Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present

by Thomas Miller

Ancient London.

“Almost every historian has set out by regretting how little is known of the early inhabitants of Great Britain and its metropolis—a loss which only the lovers of hoar antiquity deplore, since, from all we can with certainty glean from the pages of contemporary history, we should find but little more to interest us than if we possessed written records of the remotest origin of the Red Indians; for both would alike but be the history of an unlettered and uncivilised race. The same dim obscurity, with scarcely an exception, hangs over the primeval inhabitants of every other country; and if we lift up the mysterious curtain which has so long fallen over and concealed the past, we only obtain glimpses of obscure hieroglyphics; and, from the unmeaning fables of monsters and giants, to which the rudest nations trace their origin, we but glance backward and backward, to find that civilised Rome and classic Greece can produce no better authorities than old undated traditions, teeming with fabulous accounts of heathen gods and goddesses. What we can see of the remote past through the half-darkened twilight of time, is as of a great and unknown sea, on which some solitary ship is afloat, whose course we cannot trace through the shadows which every where deepen around her, nor tell what strange land lies beyond the dim horizon to which she seems bound. The dark night of mystery has for ever settled down upon the early history of our island, and the first dawning which throws the shadow of man upon the scene, reveals a rude hunter clad in the skins of beasts of the chase, whose path is disputed by the maned and shaggy bison, whose rude hut in the forest fastnesses is pitched beside the lair of the hungry wolf, and whose first conquest is the extirpation of these formidable animals. And so, in as few words, might the early history of any other country be written. The shores of Time are thickly strewn with the remains of extinct animals, which, when living, the eye of man never looked upon, as if from the deep sea of Eternity had heaved up one wave, which washed over and blotted out for ever all that was coeval with her silent and ancient reign, leaving a monument upon the confines of this old and obliterated world, for man in a future day to read, on which stands ever engraven the solemn sentence, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther: beyond this boundary all is mine!’

“Neither does this mystery end here; for around the monuments which were reared by the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain there still reigns a deep darkness; we know not what hands piled together the rude remains of Stonehenge; we have but few records of the manners, the customs, or the religion of the early Britons: here and there a colossal barrow heaves up above the dead; we look within, and find a few bones, a few rude weapons, either used in war or the chase, and these are all; and we linger in wonderment around such remains! Who those ancient voyagers were that first called England the ‘Country of Sea Cliffs,’ we know not; and while we sit and brood over the rude fragments of the Welsh Triads, we become so entangled in doubt and mystery as to look upon the son of Aedd the Great, and the Island of Honey to which he sailed, and wherein he found no man alive, as the pleasing dream of some old and forgotten poet; and we set out again with no more success to discover who were the earliest inhabitants of England, leaving the ancient Cymri and the country of Summer behind, and the tall, silent cliffs to stand, as they had done for ages, looking over a wide and mastless sea.

“We then look among the ancient names of the headlands, and harbours, and mountains, and hills, and valleys, and endeavour to trace a resemblance to the language spoken by some neighbouring nation; and we only glean up a few scattered words, which leave us still in doubt, like a confusion of echoes, one breaking in upon the other; a minglement of Celtic, Pictish, Gaulish, and Saxon sounds; where, if for a moment but one is audible and distinct, it is drowned by other successive clamours which come panting up with a still louder claim; and in very despair we are compelled to step back again into the old primeval silence. There we find geology looking daringly into the formation of the early world, and boldly proclaiming that there was a period of time when our island heaved up bare and desolate amid the silence of the surrounding ocean—when on its ancient promontories and grey granite peaks not a green branch waved nor a blade of grass grew; and no living thing, saving the tiny corals, as they piled dome upon dome above the naked foundations of this early world, stirred in the ‘deep profound’ which reigned over those sleeping seas. Onward they go, boldly discoursing of undated centuries that have passed away, during which they tell us the ocean swarmed with huge monstrous forms; and that all those countless ages have left to record their flight are but the remains of a few extinct reptiles and fishes, whose living likenesses never again appeared in the world. To another measureless period are we fearlessly carried—so long as to be only numbered in the account of time which eternity keeps—and other forms, we are told, moved over the floors of dried-up oceans—vast animals which no human eye ever looked upon alive; these, they say, also were swept away, and their ponderous remains had long mingled with and enriched the earth; but man had not as yet appeared, nor in any corner of the whole wide world do they discover, in the deep-buried layers of the earth, a single vestige of the remains of the human race.

