Volume I Part 121 (1/2)
LONDON.
A Dublin saunterer of antiquarian propensities pacing the flags in front of Christ church, or elbowing his troublesome way down the narrow defile called Castle street, can scarcely escape a certain sense of awe as he looks on the houses and the pa.s.sengers, and darts a thought back through dim and troubled time till he strives to arrive at an idea of' the first inhabitants and the scene in which they played out their short parts.
Pa.s.sing over the mysterious and weak race that preceded the Gaels, he fancies these last in their quaint garb going about their ordinary occupations, or rus.h.i.+ng to their earth mounds and d.y.k.es to repel the fierce Northmen. Then pa.s.s before his mind's eye the successive races of different speech, and different garb, and different interests--the Danes, Dano-Celts, and the Anglo Normans, employed in fierce struggles with each other, and each looking on the events of his own times as paramount to all that ever agitated society till then. All now quiet and silent in the dust. The shopkeeper attending to his customers, the tippler stepping into the corner shop for a dram, and the carman smoking his pipe, and giving his beast a mouthful of hay, are as unconscious of any personal connection with the dead generations as if they had sprung full grown and furnished with clothing from the fat glebe of the neighboring Phoenix Park.
So would feel still more intensely an archaeologist on Tower Hill, or by the Fleet Ditch, or on London Bridge, if the ever hurrying and feverish crowd would allow him to concentrate his thoughts on anything.
How it should make the feelings of the most dried up anatomy of an archaeologist glow, when, throwing his thoughts nearly nineteen centuries back, he sees the mighty robber conducting his band, guarded by strong defences of bronze, and leather, and wood, to the bank of the then clear river, and preparing to invest and destroy that ill-armed but heroic body of brave men on the other side, who, in defence of their weak children, and loving and high-souled wives and daughters, will soon send many an armed and ruthless Roman soldier to s.h.i.+ver on the cold banks of Styx.
And what was the profit of all the plotting, and all the unjust warfare, waged by men single or in ma.s.ses against those they considered their foemen? They shortened the career of their opponents, they shortened their own lives. They preferred a short and turbulent existence to the longer and quieter span intended for them, they pa.s.sed away, and were either speedily forgotten, or remembered but to be cursed.
It is a bewildering occupation to a stranger to contemplate a map of London in order to acquire some distinct notion of the number and arrangement of the streets (an idea of the inhabitants is out of the question), to ponder how the countless mult.i.tude can be fed and clothed, and to reflect that if old mother earth should lose her fruit-bearing qualities for one year, how little would avail the beauty, the bravery, the wit, the ingenuity, the industry, and the intelligence of the three million inhabitants, to prevent the circuit of famed London from becoming a vast charnel-house.
Our earliest historians were the poets, these were succeeded by the romancers. Geoffry of Monmouth, translating the ”Chronicle of Kings”
brought from Brittany, informed the {837} people of the twelfth century that Brutus, great-grandson of Eneas, after many voyages and adventures, founded a town about where the Tower has long stood, and called it New Troy. This was afterward changed to Trin.o.bantum. Lud, brother to Ca.s.sibelan, again gave it his own name--_Caer Lud_. Hence Ludstown softened to London. Other derivations for the city's name are not at all rare. From the Celtic words _Leana_, marsh or meadow; _Linn_, a pool; _Lung_, or _Long_, a s.h.i.+p; and _Dunn_, a fort, it is easy to make out the fort among the meadows, the fort of the pool, or the fort of the s.h.i.+ps. The sister city, Dublin, is simply black pool.
As ancient Dublin occupied at first only the hill of which the castle occupies the south-eastern spur, so Tower Hill, Ludgate Hill, Cornhill, and Holborn Hill, formed the site of the original British Dun or Duns. Hence the most interesting portion of London to an antiquary must include those places of strength. But as the more easterly eminences have much longer ceased to be fas.h.i.+onable than our Fishamble and Ess.e.x streets, and the traditions of London literary characters from the time of Elizabeth date from regions further west, most writers choose to expatiate on the buildings that lie between Whitehall and Temple Bar, and on the remarkable personages and incidents connected with them. Charles Knight was unable to say his say concerning the modern Babylon in fewer than six royal octavo volumes, and the portly octavo lately put forth by Mr. Thornbury is concerned with a very small area of the city, Temple Bar being at its south-east angle, and the Strand, St. Martin's lane, Holborn, and Chancery lane its boundaries.
THE STRAND.
