CHAPTER IX
LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS
Those persons upon whom the spirit of the past has power—and it has not power upon every mind!—are aware of the mysterious charm that invests certain familiar spots and objects, in all old cities. London, to observers of this class, is a never-ending delight. Modern cities, for the most part, reveal a definite and rather a commonplace design. Their main avenues are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect their main avenues. They are diversified with rectangular squares. Their configuration, in brief, suggests the sapient, utilitarian forethought of the land-surveyor and civil engineer. The ancient British capital, on the contrary, is the expression—slowly and often narrowly made—of many thousands of characters. It is a city that has happened—and the stroller through the old part of it comes continually upon the queerest imaginable alleys, courts, and nooks. Not far from Drury Lane Theatre, for instance, hidden away in a clump of dingy houses, is a dismal little graveyard—the same that Dickens has chosen, in his novel of Bleak House, as the sepulchre of little Jo's friend, the first love of the unfortunate Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped in the robes of faded sorrow, and crowded into the twilight of obscurity by the thick-clustering habitations of men.† The Cripplegate church, St. Giles's, a less lugubrious spot and less difficult of access, is nevertheless strangely sequestered, so that it also affects the observant eye as equally one of the surprises of London. I saw it, for the first time, on a gray, sad Sunday, a little before twilight, and when the service was going on within its venerable walls. The footsteps of John Milton were sometimes on the threshold of the Cripplegate, and his grave is in the nave of that ancient church. A simple flat stone marks that sacred spot, and many a heedless foot tramples over that hallowed dust. From Golden Lane, which is close by, you can see the tower of this church; and, as you walk from the place where Milton lived to the place where his ashes repose, you seem, with a solemn, awe-stricken emotion, to be actually following in his funeral train. At St. Giles's occurred the marriage of Cromwell.‡ I remembered—as I stood there and conjured up that scene of golden joy and hope—the place of the Lord Protector's coronation in Westminster Hall; the place, still marked, in Westminster Abbey, where his body was buried; and old Temple Bar, on which (if not on Westminster Hall) his mutilated corse was finally exposed to the blind rage of the fickle populace. A little time—a very little time—serves to gather up equally the happiness and the anguish, the conquest and the defeat, the greatness and the littleness of human life, and to cover them all with silence.
† That place has been renovated and is no longer a disgrace.
‡ The church of St. Giles was built in 1117 by Queen Maud. It was demolished in 1623 and rebuilt in 1731. The tomb of Richard Pendrell, who saved Charles the Second, after Worcester fight, in 1651, is in the churchyard.