Down on the ground floor, past the Temple Crusader with the Mestrovic countenance, in the west corridor, is the Gold and Silver Room, with the beautiful jewellery that some bygone Jacobean jeweller buried in Wood Street, perhaps when the menace of the Great Fire was upon him.
Of what happened to him there is no trace, and the lovely chains and rings lay buried for two and a half centuries. They may for all we know have been stolen and buried by thieves who met their end on Tyburn Tree before they could enjoy their booty. Admirers of Lalique’s work in the Place Vendôme will see how this unknown Englishman solved the same problems of the great French artist 250 years ago. The delicate enamel chains and lovely cameos and carved chalcedony and glass and onyx are prettier than many a jeweller’s stock to-day, and they must look disdainfully across at the case of heavy Victorian atrocities which our grandmothers wore so complacently.
St. James’s Church
I do not remember ever seeing anyone cross the paved courtyard of St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, on a week-day, for though it was one of Wren’s favourites among the churches he built, and inside there is a font carved by Grinling Gibbons, it has an air of sanctimonious respectability that is not very alluring, but the font with its carving of the Fall of Man, etc., is well worth seeing.
The Haymarket Shoppe
“Only far memories stray
Of a past once lovely, ...”
Walter de la Mare.
I have asked many people if they know where to find a perfect example of an eighteenth-century shop, bow windows little flight of steps and all, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus—and they look at me in blank astonishment.
Yet there it stands, at 34 Haymarket, two doors down from Coventry Street on the left-hand side, its pot-bellied windows filled with quaint jars and bottles and more modern packages of the upstart cigarette, that has ousted the honest snuff which was sold there for two hundred years.
It belongs to another day and generation, and through the old doorway the 20th-century passer-by can see the oaken shelves with their rows of old wooden boxes and snuff jars that used to contain the “King’s Morning Mixture,” as supplied to His Majesty King George IV.
The old shop has had many royal customers, and going through the beautiful Adam screen into the back room, one may be shown, if the courteous proprietor is not too busy, the accounts of Queen Charlotte, who bought her snuff here for nineteen years of the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex and the Princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, who also indulged in the best rappee.