LITERARY SHRINES OF OLD LONDON

By Elsie M. Lang

From the Borough to St. James's

Leigh Hunt was of opinion that "one of the best secrets of enjoyment is the art of cultivating pleasant associations," and, with his example before us, we will endeavour to recall some of those that are to be met with on a walk from the Borough to St. James's, from one of the poorest parts of our city to one of the richest. The Borough, dusty, noisy, toil-worn as it is, is yet, he tells us, "the most classical ground in the metropolis." From the "Tabard" inn—now only a memory, though its contemporary, the "George," hard by, gives us some idea of its look in mediæval times—there rode forth, one bright spring morning, "Sir Jeffrey Chaucer" and "nyne and twenty" pilgrims "in a companye ... to wenden on (a) pilgrimage to Caunterbury with ful devout courage." A fellow-poet of Chaucer's, John Gower, lies buried close at hand in Southwark Cathedral, "under a tomb of stone, with his image of stone also over him." He was one of the earliest benefactors of this church, then known as St. Mary Overy, and founded therein a chantry, where masses should be said for the benefit of his soul. Stones in the pavement of the choir likewise commemorate John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and Edmund Shakespeare, who lie in unmarked graves somewhere within the precincts of the cathedral.

Not a stone's throw from the Borough is the Bankside, extending from Blackfriars Bridge out beyond Southwark, a mean and dirty thoroughfare, with the grey Thames on one side, and on the other dull houses, grimy warehouses, and gloomy offices. How changed from the semi-rural resort of Elizabethan days, when swans floated on the river, and magnificent barges, laden with gaily dressed nobles and their attendants, were continually passing by! Great must have been the pleasure traffic then, for according to Taylor, "the Water Poet," who plied his trade as waterman and wrote his verses on the Bankside in the early days of Elizabeth's successor, "the number of watermen and those that live and are maintained by them, and by the labour of the oar and scull, between the bridge of Windsor and Gravesend, cannot be fewer than forty thousand; the cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been the players playing on the Bankside." Besides the players, the brilliant band of dramatists who shed lustre on the reign of the maiden Queen frequented it, not only on account of the pleasantness of its situation, but because of the near proximity of the theatres, for the Globe, the Rose, and the Hope all stood on the site now occupied by the brewery of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins, while the Swan was not far off. It is a well-authenticated fact that both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson played at the Globe, and patronised the "Falcon" tavern, the name of which still lingers in Falcon Dock and Falcon Wharf, Nos. 79 and 80, Bankside; and while in the meantime they were producing their masterpieces, Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton were at the height of their fame, Beaumont and Fletcher about to begin their career, and Philip Massinger was newly arrived in town. Some of these Bankside dramatists were well born and rich—such as Francis Beaumont, whose father was a Knight and a Justice of the Common Pleas; and John Fletcher, who was a son of the Bishop of London. Others were of obscure birth and penniless—like Ben Jonson, who had been forced to follow the trade of a bricklayer, and Dekker and Marston, whom he twitted "with their defective doublet and ravelled satin sleeves," and Philip Massinger, who in early days went about begging urgently for the loan of £5. But whatever they had or lacked, certain it is that their common art levelled all barriers between them, for though the chief of all the friendships on the Bankside was that of Beaumont and Fletcher—between whom was "a wonderful consimilarity of fancy ... which caused the dearnesse of friendship between them so that they lived together on the Bankside ... (and had) the same cloaths and cloaks between them"—yet Massinger collaborated with Fletcher in at least thirteen plays, with Dekker in one, and with Ford in two, while Dekker was occasionally associated with Middleton, and Middleton with Webster and Drayton. But the Elizabethan dramatists did not confine themselves to the Bankside; on certain nights they repaired to the "Mermaid" tavern, which used to stand on the south side of Cheapside, between Bread and Friday Streets, to attend the meetings of the famous Mermaid Club, said to have been founded by Sir Walter Raleigh. Here were to be found Shakespeare, Spenser, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Carew, Donne, and many others, in eager witty converse. Beaumont well described the brilliancy of these gatherings in his poem to Ben Jonson:—

Another favourite haunt of theirs was the "Boar's Head," which stood on the spot now marked by the statue of William IV., at the junction of Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street. At this tavern Falstaff and Prince Hal concocted many of their wildest pranks. In later days the Elizabethan poets and dramatists, led by Ben Jonson, went even further afield—to the "Devil" tavern, which stood at No. 1, Fleet Street, where they held their meetings in a room called the "Apollo," the chief adornments of which, a bust of Apollo and a board with an inscription, "Welcome to the oracle of Apollo," are still to be seen in an upper room of Messrs. Child's Bank, which now occupies the site. Ben Jonson tells us that "the first speech in my 'Catiline,' spoken to Scylla's Ghost, was writ after I had parted with my friends at the 'Devil' tavern; I had drank well that night, and had brave notions."

We have records of the deaths of two at least of these dramatists on the Bankside—viz., that of Philip Massinger, who died "in his own house, near the play-house on the Bankside," in 1639; and Fletcher, "who dyed of the plague on the 19th of August, 1625." "The parish clerk," says Aubrey, "told me that he was his (Fletcher's) Taylor, and that Mr. Fletcher staying for a suit of cloathes before he retired into the country, Death stopped his journey and laid him low there."

Cheapside, so named from the Chepe, or old London market, along the south side of the site of which it runs, has been a place of barter ever since the reign of Henry VI., when a market was held there daily for the sale of every known commodity. It is easy to see where the vendors of some of the articles had their stands by the names of the surrounding streets—Bread Street, Fish Street, Milk Street, etc. Later on the stalls were transformed into permanent shops, with a dwelling-place for their owners above, and a fair-sized garden at the back. Despite the commercial spirit that has always pervaded this region, it has given birth to two famous poets—the sweet songster Herrick, who sings in one of his poems of

golden, perhaps, having reference to his father, who was a goldsmith; and greater still, John Milton, who first saw the light in Bread Street, at the sign of the "Spread Eagle," in a house which was afterwards destroyed in the Great Fire. It must have been a house of comfortable dimensions, for it covered the site now occupied by Nos. 58 to 63, the business premises of a firm who exhibit a bust of Milton, with an inscription, in a room on their top floor. Milton's father, moreover, had grown rich in his profession, which was that of a scrivener, had been made a Judge, and knighted five years before the birth of his son, so it is evident the poet began life in easy circumstances. He was baptised in All Hallows, a church in Bread Street destroyed in 1897. In Bow Church there is a tablet in memory of Milton, which was taken from All Hallows. When he was ten years of age he began to go to Paul's School, which stood in those days on the east side of St. Paul's Churchyard, between Watling Street and Cheapside. Aubrey records that "when he went to schoole, when he was very young, he studied very hard, and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night, and his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for him, and at these years (ten) he composed many copies of verses which might well have become a riper age." He continued at this school, the old site of which is marked by a tablet on a warehouse, until he was sixteen. Some twenty years later Samuel Pepys was a pupil at Paul's School, and later on in life witnessed its destruction in the Great Fire. Milton would seem to have always cherished a great affection for the city, for after his return from his travels he seldom lived beyond the sound of Bow Bells, once only venturing as far as Westminster; and when he died he was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in the same grave as his father. Indeed, the city proper was the birthplace of several poets, for was not Pope born in Lombard Street, Gray in Cornhill, and Edmund Spenser in East Smithfield, while Lord Macaulay spent his earlier years in Birchin Lane?

In the narrow confines of Paternoster Row, where the tall fronts of the houses are so close together that only a thin strip of sky is visible between them, Charlotte Brontë and her sister Anne, fresh from the rugged solitudes of their bleak Yorkshire moors, awoke on the morning of their first visit to the great capital of which they had so often dreamed, and, looking out of the dim windows of the Chapter Coffee-house, saw "the risen sun struggling through the fog, and overhead above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds ... a solemn orbed mass dark blue and dim the dome" (of St. Paul's).

Fleet Street has always been the haunt of the "knights of the pen," and even in these modern days the names of newspapers stare at the passer-by on every side, while at every step he jostles an ink-stained satellite of some great journal. But although these ink-stained ones are to be met with in Fleet Street at every hour of the day and night, they do not live there like the writers of old time—Michael Drayton, for instance, who "lived at ye baye-windowe house next the east end of St. Dunstan's Church"; and Izaak Walton, who kept a linen-draper's shop "in a house two doors west of the end of Chancery Lane," and on his infrequent holidays went a-fishing in the River Lea at Tottenham High Cross. Abraham Cowley, again, was born over his father's grocer's shop, which "abutted on Sargeants' Inn," and here, as a little child, he devoured the Faerie Queen, and was made "irrecoverably a poet." James Shirley lived near the Inner Temple Lane; John Locke in Dorset Court. In Salisbury Square, formerly Salisbury Court, Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, the precursor of Spenser, John Dryden, and Samuel Richardson, all had a residence at one time or another. Richardson built a large printing establishment on the site now occupied by Lloyd's newspaper offices, where he continued to carry on business many years after he had removed his private residence to the West End. He was buried, moreover, in St. Bride's Church in 1761, a large stone in the nave between pews 12 and 13 recording the fact. But greatest and most constant of Fleet Street habitués was Dr. Johnson. For ten years he lived at 17, Gough Square, busy in an upper room upon his great Dictionary. Here he lost his "beloved Tetty," to whose memory he ever remained faithful. "All his affection had been concentrated on her. He had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter." Although twenty years his senior, with a complexion reddened and coarsened by the too liberal use of both paint and strong cordials, yet "to him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary." On leaving Gough Square he lived for a few years in the Temple, where he received his first visit from Boswell, and made the acquaintance of Oliver Goldsmith. The latter was then living at 6, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, where Johnson, visiting him one morning in response to an urgent message, found that "his landlady had arrested him for his rent." He showed Johnson his MS. of the just-completed Vicar of Wakefield, which he looked into, and instantly comprehending its merit, went out and sold it to a bookseller for sixty pounds. In 1765 Johnson returned to Fleet Street, and lived for eleven years at 7, Johnson's Court. Here Boswell dined with him for the first time on Easter Day, 1773, and found to his surprise "everything in very good order." Walking up the Court one day in company with Topham Beauclerk, Boswell confessed to him that he "had a veneration" for it, because the great doctor lived there, and was much gratified to learn that Beauclerk felt the same "reverential enthusiasm." In later years Dickens stole up this Court one dark December evening, and, with beating heart, dropped his first original MS. into the letter-box of The Monthly Magazine, the office of which stood on the site now occupied by Mr. Henry Sell's premises. No. 8, Bolt Court, was the next and last residence of Dr. Johnson; here, on December 13th, 1784, he met the inevitable crisis, for which he had always felt an indescribable terror and loathing, and passed peacefully and happily away. Johnson had always had a great predilection for club or tavern life, partly because it enabled him to escape for a while from the hypochondria which always dogged his footsteps. He loved nothing so much as to gather kindred spirits around him and spend long evenings in congenial conversation. He would sit, "the Jupiter of a little circle, sometimes indeed nodding approbation, but always prompt on the slightest contradiction to launch the thunders of rebuke and sarcasm." There was not much expense attached to these gatherings, for it is recorded of one of the clubs he founded that the outlay was not to exceed sixpence per person an evening, with a fine of twopence for those who did not attend. Among the Fleet Street haunts thus frequently resorted to by Dr. Johnson and his friends were the "Cocke," patronised in former years by Pepys, and in later years by Thackeray, Dickens, and Tennyson; the "Cheshire Cheese," the only house of the kind which remains as it was in Dr. Johnson's day; the "Mitre," also formerly patronised by Pepys; and the "Devil," where the poets laureate had been wont to repair and read their birthday odes. St. Clement Danes, too, is connected with Johnson, for, in spite of his love of festivity, he was devout, and regularly attended this church, occupying pew No. 18 in the north gallery, now marked by a brass plate. Boswell records that "he carried me with him to the church of St. Clement Danes, where he had his seat, and his behaviour was, as I had imagined to myself, solemnly devout."

One more memory of Fleet Street before we leave it, in connection with Dick's Coffee-house, which used to stand at Nos. 7 and 8. In December, 1763, the poet Cowper, then a student in the Inner Temple, was appointed Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords. Delicate, shy, intensely sensitive, and with a strong predisposition to insanity, the dread of these onerous public duties disturbed the balance of his morbid brain. His madness broke out one morning at Dick's, as he himself afterwards narrated. He said:

This paroxysm ended in Cowper trying to hang himself, but, the rope breaking, he went down to the Thames to the Custom House Quay and threatened to drown himself. This attempt, however, also failed, and friends interfering, he was removed to an asylum, where he remained eighteen months.

From Fleet Street it is but a step to the Temple, with its grey quiet corners full of echoing memories, stretching back even to the days of Shakespeare, whose Twelfth Night was performed before an audience of his contemporaries in the self-same Middle Temple Hall that still confronts us. The names of Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, John Gower, Thomas Shadwell, William Wycherley, Nicholas Rowe, Francis Beaumont, William Congreve, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Day, Tom Moore, Sheridan, George Colman, jun., Marston, and Ford, are all upon the Temple rolls and each must in his day have been a familiar figure among the ancient buildings. But Charles Lamb is the presiding genius of the place.

When Lamb was twenty-five years of age he went back to live in the Temple, at 16, Mitre Court Buildings, in an "attic storey for the air." His bed faced the river, and by "perking on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see," he wrote to a friend, "the white sails glide by the bottom of King's Bench Walk as I lie in my bed." Here he passed nine happy years, and then, after a short stay in Southampton Buildings, he returned to the Temple for the second time, to 4, Inner Temple Lane, fully intending to pass the remainder of his life within its precincts. His new set of chambers "looked out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it." But fate intervened, and he and his sister soon after left the Temple, never to return. It was no easy parting, however, for he wrote in after years, "I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench.... We never can strike root so deep in any other ground."

It was when Dr. Johnson had a set of chambers on the first floor of No. 1, Inner Temple Lane, that Boswell first went to see him. Boswell wrote:

Boswell, indeed, conceived so violent an admiration for him that he took rooms in Farrar's Buildings in order to be near him. Oliver Goldsmith seems to have followed his example, for he went to lodge first in 2, Garden Court, and afterwards in 2, Brick Court, on the right-hand side, looking out over the Temple Garden. Thackeray, who, years afterwards, lodged in the same set of rooms, wrote:

A stone slab with the inscription, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith," was placed on the north side of Temple Church, as near as possible to the spot where he is supposed to have been buried.

No. 2, Fountain Court, was the last house of William Blake, the poet-painter, the seer of visions, who had a set of rooms on the first floor, from whence a glimpse of the river was to be obtained. It was very poorly furnished, though always clean and orderly, and decorated only with his own pictures, but to the eager young disciples who flocked around him it was "the house of the Interpreter." When he lay there upon his death-bed, at the close of a blazing August day in 1827, beautiful songs in praise of his Creator fell from his lips, and as his wife, his faithful companion of forty-five years of struggle and stress, drew near to catch them more distinctly, he told her with a smile, "My beloved! they are not mine! no, they are not mine!"

Passing out into the Strand, we are confronted by the Law Courts. In former days this site was occupied by a network of streets, one of which was Shire Lane, where the members of the Kit Cat Club first held their gatherings, and toasted Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when, as a child of seven, enthroned on her proud father's knee, she spent "the happiest hour of her life," overwhelmed with caresses, compliments, and sweetmeats. The famous "Grecian" stood in Devereux Court, and the "Fountain" where Johnson, on his first arrival in London, read his tragedy Irene to his fellow-traveller Garrick, on the site since occupied by Simpson's for several generations. The Strand "Turk's Head" was at No. 142, and patronised by Johnson, because "the mistress of it is a good civil woman and has not much business"; and the "Coal Hole," immortalised by Thackeray as the "Cave of Harmony" in The Newcomes, where Terry's Theatre now uprears its front. But the chief literary association of the Strand is that of Congreve, who spent his last years in Surrey Street, "almost blind with cataracts," and "never rid of the gout," but looking, as Swift wrote to Stella, "young and fresh and cheerful as ever." He had always been a favourite with society, and Surrey Street was thronged by his visitors, among whom were four of the most beautiful women of the day—Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Oldfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Henrietta Duchess of Marlborough. Voltaire, too, who greatly admired his work, sought him out when staying at the "White Peruke," Covent Garden, and was much disgusted by the affectation with which Congreve begged to be regarded as a man of fashion, who produced airy trifles for the amusement of his idle hours. "If you had been so unfortunate as to have been a mere gentleman," said Voltaire, "I should never have taken the trouble of coming to see you." In spite of the looseness of his life, Congreve had early acquired habits of frugality, and continuing to practise them when the need for economy had disappeared, he contrived to amass a fortune of £10,000, which, on his death in 1789, he bequeathed to the Duchess of Marlborough, his latest infatuation. This sum, which would have restored the fallen fortunes of his nearest relatives, was a mere nothing to the wealthy beauty, who expended it in the purchase of a magnificent diamond necklace, which she continually wore in memory of the dead dramatist.

The whole of Covent Garden is classic ground, from its association with the wits of Dryden's time, when Bow Street and Tavistock Street were in turn regarded as the Bond Street of the fashionable world. Edmund Waller, William Wycherley, and Henry Fielding, each lived in Bow Street. In Russell Street stood the three great coffee-houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Wills', Button's, and Tom's. Wills' stood at No. 21, at the corner of Russell Street and Bow Street; here Pepys stopped one February evening on his way to fetch his wife, and heard much "witty and pleasant discourse"; here Dryden had his special arm-chair, in winter by the fire, and in summer on the balcony, and was always ready to arbitrate in any literary dispute. It is said that Pope, before he was twelve years old, persuaded his friends to bring him here, so that he might gaze upon the aged Dryden, the hero of his childish imagination. Dr. Johnson, Addison, Steele, and Smollett were all regular visitors. Button's, which stood on the south side of Russell Street, and Tom's at No. 17, were equally popular, and the Bedford Coffee-house "under the piazza in Covent Garden" was another favourite resort.

It was in Russell Street, in the bookshop of Thomas Davies, the actor, that Boswell had his eagerly desired first meeting with Dr. Johnson, which he describes as follows:—

In St. Paul's, Covent Garden, were buried Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras, Mrs. Centlivre, Thomas Southerne, John Wolcot, and Wycherley, but when the church was burned down in 1786 all trace of their graves disappeared.

One other literary memory before we leave the Strand; it is connected with what was once No. 30, Hungerford Stairs (now part of Villiers Street), where stood Warren's blacking factory, in which the child Dickens passed days of miserable drudgery, labelling pots of blacking for a few shillings a week. He describes it in David Copperfield, under the name of "Murdstone and Grimsby's warehouse, down in Blackfriars." It was "a crazy old house, with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats."

Pall Mall, the centre of club-land, in the eighteenth century was the "ordinary residence of all strangers," probably on account of its proximity to the fashionable chocolate and coffee-houses (the forerunners of the clubs), which, as Defoe wrote, "were all so close together that in an hour you could see the company at them all." In Pall Mall itself were the "Smyrna," the "King's Arms," and the "Star and Garter." At the "King's Arms" the Kit Cat Club met when it had quitted its quarters in Shire Lane, and at the "Star and Garter" the "Brothers" were presided over by Swift. The "Tully's Head," a bookshop kept by the wonderful Robert Dodsley, footman, poet, dramatist, and publisher, was another favourite lounging place of the times.

In Charing Cross were the "Rummer," at No. 45, kept by the uncle of Matthew Prior; Lockett's, two doors off; the "Turk's Head," next door to No. 17; and the British Coffee-house, which stood on the site now occupied by the offices of the London County Council.

In St. James's Street the great coffee and chocolate-houses positively elbowed each other up and down, just as the clubs which succeeded them do in the present day. The "Thatched House," where the Literary Club, founded by Dr. Johnson, held its meetings under the presidency of Swift and his contemporaries; the "St. James's," where Addison "appeared on Sunday nights," and "Swift was a notable figure," for "those who frequented the place had been astonished day after day, by the entry of a clergyman, unknown to any there, who laid his hat on the table, and strode up and down the room with rapid steps, heeding no one, and absorbed in his own thoughts. His strange manner earned him, unknown as he was to all, the name of the "mad parson""; White's, to which Colley Cibber was the only English actor ever admitted; and the "Cocoa Tree," nicknamed the "Wits' Coffee-house," which, in Gibbon's time, afforded "every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the finest men in the kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat or a sandwich and drinking a glass of punch."

Lord Byron was the most romantic literary figure connected with St. James's Street. His first home in London, after his youthful days, was at No. 8, where he went to live after the publication of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. From this house the proud and gloomy young man set forth to take his seat in the House of Lords as a peer of the realm. Moore wrote:

But this state of affairs was not to endure. On February 29th, 1812, Childe Harold appeared.

Perhaps we cannot do better than end these literary associations of club-land with a few words about a man who in his time was one of its most brilliant figures—Theodore Hook. When he was released from the King's Bench prison, with his debt to the Crown still hanging over him,

In the height of his social triumphs there always hung inexorably over him the Damocles sword of debt. When at last he gave way under the strain, and went into comparative retirement at Fulham, the number of dinners at the Athenæum Club, where he had always had a particular table kept for him near the door (nicknamed Temperance Corner), fell off by upwards of three hundred per annum.

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These are a few out of the many literary memories that we may encounter in an afternoon's stroll from the Borough to St. James's, along one of the great city's busiest highways; others, indeed, there are, meeting us at every corner, but space forbids our dwelling upon them, and regretfully we must pass them by.