Temple Bar, that narrow neck through which the struggling sands find their way with difficulty from the Strand and the Fleet portions of the great hour-gla.s.s, and which is looked on by shallow readers as a relic of h.o.a.r antiquity, dates only from 1670, four years after the great fire. It forms the point of junction between the cities of London and Westminster, and in early times was only provided with posts, rails, and a chain. These were succeeded by a wooden house with a narrow gate-way and a pa.s.sage on one side. The present structure is inc.u.mbered with the statues of Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., and Charles II., all distinguished, according to Mr. Thornbury, by feeble heads, crimped drapery, and feet and hands kept whitish by the rain, the non-projecting portions of the bodies rejoicing in more than a century of dark atmospheric deposits.
Mr. Thornbury's selection includes the long line of palaces that once adorned the Strand or River-bank street, the haunts of artists in St.
Martin's lane, the traditions of Long Acre, the reminiscences connected with Drury lane, and the old houses of the n.o.bility in Lincoln's-Inn Fields.
One of the most remarkable of the fine buildings of the Strand is that which bears the name of the ambitious brother of Jane Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, who boasted that he could muster retainers to the number of 10,000. To erect his palace, which, by the way, was unfinished at his death, he demolished the parish church of St. Mary, and pulled down the houses of the bishops of Worcester, Llandaff, and Lichfield. He would also have appropriated St. Margaret's at Westminster, but the mob would not sanction the sacrilege. ”Moreover, he destroyed a chapel in St. Paul's Church-yard, with a cloister containing the Dance of Death, and a charnel-house (burying the bones in unconsecrated ground).” To crown his acts of rapine he stole the stone of a church of St. John near Smithfield. It is not worth mentioning the carrying away of the stone of the Strand Inn, it being the property of the lawyers, who could afford to be robbed.
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The Danish consort of our Solomon I. here delighted all who had no objection to spectacles, in which the handsome queen and her ladies masqueraded to their own and their admirers' content. Rare Ben Jonson was surely elated by the lists of royal and n.o.ble personages who presented his masques. From this same n.o.ble residence Charles I. had some trouble in dislodging the Gallic followers of his st.u.r.dy queen, with whom his hard-headed and wooden-shoe-abhorring subjects had come to be at deadly feud. As they were rather too tedious in ”s.h.i.+fting the halter, and traversing the cart,” the poor king was obliged to write thus to Buckingham:
”STEENIE,--I have received your letter by d.i.c.k Greame. This is my answer. I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the town, if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts until you have s.h.i.+pped them, and the--go with them!
Let me hear no answer but of the performance of my command. So I rest, ”Your faithful, constant, loving friend, C. R.
”Oaking, the seventh of August, 1626.”
”The French inventing all sorts of vexatious delays, the yeomen of the guard at last jostled them out, carting them off in nearly forty coaches. They arrived at Dover after four days' tedious travelling, wrangling and bewailing.”
Queen Henrietta taking part in a masque at Christmas in 1632-3, and Prynne's _Histriomastix_ happening to be published the next day, the poor man lost his ears for an uncomplimentary remark on women-actors, which was found in the margin, though it could not possibly have been written with any reference to the queen's appearance on that occasion.
To Somerset House returned Henrietta Maria after the restoration, and there the garrulous Pepys paid his respects to her as well as to Madame Castlemaine. ”By-and-by, in came the king and Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York. The conversation was not a very decorous one, and the young queen (Catherine of Braganza) said to Charles, 'you lie,' which made good sport, as the chuckling and delighted Pepys remarks, those being the first English words he had heard her say; and the king then tried to make her reply, 'confess and be hanged.'”
The most striking object in the old days of the Strand was the new Maypole which replaced the old one taken down by Oliver's Parliament.
It was of cedar wood, 134 feet high, and stood in front of the church of St. Mary. It was brought in two pieces from below Bridge, the splicing made secure by iron bands, three crowns fastened toward its top, and then the tall article was raised by twelve sailors to a vertical position, and firmly imbedded. The operation was happily accomplished under the superintendence of the Duke of York in four hours. Then sounded trumpets and drums; and morris-dancers in motley attire, and enlivened by the music of pipe and tabor, danced in glee around it, while thousands of throats became hoa.r.s.e with loyal shouting. James would have found little enjoyment in the general glee, if he could at the moment have had a prophetic glimpse of his wife, with her infant son folded to her breast, pacing along the river bank in doubt and fear, and watching for the friendly boat that was to convey her from the unfriendly city.
When the pole that succeeded this was obliged to abdicate, it was presented to Sir Isaac Newton, who again presented it to the rector of Wanstead, and in Wanstead park it helped to support the largest telescope then known.
From this memorable if unedifying goal, Pope started the racers in the Dunciad: