishes at Mile End Bars. Pepys fre- quently traversed the road to Mile End, where there was an alehouse that he particularly fancied. One entry in the diary in 1667 says : " Thence to Mile End Greene there drinking, and so home, bringing home night with us." The ugliness of the street is broken as one passes into Mile End Road by a row of attractive almshouses, quaint little houses built by Wren " for twenty-eight decay 'd masters and commanders of ships or ye widows of such."

History has been made in Whitechapel, for here, in the Quakers' burial-ground, fhe Salvation Army was started by General Booth in 1865. Thomas Day, the author of Sandford and Merton, that smuggest of Victorian child stories, was born in Great George Street, Whitechapel.

Grim and grubby and foreign as it is nowadays, there is some light in Whitechapel — constant picture

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exhibitions in the Whitechapel High Street, admirable concerts a mile or so farther east at the People's Palace, and the London Hospital ministering efficiently to the poor. But Whitechapel belongs to the Jew, tireless, unanglicised, terrifying.

XXXVIII

EAST LONDON

Where wealth is created, there are grime and sordidness often amounting to horror. Where wealth is spent there are light and colour and sometimes even beauty. That fact is the condemnation of our civilisation. Mr. Pennell's East London, with its belching factory chimneys and its subtle suggestion of the dull, drab streets where men and women and children herd together with the minimum of space, light, and decency, is the suggestion of the ungodliness of modern society. The East-end of London is the land of the foreigner, of the sailor and of the factory. It is not as depressing as many parts of South London, perhaps because of the frequent touch of cosmopolitanism, perhaps because in East London a dirty half - prosperity exists alongside hopeless soul-destroying poverty. But ugliness is East London's prevailing characteristic, particularly as one gets farther and farther into factory land, and particularly when one is away from the river, for ugliness is always mitigated where there is a river with its moving ships and barges. East London factory land is as repelling as Wigan, and it must be hard indeed to keep one's soul when con- demned to live in the midst of such complete and insistent ugliness.

Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago a new European era began with the industrial revolution. It is probable that future historians will date the end of that era from the Great War. East London is the creation of the industrial era. It is the price of prosperity, the prosperity that made the Victorians smug and happy and comfortable, the pro- sperity that has inevitably led to social unrest and the infinite problems of our times. There is no possibility of ridding

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ourselves of the mechanical inventions and industrial develop- ments that caused the building of these factory chimneys, One of these days, perhaps, we shall learn how to use them without making our cities abominations, and without com- pelling little children to breathe the foetid air of slums that are the factory's usual accompaniment.

Before the factories were built, the East-end had its pleasant history and romance. Wat Tyler gathered his followers together on Stepney Green. Walter Raleigh, most attractive of Elizabethan cavaliers, stayed at Mile End and in the village of RatclifTe. " If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all," Elizabeth once told him. His heart never failed him, but he tried to climb too high. How far, indeed, they fall who try to climb to the stars ! The Queen, herself, composed a rebus on his name :

The bane of the stomach, and the word of disgrace, Is the name of the gentleman with the bold face.

The lines are explained if the name is spelt Raw-lie.

Stratford - by - Bow brings to mind the Prioress of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales :

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly After the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.

Stratford was once famous for its bakers, whose " creame and cakes " were sold all over London.

At Old Ford, Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I., built a bridge over the river Lea, " having herself been well washed in the water," and apparently fearing further acci- dents. In 1663 Pepys dined in a garden in Bethnal Green, where he noticed " the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw and good."

Spitalfields has its modern romance. In 1870, when Pope Pius IX. pronounced the decree of papal infallibility, it was necessary for him to wear a new vestment woven in one piece. Search was made all over Europe for a weaver with sufficient skill for the task, and he was found at last in Spitalfields and, such is the irony of human affairs, he was a descendant of a Huguenot driven out of France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

From 1769 to 1824 the wages of the Spitalfields silk-

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weavers were fixed by statute. Their earnings enabled them to live in decent comfort and, as is common with well-paid workers, they spent their leisure with admirable intelligence. Church tells us :

