“THE BULL AND MOUTH,” PICCADILLY.
The church and the churchyard in which Gibbon slipped, are so full of illustrious dead, that it would seem, indeed, a difficult matter to pass through them without stumbling against some “pointed clay.” Here lies Cotton, who shares the fame of the “Compleat Angler” with his friend Walton; Tom D’Urfey, who made up those “pills to purge melancholy” which so many have found a pleasant enough prescription; the artist Van der Velde, the royal marine painter, who knew the trick of marine painting if anyone did; Dahl and Haysman, the portraitists, and Harlowe, who reproduced the trial scene of Queen Katherine. Mrs. Delany was laid to rest here, so was Mark Akenside, who died in Old Burlington Street; Dodsley, the great Pall Mall bookseller; Gillray, who caricatured a whole generation, and “Old Q,” who scandalised another, and so on; while the great Chatham, and Chesterfield—that “glass of fashion”—were both held at the font which Grinling Gibbons had adorned.
PICCADILLY CIRCUS.
If we continue westward along Jermyn Street we shall come to St. James’s Street, which we have already traversed, and if eastward, to the Haymarket, which we have but recently left; let us therefore go up the little passage by the side of the church, and find ourselves in the full bustle of that part of Piccadilly which we have till now neglected.
Piccadilly Circus is one of the sights of London. It is the starting-point of at least four great thoroughfares. To the west lies Piccadilly; to the east, Coventry Street, leading to Leicester Square; to the north-west runs Regent Street; to the north-east, Shaftesbury Avenue; while (lower) Regent Street, leading to Waterloo Place, lies south.
“That gentle hill which goeth
Down from the ‘County’ to the Palace gate,”
as Tom Hood called it, contained several other landmarks which have disappeared, among them, the church on the right hand going towards Pall Mall, and “The Bull and Mouth,” at the top south-east corner, whence the “Age” coach, tooled by the Duke of Beaufort, used to leave on its journey westward. Later the “Bull and Mouth” was known as “The Spread Eagle,” established in 1820, and now it fulfils some part of its former rôle by being converted into a railway receiving office.
Whether by day, when the flower girls sit around the base of Gilbert’s “Cupid,” (a “cold pastoral” indeed, in his exposed situation, aiming his arrow at the luggage on the cabs or the passengers on the omnibuses as they pass and repass his happy hunting-ground); or by night, as Yoshima Markino would possibly prefer, when the lamps from the Trocadero or the Criterion are dimly perceived through a fog, or are almost indecently glaring in a clear sky (if ever London has a clear sky above it), Piccadilly Circus is a sight, I always think, to wonder at. It is a perpetual eddy of many waters. If not unhasting, certainly unresting are the passengers on those streams which flow in from so many points and seek so many exits. Here the denizens of Soho emerge to their farthest western limits; here the West End, in electric broughams, comes to the outskirts of its own country. Theatre and music-hall are here “at grips” with their opposition entertainments. Everything comes in time to Piccadilly Circus. The man strolling out from the play in evening dress and crush hat may be hailed by a friend in ulster and shooting boots, whose hansom is the last stage of a journey from the Hebrides or the Himalayas; the east and the west meet here on common ground for that amusement which would seem to be taken in anything but the sad spirit predicated of it by Continental nations.
