*■+ ++ CHURCHES OF LONDON. the poet Campbell was married, — October 11, 1803. Such old churches as this — guarding so well their treasures of history — are, in a special sense, the traveller's bless- ings. At St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the jani- tor is a woman ; and she will point out to you the lettered stone that formerly marked the grave of Milton. It is in the nave, but it has been moved to a place about twelve feet from its original position, — the remains of the illustrious poet being, in fact, beneath the floor of a pew, on the left of the central aisle, about the middle of the church : albeit there is a story, possibly true, that, on an occasion when this church was repaired, in August, 1790, the coffin of Milton suffered profanation, and his bones were dispersed. Among the monuments hard by is a fine marble bust of Milton, placed against the wall, and it is said, by way of enhancing its value, that George the Third came here to see it. 1 Several of the neighbouring inscrip- tions are of astonishing quaintness. The adjacent churchyard — a queer, irregular, 1 This memorial bears the following inscription : " John Milton. Author of ' Paradise Lost.' Born, December 1608. Died, November 1674. His father, John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both interred in this church." OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 1 95 sequestered, lonesome bit of grassy ground, teeming with monuments, and hemmed in with houses, terminates, at one end, in a piece of the old Roman wall of London (a. i). 306), — an adamantine structure of cemented flints — which has lasted from the days of Constantine, and which bids fair to last forever. I shall always remember that strange nook with the golden light of a sum- mer morning shining upon it, the birds twittering among its graves, and all around it such an atmosphere of solitude and rest as made it seem, though in the heart of the great city, a thousand miles from any haunt of man. (It was formally opened as a gar- den for public recreation on July 8, 1891.) St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and venerable temple, the church of the priory of the nuns of St. Helen, built in the thir- teenth century, is full of relics of the history of England. The priory, which adjoined this church, has long since disappeared and portions of the building have been restored ; but the noble Gothic columns and the com- memorative sculpture remain unchanged. Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, who built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded both Gresham Col- lege and the Royal Exchange in London, I96 OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. and Sir William Pickering, once Queen Elizabeth's Minister to Spain and one of the amorous aspirants for her royal hand ; and here, in a gloomy chapel, stands the veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke of Gloster received absolution, after the disappearance of the princes in the Tower. Standing at that altar, in the cool silence of the lonely church and the waning light of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his slender, misshapen form, decked in the rich apparel that he loved, his handsome, aqui- line, thoughtful face, the drooping head, the glittering eyes, the nervous hand that toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy stillness of his person, from head to foot, as he knelt there before the priest and mocked himself and heaven with the form of prayer. Every place that Richard touched is haunted by his magnetic presence. In another part of the church you are shown the tomb of a person whose will provided that the key of his sepulchre should be placed beside his body, and that the door should be opened once a year, for a hundred years. It seems to have been his expecta- tion to awake and arise ; but the allotted century has passed and his bones are still quiescent. OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 1 97 How calmly they sleep — those warriors who once filled the world with the tumult of their deeds ! If you go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above the dust of the Crusaders and mark the beau- tiful copper effigies of them, recumbent on the marble pavement, and feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the calm that follows the tempest. St. Mary's was built in 1240 and restored in 1828. It would be difficult to find a lovelier speci- men of Norman architecture — at once massive and airy, perfectly simple, yet rich with beauty, in every line and scroll. There is only one other church in Great Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a circular vestibule. The stained glass win- dows, both here and at St. Helen's, are very glorious. The organ at St. Mary's was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infa- mous as the wicked judge. The pilgrim who pauses to muse at the grave of Gold- smith may often hear its solemn, mournful tones. I heard them thus, and was think- ing of Dr. Johnson's tender words, when he first learned that Goldsmith was dead : "Poor Goldy was wild — very wild — but he is so no more." The room in which he died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, I98 OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. was but a little way from the spot where he sleeps. 1 The noises of Fleet Street are heard there only as a distant murmur. But birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter down upon his tomb, and every breeze that sighs around the gray turrets of the ancient Temple breathes out his requiem. 