" The Spitalfields Mathematical Society is second in time to the Royal Society and still exists. There was an Historical Society, which was merged in the Mathematical Society. There was a Floricultural Society, very numerously attended, but now extinct. The weavers were almost the only botanists of their day in the metropolis. They passed their leisure hours, and generally the whole family dined on Sundays, at the little gardens in the environs of London, now mostly built upon, in small rooms about the size of modern omnibuses (1840), with a fireplace at the end. There was an Entomological Society, and they were the first entomologists in the kingdom. The Society is gone. They had a Recitation Society for Shakespearean readings, as well as reading other authors, which is almost forgotten. They had a Musical Society, but this is also gone. They had a Columbarian Society, which gave a silver medal as a prize for the best pigeons of the fancy breed. They were great bird-fanciers, and breeders of canaries, many of whom now cheer their quiet hours while at the loom. Their breed of spaniels called Splashers were of the best sporting blood. . . . Many of the weavers were Freemasons, but there are now very few left, and those old men. Many of the houses in Spitalfields had porticoes with seats at their doors, where the weavers might be seen on summer evenings enjoying their pipes. The porticoes have given way to improvements of the pavements / ■

When the Act regulating wages was repealed, long hours and bad payments became the rule, and the many societies decayed.

Poplar certainly derived its name from the poplar trees that grew there, but Limehouse derives its name, not from the lime trees, but from lime kilns. Blackwall, " a notable harbour for ships," was often visited both by Raleigh and Pepys, who had an adventure on the Isle of Dogs, " a fine rich level for fattening of cattle." Pepys says in his diary :

" We set out so late, that it grew dark, so we doubted the losing of our way ; and a long time it was, or seemed,

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before we could get to the water side, and that about eleven at night, when we come, all merry, we found no ferry-boat was there, nor no oares to carry us to Deptford. However, oares was called from the other side at Greenwich ; but when it come, a frolick, being mighty merry, took us, and there we would sleep all night in the coach in the Isle of Doggs : so we did, there being now with us my Lady Scott ; and with great pleasure drew up the glasses, and slept till daylight, and then some victuals and wine being brought us, we ate a bit, and so up and took boat, merry as might be ; and when we come to Sir G. Carteret's, there all to bed.,,

A murder in Ratcliffe Highway, now renamed, is one of the subjects of De Quincey's Murder considered as a Fine Art. The Highway has its outstanding interest nowadays. It is the centre of London's Chinatown and it is the head- quarters of Jamrach's famous wild beast emporium.

Dickens knew the East-end as he knew all London. Rogue Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend lived at Limehouse, and Bill Sikes lived in Bethnal Green, " in a maze of the mean and dirty streets which abound in that close and densely populated quarter."

Chatterton, the tragic boy poet, lodged in Shoreditch when he first came to London in 1770. He wrote political squibs, for which he was paid a shilling each, and sometimes he was lucky enough to sell a poem for eighteenpence — until in despair he poisoned himself with arsenic in his garret in Brook Street, Holborn. He was then seventeen years and nine months old.

Truly there is tragedy — as indeed there is humour — in every London street.

SHOT TOWER

XXXIX

THE RIVER

There is nothing in this wide world more romantic than a great river on the banks of which stands a great city, and of all the cities in Europe, London is luckiest in its river. The Seine at Paris, the Tiber at Rome, are insignificant compared to the wide sweep of the Thames at London. Above the city the Thames is a thing of joy and beauty, as it runs from Lechlade, linked for all time with the name of William Morris, through Abingdon to Oxford and on to Pangbourne and Goring, commercialised for a mile or so by Reading, to find unsullied beauty again at Sonning and Wargrave and Henley. Then miles more of typical English beauty till Boulter's Lock is passed. The lock really marks the eastern end of the rural Thames ; for Maidenhead is Cockney and raffish and, despite Windsor Castle, the scenery as one journeys Londonwards is not to be compared with the upper stream until, that is, Richmond, still unspoiled, is reached. But good as is the Thames above London, the lower Thames, the subject of Mr. Pennell's picture, sug- gests a far greater measure of history and romance. We have already noted that St. Peter once honoured the Thames by crossing it at Westminster, since when it has been crossed by many saints and sinners. And the reach is below the bridges, the road to everywhere, the satellite of the sea, a fibre of empire if you will, but in reality something far greater, the street of genuine adven- ture. In his delightful book, London River, Mr. H. M. Tomlinson says :

