Later in time, Little Britain, from Duck-lane to the Pump, became a literary quarter. When Benjamin Franklin first visited London he took lodgings in Little Britain at 3s. 6d, per week, next door to a bookseller's, from whom, as circulating libraries were not in vogue, he purchased volumes, read them, sold them again to the same man, and bought others.
A great deal of information on bookselling and other subjects that interested the people near 200 years since, may be obtained from the perusal of the "Life and Errors of John Dunton," bookseller, an autobiography. The son of a clergyman in Huntingdonshire, he says he learned Latin so as to speak it pretty well extempore, but he could not get on well with the Greek; and this, coupled with an affection entertained for a "virgin in his father's house," such passion carefully concealed from its object, completely unhinged the classical and clerical designs of his father on him. He became a bookseller's apprentice, and in [{841}] 1685 a bookseller in his own person. He speaks very disparagingly of the mere men of letters of his day. He says, good simple-minded man, that what they got per sheet interested them more than zeal for the advancement of literature. Very little we blame the poor fellows, but they were really inexcusable for pretending to have ransacked the whole Bodleian Library, to have gone through the fathers, and to have read and digested all human and ecclesiastical history, while they had never mastered a single page in "St. Cyprian," nor could tell whether the fathers lived before or after our Saviour.
That was the golden age of sermons and pamphlets, the latter occupying the place of our monthlies. Mr. John Dunton's first essay in the publishing line was "The Sufferings of Christ," by the Rev. Mr. Doolittle. All the trade took copies in exchange for their own books, a feature peculiar to the business 160 years since. John throve and took a helpmate to himself, not Mrs. Mary Saunders, the virgin before mentioned. The beautiful Rachel Seaton, the innocent Sarah Day, the religious Sarah Briscow, had successively paled the image of the preceding lady in the mirror of his rather susceptible heart, and at the end he became the fond husband of Miss Annesley, daughter of a nonconformist divine. The happy pair always called each other by the endearing and poetic names of Iris and Philaret, but this tender attachment did not prevent Philaret from leaving Iris alone, and making excursions to Ireland, to America, and to Holland, and delaying in those regions for long periods. These separations and distant wanderings did not tend to make our bookseller's old age comfortable and independent.
Dunton has left an interesting account of most of the then eminent booksellers in the three kingdoms. He says that in general they were not much better than knaves and atheists. He also gave information of the writers he employed, the licensers of the press, etc. It would appear that the publishing business of the time was in a very vigorous condition. The shoals of pamphlets satisfied the literary hunger of those to whom, if they lived in the nineteenth century, Athenaeums and Examiners, Chambers's Journals and All the Year Rounds, would be as necessary as atmospheric air. The chief booksellers of that day, if not to be compared with continental Alduses or Stephenses or Elzevirs, were men of good literary taste and much information. Of the booksellers amber-preserved in the "Dunciad," Dunton mentions only Lintot and Tonson. The disreputable Curll was not known in his day. This genius, embalmed in the hearts of the rascally paper-men of Holywell street, being once condemned for a vile publication, and promoted to the pillory, cunningly averted the wrath of the mob by a plentiful distribution of handbills, in which he stated his offence to be a pamphlet complimentary to the memory of good Queen Anne. Edward Cave, in starting the Gentleman's Magazine, 31st January, 1731, gave healthy employment to many a pamphleteer, though he diminished the number of separate pamphlets.
BEN JONSON AND LINCOLN'S INN.
Our fancy to speak of books, and their writers and sellers, has led us aside from the area marked out by Mr. Thornbury for his own explorations, so we must return to bounds, within which we find Lincoln's-Inn Fields. These inns were originally established as places of entertainment, where pilgrims and other travellers were hospitably attended by the monks. The town houses of noblemen were also called inns, just as in Paris they were styled hostels. The inn in question derives its name from the Earl of Lincoln, Henry de Lacy, to whom it was granted by Edward I. Many eminent men have used chambers in Lincoln's Inn, since it became the resort [{842}] of legal students. Sir Thomas More had chambers there, and there Dr. Donne, the poetical divine, attempted to study law in his seventeenth year. Dr. Tillotson preached to the lawyers (with what effect is not told) in 1663, our own Archbishop Ussher in 1647. Sir Mathew Hale was at first a wild student of Lincoln's Inn, till reclaimed by the sight of a drunkard seized by a fit. Shaftesbury; Ashmole, the antiquary; Prynne, of pillory notoriety; Secretary Thurloe; Sir John Denham; George Wither, omitting mention of modern celebrities, all endeavored to penetrate the mysteries of law and equity in this long-enduring institution.