“What historian, then, while such proofs as these are before his eyes, will not hesitate ere he ventures to assert who were the first inhabitants of any country, whence they came, or at what period of time that country was first peopled? As well might he attempt a description of the scenery over which the mornings of the early world first broke,—of summit and peak which, ages ago, have been hurled down, and ground and powdered into atoms. What matters it about the date when such things once were, or at what time or place they first appeared? We can gaze upon the gigantic remains of the mastodon or mammoth, or on the grey silent ruins of Stonehenge; but at what period of time the one roamed over our island, or in what year the other was first reared, will for ever remain a mystery. The earth beneath our feet is lettered over with proofs that there was an age in which these extinct monsters existed, and that period is unmarked by any proof of the existence of man in our island. And during those not improbable periods, when oceans were emptied and dried amid the heaving up and burying of rocks and mountains,—when volcanoes reddened the dark midnights of the world, when the “earth was without form and void,”—what mind can picture aught but His Spirit “moving upon the face of the waters?”—what mortal eye could have looked upon the rocking and reeling of those chaotic ruins when their rude forms first heaved up into the light? Is not such a world stamped with the imprint of the Omnipotent—from when He first paved its foundation with enduring granite, and roofed it over with the soft blue of heaven, and lighted it by day with the glorious sun, and hung out the moon and stars to gladden the night, until at last He fashioned a world beautiful enough for the abode of his “own image” to dwell in: then He created man. And what matters it whether or not we believe in all these mighty epochs? Surely it is enough for us to discover throughout every change of time the loving-kindness of God for mankind: we see how fitting this globe was at last made for man’s dwelling-place; that before the great Architect had put his last finish to his mighty work, instead of leaving us to starve amid the Silurian sterility, He prepared the world for man, and in place of the naked granite, spread out a rich carpet of verdure for him to tread upon, then flung upon it a profusion of the sweetest flowers. Let us not, then, daringly stand by, and say thus it was fashioned, and so it was formed; but by our silence acknowledge that it never yet entered the heart of man to conceive how the Almighty Creator laid the foundation of the world.

“To his great works must we ever come with reverential knee, and before them lowly bow; for the grey rocks, and the high mountain summits, and the wide-spreading plains, and the ever-sounding seas, are stamped with the image of Eternity; a mighty shadow ever hangs over them. The grey and weather-beaten headlands still look over the sea, and the solemn mountains still slumber under their old midnight shadows; but what human ear first heard the murmur of the waves upon the beaten beach, or what human foot first climbed up those high-piled summits, we can never know.

“What would it benefit us could we discover the date when our island was buried beneath the ocean; when what was dry land in one age became the sea in another; when volcanoes glowed angrily under the dark skies of the early world, and huge extinct monsters bellowed and roamed through the old forests and swam in the ancient rivers, which have perhaps ages ago been swept away? What could we find more to interest us were we in possession of the names, the ages, and the numbers of the first adventurers who were perchance driven by some storm upon our sea-beaten coast, than what is said in the ancient Triad before alluded to? “There were no more men alive, nor any thing but bears, wolves, beavers, and the oxen with the high prominence,” when Aedd landed upon the shores of England. What few traces we have of the religious rites of the early inhabitants of Great Britain vary but little from such as have been brought to light by modern travellers who have landed in newly-discovered countries in our own age. They worshipped idols, and had no knowledge of the true God; and, saving in those lands where the early patriarchs dwelt, the same Egyptian darkness settled over the whole world. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered all nations, except themselves, barbarians; nor do the Chinese of the present day look upon us in a more favourable light; while we, acknowledging their antiquity as a nation, scarcely number them amongst such as are civilised. We have yet to learn by what hands the round towers of Ireland were reared, and by what race the few ancient British monuments that still remain were piled together, ere we can enter those mysterious gates which open upon the history of the past. We find the footprint of man there, but who he was, or whence he came, we know not; he lived and died, and whether or not posterity would ever think of the rude monuments he left behind concerned him not; whether the stones would mark the temple in which he worshipped, or tumble down and cover his grave, concerned not his creed; with his hatchet of stone, and spear-head of flint, he hewed his way from the cradle to the tomb; and under the steep barrow he knew that he should sleep his last sleep, and, with his arms folded upon his breast, he left the dead past to bury its dead: he lived not for us.”

At what remote period of time the spot on which London now stands was first peopled can never be known. A few rude huts peering perchance through the forest-trees, with grassy openings that went sloping downwards to the edge of the Thames, where the ancient Briton embarked in his rude coracle, or boat made of wicker and covered with the hides of oxen,—a pile of rugged stones on the summit of the hill which marked the cromlech, or druidical altar, and probably stood on the spot now occupied by St. Paul’s, and which nearly two thousand years ago was removed to make room for the Roman temple dedicated to Victory—was, from all we know of other ancient British towns, the appearance of London soon after the period when the old Cymri first landed in England, and called it the “Country of Sea-Cliffs.”

We next see it through the dim twilight of time occupied by the Romans. Triumphal arches and pillared temples and obelisks look down upon the streets of the Roman city. Then comes Boadicea thundering at the head of her revengeful Britons in her war-chariot: we hear the tramp of horses and the dealing of heavy blows; see the tesselated pavement stained with blood; behold pale faces upturned in the grim repose of death; then many a night of darkness again settles upon the streets of the old city.