" There is a hill-top at Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our River, the burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can be seen

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for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the ships upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of the City. And surely some surmise of what our River is, comes to a few of that multitude which crosses London Bridge every day ? They favour the east side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a pause to stare overside to the Pool. Why do they ? Ships are there, it is true, but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up which their cargo is hauled piecemeal to vanish instantly into mid-air caverns ; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is the business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below, with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing, though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods, they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the ship below are real.

" Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow, and that all you people on it are being drawn unresisting into that lower world of shades. You release yourself from this spell with an effort and look at the faces of those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their thoughts ? Do they know ? Have they also seen the ghosts ? Have they felt stirring a secret and forgotten desire, old memories, tales that were told ? They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in the suburbs. A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower Bridge gates to be opened for her. She is going. We watch the eastern mists take her from us. For we never are so passive and well-disciplined to the things which compel us, but rebellion comes at times — misgiving that there is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never ventured and made no discovery, and that our time has been saved and not spent. The gates to the outer world close again.

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" There where the ship has vanished, is the highway which brought those unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It is our oldest road, and now has many by-paths."

Apart from the thrills conveyed by its wilderness of ghosts, there is no such London thrill as the river provides with its barges in the early morning or the evening haze, sailing lazy towards the sea. It was on a May morning that Tom Hood wrote :

Gold above, and gold below,

The earth reflected the golden glow,

From river, and hill, and valley ; Gilt by the golden light of morn, The Thames — it look'd like the Golden Horn, And the barge, that carried coal or corn,

Like Cleopatra's Galley !

Drop downstream from Westminster, remembering, as the journey begins, that in 1807 Byron swam from Lambeth " through the two bridges, Westminster and Blackfriars, a distance, including the different turns and tacks made on the way, of three miles/ 9 Once a year the Thames water- men row from London Bridge to Chelsea for a prize of " an orange-coloured livery with a badge representing liberty," the purchase money for which was given by Doggett, an actor, in 171 6. From Tudor times the London watermen have been famous for expressive and explosive language. " They will have the last word," said Ben Jonson, and Boswell records :

" It is well known that there was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames to accost each other as they passed in the most abusive language they could invent ; generally, however, with as much satirical humour as they were capable of producing. Johnson was once eminently successful in this species of contest. A fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered him thus, * Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods.' "

On the right between Westminster and Blackfriars bridges is the Shot Tower, opposite the flaming modernity of the Cecil and Savoy Hotels, a river mark that, though it has lost its purpose, retains its interest.

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On the left, as you leave the City and the Tower behind you, you pass Wapping and Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs. Limehouse river front, drawn by Mr. Pennell, is a picturesque reminder of earlier river days. " Explore Wapping," recommended Dr. Johnson, but, nowadays, the explorer would find little but (I quote Mr. Tomlinson) " mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected and obscure churches and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune.,, Limehouse and Poplar below it are the land of docks, of sailors and strange foreigners assembled from the ends of the earth. On the right bank below bridges are Rotherhithe, where, so Swift tells us, Gulliver was born, and Deptford, where Peter the Great once worked in the dockyard. The streets in the districts bordering the river are often named after far-away cities. They are linked with the life of the sea. The river on which they stand is " the main thoroughfare from Kensington to Valparaiso."

The muddy waters of the Thames, scarred by thousands of keels, befouled by commercialism and the rubbish of a great city, were once clear and limpid, even in the tideway, well stocked with fish of the choicest. In Holinshed's Chronicle, dating from the end of the sixteenth century, one reads :

" What should I speak of the fat and sweet salmon, and that in such plenty (after the time of the smelt be passed) as no river in Europe is able to exceed it. What store also of barbel, trout, chevin, perch, smelt, bream, roach, dace, gudgeon, flounder, shrimps, etc., are commonly to be had therein, I refer to them that know by experience better than I, by reason of their daily trade of fishing in the same. And albeit it seemeth from time to time to be as it were defrauded in sundry wise of these large commodities by the insatiable avarice of the fishermen, yet this famous river complaineth commonly of no want ; but the more it loseth at one time the more it yieldeth at another. Only in carp it seemeth to be scant, since it is not long since that kind of fish was brought over to England, and but of late to speak of into this stream, by the violent rage of sundry land- floods that brake open the heads and dams of divers gentlemen's ponds, by which means it became somewhat partaker also of this said commodity ; whereof once it had no portion that I could ever hear (of). Oh ! that this

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THE RIVER

river might be spared but even one year from nets, etc., but alas ! then should many a poor man be undone. . . .

" In like manner I could intreat of the infinite number of swans daily to be seen upon this river, the two thousand wherries and small boats whereby three thousand poor watermen are maintained, through the carriage and re- carriage of such persons as pass or repass from time to time upon the same ; besides those huge tide-boats, tilt-boats, and barges, which either carry passengers, or bring neces- sary provisions from all quarters of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Essex, and Kent unto the City of London.' '

The " sweet salmon " have disappeared. The swans have moved upstream. The wherries are now numbered in scores and not in thousands. But " the noble Thames with all his goodly traine " remains.

XL

GREENWICH

As its name suggests, Greenwich was a Saxon village, and it remained a small village until the sixteenth century. The Manor of Greenwich was Crown land before the Norman Conquest, and there was a royal residence there in the reign of Edward I. The Manor was given to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who was Regent during the minority of Henry VI . Humphrey was an arrogant and incapable person whose one outstanding virtue was a love of letters. He befriended English contemporary writers, and he presented many books to the University of Oxford, three of which are still in the Bodleian Library. Edward IV. enlarged and beautified Greenwich Palace. Richard III. was married there, and Henry VIII. was born there in June 1491, and was baptized at Greenwich Parish Church. Greenwich was Henry's favourite palace and it was the scene of many of the most interesting events in his life. He was married at Greenwich to Catherine of Aragon in 1509. He first met Anne Boleyn at a masque at the Palace in 1522. Both his daughters were born at Greenwich. It was while on her way from Greenwich by barge to Whitehall that Anne Boleyn was arrested and taken to the Tower. The winter of 1536 was one of the severest on record, and it is said that Henry and Jane Seymour " now lately become Queen rode across the Thames to Greenwich Palace on horseback with all the Court.' ' Henry married Anne of Cleves at Greenwich Palace.

The fact that Greenwich was next door to the dockyard at Deptford was one of the reasons of its attraction for Henry and Elizabeth. Henry was staying at Greenwich when the Great Harry was launched at Deptford. From

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the windows of the Palace Elizabeth watched Martin Frobisher with his two small ships starting to discover the North-west Passage, and from the same windows she saw Drake on the Golden Hind returning from his voyage round the world. Every ship as she passed the royal palace fired a salute and dipped her flag.

The Due d'Alencon, the youngest son of Catherine de Medici, whom Elizabeth seems seriously to have thought of marrying, visited her at Greenwich in 1582. Like his brothers, he must have been a horrid young man, and, after seeing him, the Queen declared, " I would not marry Alencon to be Empress of the world." Nevertheless — the Tudor Queen was as inconsistent as the rest of us — when he had left England, Elizabeth dropped into poetry. The poem is printed by Mr. Chamberlin in his The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth :

I grieve, yet dare not show my discontent ; I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate ; I dote, but dare not what I ever meant ; I seem stark mute, yet inwardly doe prate ; I am, and am not — freeze, and yet I burn ; Since from myself my other self I turn.

My care is like my shadow in the sun — Follows me flying — flies when I pursue it ; Stands and lives by me — does what I have done ; This too familiar care doth make me rue it. No means I find to rid him from my breast, Till by the end of things it be suppressed.

Some gentler passion steal into my mind, (For I am soft, and made of melting snow ;) Or be more cruel, love, or be more kind ; Or let me float or sink, be high or low ; Or let me live with some more sweet content ; Or die, and so forget what love e'er meant.

