I am now speaking of five and thirty years ago, when shop windows, especially printsellers’, were set out according to the season. I remember that in spring-time “Jemmy Whittle,” and “Carrington Bowles, in St. Paul’s Church-yard,” used to decorate their panes with twelve prints of flowers of “the months,” engraved after Baptiste, and “coloured after nature,”—a show almost, at that time, as gorgeous as “Solomon’s Temple, in all its glory, all over nothing but gold and jewels,” which a man exhibited to my wondering eyes for a halfpenny.
Spring arrives in London—and even east of Temple-bar—as early as in the country. For—though there are neither hawthorns to blossom, nor daisies to blow—there is scarcely a house “in the city,” without a few flower pots inside or outside; and when “the seeds come up,” the Londoner knows that the spring is “come to town.” The almanac, also, tells him, that the sun rises earlier every day, and he makes his apprentices rise easier; and the shop begins to be watered and swept before breakfast; and perchance, as the good man stands at his door to look up, and “wonder what sort of a day it will be,” he sees a basket with primroses or cowslips, and from thence he hazards to assert, at “the house he uses” in the evening, that the spring is very forward; which is confirmed, to his credit, by some neighbour, who usually sleeps at Bow or Brompton, or Pentonville or Kennington, or some other adjacent part of “the country.”
To the east of Temple-bar, the flower-girl is “the herald of spring.” She cries “cowslips! sweet cowslips!” till she screams “bow-pots! sweet, and pretty bow-pots!” which is the sure and certain token of full spring in London. When I was a child, I got “a bow-pot” of as many wall-flowers and harebells as I could then hold in my hand, with a sprig of sweet briar at the back of the bunch, for a halfpenny—such a handful; but, now, “they can’t make a ha’penny bow-pot—there’s nothing under a penny;” and the penny bow-pot is not half so big as the ha’penny one, and somehow or other the flowers don’t smell, to me, as they used to do.——
It will not do however to run on thus, for something remains to be said concerning the patron of the day; and, to be plain with the reader, the recollections of former times are not always the most cheering to the writer.
St. George.
There are some circumstances in the history of Russia which abate our pretensions to our celebrated saint. In that country he is much revered. His figure occurs in all the churches, represented as usual, riding on a horse, and piercing a dragon with his lance. This device also forms part of the arms of the Russian sovereign, and is on several of the coins. Certain English historians have conjectured, that Ivan Vassilievitch II., being presented with the garter by queen Elizabeth, assumed the George and the dragon for his arms, and ordered it to be stamped upon the current money. But it does not appear that the tzar was created a knight of the garter; and it is certain that the sovereigns of Moscow bore this device before they had the least connection with England. In Hackluyt, vol. i. p. 255, Chanceler, the first Englishman who discovered Russia, speaks of a despatch sent in 1554, from Ivan Vassilievitch to queen Mary:—“This letter was written in the Moscovian tongue, in letter much like to the Greeke letters, very faire written in paper, with a broade seale hanging at the same, sealed in paper upon waxe. This seale was much like the broad seale of England, having on the one side the image of a man on horseback in complete harnesse fighting with a dragon.”
Russian coins of a very early date represent the figure of a horseman spearing a dragon; one particularly, of Michael Androvitz appears to have been struck in 1305, forty years before the institution of the order of the garter in England. From this period, numerous Russian coins are successively distinguished by the same emblem. Various notions have been put forth concerning the origin of the figure; but it seems probable that the Russians received the image of St. George and the dragon either from the Greeks or from the Tartars, by both of whom he was much revered; by the former as a christian saint and martyr, and by the latter as a prophet or a deity. We know from history, that in the fourth or fifth century he was much worshipped amongst the Greeks; and that afterwards the crusaders, during their first expedition into the Holy Land, found many temples erected to his honour. The Russians, therefore, who were converted to christianity by the Greeks, certainly must have received at the same time a large catalogue of saints, which made an essential part of the Greek worship, and there can be no reason to imagine that St. George was omitted.
In a villa of prince Dolgorucki, near Moscow, is an old basso-relievo of St. George and the dragon, found in a ruined church at Intermen, in the Crimea; it had a Greek inscription almost erased, but the words ΑΙΟΟ ΓΕΟΡΓΟΟ, or St. George, and the date 1330, were still legible. As it appears from this basso-relievo that he was worshipped in the Crimea so near the court of Russia when the great dukes resided at Kiof, his introduction into that country is easily accounted for.
Still, it is very likely that the Russians received from the Tartars the image of a horseman spearing a serpent, as represented upon their most ancient coins, and which formed a part of the great duke’s arms, towards the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Russians had none before they were conquered by the Tartars; and soon after they were brought under the Tartar yoke, they struck money. The first Russian coins bear a Tartar inscription, afterwards, with Tartar letters on one side, and Russian characters on the other; and there is still preserved in the cabinet of St. Petersburgh, a piece of money, exhibiting a horseman piercing a dragon, with the name of the great duke in Russian, and on the reverse a Tartar inscription.