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 Sreat folk of old Marylebone: 
 
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THE GREAT FOLK OF OLD MARYLEBONE. 
 
THE GREAT FOLK OF OLD MARYLEBONE 
 WRITTEN BY MRS. BAILLIE SAUNDERS .^6 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 
 AND A MAP. 
 
 HENRY J. GLAISHER, 
 57, WIGMORE STREET, 
 CAVENDISH SQUARE, 
 LONDON, W. 1904. 
 
^^'"A^&'X 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The greatest compliment a preface can receive is to be 
 ignored when the reader first takes up the book, and to be 
 read when it is finished. The obvious inference is that the 
 book has been found so interesting that even so dull a thing 
 as a preface can be tolerated in its name. I do not hope that 
 these few lines will receive such honourable treatment : they 
 will probably not be read at all. But in case a reader more 
 laboriously inclined than others should give time to their 
 perusal he will find them less of a preface than a kind of 
 apologia : a kind of polite excuse after the event. 
 
 To string together a handful of random sketches and call 
 it a book — sketches which first appeared in the St. Maryle- 
 bone ]\Jlagazine in the form of articles — requires at least the 
 explanation that it was done at the repeated request of many 
 friends and some kind, though personally unknown, readers. 
 Of these latter the majority are Americans ; a fact which I 
 accept as a kind of special tribute. Also I do not claim to 
 call the little work a " history,'' but simply an account of 
 what is, to my mind, the human aspect of Marylebone's 
 story. 
 
 I have only endeavoured to show dead past Marylebone 
 as my eyes see it : I have tried only to make others look 
 into the same vision on just the very ghosts which haunt 
 sweetly and graciously our familiar streets, and which to me 
 are so real. 
 
 For Marylebone is redolent with its ghosts. Faint, airy, 
 exquisite dreams of dead men and women whose lives and 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 works have made them immortal. It is fragrant with them, 
 as an old garden is drowsily aromatic with Virginia-stocks 
 and musk. And I had a sincere wish that some of these 
 dear "great folk" should be portrayed and gathered to- 
 gether in simple form, just as a cluster of mellow, be- 
 gemmed, immortal old Holbeins might hang side by side 
 in a dusty corner of a forgotten chamber in Hampton 
 Court — the undying impressions of Holbein of the men of 
 his day. Therefore as simply my own impressions of our 
 bygone great ones, they must be taken in all kindn'ess. 
 
 Many other great names, besides those I have enumerated, 
 claim attention, were space illimitable : it was difficult to 
 select and reject, but I have made a compromise by insert- 
 ing only the names of those I love the best, and this must 
 be my answer to any accusation of incompleteness. 
 
 To the leniency of readers I commend a collection of 
 dreams of a glorious stately Past, a past which is to me 
 more real than the loud, hurried, rude present; with only 
 the plea that it is a labour of absolute love. 
 
 Margaret Baillie Saunders. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE. 
 
 I. — The Earliest Folk i 
 
 II. — History of the Manor .... 7 
 
 III. — The Marylebone Gardens : THEIR Rise . 12 
 
 IV. — The Marylebone Gardens : THEIR Fall . 18 
 
 V. — The Taverns and Tyburn . . . -23 
 
 VI. — The Churches 30 
 
 VII. — Marylebone Celebrities . . . - 38 
 
 VIII.— The Brownings in Marylebone. . . 44 
 
 IX. — Dickens in Marylebone . . . -54 
 
 X. — Charles Wesley in Marylebone . .62 
 
 XI. — Conclusion 74 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Charles Dickens. 
 
 " Only with a sudden, sad shadow sometimes looming over his 
 humorous face like a cloud hiding the sun." (p. 6i.) 
 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 
 " A little face like a white rose, and eyes like a spaniel's with 
 the smile of a seraph in them, and a mist of womanly tears." 
 
 Charles Wesley. 
 
 " He would jog along the lanes and meads of Marylebone, those 
 heavenly songs ringing in his ears."(p. 69. 
 
CHAPTER I.— THE EARLIEST FOLK. 
 
 Once upon a time, as the fairy books say, Marylebone 
 was a fair village, far from the madding crowd, dreamy 
 and still. Who will now believe you if you tell them 
 that one hundred and eighty years ago York Gate was 
 a rippling, dancing stream, running by fresh banks of 
 bulrushes, " long purples," king-cups, and wild violets ; 
 that lovers gathered forget-me-nots where now we know 
 Wimpole Street ; that woolly white sheep browsed in a 
 then undreamed of Beaumont Street, and that High 
 Street was a straggling row of white cottages, red-tiled, 
 or brown-thatched, where they grew remarkably fine 
 roses, and where ruddy, white-haired village urchins 
 made daisy chains by the roadside ? 
 
 In those Arcadian days the present Parish Church 
 had not been dreamed of, there was no Marylebone 
 Road, but a sweeping stretch of wooded country called 
 Marylebone Park or Fields, or, as it was then spelt, 
 " Marybone," of which Regent's Park is a remnant, 
 attached to the old Manor House — the latter a quaint 
 and beautiful building, now demolished, but once a 
 royal palace, used by that intrepid Diana the Virgin 
 Huntress, Queen Bess. Foxes, hares, and deer were all 
 hunted in Regent's Park by the gallant courtiers of 
 Queen Elizabeth, and parties of rubicund City Aldermen 
 often betook themselves for a day's devotion to the 
 chase in its far-stretching woods, with, as the old 
 record puts it, "their ladies in waggons." What an 
 unconsciously graphic, unconsciously humorous touch 
 those old recorders had ! One can see those aldermen's 
 ladies dressed out magnificently in silks and velvets, 
 puffed sleeves, huge ruffs, enormous skirts, gold chains, 
 and all the splendid paraphernalia which went to gild 
 the homely " Tibs," and " Bets," and " Joans," who then 
 composed the City's chatelaines — all sitting round "in 
 waggons ! " It must have been hot, and ruinous to the 
 
 B 
 
dresses, and desperately uncomfortable, and rather un- 
 dignified, but it was fashionable, and so they forgot that 
 it was also rather funny, which is a proof that progress 
 is a very slow matter, this particular kind of human 
 nature being sometimes still in vogue. 
 
 But to go back to the first coming into the world of 
 Marylebone. Its earliest foundation is lost in the dim 
 mists of tradition, but at any rate we know that in the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was a beautiful 
 little stream, called the Bourne or Burn, which ran from 
 Hampstead — then a tract of wild moor and forest — 
 through miles of desolate wooded country now north 
 and north-west London, across Oxford Street, Piccadilly, 
 through St. James's Park near the king's palace, till it 
 fell into the Thames. 
 
 On this silver stream stood a remote little village 
 of rude peasants' cots, with a tiny church dedicated to 
 St. John the Baptist. This village was called Tyburn, 
 and this was the babyhood of Marylebone. 
 
 This tiny church stood further towards London on the 
 site of the present Court House, close to what in after 
 years became the great gibbeting place, the Tyburn of 
 later history, then, of course, a remote and lonely stretch 
 of down. This was the infancy of the Parish Church. 
 But in the year 1400 the ruinous condition of St. John's, 
 and the constant robberies committed on it, owing to its 
 extreme desolation, induced the good people of Tyburn 
 to beg for a new church. Accordingly the building was 
 pulled down and a new one erected, as the old deed 
 says, " further up the brook," and was re-christened by 
 the then Bishop of London, Robert Braybrooke, after 
 the Virgin Mary, owing, tradition says, to the river 
 Bourne being supposed to be under the sacred patronage 
 of that Saint. Perhaps the simple old Catholics of those 
 days thought her powerful name would be a protection 
 against robbers. In any case the good walls were, and, 
 in addition, the fact that the new church of St. Mary of 
 
the Bourne was attached by the Bishop to the Priory of 
 St. Lawrence, in Essex, from whence it was served by 
 monks and kept in good order. They say the " Mary's 
 Bourne" still runs its hidden course under the busy 
 streets of Marylebone — a submerged river ; however 
 true or untrue this may be, the idea has a charm of its 
 own, typifying, as it unconsciously does, the deathless- 
 ness, the vivifying, health-giving, blessing properties of 
 hidden good which no time nor change can stay. 
 
 Those Marylebone ladies to whom the subject of 
 " woman's rights " is dear, if there are any, will be pleased 
 to hear that the earliest known landlords of Marylebone 
 were ladies, and that it first grew prosperous under the 
 rule of foremothers, not forefathers ! The abbesses of 
 Barking were the owners, under the Crown, of all the 
 manor-lands prior to the thirteenth and part of the four- 
 teenth century, and the ruling abbess of that convent had 
 for her lifetime complete control over the entire estate, 
 arranging for its cultivation, and superintending and 
 directing all its business. It is odd in these days of our 
 busy borough to think of some veiled and " coifed " lady, 
 with mild Madonna face, for centuries at the head of its 
 affairs, and interrupting her hours for beads and orisons to 
 attend to such earthly matters as fever among the Mary- 
 lebone pigs, or the burning of its hay-ricks ! 
 
 But before speaking of the desolate village and the 
 charming, mild-eyed abbesses who ruled it with such 
 consummate success through the administration of their 
 " mere male " bailiffs and stewards, I must digress a 
 moment to speak of the three rivers which flowed from 
 the north into London, and which for centuries supplied 
 the City with water. These were the Hole-bourne (or 
 Holborn) ; the Ty-bourne (or Teoburna) also called the 
 Eye-bourne, and later on the Mary-bourne ; and the 
 West-bourne, still commemorated in the name West- 
 bourne Park. These three streams all had their source 
 in the north, and started more or less parallel but 
 
diverged as they grew in size : for instance, the Hole- 
 bourne arose in and about the ponds between Hampstead 
 and Highgate ; the West-bourne in West Hampstead ; 
 and the Ty-bourne, or Mary-bourne, had two sources, 
 one in what is now Fitzjohn's Avenue, Hampstead, and 
 the other the site of the present Belsize estate ; these 
 two small streams joined in the neighbourhood of Bar- 
 row Hill and Primrose Hill, and proceeded in one full, 
 strong river across Regent's Park, curving slightly west- 
 ward. The present ornamental water in Regent's Park 
 shows the shape of the Bourne, or Ty-bourne, at this 
 point, the curved water at Cornwall Terrace showing how 
 it here took a sudden turn towards the east. The river 
 then turned off rather sharply down what is now known 
 as York Gate, and ran across Marylebone Road, and 
 behind the present Parish Chapel. At the lower end of 
 High Street it again curved slightly east and crossed 
 Oxford Street, exactly where the depression in the road 
 is still visible. It then took a westerly direction, and 
 crossed Piccadilly a little east of Berkeley Square, en- 
 tered the Green Park, and broke into two " arms " or 
 separate streams at about Buckingham Palace, which, 
 by the bye, is built on a portion of the river bed. One 
 of these arms ran straight towards the Thames by West- 
 minster Abbey, and was there emptied into the big river ; 
 it was here used by the Abbot of Westminster to work 
 his water-mill — hence the name of Millbank, afterwards 
 given to the prison. The other arm took a more 
 westerly curve, finally emptying itself into the Thames 
 a little above the present Vauxhall Bridge. The area 
 of land between these two arms was thus designated an 
 island, surrounded as it was by the Bourne on two sides 
 and the Thames on the other, and was called " Thorny 
 Island," from the beautiful white-thorn which flowered 
 on its marshy meads. 
 
 The Hole-bourne ran from Highgate through Kentish 
 Town, Camden Town, Somers Town, Battle Bridge, Far- 
 
5 
 
 ringdon Road and Farringdon Street, and so into the 
 Thames close to Blackfriars Bridge. It was afterwards 
 called the Fleet river, and gave its name to Fleet Street 
 and the old Fleet prison. Hence also the name Holborn. 
 
 The West-bourne rose from several small streams 
 beyond West Hampstead, flowing through Kilburn, 
 Bayswater, Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, and into 
 the Thames near the Hospital gardens, Chelsea. One 
 of these streams which gave rise to the West-bourne 
 still runs through Neasden and Wembley. 
 
 One can only guess at the origin of the name " Ty " 
 or " Eye " bourne : many people suppose that the " Ty " 
 originated in " twy " or " two," and refers to the river's 
 two-fold start and conclusion : other antiquarians hold 
 to the belief that as "tye" or "tigh" is the old English 
 for " enclosure " or '' enclosed," this may refer to the river 
 Tye-bourne as being enclosed between its two sister 
 rivers : thus " Tigh-bourne," or " enclosed river." Others, 
 again, say that the " Tigh " referred to the triangular en- 
 closure of Thorny Island ; but it seems certain that the 
 origin of the "Ty" must remain a matter of conjecture ; all 
 we know is that it afterwards merged into the " Bourne " 
 pure and simple, to which the new church (in 1400) added 
 its name of Mary. 
 
 Long before 1400 and far back into the mists of 
 tradition, however, the manor lands and full manorial 
 rights belonged to the convent of Barking, to which the 
 proceeds of the culture of the land, etc., were devoted. 
 The Abbess had the disposal of these lands in her own 
 hands, and it was to her advantage to see that they 
 were properly cultivated. The ancient church of St. 
 John's, mentioned in the foregoing article, was therefore 
 the church of the Abbess's vassals or employes ; she 
 herself was of course stationed at Barking ruling her 
 convent, and only came over on state visits of inspection 
 at remote intervals when the roads permitted, possibly 
 riding a white mare (as those stately ladies often did) 
 
6 
 
 and followed by a retinue of ladies, to set Marylebone 
 in order ! 
 
 The manor estate 'of Mary-bourne or Ty-bourne was 
 practically looked after by bailiffs or stewards, called 
 " villans " or " villani " (the term is not so uncomplimen- 
 tary as it sounds to modern ears), who employed three 
 large ploughs to keep the land in cultivation, and who 
 also had living on the estate persons inferior in ofiice to 
 themselves called "bordars" or "bordarii," who, under 
 their sway, had charge of portions of land consisting of 
 a few acres each, like our modern " hinds." Below these, 
 again, were the "cottars," who performed the more 
 menial farming work, and acted as servants to the 
 superior officers. Looking at the present Parish Church, 
 it is interesting to reflect that these good folks formed 
 its earliest beginning, and that they are the " rude fore- 
 fathers " of the Borough of Marylebone. The very 
 name of St. John's from which it grew is forgotten. 
 Who can now imagine the tinkling of the mass-bell 
 sounding silver-clear across the daisied meads of Mary- 
 lebone Lane, to where the pious shepherd tending his 
 flocks by rippling Bourne stood with bare, bowed head 
 and greeted in simple awe the sacred cadences ? while 
 inside the rude little flint church knelt peasants, cottars 
 — " horny-handed sons of toil " — and their ruddy little 
 ones, to the ministrations of a monk, whose coarse cloth 
 cowl showed above his 'broidered, gorgeous vestments. 
 And yet this was the earliest infancy of our Parish 
 Church, and those dear people in their way worshipped 
 the same God as we. So far, far away are they to us 
 that their very existence is like the shadow of a dream : 
 the church is gone, the people are gone, their graves are 
 forgotten, their villages dust under our streets ; only the 
 God they and we worship is the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and for ever. Trenchant and strangely true come the 
 words of St. Augustine : " How many days of mine and 
 my fathers have lived and died in Thy To-DAY." 
 
CHAP. II.— HISTORY OF THE MANOR. 
 
 The pale, peaceable ladies of the cloister, the first land- 
 ladies of Marylebone (and therefore the prototypes of 
 all landladies still dwelling therein), whose rule over 
 the marshy meads of Marylebone was as mild and 
 beneficent an influence as the westerly winds that 
 fluttered its riverside primroses, gave way in due time 
 to another fair feminine ruler, one Joan de Vere, a 
 bride. 
 
 Robert de Vere, her father, who had acquired a large 
 interest in the Marylebone estate, and who had prac- 
 tically held the manor under the Abbess of Barking for 
 some years, in the early part of the fourteenth century 
 efifected its final purchase and gave it to his daughter 
 Joan as a marriage dowry. So that again Marylebone 
 became the possession of a woman, but this time a gay 
 lady of wealth and position, a sparkling, youthful bride, 
 whose hand was to be given to the Earl of Warren and 
 Surrey. 
 
 By this marriage, which for all we know took place in 
 the little Church of St. John's, Marylebone passed into 
 the hands of the House of Norfolk. 
 
 In the year 1400, the parish church becoming ruinous, 
 as before mentioned, and, moreover, being infested with 
 thieves because so near the highway to London — i.e., 
 Marylebone Lane — it was by common consent pulled 
 down and a new church built " farther up the stream," 
 and presumably farther away from highway robbers. 
 This church was built of flints and stone, on a primitive 
 pattern, with a little, stumpy kind of spire, bearing a 
 sun-dial, and, from the pictures, appeared to have been 
 very small. It stood on the site of the present Parish 
 Chapel in its own graveyard, surrounded by fields, and 
 with the River Bourne running behind it, close up to its 
 graveyard ; about where the present school play-ground 
 and Oldbury Place lie. Strange as it seems, this odd 
 
8 
 
 little church was Marylebone Parish Church from 1400 
 to 1742. It was called St. Mary's, and gradually the 
 houses in its vicinity ceased to number themselves as 
 forming the village of Tyburn and the place acquired 
 the name of St. Mary-le-Bourne. The southerly end of 
 the then struggling village, however, still clung to the 
 name Tyburn, afterwards so notorious. The churchyard 
 of that old parish church must have grown very full 
 during the three and a half centuries that it served as a 
 burial ground for miles around, especially as about the 
 reign of Elizabeth the village began to grow steadily, 
 and in the reign of Anne was something bordering on a 
 riverside suburb. How large the churchyard was cannot 
 now be decided, but there are evidences that it spread 
 over a large area, human bones having been found from 
 time to time during excavations for building purposes 
 for some considerable way down High Street. 
 
 Doubtless the old cemetery in Paddington Street was 
 opened to relieve the old churchyard of 1400, and the 
 many human bones which came to light when the Court 
 House in Marylebone Lane was being built point to even 
 an older date, as being the remains of the churchyard of 
 St. John's. 
 
 In the course of centuries, as these pathetic, mute 
 evidences of the locality of the old churchyard have 
 come to light, it is supposed that they have been taken 
 back to the burial ground still surrounding the Parish 
 Chapel (once the Parish Church), and reverently put 
 under the ground, of course without stone or headline. 
 No other assumption would explain the fact that dusty 
 whitened bones are still found less than twelve inches 
 below the surface of the Parish Chapel garden, placed 
 in such a position as to exclude the idea of their having 
 been buried in the ordinary way. It is not safe for a 
 gardener to dig there deep enough to plant large flowers 
 or shrubs lest he come across the skulls of forgotten 
 forefathers lying in the mould. 
 
In 1503, one Thomas Hobson, a gentleman, purchased 
 three parts of the manor of Marylebone from the Earl 
 of Surrey, and it is supposed that he also purchased 
 the remaining part from the Prime Minister of King 
 Henry VII., to whom it had been given some years 
 before. In the year 1 544, his son, also Thomas Hobson, 
 exchanged the Marylebone property with the King for 
 some church lands, thus making it royal property. 
 Here in the reign of King Henry VIII. was erected a 
 splendid manor house. It stood on the south side of 
 Marylebone Road, on the site now occupied by the 
 Devonshire Mews, and was occasionally used by Queen 
 Elizabeth and Queen Mary as a royal palace on account 
 of the fine hunting to be had in Marylebone forest. 
 
 In the year 1583 Queen Bess granted a lease of the 
 manor of Tyburn, or Marylebourne, to one Edward 
 Forset, gentleman, for twenty-one years, at the yearly 
 rental of ;£'i6 lis. 8d. — a very cheap little piece of 
 property ! " Edward Forset, gentleman," seems to have 
 been an amusing person, determined to be great, and 
 found a "county family." Doubtless he intended to 
 purchase the manor outright eventually for himself and 
 heirs, by the pompous inscription he caused to be 
 erected in the old Parish Church of St. Mary's, and 
 which still exists intact on the front pew in the Parish 
 Chapel ; only a trifle defaced by the coat of paint 
 lavished on it by a well-meaning, but indiscriminating 
 forefather of Marylebone. It runs as follows : — 
 
 " These pewes inscrid and tan in sunder, 
 In stone thers graven what is under, 
 To wit : a valt for burial there is, 
 Which Edward Forset built for him and his." 
 
 A stern divine, the Rev. John Trusler, who wrote in 
 1824, makes a severe comment on poor Edward Forset's 
 little conceit. He says : " By the orthography of which, 
 and its wretched metre, we are taught the folly and 
 
lO 
 
 vanity of mankind, in immortalising their names at the 
 loss of their good sense and reputation." The human 
 nature in old records is infinite! But poor Edward 
 Forset was doomed to vacate the manor, and " him and 
 his" are now only remembered by their quaint challenge 
 to Time to obscure their glory. 
 
 In the year 1611, after the manor had passed through 
 the hands of one Robert Conquest, it again came into 
 the Forset family, and then passed into that of Austen, 
 Arabella Forset marrying Thomas Austen. In 17 10 it 
 was purchased by the Duke of Newcastle from the 
 Austens, and the duke's only daughter married Edward 
 Harley, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, from whom we 
 get the names Harley Street, Oxford Street, and Mor- 
 timer Street. 
 
 Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, in Herefordshire, 
 was the first collector of the celebrated Harleian MSS., 
 which now form one of the most valuable collections in 
 the Library of the British Museum. It was in the latter 
 part of the seventeenth century that this wonderful 
 treasure was slowly piled up by the great and patient 
 man who so passionately loved his self-set task, and 
 who was afterwards so amply recognised by his country. 
 In the year 1700 he was chosen Speaker of the House 
 of Commons, and in 171 1 was created Earl of Oxford 
 and Mortimer, and again, five days afterwards, was 
 promoted to the office of Lord High Treasurer of Great 
 Britain. Later on he retired from his public duties and 
 spent the remainder of his life in increasing and arrang- 
 ing his wonderful library, not sparing any expense. He 
 employed many persons to purchase manuscripts for 
 him abroad, and by these means his library in 172 1 
 increased to nearly 6,000 books. 
 
 In 1724 he died, and was succeeded by his son 
 Edward, the second Earl, who followed his noble 
 example and devoted life and fortune to the gather- 
 ing of the store. In 1741 this good man died also, and 
 
II 
 
 the library became the property of his daughter and 
 heiress, Margaret ; then no longer Margaret Harley, but 
 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Portland, wife of the 
 Duke of Portland. The British Museum was instituted 
 in the year 1753, and it was then that the great 
 Harleian Library was purchased of the Duke and 
 Duchess by the country for the sum of ;^io,ooo. 
 
 The first librarian, or, as the epitaph says, " Library 
 Keeper," to have charge of the manuscripts, under the 
 first two Earls of Oxford, was one Master Humphrey 
 Wanley, who lies buried under the threshold stone of 
 the present Parish Chapel. His inscription is carved in 
 slate, and is still clear and readable in spite of the 
 hundreds of feet which have passed and re-passed over 
 it on their way to worship, since the year 1726, when he 
 laid down his pen and horn spectacles, and after his long 
 and dusty labours became dust himself 
 
 One can picture a faded, parchment-like old gentle- 
 man in a snuff-coloured coat and dust-coloured wig, 
 with a quill behind his ear, and unspeakable knowledge 
 behind the wig, lying quietly down under that old 
 church door stone to await the reward of those who 
 have done their work well. 
 
12 
 
 CHAP. III. — THE MARYLEBONE GARDENS: 
 THEIR RISE. 
 
 We now emerge from the mists and vapours of mere 
 guesswork and tradition, and enter into a period of our 
 borough's history about which something definite is 
 known, and of which traces are all around us — 
 namely, the eighteenth century — that barbarous, cul- 
 tured, primaeval, effete age, so gloriously pagan, and so 
 quaintly polite : whose be-satined, be-frilled, embroidered 
 gallants were splashed with the blood of duels, endless 
 and causeless ; whose women, according to Reynolds, 
 looked like angels, but drank beer at breakfast, and used 
 odd language, and rarely, if ever, washed their hair — 
 an age when houses were exquisite but insanitary ; 
 when manners were something too stately and resplen- 
 dent to be imagined, but morals conspicuous by their 
 absence ; when everyone went to church as a matter of 
 course, but snored all the time — also as a matter 
 of course ; when women intrigued, betted, gambled, 
 scandled, flirted, and thought the sun went round the 
 earth, and were triumphantly unable to spell, but yet 
 looked most charming and intellectual and refined ; 
 when men drank, fought, cheated at cards, bullied, 
 flattered, and over-dressed, and were really not gentle- 
 men according to a modern standard ; and who are yet 
 held up to this generation as models of all that is 
 stately, gallant, and charming, not without some truth ! 
 Truly an age of paradoxes ! 
 
 We are drearier now ; less dramatic. Knowledge has 
 made us less daring and more dull. There is no doubt, 
 according to many antiquarians, that we are larger, 
 better built, better developed people than they were, 
 according to the deductions to be drawn from the tiny 
 low rooms they lived in, the dresses they wore, and 
 the armour and accoutrements in which they carried 
 on those eternally long wars of theirs. But we are 
 
13 
 
 sadder, with all our wisdom, and less capable of great- 
 ness. Their intellectual great men were giants to our 
 twentieth century pigmies. Their women had a charm, 
 a grace, a tenderness, a beauty of expression, according 
 to the old portraits, which one rarely sees in the hard 
 eyes of a present day crowd of London ladies. They 
 had a secret we have not — i.e., whatever their follies, 
 they lived. We exist. 
 
 Just about the time that the great Robert Harley was 
 beginning his collection, there was a great inrush of 
 French Protestants into the country, and many of these 
 poor hunted Huguenots settled in and about Marylebone. 
 Here they built a church, called the French Chapel, sup- 
 posed to stand not far from Marylebone Lane, and por- 
 trayed by Hogarth in his picture, entitled " Noon," in 
 which he takes off French manners and customs. 
 
 About two decades after the arrival of these French 
 exiles, some of the fields of Marylebone Park were 
 planned out into a pleasure ground for the use of the 
 people, and were for some years called the French 
 Gardens ; it is supposed on account of their nearness to 
 the French Chapel. Perhaps because the elastic-spirited 
 French exiles were first among their patrons. In 1661 
 the wicked old philosopher, Pepys, wrote : " Then we 
 went abroad to Marrow-bone " (note the spelling), " and 
 there walked in the garden ; the first time I was ever 
 there, and a pretty place it is." 
 
 These gardens stood, as most people are aware, on 
 the space now covered by Devonshire Place, Beaumont 
 Street, and Devonshire Street, and were bounded by a 
 wooden fence, closely boarded, according to an old print 
 dated 1750. They were at first quite quaint and 
 countrified, and not used as public pleasure gardens at 
 all, but merely as local bowling greens. 
 
 So far as can be ascertained, their boundary was 
 limited by the top end of what is now Beaumont Street, 
 on the north, and by somewhere below Weymouth Street 
 
14 
 
 on the south ; on the east by what is now Harley Street, 
 and on the west by a rail running a little behind the 
 present row of houses and shops which form one side 
 of High Street. 
 
 An old print of 1740 shows a straggling row of small 
 cottages about opposite the present Parish Chapel, but 
 further away from it than the now existing shops, thus 
 making High Street rather wider than it is at the 
 present day. Behind these straggling cottages came the 
 fence of the gardens. Legend says that the trees were 
 particularly beautiful, tall, and thickly foliaged ; and there 
 are still stories extant of the splendour of the Maryle- 
 bone roses, and the luxuriance of its fruit orchards. 
 
 The gardens were to some degree a place of public 
 amusement when Pepys wrote about them, and it is 
 thought that they developed into properly known and 
 advertised public pleasure grounds in the year 17 18, 
 when the following announcement appeared in the 
 " Daily Courant " : " This is to give notice to all persons 
 of quality, ladies and gentlemen, that there have been 
 illuminations in Marylebone bowling greens on His 
 Majesty's birthday every year since his happy accession 
 to the throne : the same is (for this time) put off until 
 Monday next, and will be performed into a consort of 
 musick, in the middle green, by reason there is a ball 
 in the gardens at Kensington, with Richmond also." 
 
 In 1738, Mr. Gough, the then proprietor, enlarged the 
 Gardens, built an orchestra, and issued silver tickets, at 
 twelve shillings each for the season, each ticket admitting 
 two persons. There is no record of the exact limitation 
 of this "season." It seems that previous to the year 
 1737, all ranks of people could enter the Gardens at any 
 time, free of charge, but that after Mr. Gough's manage- 
 ment commenced the place became the rage as a place 
 of resort for jaded London dandies and beauties, and 
 the above price was charged. By and by, the company 
 becoming more select still, Mr. Gough determined to 
 
15 
 
 make the prices still more prohibitive, and accordingly a 
 shilling admittance was charged for a lady and gentle- 
 man together, or sixpence for a single person. An ad- 
 vertisement in a contemporary newspaper of the time 
 sent forth a bitter wail to the fops of the day, praying 
 them not to smoke in the ilower walks ! 
 
 The Gardens were arranged in the form of a square, 
 containing in about the centre (rather nearer to the west) 
 a large open space, oblong in shape, called the Grand 
 Walk. This space was planted with a long avenue of 
 beautiful trees, meeting overhead, in a natural archway, 
 each tree having an oil lamp fixed into its trunk, about 
 seven feet from the ground. On either side of this walk 
 were latticed alcoves ; and on the right-hand of the walk 
 (supposing one to be looking north), stood the orchestra, 
 a large bow-fronted affair, very decorative, with stone 
 balustrades, and supported by columns. Here sat the 
 musicians making divine harmonies, according to the old 
 pictures, mainly with strings. Below, on the gravelled 
 walk, paraded a fine company of brocaded and bewigged 
 gallants and ladies, flirting, laughing, posing, chattering, 
 sneering, rapturizing, and pretending, just like any other 
 crowd before or since. 
 
 On the left-hand side (looking north) of this walk, 
 stood a large room or assembly hall, with a handsome 
 array of columns at its base, forming a kind of covered 
 arcade for promenaders in wet weather. Here were held 
 balls, routs, concerts, and sometimes Shakespearean 
 lectures, the latter being given in 1774, by Dr. William 
 Kenrick, a well-known author of his day. The character 
 of Sir John Falstaff, as represented by this gentleman, 
 was tremendously popular with the high-bred and dainty 
 ladies who came in crowds to hear him. 
 
 Elaborate fire-works were one of the principal attrac- 
 tions of the place, and concerts, followed after by balls, 
 the whole, including refreshments, costing but two-and-six 
 for two persons, were considered supremely fashionable. 
 
i6 
 
 So great had the fame of the Gardens become, that all 
 forms of rough characters, thieves, and rogues, and vaga- 
 bonds, footpads and highwaymen, made their precincts a 
 nightly resort, with a view to plundering the visitors on 
 their return to their City homes. These engaging gentle- 
 men were in no way averse to murdering the returning 
 revellers on any of the dark and desolate roads between 
 Marylebone and the City should chance favour them ; 
 and being quite desperate, savage, and afraid of nobody, 
 they often succeeded in this pleasant design, no one, 
 except doubtless the sufferers, taking the tragedy very 
 seriously. However, the road became in time so thickly 
 infested with cut-throats, that the Manager at the Gar- 
 dens found it expedient to provide a Horse Patrol to 
 protect the gallant company along to the City Road, to 
 and from the Gardens, and the existence of this patrol 
 used to be advertised in the ball or concert handbills, 
 to reassure the timid that they might, with luck, reach 
 home after the revels, alive and whole. 
 
 After Mr. Gough's management came that of Mr. John 
 Trusler, a far-seeing worthy, who in 175 1 became the 
 sole proprietor of the place. His son produced the first 
 " burletta" that was ever performed there ; and in 1759, 
 his daughter, an enterprising and energetic damsel, sug- 
 gested that he should open the Gardens for breakfasting, 
 she, with her own fair hands, providing the breakfasts. 
 
 This was accordingly done, the gardens opening at six 
 o'clock, and it soon became " the mode " for all " persons 
 of quality " to breakfast there in the fine summer weather, 
 fondly imagining themselves to be Arcadian and simple. 
 
 That dear old century was nothing if not posing as 
 Arcadian ! One can see the rank and fashion of the 
 day flocking in to those rural, but modish, breakfasts. 
 Coquettes — ^jaded faces, worn and lined with late revel- 
 lings, rouged, daubed, patched beauties, whose every 
 finger was stiff with gaudy rings, whose every speech was 
 stiff with naive falsities, whose feet were pinched into tight. 
 
17 
 
 tottering high-heeled shoes, whose souls were pinched 
 into cynic formulas, worldly maxims, coarse jokes, strange 
 unwomanly things that caused in a succeeding century a 
 reaction so intense that England was plunged for fifty 
 years into Victorian puritanics. Gallants — old, tired, 
 greedy, sardonic, covered with satin and lace, and crimes 
 and follies, painted red and white, patched, wigged, and 
 dressed out, sneering at most things, with a deep know- 
 ledge of all that need not be known, and a complete and 
 sublime ignorance of all that elevates and enlarges — these 
 pathetic creatures, like so many faded marionettes, parad- 
 ing about in the fresh morning air, when the dew was wet 
 on the roses, and shimmering on the grass, and calling 
 themselves " Corydon," and " Phyllis," and " Strephon " 
 and " Ariadne," and anything else off a Watteau vase, 
 their notion of all primaeval simplicity. 
 
 But Mistress Trusler was sincere enough and did 
 things well — particularly the making of cakes, cheese 
 cakes, seed cakes, plum cakes, and fruit tarts, and so 
 became the presiding deity, or goddess, at those early 
 morning breakfasts with great Mat. 
 
 In a quaint advertisement of hers which appeared in 
 the newspapers, she mentions her attainments, modestly 
 calling herself " Mr. Trusler's daughter," and assuring 
 the world in general that her fruit tarts for breakfast are 
 all made of the best fruit, " always fresh-gathered, having 
 great quantities in the garden. None but loaf-sugar used 
 and the finest Epping butter." Later on she exhorts 
 those patrons who require tarts of a special size or shape 
 to " bring their dish, or the size of it, and the same shall 
 be made to fit." So that occasionally they were a trifle 
 Arcadian in all sincerity, if one can believe it possible 
 for a bedecked gallant or coquette to arrive carrying 
 the dish for the special pie ! 
 
 This tells of the gardens in their glory : my next 
 chapter will deal with their fall from public favour. 
 
i8 
 
 CHAP. IV.— MARYLEBONE GARDENS : THEIR 
 FALL. 
 
 The saddest paradox in the world is the fact that every 
 great human movement is in its own essence capable of 
 and inevitably doomed to self-caricature, in the course of 
 a decade or two ; but if it were not so, social evolution 
 would be an impossibility. This grim force is constantly, 
 in the space of a few centuries, over-turning and re-dress- 
 ing entire social systems, habits, religions, fashions, even 
 crimes : nothing escapes its reforming zeal. And the 
 agents, though unconscious, of this constantly working 
 reform, its prophets, priests and expounders, are the vul- 
 gar : so that we are sure of its continuance, these being 
 always with us. 
 
 Francis of Assisi, himself a talented, unselfish, sincere 
 social reformer, has been parodied repeatedly by many a 
 weak-headed egotist, who felt saintly when saying a few 
 beads, and chose to hide his general incapacity for work 
 in the world of men under a brown habit. The revival 
 of purer and classic art in the Italy of the i6th century, 
 has finally caricatured itself in the Italian art of the 
 present day; no doubt, the first Quaker bonnet on a 
 beautiful dimpled Quaker face was enchanting, but its 
 later form, its spectre, the Victorian "poke," was fatal. 
 The mighty movement towards raising the standard of 
 English taste and ethics, made by such giants as Ruskin, 
 Rossetti, F. Madox Brown, and Holman Hunt, carries 
 with it, along with its glory, the solemn blame for many 
 a hand-painted mirror adorned with happily impossible 
 bulrushes, many an Aspinall's enamelled palm-leaf screen, 
 and many a terrific photograph frame, in the otherwise 
 peaceful homes of England, 
 
 Looking back over dear old Marylebone Gardens at 
 this distance of time, one sighs to think for how short a 
 span were they charming, unspoilt and rural, before the 
 great wave of vulgarity rushed over and engulfed them. 
 
19 
 
 Only the foregoing thought that this order of things is 
 an essential part of the great social plan can console us 
 to whom they are lost : so peaceful, fresh and innocent, 
 in the days of Pepys, so that even he could speak nothing 
 but good of them : so really pastoral, serene, and un- 
 spoiled, when the first lovely London ladies found them 
 out and used to gather for the freshening breezes, the 
 sight of roses, and the scent of new-mown hay. 
 
 When conversation was the only amusement, and that 
 highly classic and learned and refined ; or lectures, or 
 choice open-air concerts of Purcell or Haydn or " Mr. 
 Handel," as he was then called ; mainly on rather thin 
 strings, the always half-sad melodies of those days float- 
 ing vaguely and delicately through the summer dusk. 
 These were days to dream of: those are sweet, serene 
 and lovely ghosts — which, if ghosts walk, we hope still 
 hover round Devonshire Place and Beaumont Street ; 
 gentle shades of the good and gracious, the lovely and 
 the learned, who " in gloss of satin and glimmer of pearl, " 
 could strike no terror into the most timid were they to 
 be met on a moonlight All Hallow E'en. 
 
 But by and bye, the enterprising built a concert hall, 
 an orchestra, an arcade, and a theatre, an assembly-room 
 for balls, and planned out a grand parade. Then Rank and 
 Fashion, who had found out that the choice spirits of the 
 great world came hither to sincerely ruralize, came too ; 
 and, alas ! with their advent the charm went. Instead 
 of the graceful pre'cieuses, the wits and the blue-stockings, 
 came dandies and female fashion-mongers. Where once 
 that " conversation," so beloved of Dr. Johnson, the play 
 of soul to soul, flowed on so freely, now mean, witless, 
 spiteful banter held the day. Where once women dressed 
 simply and charmingly, theynow dressed with a simplicity 
 which cost them five sleepless nights a week to plan : for 
 the roses Marylebone could call up in the cheeks of pale 
 London ladies, red rouge arrived ; for the classic concert 
 was substituted the " rout," for the airy minuet on the 
 
20 
 
 grass lawn at dusk, the hot, crowded ball in bad at- 
 mosphere, and the smell of flaring candle-grease ; for the 
 literary lecture, the coarse licentious play — and all gay 
 London was in Marylebone, and its fairy charm was 
 gone for ever. 
 
 Fashion came, and in its train its parasites — the pan- 
 der, the sharper, the rogue, the gambler, followed in their 
 due degree by the spy, the pickpocket, the cut-throat and 
 the assassin. Fortune-tellers, sooth-sayers, "witches," 
 horoscope readers, card-sharpers, jesters, idlers, and vaga- 
 bonds of all kinds came seething in, like the rats in the 
 " Pied Piper " : the carnival, the rout, the masquerade, 
 took the place of more sober joys : stupendous displays 
 of fireworks became a nightly treat, and tawdry lamps 
 and festoons decorated (?) the lovely avenue of tall and 
 beautiful trees along the Grand Walk. 
 
 The population of the district around the Gardens 
 now rapidly increased. Herds of queer characters of all 
 kinds flooded into the sleepy Marylebone cottages, and 
 over-flowed its lodging accommodations, so that new 
 houses were rapidly built, and the place grew from a 
 little dainty village into a noisy disordered sort of mush- 
 room town. 
 
 There is a candid reference to Marylebone at the time 
 of which I write, about 1770, in Combe's "Dr. Syntax," 
 which is rather interesting in this connection. The 
 supposed-to-be unsophisticated old country clergyman 
 and philosopher, Dr. Syntax, takes up his quarters in 
 " Mary-bonne," while on a journey in search of a wife. 
 His friend Vellum, a publisher and learned " man about 
 town," warned him in the following lines : 
 
 " Where'er you be there must be good, 
 Whatever be the neighbourhood, 
 But 'tis a region let me say, 
 Where you, Sir, would not wish to stay." 
 
 So that, apparently, Marylebone was considered a 
 
21 
 
 highly unlikely place for a clerical philosopher in search 
 of a wife to find one. 
 
 From becoming the resort of Fashion in search of ex- 
 citement, the Gardens gradually descended to a general 
 meeting place for mere rowdyism and criminality. One 
 by one the "persons of quality" ceased to frequent 
 them. The roughs who nightly assembled there, robbed, 
 insulted, and jostled all well-dressed visitors ; accidents 
 constantly occurred from the fireworks, which were care- 
 lessly managed, and a party of idle but desperate fellows 
 tore down the decorations and injured the stage. In 
 1774 the public press made serious complaints against 
 the managers, who on one occasion charged five shillings 
 entrance fee for a Fite Champitre which was really no- 
 thing more than a few tawdry festoons and a few extra 
 lamps. Still, things got worse and worse. The magis- 
 trates were besieged with complaints from respectable 
 inhabitants and law-loving folk, and finally, in 1778, the 
 Gardens were suppressed utterly, and the site let out to 
 builders. 
 
 There is still extant an old deed of assignment con- 
 veying the property in Marylebone Gardens belonging 
 to Thomas Lowe to certain trustees, for the benefit of 
 his creditors, in which our Borough is alluded to as " the 
 town of Saint Marylebone, alias Marybone." It seems 
 rather a pity the word " Saint " in the title of the place 
 has been lost, as it is uncommon and archaic, and is in 
 itself a proof of the antiquity of the town. Apropos, 
 the Marylebone Vestry and Infirmary seem determined 
 not to let the old name die out, those substantial insti- 
 tutions on their stationery, etc., being always officially 
 subscribed Saint Mary-le-bone. 
 
 Shortly before the gardens closed (in 1778), a spring 
 was discovered within their limits, which was christened 
 the Marylebone Spa ; the waters of which were supposed 
 to be good for the digestion and to promote a good ap- 
 petite. Hither came people in search of health at six 
 
22 
 
 o'clock in the morning. A quaint old pump, by many 
 people believed to be the last remaining trace of this 
 Spa, still stands in the out-buildings behind the premises 
 of Mr. S. Drewell, in Weymouth Street. By some happy 
 chance it has not gone the way of most old and interesting 
 relics, but has survived the inrushing tide of buildings, 
 and though hidden from all but its owners, still exists. 
 
 This is the tale of the Gardens. They had a brief and 
 boisterous career, and though once Arcadian, came to an 
 untimely end. The good historian never moralizes and 
 should be utterly devoid of a sense of humour ; but per- 
 haps the mere sentimental scribbler may be allowed to 
 shed a ghostly tear for those dear forgotten Gardens, 
 which, if only the entire universal social order of things 
 had been different, might still exist to some extent in 
 quaint facade and stone spring, lichen crowned, as a 
 monument of a great dim Past in the midst of that sea of 
 rampant vulgarity, which we are nevertheless constrained 
 to admit is necessary, and Progress. 
 
 About all that is left to us are a Church and a Pump. 
 The Pump is hidden in a stable, the Church in a little 
 dark burying-ground, behind rusty iron railings, and 
 crowds pass by and think it a disused school-house. 
 They are oddly symbolic relics — the fount of pure living 
 water, and the House of God, the abode of Christian 
 idealism ; two solitary things which have escaped a 
 century and a half of change and chaos ; two things, 
 which either too necessary or too unimportant for the 
 vandal to destroy, cast a little ray of hope on the 
 present prospect of progressing Humanity. 
 
23 
 
 CHAP, v.— THE TAVERNS AND TYBURN. 
 
 Reformers occasionally overlook details in a manner 
 rather astonishing to the puppets they move until one 
 remembers that this trait is an absolute essential to the 
 character of a reformer : if he did not do this, he would 
 give things up. One would not set an entomologist to 
 sweep a kitchen for fear he should be tempted to con- 
 sult the individual sensations of every stray cricket on 
 the hearth. A reformer necessarily sees things broadly, 
 on a vast scale only ; which is his strength — and, alas ! 
 also his weakness. 
 
 They took poor Marylebone and tidied it up by 
 clearing away its Gardens in all good faith : they let 
 them out in building lots, and built solemn houses and 
 streets on their site. It was a sweeping reform, and 
 perfectly serious in intention, but it managed to miss the 
 corners ; for that anything but goodly company whose 
 rioting had spoilt the Gardens, instead of leaving Mary- 
 lebone for " pastures new," simply dispersed into the 
 neighbouring taverns and way-side inns ; so setting up 
 in the place a series of noisy resorts and meeting-places 
 having no restrictions, instead of only one which was 
 at least under the eye of the metropolis. Consequently 
 those old bowery places, all roses and clipped hedges, 
 and sweet stocks and thyme, which formed the grounds 
 to the quaint way-side inns or hostels of Marylebone, 
 became meeting places for all the rabble thrown out of 
 the Gardens ; and in the course of a very few years, the 
 scenes of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, paid duels, boxing 
 and prize-fighting of the lowest and most brutal kind. 
 These attended, of course, by their usual accompani- 
 ments, gambling, vice, intemperance and all unloveliness. 
 Fights between women — giant women, "amazons" and 
 what not, were publicly advertised at some of these 
 taverns, and crowds came to see the revolting sights: 
 so that Marylebone seemed very little better off than it 
 
24 
 
 had been ; in some respects rather worse. The Gardens, 
 at any rate, had had a managing committee, which, 
 however casual and dreamy, was necessarily some check 
 on the proceedings : but the taverns were without even 
 the irresponsible guidance of gentlemen like Mr. Gough 
 and his friends, and soon went to far worse lengths than 
 anything in the Gardens. Each landlord ran his inn for 
 what he could get out of it, and was permitted to do so 
 without censure from anyone. 
 
 Most of these tavern gardens had been bowling- 
 greens for many a long year, and had, until that time, 
 attracted only the self-respecting followers of that good 
 old English game— genial, delicious old philosophers, or 
 merry, honest, sturdy youths, all joining together on 
 long still summer evenings in the healthy flinging of 
 the great wooden balls, or planking down their modest 
 stakes between the lazy whiffs of their pipes : pleasant 
 evenings, when the "click, click" of the bowls fell 
 lightly on the hushed air and mingled with the laugh of 
 those fine good-humoured old Marylebone gentlemen, as 
 their mellow tobacco mingled with the wafted scents of 
 mignonette and musk. 
 
 Here had been wont to meet in perfect good fel- 
 lowship the duke, the dandy, the grave-digger, the 
 merchant, the apprentice, the apothecary, and perhaps — 
 who knows ?— the parson. He was, let us hope, a philo- 
 sopher, that old Rector of Marylebone, for in the year 
 1650 his stipend was only £1^ per annum, with about 
 as much again in emoluments ! He must have been 
 glad of an occasional quiet smoke in the bowling-green, 
 if only to drive away his cares. 
 
 Of course, one or two of these taverns had had no 
 very good reputation long before the Gardens became 
 notorious, but the majority of them were sleepy, quiet, 
 country inns of the old type, used only by travellers. 
 " The Rose," which was situated at the top end of what 
 is now High Street, and stood pretty much on the site 
 
25 
 
 of the present Girls' Schools, was a fairly noted gaming 
 place for persons of rank even in the 17th century, and 
 is mentioned in the London Gazette, 1 691, in such a con- 
 nection. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu also writes : — 
 " Some dukes at Marylebone bowl time away": and an- 
 other writer (in 1699) mentions one or two of the Mary- 
 lebone taverns as not being quite above suspicion. " The 
 Rose of Normandy " stood very close to " The Rose ; " 
 and the bowling-greens of both these taverns were incor- 
 porated into the Gardens when they first started. 
 
 " The Queen's Head and Artichoke " was another 
 beautiful old inn, which, after the Gardens closed, 
 became notorious for its evil company. 
 
 •' The Yorkshire Stingo " was a very famous place, 
 indeed, celebrated for its Yorkshire ale — hence its odd 
 name. It stood opposite Lisson Grove on the south 
 side of Marylebone Road, and had particularly lovely 
 gardens. It is shown in one of the illustrations in 
 Combe's " Dr. Syntax," written about that time, and is 
 evidently considered a typical place of resort for roughs 
 and sharpers by the writer : for it is here that Dr. Syntax 
 meets some very odd characters in connection with a 
 horse fair. 
 
 "The Farthing Pie House," another famous tavern, 
 stood on the St. Pancras side of Marylebone, practically 
 on the boundary line of the two parishes. 
 
 " The Jew's Harp," a very picturesque old place, stood 
 in what is now Regent's Park, about a mile north of 
 Portland Place. Possibly it was somewhat too far out of 
 Marylebone to attract the London loafers, for it seems to 
 have kept up its quiet and rural reputation even after the 
 influx of the weird brotherhood of the Gardens. 
 
 But " The Rose," " The Rose of Normandy," " The 
 Queen's Head and Artichoke," " The Yorkshire Stingo," 
 and " The Farthing Pie House," became amazingly 
 famous for all that was wild, disorderly, and utterly 
 destructive of all social peace or comfort. Other and 
 
26 
 
 smaller taverns rose into existence and bad fame, and 
 the few red-tiled, white-washed cottages which went 
 straggling along in the vague form of a country lane, 
 very sketchy indeed, became interspersed with other 
 cottages and small houses and rapidly grew into High 
 Street — a baby High Street which we should find it 
 hard to recognize now! Charmingly casual mottled 
 pigs strolled about its grassy furrows ; easy-looking, 
 comfortable geese cackled airily about its environs, if 
 one may judge from an old print of that part of the 
 century. 
 
 Lisson Grove — then Lisson Fields — became infested 
 with professional robbers, who simply waited there to 
 rob and murder any passing travellers : Hampstead 
 Heath, as we all know, was a happy hunting-ground for 
 highwaymen and cut-throats : Primrose Hill had its 
 share of tragedies : and the fields between what is now 
 Oxford Street and Marylebone were scenes of nightly 
 bloodshed. Rioting became quite common, and the 
 fearful amount of strong beer drunk by the lower 
 classes, combined with their utter ignorance, savagery, 
 and uncared-for state, made a London crowd in those 
 days as furious, brutal, and terrible as a French revo- 
 lutionary mob. Marylebone did not escape these evils, 
 which, indeed, existed in all thickly-populated places in 
 that century : and we, who talk of " good old days " and 
 of the fearful degeneration of the present age, would do 
 well not to study the social history and contemporary 
 literature of less than a hundred and fifty years back, 
 unless we want to feel rather small. It was nice to be 
 so picturesque, but it must also have been distinctly bad 
 for the nerves. Of course you cannot have everything. 
 
 As an illustration of the great social principle of 
 supply and demand, the ever famous gallows, Tyburn 
 Tree, or " Deadly Never-Green," as it was called, now 
 sprang into fashion more than ever before. It was the 
 place of execution for all Middlesex criminals, and as 
 
27 
 
 the criminal law was at that period almost as savage, 
 unreasoning, and brutal as the wretchedly ill-taught 
 people, it plied a merry trade. 
 
 Hogarth, who was a Marylebone gentleman, has left 
 us a deathless picture of Tyburn and a Tyburn crowd in 
 his series " The Idle Apprentice. It became the fashion 
 to crowd in thousands to see a poor miserable fellow- 
 creature hanged ; gentle ladies, or what heaven origi- 
 nally intended for such, came in their best to see this 
 thing, perhaps themselves a more awful spectacle of 
 degradation — the degradation of the heart and mind 
 and soul — than the poor wretch who only came to pay 
 the penalty of his, perhaps ignorant, blind, almost inevi- 
 table misdeeds. All the dandies came, and all the 
 roughs ; the rich and the poor ; the learned and the 
 unlettered. Happily some of the scenes enacted on 
 those fiendish gala days pass the limit of our imagina- 
 tion ; we may rest content only to know that every evil 
 passion ran riot and every kind of coarseness held the 
 day. People paid for their seats at these shows, and the 
 prices were regulated according to the degree of crimi- 
 nality, or else the social position of the poor miserable 
 felon. 
 
 The gallows was a vast wooden structure, three-square, 
 and supported by three stilts. It stood on the site of 
 what is now Connaught Place, and Park Lane was 
 called Tyburn Lane, and Oxford Street Tyburn Road, 
 on its account. It had stood there doing its grim duty 
 long before the time of which I now write, and had 
 supported its terrible fame for many years, since, when 
 in the reign of Henry VIII. it had cast into eternity the 
 Holy Maid of Kent, and many other persons of note ; 
 in the reign of Elizabeth also, the famous and brilliant 
 Jesuit, Robert Southwell, executed for alleged con- 
 spiracy against the Government, but by many Catholics 
 believed to have been a saint, and not without strong 
 reason. Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I., 
 
28 
 
 is said to have walked there barefoot through Hyde 
 Park to do penance. One cannot help thinking the 
 Queen must have had a great many things on her 
 conscience, to walk "without sock or brogue" from 
 Whitehall to Connaught Place, especially in the then 
 state of the roads ! 
 
 When Charles II. was reinstated on the throne of his 
 fathers, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw 
 were dragged from their graves in Westminster Abbey 
 and hanged on Tyburn Tree, at its three corners, in their 
 grave clothes, from sunrise to sunset. They were then 
 taken down and beheaded, their bodies buried beneath 
 the gallows, and their heads set upon poles on the top of 
 Westminster Hall. A brilliant woman once said, " Count 
 no man great till his effigy is smashed." Cromwell, whose 
 tomb was thus ravaged and desecrated, must then be 
 considered to have reached the altitude of greatness. 
 
 The criminal law was catholic in its methods. At 
 this deadly tree, for instance, suffered in their turn John 
 Felton, for murdering a duke ; Okey, Barkstead, and 
 Corbet, for signing, with fifty-six others, the death-warrant 
 of their king (Charles I.) ; Thomas Sadler, for stealing 
 the Lord Chancellor's mace and purse ; the Archbishop 
 of Armagh, for imagined treason ; and one Sir Thomas 
 Armstrong, for complicity in the Rye House Plot ; again, 
 one John Smith, for burglary, which gentleman hung by 
 the neck for half-an-hour and still did not die, so was 
 reprieved and came to himself, and one presumes lived 
 burglariously ever after. Here the great highwayman. 
 Jack Sheppard, was hanged ; also another celebrated 
 reprobate of the same stamp, called John Rann, who, 
 strangely enough, had foretold throughout his violent 
 career that he would be hanged eventually in the month 
 of November — he was executed on November 30th, 1774. 
 Here, too, suffered Dr. Dodd for forgery ; and the last 
 woman who suffered death in England for a political 
 offence, an old dame named Elizabeth Gaunt, was burned 
 
29 
 
 to death at Tyburn for harbouring in her house a person 
 concerned in the Rye Housei Plot. John Austen was the 
 last man to be hanged at Tyburn, in 1783, after which 
 date it was pulled down and all criminals executed at 
 Newgate. 
 
 The hangmen were given I3%d. per head for their 
 wages, and were considered persons of quality, the one 
 who followed Derrick, the hangman of James the First's 
 reign, being created an Esquire and given Arms, on 
 account of his office. His name was Gregory Brandon. 
 He was followed by Dun, who in his turn gave place to 
 Jack Ketch, the last and most famous Tyburn hangman, 
 whose name still stands for that gloomy profession. 
 
30 
 
 CHAP. VI.— THE CHURCHES. 
 
 We often hear of the " Mother " Church of a parish or 
 district, but very rarely of a " Grandmother " Church, 
 yet Marylebone possesses such an ecclesiastical relation. 
 The Mother Church — Marylebone Parish Church — is so 
 large and imposing a person, and her offspring so very 
 numerous and fine, that the little shabby grandmother 
 has retired long ago into the background. She is a 
 quiet, soberly garbed, plain little old lady, and has a 
 quaint, dim, forgotten little churchyard all to herself, at 
 the top end of the High Street. She is now called the 
 Parish Chapel, and it is so long ago since she bore any 
 other title that people have practically forgotten that 
 she was ever the Parish Church. She is very conserva- 
 tive, prim, and dignified — she keeps her high pews, her 
 Commandments placed over the altar, her little odd 
 " cornery " galleries, her sober wall tablets setting forth 
 the correct civic and social virtues of the long-forgotten 
 1 8th century dead. She even grows specially um- 
 brageous shady trees in her still graveyard, just as some 
 dear retiring old lady will be found to have the secret 
 of growing particularly fine musk in the window of a 
 dim old room, ghostly with miniatures ^nA pot-pourri. 
 
 In a former chapter, I gave a full account of the first 
 Marylebone Church, St. John's, Tybourne, on the site of 
 the old Court House, also the building of the new church 
 of 1400, re-christened St. Mary-atte-the-Bourne, on the 
 site of the present Parish Chapel, High Street, served and 
 owned by the Monks of St. Lawrence de Blakemore's 
 Priory, Essex, up to the period of the Reformation. 
 
 I now give an outline of its history from that date. 
 King Henry VIII., suppressing the Priory, took Mary- 
 lebone Church and gave it to Wolsey, who made it 
 subservient to Ipswich. When the Cardinal fell into 
 disgrace, the Crown again took possession, finally grant- 
 ing it to Thomas Reve and George Cotton as sole 
 
31 
 
 proprietors and patrons. It then passed to the Forsets, 
 who married into the Portland family, who were its 
 patrons for years. In the year 1740 the old building of 
 1400 became finally and hopelessly ruinous and was 
 pulled down, a new Church being erected immediately 
 on its site, which was completed in 1742. That building 
 was identically the same as the present Parish Chapel. 
 This extremely ugly, tiny, primitive little sanctuary did 
 duty as the sole Parish Church of Marylebone from 
 1742 to 1818, incredible as it may seem to those who 
 realize that, at the end of the 1 8th century, Marylebone 
 was a large and fast-growing town of 70,000 souls. A 
 picturesquely worded complaint was wailed forth in the 
 Gentleman's Magazine in the year 1 807, by a gentleman 
 who was justly horrified at the fearful want of space, 
 dignity, or decency, which was the inevitable result of its 
 cramped dimensions. He says, after stating that he 
 visited Marylebone Church by chance, and his belief 
 that it was the smallest Church of England place of 
 worship in London, "there is no font for baptism, no 
 room for depositing dead bodies on tressels in the usual 
 way, no aisle to contain them. They are placed in the 
 most indecent manner on the pews. At the time I 
 visited this scandal to our church and nation, there were 
 no fewer than five corpses placed in the manner de- 
 scribed ; eight children with their sponsors, &c., waiting 
 to be christened, and five women to be churched ; all 
 within these contracted dimensions." This gentleman 
 goes on to state that, in place of a font, a "common 
 basin" was placed on the Communion Table, and the 
 children, who apparently were none of them babies, 
 ranged round to be baptized, their sponsors and parents 
 lolling about in utter disorder in the few pews disen- 
 gaged by coflfins ! A terrible picture of the indifference, 
 carelessness, and sloth of the clergy of those days. 
 
 Lord Byron was baptized at this Church, presumably 
 out of the above-mentioned " common basin " ; possibly 
 
32 
 
 with similar accompaniments — an unromantic begin- 
 ning ! Apropos, numbers of zealous Americans who 
 visit England in the summer, come to this Church to see 
 Byron's font, only to be disappointed, as there is, of 
 course, none to show ; one lady in particular, who visited 
 it last summer, resplendent in waving veil and noisy 
 silk skirts, did not wait to hear the tale of the basin, but 
 fiercely upbraided "you Kng-/tsk" for utter lack of a 
 love for the past, utter vandalism, and utter want of all 
 appreciation of relics. " You've no reverence," she said, 
 " like we have. Why, I came here on purpose miles 
 and miles to see that font, and never a chip of it can I 
 take home after all, and such a good sum as it would 
 have fetched over the Pond ! " Such is reverence. 
 
 Evidently the absurdly small church became a crying 
 scandal in Marylebone, for in 1810 we find plans well on 
 foot for five chapels-of-ease to be built. How few people 
 know that the present Parish Church was first intended 
 for a chapel-of-ease to what is now the Parish Chapel ! 
 In 18 1 3 the foundation of this chapel-of-ease was laid, 
 but in 1814 the work of building was suddenly stopped 
 and the designs entirely altered and revised, and instead 
 of a chapel-of-ease the Vestry determined to build a new 
 Parish Church. A more extended portico and steeple 
 were introduced, and all the original plans submitted 
 by Mr. Nash entirely put aside for the designs of Mr. 
 Thomas Hardwicke, a pupil of Sir William Chambers, 
 — and so came our present Parish Church. 
 
 In 18 18 the church was finished, and on the 4th of 
 February in that year was consecrated and formally 
 opened as a Parish Church. The old Parish Church was, 
 on the same day, formally converted into a chapel-of-ease, 
 her east doors blocked up, her ponderous "three-decker" 
 divided into a pulpit and reading-desk separately, and 
 her organ placed at the west end of the church, instead 
 of over the Altar as originally placed, and still to be seen 
 in Hogarth's " Industrious Apprentice at Church," who is 
 
33 
 
 supposed to be worshipping within Marylebone Church, 
 while his comrade, the " Idle Apprentice," is represented 
 in the next picture playing dice outside. 
 
 The Parish Church that we know is not the thing it 
 was then, for which let us offer devout thanks. The 
 exterior was always imposing, but Marylebone has its 
 present Rector, the Rev. Canon Barker, to thank for the 
 now beautiful and dignified interior, he having entirely 
 altered and restored it at enormous cost, and made it 
 what it is. Those of us who know nothing of its early 
 ugliness, can perhaps hardly realize the unspeakable 
 benefit this tremendous work of our Rector has been to 
 the parish, but when we are dead and gone it will be 
 remembered by others. 
 
 But in 1818 they were really, artistically speaking, 
 irreclaimable. They were the most dangerous thing 
 one can be — perfectly self-satisfied. The victory of 
 Waterloo, perhaps, had turned some of their heads ; 
 they felt that England — Albion they called it — ruled 
 the world ; that she could henceforth be a law unto 
 herself, especially in Church architecture, and give tips 
 to the builders of the ancient Cathedrals, and patronize 
 such nonentities as mere classics. 
 
 There were two galleries, one above the other, round 
 the Church, private boxes like theatre boxes, with fire- 
 places and curtains, close up to the Altar. The pulpit 
 was a beautiful example of carving in that somewhat 
 impossible material, mahogany ; and there was a fine 
 " Nativity," by West, over the Communion Table. A 
 terrific transparency— a painting on gauze — was let into 
 the middle of the organ, which was placed over the 
 Altar. True, it, too, was by Sir Benjamin West, the 
 President of the Royal Academy, who ought to have 
 known better, and it cost a pretty penny, but its fearful 
 mis-proportions, its noisy colouring, and its entirely un- 
 ecclesiastical style, made it a horror. It represented the 
 Angel appearing to the Shepherds. In 1826 it was 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 taken down and stowed away in the crypt of the 
 Church, from whence it was either stolen or spirited 
 away, for all trace of it is lost. There was a heavy 
 mahogany screen behind the Altar, and crimson velvet 
 draperies were festooned casually on to most things, like 
 so many antimacassars. 
 
 An impossible moment for architectural art, the 
 "teens" of the 19th century! A terrible epoch, when 
 England was tossing between desperate conservatism 
 and fierce socialistic upheavals ; when she was grimly 
 true to all that was false in art, and prodigally false to 
 all that was true. A period when she swept away ruth- 
 lessly beautiful old Tudor houses to build in their stead 
 vulgar imitations of " classic." When lovely old oak 
 window-seats, things to dream of, went out of fashion to 
 make room for more " genteel " mahogany chairs with 
 black horsehair seats, and wax fruit under bell-glasses ! 
 A coloured picture of the Parish Church interior in the 
 early " twenties " can be seen still in the Vestry of the 
 Church, proving the justice of these statements. In this 
 painting a very pompous, highly self-satisfied looking 
 gentleman in white nankeens and swallow-tails, is repre- 
 sented sailing haughtily along the aisle with a stiff stock 
 round his neck, as though he were pointing to the general 
 hideousness around him and saying from Olympian 
 heights, " See what the British Constitution can do ! " 
 
 But in this rough outline of the Church's history, I 
 must not omit a brief r^sumi of the Clergy and Rectors 
 of Marylebone. 
 
 Far, far back in the days of old St. John's, Tybourne, 
 what crude, pious, shaven monk, supplied by the Abbey 
 of Barking, was their forefather ? A gentleman whose 
 Latin Aves and exquisite Altar vestments, utter igno- 
 rance, and intense good-nature, must have made him 
 generally beloved by his Catholic flock. He is lost in 
 the past. He was followed in turn by the monks of St. 
 Lawrence — " Black Canons " they were called — who were 
 
35 
 
 the first to minister in the first St. Mary-of-the-Bourne, 
 in 1400. They wore black habits and high-pointed cowls, 
 and the officiating Chaplain, or chief of these — the proto- 
 type of the later rectors — was called the Minister. His 
 salary, good man, was quite stupendous — it was thirteen 
 shillings a year ! Happily, being a monk, he had few 
 wants and much philosophy, but he was not over-paid 
 for all that. These " black " Canons came down one 
 after the other in solemn sable succession, doing their 
 steady obedient duty for their thirteen shillings with 
 never a murmur. Fine examples of a system which has 
 had its day. The last of the " Black Monks " was called 
 Demerick, recorded as the " last Catholic priest " to min- 
 ister in Marylebone. Then came the Reformation. The 
 first protestant clergy here were the Deans and Canons 
 of Christchurch, then the Masters of Ipswich, and then, 
 under the patronage of the Forsets and Portlands, the 
 following Rectors : Francis Barton, July, 1582 ; Thomas 
 Moore, July, 1583 ; John Payton, January, 1585 ; Robert 
 Powell, June, 1587; Griffin Edwards, December, 1598; 
 Thomas Swadlin, D.D., 1640 ; Edmund Price, 1664 ; John 
 Crosbie, 1669 ; William Rogers (no date given) ; George 
 Allen, May, 1672; Matthew Brailsford, 171 1 ; Randolph 
 Ford (curate), 171 1 ; Daniel Boote, 1754 ; Thomas Dyer, 
 1760; James Parent, 1760; Thomas Foster, 1 765 ; Stephen 
 Deguthon, 1767 ; J. Baker, 1768 ; Sambrook Russell, 
 1768 ; William Charles Dyer (no date given) ; The Hon. 
 and Rev. John Harley, Bishop of Hereford, died 1788 ; 
 the Rev. Sir Richard Kaye, LL.D., Dean of Lincoln, 
 died 1809; the Rev. Luke Heslop, B.D., Archdeacon of 
 Bucks, died 1825; the Rev. John Hume Spry, D.D., 
 Canon of Canterbury, 1854; the Rev. the Hon. G. T. 
 Pelham,late Bishop of Norwich, 1857 ; the Rev. J. Phipps 
 Eyre, resigned 1882, when he was followed by the Rev. 
 Canon Barker, the present Rector. 
 
 It is a curious thing to note in passing, that through 
 all the years recorded here, there has never been a pro- 
 
36 
 
 perly endowed or settled Rectory in connection witii 
 Marylebone till the Rectorship of Canon Barker. In 
 1650 the Rector of Marylebone enjoyed a stipend of 
 £iS per annum, with another ;^I5 in emoluments but 
 with no Rectory. Of course money was of a totally 
 different value in those days, and rent and food were 
 infinitely cheaper, also you wore the same clothes for 
 years. Still, £1$ looks very odd to us. 
 
 A famous Rector of Marylebone was Dr. Swadlin, 
 mentioned in the foregoing list. When the fierce Civil 
 Wars raged over the land, he was one fine day seized, 
 robbed of his clerical dignities, thrown into prison, and 
 his wife and children turned ruthlessly out of doors to 
 starve. These determined people seem to have clung to 
 a living somehow, for in a year's time, when the poor 
 Rector was released, they all re-assembled, made a new 
 home in Oxford, and Dr. Swadlin there, by hard grinding, 
 got his D.D. degree and set to work to teach for a live- 
 lihood. Here he bided his time till the Merry Monarch's 
 Restoration, when he just went to Court in his shabby 
 teacher's gown and asked for Marylebone to be given 
 back to him. He got it, came back, and continued his 
 honourable ministry here as though nothing had hap- 
 pened ! A dogged and delightful person indeed. One 
 can picture him a fine old Vicar of Wakefield type of 
 man, with perhaps a more bull-dog style of chin, and a 
 grim-set mouth, and a laugh up his sleeve at his enemies. 
 
 Before concluding the history of the Clergy, I must 
 mention the fact that they have had a great many minor 
 troubles to encounter even in the 19th century, one being, 
 in 1832, a stern motion moved by the Vestry that they 
 should not use so much soap in the Church vestry. The 
 gentleman who brought this complaint forward stating 
 that " two cakes of soap were amply sufficient for two 
 clergymen to use in a year " ! Another, the fact that 
 until quite recent years no curates were allowed to be 
 subscribers to the Park Square Gardens, they, and dogs 
 
37 
 
 and footmen, being strictly forbidden from entering that 
 paradise. The reasons were purely sentimental, the 
 younger clerics being considered dangerous to the peace 
 of mind of susceptible young ladies, and at the same time 
 quite ineligible. The curates must have consoled them- 
 selves by reflecting on the absolutely immense inferential 
 compliment contained in this stern mandate ! 
 
38 
 
 t 
 
 CHAP. VII.— MARYLEBONE CELEBRITIES. 
 
 He who sets himself the task of writing one chapter on 
 the bygone celebrities of Marylebone is like a child who 
 tries to confine an ocean in an oyster shell. The attempt 
 is stupendous, superb, idle, and foolish. One requires no 
 sense of humour, and no sense of proportion, and a bland 
 and glorious belief in one's own sufficiency of which even 
 the most stupid are hardly capable. Yet the exigencies 
 of space here demand it to be done. We bow to the 
 laws of local handbooks and here make the attempt — 
 with apologies. Let him who feels inclined to criticize, 
 try to do it himself! 
 
 If, out of that array of glorious ghosts of the good, the 
 witty, the lovely, and the wise, we could call back two 
 only, we might have such a book on the subject as would 
 be a history of human nature in itself. If Dickens and 
 Hogarth would step forth from the enfolding shadows of 
 the " land where all things are forgotten," what a making 
 of books that would be ! But no echo comes from that 
 (to us) dim world where dwell the deathless dead : where 
 the great and fiercely-bright spirits of men and women, 
 gifted beyond human understanding, circle together like 
 stars in the- sight of Him who gave them spirit birth, and 
 created them with all the glories and the passionate suffer- 
 ings of genius for some high purpose beyond our knowing. 
 
 Marylebone-ites know their own traditions so well, 
 especially old Marylebone-ites, that they are quite cross 
 if you allude to them : much less write about them. They 
 answer you shortly, with a little shrug. But the new- 
 comers do not yet know all, and this is for the new- 
 comers, and not for the old residents, to whom an officious 
 upstart raconteur must be distinctly boring. 
 
 It is like saying, for instance, that Queen Anne has posi- 
 tively expired, to tell anyone in Marylebone that Dickens 
 Ifved in the house at the top of High Street called No. 
 I, Devonshire Terrace. But it is necessary to say so to 
 
39 
 
 fulfil the uses of this chapter. The house has been very 
 little altered, and was the birthplace of nearly all Dickens's 
 most popular works, notably " David Copperfield " and 
 " Dombey and Son." Lord Bacon was married at Maryle- 
 bone Parish Chapel ; Lord Byron was christened there ; 
 there also was christened Horatia Nelson, the child of Lord 
 Nelson, brought to the Church by the beautiful but erring 
 Lady Emma Hamilton. The Parish Registers record 
 the little girl's name as " Horatia Nelson Thompson." 
 This unique entry stands alone in the entire omission of 
 the parents' names or occupations. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth came here to hunt, the old Manor 
 House which stood at the top of Devonshire Place being 
 used as a Royal hunting lodge, adjoining as it did the 
 forests which then stretched over what is now Regent's 
 Park, away to the lonely tracts and uplands of Hamp- 
 stead. She must have made a gay picture, dashing off 
 on her cream palfrey, followed by her crowd of cavaliers, 
 attired in a stiffened and jewelled hunting-dress of Lin- 
 coln green, with a black peaked hat and waving scarlet 
 feather setting off her wonderful red hair and wicked, 
 foxy, fascinating face with a witch-like effect — a woman 
 who played ping-pong with Europe and moved kings 
 and statesmen like the ivory pawns on a chessboard : 
 witty, spiteful, intrepid, powerful, brilliant, and utterly 
 unscrupulous, she wrought her country and her people 
 " lasting good." 
 
 Doctor Johnson, the great lexicographer, the philoso- 
 pher, the wit, and, as Mieklejohn calls him, the mighty 
 turning-point in the literature of his age, the herald of a 
 newer and more powerful school, lived at No. 38, Castle 
 Street. It was in that street, in the house opposite to 
 No. 38, that he was introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds at 
 the tea party given by two Misses Cotterell, old friends 
 of the great doctor. If the dear old gentleman drank 
 his usual nineteen cups on that occasion, the two ladies 
 must have had their work cut out for them, as Sir Joshua 
 
40 
 
 was also very partial to tea, and usually managed to call 
 on his friends at the witching hour of its brewing. They 
 would be a nice pair to entertain in those primitive days 
 when hostesses made the tea themselves, and boiled the 
 kettle in the " parlour." 
 
 A friend of Dr. Johnson's, Mrs. Montagu, the Queen 
 of the Blue-stockings, lived in Portman Square, at the 
 large corner mansion which still stands there, and which 
 she had built herself She was a well-known literary star 
 of her day, and a clever and voluminous though not a 
 brilliant talker ; her salons being a centre for all the great 
 intellectual lights of the times. One room in her house 
 was entirely lined from ceiling to floor with birds' feathers, 
 and it was in reference to this room that Pope wrote : 
 
 " The birds put off their every hue 
 To deck a room for Montagu." 
 
 " Bluestocking " is a term which now suggests something 
 so dreadful and ill-dressed and unwomanly that it is only 
 fair to the great founder of that order's memory to men- 
 tion that she was a past mistress in the art of graceful 
 attire : that she followed the fashions of her day with 
 grace and elegance, and was in no way different to other 
 ladies of position so far as appearance went, except that 
 she generally looked better than they, as she had a tall 
 and handsome figure and walked with a stately gait. She 
 was an imperious woman of fierce party prejudices, and 
 managed to quarrel with a good many friends, notably 
 Dr. Johnson himself, who in the end ceased to be invited 
 to her receptions. The loss was unquestionably hers. 
 However, the old philosopher had his revenge — perhaps 
 unconsciously — for he solemnly uttered one oracular sen- 
 tence on the subject which has been faithfully recorded : 
 " Mrs. Montagu, sir, has dropped me. Now, sir, there are 
 some people one should like to drop very well, but would 
 not wish to be dropped by " — a crystallized snub which 
 still holds fast to the memory of Elizabeth Montagu, 
 
41 
 
 when her writings and words are forgotten. Moral: Do 
 not too lightly drop philosophers. 
 
 Another of the same group, Mrs. Thrale, later on Mrs. 
 Piozzi, the dear friend of Johnson for many years, lived 
 at No. 33, Welbeck Street. While last, but not least, 
 James Boswell, the shadow, the adorer, and biographer of 
 Johnson, lived at 122, Great Portland Street. Never was 
 a parasite turned to such perfect use as James Boswell : 
 a little foolish man, of narrow intellect, poor spirit, utter 
 want of all sense of humour, affected, loquacious, and 
 tactless ; yet containing behind all this lumber a capacity 
 for passionate devotion, noble self-effacement, and sincere 
 hero-worship which hands him down even to our day as 
 one of the great types of unselfish friendship — a friend- 
 ship worthy in its own degree to rank with the love of 
 Jonathan. Many and many were the snubs poor Bos- 
 well bore in pathetic silence when his great hero had the 
 gout or the dyspepsia, or felt upset with creation generally. 
 Much contumely had he to endure : he was to Johnson 
 what the familiar Daemon was to Socrates ; only instead 
 of being a shadow to lead and instruct, he was a shadow 
 to throw boots at. But he never wavered. Johnson was 
 to him the Ideal embodied, the king among men, the lion 
 (not the bear ! ), and he patiently plodded away noting 
 down the great sayings that fell from his hero's lips, 
 snubs and all, with an accuracy that is in itself a pathetic 
 proof of his utter self-less devotion. 
 