James I. and Charles I. were both constantly at Green- wich. During the Civil War the Palace fell into decay, and although after the Restoration Charles II. thought of restoring it, the cost was too great. The only part of the old Palace left was the Queen's House, which was handed over to the Navy Office where Pepys spent part of his official life.

Moved by the plight of the sailors wounded in the

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battle of La Hogue in 1692, Queen Mary II. determined to use Greenwich Palace as a hospital " similar in plan to her uncle's foundation at Chelsea for veteran soldiers.' ' The plan was carried out by her husband after her death. Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of the Hospital and Evelyn was one of the Royal Commissioners, contributing a donation of a thousand pounds to the fund. The Hospital was established " for seamen and mariners who from old age, wounds or infirmities are incapable of further service.' ' With characteristic official meanness, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1696 to enforce a contribution of sixpence a month to the Hospital out of the miserable wages then paid in the navy.

The building of the Hospital took nearly sixty years, but the first batch of pensioners was admitted in 1705. The rations were so plentiful that the pensioners added to their income by selling part of them to the Greenwich poor. The weekly allowance for each man consisted of seven i-lb. loaves ; 3 lb. of beef ; 2 lb. of mutton ; a pint of peas ; 1 J lb. of cheese ; 2 oz. of butter and fourteen quarts of beer, and a shilling a week with which to buy tobacco.

The unfortunate Admiral Byng was imprisoned at Greenwich Hospital for four and a half months before being taken to Portsmouth to be court-martialled and shot. Johnson visited the Hospital in 1763. He said, according to Boswell, that it was " too magnificent for a place of charity and that its parts were too much detached to make one great whole." Johnson had stayed in Greenwich twenty-six years earlier, next door to the Golden Heart in Church Street, at the time when he was writing his play " Irene/' composing part of it while walking in the Park. " Irene " was produced at Drury Lane by Garrick twelve years after it was written. It is described by Leslie Stephen as " one of the heaviest and most unreadable of dramatic performances." Even Boswell, where his hero is concerned the greatest sycophant in history, has to admit its entire absence of dramatic interest, though he adds that it is " entitled to the praise of superior excellence." It ran at Drury Lane for nine nights. During his stay " next door to the Golden Heart," Johnson, who was then at the beginning of his struggling stage, wrote an interesting letter to Cave, the bookseller :

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Sir — Having observed in your papers very uncommon offers of encouragement to men of letters, I have chosen, being a stranger in London, to communicate to you the following design, which, I hope, if you join in it, will be of advantage to both of us.

The History of the Council of Trent having been lately translated into French, and published with large Notes by Dr. Le Conrayer, the reputation of that book is so much revived in England, that it is presumed a new translation of it from the Italian, together with Le Conrayer's Notes from the French, could not fail of a favourable reception.

If it be answered, that the History is already in English, it must be remembered, that there was the same objection against Le Conrayer's undertaking, with this disadvantage, that the French had a version by one of their best translators, whereas you cannot read three pages of the English History without discovering that the style is capable of great improvements ; but whether those improvements are to be expected from the attempt, you must judge from the specimen, which, if you approve the proposal, I shall submit to your examination.

Suppose the merit of the versions equal, we may hope that the addition of the Notes will turn the balance in our favour, consider- ing the reputation of the Annotator.

Be pleased to favour me with a speedy answer, if you are not willing to engage in this scheme ; and appoint me a day to wait upon you, if you are. — I am, Sir, your humble servant,

Sam. Johnson.

In Johnson's London occur the lines :

On Thames' banks in silent thought we stood, Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood ; Pleased with the seat that gave Eliza birth, We kneel and kiss the consecrated earth.

I do not suppose that he did. Johnson the poet might be guilty of the suggestion, but Johnson the Tory realist would not dream of acting on it.

The great Admiral Rodney was at one time the Governor of Greenwich Hospital, and Lord Hood was the Governor in the year of Trafalgar. Nelson's body lay in state in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital for three days before the funeral in St. Paul's, and over a hundred thousand people came from London by river and by road to pay their tribute to the greatest of all England's heroes. When the gates were finally closed, it is said that " an enormous multitude of people extending from London to Greenwich

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were obliged to return without seeing the object of their pilgrimage/ ' The river funeral procession was a mile long. The barge that carried the body flew the Victory's flag, and carried State Trumpeters in their full dress and a guard of naval officers. Nelson's Hardy was appointed Governor of Greenwich Hospital in 1834. The Hospital was closed in 1869. There had been no naval battles for nearly half a century, and there were not enough pensioners to make it worth while keeping up so expensive an establishment. In 1873 the Hospital became the Royal Naval College.

