East of St. John’s Gate we passed a disused intramural cemetery, begloomed on all sides by rows of dingy houses. The rain of “blacks” incessantly descending upon the metropolis collects here in unstirred, sable sheets. Such a pall enfolds the graves of Isaac Watts and Daniel Defoe, whose “Diary of the Great Plague” is a work of more dramatic power than his Robinson Crusoe. A stone’s throw apart from hymnster and romancist, lies a greater than either—the prince of dreamers, John Bunyan.
Temple Bar is—or was, for it has been pulled down since we were there—an arch of Portland stone, and is attributed, I hope, erroneously, to Christopher Wren. Without this information I should have said that it was a wooden structure, badly hacked, gnawed, and besmirched by time, with dirty plaster statues of the two Charleses niched upon one side, and, upon the other, corresponding figures of James I. and Elizabeth. It was much lower than we had supposed, and than it is represented in pictures, and just wide enough to allow two coaches to pass abreast without collision. The roaring tide overflowing the Strand and Fleet Street appeared to squeeze through with difficulty. Above the gate was a row of one-story offices—mere boxes—such as are occupied in our country by newspaper-venders. Within the memory of living men the top of the gate was a thick-set hedge of spikes, reckoned, not very many years back, as one of the bulwarks of English liberties. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, law-abiding cockneys, on their peregrinations to and from the city, were strengthened in loyalty and veneration for established customs, by the spectacle of rotting and desiccated heads of traitors exposed here. They were tardy in the abolition of object-teaching in Christian England. There were solid oaken gates with real hinges and bars at Temple Gate. When the sovereign paid a visit to the city she was reminded of some agreeable passages between one of her predecessors and the London lords of trade, by finding these closed. Her pursuivant blew a trumpet; there was an exchange of question and reply; the oaken leaves swung back; the Lord Mayor presented his sword to our gracious and sovereign lady, the queen, who returned it to him with an affable smile, and the royal coach was suffered to pass under the Bar. More object-teaching!
From Temple Gate to Temple Gardens was a natural transition. These famous grounds formerly sloped down to the Thames, and were an airy, spacious promenade. Now, one smiles in reading that Suffolk found it a “more convenient” place for private converse than the “Temple Hall.” A talk between four gentlemen of the rank of Plantagenet, Suffolk, Somerset and Warwick, in the pretty plat of grass and flowers, fenced in by iron rails, would have eavesdroppers by the score, and the incident of plucking the roses be overlooked by the gossips of fifty tenement-houses. But the area, sadly circumscribed by the encroachments of business, is a sightly bit of green, intersected by gravel walks, and in the season enlivened by the flaming geraniums that not even London “blacks” can put out of countenance. We really saw rose-trees there in flower, the following August.
In one particular, and one only, the knowledge and zeal of our Scotchman were at fault in the course of our Bohemian expedition. I have said that Baedeker’s excellent “Hand-book for London” was in the printer’s hands just when we needed it most. Therefore we searched vainly in St. Paul’s Churchyard for Dr. Johnson’s Coffee-house, where Boswell hung upon his lumbering periods, as bees upon honeysuckle; for the site of the Queen’s Arms Tavern, also a resort of the literati in the time of the great Lexicographer. We were mortified at our ill-success, chiefly because we ascribed it to the very lame and imperfect descriptions of these places which were all we could offer the Average Britons of whom we made inquiry. We were in no such uncertainty as to the Chapter Coffee-house in Paternoster Row; Mrs. Gaskell had been there before us and left so broad a “blaze” we could hardly miss seeing it.
“Half-way up (the Row), on the left hand side, is the Chapter Coffee-house. It is two hundred years old, or so.... The ceilings of the small rooms were low, and had heavy beams running across them; the walls were wainscoted breast-high; the staircase was shallow, broad, and dark, taking up much space in the centre of the house. This, then, was the Chapter Coffee-house, which, a century ago, was the resort of all the booksellers and publishers; and where the literary hacks, the critics, and even the wits, used to go in search of ideas, or employment. This was the place about which Chatterton wrote, in those delusive letters he sent to his mother at Bristol, while he was starving in London. ‘I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there.’ Here he heard of chances of employment; here his letters were to be left.”
Here the Brontë sisters, visiting London upon business connected with “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” stayed for two days, resisting the invitation of their publisher to come to his house.
Charlotte’s biographer had gone on to draw for us with graphic pen a scene of later date:
“The high, narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row. The sisters, clinging together on the most remote window-seat, could see nothing of motion or of change in the grim, dark houses opposite, so near and close although the whole breadth of the Row was between. The mighty roar of London was round them, like the sound of an unseen ocean, yet every foot-fall on the pavement below might be heard distinctly in that unfrequented street.”
When we made known our purpose to the guide, who, by this time, had taken upon him the character of protector, likewise, he was puzzled but obedient. He got down at the mouth of the crooked Row and begged permission to do our errand.
“The horse is pairfectly quiet, and there’s quite a dreezle comin’ on.”