CHAPTER XIII
UP TO LONDON 1882
About the middle of the night the great ship comes to a pause, off the coast of Ireland, and, looking forth across the black waves and through the rifts in the rising mist, we see the low and lonesome verge of that land of trouble and misery. A beautiful white light flashes now and then from the shore, and at intervals the mournful booming of a solemn bell floats over the sea. Soon is heard the rolling click of oars, and then two or three dusky boats glide past the ship, and hoarse voices hail and answer. A few stars are visible in the hazy sky, and the breeze from the land brings off, in fitful puffs, the fragrant balm of grass and clover, mingled with the salt odours of sea-weed and slimy rocks. There is a sense of mystery over the whole wild scene; but we realise now that human companionship is near, and that the long and lonely ocean voyage is ended.
Travellers who make the run from Liverpool to London by the Midland Railway pass through the vale of Derby and skirt around the stately Peak that Scott has commemorated in his novel of Peveril. It is a more rugged country than is seen in the transit by the Northwestern road, but not more beautiful. You see the storied mountain, in its delicacy of outline and its airy magnificence of poise, soaring into the sky—its summit almost lost in the smoky haze—and you wind through hillside pastures and meadow-lands that are curiously intersected with low, zigzag stone walls; and constantly, as the scene changes, you catch glimpses of green lane and shining river; of dense copses that cast their cool shadow on the moist and gleaming emerald sod; of long white roads that stretch away like cathedral aisles and are lost beneath the leafy arches of elm and oak; of little church towers embowered in ivy; of thatched cottages draped with roses; of dark ravines, luxuriant with a wild profusion of rocks and trees; and of golden grain that softly waves and whispers in the summer wind; while, all around, the grassy banks and glimmering meadows are radiant with yellow daisies, and with that wonderful scarlet of the poppy that gives an almost human glow of life and loveliness to the whole face of England. After some hours of such a pageant—so novel, so fascinating, so fleeting, so stimulative of eager curiosity and poetic desire—it is a relief at last to stand in the populous streets and among the grim houses of London, with its surging tides of life, and its turmoil of effort, conflict, exultation, and misery. How strange it seems—yet, at the same time, how homelike and familiar! There soars aloft the great dome of St. Paul's cathedral, with its golden cross that flashes in the sunset! There stands the Victoria tower—fit emblem of the true royalty of the sovereign whose name it bears. And there, more lowly but more august, rise the sacred turrets of the Abbey. It is the same old London—the great heart of the modern world—the great city of our reverence and love. As the wanderer writes these words he hears the plashing of the fountains in Trafalgar Square and the evening chimes that peal out from the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and he knows himself once more at the shrine of his youthful dreams.
To the observant stranger in London few sights can be more impressive than those that illustrate the singular manner in which the life of the present encroaches upon the memorials of the past. Old Temple Bar has gone,—a sculptured griffin, at the junction of Fleet Street and the Strand, denoting where once it stood. (It has been removed to Theobald's Park, near Waltham, and is now the lodge gate of the grounds of Sir Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway trains dash over what was once St. Pancras churchyard—the burial-place of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and of many other British worthies—and passengers looking from the carriages may see the children of the neighbourhood sporting among the few tombs that yet remain in that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's Chop-House, intimately associated with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne, has been destroyed. The ancient tavern of The Cock, immortalised by Tennyson, in his poem of Will Waterproof's Monologue, is soon to disappear,—with its singular wooden vestibule that existed before the time of the Plague and that escaped the great fire of 1666. On the site of Northumberland House stands the Grand Hotel. The gravestones that formerly paved the precinct of Westminster Abbey have been removed, to make way for grassy lawns intersected with pathways. In Southwark, across the Thames, the engine-room of the brewery of Messrs. Barclay & Perkins occupies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which most of Shakespeare's plays were first produced. One of the most venerable and beautiful churches in London, that of St. Bartholomew the Great,—a gray, mouldering temple, of the twelfth century, hidden away in a corner of Smithfield,—is desecrated by the irruption of an adjacent shop, the staircase hall of which breaks cruelly into the sacred edifice and impends above the altar. On July 12, 1882, the present writer, walking in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,—the sepulchre of William Wycherley, Robert Wilks, Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas King, Samuel Butler, Thomas Southerne, Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne, Thomas Davies, Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt, William Havard, and many other renowned votaries of literature and the stage,—found workmen building a new wall to sustain the enclosure, and almost every stone in the cemetery uprooted and leaning against the adjacent houses. Those monuments, it was said, would be replaced; but it was impossible not to consider the chances of error in a new mortuary deal—and the grim witticism of Rufus Choate, about dilating with the wrong emotion, came then into remembrance, and did not come amiss.
Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that even the relics of the past are passing away, and that cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so old that at last they will become new. It is not wonderful that London should change its aspect from one decade to another, as the living surmount and obliterate the dead. Thomas Sutton's Charter-House School, founded in 1611, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were still writing, was reared upon ground in which several thousand corses were buried, during the time of the Indian pestilence of 1348; and it still stands and nourishes—though not as vigorously now as might be wished. Nine thousand new houses, it is said, are built in the great capital every year, and twenty-eight miles of new street are thus added to it. On a Sunday I drove for three hours through the eastern part of London without coming upon a single trace of the open fields. On the west, all the region from Kensington to Richmond is settled for most part of the way; while northward the city is stretching its arms toward Hampstead, Highgate, and tranquil and blooming Finchley. Truly the spirit of this age is in strong contrast with that of the time of Henry the Eighth when (1530), to prevent the increasing size of London, all new buildings were forbidden to be erected "where no former hath been known to have been." The march of improvement nowadays carries everything before it: even British conservatism is at some points giving way: and, noting the changes that have occurred here within only five years, I am persuaded that those who would see what remains of the London of which they have read and dreamed—the London of Dryden and Pope, of Addison, Sheridan, and Byron, of Betterton, Garrick, and Edmund Kean—will, as time passes, find more and more difficulty both in tracing the footsteps of fame, and in finding that sympathetic, reverent spirit which hallows the relics of genius and renown.
