CHAUCER’S TOMB. WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
But his letters and essays are full of his love of London. “I don’t care much,” he wrote to Wordsworth, “if I never see a mountain. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with dead Nature.... I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy in so much life.” Again, “Fleet Street and the Strand,” he writes to Manning, “are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw.” After he had removed to Edmonton, on account of his sister’s health, it was to Wordsworth he wrote, saying how he pined to be back again in London: “In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I wake and cry to sleep again.... Oh, never let the lying poets be believed who ’tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets.... A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London.... I would live in London shirtless, bookless.”
But to get back to our catalogue of birthplaces—Blake was born in Broad Street, near Golden Square; Byron in Holles Street; Hood in the Poultry, within sight of the Mansion House; Dante and Christina Rossetti were Londoners born; so were Swinburne, Browning, Philip Bourke Marston, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Turner, Holman Hunt, Sir Arthur Sullivan—but if we go outside literary Londoners this chapter will end only with the book. Moreover, my purpose is not so much to talk of authors and artists who were born in London, as to give some record of the still surviving houses in which many of them lived; whether they had their birth here or not, the majority of them came here to live and work, for, so far as England is concerned, there is more than a grain of truth in Lamb’s enthusiastic boast that “London is the only fostering soil of genius.”
CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON
The London that Shakespeare knew has vanished like a dream. The Great Fire swept most of it out of existence in a few days of 1666, and the two and a half centuries of time since then have made away with nearly all the rest of it. The Tower still remains; there are parts of the Temple; a stray relic or so, such as the London Stone in Cannon Street, by which Shakespeare lays one of the Jack Cade scenes of his Henry VI. There are the stately water-gates along the Embankment, too; here and there an old house or so, such as that above the Inner Temple gateway, those of Staple Inn, those in Cloth Fair, and over in the Borough High Street; a few ancient Inns, like the Mitre off Ely Place, the Dick Whittington in Cloth Fair, the George in Southwark; some dozen of churches, including Westminster Abbey (in whose Jerusalem Chamber the translators of the Bible held their meetings), St. Saviour’s, Southwark, St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, St. Andrew Undershaft, St. Ethelburga’s and St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in which latter parish it seems probable that Shakespeare was for a while a householder; otherwise Elizabethan London has dwindled to little but remembered sites of once-famous buildings and streets that have changed in everything but their names.