CHAPTER XV
LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON
The mind that can reverence historic associations needs no explanation of the charm that such associations possess. There are streets and houses in London which, for pilgrims of this class, are haunted with memories and hallowed with an imperishable light—that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life can quench or dim. Almost every great author in English literature has here left behind him some personal trace, some relic that brings us at once into his living presence. In the time of Shakespeare,—of whom it may be noted that wherever you find him at all you find him in select and elegant neighbourhoods,—St. Helen's parish was a secluded and peaceful quarter of the town; and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the theatre in Blackfriars, in which he is known to have owned a share. It is said that he dwelt at number 134 Aldersgate Street (the house has been demolished), and in that region,—amid all the din of traffic and all the strange adjuncts of a new age,—those who love him are in his company. Milton was born in a court adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer comes upon him as a resident in St. Bride's churchyard,—where the poet Lovelace was buried,—and at the house which is now No. 19 York Street, Westminster (in later times occupied by Bentham and by Hazlitt), and in Jewin Street, Aldersgate. When secretary to Cromwell he lived in Scotland Yard, where now is the headquarters of the London police. His last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget Edmund Spenser, who died there, in grief and destitution, a victim to the same inhuman spirit of Irish ruffianism that is still disgracing humanity and troubling the peace of the world. Everybody remembers Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street." Jonson himself is closely and charmingly associated with places that may still be seen. He passed his boyhood near Charing Cross—having been born in Hartshorn Lane, now Northumberland Street—and went to the parish school of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; and those who roam around Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that this great poet helped to build it—a trowel in one hand and Horace in the other. His residence, in his days of fame, was just outside of Temple Bar—but all that neighbourhood is new at the present time.
The Mermaid, which he frequented—with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chapman, and Donne—was in Bread Street, but no trace of it remains; and a banking-house stands now on the site of the Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, where the Apollo Club, which he founded, used to meet. The famous inscription, "O rare Ben Jonson," is three times cut in the Abbey—once in Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle where he was buried, the smaller of the two slabs marking the place of his vertical grave.
Dryden once dwelt in a narrow, dingy, quaint house, in Fetter Lane,—the street in which Dean Swift has placed the home of Gulliver, and where now (1882) the famous Doomsday Book is kept,—but later he removed to a finer dwelling, in Gerrard Street, Soho, which was the scene of his death. Both buildings are marked with mural tablets and neither of them seems to have undergone much change. (The house in Fetter Lane is gone—1891.) Edmund Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a beer-shop; but his memory hallows the place, and an inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square bears likewise a mural tablet, and, standing at its time-worn threshold, the visitor needs no effort of fancy to picture that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that lead into this queer, sombre, melancholy retreat. In that house he wrote the first Dictionary of the English language and the immortal letter to Lord Chesterfield. In Gough Square lived and died Hugh Kelly, dramatist, author of The School of Wives and The Man of Reason, and one of the friends of Goldsmith, at whose burial he was present. The historical antiquarian society that has marked many of the literary shrines of London has rendered a great service. The houses associated with Reynolds and Hogarth, in Leicester Square, Byron, in Holies Street, Benjamin Franklin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street, Campbell, in Duke Street, St. James's, Garrick, in the Adelphi Terrace, Michael Farraday, in Blandford Street, and Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, are but a few of the historic spots which are thus commemorated. Much, however, remains to be done. One would like to know, for instance, in which room in "The Albany" it was that Byron wrote Lara† in which of the houses of Buckingham Street Coleridge had his lodging while he was translating Wallenstein; whereabouts in Bloomsbury Square was the residence of Akenside, who wrote The Pleasures of Imagination, and of Croly, who wrote Salathiel; or where it was that Gray lived, when he established himself close by Russell Square, in order to be one of the first—as he continued to be one of the most constant—students at the then newly opened British Museum (1759).
† Byron was born at No. 34 Holies Street, Cavendish Square. While he was at school in Dulwich Grove his mother lived in a house in Sloane Terrace. Other houses associated with him are No. 8 St. James Street; a lodging in Bennet Street; No. 2 "The Albany"—a lodging that he rented of Lord Althorpe, and entered on March 28, 1814; and No. 139 Piccadilly, where his daughter, Ada, was born, and where Lady Byron left him. This, at present, is the home of the genial scholar Sir Algernon Borthwick (1893). John Murray's house, where Byron's fragment of Autobiography was burned, is in Albemarle Street. Byron's body, when brought home from Greece, lay in state at No. 25 Great George Street, Westminster, before being taken north, to Hucknall-Torkard church, in Nottinghamshire, for burial.
These, and such as these, may seem trivial things; but Nature has denied an unfailing source of innocent happiness to the man who can find no pleasure in them. For my part, when rambling in Fleet Street it is a special delight to remember even so slight an incident as that recorded of the author of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard,—that he once saw there his satirist, Dr. Johnson, rolling and puffing along the sidewalk, and cried out to a friend, "Here comes Ursa Major." For the true lovers of literature "Ursa Major" walks oftener in Fleet Street to-day than any living man.
A good thread of literary research might be profitably followed by him who should trace the footsteps of all the poets that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of Edward IV.; Andrew Bernard in that of Henry VII.; John Skelton in that of Henry VIII.; and Edmund Spenser in that of Elizabeth.
Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Lawrence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, Thomas Wharton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson—who, until his death, in 1892, wore, in spotless renown, that
"Laurel greener from the brows
Of him that utter'd nothing base."
Most of those bards were intimately associated with London, and several of them are buried in the Abbey. It is, indeed, because so many storied names are written upon gravestones that the explorer of the old churches of London finds so rich a harvest of impressive association and lofty thought. Few persons visit them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively alone in rambles of this kind. I went one morning into St. Martin—once "in the fields," now in one of the busiest thoroughfares at the centre of the city—and found there only a pew-opener preparing for the service, and an organist playing an anthem. It is a beautiful structure, with its graceful spire and its columns of weather-beaten stone, curiously stained in gray and sooty black, and it is almost as famous for theatrical names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, or St. George's, Bloomsbury, or St. Clement Danes. Here, in a vault beneath the church, was buried the bewitching and affectionate Nell Gwyn; here is the grave of James Smith, joint author with his brother Horace—who was buried at Tunbridge Wells—of The Rejected Addresses; here rests Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface; and here were laid the ashes of the romantic and sprightly Mrs. Centlivre, and of George Farquhar, whom neither youth, genius, patient labour, nor sterling achievement could save from a life of misfortune and an untimely and piteous death. A cheerier association of this church is with Thomas Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here married.
At St. Giles-in-the-Fields, again, are the graves of George Chapman, who translated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely lyrics of love, Rich, the manager, who brought out Gay's Beggar's Opera, and James Shirley, the fine old dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so often murmured in such solemn haunts as these—
"Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."
Shirley lived in Gray's Inn when he was writing his plays, and he was fortunate in the favour of queen Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles the First; but when the Puritan times arrived he fell into misfortune and poverty and became a school-teacher in Whitefriars. In 1666 he was living in or near Fleet Street, and his home was one of the many dwellings that were destroyed in the great fire. Then he fled, with his wife, into the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where, overcome with grief and terror, they both died, within twenty-four hours of each other, and were buried in the same grave.
