The Town Part 5

[34] Maitland, vol. ii., p. 949.

[35] The reader, perhaps, will agree with us in thinking, that the last three lines of this poetry are unworthy of the rest, and put Jane in a theatrical att.i.tude which she would not have effected.

[36] Some account of London, third edition, p. 394.

[37] Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv., p. 91.

[38] "After which, once ended," says Stow, "the preacher gat him home, and never after durst look out for shame, but kept him out of sight like an owle; and when he once asked one that had been his olde friende, what the people talked of him, all were it that his own conscience well shewed him that they talked no good, yet when the other answered him, that there was in every man's mouth spoken of him much shame, it so strake him to the hart, that in a few daies after, he withered, and consumed away."--Brayley, vol. i., p. 312.

[39] From a MS. in the British Museum, quoted by Brayley, vol. ii., p.

312.

[40] A Dance of Death (for the subject was often repeated) is a procession of the various ranks of life, from the pope to the peasant, each led by a skeleton for his partner. Holbein enlarged it by the addition of a series of visits privately paid by Death to the individuals. The figurantes, in his work, by no means go down the dance "with an air of despondency." The human beings are unconscious of their partners (which is fine); and the Deaths are as jolly as skeletons well can be.

[41] Brayley, vol. ii., p. 320.

[42] See Todd's Milton, vol. vii.; Aubrey's Letters and Lives; and Ben Jonson's Poems. Gill's specimen of a satire is very bad, and the great laureate's answer is not much better. The first couplet of the latter, however, is to the purpose:--

"Shall the prosperity of a pardon still Secure thy railing rhymes, infamous Gill?"

[43] History of London, vol. ii., p. 1166.

[44] Life of Sir Christopher Wren, in the Library of Useful Knowledge, No. 24, p. 27.

[45] Wordsworth.

CHAPTER II.

ST. PAUL'S AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.

The Church of St. Faith -- Booksellers of the Churchyard -- Mr.

Johnson's -- Mr. Newberry's -- Children's Books -- Clerical Names of Streets near St. Paul's -- Swift at the top of the Cathedral -- Dr. Johnson at St. Paul's -- Paternoster Row -- Panyer's Alley -- Stationers' Hall -- Almanacks -- Knight-Riders' Street -- Armed a.s.semblies of the Citizens -- Doctor's Commons -- The Heralds'

College -- Coats of Arms -- Ludgate -- Story of Sir Stephen Forster -- Prison of Ludgate -- Wyatt's Rebellion -- The Belle Sauvage Inn -- Blackfriars -- Shakspeare's Theatre -- Accident at Blackfriars in 1623 -- Printing House Square -- The Times -- Baynard's Castle -- Story of the Baron Fitzwalter -- Richard III. and Buckingham -- Diana's Chamber -- The Royal Wardrobe -- Marriages in the Fleet -- Fleet Ditch -- The Dunciad.

We remember, in our boyhood, a romantic story of a church that stood under St. Paul's. We conceived of it, as of a real good-sized church actually standing under the other; but how it came there n.o.body could imagine. It was some ghostly edification of providence, not lightly to be inquired into; but as its name was St. Faith's, we conjectured that the mystery had something to do with religious belief. The mysteries of art do not remain with us for life, like those of Nature. Our phenomenon amounted to this:

"The church of St. Faith," says Brayley, "was originally a distinct building, standing near the east end of St. Paul's; but when the old cathedral was enlarged, between the years 1256 and 1312, it was taken down, and an extensive part of the vaults was appropriated to the use of the parishioners of St.

Faith's, in lieu of the demolished fabric. This was afterwards called the church of St. Faith in the Crypts (_Ecclesia Sanctae Fidei in Cryptis_) and, according to a representation made to the Dean and Chapter, in the year 1735, it measured 180 feet in length, and 80 in breadth. After the fire of London, the parish of St. Faith was joined to that of St. Augustine; and on the rebuilding of the cathedral, a portion of the churchyard belonging to the former was taken to enlarge the avenue round the east end of St. Paul's, and the remainder was inclosed within the cathedral railing."[46]