Greenwich Park was first enclosed by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who built in it a tower which was the be- ginning of the Royal Observatory. This tower was used sometimes as a residence and sometimes as a prison, Leicester being confined there by Queen Elizabeth when he had incurred Gloriana's displeasure by marrying. Greenwich Observatory was founded to assist navigation. It is obviously necessary for a ship's captain to know exactly where he is when at sea. From earliest times the latitude could be determined, as Mr. Walter Maunder tells us (I am a child in these matters), by observing the height of the Pole Star at night or the height of the sun at noonday ; but longitude was another matter. Philip of Spain offered a large money prize for solving the longitude problem, and it was the great Galileo who suggested the solution. First of all it was necessary to determine a standard time, and it was with the idea of settling this standard, or Greenwich time, that the Observatory was started. The first Astro- nomer-Royal was John Flamsteed, who received a salary of a hundred pounds a year. He was a sickly, difficult man, who had the greatest trouble to obtain the necessary instru- ments from a parsimonious Government and who, in- cidentally, quarrelled with Isaac Newton. Mr. Maunder has told us exactly what they do in Greenwich Observatory :

" The daily observation of the sun and of many stars — selected from a carefully chosen list of some hundreds, and known as ' clock stars ' — the determination of the error of the standard clock to the hundredth of a second if possible, and its correction twice a day, the sending out of time signals to the General Post Office and other places, whence they are distributed all over the country ; the care, the winding, and rating of hundreds of chronometer watches,

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and from time to time the determination of the longitude of foreign or colonial cities, make up a heavy, ceaseless routine in which there is little opportunity for the realisa- tion of an astronomer's life as it is apt to be popularly conceived."

Greenwich was once famous for a riotous fair that offended Victorian proprieties and was suppressed in the fifties of last century. From Greenwich Lord Chesterfield dated some of his famous letters to his son. At Greenwich lived for many years Lavinia Fenton, the creator of Polly Peachum in " The Beggar's Opera," and until almost the end of the nineteenth century Cabinet Ministers used to make regular trips down the river to Greenwich to eat fish dinners at the Ship.

XLI

THE CRYSTAL PALACE

For the purposes of this book, and since it has seemed good to Mr. Pennell to include a picture of the Crystal Palace in his portfolio, I spent some hours of a spring day at Sydenham wandering about the Crystal Palace, gazing with awe at the great organ and shuddering a little at the mentality of a people to whom there is joy in size et praeterea nihil. My friend, the late Ivan Heald, one of the many brilliant young men whose careers the Great War brought to an untimely end, was for some months stationed at the Crystal Palace. He records that one morning he was ordered to clean the steps leading to the garden and that he was rilled with terror that the next day he might be ordered to clean the windows.

A house that is all windows is more fearsome than a house with none. Without light there can be no life, but without shadows there can be no dreams.

The Crystal Palace marks an important episode in the history of England. In 1851 Prince Albert, the Consort of Queen Victoria, achieved the ambition of his life, and a great exhibition was opened in Hyde Park. The main building of the exhibition, the Crystal Palace, was first erected immediately east of where the Albert Memorial now stands. It was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. It covered an area of nearly nineteen acres. It enclosed beneath its roof some unfortunate elm trees (how Teutonic !), and it was visited during twenty-four weeks by over twenty- six million persons. The exhibition was, of course, opened on the first day by the Queen, who was immensely touched by the enthusiasm of the people, by a glass fountain and by a beautiful Amazon in bronze. In one of her letters she says of this opening day, the 1st of May, that it was " the

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greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and amazing and touching spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my beloved Albert. ... It has been the happiest, brightest day in my life and I can think of nothing else. Albert's dearest name is immortalised with this great conception, his own, and my own dear country showed she was worthy of it. The triumph is immense." O wondrous Victoria ! The opening day of an overgrown conservatory the brightest day in the history of a country that had seen a Crecy and an Agincourt, a Trafalgar and a Waterloo ; that is the birthplace of Shakespeare and Bunyan and Shelley !

But there it is — the Queen has said it — her husband is immortalised by the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and England has shown herself worthy of it. The country that possesses Westminster Abbey and Ely Cathedral worthy of the Crystal Palace !

He was a strange man, the Coburger who married the Queen of England, precise, conscientious, intelligent, dull, caring nothing for fashionable fribble, yearning for the society of the serious, eager to defend the rights of kings. He was responsible for far more than the Crystal Palace. It was he who decided the orientation of the British Court during the Victorian era towards Germany. Doubtless Victoria's sympathies would sooner or later have been with her German relatives, but at one time she was extremely sympathetic with Louis Philippe, and in later years she was dazzled by the cheap flatteries of Napoleon III. But Albert was a German, and Albert and his mentor, Baron Stockmar, had decided, even before he married the Queen, that the unity and greatness of Germany could only be attained under Prussian leadership. So in face of the opposition of Palmerston, most English of the nineteenth - century statesmen, England permitted Prussia to absorb Schleswig- Holstein. This made it possible for her to become a naval power, and was the first step in the series of Bismarckian aggressions that concluded with the war against France in 1870 and the proclamation of the Hohenzollern German Empire at Versailles. To Prince Albert, therefore, in- directly, but certainly actually, as well as to Bismarck and Moltke, was due the German domination of Europe for forty-four years, a domination culminating in the most dreadful war the world has ever known.

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So at the Crystal Palace, whether you are listening to the Handel Festival with its enormous orchestra and still more enormous choir, or whether on a summer's evening you are on the terrace watching Mr. Brock's fireworks, remember that the man who, as his wife recorded, is immortalised in this great glass monster was one of the makers of the nineteenth century, and possibly one of the wreckers of the twentieth, as Mr. Lytton Strachey has drawn him, a virtuous, persevering, intelligent, proud, lonely and always rather unhappy man, a German who was always an exile in England.

XLII

HAMPTON COURT

In the gardens of Hampton Court Palace there is one of the finest herbaceous borders that I know, a joyous flower- bed such as only can be seen in southern England. To me this herbaceous border is the glory of the Palace. I do not forget its history. I remember, for instance, that the Palace was built by the great Cardinal Wolsey in the early years of the sixteenth century. But a live flower-bed is worth a wilderness of dead cardinals.

Wolsey was wont to walk alone in his garden, pondering the schemes that were to make England great and himself greater, schemes that he dreamt were to carry him to the Papal throne. In order that his meditations might not be interrupted, his servants were commanded never to ap- proach him nearer than " as far as one might shoot an arrow/ ' Wolsey was one of the two great English ecclesi- astical statesmen ; the other was St. Dunstan who lived centuries before. No one has ever suggested that Wolsey should be canonised, though he had his great qualities and was indeed the great servant of a lesser master. It was said of him by the Venetian Ambassador in London : " He is very handsome, learned, extremely eloquent, of fine ability and indefatigable. He alone transacts the business which occupies all the magistrates and counsels of Venice, both civil and criminal, and all state affairs are managed by him, let their nature be what it may. He is grave and has the reputation of being extremely just ; he favours the people exceedingly and especially the poor, hearing their suits and seeking to dispatch them instantly.,, A just man if a greedy man, a kindly and able man, though proud, it was a great figure that strode up and down the garden walks

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at Hampton Court, with waiting and perhaps rather fearful servants a bowshot away, with, I fear, no herbaceous border to gladden his heart as I have to gladden mine.

