Shakespeare's England Part 6

"Even such is time; that takes in trust Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us nought but age and dust; Which, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days.-- But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My G.o.d shall raise me up, I trust."

This church contains a window commemorative of Raleigh, presented by Americans, and inscribed with these lines, by Lowell--

"The New World's sons, from England's breast we drew Such milk as bids remember whence we came; Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew, This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."

It also contains a window commemorative of Caxton, presented by the printers and publishers of London, which is inscribed with these lines by Tennyson--

"Thy prayer was Light--more Light--while Time shall last, Thou sawest a glory growing on the night, But not the shadows which that light would cast Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light."

In St. Margaret's--a storied haunt, for s.h.i.+ning names alike of n.o.bles and poets--was also buried John Skelton, another of the old bards (obiit 1529), the enemy and satirist of Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, one of whom he described as "madde Amaleke," and the other as "dawc.o.c.k doctor." Their renown has managed to survive those terrific shafts; but at least this was a falcon who flew at eagles. Here the poet Campbell was married,--October 11, 1803. Such old churches as this--guarding so well their treasures of history--are, in a special sense, the traveller's blessings. At St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the janitor is a woman; and she will point out to you the lettered stone that formerly marked the grave of Milton. It is in the nave, but it has been moved to a place about twelve feet from its original position,--the remains of the ill.u.s.trious poet being, in fact, beneath the floor of a pew, on the left of the central aisle, about the middle of the church: albeit there is a story, possibly true, that, on an occasion when this church was repaired, in August, 1790, the coffin of Milton suffered profanation, and his bones were dispersed.

Ill.u.s.tration: "St. Giles', Cripplegate."

Among the monuments hard by is a fine marble bust of Milton, placed against the wall, and it is said, by way of enhancing its value, that George the Third came here to see it. Several of the neighbouring inscriptions are of astonis.h.i.+ng quaintness. The adjacent churchyard--an eccentric, sequestered, lonesome bit of gra.s.sy ground, teeming with monuments, and hemmed in with houses, terminates, at one end, in a piece of the old Roman wall of London (A.D. 306),--an adamantine structure of cemented flints--which has lasted from the days of Constantine, and which bids fair to last forever. I shall always remember that strange nook with the golden light of a summer morning s.h.i.+ning upon it, the birds twittering among its graves, and all around it such an atmosphere of solitude and rest as made it seem, though in the heart of the great city, a thousand miles from any haunt of man. (It was formally opened as a garden for public recreation on July 8, 1891.)

This memorial bears the following inscription: "John Milton. Author of 'Paradise Lost.' Born, December 1608. Died, November 1674. His father, John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both interred in this church."

St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and venerable temple, the church of the priory of the nuns of St. Helen, built in the thirteenth century, is full of relics of the history of England. The priory, which adjoined this church, has long since disappeared and portions of the building have been restored; but the n.o.ble Gothic columns and the commemorative sculpture remain unchanged. Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, who built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded both Gresham College and the Royal Exchange in London, and Sir William Pickering, once Queen Elizabeth's Minister to Spain and one of the amorous aspirants for her royal hand; and here, in a gloomy chapel, stands the veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke of Gloster received absolution, after the disappearance of the princes in the Tower.

Standing at that altar, in the cool silence of the lonely church and the waning light of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his slender, slightly misshapen form, decked in the rich apparel that he loved, his handsome, aquiline, thoughtful face, the drooping head, the glittering eyes, the nervous hand that toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy stillness of his person, from head to foot, as he knelt there before the priest and perhaps mocked both himself and heaven with the form of prayer.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Sir John Crosby's Monument."

Every place that Richard touched is haunted by his magnetic presence. In another part of the church you are shown the tomb of a person whose will provided that the key of his sepulchre should be placed beside his body, and that the door should be opened once a year, for a hundred years. It seems to have been his expectation to awake and arise; but the allotted century has pa.s.sed and his bones are still quiescent.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Gresham's Monument."

How calmly they sleep--those warriors who once filled the world with the tumult of their deeds! If you go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above the dust of the Crusaders and see the beautiful copper effigies of them, rec.u.mbent on the marble pavement, and feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the calm that follows the tempest. St.

Mary's was built in 1240 and restored in 1828. It would be difficult to find a lovelier specimen of Norman architecture--at once ma.s.sive and airy, perfectly simple, yet rich with beauty, in every line and scroll.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Goldsmith's House."

