Pepys’s diary was begun in 1660, when he was in his twenty-seventh year. Ten years later, when he feared blindness, he ceased writing it. He bequeathed it in six volumes, written in cipher as above stated, with his library of three thousand books, to his old college, Magdalen, at Cambridge, and it is now its greatest treasure. Pepys was no Puritan. His comments on the Calvinistic teaching of his pastor, Daniel Mills, are characteristic. In 1666, he writes: “Up and to church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy, simple sermon upon the Devil’s having no right to anything in this world;” and again he writes: “Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon on original sin, neither understood by himself nor the people.” He writes that when he invited the reverend gentleman to dinner on a Sunday, he “had a very good dinner and very merry.”
Among the notable men buried near Pepys is William Turner, an early Puritan, who was educated under Latimer and died in 1568. He wrote the earliest scientific work by any Englishman on botany. His great object was to learn the materia medica of the ancients throughout the vegetable kingdom. But he wrote against the Roman Antichrist as well. The title of one book illustrates the orthography of his day: “The Hunting and Fynding of the Romish Fox: which more than seven years hath been among the Bysshoppes of England, after that the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII. had commanded hym to be driven out of hys Realme.” Of Sir James Deane, a merchant adventurer to India, China, and the Spice Islands, it is recorded that he gave generous bequests, and directed £500 to be expended on his funeral, a vast sum for those days, yet probably no more than was customary for wealthy men.
Of Sir John Mennes, who is buried here, Pepys tells us that “he brought many fine expressions of Chaucer which he doats on mightily,” and naïvely adds, “and without doubt he is a very fine poet.” Droll, lively, garrulous Pepys! Who would have dreamed that this boyish writer was in reality a great military authority, and in a large measure responsible for the care of England’s navy?
As in All Hallows, Barking, and several old “city” churches, the visitor will notice in St. Olave’s the remarkable, wrought-iron “sword-stands,” used in Elizabeth’s reign and placed in the pews of distinguished persons. The pulpit, with its elaborate carving, said to have been done by Grinling Gibbons, is one that was removed from the “deconsecrated” church of St. Benet.
St. Olave’s had one of the churchyards in which the victims of the plague were buried in great numbers, and of which Pepys writes: “It frightened me indeed to go through the church, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of the plague.” The gruesome skulls and crossbones, carved over its gateway, are a dismal reminder of the horrors of that time. In the chapter on the “City of the Absent,” in his “Uncommercial Traveller,” Dickens thus graphically describes his visit to it: “One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no information. It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall Railway shrieks at it daily. It is a small, small churchyard, with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim that to stick iron spikes atop of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore the skulls grin aloft, horribly thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint Ghastly Grim, and having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn toward it in a thunder-storm at midnight. ‘Why not?’ I said; ‘I have been to the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is it worse to go to see Saint Ghastly Grim by the light of the lightning?’ I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes.”
In the chapter on “A Year’s Impressions,” in which Dickens depicts repeated visits to the deserted churches of the London of the past, he, with a deft touch, describes the commercial atmosphere which now impregnates all of what poetry, history, and romance remain to-day.
“From Rood Lane unto Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine. In the churches about Mark Lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of wheat, and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock in one of them. One church near Mincing Lane smelt like a druggist’s drawer. Behind the Monument the service had the flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little farther down toward the river, tempered into herrings and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of fish.... The dark vestries and registers into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory, distinct and quaint. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made some heart leap, or some tears flow, in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry, and the old tree at the window, with no room for its branches, has seen them all out. These churches remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them—monuments of another age. They are worth a Sunday exploration, for they echo to the time when the City of London really was London; when the Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even the Lord Mayor himself was a reality.”
In Milton’s day, on the street of the Crutched Friars, named from the ancient convent of Crossed Friars, was the row of almshouses built by Sir John Milborne in 1535 in honour of God and the Virgin. In some way, the relief of the Assumption of the Virgin at the entrance gate escaped destruction by the Puritans, and remained with the almshouses to a late period. To the American, to whom the word “almshouse” signifies the English “workhouse,”—an institution of paupers where all live in common,—little idea is conveyed of the comfortable, and usually quaint and picturesque retreat which “almshouse” signifies to the English mind. In many London suburbs one may see little rows of cottages within walled gardens, where, in quiet and comfort and serenity, aged couples spend their last days, in some ways the happiest of their lives, though it be in an almshouse.
At 53 Fenchurch Street, in Milton’s time, stood the Queen’s Head Tavern, where the Princess Elizabeth dined on pork and peas after her release from the Tower in 1554. The modern building erected on the site bears a commemorative statue of her.
Mincing Lane, in the vicinity, was named from houses which belonged to the Minchuns or nuns of Saint Helen’s. Near its entrance is the Hall of the Clothworkers’ Company, whose badge is a ram; within are gilt statues of James I. and Charles I., which were saved from the Great Fire. Its garden was once the churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, whose fine old tower, which escaped the Fire, still stands as when Milton strolled past and gazed on it. The church, which was demolished recently, was reputed to have been the earliest stone church in the city. “Stane” is the Saxon word for stone, and the word “Staining” indicates the fact mentioned above.