When Wolsey realised that his master, the greediest king in history, envied him the beautiful house that he had built by the side of the Thames (it is the finest specimen of Tudor architecture in existence), he gave it to him as a present lest worse might befall him. Henry VIII. made additions to the Palace after it had become his, and it was his favourite residence. He planted quickset hedges, he bought pear trees and apple trees for which he paid six- pence each, and damsons for which he paid twopence. Here Edward VI. was born in September 1537, a great event for his father, since the King, who had insisted that the English should have two religions because he needed two wives, and who established arbitrary rule for the first time in this country, never felt that his throne was safe until he had a male heir. News of the birth of the young prince, whose life was to be so tragically short and sad, was received with rapture, particularly by the Reformers. Latimer went so far as to say that by granting a prince to England God " hath shewed Himself the God of England ; or rather an English God." If, as has often been stated, the Renaissance saw the beginning of Nationalism, old Hugh Latimer's exaggeration shows how quickly the plant grew. Joy very soon gave place to sorrow, for a month after the birth of her son Jane Seymour, the one of his many wives whom the King really loved, died in Hampton Court Palace and her husband in sorrow hid himself away alone in his Palace at Westminster.

Elizabeth was often at Hampton Court, and Shake- speare's play " Henry VIII." was acted there, it is said, with the poet in the cast. The gardens must have con- tinued to have been the chief delight of the place. They are described by a foreign visitor during the reign of Eliza- beth as being most pleasant with rosemary " so planted and nailed to the walls as to cover them entirely, which is a method exceedingly common in England."

When James I. came south from Scotland, a conference was held between Anglican and Presbyterian divines at Hampton Court that differences might be discussed and reunion, still unaccomplished, might be brought about.

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In the reign of Charles I. the canal was brought into the gardens. During the Commonwealth, Hampton Court was sold to a profiteer of the period. There has never been a revolution without its profiteers. But Cromwell restored it to the State. Charles II. appears to have gone to Hampton Court very rarely, but during his reign many elms and lime trees were planted in the park. Dutch William, who built Kensington Palace, revelled in Hampton Court and his handiwork may be still seen in the gardens. It was he who planted the box, the yew and the holly, cutting them into the shape of fearsome monsters. It was he who made straight canals where irregular rivulets had been before. It was he who erected fountains, as Walpole said (no man, by the way, ever loved the artificial more than Walpole), " to wet the unwary, not to refresh the panting spectator. " It was William, too, who laid out the wilder- ness and planted the avenues, though the maze belongs to a later period. The great vine was planted in 1769, and it is said that in one year it produced over two thousand bunches of grapes. Christopher Wren built for King William one of the three courts of the Palace that remain.

Many and wonderful are the artistic possessions of Hampton Court Palace — tapestries designed, so Evelyn tells us, by Raphael and presented by the Emperor Charles V. to the great Cardinal ; carvings by Grinling Gibbons, pictures by Kneller, Van Dyck, Peter Lely, and a dozen others of the great. But fine as the pictures are, to me the interest of the old Palace, an interest that never fails, lies in its dramatic historical associations, though let it be repeated that one's feet instinctively turn on a summer's day towards the herbaceous border.

The Hampton Court ghosts are a noble company. One sees the great Wolsey and thinks of him falling like Lucifer, never to rise again, and Johnson's sententious lines occur to one's mind :

Speak thou whose thoughts at humble peace repine, Shall Wolsey's wealth and Wolsey's end be thine ?

One thinks of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, most chivalrous of poets, writing lines on a pane of one of the windows to the fair Geraldine ; one thinks of the birth of Edward VI. and of the death of his unhappy mother ; one

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thinks of Queen Mary I. spending her honeymoon at Hampton Court with the dull, gloomy Philip of Spain ; one thinks of Shakespeare acting in the great hall before the Virgin Queen ; one thinks of Charles I. and Cromwell in secret consultation, Cromwell doubtless earnestly desiring to save the King's life, the King declining, as he always declined, to surrender anything of his faith ; one thinks of Cromwell during the Protectorate using Hampton Court as modern Prime Ministers use Chequers, and hunting in Bushy Park. It was at Hampton Court that James II. received the Papal Nuncio, and by so doing hastened the end of his reign ; and it was a Hampton Court mole that made William III.'s horse stumble and was the cause of his death, Pope wrote of Hampton Court in the reign of Queen Anne :

Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flowers, Where Thames with pride surveys his rising towers, There stands a structure of majestic frame, Which from the neighboring Hampton takes its name. Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom Of foreign tyrants, and of nymphs at home ; Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.

THE END

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