At the end of this lane I crossed a road, which I found led to Chiswick Ferry. The opening gave increased effect to the renewed peal, and I regretted that I could not then indulge in a nearer approach to that beloved spot. I passed a farm-house and some neat villas, and presently came to the unostentatious, but interestingly-ancient structure of Barnes Church, situated on the Common, at the distance of a quarter of a mile from the village. I essayed to enter the church-yard to read some of the chronicles of mortality, particularly as it invited attention by the unusual object of a display of elegant Roses, which I afterwards learnt had been cultivated on the same spot about 150 years, to indulge the conceit of a person of the name of Rose, who was buried there, and left an acre of ground to the parish to defray the expence; but I found the gate locked, and was told it was never opened, except during service. I confess I was not pleased with this regulation, because it appeared to sever the affections of the living from their proper sympathy with the dead. I have felt in the same manner in regard to the inclosed cemeteries of the metropolis: they separate the dead too abruptly from surviving friends and relatives. Grief seeks to indulge itself unobserved; it desires to be unrestrained by forms and hours, and to vent itself in perfect solitude. The afflicted wife longs to weep over the grave of her husband; the husband to visit the grave of a beloved wife; and the tender mother seeks the spot endeared by the remains of her child: but they cannot submit to the formality of asking permission, or allow their griefs to be intruded upon by strange attendants. Such tributes to our unsophisticated feelings are, however, denied by the locks, bolts, and walls, of the metropolitan cemeteries. The practised grave-digger wonders at the indulgence of unavailing woe—the unconscious tenants of his domain possess no peculiar claims on his sympathy—he cannot conceive how any can be felt by others—and, if he grant permission to enter, it must be for some cause more urgent, and more apparent, than that of bewailing over a grave! Did it never occur, however, to the clergymen who superintend these depositories of mortality, that more respect is due to the feelings of survivors? Is it necessary for any evident purpose, that the gates should be locked at any time, or for more than a few hours in the night? And, if even this privation be suffered merely from the fear of resurrection-men, is it not due to the best feelings of our nature that the severest punishment should attach to the crime of stealing dead bodies? What can now be learnt of anatomy which cannot be found in books and models, or be taught in the dissection of murderers? I would therefore rather bury a detected resurrection-man alive with the body he might be stealing, than shut out the living from all communion with the dead, and from all the sympathies and lessons addressed to the heart and understanding by their unrestricted intercourse.
Barnes consists of a few straggling houses opposite the Common, of a mean street leading to the water-side, and of a row of elegant houses facing the Thames, on a broad terrace nearly half a mile long. On the opposite side of the river is a tract of new-made swampy ground, shaped circularly by the winding of the river. The chord of this circle extends from Chiswick to Strand-on-the-Green; and upon it is seen the exquisitely beautiful villa of the Duke of Devonshire, where Charles James Fox lately terminated his patriotic career; and on the left are the house and extensive grounds long occupied by the amiable Valentine Morris, esq. who, on his death-bed in Italy, in 1786, bequeathed these premises and a competent annuity as a provision for about thirty aged horses and dogs,—and here some of them survived till within these seven years, dying, from the gradual decay of their vital powers, at the ages of forty and fifty.
The beauty and seclusion of this terrace have long invited the residence of persons of wealth and distinction. Many of those Frenchmen who, from interested connexions, or the prejudices of education, preferred exile and comparative poverty in foreign lands, to the reign of liberty and reason at home, came to reside on this spot. Here was acted the terrible tragedy of the Count and Countess D’Antraigues. These famous intriguants, after traversing Europe to enlist the vain prejudices of kings, and the sycophant spirit of courtiers, against the unalterable principles of the rights of man, settled themselves in a small house near the upper end of this terrace. Here their establishment consisted only of a single Italian footman, and two maid-servants. One day in every week they went to London, in a hired coach, to confer with their partizans; and it was on the morning of one of these excursions that these unhappy persons were suddenly butchered by their Italian footman. The coach stood at the door, and the Count and Countess had descended the stairs, when the servant, rushing from the parlour, fired a pistol at the Count; the ball of which struck, but did not injure him. It, however, so much surprised him as to throw him off his guard, when the wretch struck him with a stiletto between the shoulders. The Count at first reeled on the step of the door, but instantly rushed up stairs, as is supposed, to get arms from his bed-chamber, which he reached, but only to fall dead on the floor. In the mean time, the Countess, who was two or three paces in advance, and had reached the carriage-door, not aware of the cause of the report of the pistol, and of the Count’s precipitate retreat, asked the man, peevishly, why he did not open the door? He advanced as if to do it; but instantly stabbed her in the breast to the hilt of his weapon: she shrieked, reeled a few yards, and fell dead beside the post which adjoins the house to the West, on the pavement near which her blood was lately visible. The villain himself fled up-stairs to the room where his master lay weltering in his blood, and then, with a razor, cut his own throat. I saw the coachman, who told me that scarcely five minutes elapsed between the time when he heard them approach the carriage and beheld them corpses! The several acts were begun and over in an instant. At first he could not conceive what was passing; and, though he leaped from the box to the aid of the dying lady, he had then no suspicion of the fate of the Count. I took pains to ascertain the assassin’s motive for committing such horrid deeds; but none can be traced beyond a feeling of revenge, excited by a supposed intention of his master to discard him, and send him out of the kingdom; a design which, it is said, he discovered by listening on the stairs to the conversation of the Count and Countess, while they were enjoying the water-scene by moon-light, on the preceding evening, from their projecting windows. It was impossible to view the spot where such a tragedy had been acted, without horror, and without deep sympathy for the victims; yet it gratified me to find the house already inhabited by a respectable family, because it thus appeared that there are now dispersed through society many whose minds are raised above the artifices of superstition,—which, in no distant age, would have filled these premises with ghosts and hobgoblins, till they had become a bye-word and a heap of ruins!
Nearly adjoining and behind the residence of Count d’Antraigues, stand the premises and grounds long occupied by another distinguished emigrant, the Marquis de Chabanes, a relation of the notorious and versatile Talleyrand. This marquis here pursued two speculations, by which, at the time, he attracted attention and applause. In the first he undertook to give useful body and consistency to the dust of coals, of which thousands of tons, before their application to gas-lights, were annually wasted in the shipping and coal-wharfs; and for this purpose he erected a manufactory; but, after much loss of labour and property, found it necessary to abandon the project. In the second speculation, he proposed to introduce various French improvements into English horticulture, and undertook to supply the fruiterers of the metropolis with tender and unseasonable fruits and vegetables, in greater perfection, and at a lower rate, than they had heretofore been supplied by the English gardeners. For this purpose he built large and high walls, and very extensive hot-houses and conservatories; but, being unable to contend against the fickleness of our climate, he found it necessary to abandon this scheme also; when the glasses, the frames, &c. were sold by auction; and no vestiges now remain of his labours, but his vines and the ruins of his flues and foundation-walls.