The parishioners of St. Faith have still liberty to bury their dead in certain parts of the churchyard and the Crypts. Other portions of the latter have been used as storehouses for wine, stationery, &c. The stationers and booksellers of London, during the fire, thought they had secured a great quant.i.ty of their stock in this place; but on the air being admitted when they went to take them out, the goods had been so heated by the conflagration of the church overhead, that they took fire at last, and the whole property was destroyed. Clarendon says it amounted to the value of two hundred thousand pounds.[47]

One of the houses on the site of the old episcopal mansion, now converted into premises occupied by Mr. Hitchc.o.c.k the linendraper, was Mr. Johnson's the bookseller--a man who deserves mention for his liberality to Cowper, and for the remarkable circ.u.mstance of his never having seen the poet, though his intercourse with him was long and cordial. Mr. Johnson was in connection with a circle of men of letters, some of whom were in the habit of dining with him once a week, and who comprised the leading polite writers of the generation--Cowper, Darwin, Hayley, Dr. Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld, G.o.dwin, &c. Fuseli must not be omitted, who was at least as good a writer as a painter. Here Bonnycastle hung his long face over his plate, as glad to escape from arithmetic into his jokes and his social dinner as a great boy; and here Wordsworth, and we believe Coleridge, published their earliest performances. At all events they both visited at the house.

But the most ill.u.s.trious of all booksellers in our boyish days, not for his great names, not for his dinners, not for his riches that we know of, nor for any other full-grown celebrity, but for certain little penny books, radiant with gold and rich with bad pictures, was Mr. Newberry, the famous children's bookseller, "at the corner of St.

Paul's churchyard," next Ludgate Street. The house is still occupied by a successor, and children may have books there as formerly--but not the same. The gilding, we confess, we regret: gold, somehow, never looked so well as in adorning literature. The pictures also--may we own that we preferred the uncouth coats, the staring blotted eyes, and round pieces of rope for hats, of our very badly drawn contemporaries, to all the proprieties of modern embellishment? We own the superiority of the latter, and would have it proceed and prosper; but a boy of our own time was much, though his coat looked like his grandfather's. The engravings probably were of that date. Enormous, however, is the improvement upon the morals of these little books; and there we give them up, and with unmitigated delight. The good little boy, the hero of the infant literature in those days, stood, it must be acknowledged, the chance of being a very selfish man. His virtue consisted in being different from some other little boy, perhaps his brother; and his reward was having a fine coach to ride in, and being a King Pepin. Now-a-days, since the world has had a great moral earthquake that set it thinking, the little boy promises to be much more of a man; thinks of others, as well as works for himself; and looks for his reward to a character for good sense and beneficence. In no respect is the progress of the age more visible, or more importantly so, than in this apparently trifling matter. The most bigoted opponents of a rational education are obliged to adopt a portion of its spirit, in order to retain a hold which their own teaching must accordingly undo: and if the times were not full of hopes in other respects, we should point to this evidence of their advancement, and be content with it.

One of the most pernicious mistakes of the old children's books, was the inculcation of a spirit of revenge and cruelty in the tragic examples which were intended to deter their readers from idleness and disobedience. One, if he did not behave himself, was to be shipwrecked, and eaten by lions; another to become a criminal, who was not to be taught better, but rendered a mere wicked contrast to the luckier virtue; and, above all, none were to be poor but the vicious, and none to ride in their coaches but little Sir Charles Grandisons, and all-perfect Sheriffs. We need not say how contrary this was to the real spirit of Christianity, which, at the same time, they so much insisted on. The perplexity in after life, when reading of poor philosophers and rich vicious men, was in proportion; or rather virtue and mere worldly success became confounded. In the present day, the profitableness of good conduct is still inculcated, but in a sounder spirit. Charity makes the proper allowance for all; and none are excluded from the hope of being wiser and happier. Men, in short are not taught to love and labour for themselves alone or for their little dark corners of egotism; but to take the world along with them into a brighter sky of improvement; and to discern the want of success in success itself, if not accompanied by a liberal knowledge.

