Let us now come to Fleet Street. This thoroughfare—the main artery from St. Paul’s to the west—for many years has been emphatically one of literary associations, full as it is of newspaper and printing-offices. The late Angus B. Reach used humorously to call it, “The march of intellect.” Wynkyn de Worde, the early printer, lived here, and two of his books were “fynysshed and emprynted in Flete Streete, in ye syne of ye Sonne.” The Devil tavern, which stood near Temple Bar, on the south side, was a favourite hostelrie of Ben Jonson. At the Mitre, near Mitre Court, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, and Boswell, held frequent rendezvous. The Cock was one of the oldest and least altered taverns in Fleet Street. The present poet-laureate, in one of his early poems, “A Monologue of Will Waterproof,” has immortalized it, in the lines beginning—
“Thou plump head waiter at the Cock,
To which I most resort,
How goes the time? Is ’t nine o’clock?
Then fetch a pint of port!”
Dr. Johnson lived many years either in Fleet Street, in Gough Square, in the Temple, in Johnson’s Court, in Bolt Court, &c., &c.; and in Bolt Court he died. William Cobbett, and Ferguson the astronomer, were also among the dwellers in that court. John Murray (the elder) began the publishing business in Falcon Court. Some of the early meetings of the Royal Society and of the Society of Arts took place in Crane Court. Dryden and Richardson both lived in Salisbury Court. Shire Lane (now Lower Serle’s Place), close to Temple Bar on the north, can count the names of Steele and Ashmole among its former inhabitants. Izaak Walton lived a little way up Chancery Lane. At the confectioner’s shop, nearly opposite that lane, Pope and Warburton first met. Sir Symonds D’Ewes, ‘Praise-God Barebones,’ Michael Drayton, and Cowley the poet, all lived in this street. Many of the courts, about a dozen in number, branching out of Fleet Street on the north and south, are so narrow that a stranger would miss them unless on the alert. Child’s Banking House, the oldest in London, is at the western extremity of Fleet Street, on the south side, and also occupies the room over the arch of Temple Bar. St. Bride’s Church exhibits one of Wren’s best steeples. St. Dunstan’s Church, before it was modernized, had two wooden giants in front, that struck the hours with clubs on two bells—a duty which they still fulfil in the gardens belonging to the mansion of the Marquis of Hertford in the Regent’s Park. North of Fleet Street are several of the Inns of Court, where lawyers congregate; and southward is the most famous of all such Inns, the large group of buildings constituting the Temple. In the cluster of buildings lying east from the Temple once existed the sanctuary of Whitefriars, or Alsatia, as it was sometimes called, a description of which is given by Scott in the Fortunes of Nigel. The streets here are still narrow and of an inferior order, but all appearance of Alsatians and their pranks is gone. The boundary of the city, at the western termination of Fleet Street, is marked by Temple Bar, consisting of a wide central archway, and a smaller archway at each side for foot-passengers. There are doors in the main avenue which can be shut at pleasure; but, practically, they are never closed, except on the occasion of some state ceremonial, when the lord mayor affects an act of grace in opening them to royalty. The structure was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and erected in 1672. The heads of decapitated criminals, after being boiled in pitch to preserve them, were exposed on iron spikes on the top of the Bar. Horace Walpole, in his Letters to Montague, mentions the fact of a man in Fleet Street letting out “spy-glasses,” at a penny a peep, to passers-by, when the heads of some of the hapless Jacobites were so exposed. The last heads exhibited there were those of two Jacobite gentlemen who took part in the rebellion of 1745, and were executed in that year. Their heads remained a ghastly spectacle to the citizens till 1772, when they were blown down one night in a gale of wind.
Having thus noticed some of the interesting objects east of Temple Bar, we will now take
A FIRST GLANCE AT THE WEST END.
The Strand—so called because it lies along the bank of the river, now hidden by houses—is a long, somewhat irregularly built street, in continuation westward from Temple Bar; the thoroughfare being incommoded by two churches—St. Clement Dane’s and St. Mary’s—in the middle of the road. On the site of the latter church once stood the old Strand Maypole. The new Palace of Justice, about whose site there have been so many Parliamentary discussions, will stand on what is at present a huge unsightly space of boarded-in waste ground, formerly occupied by a few good houses, between Temple Bar and Clement’s Inn, and many wretched back-slums. Not having the gift of prophecy as to its future, and warned by so many long delays in its case, we hazard no conjecture as to the time when it will gladden our eyes. In the seventeenth century the Strand was a species of country road, connecting the city with Westminster; and on its southern side stood a number of noblemen’s residences, with gardens towards the river. The pleasant days are long since past when mansions and personages, political events and holiday festivities, marked the spots now denoted by Essex, Norfolk, Howard, Arundel, Surrey, Cecil, Salisbury, Buckingham, Villiers, Craven, and Northumberland Streets—a very galaxy of aristocratic names. The most conspicuous building on the left-hand side is Somerset House, a vast range of government offices. Adjoining this on the east (occupying the site once intended for an east wing to that structure), and entering by a passage from the Strand, is a range of rather plain, but massive brick buildings, erected about thirty years ago for the accommodation of King’s College; and adjoining it on the west, abutting on the street leading to Waterloo Bridge, is a still newer range of buildings appropriated to government offices—forming a west wing to the whole mass. The Strand contains no other public structure of architectural importance, except the spacious new Charing Cross Railway Station and Hotel on the south side. The eastern half of the Strand, however, is thickly surrounded by theatres—Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Olympic, the Charing Cross, the Adelphi, the Vaudeville, the Lyceum, the Gaiety (built on the site of Exeter ’Change and the late Strand Music Hall, as is the Queen’s on that of St. Martin’s Hall in Long Acre), the Globe, and the Strand Theatres, are all situated hereabouts. Exeter Hall is close by, and—pardon the contrast of ideas—so is Evans’s Hotel and Supper Rooms, long famous for old English glees, madrigals, chops and steaks, and as a place for friendly re-unions, without the objectionable features of many musical halls.
Northumberland House, the large mansion with the lion on the summit, overlooking Charing Cross, is the ancestral town residence of the Percies, Dukes of Northumberland. Over the way is St. Martin’s Church, where lie the bones of many famous London watermen—the churchyard used to be called “The Waterman’s Churchyard”—and those of that too celebrated scoundrel and housebreaker, Jack Sheppard, hanged in 1724. There also lies the once famous sculptor, Roubilac, several monuments from whose chisel you can see in Westminster Abbey. Here, too, are interred the witty, but somewhat licentious dramatist, Farquhar, author of The Beau’s Stratagem; the illustrious Robert Boyle, a philosopher not altogether unworthy to be named in the same category with Lord Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton; and John Hunter, the distinguished anatomist.
The open space is called Charing Cross, from the old village of Charing, where stood a cross erected by Edward the First, in memory of his Queen Eleanor. Wherever her bier rested, there her sorrowful husband erected a cross, or, as Hood whimsically said, in his usual punning vein, apropos of the cross at Tottenham,