During my inquiries of the working gardener who has succeeded him on the ground, I learnt some particulars in regard to the economy by which the metropolis receives its vast supplies of fruits and fresh vegetables. Mr. Middleton, in his philosophical Survey of Middlesex, estimates the quantity of garden-ground, within ten miles of the metropolis, at 15,000 acres, giving employment in the fruit-season to 60,000 labourers. The mode of conveying this vast produce to market creates habits among this numerous class of people which are little suspected by the rest of the community. A gardener’s life appears to be one of the most primitive and natural; but, passed near London, it is as artificial and unnatural as any known to our forced state of society. Covent-garden market is held three days in the week, and other markets on the same or other days; and, as vegetables ought to be eaten as soon as possible after they are gathered, it is the business of the gardener to gather one day and sell the next; hence the intervening night is the period of conveyance from the places of growth to those of consumption. All the roads round London, therefore, are covered with market-carts, and waggons during the night, so that they may reach the markets by three, four, or five o’clock, when the dealers attend; and these markets are over by six or seven. The shops of retailers are then supplied by the aid of ill-paid Irish women, who carry loads of a hundredweight to all parts of London on their heads, to meet the demands of good house-wives, who, at ten or eleven, buy their garden-stuff for the day. This rapid routine creates a prodigious quantity of labour for men, women, and horses. Every gardener has his market-cart or carts, which he loads at sun-set; and, they depart at ten, eleven, twelve, or one o’clock, according to the distance from London. Each cart is accompanied by a driver, and also by a person to sell, generally the gardener’s wife; who, having sold the load, returns with the team by nine or ten o’clock in the morning; and has thus finished the business of the day, before half the inhabitants of London have risen from their beds. Such is the economy of every gardener’s family within ten miles of London,—of some every night, and of others every other night, during at least six months in the year. The high vegetable season in summer, as well as peculiar crops at other times, call for exertions of labour, or rather of slavery, scarcely paralleled by any other class of people. Thus, in the strawberry season, hundreds of women are employed to carry that delicate fruit to market on their heads; and their industry in performing this task is as wonderful, as their remuneration is unworthy of the opulent classes who derive enjoyment from their labour. They consist, for the most part, of Shropshire and Welsh girls, who walk to London at this season in droves, to perform this drudgery, just as the Irish peasantry come to assist in the hay and corn harvests. I learnt that these women carry upon their heads baskets of strawberries, or raspberries, weighing from forty to fifty pounds, and make two turns in the day, from Isleworth to market, a distance of thirteen miles each way; three turns from Brentford, a distance of nine miles; and four turns from Hammersmith; a distance of six miles. For the most part, they find some conveyance back; but even then these industrious creatures carry loads from twenty-four to thirty miles a-day, besides walking back unladen some part of each turn! Their remuneration for this unparalleled slavery is from 8s. to 9s. per day; each turn from the distance of Isleworth being 4s. or 4s. 6d.; and from that of Hammersmith 2s. or 2s. 3d. Their diet is coarse and simple, their drink, tea and small-beer; costing not above 1s. or 1s. 6d. and their back-conveyance about 2s. or 2s. 6d.; so that their net gains are about 5s. per day, which, in the strawberry season, of forty days, amounts to 10l. After this period the same women find employment in gathering and marketing vegetables, at lower wages, for other sixty days, netting about 5l. more. With this poor pittance they return to their native county, and it adds either to their humble comforts, or creates a small dowry towards a rustic establishment for life. Can a more interesting picture be drawn of virtuous exertion? Why have our poets failed to colour and finish it? More virtue never existed in their favourite Shepherdesses than in these Welsh and Shropshire girls! For beauty, symmetry, and complexion, they are not inferior to the nymphs of Arcadia, and they far outvie the pallid specimens of Circassia! Their morals too are exemplary; and they often perform this labour to support aged parents, or to keep their own children from the workhouse! In keen suffering, they endure all that the imagination of a poet could desire; they live hard, they sleep on straw in hovels and barns, and they often burst an artery, or drop down dead from the effect of heat and over-exertion! Yet, such is the state of one portion of our female population, at a time when we are calling ourselves the most polished nation on earth, and pretending to be so wealthy that we give away millions a-year to foreigners unsolicited, and for no intelligible purpose! And such too is their dire necessity, that it would be most cruel to suggest or recommend any invention that might serve as a substitute for their slavery, and thereby deprive them of its wretched annual produce!
