CHAPTER IV
RAMBLES IN LONDON
All old cities get rich in association, as a matter of course and whether they will or no; but London, by reason of its great extent, as well as its great antiquity, is richer in association than any modern place on earth. The stranger scarcely takes a step without encountering a new object of interest. The walk along the Strand and Fleet Street, in particular, is continually on storied ground. Old Temple Bar still stands (July 1877), though "tottering to its fall," and marks the junction of the two streets. The statues of Charles the First and Charles the Second on its western front would be remarkable anywhere, as characteristic portraits. You stand beside that arch and quite forget the passing throng, and take no heed of the tumult around, as you think of Johnson and Boswell leaning against the Bar after midnight in the far-off times and waking the echoes of the Temple Garden with their frolicsome laughter. The Bar is carefully propped now, and they will nurse its age as long as they can; but it is an obstruction to travel—and it must disappear. (It was removed in the summer of 1878.) They will probably set it up, newly built, in another place. They have left untouched a little piece of the original scaffolding built around St. Paul's; and that fragment of decaying wood may still be seen, high upon the side of the cathedral. The Rainbow, the Mitre, the Cheshire Cheese, Dolly's Chop-House, the Cock, and the Round Table—taverns or public-houses that were frequented by the old wits—are still extant (1877). The Cheshire Cheese is scarcely changed from what it was when Johnson, Goldsmith, and their comrades ate beefsteak pie and drank porter there, and the Doctor "tossed and gored several persons," as it was his cheerful custom to do. The benches in that room are narrow, incommodious, penitential; mere ledges of well-worn wood, on which the visitor sits bolt upright, in difficult perpendicular; but there is, probably, nothing on earth that would induce the owner to alter them—and he is right.
The conservative principle in the English mind, if it has saved some trash, has saved more treasure. At the foot of Buckingham Street, in the Strand,—where was situated an estate of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, assassinated in 1628, whose tomb may be seen in the chapel of Henry the Seventh in Westminster Abbey,—still stands the slowly crumbling ruin of the old Water Gate, so often mentioned as the place where accused traitors were embarked for the Tower. The river, in former times, flowed up to that gate, but the land along the margin of the Thames has been redeemed, and the magnificent Victoria and Albert embankments now border the river for a long distance on both sides. The Water Gate, in fact, stands in a little park on the north bank of the Thames. Not far away is the Adelphi Terrace, where Garrick lived and died (Obiit January 20, 1779, aged 63), and where, on October 1, 1822, his widow expired, aged 98. The house of Garrick is let in "chambers" now. If you walk up the Strand towards Charing Cross you presently come near to the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which is one of the works of James Gibbs, a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, and entirely worthy of the master's hand. The fogs have stained that building with such a deft touch as shows the caprice of nature to be often better than the best design of art. Nell Gwyn's name is connected with St. Martin. Her funeral occurred in that church, and was pompous, and no less a person than Tenison (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury) preached the funeral sermon.†
† This was made the occasion of a complaint against him, to Queen Mary, who gently expressed her unshaken confidence in his goodness and truth.
That prelate's dust reposes in Lambeth church, which can be seen, across the river, from this part of Westminster. If you walk down the Strand, through Temple Bar, you presently reach the Temple; and there is no place in London where the past and the present are so strangely confronted as they are here. The venerable church, so quaint with its cone-pointed turrets, was sleeping in the sunshine when first I saw it; sparrows were twittering around its spires and gliding in and out of the crevices in its ancient walls; while from within a strain of organ music, low and sweet, trembled forth, till the air became a benediction and every common thought and feeling was purified away from mind and heart. The grave of Goldsmith is close to the pathway that skirts this church, on a terrace raised above the foundation of the building and above the little graveyard of the Templars that nestles at its base. As I stood beside the resting-place of that sweet poet it was impossible not to feel both grieved and glad: grieved at the thought of all he suffered, and of all that the poetic nature must always suffer before it will utter its immortal music for mankind: glad that his gentle spirit found rest at last, and that time has given him the crown he would most have prized—the affection of true hearts. A gray stone, coffin-shaped and marked with a cross,—after the fashion of the contiguous tombs of the Templars,—is imposed upon his grave.
One surface bears the inscription, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith"; the other presents the dates of his birth and death. (Born Nov. 10, 1728; died April 4, 1774.) I tried to call up the scene of his burial, when, around the open grave, on that tearful April evening, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Beauclerk, Boswell, Davies, Kelly, Palmer, and the rest of that broken circle, may have gathered to witness
"The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid,
And the last rites that dust to dust conveyed."