One of the most remarkable, though not the most reputable, of lawyers connected with Lincoln's Inn was Sir Edmund Saunders, who gave his aid to the crown while endeavoring, in 1683, to overthrow the charter of London. The following extract concerning him is taken from Granger: "Sir Edmund Saunders was originally a strolling beggar about the streets, without known parents or relations. He came often to beg scraps at Clement's Inn, where he was taken notice of for his uncommon sprightliness; and as he expressed a strong inclination to learn to write, one of the attorney's clerks taught him, and soon qualified him for a hackney writer. He took all opportunities of improving himself by reading such books as he borrowed from his friends; and in the course of a few years became an able attorney and a very eminent counsel. His practice in the Court of King's Bench was exceeded by none. His art and cunning was equal to his knowledge, and he gained many a cause by laying snares. If he was detected he was never put out of countenance, but evaded the matter with a jest, which he had always at hand. He was much employed by the king (Charles II.) against the city of London in the business of the Quo Warranto. His person was as heavy and ungain as his wit was alert and sprightly. He is said to have been a mere lump of morbid flesh. The smell from him was so offensive that people held their noses when he came into court. One of his jests on such occasions was, 'That none could say he wanted issue, for he had no less than nine on his back.'"
The literary students of the inn, as they sit in their lonely chambers, or converse with their comrades, Arthur Pendennis and Mr. Warrington, in the pleasant grounds, delight to fancy brave old Ben Jonson helping to raise the wall on the Chancery lane side, and reciting a passage from Homer. Whether Sutton or Camden sent him back to college to pursue his studies is not so certain. His fighting single-handed in Flanders in the sight of the two armies, and the subsequent carrying away of the "Spolia Opima" of his foeman, were in strict accordance with the practice of the heroes of his studies. His college life and his deeds in foreign fields were all over in his twenty-third year, 1597, when we find him a player and writer for the stage in London; his critics asserting that he walked the boards as if he were treading mortar. Poor Ben, with a countenance compared to a rotten russet apple, and described by himself as remarkable for a "mountain belly and a rocky face," was equally ragged in temper. Quarreling with a brother actor, he killed him in a duel in Hogsden Fields, and was brought very near the gallows-foot for his non-command of temper. He had not the gentle character nor the expansive intellect of his friend, the "Gentle Shakespeare," nor did his characters embrace entire humanity, nor did he possess the soaring and far-seizing imagination of his brother poet and player, but he more closely pictured the modes of society in which they moved, the social and politic features of the locality and the era; all those outward manifestations, in fact, that distinguish the intercourse, and the morals, and the character of this or that locality or time, from those of [{843}] its neighbors. Hence a better idea can be had of the scenic features of Old London, and the costumes, the idioms, and usages of its people at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, from the literary remains of Ben Jonson than from those of William Shakespeare. Aubrey remarked that "Shakespeare's comedies would remain wit as long as the English tongue is understood; while our present writers reflect so much upon particular persons and coxcombeties, that twenty years hence they will not be understood."
London was Ben Jonson's world; its people, such as they appeared to him, the whole human race. The humorists that he knew were reproduced with the utmost truth—and the class-modes and manners that came under his observation were sketched from and to the life. There was local truth of costume and character, but little generalization. Illustrative instances abound in all his plays and poems. In Elizabeth's time, Finsbury Fields were covered with trees and windmills. So we find Master Stephen ("Every Man in his Humor"), who dwells at Hogsden (Hoxton), despising the archers of Finsbury and the citizens that come a-ducking to Islington Ponds. "The Strand was the chief road for ladies to pass through in their coaches, and there Lafoole in the 'Silent Woman' has a lodging to watch when ladies are gone to the china houses or the exchange, that he may meet them by chance, and give them presents. The general character of the streets before the fire is not forgotten. In 'The Devil is an Ass' the lady and her lover speak closely and gently from the windows of two contiguous buildings. Such are a few of the examples of the local proprieties which constantly turn up in Jonson's dramas."
To those who accuse rare Ben of intemperate habits it is useless to object that he lashed intemperance and the other vices of his time as severely as the most rigid moralist could; there are too many instances extant of the sons of Satan correcting sin in their speeches and writings. However, the club at the Mermaid in Friday street to which he belonged, consisted of such men as we cannot suppose to be of intemperate habits, nor willing to cherish a noted drunkard. For Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Cotton, Carew, Martin, Donne, flashes of wit, and sallies of imagination, and touches of genial humor, had more charms then beastly wallowing in liquor. Hear what Jonson himself says in his invitation to a friend to supper where canary, his darling liquor, was to flow: