CHAPTER XIV
OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON
Sight-seeing, merely for its own sake, is not to be commended. Hundreds of persons roam through the storied places of England, carrying nothing away but the bare sense of travel. It is not the spectacle that benefits, but the meaning of the spectacle. In the great temples of religion, in those wonderful cathedrals that are the glory of the old world, we ought to feel, not merely the physical beauty but the perfect, illimitable faith, the passionate, incessant devotion, which alone made them possible. The cold intellect of a sceptical age, like the present, could never create such a majestic cathedral as that of Canterbury. Not till the pilgrim feels this truth has he really learned the lesson of such places,—to keep alive in his heart the capacity of self-sacrifice, of toil and of tears, for the grandeur and beauty of the spiritual life. At the tombs of great men we ought to feel something more than a consciousness of the crumbling clay that moulders within,—something more even than knowledge of their memorable words and deeds: we ought, as we ponder on the certainty of death and the evanescence of earthly things, to realise that art at least is permanent, and that no creature can be better employed than in noble effort to make the soul worthy of immortality. The relics of the past, contemplated merely because they are relics, are nothing. You tire, in this old land, of the endless array of ruined castles and of wasting graves; you sicken at the thought of the mortality of a thousand years, decaying at your feet, and you long to look again on roses and the face of childhood, the ocean and the stars. But not if the meaning of the past is truly within your sympathy; not if you perceive its associations as feeling equally with knowledge; not if you truly know that its lessons are not of death but of life! To-day builds over the ruins of yesterday, as well in the soul of man as on the vanishing cities that mark his course. There need be no regret that the present should, in this sense, obliterate the past.
Much, however, as London has changed, and constantly as it continues to change, many objects still remain, and long will continue to remain, that startle and impress the sensitive mind. Through all its wide compass, by night and day, flows and beats a turbulent, resounding tide of activity, and hundreds of trivial and vacuous persons, sordid, ignorant, and commonplace tramp to and fro amid its storied antiquities, heedless of their existence. Through such surroundings, but finding here and there a sympathetic guide or a friendly suggestion, the explorer must make his way,—lonely in the crowd, and walking like one who lives in a dream. Yet he never will drift in vain through a city like this. I went one night into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey—that part, the South Walk, which is still accessible after the gates have been closed. The stars shone down upon the blackening walls and glimmering windows of the great cathedral; the grim, mysterious arches were dimly lighted; the stony pathways, stretching away beneath the venerable building, seemed to lose themselves in caverns of darkness; not a sound was heard but the faint rustling of the grass upon the cloister green. Every stone there is the mark of a sepulchre; every breath of the night wind seemed the whisper of a gliding ghost. There, among the crowded graves, rest Anne Oldfield and Anne Bracegirdle,—in Queen Anne's reign such brilliant luminaries of the stage,—and there was buried the dust of Aaron Hill, poet and dramatist, once manager of Drury Lane, who wrote The Fair Inconstant for Barton Booth, and some notably felicitous love-songs. There, too, are the relics of Susanna Maria Arne (Mrs. Theo. Cibber), Mrs. Dancer, Thomas Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting upon the narrow ledge that was the monks' rest, I could touch, close at hand, the tomb of a mitred abbot, while at my feet was the great stone that covers twenty-six monks of Westminster who perished by the Plague nearly six hundred years ago. It would scarcely be believed that the doors of dwellings open upon that gloomy spot; that ladies may sometimes be seen tending flowers upon the ledges that roof those cloister walks. Yet so it is; and in such a place, at such a time, you comprehend better than before the self-centred, serious, ruminant, romantic character of the English mind,—which loves, more than anything else in the world, the privacy of august surroundings and a sombre and stately solitude. It hardly need be said that you likewise obtain here a striking sense of the power of contrast. I was again aware of this, a little later, when, seeing a dim light in St. Margaret's church near by, I entered that old temple and found the men of the choir at their rehearsal, and presently observed on the wall a brass plate which announces that Sir Walter Raleigh was buried here, in the chancel,—after being decapitated for high treason in the Palace Yard outside. Such things are the surprises of this historic capital. This inscription begs the reader to remember Raleigh's virtues as well as his faults,—a plea, surely, that every man might well wish should be made for himself at last. I thought of the verses that the old warrior-poet is said to have left in his Bible, when they led him out to die—
"Even such is time; that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us nought but age and dust;
Which, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.—
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust."
This church contains a window commemorative of Raleigh, presented by Americans, and inscribed with these lines, by Lowell—
"The New World's sons, from England's breast we drew
Such milk as bids remember whence we came;
Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."