The _Seven Champions of Christendom_, _Valentine and Orson_, and other books of the fict.i.tious cla.s.s, which have survived their more rational brethren (as the latter thought themselves), are of a much better order, and, indeed, survive by a natural instinct in society to that effect. With many absurdities, they have a general tone of manly and social virtue, which may be safely left to itself. The absurdities wear out and the good remains. n.o.body in these times will think of meeting giants and dragons; of giving blows that confound an army, or tearing the hearts out of two lions on each side of him, as easily as if he were dipping his hands into a lottery. But there are still giants and wild beasts to encounter, of another sort, the conquest of which requires the old enthusiasm and disinterestedness; arms and war are to be checked in their career, and have been so, by that new might of opinion to which every body may contribute much in his single voice; and wild men, or those who would become so, are tamed, by education and brotherly kindness, into ornaments of civil life.

The neighbourhood of St. Paul's retains a variety of appellations indicative of its former connection with the church. There is Creed Lane, Ave-Maria Lane, Sermon Lane[48], Canon Alley, Pater-Noster Row, Holiday Court, Amen Corner, &c. Members of the Cathedral establishment still have abodes in some of these places, particularly in Amen Corner, which is enclosed with gates, and appropriated to the houses of prebendaries and canons. Close to Sermon Lane is Do-little Lane; a vicinity which must have furnished jokes to the Puritans. Addle Street is an ungrateful corruption of Athelstan Street, so called from one of the most respectable of the Saxon kings, who had a palace in it.

We have omitted to notice a curious pa.s.sage in Swift, in which he abuses himself for going to the top of St. Paul's. "To-day," says he, writing to Stella, "I was all about St. Paul's, and up at the top like a fool, with Sir Andrew Fountain, and two more; and spent seven shillings for my dinner, like a puppy." "This," adds the doctor, "is the second time he has served me so: but I will never do it again, though all mankind should persuade me--unconsidering puppies!"[49] The being forced by richer people than one's self to spend money at a tavern might reasonably be lamented; but from the top of St. Paul's Swift beheld a spectacle, which surely was not unworthy of his attention; perhaps it affected him too much. The author of Gulliver might have taken from it his notions of little bustling humankind.

Dr. Johnson frequently attended public worship in St. Paul's. Very different must his look have been, in turning into the chancel, from the threatening and trampling aspect they have given him in his statue. We do not quarrel with his aspect; there is a great deal of character in it. But the contrast, considering the place, is curious.

A little before his death, when bodily decay made him less patient than ever of contradiction, he inst.i.tuted a club at the Queen's Arms, in St. Paul's Churchyard. "He told Mr. Hook," says Boswell, "That he wished to have a _City Club_, and asked him to collect one; but, said he, don't let them be patriots."[50] (This was an allusion to the friends of his acquaintance Wilkes.) Boswell accompanied him one day to the club, and found the members "very sensible well-behaved men:"

that is to say Hook had collected a body of decent listeners. This, however, is melancholy. In the next chapter we shall see Johnson in all his glory.

St. Paul's Churchyard appears as if it were only a great commercial thoroughfare; but if all the clergy could be seen at once, who have abodes in the neighbourhood, they would be found to const.i.tute a numerous body. If to the sable coats of these gentlemen be added those of the practisers of the civil law, who were formerly allied to them, and who live in Doctors' Commons, the churchyard increases the clerkly part of its aspect. It resumes, to the imagination, something of the learned and collegiate look it had of old. Paternoster Row is said to have been so called on account of the number of Stationers or Text-writers that dwelt there, who dealt much in religious books, and sold horn-books, or A B C's, with the Paternoster, Ave-Maria, Creed, Graces, &c. And so of the other places above-named. But it is more likely that this particular street (as indeed we are told) was named from the rosary or paternoster-makers; for so they were called, as appears by a record of "one Robert Nikke, a paternoster-maker and citizen, in the reign of Henry the Fourth."

It is curious to reflect what a change has taken place in this celebrated _book-street_, since nothing was sold there but rosaries.

It is but rarely the word Paternoster-Row strikes us as having a reference to the Latin Prayer. We think of booksellers' shops, and of all the learning and knowledge they have sent forth. The books of Luther, which Henry the Eighth burnt in the neighbouring churchyard, were turned into millions of volumes, partly by reason of that burning.

