A Morning's Walk from London to Kew

by Sir R. Phillips

Such are the unceasing works of CREATION, constantly taking place on this exterior surface of the earth; where, though less evident to the senses and experience of man, matter apparently inert is in as progressive a state of change from the operation of unceasing and immutable causes, as in the visible generations of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus water, wind, and heat, the energies of which NEVER CEASE to be exerted, are constantly producing new combinations, changes, and creations; which, if they accord with the harmony of the whole, are fit and “good;” but, if discordant, are speedily re-organized or extinguished by contrary and opposing powers. In a word, WHATEVER IS, IS FIT; AND WHATEVER IS NOT FIT, IS NOT, OR SOON CEASES TO BE!—Such seems to be the governing principle of Nature—the key of all her mysteries—the primary law of creation! All things are the proximate effects of a balance of immutable powers—those powers are results of a PRIMORDIAL CAUSE,—while that CAUSE is inscrutable and incomprehensible to creatures possessing but a relative being, who live only in TIME and SPACE, and who feel and act merely by the IMPULSE of limited senses and powers.

A lane, in the north-west corner of the Common, brought me to Barnes’ Elms, where now resides a Mr. Hoare, a banker of London. The family were not at home; but, on asking the servants if that was the house of Mr. Tonson, they assured me, with great simplicity, that no such gentleman lived there. I named the Kit-Cat Club, as accustomed to assemble here; but the oddity of the name excited their ridicule; and I was told that no such Club was held there; but, perhaps, said one to the other, the gentleman means the Club that assembles at the public-house on the Common. Knowing, however, that I was at the right place, I could not avoid expressing my vexation, that the periodical assemblage of the first men of their age, should be so entirely forgotten by those who now reside on the spot—when one of them exclaimed, “I should not wonder if the gentleman means the philosopher’s room.”—“Aye,” rejoined his comrade, “I remember somebody coming once before to see something of this sort, and my master sent him there.” I requested then to be shewn to this room; when I was conducted across a detached garden, and brought to a handsome structure in the architectural style of the early part of the last century—evidently the establishment of the Kit-Cat Club!

A walk covered with docks, thistles, nettles, and high grass, led from the remains of a gate-way in the garden-wall, to the door which opened into the building. Ah! thought I, along this desolate avenue the finest geniuses in England gaily proceeded to meet their friends;—yet within a century, how changed—how deserted—how revolting! A cold chill seized me, as the man unfastened the decayed door of the building, and as I beheld the once-elegant hall, filled with cobwebs, a fallen ceiling, and accumulating rubbish. On the right, the present proprietor had erected a copper, and converted one of the parlours into a wash-house! The door on the left led to a spacious and once superb staircase, now in ruins, filled with dense cobwebs, which hung from the lofty ceiling, and seemed to be deserted even by the spiders! The entire building, for want of ventilation, having become food for the fungus, called dry-rot, the timber had lost its cohesive powers. I ascended the staircase, therefore, with a feeling of danger, to which the man would not expose himself;—but I was well requited for my pains. Here I found the Kit-Cat Club-room, nearly as it existed in the days of its glory. It is eighteen feet high, and forty feet long, by twenty wide. The mouldings and ornaments were in the most superb fashion of its age; but the whole was falling to pieces, from the effects of the dry-rot.

My attention was chiefly attracted by the faded cloth-hanging of the room, whose red colour once set off the famous portraits of the Club, that hung around it. Their marks and sizes were still visible, and the numbers and names remained as written in chalk for the guidance of the hanger! Thus was I, as it were, by these still legible names, brought into personal contact with Addison, and Steele, and Congreve, and Garth, and Dryden, and with many hereditary nobles, remembered, only because they were patrons of those natural nobles!—I read their names aloud!—I invoked their departed spirits!—I was appalled by the echo of my own voice!—The holes in the floor, the forests of cobwebs in the windows, and a swallow’s nest in the corner of the ceiling, proclaimed that I was viewing a vision of the dreamers of a past age,—that I saw realized before me the speaking vanities of the anxious career of man! The blood of the reader of sensibility will thrill as mine thrilled! It was feeling without volition, and therefore incapable of analysis!

