One cannot but feel that the old gentlemen must sadly miss their sprightly young comrades, and long for the sound of their merry shouts and whistles. Their numbers are falling off, for the revenues, drawn from agricultural sources, are diminishing. To-day about fifty-five are entered. All must be over sixty years of age. They have all the freedom of private citizens, except that they are expected to dine together in the great panelled dining-hall, and at night to be in by eleven o’clock. Each pensioner has a bedroom and sitting-room, and a loaf and butter is brought him for his breakfast. About £30 a year are allowed each for clothing and other food, and a female attendant is assigned to each half dozen gentlemen. Thackeray’s description of Founder’s Day is most touching, and deserves to be read by all who visit Charterhouse, where he studied, and in imagination saw the last days of Colonel Newcome:

“The custom of the school is on the 12th of December, the Founder’s Day, that the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of our founder and upon other subjects, and a goodly company of old Cistercians is generally brought together to attend this oration, after which we go to chapel and have a sermon, after which we go to a great dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches made. Before marching from the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day’s dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have wands in their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit in places of honour. The boys are already on their seats with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches, the chapel is lighted, the founder’s tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful lights and shadows. There he sits, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting the Great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats were altered since we were here, and how the doctor used to sit yonder and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys on whom it lighted; and how the boy next us would kick our shins during the service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterward because our shins were kicked. Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays to-morrow. Yonder sit some three-score old gentlemen—pensioners of the hospital, listening to the prayers and psalms. You hear them coughing feebly in the twilight—the old, reverend black gowns.... A plenty of candles light up this chapel, and this scene of youth and age and early memories and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite! How noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest utters, and to which generations of bygone seniors have cried, ‘Amen,’ under those arches.“

We pass up, as Milton may have done, the broad carved oak staircase of the period antedating Sutton’s purchase, when Lord North welcomed the Princess Elizabeth as his guest and entertained her royally, five days before her coronation. In these spacious rooms, with deep-set windows, and richly decorated ceilings, the cautious princess held meetings daily with her councillors. The lofty fireplace and the tapestry hangings that remain recall in their dim splendour days when lords and dukes and maids of honour waited in trepidation upon the behest of the haughty woman who was soon to become their dread sovereign. It was in one of these rooms that the pupil orator gave his oration upon Founder’s Day.

One of the rooms not always shown to visitors should not be missed. It is the long, cosy library of the pensioners. Here, leaning out of the diamond-paned windows upon a summer’s day, or grouping themselves in easy chairs about the blazing hearth in gray November, one loves to think of these lonely gentlemen, who have seen better days, spending their last, quiet years among their books.

The visitor to the Charterhouse will not fail to spend a half day within the vicinity. In spite of its sordid and commercial aspect, it possesses many of the most precious relics of the past.

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ST. JOHN’S GATE, CLERKENWELL

From an old engraving.

A little to the northwest of Smithfield, where it spans a narrow and somewhat squalid street, stands the huge stone gateway of St. John’s. Nothing in its vicinity reveals the fact that once beside it stood a conventual church, and a bell-tower that was one of the glories of London, and nothing to indicate that, centuries before these, one of the richest and most famous of all the monastic establishments around London was built here. The history of the Knights of St. John is one of the longest and most romantic of mediæval histories. The prototype of their ancient hospital was in Jerusalem, where the knights of the order lived lives of abstinence and charity. The English establishment in Clerkenwell was founded in 1100 A. D., only a generation after the coming of the Norman Conqueror. This was the time of Godfrey of Bouillon and of the first Crusade. Forty years later the monks in Jerusalem became a military order, and thenceforth their history is one that seemed guided by Joshua rather than the Prince of Peace. Large gifts and power led them soon far from the simple habits of their early days. Of their fights with pirates and with Turks and with rival Christian bodies, there is no space to tell. Like the Christian Church itself, in many periods, they waxed fat and gross, and became the hated “plutocrats” of the working men of their time. In that sweet story, written in Saxon English, by William Morris, of the monk, “John Ball,” we have a picture of the brave men of Kent who rose in wrath to destroy, as did the Paris mob of 1793, the men who long had mocked at their impotence and fed upon their toil. The rebels marched with spear and bow to London, and wreaked their vengeance on many, but especially those whose travesty on the teaching of the saint whose name they bore had maddened them to fury. They burnt all the houses belonging to St. John’s, and set on fire the beautiful priory, which burned seven days. King Richard II., safe in the Tower, in vain besought his Council for advice in this extremity. The prior himself did not escape, but fell beneath the relentless axe of the men of Kent, as thousands for a like cause fell under the guillotine in Paris.