Paternoster-Row, however, has not been exclusively in possession of the booksellers, since it lost its original tenants, the rosary-makers. Indeed it would appear to have been only in comparatively recent times that the booksellers fixed themselves there. They had for a long while been established in St. Paul's Churchyard, but scarcely in the Row, till after the commencement of the last century.

"This street," says Maitland, writing in 1720, "before the fire of London, was taken up by eminent mercers, silkmen, and lacemen; and their shops were so resorted unto by the n.o.bility and gentry in their coaches, that ofttimes the street was so stopped up, that there was no pa.s.sage for foot pa.s.sengers. But since the said fire, those eminent tradesmen have settled themselves in several other parts; especially in Ludgate Street, and in Bedford Street, Henrietta Street, and King Street, Covent Garden. And the inhabitants in this street are now a mixture of tradespeople, such as tire-women, or milliners, for the sale of top-knots, and the like dressings for the females."

In a subsequent edition of his history, published in 1755, it is added, "There are now many shops of mercers, silkmen, eminent printers, booksellers, and publishers."[51] The most easterly of the narrow and partly covered pa.s.sages between Newgate Street and Paternoster Row is that called Panyer's Alley, remarkable for a stone built into the wall of one of the houses on the east side, supporting the figures of a pannier or wicker basket, surmounted by a boy, and exhibiting the following inscription:--

"When you have sought the city round, Yet still this is the highest ground."

We cannot say if absolute faith is to be put in this a.s.severation; but it is possible. It has been said that the top of St. Paul's is on a level with that of Hampstead.

We look back a moment between Paternoster Row and the churchyard, to observe, that the only memorial remaining of the residence of the Bishop of London is a tablet in London-House Yard, let into the wall of the public house called the Goose and Gridiron. The Goose and Gridiron is said by tradition to have been what was called in the last century a "music house;" that is to say, a place of entertainment with music. When it ceased to be musical, a landlord, in ridicule of its former pretensions, chose for his sign "a goose stroking the bars of a gridiron with his foot," and called it the Swan and Harp.[52]

Between Amen Corner and Ludgate Street, at the end of a pa.s.sage from Ave-Maria Lane, "stood a great house of stone and wood, belonging in old time to John, Duke of Bretagne, and Earl of Richmond, cotemporary with Edward II. and III. After him it was possessed by the Earls of Pembroke, in the time of Richard II. and Henry IV., and was called Pembroke's Inn, near Ludgate. It then fell into the possession of the t.i.tle of Abergavenny, and was called Burgavenny House, under which circ.u.mstances it remained in the time of Elizabeth. To finish the anti-climax," says Pennant, "it was finally possessed by the Company of Stationers, who rebuilt it of wood, and made it their Hall. It was destroyed by the Great Fire, and was succeeded by the present plain building."[53] Of the once-powerful possessors of the old mansion nothing now is remembered, or cared for; but in the interior of the modern building are to be seen, looking almost as if they were alive, and as if we knew them personally, the immortal faces of Steele and Richardson, Prior in his cap, and Dr. Hoadley, a liberal bishop. There is also Mrs. Richardson, the wife of the novelist, looking as prim and particular as if she had been just chucked under the chin; and Robert Nelson, Esq., supposed author of the Whole Duty of Man, and prototype of Sir Charles Grandison, as regular and pa.s.sionless in his face as if he had been made only to wear his wig. The same is not to be said of the face of Steele, with his black eyes and social aspect; and still less of Richardson, who, instead of being the smooth, satisfied-looking personage he is represented in some engravings of him (which makes his heartrending romance appear unaccountable and cruel), has a face as uneasy as can well be conceived--flushed and shattered with emotion.

We recognise the sensitive, enduring man, such as he really was--a heap of bad nerves. It is worth anybody's while to go to Stationers'

Hall, on purpose to see these portraits. They are not of the first order as portraits, but evident likenesses. Hoadley looks at once jovial and decided, like a good-natured controversialist. Prior is not so pleasant as in his prints; his nose is a little aquiline, instead of turned up; and his features, though delicate, not so liberal. But if he has not the best look of his poetry, he has the worst. He seems as if he had been sitting up all night; his eyelids droop: and his whole face is used with rakery.