I could not help lingering in a place so consecrated by the religion of Nature; and, sitting down for a few minutes on some broken boards, I involuntarily shed a tear of sympathy for the departed great—for times gone by,—here brought before my eyes in so tangible a shape! I yielded to the unsophisticated sentiments which I could not avoid reading in this VOLUME of ruins; and felt, by irresistible association, that every object of our affections—that our affections themselves—and that all things that delight us, must soon pass away like this place and its former inhabitants! Beginning yesterday—flourishing to-day—ceasing to-morrow!—such is the sum of the history of all organized being! Certain combinations excite, and the creative powers proceed with success, till balanced by the inertia of the materials—a contest of maturity arises, measured in length by the activity of the antagonist powers;—but the unceasing inertia finally prevails over the original excitement and its accessary stimuli, and ultimately produces disorganization and dissolution! Such is the abstract view of the physical laws which, in the peculiar career of intellectual man, successively give rise to HOPE in youth—PRIDE in manhood—REFLECTION in decay—and HUMILITY in old age. He knows his fate to be inevitable—but every day’s care is an epitome of his course, and every night’s sleep affords an anticipation of its end!—He is thus taught to die—and, if in spite of his vices or follies he should live till his world has passed away before him, he will then contentedly await the termination of that vital action which, creating no passion, affords no enjoyment. Such, said I, is the scheme of Benevolence, which, by depriving the prospect of death of its terrors, makes room, without suffering, for a succession of new generations, to whose perceptions the world is ever young. The only wise use therefore which men can make of scenes like that before me, is to deduce from them a lesson of moderation and humility;—for, such as are these dumb, though visible cares of that generation—such will our own soon be!

On rejoining Mr. Hoare’s man in the hall below, and expressing my grief that so interesting a building should be suffered to go to decay for want of attention, he told me that his master intended to pull it down and unite it to an adjoining barn, so as to form of the two a riding-house; and I learn that this design has since been executed! The Kit-Cat pictures were painted early in the eighteenth century, and, about the year 1710, were brought to this spot; but the room I have been describing was not built till ten or fifteen years afterwards. They were forty-two in number, and were presented by the members to the elder Tonson, who died in 1736. He left them to his great nephew, also an eminent bookseller, who died in 1767. They were then removed from this building to the house of his brother, at Water-Oakley, near Windsor; and, on his death, to the house of Mr. Baker, of Hertingfordbury, where they now remain, and where I lately saw them splendidly lodged and in fine preservation. It may be proper to observe, that the house of Mr. Hoare was not the house of Mr. Tonson, and that Mr. Tonson’s house stood nearer to the Kit-Cat Club-rooms, having a few years since been taken down. The situation is certainly not a happy one, being on a level with the Thames, and the adjacent grounds being deeply flooded at high tides. It is, however, completely sequestered from vulgar approach, and on that account was, perhaps, preferred as the retreat of a man of business.

At Barnes’ Elms lived the virtuous minister of Elizabeth, Sir Francis Walsingham, and here he once entertained that chivalrous queen. Cowley, the poet, afterwards resided here; and, in a later age Heydegger, the buffoon, who gave an eccentric entertainment to the second Guelph, and contrived to gratify his listless mind by an ingenious surprize, in at first making him believe that he was not prepared to receive him, and then contriving a sudden burst of lights, music, and gaiety.

In returning through the lane which led from the Kit-Cat Club-room to Barnes Common, the keenest emotions of the human mind were excited by an unforeseen cause. I was admiring the luxuriance and grandeur of the vegetation, in trees which from the very ground expanded in immense double trunks, and in the profusion of weeds and shrubs which covered every part of the untrodden surface—when, on a sudden, I caught the distant sound of a ring of VILLAGE BELLS. Nothing could be more in accordance with the predispositions of my mind. All the melancholy which is created by the recurrence of the same succession of tones, instantly controlled and oppressed my feelings. I became the mere patient of these sounds; and I sank, as it were, under the force of gloomy impressions, which so completely lulled and seduced me, that I suffered without being able to exert an effort to escape from their magic spell. Seldom had the power of sound acquired a similar ascendency over me. I seemed to be carried back by it to days and events long passed away. My soul, so to speak, was absorbed; and I leaned upon a gate, partly to indulge the reverie, partly as an effect of lassitude, and partly to listen more attentively to the sounds which caused so peculiar a train of feeling.

There were six bells; and they rang what might be designed for a merry peal, to celebrate some village festival; or, perhaps, thought I, they may be profaning a sanctuary of the religion of peace, and outraging a land of freedom, to announce some bloody victory, gained by legions of trained slaves, over patriots who have been asserting the liberties and defending the independence of their country. Whichever might be the purpose, (for, alas! the latter, among my degenerated countrymen, is as likely as the former,) the recurring tones produced corresponding vibrations on my nerves, and I felt myself played upon like a concordant musical instrument. Presently, however, it occurred to me, that I was not an entire stranger to the tones of those bells, and that part of their fascination arose from an association between them and some of the earliest and dearest objects in my remembrance. “Surely,” I exclaimed, “they are Chiswick bells!—the very bells under the sound of which I received part of my early education, and, as a school-boy, passed the happiest days of my life!—Well may their tones vibrate to my inmost soul—and kindle uncommon sympathies!” I now recollected that the winding of the river must have brought me nearer to that simple and primitive village than the profusion of wood had permitted me to perceive, and my nerves had been unconsciously acted upon by tones which served as keys to all the associations connected with these bells, their church, and the village of Chiswick! I listened again, and now discriminated the identical sounds which I had not heard during a period of more than thirty years. I distinguished the very words, in the successive tones, which the school-boys and puerile imaginations at Chiswick used to combine with them. In fancy, I became again a school-boy—“Yes,” said I, “the six bells repeat the village-legend, and tell me that “my dun cow has just calv’d,” exactly as they did above thirty years since!”—Did the reader ever encounter a similar key-note, leading to a multitude of early and vivid impressions; for in like manner these sympathetic tones brought before my imagination numberless incidents and personages, no longer important, or no longer in existence. My scattered and once-loved school-mates, their characters, and their various fortunes, passed in rapid review before me;—my school-master, his wife, and all the gentry, and heads of families, whose orderly attendance at Divine service on Sundays, while those well-remembered bells were “chiming for church,” (but now departed and mouldering in the adjoining graves!) were rapidly presented to my recollection. With what pomp and form they used to enter and depart from their house of God!—I saw with the mind’s eye the widow Hogarth and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle, dressed in their silken sacks, their raised headdresses, their black calashes, their lace ruffles, and their high crook’d canes, preceded by their aged servant, Samuel; who, after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the Monthly Review, with his literary wife in her neat and elevated wire-winged cap! And oft-times the vivacious and angelic Duchess of Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of pecuniary distress, created by the luxury of charity! Nor could I forget the humble distinction of the aged sexton Mortefee, whose skill in psalmody enabled him to lead that wretched groupe of singers, whom Hogarth so happily pourtrayed; whose performance with the tuning-fork excited so much wonder in little boys; and whose gesticulations and contortions of head, hand, and body, in beating time, were not outdone, even by Joah Bates in the commemorations of Handel! Yes, simple and happy villagers! I remember scores of you;—how fortunately ye had escaped the contagion of the metropolitan vices, though distant but five miles; and how many of you have I conversed with, who, at an adult age, had never beheld the degrading assemblage of its knaveries and miseries!

I revelled in the melancholy pleasure of these recollections, yielding my whole soul to that witchery of sensibility, which magnifies the perception of being, till one of the bells was overset; when, the peal stopping, I had leisure to reflect on the rapid advance of the day, and on the consequent necessity of quickening my speed.