But in the pavement near the font, covered with a mat, is the ledger-stone marking the resting-place of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wife, who died in 1753. It bears, of course, a Latin epitaph, for that great literary giant of the eighteenth century was violently of opinion that the English language was no fitting medium for the conveyance of monumental honours. His arguments in support of that opinion are unfortunately not recorded. They would doubtless be amusing, but it would require a very robust argument to convince most people that an inscription in a foreign language, and that a dead one, not to be understood except by the comparatively few who are well versed in it, is the best vehicle for the purpose. There seems, however, to have been in Johnson’s time, and before, and for some while after it, an odd feeling that the mother-tongue of the Englishman was, applied to monuments, vulgar. To be classic, even at the risk of not being understood, was the only resort of those who at all risks desired to dissociate themselves from the vulgar herd. Johnson shared this feeling to the full, and thus the epitaph to his “Tetty” is couched in the language that Cæsar spoke. It extols the charms of her person and manners, and thus gives point to Macaulay’s description of Johnson’s singular infatuation for a woman twenty-one years older than himself. “Every eye makes its own beauty,” truly says the old proverb, and here is an instance. It was in 1736, when he was twenty-seven years of age, that Johnson met the widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, fell in love with her, and married her. She was then forty-eight, and had children as old as himself. Macaulay, in his broad, expressive, rather cruel way, says: “To ordinary spectators the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.” She was, continues Macaulay, “a silly, vain old woman. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, and whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish cerise from natural bloom, his Tetty was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration of her was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she was as poor as himself.”
There are many tablets on the walls of this much-galleried building: one to a Mr. Thomas Chase, of the Rookery, who was nearly swallowed up by the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. He seems to have been born there in 1729, and after his nerve-shaking experience to have removed to this country. He died in 1788, aged fifty-nine.
One harrowing inscription meets the eye on leaving the building. It tells how, on Saturday, September 10th, 1904, a peal of grandsire triples of 5,040 changes was rung upon the bells. They took 3 hours 6 minutes, and then quiet came to the suffering town. Bromley has my respectful sympathy.
X
The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are a part of every civilisation forbade much alteration, and the road still trickles and meanders through the town and divides into two channels and unites again, like some sluggish, undecided river. It is an infirmity of purpose that can be carried back to a very remote origin: to the time, in fact, when Bromley was only beginning to be a settlement amid the then widespreading wastes; when the prehistoric tribesmen drove their herds across the broomy heaths to water at the Ravensbourne, and tracked deviously to avoid boulders, trees, or boggy places. These were the circumstances that fixed throughout the ages the windings of Bromley’s streets. One somewhat important change was, however, made under the Improvement Act of 1830. A new road was cut to one side of the Market Place, starting just beyond the “Bell” and ending just short of the “White Hart.”
The historian seeking something of the old coaching days at Bromley pities himself. He finds the “Swan” very gay and attractive in summer with displays of geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelia, but he does not find the old house, and when he has found the “Bell,” in the centre of the town, he has come to a very beautiful building; but it is modern. The alleged fact that its doorway is on a level with the cross of St. Paul’s Cathedral does not seem to have the significance it would possess were the old house standing.
The old inn is the subject of a slight reference in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” where she makes Lady Catherine say: “Where shall you change horses? Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the ‘Bell’ you will be attended to.” The passage does not make my pulses leap.
Only the “White Hart” remains; appropriately enough white-faced, cool and clean-looking, with the white hart himself “couchant regardant, collared or,” as a herald might say, over the portico. Unhappily, gigantic modern red-brick buildings encompass the inn, rising to four times the height of it, and presently the old house itself will inevitably go.
Beyond this point is South Bromley, where the railway runs and modern expansion is most evident. You descend to it, and having descended immediately ascend again, up the not very Andean slope of Mason’s Hill.
At the time these lines are being written Mason’s Hill still remains old-fashioned. A few of its dignified Queen Anne mansions, standing with an old-world detachment behind their palisade of formal iron railings, are left; but they are to be sold for clearance and rebuilding, and so also are a group of ancient dormer-windowed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of a humbler type. They have all the added importance that comes from being situated above a footpath which itself is in places raised more than head and shoulders above the road for wheeled traffic. Old wooden railings protect children, boozy wayfarers, and sheer wool-gathering, star-gazing folk from falling off the pavement into the hollow road.