1 No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. —In 1757-58 Goldsmith was employed by a chemist, near Fish Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was living in Green Arbour Court, "over Break-neck Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, he wrote The Vicar of Wakefield. After- wards he had lodgings at Canonbury House, Isling- ton, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the Inner Temple. LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 1 99 XV. LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. THE mind that can reverence historic associations needs no explanation of the charm that such associations possess. There are streets and houses in London which, for pilgrims of this class, are haunted with memories and hallowed with an imper- ishable light — that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life can quench or dim. Almost every great author in English literature has here left behind him some personal trace, some relic that brings us at once into his living presence. In the time of Shakespeare, — of whom it may be noted that wherever you find him at all you find him in select and elegant neighbourhoods, — Aldersgate was a secluded and peaceful quarter of the town ; and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the theatre in Blackfriars, in which he is known to have owned a share. It is said that he dwelt at number 134 Aldersgate Street (the 200 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. house was long ago demolished), and in that region, — amid all the din of traffic and all the strange adjuncts of a new age, — those who love him are in his company. Milton was born in a court adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer comes upon him as a resident in St. Bride's churchyard, — where the poet Lovelace was buried, — and at the house which is now No. 19 York Street, West- minster (in later times occupied by Bentham and by Hazlitt), and in Jewin Street, Aldersgate. When secretary to Cromwell he lived in Scotland Yard, where now is the headquarters of the London police. His last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walk- ing through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget Edmund Spenser, who died there, in grief and destitution, a victim to the same inhuman spirit of Irish ruffian- ism that is still disgracing humanity and troubling the peace of the world. Every- body remembers Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity : ' ' The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 201 Street." Jonson himself is closely and charmingly associated with places that may still he seen. He passed his boyhood near Charing Cross — having been born in Harts- horn Lane, now Northumberland Street — and went to the parish school of St. Martin- in-the-Fields ; and those who roam around Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that this great poet helped to build it — a trowel in one hand and Horace in the other. His residence, in his days of fame, was just outside of Temple Bar — but all that neigh- bourhood is new at the present day. The Mermaid, which he frequented — with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chap- man, and Donne — was in Bread Street, but no trace of it remains ; and a banking- house stands now on the site of the Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, where the Apollo Club, which he founded, used to meet. The famous inscription, " O rare Ben Jonson," is three times cut in the Abbey — once in Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle where he was buried, the smaller of the two slabs marking the place of his vertical grave. Dryden once dwelt in a narrow, dingy, quaint house, in Fetter Lane, — the street in which Dean Swift has placed the home of Gulliver, and where now the famous 202 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. Doomsday Book is kept, — but later he re- moved to a finer dwelling, in Gerrard Street, Soho, which was the scene of his death. Both buildings are marked with mural tablets and neither of them seems to have undergone much change. (The house in Fetter Lane is gone — 1891.) Edmund Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a beer-shop ; but his memory hallows the place, and an inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square bears likewise a mural tab- let, and, standing at its time-worn thresh- old, the visitor needs no effort of fancy to picture that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that lead into this queer, sombre, melancholy retreat. In this house he wrote the first Dictionary of the English language and the immortal letter to Lord Chesterfield. In Gough Square lived and died Hugh Kelly, drama- tist, author of The School of Wives and The Man of Reason, and one of the friends of Goldsmith, at whose burial he was pres- ent. The historical antiquarian society that has marked many of the literary shrines of London has rendered a great service. The houses associated with Rey- nolds and Hogarth, in Leicester Square, LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 203 Byron, in Holies Street, Benjamin Frank- lin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street, Campbell, in Duke Street, St. James's, Garrick, in the Adelphi Terrace, Michael Farraday, in Blandford Street, and Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, are but a few of the historic spots which are thus commem- orated. Much, however, remains to be done. One would like to know, for in- stance, in which room in "The Albany" it was that Byron wrote Lara, 1 in which of the houses in Buckingham Street Coleridge had his lodging while he was translating WaUenstein ; whereabouts in Bloomsbury Square was the residence of Akenside, who 1 Byron was born at No. 24 Holies Street, Caven- dish Square. While he was at school in Dulwich Grove his mothf r lived in a house in Sloane Terrace. Other houses associated with him are No. S St. James Street; a lodging in Bennet Street; No. 2 "The Albany" — a lodging that he rented of Lord Althorpe, and moved into on March 28th, 181-t; and No. 139 Piccadilly, where his daughter, Ada, was born, and where Lady Byron left him. This, at present, is the home of the genial scholar Sir Alger- non Borthwick (18S5). John Murray's house, where Byron's fragment of Autobiography was burned, is etill on the same spot in Albemarle Street. Byron's body, when brought home from Greece, lay in state at No. 25 Great George Street, Westminster, before being taken north, to Hucknall-Torkard church, in Nottinghamshire, for burial. 