and a hard struggle they have to hold their own against the menacing chimney-stacks of manufacturing England. All the poetry and aspiration of the past seems contending, shoulder to shoulder, in thick air with the material interests of the present.
Strolling about through the grimy streets, one's eye is caught by the sign "Quakers' Friars," and following up the narrow court to seek the meaning of this odd combination of opposing ideas, one comes to the Friends' school, occupying the remnant of a former priory of Black Friars. It is a spot intimately associated with recollections of the early Friends. In 1690 the father of Judge Logan of Pennsylvania was master of this school. Adjoining the school is the Friends' meeting-house, built in 1669 on what was then an open space near the priory, where George Fox often preached; and within the walls of the meeting-house this Quaker father took upon himself the state of matrimony. A local bard is inspired to sing:
Many years ago, six hundred or so,
The Dominican monks had a praying and eating house
Just on the spot where a little square dot
On the Bristol map marks the old Quakers' meeting-house.
A different scene it was once, I ween:
No monk is now heard his prayers repeating;
And the singers and chaunters and black gallivanters
Had never a thought of "a silent meeting."
The streets near by, called Callowhill, Philadelphia and Penn streets, recall the residence here of William Penn in 1697, after his marriage with Hannah, daughter of Thomas Callowhill and granddaughter of Dennis Hollister, prominent merchants of Bristol. These streets are believed to have been laid out and named by Penn on land belonging to Hollister. Another Friend was Richard Champion, the inventor of Bristol china and the friend of Burke. Champion's manufactory was not commercially a success, but his ware is now highly prized, and some few remaining pieces of a tea-service, presented by Mr. and Mrs. Champion to Mrs. Burke at the time the latter's husband was returned member for Bristol, have brought thrice their weight in gold.
In Castle street, not far from Quakers' Friars, stands a profusely ornamented mansion, now St. Peter's Hospital. The eastern portion is of considerable antiquity: the western was rebuilt in 1608. In the fifteenth century the older portion was the residence of Thomas Norton, a famous alchemist, who, according to Fuller, "undid himself and all his friends who trusted him with money, living and dying very poor about the year 1477."[2] Norton's ill-success was, however, in his own belief, the success of others. He declared that a merchant's wife of Bristol had stolen from him the elixir of life. "Some suspect her" (says Fuller) "to have been the wife of William Cannings, contemporary with Norton, who started up to so great and sudden wealth—the clearest evidence of their conjecture." The person here intended is no other than the great Bristol merchant William Canynge the younger, who was five times mayor and one of the rebuilders of Redcliff church. His ships, which crowded the quays of Bristol, were a more evident source of wealth than any cunningly devised elixir except in the eyes of a disappointed dreamer. The reflection that in this quaint old house was enacted a history like to that of Balthazar Claes lends to it a strange fascination.
The church of St. Mary Redcliff is, as ever, intimately associated with the name and genius of Chatterton: no saint in the calendar could have shed over it such an interest; and beautiful as it is, "the pride of Bristowe and the Westerne Land," how many visit it for its beauty alone? This is rather hard for the clericals: they are unwilling to forget that Chatterton was an impostor and a suicide; and to have their church surrounded by a halo from such a source! bah! They have done what they could by removing his monument from consecrated ground and depriving it of its inscription.
In an old chest left to moulder in a room over the north porch of this church Chatterton professed to find the Rowley manuscripts. In this room, "here, in the full but fragile enjoyment of his brief and illusory existence, he stored the treasure-house of his memory with the thoughts that, teeming over his pages, have enrolled his name among the great in the land of poetry and song. Happy here, ere his first joyous aspirations were repressed—ere the warm and genial emotions of his heart were checked—before time had dissipated his idle dreams, and neglect, contempt and distress had fastened on his mind, and hurried him onward to his untoward destiny."[3]