Act I.
Act II.
LONDON'S LINKS WITH THE PAST.
When I was a child I had the signal honour of being seated upon the knee of an old lady whose great-great-great-great-uncle once shook hands with a man whose grandfather remembered seeing green fields at the spot which is now covered by Carmelite House. How short is the history of the Metropolis!
Everybody, of course, is aware that Professor Joff committed one of his notorious "howlers" when he derived "Carmelite"—in the street name—from "Cromwell's Heights." The latter, needless to say, must have been a deal nearer the South Kensington Museum than Whitefriars, famed for its sanctuary. Cromwell may have wandered in the meadows (if they still existed in his day) where the 6.30 News now leaps from its machines every afternoon about half-past five; he may even (as Plip and Johnstone surmise, in their ponderous tomes, Odd Corners in London and More and Odder Corners in London) have supped at the Pig and Mortarboard, which stood on what is now the site of the Ludgate Hill station booking-office (Plip, by-the-by, wrongly says not the booking-office, but the "bookstall," an amazing error in one usually so careful). But whatever else Cromwell did or did not do, he certainly never gave his name to any district further east than Knightsbridge.
I flatter myself that Professor Joff's preposterous surmises were finally silenced by my monograph, A Hundred Queer Things about Bouverie Street. Curiously enough I wrote this with a pencil borrowed from a friend whose aunt once caught sight, as a girl, of a prisoner being taken to the Old Bailey to be tried for murder. That prisoner was the notorious Budgingham. And now comes the interesting part of the story. Budgingham, as transpired at the trial, had bigamously married the step-daughter of a man whose godfather's mother's cousin's great-grandmother remembered hearing the bells of Bow Church tolling on the day when Henri de Bouverie landed in England to attend the funeral of his niece, the beautiful Mrs. Coop.
London's history is indeed crowded, though (to the antiquarian) oddly short in its perspective. Next week, having sketched the romantic career of Henri de Bouverie (concerning whom Professor Joff has made several incredible mistakes), I shall give a still more startling example of the links which lead us so abruptly to the antechambers of what we might have supposed to be the dim and distant past. The Metropolis, to anyone who appreciates historical research and can write as easily as I can, is a gold-mine; fortunately few pressmen realise its possibilities, and that of an Index Rerum, as I do. If, as I anticipate, this article is printed and paid for with the usual eagerness and a series ordered, nothing can stop me—— [Wait and see.—Ed.]