IX
The interior of the church is injured by the galleries built round it, to accommodate a crowded congregation, and is otherwise of little interest; the tombs of the Bishops of Rochester consisting merely of a mangled relic of that supposed to be for Richard de Wendover, who died in 1350, and the slab and the tablet, respectively, to John Yonge, 1605, and Zachary Pearce, 1774.
But in the pavement near the font, covered with a mat, is the ledger-stone marking the resting-place of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wife, who died in 1753. It bears, of course, a Latin epitaph, for that great literary giant of the eighteenth century was violently of opinion that the English language was no fitting medium for the conveyance of monumental honours. His arguments in support of that opinion are unfortunately not recorded. They would doubtless be amusing, but it would require a very robust argument to convince most people that an inscription in a foreign language, and that a dead one, not to be understood except by the comparatively few who are well versed in it, is the best vehicle for the purpose. There seems, however, to have been in Johnson’s time, and before, and for some while after it, an odd feeling that the mother-tongue of the Englishman was, applied to monuments, vulgar. To be classic, even at the risk of not being understood, was the only resort of those who at all risks desired to dissociate themselves from the vulgar herd. Johnson shared this feeling to the full, and thus the epitaph to his “Tetty” is couched in the language that Cæsar spoke. It extols the charms of her person and manners, and thus gives point to Macaulay’s description of Johnson’s singular infatuation for a woman twenty-one years older than himself. “Every eye makes its own beauty,” truly says the old proverb, and here is an instance. It was in 1736, when he was twenty-seven years of age, that Johnson met the widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, fell in love with her, and married her. She was then forty-eight, and had children as old as himself. Macaulay, in his broad, expressive, rather cruel way, says: “To ordinary spectators the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.” She was, continues Macaulay, “a silly, vain old woman. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, and whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish cerise from natural bloom, his Tetty was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration of her was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she was as poor as himself.”
There are many tablets on the walls of this much-galleried building: one to a Mr. Thomas Chase, of the Rookery, who was nearly swallowed up by the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. He seems to have been born there in 1729, and after his nerve-shaking experience to have removed to this country. He died in 1788, aged fifty-nine.
One harrowing inscription meets the eye on leaving the building. It tells how, on Saturday, September 10th, 1904, a peal of grandsire triples of 5,040 changes was rung upon the bells. They took 3 hours 6 minutes, and then quiet came to the suffering town. Bromley has my respectful sympathy.