204 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. wrote The Pleasures of Imagination, and of Croly, who wrote Salathiel ; or where it was that Gray lived, when he established himself close by Russell Square, in order to be one of the first — as he continued to be one of the most constant — students at the then newly opened British Museum (1759). These, and such as these, may seem trivial thing's ; but Nature has denied an unfailing source of innocent happiness to the man who can find no pleasure in them. For my part, when rambling in Fleet Street it is a special delight to remember even so slight an incident as that recorded of the author of the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," — that he once saw there his satirist, Dr. Johnson, rolling and puffing along the side- walk, and cried out to a friend, " Here comes Ursa Major. 1 ' For the true lovers of literature "Ursa Major" walks oftener in Fleet Street to-day than any living man. A good thread of literary research might be profitably followed by him who should trace the footsteps of all the poets that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of Ed- ward IV. ; Andrew Bernard in that of Henry VII. ; John Skelton in that of Henry VIII. ; and Edmund Spenser in that of LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 205 Elizabeth. Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, John Dryclen, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Lawrence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, Thomas Wharton, Henry James Pye, Rob- ert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson — the latter still wearing, in spotless renown, that " Laurel greener from the brows Of him that uttered uothiug base." Most of those bards were intimately asso- ciated with London, and several of them are buried in the Abbey. It is, indeed, be- cause so many storied names are written upon gravestones that the explorer of the old churches of London finds so rich a har- vest of impressive association and lofty thought. Few persons visit them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively alone in rambles of this kind. I went one morning into St. Martin — once ' ' in the fields," now in one of the busiest thorough- fares at the centre of the city — and found there only a pew-opener preparing for the service, and an organist playing an anthem. It is a beautiful structure, with its graceful 206 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. spire and its columns of weather-beaten stone, curiously stained in gray and sooty black, and it is almost as famous for theat- rical names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, or St. George's, Bloomsbury, or St. Clement Danes. Here, in a vault beneath the church, was buried the bewitching and large-hearted Nell Gwyn ; here is the grave of James Smith, joint author with his brother Hor- ace — who was buried at Tunbridge Wells — of The Rejected Addresses; here rests Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface ; and here were laid the ashes of the romantic and brilliant Mrs. Centlivre, and of George Farquhar, whom neither youth, genius, patient labour, nor sterling achievement could save from a life of misfortune and an untimely and piteous death. A cheerier association of this church is with Thomas Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here married. At St. Giles' s-in-the-Fields, again, are the graves of George Chapman, who translated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely lyrics of love, Kich, the manager, who brought out Gay's Beggars' 1 Opera, and James Shirley, the fine old dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so often murmured in such solemn haunts as these — LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 207 " Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." Shirley lived in Gray's Inn when he was writing his plays, and he was fortunate in the favour of Queen Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles the First ; but when the Puritan times came in he fell into misfortune and poverty and became a school-teacher in Whitefriars. In 1666 he was living in or near Fleet Street, and his home was one of the many dwellings that were destroyed in the great fire. Then he fled, with his wife, into the parish of St. Giles' s-in-the- Fields, where, overcome with grief and terror, they both died, within twenty-four hours of each other, and were buried in the same grave. 