These, and such as these, may seem trivial things; but Nature has denied an unfailing source of innocent happiness to the man who can find no pleasure in them. For my part, when rambling in Fleet Street it is a special delight to remember even so slight an incident as that recorded of the author of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard,—that he once saw there his satirist, Dr. Johnson, rolling and puffing along the sidewalk, and cried out to a friend, "Here comes Ursa Major." For the true lovers of literature "Ursa Major" walks oftener in Fleet Street to-day than any living man.
A good thread of literary research might be profitably followed by him who should trace the footsteps of all the poets that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of Edward IV.; Andrew Bernard in that of Henry VII.; John Skelton in that of Henry VIII.; and Edmund Spenser in that of Elizabeth.
Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Lawrence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, Thomas Wharton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson—who, until his death, in 1892, wore, in spotless renown, that
"Laurel greener from the brows
Of him that utter'd nothing base."
Most of those bards were intimately associated with London, and several of them are buried in the Abbey. It is, indeed, because so many storied names are written upon gravestones that the explorer of the old churches of London finds so rich a harvest of impressive association and lofty thought. Few persons visit them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively alone in rambles of this kind. I went one morning into St. Martin—once "in the fields," now in one of the busiest thoroughfares at the centre of the city—and found there only a pew-opener preparing for the service, and an organist playing an anthem. It is a beautiful structure, with its graceful spire and its columns of weather-beaten stone, curiously stained in gray and sooty black, and it is almost as famous for theatrical names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, or St. George's, Bloomsbury, or St. Clement Danes. Here, in a vault beneath the church, was buried the bewitching and affectionate Nell Gwyn; here is the grave of James Smith, joint author with his brother Horace—who was buried at Tunbridge Wells—of The Rejected Addresses; here rests Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface; and here were laid the ashes of the romantic and sprightly Mrs. Centlivre, and of George Farquhar, whom neither youth, genius, patient labour, nor sterling achievement could save from a life of misfortune and an untimely and piteous death. A cheerier association of this church is with Thomas Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here married.
At St. Giles-in-the-Fields, again, are the graves of George Chapman, who translated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely lyrics of love, Rich, the manager, who brought out Gay's Beggar's Opera, and James Shirley, the fine old dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so often murmured in such solemn haunts as these—