There is only one other church in Great Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a circular vestibule. The stained gla.s.s windows, both here and at St. Helen's, are very glorious. The organ at St. Mary's was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infamous as the wicked judge. The pilgrim who pauses to muse at the grave of Goldsmith may often hear its solemn, mournful tones. I heard them thus, and was thinking of Dr.

Johnson's tender words, when he first learned that Goldsmith was dead: "Poor Goldy was wild--very wild--but he is so no more." The room in which he died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, was but a little way from the spot where he sleeps. The noises of Fleet Street are heard there only as a distant murmur. But birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter down upon his tomb, and every breeze that sighs around the gray turrets of the ancient Temple breathes out his requiem.

No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple.--In 1757-58 Goldsmith was employed by a chemist, near Fish Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was living in Green Arbour Court, "over Break-neck Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, he wrote The Vicar of Wakefield. Afterwards he had lodgings at Canonbury House, Islington, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the Inner Temple.

Ill.u.s.tration: "A Bit from Clare Court"

CHAPTER XV

LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON

The mind that can reverence historic a.s.sociations needs no explanation of the charm that such a.s.sociations possess. There are streets and houses in London which, for pilgrims of this cla.s.s, are haunted with memories and hallowed with an imperishable light--that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life can quench or dim. Almost every great author in English literature has here left behind him some personal trace, some relic that brings us at once into his living presence. In the time of Shakespeare,--of whom it may be noted that wherever you find him at all you find him in select and elegant neighbourhoods,--St.

Helen's parish was a secluded and peaceful quarter of the town; and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the theatre in Blackfriars, in which he is known to have owned a share. It is said that he dwelt at number 134 Aldersgate Street (the house has been demolished), and in that region,--amid all the din of traffic and all the strange adjuncts of a new age,--those who love him are in his company. Milton was born in a court adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer comes upon him as a resident in St. Bride's churchyard,--where the poet Lovelace was buried,--and at the house which is now No. 19 York Street, Westminster (in later times occupied by Bentham and by Hazlitt), and in Jewin Street, Aldersgate. When secretary to Cromwell he lived in Scotland Yard, where now is the headquarters of the London police. His last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks.

Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget Edmund Spenser, who died there, in grief and dest.i.tution, a victim to the same inhuman spirit of Irish ruffianism that is still disgracing humanity and troubling the peace of the world. Everybody remembers Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street." Jonson himself is closely and charmingly a.s.sociated with places that may still be seen. He pa.s.sed his boyhood near Charing Cross--having been born in Hartshorn Lane, now Northumberland Street--and went to the parish school of St.

Martin-in-the-Fields; and those who roam around Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that this great poet helped to build it--a trowel in one hand and Horace in the other. His residence, in his days of fame, was just outside of Temple Bar--but all that neighbourhood is new at the present time.

The Mermaid, which he frequented--with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chapman, and Donne--was in Bread Street, but no trace of it remains; and a banking-house stands now on the site of the Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, where the Apollo Club, which he founded, used to meet. The famous inscription, "O rare Ben Jonson," is three times cut in the Abbey--once in Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle where he was buried, the smaller of the two slabs marking the place of his vertical grave.

Ill.u.s.tration: "A Bit from Clare Market."

Dryden once dwelt in a narrow, dingy, quaint house, in Fetter Lane,--the street in which Dean Swift has placed the home of Gulliver, and where now (1882) the famous Doomsday Book is kept,--but later he removed to a finer dwelling, in Gerrard Street, Soho, which was the scene of his death. Both buildings are marked with mural tablets and neither of them seems to have undergone much change. (The house in Fetter Lane is gone--1891.) Edmund Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a beer-shop; but his memory hallows the place, and an inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square bears likewise a mural tablet, and, standing at its time-worn threshold, the visitor needs no effort of fancy to picture that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that lead into this queer, sombre, melancholy retreat. In that house he wrote the first Dictionary of the English language and the immortal letter to Lord Chesterfield. In Gough Square lived and died Hugh Kelly, dramatist, author of _The School of Wives_ and _The Man of Reason_, and one of the friends of Goldsmith, at whose burial he was present. The historical antiquarian society that has marked many of the literary shrines of London has rendered a great service. The houses a.s.sociated with Reynolds and Hogarth, in Leicester Square, Byron, in Holies Street, Benjamin Franklin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street, Campbell, in Duke Street, St. James's, Garrick, in the Adelphi Terrace, Michael Farraday, in Blandford Street, and Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, are but a few of the historic spots which are thus commemorated. Much, however, remains to be done. One would like to know, for instance, in which room in "The Albany" it was that Byron wrote _Lara_ in which of the houses of Buckingham Street Coleridge had his lodging while he was translating _Wallenstein;_ whereabouts in Bloomsbury Square was the residence of Akenside, who wrote _The Pleasures of Imagination,_ and of Croly, who wrote _Salathiel;_ or where it was that Gray lived, when he established himself close by Russell Square, in order to be one of the first--as he continued to be one of the most constant--students at the then newly opened British Museum (1759).

Byron was born at No. 34 Holies Street, Cavendish Square. While he was at school in Dulwich Grove his mother lived in a house in Sloane Terrace. Other houses a.s.sociated with him are No. 8 St. James Street; a lodging in Bennet Street; No. 2 "The Albany"--a lodging that he rented of Lord Althorpe, and entered on March 28, 1814; and No. 139 Piccadilly, where his daughter, Ada, was born, and where Lady Byron left him. This, at present, is the home of the genial scholar Sir Algernon Borthwick (1893). John Murray's house, where Byron's fragment of Autobiography was burned, is in Albemarle Street. Byron's body, when brought home from Greece, lay in state at No. 25 Great George Street, Westminster, before being taken north, to Hucknall-Torkard church, in Nottinghams.h.i.+re, for burial.

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.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Fleet Street in 1780."

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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation of this church is with Thomas Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here married.

Ill.u.s.tration: "Gray's Inn Square."

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 s.h.i.+rley, the fine old dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so often murmured in such solemn haunts as these--

"Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

s.h.i.+rley lived in Gray's Inn when he was writing his plays, and he was fortunate in the favour of queen Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles the First; but when the Puritan times arrived he fell into misfortune and poverty and became a school-teacher in Whitefriars. In 1666 he was living in or near Fleet Street, and his home was one of the many dwellings that were destroyed in the great fire. Then he fled, with his wife, into the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where, overcome with grief and terror, they both died, within twenty-four hours of each other, and were buried in the same grave.

Ill.u.s.tration: "s.h.i.+eld with Gargoyle Head"

CHAPTER XVI

A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN

To muse over the dust of those about whom we have read so much--the great actors, thinkers, and writers, the warriors and statesmen for whom the play is ended and the lights are put out--is to come very near to them, and to realise more deeply than ever before their close relations.h.i.+p with our own humanity; and we ought to be wiser and better for this experience. It is good, also, to seek out the favourite haunts of our heroes, and call them up as they were in their lives. One of the happiest accidents of a London stroll was the finding of the Harp Tavern, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, near the stage door of Drury Lane theatre, which was the accustomed resort of Edmund Kean.

An account of the Harp, in the _Victuallers' Gazette_, says that this tavern has had within its doors every actor of note since the days of Garrick, and many actresses, also, of the latter part of the eighteenth century; and it mentions, as visitants there, Dora Jordan, Nance Oldfield, Anne Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Harriet Mellon, Barton Booth, Quin, Cibber, Macklin, Grimaldi, Eliza Vestris, and Miss Stephens--who became Countess of Ess.e.x.

Carpenters and masons were at work upon it when I entered, and it was necessary almost to creep amid heaps of broken mortar and rubbish beneath their scaffolds, in order to reach the interior rooms. Here, at the end of a narrow pa.s.sage, was a little apartment, perhaps fifteen feet square, with a low ceiling and a bare floor, in which Kean habitually took his pleasure, in the society of fellow-actors and boon companions, long ago. A narrow, cus.h.i.+oned bench against the walls, a few small tables, a chair or two, a number of churchwarden pipes on the mantlepiece, and portraits of Disraeli and Gladstone, const.i.tuted the furniture. A panelled wainscot and dingy red paper covered the walls, and a few cobwebs hung from the grimy ceiling. By this time the old room has been made neat and comely; but then it bore the marks of hard usage and long neglect, and it seemed all the more interesting for that reason.

Kean's seat is at the right, as you enter, and just above it a mural tablet designates the spot,--which is still further commemorated by a death-mask of the actor, placed on a little shelf of dark wood and covered with gla.s.s. No better portrait could be desired; certainly no truer one exists. In life this must have been a glorious face. The eyes are large and prominent, the brow is broad and fine, the mouth wide and obviously sensitive, the chin delicate, and the nose long, well set, and indicative of immense force of character. The whole expression of the face is that of refinement and of great and desolate sadness. Kean, as is known from the testimony of one who acted with him, was always at his best in pa.s.sages of pathos.

The mother of Jefferson, the comedian, described Edmund Kean in this way. She was a member of the company at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, when he acted there, and it was she who sang for him, when he acted The Stranger, the well-known lines, by Sheridan,--