 Turner, " the greatest landscape painter England has 
 ever known," as I think it was Ruskin called him, lived 
 at 64, Harley Street, for many years, and after 1812 at 
 25, Queen Anne Street (a house built by himself), which 
 has since been replaced by a building numbered 23-24. 
 His style of living was so penurious and so wretched, 
 though he was earning an enormous income, and was an 
 R.A. at the time, that it reads like a Dickens romance. 
 His aged father, a wizened, ragged old man, who had 
 once been a barber in Maiden Lane, seems to have been 
 
42 
 
 his sole servitor, and used to answer the door to the few 
 callers by pulling back a creaking chain, and peering out 
 of the hardly opened portal with a snarling negative to 
 most. The paint on the broken railings was cracked and 
 blistered, the walls were tumbling down, and the whole 
 manage carried on in a squalid and miserable fashion. 
 Turner's extraordinary genius seems to have made him 
 superior to externals in a marked degree. He died in a 
 poor Chelsea cottage, the death of a forgotten pauper, 
 but was folded for his burial in one of his own pictures 
 as a shroud : so says tradition. Thus he lies wrapped in 
 his own glory. 
 
 Another great artist, George Romney, lived at 32, 
 Cavendish Square ; and yet another, the great Flaxman, 
 at 7, Buckingham Street ; while Marylebone was the 
 home of hosts of other immortal painters, amongst whom 
 may be cited Allan Ramsay, Sir Edwin Landseer, Sir 
 Benjamin West, and the mighty Hogarth, whom Dickens 
 accounted one of the greatest moralists and social re- 
 formers that England has ever known. 
 
 Michael Faraday, one of the most famous scientific 
 lights of the nineteenth century, used to play marbles 
 in Spanish Place, where he was employed as errand- 
 boy at a newspaper shop. His father was a blacksmith, 
 who lived in Jacob's Well Mews in Spanish Place. 
 He used to take out his little sister for walks in Man- 
 chester Square in his free times, his busy little mind 
 occupying itself continually with all sorts of self-set 
 scientific problems. Later on he got a place as errand- 
 boy to a doctor, where his work was to take round the 
 medicines to the various patients, much to his childish 
 delight. In after years, when he became the centre of the 
 highest circles of scientific thought and discovery, and one 
 of the greatest men in England, he could never hear the 
 clang of an anvil, or the rattling together of metal tools, 
 without going back in imagination to the forge where his 
 father worked in the early scenes of his childhood. 
 
43 
 
 Macready, the actor, lived at No. i, York Place, and 
 was very friendly with Dickens. Captain Marryat, an- 
 other friend of the Dickens', lived at 3, Spanish Place, 
 from whence he used to goto No. i, Devonshire Terrace, 
 and romp with the little Dickens children by the hour. 
 
 In Chesterfield Street (No. i) lived the great Charles 
 Wesley and his beautiful and gifted wife, Sarah Wesley. 
 I am asked to devote an entire chapter to the Marylebone 
 life of this great man by several of his most ardent ad- 
 mirers. I have also been specially requested to devote a 
 whole chapter to Dickens and the Brownings respectively 
 in their connection with Marylebone, hence my omitting 
 these mighty names from the present list 
 
44 
 
 CHAP. VIII.— THE BROWNINGS IN MARYLE- 
 BONE. 
 
 By the request of an American lady and her husband, 
 I must devote a chapter to the Brownings in Maryle- 
 bone. The courteous American visitors who come and 
 visit our Parish Church have constantly expressed a 
 wish for such an account, however brief, and it is in a 
 sense of responsibility for having made many vague 
 promises as well as one definite one, that I venture to 
 take up the time of Marylebone readers with what is 
 bound in its nature to be the story of a love romance — 
 i.e., the connection of the Brownings with Marylebone. 
 The most grimly archaeological person could make no- 
 thing else of it. If you told the story of the Brownings 
 in dates, it would still be a romance ; as the story of a 
 famine is told in statistics and remains a tragedy, or the 
 story of war is told in agency bulletins and remains an 
 awful and eternal enigma. 
 
 One of the most perfect unions that has ever been 
 known, between two of the most remarkable poets in 
 the world, was brought about in our own familiar neigh- 
 bourhood, and must, therefore, take its place as part of 
 our local history. 
 
 To begin with, it will take England a century or two, 
 myriad disasters, and a revolution or so, to appreciate 
 Browning. Browning is the great epitome of energy 
 in philosophy, in poetry, in imagination. Into his soul, 
 more than into any other man's, has entered the pas- 
 sionate realization of the eternal energy of things, of 
 the universe — of the great physical world as well as the 
 spiritual. To Browning all things are vital, ardent, im- 
 portant, teeming with life and meaning, from a crater 
 to a cabbage-garden — from a Colossus to a city clerk. 
 As his most brilliant biographer says of Dante in this 
 connection, his soul has listened to " the roaring mills of 
 God." 
 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 
 " A little face like a white rose, and eyes like a spaniel's with the 
 ^niile of a seraph in them, and a mist of womanly tears," 
 

 
45 
 
 The American people, themselves energy personified, 
 have caught and grasped Browning's philosophy with an 
 enthusiasm that our cold, apathetic, pettishly-conserva- 
 tive British temperaments are at present incapable of 
 understanding. To the Americans, Browning is one of 
 the greatest philosophers the world has ever seen. To 
 us, except a mere few, he is a rather silly and very unex- 
 plainable poet, who used an enormous amount of slang, 
 and who did not write nearly such nice little jog-trot 
 rhymes as Mrs. Hemans or Doctor Watts. Just as one 
 might say Julius Ca;sar could not really be compared 
 to the Prince Consort because he could not draw so 
 elegantly in crayon, or dance so prettily. 
 
 To an England whose rising generation is capable of 
 nothing but the useless alternations of feverish excite- 
 ment and utter mental apathy — the rush for emotion and 
 the flat after-taste of it — strong, real intellectual energy 
 is unexplainable. In an age when you can be " inter- 
 viewed " in all the periodicals before you have done any- 
 thing, real energy is, of course, at a discount. To such. 
 Browning does and can mean nothing. He seems noisy 
 and tiresome, and too much in earnest. But, perhaps, 
 in about two hundred years' time it will dawn upon 
 our race that it produced in the nineteenth century the 
 greatest prophet of the energy of life that our country 
 has ever known. Till then, the American people will 
 be almost the sole pilgrims to the stone in Marylebone 
 Parish Church, at which he knelt at his marriage, and to 
 which he returned long years after, unutterably alone, to 
 kiss. 
 
 The poetess, Miss Elizabeth Barrett, who lived for a 
 time at 74, Gloucester Place, and later at 50, Wimpole 
 Street, was as celebrated in her way as Browning was 
 in his, when their romantic acquaintance came about. 
 But she was, or her relatives thought she was. a hope- 
 less invalid, doomed to a lifetime of existence in two 
 darkened rooms : with no change possible but the change 
 
.46 
 
 from the bed to the sofa and back again. In spite of 
 these gruesome conditions she was a most interesting 
 personality. She was a pretty, charming woman, with 
 long silky brown " ringlets," and large wistful brown eyes 
 like a spaniel's ; she read Greek as ordinary people read 
 English, and was the kindest, brightest, most fascinating 
 companion to her sister, Arabella, and a model daughter 
 to her stern and narrow-minded father, with whom she 
 lived. Though originally the result of an accident, her 
 illness in these days, according to Chesterton, would be 
 called "hysteria" pure and simple, and would be treated 
 in an absolutely different manner. But in the forties of 
 the last century there were no open-air cures, or com- 
 mon-sense nerve treatments, and so this strangely bril- 
 liant, graceful, gifted girl, was shut up in a kind of dark, 
 close, horrible prison of invalidism through the loving 
 but fearful ignorance of her relatives and physicians. 
 
 No friends were allowed to visit her, except only a 
 rare few and those elderly people. A perfectly delightful 
 old " gentleman of the old school," a Mr. Kenyon, and 
 the dignified and gifted writer, Miss Mitford, then a 
 lady in years, seem to be about the only people who 
 were permitted to see her in her prison ; and Miss Mitford 
 has left a few graceful words describing the charm of 
 Miss Barrett's combined beauty and intellect — the con- 
 trast of her childish and fragile appearance with her 
 extraordinary mastery of language, and masculine grasp 
 of " classics." 
 
 How she bore those long dreary years in the solemn 
 house in Wimpole Street, it is hard to imagine. Except 
 that her brilliant soul had wings and could fly to glowing 
 countries and richer centuries as a swallow flies to the 
 south and the sun, that solemn, gloomy British establish- 
 ment, with its eternally shut doors, its pompous cere- 
 monies, its grim furniture and grimmer master, its pitiless 
 and irrevocable early- Victorian" correctness" and funereal 
 splendour, must have crushed her entirely. Her sweet 
 
47 
 
 patience seems to have been as great as her talents ; yet 
 had she had a little less of it she might have escaped 
 years before from the awful thraldom of her invalid exis- 
 tence. Her father, in his own stern unexplainable way, 
 seems to have loved her. He used to go and pray over 
 her twice a day, and forbid her to rise from her sofa or 
 bed to breathe the fresh and beautiful air of God. It was 
 his idea of love, and he was sincere. Fixed firmly in his 
 lofty but limited mind was the one idea — he had a dying 
 daughter, and that daughter must be guarded like a 
 criminal from all disturbing influences, such as light, air, 
 sunshine, friends, hope, beauty, laughter and life. To his 
 lonely creed, only despair and gloom spelt goodness or 
 obedience to the will of Providence. 
 
 Therefore, if we can conceive it, Elizabeth Barrett saw 
 nothing for years in the way of landscape save the 
 chimney-pots of the opposite houses in Wimpole Street, 
 heard no music save the solemn door-bell echoing coldly 
 through the gloomy vaults of her father's mansion ; yet 
 made live, as no other poet has made live, the life, the 
 joy, the glories of old Greece, saw the fleet-footed fauns, 
 listened to the laughter of red-lipped, vine-crowned Bac- 
 chantse, and shouted aloud in her soul like a child in the 
 sun, with the glow and the splendour of a " rich dead 
 century " that she saw only with the eyes of her poet 
 spirit from behind the shut blinds of a room of suffering. 
 If Elizabeth Barrett had never written a line, she would 
 still have been a genius. 
 
 But the songs of this hidden singer were known to 
 the world when she herself was practically unheard of. 
 Robert Browning, then himself in the full glow of honours 
 and fame, had read them with keenest admiration, and 
 had made many enquiries about her personality, at last 
 finding someone who knew her, the Mr. Kenyon already 
 mentioned. This courtly old gentleman had already es- 
 tablished himself as Elizabeth Barrett's " fairy-godfather," 
 and used to go to Wimpole Street when permitted and chat 
 
48 
 
 to her in his own whimsical way about " Mr. Browning " 
 and what he said, and what he was doing, and how look- 
 ing. At this time she took only a passing interest in the 
 great poet from a personal point of view, having of course 
 never met him, but had a passionate devotion to his work. 
 He, on the other hand, seems to have felt an interest 
 in the " veiled lady " of Wimpole Street that in the light 
 of later events seemed positively prophetic. He did his 
 best to bring about a friendship. He corresponded with 
 her on the intellectual subjects that were her life, and her 
 letters in reply were charming, friendly, and humorous, 
 but gave no hint of a wish to behold her unseen corres- 
 pondent. But one day Browning suggested something 
 that was almost a blasphemy in that Wimpole Street con- 
 vent — he suggested that he should call ! She answered 
 in consternation : such a thing was quite unheard of; no 
 one ever saw her ; no one ever dreamed of seeing her ; 
 " besides," she added naively, " I am not worth seeing." 
 Browning's reply was characteristic : it was to the effect, 
 " I will call at two on Tuesday." 
 
 They met on May 20th, 1845. Shortly after, he made 
 her an offer of marriage. Again the shades of Wimpole 
 Street were thrown into consternation and flutter unspeak- 
 able. Her sister Arabella, devoted as she was, argued that 
 the thing was madness. Her father, her long array of 
 medical advisers, her many and sincerely well-meaning 
 relations rose up in one vast protesting body. Her own 
 heart alone consented. Her reason said it could not be ; 
 for she herself believed, without a shadow of doubt, that 
 she was a doomed invalid for the rest of her days, and 
 had been told repeatedly that to be moved from the house 
 alone would kill her. Browning's unutterable daring in 
 even proposing such a thing, set all her guardians and 
 relations raging ; and a year after, according to her bio- 
 grapher, she was " still living under the great family con- 
 vention which provided her with nothing but an elegant 
 death-bed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper 
 
49 
 
 daylight, forbidden to see a friend lest the shock should 
 destroy her suddenly." 
 
 But a day came when this weary life was too much 
 for her, and her physicians pronounced that she must go 
 to Italy, or die. Then her father's strange love for her 
 was tested and found wanting — he forbad the journey. 
 A lady who loved her dearly came and repeatedly 
 begged to be allowed to take her herself, but the un- 
 compromising Mr. Barrett refused. Chesterton most 
 humorously says, " he had grown to regard his dying 
 daughter as part of the furniture." And this was 
 Browning's opportunity — he wrote to her and proposed 
 again that she should marry him and elope with him to 
 Italy. 
 
 It took days and weeks, and budgets of letters to get 
 her consent to this daring scheme. But one day she 
 called her sister Arabella to her side, and asked her to 
 order the carriage, to that lady's speechless amazement. 
 Her devoted maid dressed her in an out-door garb — she 
 had hardly worn such things since childhood — and she 
 drove, accompanied by her sister, to Regent's Park, 
 alighted and walked on the grass and leaned against a 
 tree, and looked long at the leaves and the sky, thinking. 
 Then she went home and wrote off "Yes." Why, oh 
 why, is not that tree marked, singled out in some way 
 to us people of Marylebone ? Which out of the myriad 
 trees is the one against which leaned the frail form of 
 that almost dead woman solemnly emerging into life 
 out of shadows ? A slight figure in a black robe and 
 under the black "Granny" bonnet, a little face like a 
 white rose, and eyes like a spaniel's with the smile of a 
 seraph in theni, and a mist of womanly tears. 
 
 Browning was as prompt a bridegroom as he had 
 been a lover. One grey misty morning in September, 
 1846, when the solemn Barrett household was hardly 
 stirring, down the steps of 50, Wimpole Street, crept 
 two figures, two timid women, peeping furtively from 
 
 E 
 
so 
 
 side to side, and shutting the big door noiselessly. It 
 was Elizabeth and her loving maid, a good, tender- 
 hearted woman, named Elizabeth Wilson. Perhaps I 
 should say three figures, for one was a pet dog, named 
 " Flush," who had been his mistress's most faithful com- 
 panion through many years of sickness, and who seemed 
 now to recognize the occasion as romantically festive, 
 for he insisted upon perilously barking in its honour, 
 and had to be affectionately choked and muffled into 
 silence. 
 
 Along Wimpole Street, possibly up Devonshire Street, 
 and then up either Beaumont or High Street, they made 
 their fearful way to the Parish Church, coaxing the too- 
 congratulatory little dog into quieter ecstatics, and seeing 
 enemies lurk in every doorway. Up the steps, into the 
 shadows of the big church where Robert Browning stood 
 awaiting them. 
 
 What that meeting was it is impossible to describe. 
 The bridegroom had not seen the bride for a year till 
 that moment. In that year both had suffered unspeak- 
 ably. And now they were to be united. The vast 
 shades of Marylebone Church must have looked ghostly 
 on that grey morning, with no one but the clergyman, 
 the clerk, and the black-robed pew-opener to bear them 
 company. The short service was gone through, the 
 registers signed, the faithful maid kissed in a shower of 
 happy tears, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning drove 
 away for ever from her life of pain and suffering to a 
 happy home of her own under Italian skies, to restored 
 powers and restored health. 
 
 The entry of that momentous ceremony may still be 
 seen in the parish registers at Marylebone Parish Church. 
 It reads very quaintly to us who seem to have known 
 them : " September 12, 1846. Robert Browning, bachelor, 
 gentleman, of full age ; to Elizabeth Barrett Moulton 
 Barrett, spinster, of full age, daughter of Edward Barrett, 
 gentleman." It is signed by the clergyman, " Thomas 
 
SI 
 
 • 
 
 Woods Goldhawk, Curate," and the clerk, " James Sil- 
 verthorn," and the loving maid, " Elizabeth Wilson." 
 
 Browning's signature is large, daring, and definite, 
 without a flourish too much or an illegible letter : a very 
 characteristic signature, and worthy of so headstrong a 
 bridegroom. Sweet Elizabeth's signature is small and 
 cramped, with very fine strokes ; it looks a little tremu- 
 lous, as though she could not sign for tears, as though 
 her little hand had shaken like a leaf in the tempest of 
 her new joy. Such a little fluttering contrast to the 
 powerful hand above it. And, by the bye, she spells her 
 name, " Elisabeth," with an " s " instead of a " z " in 
 this wedding entry, a rather interesting point. 
 
 The old servant's name is written in an old-fashioned, 
 crabbed, and " skimpy " hand, as of one unaccustomed 
 to inscribing herself. The clerk's, in a flourishing 
 style, as became a self-respecting Bumble in the forties. 
 " Thomas Woods Goldhawk, Curate," appears to have 
 been quite official. He seems to have regarded the whole 
 affair as unnoticeable, and his signature is dashed off" 
 roughly, casually. Haply, poor man, he had no means 
 of knowing, on that dim, misty September morning, that 
 he was consecrating, perhaps, one of the most famous 
 marriages the world has ever seen. No one told him, 
 possibly, that the big, strong, ruddy-faced man, with 
 keen genial eyes, was anything more than the healthy, 
 energetic, English gentleman he looked ; and as he 
 signed himself, " Robert Browning, gentleman," not 
 "poet." Probably, also, Thomas Woods Goldhawk never 
 dreamed of reading poetry, and would not have been 
 much wiser had the little, frail, angel-faced bride, put 
 " poetess " after her tremblingly written name. At any 
 rate, he has left us no story of that quiet wedding. No 
 one will ever know, for instance, what they did with the 
 little dog. Did he stay in the vestry, or was he hidden 
 under Elizabeth Wilson's cloak ? He could not have 
 been left to yelp outside the doer — that would have been 
 
52 
 
 dangerous indeed ! Pel-haps he awaited his mistress and 
 new master in the cab outside the Church ? But, apart 
 from church decorum, one weakly likes to think he hid 
 under the maid's cloak and so was a witness to the 
 ceremony, although the name, " Flush, pet-dog," does 
 not appear in the formal entry of witnesses I 
 
 But "Thomas Woods Goldhawk, Curate," would not 
 have been thanked for proving garrulous. Indeed, such 
 a tendency would have been most dangerous, for Robert 
 Browning, though a kindly man, could be as furious as 
 Jove if anyone dared to discuss his private affairs in public. 
 Perhaps that serious clerical gentleman in his Geneva 
 gown was wise in his generation. Perhaps he thought : 
 " This is a runaway match — licence — tremulous bride — 
 tearful, agitated servant — resolute-looking man. Clearly 
 an elopement, but it's not my business." All honour to 
 him, if he was, for such a cause, laconic ! 
 