It also contains a window commemorative of Caxton, presented by the printers and publishers of London, which is inscribed with these lines by Tennyson—
"Thy prayer was Light—more Light—while Time shall last,
Thou sawest a glory growing on the night,
But not the shadows which that light would cast
Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light."
In St. Margaret's—a storied haunt, for shining names alike of nobles and poets—was also buried John Skelton, another of the old bards (obiit 1529), the enemy and satirist of Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, one of whom he described as "madde Amaleke," and the other as "dawcock doctor." Their renown has managed to survive those terrific shafts; but at least this was a falcon who flew at eagles. Here the poet Campbell was married,—October 11, 1803. Such old churches as this—guarding so well their treasures of history—are, in a special sense, the traveller's blessings. At St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the janitor is a woman; and she will point out to you the lettered stone that formerly marked the grave of Milton. It is in the nave, but it has been moved to a place about twelve feet from its original position,—the remains of the illustrious poet being, in fact, beneath the floor of a pew, on the left of the central aisle, about the middle of the church: albeit there is a story, possibly true, that, on an occasion when this church was repaired, in August, 1790, the coffin of Milton suffered profanation, and his bones were dispersed.
Among the monuments hard by is a fine marble bust of Milton, placed against the wall, and it is said, by way of enhancing its value, that George the Third came here to see it.† Several of the neighbouring inscriptions are of astonishing quaintness. The adjacent churchyard—an eccentric, sequestered, lonesome bit of grassy ground, teeming with monuments, and hemmed in with houses, terminates, at one end, in a piece of the old Roman wall of London (A.D. 306),—an adamantine structure of cemented flints—which has lasted from the days of Constantine, and which bids fair to last forever. I shall always remember that strange nook with the golden light of a summer morning shining upon it, the birds twittering among its graves, and all around it such an atmosphere of solitude and rest as made it seem, though in the heart of the great city, a thousand miles from any haunt of man. (It was formally opened as a garden for public recreation on July 8, 1891.)
† This memorial bears the following inscription: "John Milton. Author of 'Paradise Lost.' Born, December 1608. Died, November 1674. His father, John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both interred in this church."
St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and venerable temple, the church of the priory of the nuns of St. Helen, built in the thirteenth century, is full of relics of the history of England. The priory, which adjoined this church, has long since disappeared and portions of the building have been restored; but the noble Gothic columns and the commemorative sculpture remain unchanged. Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, who built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded both Gresham College and the Royal Exchange in London, and Sir William Pickering, once Queen Elizabeth's Minister to Spain and one of the amorous aspirants for her royal hand; and here, in a gloomy chapel, stands the veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke of Gloster received absolution, after the disappearance of the princes in the Tower. Standing at that altar, in the cool silence of the lonely church and the waning light of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his slender, slightly misshapen form, decked in the rich apparel that he loved, his handsome, aquiline, thoughtful face, the drooping head, the glittering eyes, the nervous hand that toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy stillness of his person, from head to foot, as he knelt there before the priest and perhaps mocked both himself and heaven with the form of prayer.
Every place that Richard touched is haunted by his magnetic presence. In another part of the church you are shown the tomb of a person whose will provided that the key of his sepulchre should be placed beside his body, and that the door should be opened once a year, for a hundred years. It seems to have been his expectation to awake and arise; but the allotted century has passed and his bones are still quiescent.
How calmly they sleep—those warriors who once filled the world with the tumult of their deeds! If you go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above the dust of the Crusaders and see the beautiful copper effigies of them, recumbent on the marble pavement, and feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the calm that follows the tempest. St. Mary's was built in 1240 and restored in 1828. It would be difficult to find a lovelier specimen of Norman architecture—at once massive and airy, perfectly simple, yet rich with beauty, in every line and scroll.
There is only one other church in Great Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a circular vestibule. The stained glass windows, both here and at St. Helen's, are very glorious. The organ at St. Mary's was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infamous as the wicked judge. The pilgrim who pauses to muse at the grave of Goldsmith may often hear its solemn, mournful tones. I heard them thus, and was thinking of Dr. Johnson's tender words, when he first learned that Goldsmith was dead: "Poor Goldy was wild—very wild—but he is so no more." The room in which he died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, was but a little way from the spot where he sleeps.† The noises of Fleet Street are heard there only as a distant murmur. But birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter down upon his tomb, and every breeze that sighs around the gray turrets of the ancient Temple breathes out his requiem.
† No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple.—In 1757-58 Goldsmith was employed by a chemist, near Fish Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was living in Green Arbour Court, "over Break-neck Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, he wrote The Vicar of Wakefield. Afterwards he had lodgings at Canonbury House, Islington, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the Inner Temple.