It is impossible to see Prior and Steele together, without regretting that they quarrelled: but as they did quarrel, it was fit that Prior should be in the wrong. From a Whig he had become a Tory, and showed that his change was not quite what it ought to have been, by avoiding the men with whom he had a.s.sociated, and writing contemptuously of his fellow wits. All the men of letters, whose portraits are in this hall, were, doubtless, intimate with the premises, and partakers of Stationers' dinners. Richardson was Master of the Company. Morphew, a bookseller in the neighbourhood, was one of the publishers of the _Tatler_; and concerts as well as festive dinners used to take place in the great room, of both of which entertainments Steele was fond. It was here, if we mistake not, that one of the inferior officers of the Company, a humourist on sufferance, came in, one day, on his knees, at an anniversary dinner when Bishop Hoadley was present, in order to drink to the "Glorious Memory."[54] The company, Steele included, were pretty far gone; Hoadley had remained as long as he well could; and the genuflector was drunk. Steele, seeing the Bishop a little disconcerted, whispered him, "Do laugh, my lord; pray laugh:--'tis _humanity_ to laugh." The good-natured prelate acquiesced. Next day, Steele sent him a penitential letter, with the following couplet:--

Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits, All faults he pardons, though he none commits.

The most ill.u.s.trious musical performance that ever took place in the hall was that of Dryden's Ode. A society for the annual commemoration of St. Cecilia, the patroness of music, was inst.i.tuted in the year 1680, not without an eye perhaps to the religious opinions of the heir presumptive who was shortly to ascend the throne as James the Second.

An ode was written every year for the occasion, and set to music by some eminent composer; and the performance of it was followed by a grand dinner. In 1687, Dryden contributed his first ode, ent.i.tled, "A Song for Saint Cecilia's Day," in which there are finer things than in any part of the other, though as a whole it is not so striking. Ten years afterwards it was followed by "Alexander's Feast," the dinner, perhaps, being a part of the inspiration. Poor Jeremiah Clarke, who shot himself for love, was the composer.[55] This is the ode with the composition of which Bolingbroke is said to have found Dryden in a state of emotion one morning, the whole night having been pa.s.sed, _agitante deo_, under the fever of inspiration.

From Stationers' Hall once issued all the almanacks that were published, with all the trash and superst.i.tion they kept alive.

Francis Moore is still among their "living dead men." Francis must now be a posthumous old gentleman, of at least one hundred and fifty years of age. The first blunder the writers of these books committed, in their cunning, was the having to do with the state of the weather; their next was to think that the grandmothers of the last century were as immortal as their t.i.tle-pages, and that n.o.body was getting wiser than themselves. The mysterious solemnity of their hieroglyphics, bringing heaven and earth together, like a vision in the Apocalypse, was imposing to the nurse and the child; and the bashfulness of their bodily sympathies no less attractive. We remember the astonishment of a worthy seaman, some years ago, at the claim which they put into the mouth of the sign Virgo. The monopoly is now gone; almanacks have been forced into improvement by emulation; and the Stationers (naturally enough at the moment) are angry about it. This fit of ill humour will pa.s.s; and a body of men, interested by their very trade in the progress of liberal knowledge, will by and by join the laugh at the tenderness they evinced in behalf of old wives' fables. It is observable, that their friend Bickerstaff (Steele's a.s.sumed name in the _Tatler_) was the first to begin the joke against them.

Knight-Riders' Street (Great and Little), on the south side of St.

Paul's Churchyard, is said to have been named from the processions of Knights from the Tower to their place of tournament in Smithfield. It must have been a round-about way. Probably the name originated in nothing more than a sign, or from some reference to the Heralds'

College in the neighbourhood. The open s.p.a.ce, we may here notice, around the western extremity of the Cathedral, was anciently used by the citizens for a.s.sembling together "to make shew of their arms," or to hold what was called among the Scotch "a _weapon shaw_." A complaint was made by the Lord Mayor and the Ward, in the reign of Edward I., against the Dean and Chapter for having inclosed this ground, which they insisted was "the soil and lay-fee of our lord the King," by a mud wall, and covered part of it with buildings.[56] The houses immediately to the west of Creed Lane and Ave-Maria Lane probably occupy part of the s.p.a.ce in question.