 For fifteen happy years those two lived the most 
 perfect married life the world has ever seen. Elizabeth's 
 health was restored gradually, and with care. In her 
 Italian home she wrote and worked, entertained friends, 
 climbed mountains, and became the useful, healthy, joy- 
 ful human being that heaven intended her to be. She 
 was the proud mother of a little son, and the happiest of 
 happy wives from first to last.' Her father never forgave 
 her, but her sister remained her friend. 
 
 Years afterwards, Mrs. Browning came and lived in 
 Marylebone again for a time, where she and Browning, 
 and their little son, became a centre of literary society. 
 This was at a house in Devonshire Street, but the 
 number of this house is unfortunately lost. 
 
 Many years after, when the bright and beautiful spirit 
 of his wife had gone to its eternal home. Browning, 
 stricken with grief, came back from Italy, and went 
 alone to Marylebone Parish Church and kissed the Altar 
 stone where, on the grey September morning he had 
 knelt for his marriage blessing. Americans still come 
 
S3 
 
 and kiss that stone in memory of him ; and we, all 
 English people as well as more particularly Marylebone 
 people, though we may say very little, are conscious of 
 the compliment, and tender them our sincere thanks. 
 
 I have to thank a courteous reader for the following 
 letter throwing a light on the Brownings' second sojourn 
 in Marylebone. 
 
 13, Dorset Street, Portman Square, W. 
 
 SiK, — In the fascinating article on the Brownings in relation to Old Mary- 
 lebone which appeared in the July number of the St. Marylebone Magazine, 
 the writer says that years after their marriage and residence in Italy the 
 . Brownings again lived for a time in Marylebone with their little son in a house 
 in Devonshire Street, the number of which " is unfortunately lost." It may 
 help to clear up this point, and will, I hope, be of interest both to the writer 
 of the article and the readers of the magazine, if I call attention to the dedi- 
 cation of ' ' Aurora Leigh " to John Kenyon, in which Mrs. Browning says, 
 " the last pages of which have been finished under the hospitality of your roof." 
 This dedication was dated from 39, Devonshire Place, W., October' 17th, 
 1856. A not unnatural inference would be that No. 39, Devonshire Place 
 was the residence of Mr. Kenyon, and that the Brownings extended their visit 
 to him until they left for Italy soon after, for in this same dedication Mrs. 
 Browning says that she was preparing to quit England. That in 1855 they 
 were living at 13, Dorset Street, Portman Square, is indicated in the follow- 
 ing extract from William Sharp's " Life of Browning" : — '"I remember,' 
 Browning writes, 'Tennyson reading his " Maud" one evening while Ros- 
 setti made a rapid pen-and-ink sketch of him, very good, from one obscure 
 point of vantage, which I still possess and duly value.' This (says Sharp) 
 took place at 13, Dorset Street, Portman Square, on September 27th, 1855, 
 and those present besides the Poet Laureate, Browning, and Rossetti, were 
 Mrs. Barrett Browning and Miss Arabella Barrett." I have been told that 
 previous to about the year 1887 the first floor at 13, Dorset Street was one 
 large drawing-room. It is quite possible, therefore, that this interesting 
 incident took place on that floor.— I am, Sir, faithfully yours, B. Erwin. 
 
54 
 
 CHAP. IX.— DICKENS IN MARYLEBONE. 
 
 At first sight it appears to be one of the strangest 
 spectacles in modern social development that we as a 
 nation now despise Dickens, and consider ourselves re- 
 markably intellectual for saying so, while the American 
 nation, which is, roughly speaking, the living embodiment 
 of materialism at its crudest, worships him. Dickens 
 roused in England what was in his day practically dead 
 — an appreciation of the fine gold to be found in the 
 roughest human ore, the greatness that may lie behind a 
 sordid veil, the pathos of the common-place. He told 
 of people whose lives were ordinary to squalor, dull, 
 unromantic, common, unadorned, and the marvellous 
 triumph of great human character over the dreary tread- 
 mill of circumstance. And that in an age (the forties) 
 when every respectable novelist represented the hero of 
 his book as a romantic person with at least a " fine 
 rolling eye," and Macassar oil on his " locks " — unless he 
 wanted to be called a cynic — when every lady who went 
 through any adversities (and those romantic ones) was 
 beautiful and emotional, and inclined to faint if the 
 Berlin wool-work went contrary, or the canary died : an 
 age when sorrow was not Sorrow with a capital S, 
 without the appropriate stage effects : the very real 
 unpicturesque troubles of the then submerged lower- 
 middle classes being considered by literary circles as 
 beneath notice. Those were the days when Charlotte 
 Bronte considered herself a daring and dashing inno- 
 vator — almost an iconoclast — when she courageously 
 wrote a book, " Jane Eyre," in which both hero and 
 heroine were plain-looking, and glaringly unrelated to 
 the nobility : when George Elliot, who wrote of car- 
 penters' and millers' daughters, and small provincial 
 townspeople, was considered " not nice," and was only 
 read by a few : when Thackeray, whom we now call a 
 philosopher of the most genial and delightful kind, was 
 
55 
 
 banned as a wicked cynic : when Bulwer Lytton and 
 D'Israeli were possible, and found a sale, and never, 
 never a smile : and " Cranford," which is brilliant 
 humour, was taken seriously. Then Dickens rose up, 
 and with that marvellous pen, which even to-day an 
 eminent critic says had "no style," drew picture after 
 picture of the beings he saw around him, the plainer, the 
 quainter, the poorer, the more unpicturesquely unhappy 
 the better. Or the more ordinary, or the more vulgar, 
 or the more usual the better ; anything to portray a real 
 world and not a fancy one, peopled with dukes and 
 duchesses, and adorned by virtue, tragedy, Macassar oil, 
 wool-work mats, fine rolling eyes, and gentlemen whose 
 whole moral attitude was that of a left hand in the breast 
 of the coat, the right on a scroll, and a thunderstorm, St. 
 Paul's, and a Corinthian pillar draped with crimson velvet 
 in the background. 
 
 Dickens drew the world as he saw it, and a large part 
 of the world he drew was Marylebone ; while a number 
 of the characters were genuine Marylebone portraits. 
 Someone recently suggested writing a " Who's Who " of 
 Dickens — a splendid idea if it could be at all adequately 
 carried out, and one which would show how deeply 
 Marylebone is bound up in the works of the great 
 novelist. But perhaps until it ceases to be the fashion 
 to be thought intellectual by decrying him, the project 
 had better be postponed. At present its sale would be 
 mainly in America, where, if they are materialistic, they 
 are broad-minded, and do not find that objection to 
 Dickens which was within the last few years published 
 in England in all seriousness, i.e., that he "only wrote 
 about the middle classes." 
 
 The people who come to look at No. i, Devonshire 
 Terrace, are mainly Americans — the people of the pro- 
 phet's own country pass by. Yet that house was not 
 only lived in by Dickens, for years, but was enthusiasti- 
 cally loved by him, and described in 1839 by him as "a 
 
56 - 
 
 house of undeniable situation and excessive splendour " ; 
 and from its walls came forth in the order named : " The 
 Old Curiosity Shop," " Barnaby Rudge," " American 
 Notes," " Martin Chuzzlewit," " Christmas Carols," " The 
 Chimes," " The Cricket on the Hearth," " Dombey and 
 Son," " The Battle of Life," " The Haunted Man," and 
 " David Copperfield." 
 
 At this house met many and many a brilliant and 
 merry party : the Carlyles, the Landseers, Frith, East- 
 lake, Hood, Rogers, Thackeray, Charles Knight, Marryat, 
 and Macready. There was one memorable party, when 
 Dickens, enquiring kindly after Carlyle's health, received 
 from him the mock-melancholy reply that he was a 
 " lone, lorn creature, and everything went contrairy," in 
 the words of " Mrs. Gummidge," to the ecstatic delight of 
 Dickens. Longfellow visited him here, and wrote, in 1841, 
 " I write this from Dickens's study, the focus from which 
 so many luminous things have radiated. The raven 
 croaks in the garden, and the ceaseless roar of London 
 fills my ears." 
 
 The raven alluded to is one of the Marylebone celebri- 
 ties commemorated by Dickens, for its portrait appears 
 in " Barnaby Rudge." Its real name was " Grip," and it 
 lived and died in the garden and stables of the Devonshire 
 Terrace house, so maybe reckoned as a local lion in its day. 
 It hated Topping, the groom ; it bit the children's legs, and 
 though Dickens humorously said " that was play," they 
 secretly rejoiced when it died tragically, in 1841, much 
 to the grief of its fond master, and making stern com- 
 ments on the groom to the last. Dickens and his wife 
 were almost childishly sorry to lose it, especially as it 
 was always suspected to have been poisoned by a Mary- 
 lebone butcher, whom it used to molest when he called 
 for orders. 
 
 It is, perhaps, in " Dombey and Son " that Mary- 
 lebone takes a specially important part. The church 
 mentioned there, both at the christening of Paul 
 
57 
 
 Dombey and the wedding of Mr. Dombey, is the Parish 
 Church, which, as it then was, is faithfully described. 
 Mr. Dombey himself was a gentleman well known to 
 Dickens, and alluded to by him in letters by the familiar 
 initial "A," and constantly mentioned in the directions 
 to Cruikshank, his artist, and others. Florence Dombey 
 is his own sweet daughter Kate ; Paul his own little boy ; 
 Mr. Dombey 's " corner house," so disapproved by Tow- 
 linson, is a description of the house in which Dickens 
 himself lived, in Devonshire Terrace ; the church clock, 
 which wistful little Florence thought so solemn at nights, 
 was Marylebone Parish Church clock ; while the chris- 
 tening of Paul Dombey is a description of the christening 
 of Dickens's own little boy. The clerk in this scene, of 
 which the author says, " the clerk was the only cheerful 
 person present, and he was an undertaker," is a portrait 
 of a gentleman whose name is still affectionately re- 
 membered in Marylebone, and who was a friend of 
 Dickens. I allude to Mr. William Tookey, the undertaker 
 and Crown Clerk. Delightful, philosophic, humorous 
 " Mr. Chick " is the great Macready, the actor, who lived 
 at York Gate at the time the book was written, and who 
 was also a very dear friend. When " Dombey and Son " 
 first came out in Household Words, and Macready saw 
 himself stand revealed in it, he came running round to 
 Mr. Tookey's offices in High Street, roaring with laughter, 
 and seized him by the hand and shook it violently in 
 congratulation on their mutual immortality as the clerk 
 and sponsor in " Dombey and Son." " Mrs. Miff," the 
 pew-opener in the same work, who wore a " mortified 
 bonnet " and " crackled " when she curtsied, and who 
 attended at " Mr. Dombey's " melancholy wedding, is an 
 exact portrait of the old lady who then occupied that 
 post at the Parish Church ; while " Mr. Sowndes," the 
 beadle, is also a portrait of the beadle then existing. 
 " Miss Tox " was a lady Dickens met at Lausanne 
 during a long stay there, but the remembrance of whom 
 
S8 
 
 he brought back to Marylebone ; "Major Bagstock" was 
 a gentleman who lived close to Regent's Park and who 
 Dickens knew through Macready ; and the poor little 
 " Charitable Grinder," in the tight leather " smalls," who 
 used to be sat up in the roof of the church close to a 
 great organ which " snorted " at him, was one of the 
 small boys from Marylebone Charity School, which in 
 those days included boys as well as girls. 
 
 " David Copperfield," who, as everyone knows, was 
 Dickens himself when young, was written here ; and 
 " Miss Mowcher," the dwarfi was a celebrated little 
 Marylebone lady, a corn-cutter or chiropodist, who lived 
 in a street off Regent's Park, where she had a large 
 connection. Her real name was Miss Hall. So irate 
 was this tiny little person at her portraiture that she 
 nearly dragged poor Dickens into a libel action, but he 
 . managed to pacify her with the ready tact he knew so 
 well how to use. "Agnes Wickfield " was his own sweet 
 sister-in-law, beautiful Fanny Hogarth. " Dora," accord- 
 ing to many people, is a portrait of his wife in her early 
 days, a very pretty but singularly vague and helpless 
 little lady : from Dickens's own letters there are strong 
 hints that immortal " Mrs. Nickleby " in " Nicholas 
 Nickleby," is also a portrait of Mrs. Dickens in later life. 
 Whatever may be the truth of the former assertion, it is 
 quite possible that sweet " Dora," charming as she was, 
 would have been quite likely to mature in time into the 
 amiable, fatuous, and useless babbler, " Mrs. Nickleby." 
 " Dora " in later life, without the charm of youth and an 
 angel's face, would, indeed, have been a horror, and is it 
 not quite possible that " Mrs. Nickleby " shows us the 
 particular kind of horror ? There is no doubt that 
 Dickens was unhappy in his marriage, and if the above 
 surmise be true he had reason enough. 
 
 In the " Uncommercial Traveller " he mentions the 
 Parish Chapel, describing it as the church painted by 
 Hogarth in the wedding-scene of "The Rake's Progress," 
 
59 
 
 which, of course, it is well known to be. The allusion 
 occurs in a chapter of that work called " The City of the 
 Absent," and the author relates a humorous and pathetic 
 incident of a charity boy and girl making love in the 
 graveyard, and how he rescued them from the wrath of 
 the beadle. There is also an interesting mention of the 
 then prevalent ruffianism in Regent's Park, when his 
 own little children and their nurses could not take a 
 walk there without insult and molestation from tramping 
 women and girls — an evil which he was the means of 
 eventually putting down by untiring appeals to the press 
 and continual police court charges. In the same work 
 he speaks with mock awe of the " frowning vistas of 
 Harley Street and Wimpole Street " ; which two streets 
 were, no doubt, in the far-off forties gloomier places than 
 the pleasant ones we know. 
 
 .Besides the Devonshire Terrace house, Dickens owned 
 a country house at Gad's Hill, to which he would con- 
 stantly go when he needed change. His notions of coun- 
 try visits were erratic. He would get up at one o'clock 
 in the morning, after having retired comfortably to rest, 
 dress, and set off to walk to Gad's Hill, whatever the 
 weather. In the course of such a nocturnal walk, he 
 would pick up tramping acquaintances with whom he 
 would sincerely fraternize, in order to study their words 
 and ways for future productions. Or he would be found 
 wandering the silent echoing streets of the City, at three 
 o'clock in the morning, studying vagrants at coiifee-stalls, 
 or gazing into the ghostly river, and weaving a hundred 
 new wonders in his restless, marvellous brain. His move- 
 ments could never be depended upon, except that his 
 friends might always look for the most unexpected things 
 from him ; and everybody he came across, it did not 
 matter how insigniiicant, had to beware of being por- 
 trayed faithfully in his book. He used to say, " I can't 
 help such-and-such acharacter being a portrait of so-and- 
 so. So-and-so shouldn't exist if he wants to escape por- 
 
6o 
 
 trayal. I've no grudge against him — in fact I love him, 
 he's a dear fellow. But he grew into my book." Then 
 so-and-so might say, " But, my dear Dickens, I never did 
 this or I never did that," pointing to incidents in the 
 work. At which Dickens would reply impatiently, " But 
 my dear so-and-so, you would have done both this and 
 that under given circumstances ! " This was generally 
 found unanswerable. 
 
 It was at Devonshire Terrace, one snowy winter's day, 
 that his two little girls spent hours trying to teach him 
 the polka, in preparation for a children's party they were 
 to give ; and in the small hours of the morning after the 
 lesson he woke up, and could not recollect the step that 
 he had laughingly laboured so hard to learn, so up he rose 
 in that bleak wintry atmosphere and worked at the polka 
 step on his bedroom floor, till he remembered it again and 
 could once more face his rigorous little teachers. 
 
 As everyone knows, the original Bleak House is a 
 house at Broadstairs, but it is not so generally known 
 that " Esther Summerson," its heroine, is an exact por- 
 trait of a young ward of Dickens's own — a lady who was 
 left an orphan when a mere girl, and a ward of Chancery, 
 named Esther Elton. This lady afterwards became Mrs. 
 Nash, and was the mother of the present Chaplain of the 
 Marylebone Workhouse, the Rev. J. A. Nash. Her 
 death at an advanced age, only took place quite recently. 
 The exquisite picture of " Esther Summerson," is in no 
 way an over-drawn portrait of one of the sweetest, truest, 
 and most lovable of women, to whom her guardian was 
 deeply attached, so that he could weave the beautiful 
 story of " Mr. Jarndyce's " love for his ward, with a sym- 
 pathy and simplicity that appeals to everyone. 
 
 These are but a few instances gathered at random 
 of Marylebone people portrayed in Dickens's works. 
 Space forbids a further enumeration, even if the patience 
 of readers permitted it. But there is one word more and 
 then I have done. We are apt to imagine great writers 
 
6i 
 
 who have passed away as remote, distant beings, con- 
 scious always of Olympian greatness, and taking no 
 part in ordinary daily things outside their own studies. 
 We are inclined to forget that Dickens was an ordinary 
 Marylebone gentleman with absolutely no "pose." A 
 handsome man with a keen face and merry eyes, a quick, 
 alert walk, a neatly trimmed pointed beard, and hair worn 
 a little long, after the fashion of the day, and with a natural 
 curl in it, whom one was liable to meet anywhere about 
 High Street, Regent's Park, St. John's Wood, any day, 
 fine or wet — that was Dickens as Marylebone knew him. 
 A jolly gentleman, well known to all ; as courteous to 
 a cabman as to an earl ; with a joke and a ready laugh, 
 or a sympathetic ear for everybody, and only a sudden 
 sad shadow sometimes looming over his humorous face, 
 like a cloud hiding the sun, when alone with himself 
 and his own strange knowledge of the awful mystery — 
 humanity. 
 
 He has gone from Marylebone — he has been gone many 
 a long year — but one never so much as dreams that he 
 is dead. Such souls live for ever. Not only our sincere 
 Christian belief tells us this, but something inherent in 
 our very being : a conviction, vague, intuitive, unreason- 
 ing and perfectly absolute, which is proof against all 
 doubt, or possibility of doubt, that all that was best and 
 grandest in this most gifted of men, still lives on, and 
 works on, and will so live when the Marylebone we know 
 is forgotten. 
 
62 
 
 CHAP. X.— CHARLES WESLEY IN MARYLE- 
 BONE. 
 
 A GOOD man's glory is his absolute belief in God : Charles 
 Wesley's religion was higher than this — he believed in 
 God absolutely and in man passionately. His faith was 
 the unutterable belief in humanity which belongs to those 
 who have been in the heights and in the depths. One 
 needs to be first an archangel to understand the human 
 soul as Charles Wesley understood it. 
 
 Before coming to the familiar, happy, cheery social life 
 of Charles Wesley as a burgher of Marylebone, one would 
 like to ask, For what does the world call him famous ? 
 
 In my own perhaps insignificant judgment, it would 
 have been enough to exalt him into a great man simply 
 to have written one of his hymns, " Jesu, lover of my soul." 
 That alone makes him into a peerless moral teacher and 
 an immortal, just as Cardinal Newman is immortal simply 
 for having written, " Lead, kindly Light," that wild, lone 
 cry of a soul in the darkness, apart from all his poems, 
 philosophies, theologies, and apologies. Or the dying 
 Henry Francis Lyte for his never-to-be-forgotten glorious 
 prayer, " Abide with me, fast falls the eventide." 
 
