To the observant stranger in London few sights can be more impressive than those that illustrate the singular manner in which the life of the present encroaches upon the memorials of the past. Old Temple Bar has gone,—a sculptured griffin, at the junction of Fleet Street and the Strand, denoting where once it stood. (It has been removed to Theobald's Park, near Waltham, and is now the lodge gate of the grounds of Sir Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway trains dash over what was once St. Pancras churchyard—the burial-place of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and of many other British worthies—and passengers looking from the carriages may see the children of the neighbourhood sporting among the few tombs that yet remain in that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's Chop-House, intimately associated with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne, has been destroyed. The ancient tavern of The Cock, immortalised by Tennyson, in his poem of Will Waterproof's Monologue, is soon to disappear,—with its singular wooden vestibule that existed before the time of the Plague and that escaped the great fire of 1666. On the site of Northumberland House stands the Grand Hotel. The gravestones that formerly paved the precinct of Westminster Abbey have been removed, to make way for grassy lawns intersected with pathways. In Southwark, across the Thames, the engine-room of the brewery of Messrs. Barclay & Perkins occupies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which most of Shakespeare's plays were first produced. One of the most venerable and beautiful churches in London, that of St. Bartholomew the Great,—a gray, mouldering temple, of the twelfth century, hidden away in a corner of Smithfield,—is desecrated by the irruption of an adjacent shop, the staircase hall of which breaks cruelly into the sacred edifice and impends above the altar. On July 12, 1882, the present writer, walking in the churchyard of St. Paul's, Covent Garden,—the sepulchre of William Wycherley, Robert Wilks, Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas King, Samuel Butler, Thomas Southerne, Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne, Thomas Davies, Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt, William Havard, and many other renowned votaries of literature and the stage,—found workmen building a new wall to sustain the enclosure, and almost every stone in the cemetery uprooted and leaning against the adjacent houses. Those monuments, it was said, would be replaced; but it was impossible not to consider the chances of error in a new mortuary deal—and the grim witticism of Rufus Choate, about dilating with the wrong emotion, came then into remembrance, and did not come amiss.
Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that even the relics of the past are passing away, and that cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so old that at last they will become new. It is not wonderful that London should change its aspect from one decade to another, as the living surmount and obliterate the dead. Thomas Sutton's Charter-House School, founded in 1611, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were still writing, was reared upon ground in which several thousand corses were buried, during the time of the Indian pestilence of 1348; and it still stands and nourishes—though not as vigorously now as might be wished. Nine thousand new houses, it is said, are built in the great capital every year, and twenty-eight miles of new street are thus added to it. On a Sunday I drove for three hours through the eastern part of London without coming upon a single trace of the open fields. On the west, all the region from Kensington to Richmond is settled for most part of the way; while northward the city is stretching its arms toward Hampstead, Highgate, and tranquil and blooming Finchley. Truly the spirit of this age is in strong contrast with that of the time of Henry the Eighth when (1530), to prevent the increasing size of London, all new buildings were forbidden to be erected "where no former hath been known to have been." The march of improvement nowadays carries everything before it: even British conservatism is at some points giving way: and, noting the changes that have occurred here within only five years, I am persuaded that those who would see what remains of the London of which they have read and dreamed—the London of Dryden and Pope, of Addison, Sheridan, and Byron, of Betterton, Garrick, and Edmund Kean—will, as time passes, find more and more difficulty both in tracing the footsteps of fame, and in finding that sympathetic, reverent spirit which hallows the relics of genius and renown.