The transit from Barnes to Mortlake is but a few paces; a small elbow in the road forming their point of separation. Both of them contain some handsome villas, and they are pleasantly situated on the banks of the Thames; yet they are less beautiful than they might be rendered, by very slender attentions. There is no public taste, no love of natal soil, no pride of emulation apparent, though the scite is one of the finest in England. A few mansions of the opulent adorn both villages, and the country fascinates in spite of the inhabitants; but the third and fourth rate houses have a slovenly, and often a kind of pig-sty character, disgusting to those who, in the beautiful towns and villages of Essex, have seen what may be done, to improve the habitations even of humble life. Lovely Witham, and Kelvedon, and Coggeshall! what examples you set to all other towns in your neatly painted and whitened houses—unostentatious, though cheerful—and inviting, though chaste and modest! What a contrast do you present to the towns and villages in Middlesex and Surrey, and even in Kent! If poverty forbids a stuccoed or plastered wall, the cleanly and oft-repeated whitewash proves the generous public spirit of the occupant, while the outside seldom has occasion to blush for the inside. A spirit of harmony runs through the whole, and a pure habitation is indicative of pure inhabitants; thus, cleanliness in the house leads to neatness of apparel—both require order, and out of order grow moral habits, domestic happiness, and the social virtues. Nor is this theory fanciful; Witham, Kelvedon, and Coggeshall, form a district which is at once the most beautiful, the least vicious, and the happiest, in the kingdom. One virtue is doubtless consequent on another, and one good habit generates another; the result is the harmonious triumph of virtue! If it be doubted whether the white-washed exterior is more than “an outward and visible sign” of the purity within, I reply—that virtue is so much the effect of habit, that whatever improves the habits improves the character; and that, if a house were frequently white-washed within and without, it could scarcely fail to banish personal filth from the inmates; while habits of cleanliness, which call for habits of industry, would produce the rest. I have, indeed, often thought that it would be an efficacious means of bettering the morals, as well as the health, of the London poor, if St. Giles’s, Hockly-in-the-hole, Fleet-lane, Saffron-hill, and other dens of vice and misery, were by law lime-washed inside and outside twice in every year. But, in whatever degree this doctrine may be just, let me hope these observations will meet the eye of some active philanthropists, who, being thus taught to consider cleanliness as an auxiliary of morals and happiness, will be induced so to paint and whiten our dusky-coloured villages and dirty towns, as to render them worthy of virtuous residents, in the hope that, by reciprocation, they may render themselves worthy of their purified habitations.
I do not charge on Barnes and Mortlake exclusively the characteristics of filth—they are not inferior to other villages within ten miles; but the whole require improvement, and I recommend Witham, Kelvedon, and other places in that district of Essex, to their imitation.
Mortlake church-yard and its ancient church stand pleasantly on the north side of a large field, across which is a picturesque foot-path to East Sheen. I inquired eagerly for the tomb of Partridge, the almanack-maker and astrologer, and found it in the south-east corner, in a tottering condition. Relics so famous would, it might have been supposed, have extorted from the Parish Vestry a single hod of mortar, and an hour’s labour of a mason, to sustain it: yet thus it is, not only at Mortlake, but every where. Nothing is conceded to public feeling, and the most venerable monuments are suffered to fall to decay for want of the most trifling repairs. The following inscription is still legible on the slab of the tomb:—
Johannes Partridge, Astrologus et Medicinæ Doctor, natus est apud East-Sheen, in comitatu Surrey, 8º die Januarii, anno 1644, et mortuus est Londini 24º die Junii, anno 1715. Medicinam fecit duobus Regibus unique Reginæ; Carolo scilicet Secundo, Willielmo Tertio, Reginæque Mariæ. Creatus Medicinæ Doctor Lugduni Batavorum.
How many are the associations which grow out of this name of Partridge! He was one of the last of the learned votaries of Astrology, the mother of the sciences, though herself the daughter of superstition. His works on genitures, and on the errors of his favourite science, are specimens of acute reasoning, not exceeded by the ablest disquisitions on more worthy subjects. Yet he was held up by Swift as an impostor, though Swift himself lived by a show of faith in other mysteries, for which his reverence is very doubtful. Not so Partridge; he evidently believed sincerely that the stars were indices of fate, and he wrote and acted in that belief, however much he may have been deceived by appearances. He found, as all students in astrology find, that every horoscope enabled him to foretel with precision a certain number of events; and, if his prognostics failed in some cases, he ascribed the failure to no defect of his celestial intelligencers, but to the errors or short-sightedness of his art. Good, and even wise men have, in all ages, been deceived by the same appearances. They found that the planets foretold some events; they thence inferred that the planets ruled those and all events; and, if the science often disappointed them, they found an apology for it in their own mistaken judgments, or in the errors introduced into it by different authors. Astrologers were therefore not impostors, as they are often described by the over-righteous, the hasty, or the ignorant. They found a science reared on the observations and experience of the remotest antiquity, and their prognostications were deduced from its established laws. Its practices were directed by the unerring motions of the earth, moon, and planets; and it possessed characteristics of grandeur and sublimity, arising from the magnitude and solemnity of its sources, and from the eternal laws which regulated them.