“THE ANGLERS,” TEDDINGTON.
Teddington is but a couple of miles, as the river flows, from Kingston, and for the last half mile of the distance the murmur, one might almost say sometimes the roar, of the weir is audible. This same weir is the prime delight of the angler upon the more Cockneyfied portion of the river, and many is the patient piscator who perches himself thereon betimes, and sits at the receipt of finny custom until the gathering dusk renders the enterprise no longer profitable. The old-fashioned carp, that mysterious, long-lived fish which was once, like the peacock, an old English delicacy with which monastic fishponds swarmed, runs to a great size about Teddington Weir, while dace are almost as plentiful as minnows in a brook. Adjoining the weir is the lock, the first in the ascent and the last in the descent of the river. The lock and weir mark, to all intents and purposes, the spot, between sixty or seventy miles from the sea, at which the Thames ceases to be tidal. Henceforth the pilgrim, following the river on its way to the ocean, will see at low water, particularly between here and Kew Bridge, more mud-banks than he cares to count. At such times, too, the sense of smell will, at all events in hot weather, be found to have taken so keen a development that even chloride of lime would be accounted an odour sweeter than that given forth by the nude expanse of festering mud. At Teddington as yet there is happily little annoyance of this kind. To see the little of interest the village affords it is necessary to land at the ferry opposite the “Anglers,” an old-fashioned inn which has long been popular with fishermen. At Teddington, be it remembered, is kept jealously locked up, in the custody of Mr. J. A. Messenger, the Royal Bargemaster, the State barge which has descended to her Majesty from early Jacobean times. In form it is graceful and elegant, and in the centre is a covered pavilion for shelter from the sun and rain. It is profusely gilded, and lavishly carved with mermaids and dolphins, while near the figure-head are emblazoned the coronet and plumes of the Princes of Wales, and the badge of the Garter. When he was at Hampton Court Charles I. delighted to spend an hour or two on summer evenings in this barge feeding the swans upon the river. It has not been used since 1849, when her Majesty rowed in state to open the Coal Exchange; but the public had an opportunity of seeing it in 1883, when it was shown at the Fisheries Exhibition. The village of Teddington lies away from the river, and stretches on westward to the gates of Bushey Park. At the head of the main street stands the parish church, a not unpicturesque amalgam of the new and the old. Its architectural interest is small, and the interior is whitewashed, but it contains the tombs of two or three notable people. Of these, “Peg” Woffington, the actress, is perhaps the best remembered. There is a marble monument to her memory which records that, “Near this monument lies the body of Margaret Woffington, spinster, born October 18th, 1720, who departed this life March 28th, 1760, aged thirty-nine years.” She was buried in the grave of her infant nephew, Master Horace Cholmondeley, who had died seven years previously. At the end of her wayward career poor Peg could not have found a more peaceful resting-place. The oldest monument in the church is to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who died in 1674. This descendant and ancestor of a long line of Orlandos was lord of the manor and a legal luminary. He was Charles I.’s Commissioner for the treaty of Uxbridge; and under Charles II. was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. When the church was being overhauled in 1833 the Bridgeman vault was opened, and Sir Orlando’s body was found lying in a lidless coffin. So skilfully had the embalmer done his work that the remains were perfect, even the pointed Jacobean beard being untouched. An express was sent off to fetch the then Earl of Bradford, Sir Orlando’s descendant, who thus had the strange privilege of looking upon the features of a progenitor who had been dead 159 years. There are two old and uninteresting brasses, and a tablet to the memory of John Walter, the founder of the Times, who died at Teddington. The churchyard is beautifully kept, full of trees and shrubs and climbing plants, which latter have grown luxuriantly over some of the older tombs. Here lie buried Paul Whitehead, the poet, minus his heart, deposited in the Despencer mausoleum at High Wycombe, whence it was most reprehensibly stolen; Richard Bentley, who shares with Walpole the guilt of designing Strawberry Hill; and “Plain Parson Hale,” the friend of Pope, who was for more than fifty years the incumbent of the parish.
STRAWBERRY HILL.
From Teddington Lock until close to Richmond the stream is undeniably less picturesque than in the reaches described earlier in this chapter. The river is less full of water, and when the tide is out the unsightly and unsavoury mud-banks are always in view. The towing-path becomes stony and arid; the hedgerows filled with poppies cease, and a very matter-of-fact embankment on the Surrey shore has to be reckoned with. Yet the reach between the lock and Eel Pie Island has always been popular, and often in the summer one may see here all sorts and conditions of notabilities disporting themselves at a little water-party. The spot is comparatively near to London, and your amateur boatman, with true wisdom, prefers not to get between two locks. We are coming now to classic ground, where wit and letters, fashion and frivolity, long have reigned. There is not another village in England with literary associations so numerous and august as Twickenham. Pope and Walpole are the presiding genii—neither of them, perhaps, the most genial of genii; but the fairy-like element is supplied by the hosts of feminine friends with whom the two bachelors were wont to philander. Whether as a letter-writer or as an architect, Walpole was vastly diverting; and it is a pity that so little of his brown stucco abode can be seen from the river. Strawberry Hill is the kind of place a mad architect might build in a delirium. We have a side not unlike the west front of Westminster Hall might have been had it been built of lath and plaster; then comes the keep of a Norman castle, flanked by a Renaissance tourelle from Chambord; the whole crowned with crow-stepped Flemish gables from Antwerp, and the twisted and fluted chimneys of a Tudor farmhouse. Then there are wings which aim at imitating these imitations; these, it is fair to say, are due to Walpole’s successors. But howsoever astounding the exterior of Strawberry Hill, the interior is far more remarkable. Within, as without, the place bears every mark of having been built by a man who learned his architecture as he proceeded. Walpole leaped gaily over an anachronism, and saw nothing unorthodox in copying a mediæval tomb and fashioning it into a chimney-piece, nor in taking the choir stalls of Old St. Paul’s as the model for the bookcases in his library. The internal arrangements of Strawberry Hill are as wonderful as the events recounted in that very Gothic story the “Castle of Otranto.” It is a mighty maze without a plan. A long, narrow corridor, leading apparently to nothing, debouches upon a door which, when opened, discloses a large and splendid apartment. It is, indeed, a house of after-thoughts; but, whatever be its crudeness, it is not devoid of value as an early forerunner of the real Gothic revival. Pseudo-Gothic of this pattern was almost as popular towards the end of the eighteenth century as houses built in the guise of Greek temples. Happily, most of the examples have fallen down, but a few, such as that terrible “restoration” of Windsor Castle, still remain. In literary and personal memories Strawberry Hill is far richer than many houses of greater antiquity and of real historical interest. Horace Walpole gathered all “the town” around him in these “enamelled meadows with filigree hedges;” and few are the great names of the last century and a quarter which have not some connection with “the castle,” as its builder loved to call it. All the world’s familiarity with this chic abode of Walpoles, Damers, and Waldegraves excuses me from dwelling lengthily upon its peculiar but undoubted charm. Frances, Countess Waldegrave, made it almost as fashionable as it had been in Walpolean times; and although the bulk of the contents of the house were sold after her death, it is pleasant to know that Baron de Stern, who became the proprietor in 1883, purchased much of the furniture, and that, to some extent at least, the historic continuity of olden associations has not been broken.
POPE’S VILLA, TWICKENHAM.