No place could be less romantic than Southwark is now; but there are few places in England that possess a greater charm for the literary pilgrim. Shakespeare lived there, and it was there that he wrote for a theatre and made a fortune. Old London Bridge spanned the Thames at this point, in those days, and was the only road to the Surrey side of the river. The theatre stood near the end of the bridge and was thus easy of access to the wits and beaux of London. No trace of it now remains; but a public-house called the Globe, which was its name, is standing near, and the old church of St. Saviour—into which Shakespeare must often have entered—still braves the storm and still resists the encroachments of time and change. In Shakespeare's day there were houses on each side of London Bridge; and as he walked on the bank of the Thames he could look across to the Tower, and to Baynard Castle, which had been the residence of Richard, Duke of Gloster, and could see, uplifted high in air, the spire of old St. Paul's. The borough of Southwark was then but thinly peopled. Many of its houses, as may be seen in an old picture of the city, were surrounded by fields or gardens; and life to its inhabitants must have been comparatively rural. Now it is packed with buildings, gridironed with railways, crowded with people, and to the last degree resonant and feverish with action and effort. Life swarms, traffic bustles, and travel thunders all round the cradle of the British drama. The old church of St. Saviour alone preserves the sacred memory of the past. I made a pilgrimage to that shrine, with Arthur Sketchley (George Rose), one of the kindliest humourists in England. (Obiit November 13, 1882.) We embarked at Westminster Bridge and landed close by the church in Southwark, and we were so fortunate as to get permission to enter it without a guide. The oldest part of it is the Lady chapel—which, in English cathedrals, is almost invariably placed behind the choir. Through this we strolled, alone and in silence. Every footstep there falls upon a grave. The pavement is one mass of gravestones; and through the tall, stained windows of the chapel a solemn light pours in upon the sculptured names of men and women who have long been dust. In one corner is an ancient stone coffin—a relic of the Roman days of Britain. This is the place in which Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, in the days of cruel Queen Mary, held his ecclesiastical court and doomed many a dissentient devotee to the rack and the fagot. Here was condemned John Rogers,—afterwards burnt at the stake, in Smithfield. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth may often have entered this chapel. But it is in the choir that the pilgrim pauses with most of reverence; for there, not far from the altar, he stands at the graves of Edmund Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger.
They apparently rest almost side by side, and only their names and the dates of their death are cut in the tablets that mark their sepulchres. Edmund Shakespeare, the younger brother of William, was an actor in his company, and died in 1607, aged twenty-seven. The great poet must have stood at that grave, and suffered and wept there; and somehow the lover of Shakespeare comes very near to the heart of the master when he stands in that place. Massinger was buried there, March 18, 1638,—the parish register recording him as "a stranger." Fletcher—of the Beaumont and Fletcher alliance—was buried there, in 1625: Beaumont's grave is in the Abbey. The dust of Henslowe the manager also rests beneath the pavement of St. Saviour's. Bishop Gardiner was buried there, with pompous ceremonial, in 1555,—but subsequently his remains were removed to the cathedral at Winchester. The great prelate Lancelot Andrews, commemorated by Milton, found his grave there, in 1626. The royal poet King James the First, of Scotland, was married there, in 1423, to Jane, daughter of the Earl of Somerset and niece of Cardinal Beaufort. In the south transept of the church is the tomb of John Gower, the old poet—whose effigy, carved and painted, reclines upon it and is not attractive. A formal, severe aspect he must have had, if he resembled that image. The tomb has been moved from the spot where it first stood—a proceeding made necessary by a fire that destroyed part of the old church. It is said that Gower caused the tomb to be erected during his lifetime, so that it might be in readiness to receive his bones. The bones are lost, but the memorial remains—sacred to the memory of the father of English song. This tomb was restored by the Duke of Sutherland, in 1832.
It is enclosed by a little grill made of iron spears, painted brown and gilded at their points. I went into the new part of the church, and, alone, knelt in one of the pews and long remained there, overcome with thoughts of the past and of the transient, momentary nature of this our earthly life and the shadows that we pursue.
One object of merriment attracts a passing glance in that old church. There is a tomb in a corner of it that commemorates Dr. Lockyer, a maker of patent physic, in the time of Charles the Second. This elaborate structure presents an effigy of the doctor, together with a sounding epitaph which declares that
"His virtues and his pills are so well known
That envy can't confine them under stone."
Shakespeare once lived in Clink Street, in the borough of Southwark. Goldsmith practised medicine there. Chaucer came there, with his Canterbury Pilgrims, and lodged at the Tabard inn, which has disappeared. It must have been a romantic region in the old times. It is anything but romantic now.