 To begin with, Charles Wesley was a poet, after that 
 a saint. Had he chosen to devote himself to " profane " 
 poetry, he would have ranked as an English classic in 
 literature, as he now does in hymnology. And he may 
 be certainly called the creator of a new epoch in hymno- 
 logy and the founder of a deathless school of hymns — 
 the human school. In those days there were no Keble, 
 no Caswall, no Faber : these writers, great as they are, 
 followed Wesley's inspiration. Centuries before him, 
 St. Bernard, from the stillnesses of his white cloister at 
 Clairvaulx had flooded Europe with the golden glow of 
 his heavenly songs, " Jerusalem the golden," " For thee, 
 O dear, dear country," " Ah, my sweet home, Jerusalem," 
 and, like the cry of a wearied spirit after a spent emotion. 
 
Charles Weshsy. 
 
 " He would jog ali?ng the lanes and meads of Maiylebone, those 
 heavenljr son^ ringing in his ears," 
 
■ 63 
 
 " Brief life is here our portion," and " The world is very 
 evil." All these the beautiful or melancholy communings 
 of a white-robed, white-souled Cistercian abbot. 
 
 Then the hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, like organ 
 music or deep, rich stained windows in their relation to 
 other sacred songs, must always hold their own through 
 the ages for pure doctrine, solid majesty, and sonorous 
 dogma. Of these, " Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle," 
 is perhaps the most gorgeous, with its terrible verse, 
 " Crux fidelis," the clarion-like" Urbsbeata," or " Blessed 
 city, heavenly Salem," and the solemn and seldom heard 
 Communion hymn, " Adoro te." 
 
 These hymns are ecclesiasticism in the concrete : they 
 are only heard to perfection in their original Latin, and 
 they need great cathedrals with dim, lofty roofs and 
 solemn forests of carved and fretted arches, and all the 
 splendour of a mighty Church ceremonial, before they 
 can be fully understood. 
 
 St. Thomas Aquinas expressed the Church on earth, 
 the Church of his day, the mediaeval Church in all its 
 splendour, awe, dogma, and mystery : St. Bernard of 
 Clairvaulx, the Church in Heaven the vision of the 
 future : Charles Wesley, just the Church that is in every 
 human soul — the possibility of the union between man 
 and his God. But strangely enough to a vast number of 
 present-day people, Charles Wesley's name is vaguely 
 confused with his brother John's, or else he is credited 
 with having been an i8th century religionist, a preacher 
 and good minister. Yet such praise, though intrinsi- 
 cally true, is equivalent to calling Michael Angelo "a 
 pretty artist," or Wagner "a nice musician." A lady 
 once said the Coliseum was " nice " ; and one has 
 heard similar critics describe a thunderstorm as " noisy " 
 and the sea as " tiresome." To such Charles Wesley 
 was a Wesleyan preacher, a "nice" preacher, but in- 
 ferior to his brother John in that respect ; a shadow, 
 rather weakly cast of his brother John : a kind of fraternal 
 
64 
 
 anti-climax. Devout Wesleyans know better, but the 
 average Church of England worshipper goes away as a 
 rule with this or a similar impression. There is also a 
 vague idea prevalent that the trio of great and good men 
 who led the Revivalist Movement in the i8th century 
 were three preachers each vying with the other in pulpit 
 oratory to the glory of John Wesley, the moderated 
 praise of George Whitfield, and the almost extinguished 
 fame of Charles. 
 
 As a matter of fact, that great revivalist upheaval was 
 worked by a far more concrete and definite organisation 
 than three random rival preachers. To John, as the 
 moving spirit, the main glory is due. John Wesley is 
 believed in now as men believe in St. Paul, and rightly. 
 
 But his extraordinary power lay less in his preaching, 
 regarded as a showy talent, than in his almost super- 
 natural personal magnetism, genius for organisation, 
 and his character for undeniable and absolute saintliness. 
 It is now put forth that of the three evangelists, Whit- 
 field was strictly the most talented orator, pure and 
 simple ; and had the movement depended on mere wordy 
 eloquence, he would now be accounted the greatest. But 
 Charles was the " singer " of the mission, and though a 
 powerful preacher, it is in his hymns that his genius is 
 manifested, and it was through them that he preached 
 as mightily as either of his fellow labourers : some say 
 more so, for he preaches still. 
 
 To understand this power, we must remember that the 
 majority of the early followers of the Wesleys were poor 
 people, unlettered and untaught, many of them unable 
 to write their own names. To such an ignorant, hungry 
 crowd, what must have been those human, kindly, sym- 
 pathetic hymns, with their easy style and dogma, their 
 generous encouragement, their simple consolation ? 
 
 " Soldiers of Christ, arise ! " for instance, must have 
 marked to them a new era in hymnology altogether, 
 with its spirited call to individual life and energy. 
 
6s 
 
 " Hark ! the herald angels sing," is another which must 
 have come with a freshness and vigour quite unknown. 
 The ancient Catholic carols, happily revived for us, were 
 unknown to the majority of poor folk in the 1 8th century, 
 who must have almost heard the song of the " herald 
 angels " over again in Wesley's beautiful words. " Love 
 divine, all love excelling," is an exquisitely sympathetic 
 fragment, and " Hail the day that sees Him rise," a 
 trumpet-call to courage and fresh effort. And how he 
 must have completely gathered up and soothed all the 
 sorrows of those tired, ignorant lives, with the now ad- 
 mittedly divine words of " Jesu, lover of my soul." One 
 can see now the breathless crowds of pit " Geordies," toil- 
 worn and half-stupefied with the long battles with poverty 
 and squalor ; the weary, bedraggled women ; the un- 
 kempt babies, and ill-clad, half-wild children ; the tired 
 old folk, sitting apart, and shaking palsied heads over 
 the life-long riddle of hopelessness, oppression, hunger, 
 and pain. All the grim signs and hall-marks of that 
 century when England's poorer classes were the most 
 trodden-down, ill-cared for, brutalized rabble in Europe 
 according to Meiklejohn. And one can see John the 
 preacher, cameo-faced, white-headed, and passionately 
 inspired, exhorting in their midst ; and Charles the 
 singer, sturdy, kindly, handsome: a little man, with a 
 face strangely like Balzac's, with the steadfastness of 
 Milton, and the burning eyes of Isaiah, leading the sing- 
 ing, when the sermon was over and the hearts of those 
 desolate creatures stirred unspeakably. What a song 
 for the uncared-for poor of all days — 
 " Other refuge have I none : 
 
 Hangs my helpless soul on Thee ; 
 
 Leave, ah ! leave me not alone, 
 
 Still support and comfort me. 
 
 All my trust on Thee is stay'd : 
 
 All my help from Thee I bring ; 
 
 Cover my defenceless head 
 
 With the shadow of Thy wing." 
 
66 
 
 How warm and strangely comforting the words must 
 have lingered in those long-neglected hearts, when the 
 stars had come out in the roof of that simple temple " not 
 made with hands," whose floor was the sweet-smelling 
 grass, whose walls the woodbine-covered hedges, long 
 after the sounds of prayer and praise had died away on 
 the still evening air, and the two evangelists had wended 
 their way to their humble lodging in the hush of the star- 
 light, and of the peace which passeth all understanding. 
 
 My brief narrative professes to deal only with the life 
 of Charles Wesley in Marylebone. I will, therefore, pass 
 over his early years, his life at Westminster School, his 
 subsequent ordination as a clergyman of the Church of 
 England, and following that, his long toiling hand-in-hand 
 with his brother in the great Revivalist cause : the cause 
 which cut them off, against their own will, from the church 
 of their profession, and almost forced them into a division 
 that they so little contemplated in their earlier days. 
 
 I also pass over the long missionary work, first in 
 Georgia, and afterwards in the provinces, and come to 
 the time when Charles Wesley found himself summoned 
 to the metropolis, to assist in the great work at the City 
 Road Chapel. He was then living at Bristol, working 
 hard on very little means, with a family of five children, 
 when the command came to seek for souls in fresh fields. 
 He had, quite early in his career, married a lady of great 
 beauty and good position, the famous Sarah Wesley, who 
 had herself left a happy and luxurious home to follow 
 the fortunes of the man she loved and help him in his 
 mission. 
 
 At this time, of course, he had many more than spiritual 
 cares : his anxieties were great, and his large family grow- 
 ing up to the age when all the means he possessed were 
 required for their education. His wife worked and toiled 
 cheerfully enough, but even her charming, dauntless spirit 
 could not make both ends always meet. She taught her 
 boys music, as she was well qualified to do, and gave 
 
67 
 
 "lessons" to all her little ones, besides making and 
 mending all their clothes, attending to her household 
 affairs, and assisting her husband in his ministry to the 
 poor and the sick. She was a jewel of a woman, whose 
 brave, merry courage never flagged, and whose goodness, 
 culture and beauty must have shed a constant lustre of 
 joy and happiness round her wherever she went. 
 
 But even she wondered what future lay before them 
 in the strange city : where and how they would all live. 
 Her sweet mother's prayers must have risen morning, 
 noon, and night to the Eternal Fatherhood to provide 
 for her helpless brood and her toiling husband, as such 
 women's prayers do rise. 
 
 And the romance of the Christian life is unfathom- 
 able : for one day a letter came from a Mrs. Gumley, a 
 lady of wealth and a good Wesleyan, whose deep and 
 sincere friendship for Charles and his wife was of long 
 standing — she asked to be allowed to present them with 
 a house in London. The house was in Marylebone: 
 No. I, Great Chesterfield Street, and she proposed to 
 hand it over to them for their life use. With almost 
 tears of gratitude, they accepted this generous offer, and 
 shortly after settled up their affairs and came to London, 
 Charles and his elder boy going first to reconnoitre, and 
 his wife following with their little ones and such quaint 
 and modest furniture as they possessed ; sweet Sarah, 
 perhaps, silently wondering whether it would fit the large 
 London house at all, and privately planning what she 
 would do with a wilderness of bare rooms to make them 
 "home" for her dear ones. Travelling in those days was 
 no light matter. What days and nights they must have 
 spent trundling along the bad roads ! What sacrifices they 
 must have made for one another — the tired children, the 
 frugal means, the untried future, the unknown way, and, 
 from the wife's point of view, an extra care in that 
 brilliant father, who must be kept from undue anxiety 
 or material worry — the dear grey head that must lie in 
 
68 
 
 peace at night for the sake of the great mission, what- 
 ever her own toil. 
 
 Gallant Sarah Wesley ! With her brave serene mind, 
 her strong grasp of present needs, her child's faith in 
 God, what a ministering angel she must have been on 
 that weary journey. One can almost see her calm, clear 
 eyes, her smooth brow, her lovely face, as, her many 
 charges put to rest, she sat and tried to read in the night 
 sky something of their future home. Of all the Maryle- 
 bone ghosts this is to me the dearest ! But when at last 
 she got to Marylebone, what a joy awaited her ! for, 
 instead of an empty, echoing house, whose cold boards 
 clanked a mockery of " home," she found it fully fur- 
 nished with everything they could want, by the friend 
 who knew them so well that she had made a " study " for 
 the master, and put a spinet in the wide old oak parlour 
 for Mistress Wesley's use ! She was a friend indeed, and 
 deserves to be remembered among friends for all time. 
 
 That old house is no more. Legend says it was a wide, 
 roomy, oak-panelled old symphony in bricks and mortar, 
 dating from the prim and architecturally peaceable days 
 of Anne. It had, tradition says, wide old windows opening 
 outwards, with leaded panes, lalack oak beams, red tiles, 
 and open fire-places ; also a beautiful front door, and a 
 garden for pinks, Virginia-stocks," honesty," and lavender 
 to grow in fragrant comfort. Marylebone was then a 
 large growing village or country suburb : fields and lanes 
 blossoming in dog-roses and buttercups stretched and 
 wound about the Wesleys' home, and the River Bourne 
 running through York Gate and across Oxford Street no 
 doubt shone silver on their horizon. As the centre of 
 Charles Wesley's greatest work, as the cradle of the 
 loveliest hymns in the world, as the place which once 
 enshrined as in a casket so much sanctity, genius, and 
 grace, this house should surely have remained sacred. 
 If only as the sweet spot in which once dwelt a perfect 
 Christian family, this lovely place might have been pre- 
 served, a Bethel in a Babel. 
 
69 
 
 But to the bland vandal of the age called Early Vic- 
 torian, what, save his own pocket, was sacred ? That fair 
 place, echoing with sweet and hallowed memories, was 
 pulled down by hands that we cannot now execrate be- 
 cause they are too insignificant to have been remembered ; 
 and, heaven alone knows for what rhyme or reason, in its 
 place was built a house, or row of houses, whose supreme 
 severity leaves nothing to be suggested or desired in that 
 way. No. i, all that now remains where once Wesley's 
 home stood, is a tall, narrow strip of a house, and pro- 
 bably dates from about 1850 ; it has a lofty, narrow door- 
 way, a passage like a " Tube " tunnel, and an unlovely 
 exterior. It is let out in " floors " to poor families, and 
 stands next door to a public-house. The pilgrim who 
 goes to muse sadly upon this Ichabod, feels a fresh pang 
 because of the poor little unwashed children who loiter 
 about the door and staircase. There is no trace of Wesley 
 save in the name of the street two doors away — Wesley 
 Street ; this also a slum, mediocre, and drab. 
 
 Yet on this identical spot, though in far, far other sur- 
 roundings, Charles Wesley lived for seventeen usefuljyears, 
 working, writing, preaching, and loving, as was his happy 
 way. Green fields stretched from Chesterfield Street to 
 Whitfield's Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road ; and 
 Marylebone Road, then called the New Road, was in those 
 days but a country highway. He kept a plump white pony, 
 or cob, to carry him to and fro about his parochial business 
 or to the chapel, and was a familiar figure in the lanes and 
 byways of Marylebone in his blue coat, which he wore for 
 many years, his riding-boots and his broad hat : a hand- 
 some portly man, shorter and somewhfit stouter than his 
 brother John, with decisive, aquiline features, keen blue 
 eyes, and long white hair falling on either side of his clean- 
 shaven, kindly face. It was on the back of this white cob 
 that many of his hymns were composed. He would jog 
 along the lanes and meads of Marylebone, those heavenly 
 songs ringing in his ears, his face absorbed and brooding, 
 so that he got quite a name for unconsciously " cutting " 
 
70 
 
 his best friends. When he arrived, on these occasions, at 
 any house, he would rush in and call for " paper, paper," 
 eagerly set down his flying but precious thoughts, and 
 this done, turn and greet with his blessing the inmates 
 of the house he had so oddly invaded ! He had a name 
 for being eccentric in his manners, and perhaps we may 
 admit that he earned it. 
 
 His two sons, Charles and Samuel, inherited their 
 mother's musical talent, and afterwards became celebrated 
 musicians, Charles being the first organist at Marylebone 
 Parish Church and a composer of no small merit, while 
 Samuel became a yet more celebrated composer, and is 
 described in Naumann's " History of Music" as "great." 
 Before he wae three years old he played the harpsichord 
 with great accuracy, and in after years he became the 
 first English interpreter of Bach. Mrs. Wesley had a 
 clear, bell-like voice, her husband a full baritone ; and 
 sweet, indeed, must have been those famous musical 
 evenings in the old Chesterfield Street house, when such 
 an odd party as Arne, Arnold, Doctor Johnson, Lord 
 Mansfield, Lord Mornington, the Bishop of London, and 
 the Danish Ambassador mingled amicably together in 
 the spell of Handel's divine harmonies, and the spell of 
 Charles and Sarah Wesley's presence. 
 
 Handel's own harpsichord stood in the place of honour 
 in the dim oak-panelled parlour, the mo.st precious pos- 
 session of the younger Charles Wesley ; and beautiful 
 Sarah, that fair and famous matron, must have made a 
 picture as she stood in her prim Quaker garb of grey, 
 with cap, kerchief, and folded hands, to sing " I know 
 that my Redeemer liveth," while the boy Charles ac- 
 companied her on the master's own instrument, and out 
 of the shadows of the wide old room lighted by candles 
 in silver " stocks," shone the faces of the learned, the 
 great, and the wise : giant Johnson and brilliant Arne, 
 hushed alike into rapt silence, in the summer dusk, when 
 the scent of clove-pinks wafted in from the still garden, 
 and far away came the low of distant kine. 
 
71 
 
 From this centre Charles Wesley held many open-air 
 services, preaching sometimes at York Gate, then Mary- 
 lebone Fields, by the river Bourne ; sometimes near the 
 Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street ; and near the Tyburn 
 Gibbet, now the Marble Arch. He must have looked with 
 stern disapproval at the Marylebone Gardens, so near his 
 house, and slowly becoming more unruly and less savoury, 
 and his sufferings and jeopardy during the famous Gor- 
 don riots are a chapter in themselves. 
 
 In Chesterfield Street he was often visited by his more 
 famous brother John, the father of the movement, who 
 also lived in London, and whose own unhappy domestic 
 life must have made his brother's manage seem like a 
 paradise. It was in this house that the energetic, ter- 
 magant Mrs. John Wesley secured her husband and 
 brother-in-law in a room, by bolting the door and put- 
 ting her back to it, and set to work in good earnest to 
 charge them roundly with their faults, real and imaginary. 
 Upon which Charles's ready wit rose to the occasion : in 
 his rich, loud baritone voice he suddenly commenced 
 quoting the yEneid in Latin with an aspect of mock fury, 
 hurling out the rolling syllables as he alone had the ready 
 facility to do. With a shriek that she was being cursed, 
 the angry woman tore open the floor and fled, frightened 
 out of her wits. She left her brother-in-law's faults alone 
 after that. Even saints have a sense of humour ! 
 
 He lived to an honoured old age. His children grew 
 up around him respected and loved, some of them dis- 
 tinguished : his wife an ornament to her sex and a 
 pattern of perfect Christian matronhood. When, after 
 his long, useful, and beautiful life the Angel of Death 
 called him, he sent for the Rector of Marylebone, the 
 Hon. and Rev. John Harley, later Bishop of Hereford 
 and brother of the famous Harley, Earl of Oxford, and 
 said to him, " Sir, whatever the world may say of me, I 
 have lived and I die a member of the Church of Eng- 
 land. I pray you bury me in your churchyard." The 
 Rector, all honour to him, consented to do so. Charles 
 
72 
 
 Wesley departed this life on Saturday, March 29, 1788, 
 and his body was carried to Marylebone Churchyard, 
 the pall borne by eight clergymen of the Church of 
 England. Hundreds of his own people followed him to 
 his resting-place in the old Parish Churchyard, though 
 not a little controversy arose over his place and manner 
 of burial : John Wesley and others considering it some- 
 what of a falling-back from the bold line they had 
 taken ; and some Church of England divines resenting 
 what they were pleased to call the return, at his death, 
 of a stray sheep from their ecclesiastical fold ! There 
 is something almost laughable, something ironical, in 
 that inevitable, small, human squabble over the last 
 hallowed remains of a man whose great soul belonged 
 neither to time nor party. Church nor Church faction : 
 who was the priest of Humanity, the minister to fallen 
 manhood, the preacher of Christ, not creed. Whose only 
 temple was — 
 
 "That cathedral, boundless as our wonder, 
 "Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply, 
 Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder, 
 Its dome the sky." 
 
 And there under a plane tree in a little dark shady 
 churchyard he lies, while outside the iron rails the race 
 of life and noise and traffic whirls ceaselessly on. 
 
 But year by year good Americans come and visit that 
 sacred place ; and good English Wesleyans too, only 
 these more rarely. 
 
 It is a very ugly tomb. The earlier Wesleyans placed 
 a simple stone over their dear Father in God ; the more 
 ambitious Wesleyans of the fifties or sixties erected in 
 all sincerity a very hideous kind of Cleopatra's needle 
 in its place, which has turned in the course of years a 
 shabby drab and sorely needs cleaning or restoring. 
 Round it a few white stocks and marigolds linger 
 weedily, and the dirty London sparrows are rather fond 
 
73 
 
 of it as a public ground for consultations, love-making, 
 or fights. 
 
 John Wesley and George Whitfield lie in the yard of 
 the City Road Chapel : but in Westminster Abbey is a 
 tablet erected to the memory of the Wesleys which in 
 exquisite beauty, pathos, and dignity has hardly its 
 equal, and compensates somewhat for those lonely and 
 divided graves. The faces of the two brothers appear 
 side by side, bas-relief profiles — those cameo-like faces, 
 the strongly-drawn masculine contour of Charles ; the 
 fine, exquisite, pure outline of John : looking earnestly 
 forward as they looked in life. Two brothers, whose love 
 for one another was great, " passing the love of women," 
 who worked hand in hand, who died in harness, and who 
 will be remembered so long as the world remembers the 
 two Boanerges, John and James, who walked together 
 through the golden harvest-fields of Galilee. 
 
74 
 
 CHAP. XI.— CONCLUSION. 
 
 If you allow anything imperishable sufficient time, it 
 will become valuable, only you must not be impatient — 
 it must be granted a full maximum of years to prove 
 its merits. A hundred years ago quite educated people 
 pulled down their houses, criss-crossed with black oak 
 beams, and tiled in soft reds that no " art " firms can 
 now imitate, to build imitation Roman or Greek villas 
 in stucco, with mean banisters and hollow Corinthian 
 pillars, like pipes. They did not value their quaint and 
 beautiful abodes — these were not old enough to have 
 become valuable. Now they would fetch any price. In 
 some far, dim future, a day will dawn when what we even 
 now call " Early Victorian " and frightful, will evolve 
 into a cult, and will command any money. It is not easy 
 to suppose it, because we are but human and limited in 
 our vision after all, but there will come a period when 
 impossible wax flowers under bell-glasses, " shell-work " 
 frames, and bad imitation engravings of " Bolton Abbey " 
 or the " Hunted Stag," will be collected by virtuosi, and 
 lectured upon enthusiastically by Ruskins-to-be. They 
 will have their value as exponents of an epoch. Every 
 beaded wool-work stool, every black horse-hair suite 
 with its black sofa like a tomb, will have its niche and 
 perhaps its real admirers. So that, given about eighty 
 years, or perhaps a hundred, to mellow, any object may 
 become a prize. 
 
 In the same way social periods improve by keeping. 
 The Johnsonian age is now raved about by literary 
 people who would have been, secretly, very sorry to have 
 had to pay for their literary fame by almost certain 
 beggary, as was usually the case then. It is, however, 
 old enough to have managed to get its drawbacks for- 
 gotten. The days of " satin and patches " are extolled in 
 song, play, and story, because they are so far past that 
 minor drawbacks, such as the lawless streets, the intem- 
 
75 
 
 perate vulgarities, and the defective sanitation, are left out 
 of count. Even a later age — the early quarter of the 
 nineteenth century^-is now held up in sincere admiration 
 because it is pretty well out of the personal memory 
 of most men ; and is commemorated in miniatures, in 
 Sheraton tables, and all the fashionable bric-a-brac, real 
 or imitation, which one now sees everywhere. 
 
 But the age still to be revived in all its glory is the 
 Victorian — and perhaps it is not yet quite old enough. 
 It will be interesting when it is. The first young and 
 modish lady, for instance, to wear a cap (in the house), 
 like a windmill, with two lace lappets hanging from it 
 which require constant rolling in the fingers, will create 
 a sensation unspeakable ; also, when Messrs. Maple first 
 seriously suggest black horse-hair for one's new dining- 
 room, and put green glasses on the mantel-piece with 
 " spills " in them, it will be a day to be remembered. 
 In the natural course of things, something of the kind is 
 bound to come ; but meanwhile the early Victorian age 
 lies in the lumber-room, consequently, my small historical 
 summary having now reached it, I draw to a close, know- 
 ing that no one pretends to care for a period so raw as 
 to be under eighty years old. 
 
 Marylebone's history has not ceased — it is building it- 
 self up day by day, as fast as it ever did in the days that 
 we now call picturesque ; but in the rush and whirr of 
 the machinery one cannot yet analyse the product ; a 
 day will come when others will do that for us, therefore, 
 my present task is over. 
 
 One or two threads I must gather up before closing, 
 though I fancy they refer to facts about which all my 
 readers are as well acquainted as myself, perhaps better. 
 One is, the great fact that Marylebone is one of the cele- 
 brated homes of Cricket as an international game, and that 
 the nursery, as it were, of Lord's, now famous all over 
 the world, was Dorset Square. There, until 1814, a small 
 green owned by one Lord, the keeper of a small beer- 
 
76 
 
 house adjoining, was the ground of the Marylebone 
 Cricket Club, as everyone knows, the forerunner of the 
 M.C.C. In 1814 the rapid growth of handsome houses 
 and squares, following on the development of Regent's 
 Park under the Prince Regent made a move necessary, 
 and Mr. Lord next rented a portion of the Park itself, 
 called the North Bank, for the cricket matches. This 
 was shortly replaced by a more satisfactory and per- 
 manent ground, one of the fields lying towards Hamp- 
 stead, which gradually grew into the Lord's we know so 
 well. This was first fenced round with wood, as the old 
 pictures show, and gentlemen attired in white flannel 
 cricketing clothes and high top hats played matches, one 
 would imagine under some difficulties ! Later on, fashion 
 apparently gave way to utility, for even in 1820 prints 
 appeared showing the gallant cricketers divided on the 
 subject of hats — half wearing cricket caps very like a 
 cross between those we know and a jockey's cap, the 
 other half clinging desperately to the tall black " chimney- 
 pots." A little later the cricketing caps won the day 
 and the tall hats were laid for ever on the shelf, together 
 with the curved bats and abbreviated wickets of those 
 early cricketing days. 
 
 Regent's Park was, as everybody knows, built under 
 the auspices of the Prince Regent, and was designed 
 with great care with a view to its being an aristocratic 
 and healthy suburb, looking as it did straight over 
 Marylebone Fields. Portland Place was intended as an 
 approach to it, and Regent Street as a handsome and 
 ornamental continuation of Portland Place, connecting 
 the Park with the grand avenue of Buckingham Palace. 
 A summer palace was to have been built for the Sove- 
 reign in Regent's Park, but this was never brought about. 
 It is interesting to reflect that Regent Street, that boule- 
 vard of shops, was not intended entirely for shops, but 
 was partly designed for the town houses of the nobility. 
 It is still quite easy to trace the resemblance between 
 
77 
 
 the upper parts of the Regent Street buildings and the 
 white houses in Regent's Park, and to see how beautiful 
 and extensive was the design of those dead-and-gone 
 builders, though much of it has fallen through in the 
 course of the years. There is no doubt that but for their 
 forethought and care this most unique and picturesque 
 district of London would have become by this time a 
 mass of densely packed streets and shops. There are 
 some ghosts one would like to shake hands with. 
 
 We have the great Mrs. Siddons to thank for Clarence 
 Gate, by a very strange chance that is not without its 
 humour. Her house, which still stands at the top of 
 Upper Baker Street, commanded a lovely view of the 
 far-stretching Marylebone Fields when it was built, and 
 she was accustomed to entertain her friends in the quaint 
 old parlour, whose wide windows looked over such a 
 smiling and pastoral scene. The Prince Regent's plans 
 for Regent's Park filled her with dismay, for in the 
 original design Cornwall Terrace was continued un- 
 brokenly, and joined to Clarence Terrace, thus shutting 
 out all Mrs. Siddons's lovely prospect. The " Stone God- 
 dess " was not without resource, however ; instead of 
 agitating, raving, and protesting, she simply wrote in her 
 own direct sincere fashion to the Prince Regent himself 
 — a pretty letter, naively stating the case, and pleading 
 in a placid and quite unabashed manner for her right to 
 her pretty view of " the country." She won her point 
 without further effort. The Regent was a gallant man, 
 and Sarah Siddons was so beautiful, so queenly, and so 
 talented, that her quiet request came as a command from 
 a goddess : Clarence Gate was designed, and to her 
 death Mrs. Siddons feasted her eyes on the smiling pas- 
 tures her artist-soul delighted in so truly. 
 
 Of course there are endless more things to say about 
 Marylebone, and of course its history did not cease in 
 the forties of the last century ; but there is a limit to the 
 patience of even the kindest readers, and enough has 
 
78 
 
 been told in these eleven chapters to give a general idea 
 of the story of our Borough to those who were not before 
 acquainted with it. I have tried to give an outline of 
 its human or social history rather than a solemn collec- 
 tion of data, dull alike to readers and writer. I have in 
 no way professed to write anything approaching the tre- 
 mendous seriousness of a regular history, or even a 
 strictly historical account of the place : from the first I 
 have endeavoured as sincerely as possible to deal with 
 the purely human aspect of Marylebone's story ; an 
 aspect which is ever new, ever varying and ever capable 
 of fresh comment or extension, since the study of human 
 character is the most illimitable science in the world. 
 These dead and gone men and women are landmarks 
 as it were in the great dim wastes of the past : from the 
 study of their individual experience we unconsciously 
 study the times they lived in, and perhaps equally un- 
 consciously learn by philosophic comparison more about 
 our own. They built up in their day what is now handed 
 down to us to continue building. Patiently, solemnly, 
 wisely, in the main, though perhaps with many mistakes 
 and many falls, they tried to do what we are still trying 
 to do, what we are bound to do whether we will or no, 
 for not one unit in our crowd can avoid playing his part 
 in the history of his borough or his day. It is rather a 
 solemn thought, that perhaps those earlier builders can 
 see what stones we are adding to their walls with that 
 now clearer vision of theirs which sees that the house 
 wherein the Lord hath no building is labour lost : Ex- 
 cept the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but 
 in vain. 
 
 And out of the solemn procession of grey ghosts of 
 Marylebone, many voices echo to us down the years — 
 the sonorous voice of old Samuel Johnson in solemn 
 warning and stern exhorting to duty, truth, and right ; 
 the clarion voice of Browning to energy ; the laughing 
 voice of Dickens, with the sound of tears in it, to charity 
 
79 
 
 and humanity ; the gentle voice of Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning to earthly love, the angel voice of Adelaide 
 Anne Proctor to divine. Elizabeth Montagu sends a 
 grave summons to wisdom ; Sarah Wesley to Christian 
 wifehood and lovely womanliness ; James Boswell to 
 perfect friendship ; William Turner to steady industry ; 
 and Pitt, Burke, and Hogarth, to manly public spirit 
 and social reform. So every voice speaks to us its own 
 special teaching and lesson, an innumerable cloud of 
 witnesses ; and last but not least the herald voice of the 
 divine Charles Wesley singing down the years' distances 
 those deathless hymns, which are a trumpet-call to 
 brotherly love and unity : 
 
 " Let Saints on earth in concert sing 
 With those whose work is done, 
 For all the servants of our King, 
 In heaven and earth are one. 
 
 One family we dwell in Him, 
 One Church above, beneath, 
 Though now divided by the stream : 
 The narrow stream of death." 
 
 THE END. 
 
PniNTED JJY 
 
 WILLIAM K. BOWDEN, (POEMHELY PBINTRR TO THE LATK WILLIAM MORIlia, 
 
 AT THE KELM9C0TT PRBSS), 
 
 17, EAST 3TnEBT, KAKCHKSTBR SQUARE, 
 
 LONiKJX, vr, 
 
 4- 
 
Uniform with this Volume. 
 
 ^.^sDESCRIPTION AND HISTORY OF THE 
 CHURCH OF ST. MARY MAGDALENE ^^ 
 MUNSTER SQUARE LONDON N.W- COM- 
 PILED BY TOM E. SEDGWICK.^9.-^^=56«5ft^ 
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 dalene, by R. Norman Shaw,R.A.; On the Services 
 oftheChurch,bythcRev.W.H.H.Jcrvois,M.A.,and 
 on the Schools, by J. A. Chalk. 
 
 The Appendix includes Extracts from the Writings 
 of thelateRev. Edward Stuart, five Mediaeval Hymns 
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 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS..^ 
 
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 tories would prove eminently useful A good ac- 
 count of the schools. 
 
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 Daily Chronicle: Prettily produced, careful and very 
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 Church Bells: An interesting volume. 
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 terest. The historyof this particular church is largely 
 the history of the High Church revival in London. 
 Home Counties Magazine: Of great interest....Very 
 heartily we commend this little book to all interested 
 in church architecture and church extension. 
 
 London: HENRY J. GLAISHER, 57 Wigmore 
 Street, Cavendish Square, W. Tel. 74 Mayfair. 
 
A LIST OF WORKS 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
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 57, WIGMORE STREET, CAVENDISH SQUARE, LONDON, W. 
 
 Beady Shortly. 
 OULLINGWORTH, Charles J., M.D., D.C.L., F.R.C.P. 
 
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 and Obstetrician of the Eighteenth Century, 
 An Address delivered before the Medical Society of Man- 
 chester, October 7th, 1903. Demy 8vo, illustrated, cloth. 
 
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 When the Devil Drives, A Comedy Satire. Fcap. 8vo, 
 wrapper. Price Is. 6d. net; by post. Is. 9d. 
 
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 of fashion It is interesting to read and has many witty strokes 
 
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 " I should like to quote, but space forbids, the whole of ' Monsieur 
 
 Methuselah,' that delightful bit of eigliteenth-century brocade.' 
 
 —Truth. 
 " Carries off his work with the aid of a quiet humour and natural- 
 ness of dialogue. "^ — Daily News. 
 " May be commended to amateurs. In a ' Prank of Cupid ' we have 
 
 a lively picture of eighteenth-century majmeis."— Morning Post. 
 
2 57, Wigmore Street, Cavendish Square, London, W. 
 
 TOYNBEE, 'Willia.va.—WorJcs by, continued. 
 
 On Oaten Flute, and Other Versicles. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 
 
 gilt top. Price 2s. 6d. net ; by post, 2s. 8d. 
 "Has a keen eye for the gladness of life and the beauties of 
 
 Nature."— JForW. 
 " His sonnets have a note of distinction." — Westminster Review. 
 " Exquisite as impressions of peace and beauty." — Daily News. 
 " Among the most careful of lyrists." — Literature. 
 " He loves Nature, and is alive to many of her changing moods." — 
 
 Morning Post. 
 
 BARLOW, George. 
 
 Complete Poetical Works, in 10 volumes. Demy 8vo, 
 
 Cloth. Price 5s. net ; by post, 5s. 4d. 
 List of the Volumes. — 1. Poems — 2. A Life's Love — 3. Poems and 
 Sonnets — 4. Poems — 5. Loved beyond Words — 6. Pageant of Life 
 — 7. From Da-KTi to Sunset — 8. A Lost Mother and the Story 
 of Caleb Smith — ^9. Poems and Lyrics — 10. Poems. 
 
 The Scotsman: — "Mr. Barlow's work is always genuine, fluent, 
 and sweet, and the appearance of this collective edition of the 
 Poems will prove welcome to many. " 
 
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 are being published by Mr. H. J. Glaisher in ten uniform volumes, 
 each at 5s. net. The first two of the edition are to hand. All too 
 little enterprise has in the past been displayed in keeping the 
 work of this gifted singer before the public. Such lofty thought, 
 catholic sympathy, clear reasoning, and withal such sweetly melo- 
 dious verse, deserve the affection of every lover of the beauties 
 and treasures in English literature." 
 
 HARRISON, Clifford. 
 
 "Echoes." A New Volume of Poems, containing "The Post 
 Boy." Cr. 8vo, cloth. Price 3s. 6d. net. ; by post, 3s. lOd. 
 
 "Mr. Harrison knows how to impress a scene or picture in very 
 vivid and musical poetry." — Brighton Gazette. 
 
 "Next to the delight of hearing Mr. Clifford Harrison, a king 
 among reciters, comes the pleasure of reading his charming poems. 
 In this volume we are glad to see ' The Post-Boy,' a favourite 
 piece at Mr. Harrison's recitals, and a fine poem on ' Gethsemane,' 
 which strikes a solemn note like some church bell striking at 
 midnight. 'Faith ' is one of the poet's happiest inspirations ; and 
 ' The Statue ' contains many original ideas. The volume will 
 send us again to Mr. Harrison's recitals." — The Examiner. 
 
 "The best pieces are those, like 'The Post-boy,' ' Sir Debonnair,' 
 and ' The Eve of St. John," which were written ostensibly or pre- 
 sumably for recitation." — Manchester Guardian. 
 
57, Wigmore Street, Cavendish Square, London, W. 3 
 
 SMITH, Heywood, M.A., M.D. Oxon. 
 
 The Genesis of the Soul. Or. 8vo, sewed. Price 6d. net; 
 
 by post, 6^d. 
 
 " Dr. Heywood Smitu, in TiiK Genesis of the Soul, finds in 
 
 the openins verses of tlie Old Testament a picture or parable of 
 
 Man's soul development. As a study, suggestive though slight, 
 
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 The Gospel according to Satan. Or. 8vo, cloth, is. 6d. 
 
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 Or. 8vo, cloth. Price 2s. 6d. net; by post, 2s. 9d. 
 
 " ' Amongst the Pots and Pans ' is the title of a little book on 
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 clearly conveyed. The index is complete." — Morning Post. 
 
 "A number of new recipes will be found in this work." — Daily 
 Ch-aphic. 
 
 " The latest arrival on the culinary field of art is a volume of dainty 
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 contrived guide, philosopher, and gastronomic friend. The French 
 dLshes have been handed down to the writer as the work of a 
 celebrated French chef, when the Tuileries was the pulse of 
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 most elaborate dinner can be constructed or the most simple dainty 
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 prides herself upon a well-conducted establishment should possess." 
 — The Whitehall Review. 
 
 THORPE, Elphinstone. 
 
 Lyrics from Lazyland. Fcap. Svo, cloth. Price 2s. 6d. net ; 
 by post, 2s. 8d. 
 " The author of this dainty little volume of lyrics has a very pretty 
 gift of song, and succeeds in wedding refined and tender thoughte 
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 " A flowery and vigorous rhythm." — Birmingham Post. 
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 "The popularity of these Lyrics is evinced by the number selected 
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4 HENRY J. GLAISHER, Publisher & Bookseller. 
 
 STOCKER, R. D., Author of " A Concordance of Graphology." 
 
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 the science is becoming daily more and more popular. A very 
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 the most casual physiognomist, whilst it will be of no little assis- 
 tance to the eager student." — Home Life. 
 
 The Life of Our Ladye. Scriptural, Traditional and Topographical. 
 
 Compiled from approved sources by M. P., with Preface by 
 
 His Eminence Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster. 
 
 Cheaper Edition. Price 3s. net ; by post, 3s. 4d. 
 
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