Richardson's own home was, however, at some distance from his Fleet Street printing-office; as far, indeed, as North End, Fulham. His house there, which still stands, is one of two named "The Grange"; that nearest the Hammersmith Road. Here, in his garden-house, the novelist wrote his somewhat long-winded romances, indulged his amiable vanity, and indited his letters, with their touches of playfully elephantine wit, to "Lady Bradshaigh" and his other fair correspondents.
It is this very house, "The Grange," old-fashioned, red-brick, sedate, that, by another of Fate's curious ironies, was for twenty-seven years the home and studio of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Strange contrast, indeed, between the prosy, fussy, precise old painter-novelist, and the most ideal and imaginative of our modern painters!
"When the painter first settled here, the house stood in the midst of fields on the outskirts of London. Now, whole rows of new streets have sprung up on every side, the fields are built over, and omnibuses and district trains have their stations within a stone's throw. But the leafy trees and sheltered garden of the painter's house remain, a green oasis in the sandy waste. From the noise and dust of crowded thoroughfares we step into the quiet garden with its shady lawns and gay flower borders, its fine old mulberry-tree and rows of limes. Here snowdrops and crocuses blossom in the early spring, and later in the year, blue irises and white lilies, sunflowers and hollyhocks grow tall under the ivied wall. And here, at the end of the garden, among the flowers and leaves, is the studio where the master worked."
Here, then, in the historic "garden-house," where Richardson once wrote, and received his friends Hogarth and Johnson, was Burne-Jones's studio, where he imagined that
"land of clear colours and stories
In a region of shadowless hours,"
described by Swinburne the poet in the lovely dedication of his poems to his friend and Master in another art, begging that they may find place, "for the love of lost loves and lost times," in the painter's created paradise; "Receive," he cries,
"in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes."
It is a far cry from Fleet Street to Fulham, whither we have wandered in company of Richardson and his friends, and we must retrace our steps. All these sages and worthies of Fleet Street were, of course, more or less connected with the great engine of the Press, then comparatively in its childhood, but now, though grown to mighty dimensions, occupying still the same sacred and classic ground. The Jupiters of the Press have from the first wielded their sceptres in Fleet Street and its immediate neighbourhood. And not only the newspaper press, but all sorts of lampoons, political skits, libellous pamphlets, and the like, had here their home in early days. Here that meteoric and unstable wit, Theodore Hook, devoted his misapplied genius to the editing of the then scurrilous journal John Bull, (a paper whose métier was the satirising of society); his favourite and thoughtful axiom being "that there was always a concealed wound in every family, and the point was to strike exactly at the source of pain." The primary object of the paper, which was started in "Johnson's Court" in 1820, was the slandering of the unfortunate Queen Caroline, wife of George IV. The death of the Queen soon reforming the John Bull, it altered to dulness, and declined in sale; its first editor is, indeed, now mainly remembered by one of his early escapades, the famous "Berners Street hoax." This was a wild practical joke played on a harmless widow lady, living at 54, Berners Street. Hook, it seems, had made a bet that "in one week that nice quiet dwelling should be the most famous in all London;" and, the bet being taken, he forthwith wrote many hundred letters to tradesmen, ordering goods and visits of every kind, from coals to cranberry tarts, from attorneys to popular preachers. The street became, of course, absolutely blocked with traffic, Hook himself enjoying the "midday melodrama" from an apartment he had himself hired in a house opposite. Such wholesale destruction was the result that the enfant terrible, being suspected, had to sham illness, until the affair had blown over.
Theodore Hook was a Londoner of the Londoners, with "a gigantic intellect and no morals," added to the peculiar resourcefulness and adaptability of the typical cockney. Nevertheless, even this unprincipled buffoon and wit, petted by royalty and fashion, and left to die, a drunken worn-out spendthrift at last—must, he, too, have had his bad moments. There is a peculiar and haunting horror attaching to the story (told in his Life and Letters), of how, when passing by his birthplace in Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, Hook pointed to a spot nearly opposite the house where he was born, saying, "There by that lamp-post stood Martha the Gypsy."
The Strand, still picturesque, narrow, and tortuous, is now nearly entirely given up to shops, newspaper offices and theatres; but at No. 149 (once a lodging-house and now a newspaper office), the actress Mrs. Siddons stayed when she first came up to London, and here she supped joyfully with her father and husband, to celebrate her first London success. Less changed is the historic Temple, where that constant Londoner, Charles Lamb, lived so long, and of which he has left us such lovely descriptions. Indeed, Charles Lamb is one of those Londoners of whom, like Dickens, Milton, and Johnson, it is difficult to say where they have not lived in the great metropolis. Milton, perhaps, is, however, an extreme case: for he not only lived in a score of different residences, but further puzzles the conscientious topographer by being married in three different churches and buried piecemeal; having been also disinterred at various times, and his remains scattered,—a thing manifestly unfair to the future historian.