208 A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. XVI. A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. TO muse over the dust of those about whom we have read so much — the great actors, thinkers, and writers, the warriors and statesmen for whom the play is ended and the lights are put out — is to come very near to them, and to realise more deeply than ever before their close relation- ship with our own humanity; and we ought to be wiser and better for this experience. It is good, also, to seek out the favourite haunts of our heroes, and call them up as they were in their lives. One of the hap- piest accidents of a London stroll was the finding of the Harp Tavern, 1 in Russell Street, Covent Garden, near the stage door 1 An account of the " Harp " in the Victuallers* Gazette says that this tavern has had within its doors every actor of note since the days of Garrick, and many actresses, also, of the period of eighty or a hundred years ago; and it mentions as visitants here Dora Jordan, Nance Oldfield, Anne Bracegirdle, A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 20Q. of Drary Lane Theatre, which was the ac- customed resort of Edmund Kean. Car- penters and masons were at work upon it when I entered, and it was necessary almost to creep amid heaps of broken mortar and rubbish beneath their scaffolds, in order to reach the interior rooms. Here, at the end of a narrow passage, was a little apartment, perhaps fifteen feet square, with a low ceil- ing and a bare floor, in which Kean habitu- ally took his pleasure, in the society of fellow-actors and boon companions, long ago. A narrow, cushioned bench against the walls, a few small tables, a chair or two, a number of churchwarden pipes on the mantlepiece, and portraits of Disraeli and Gladstone, constituted the furniture. A panelled wainscot and dingy red paper covered the walls, and a few cobwebs hung from the grimy ceiling. By this time the old room has been made neat and comely; but then it bore the marks of hard usage and long neglect, and it seemed all the more interesting for that reason. Kean's seat is at the right, as you enter, and just above it a mural tablet designates Kitty Clive, Harriet Mellon, Barton Booth, Quin, Cibber, Macklin, Grimaldi, Mine. Vestris, and Miss Stephens — who became Countess of Essex. O 2IO A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. the spot, — which is still further commemo- rated by a death-mask of the actor, placed on a little shelf of dark wood and covered with glass. No better portrait could be de- sired; certainly no better one exists. In life this must have been a glorious face. The eyes are large and prominent, the brow is broad and fine, the mouth wide and obviously sensitive, the chin delicate, and the nose long, well set, and indicative of immense force of character. The whole expression of the face is that of refinement and of great and desolate sadness. Kean, as is known from the testimony of one who acted with him, 1 was always at his best in passages of pathos. To hear him speak Othello's farewell was to hear the perfect music of heart-broken despair. To see him when, as The Stranger, he listened to the song, was to see the genuine, absolute reality of hopeless sorrow. He could, of 1 The mother of Jefferson, the comedian, described Edmund Kean in this way. She was a member of the company at the Walnut Street Theatre, Phila- delphia, when he acted there, and it was she who eang for him the well-known lines — " I have a silent sorrow here, A grief I '11 ne'er impart; It breathes no sigh, it sheds no tear, But it consumes my heart." A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 211 course, thrill his hearers in the ferocious outbursts of Richard and Sir Giles, but it was in tenderness and grief that he was supremely great ; and no one will wonder at that who looks upon his noble face — so eloquent of self-conflict and suffering — even in this cold and colourless mask of death. It is easy to judge and condemn the sins of a weak, passionate humanity; but when we think of such creatures of genius as Edmund Kean and Robert Burns, we ought to con- sider what demons in their own souls those wretched men were forced to fight, and by what agonies they expiated their vices and errors. This little tavern-room tells the whole mournful story, with death to point the moral, and pity to breathe its sigh of unavailing regret. Many of the present frequenters of the Harp are elderly men, whose conversation is enriched with memories of the stage and with ample knowledge and judicious taste hi literature and art. They naturally speak with pride of Kean's association with their favourite resort. Often in that room the eccentric genius has put himself in pawn, to exact from the manager of Drury Lane theatre the money needed to relieve the wants of some brother actor. Often his 212 A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. voice lias been heard there, in the songs that he sang with so much feeling and sweetness and such homely yet beautiful skill. In the circles of the learned and courtly he never was really at home ; but here he filled the throne and ruled the king- dom of the revel, and here no doubt every mood of his mind, from high thought and generous emotion to misanthropical bitter- ness and vacant levity, found its unfettered expression. They show you a broken panel in the high wainscot, which was struck and smashed by a pewter pot that he hurled at the head of a person who had given him offence ; and they tell you at the same time, — as, indeed, is historically true, — that he was the idol of his comrades, the first in love, pity, sympathy, and kindness, and would turn his back, any day, for the least of them, on the nobles who sought his com- panionship. There is no better place than this in which to study the life of Edmund Kean. Old men have been met with here who saw him on the stage, and even acted with him. The room is the weekly meeting-place and habitual nightly tryst of an ancient club, called the City of Lushington, which has existed since the days of the Regency, and of which these persons are members. A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 21 3 The City lias its Mayor, Sheriff, insignia, record-book, and system of ceremonials ; and much of wit, wisdom, and song may be enjoyed at its civic feasts. The names of its four wards — Lunacy, Suicide, Pov- erty, and Juniper — are written up in the four corners of the room, and whoever joins must select his ward. Sheridan was a member of it, and so was the Kegent ; and the present landlord of the Harp (Mr. M'Pherson) preserves among his relics the chairs in which those gay companions sat, when the author presided over the initiation of the prince. It is thought that this club originated out of the society of "The Wolves," which was formed by Kean's adherents, when the elder Booth arose to disturb his supremacy upon the stage. But there is no malice in it now. Its purposes are simply convivial and literary, and its tone is that of thorough good-will. 1 One of the gentlest and most winning traits in the English character is its instinct of companionship as to literature and art. Since the days of the Mermaid the authors and actors of London have dearly loved and 1 A coloured print of this room may be found in that eccentric book The Life of an Actor, by Pierce Egan: 1825. 214 A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. deeply enjoyed such odd little fraternities of wit as are typified, not inaptly, by the City of Lushington. There are no rosier hours in my memory than those that were passed, between midnight and morning, in the cosy clubs in London. And when dark days come, and foes harass, and the trou- bles of life annoy, it will be sweet to think that in still another sacred retreat of friend- ship, across the sea, the old armour is gleam- ing in the festal lights, where one of the gentlest spirits that ever wore the laurel of England's love smiles kindly on his com- rades and seems to murmur the charm of English hospitality — " Let no one take beyond this threshold.hence Words uttered here in friendship's confi- dence." STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 215 XVII. STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. IT is a cool afternoon in July, and the shadows are falling eastward on fields of waving grain and lawns of emerald velvet. Overhead a few light clouds are drifting, and the green boughs of the great elms are gently stirred by a breeze from the west. Across one of the more distant fields a flock of sable rooks — some of them fluttering and cawing — wings its slow and melancholy flight. There is the sound of the whetting of a scythe, and, near by, the twittering of many birds upon a cottage roof. On either side of the country road, which runs like a white rivulet through banks of green, the hawthorn hedges are shining and the bright sod is spangled with all the wild-flowers of an English summer. An odour of lime-trees and of new-mown hay sweetens the air for miles and miles around. Far off, on the horizon's verge, just glimmering through the haze, rises the imperial citadel of Wind- 21 6 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. sor. And close at hand a little child points to a gray spire peering out of a nest of ivy, and tells me that this is Stoke-Pogis church. If peace dwells anywhere upon the earth its dwelling-place is here. You come into this little churchyard by a pathway across the park and through a wooden turnstile ; and in one moment the whole world is left behind and forgotten. Here are the nod- ding elms ; here is the yew-tree's shade ; here ' ' heaves the turf in many a moulder- ing heap." All these graves seem very old. The long grass waves over them, and some of the low stones that mark them are en- tirely shrouded with ivy. Many of the ' ' frail memorials ' ' are made of wood. None of them is neglected or forlorn, but all of them seem to have been scattered here, in that sweet disorder which is the perfection of rural loveliness. There never, of course, could have been any thought of creating this effect ; yet here it remains, to win your heart forever. And here, amid this mourn- ful beauty, the little church itself nestles close to the ground, while every tree that waves its branches around it, and every vine that clambers on its surface, seems to clasp it in the arms of love. Nothing breaks STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 21 7 the silence but the sighing of the wind in the great yew-tree at the church door, — beneath which was the poet's favourite seat, and where the brown needles, falling, through many an autumn, have made a dense carpet on the turf. Now and then there is a faint rustle in the ivy ; a fitful bird-note serves but to deepen the stillness ; and from a rose-tree near at hand a few leaves flutter down, in soundless benedic- tion on the dust beneath. Gray was laid in the same grave with his mother, ' i the careful, tender mother of many children, one alone of whom," as he wrote upon her gravestone, "had the mis- fortune to survive her." Their tomb — a low, oblong, brick structure, covered with a large slab — stands a few feet away from the church wall, upon which is a small tab- let to denote its place. The poet's name has not been inscribed above him. There was no need here of "storied urn or animated bust." The place is his monument, and the majestic Elegy — giving to the soul of the place a form of seraphic beauty and a voice of celestial music — is his immortal epitaph. " There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year, By hands unseen are showers of vi'lets found ; 21 8 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. The Redbreast loves to build & warble there, And little Footsteps lightly print the ground." There is a monument to Gray in Stoke Park, about two hundred yards from the church ; but it seems commemorative of the builder rather than the poet. They intend to set a memorial window in the church, to honour him, and the visitor finds there a money-box for the reception of contribu- tions in aid of this pious design. Nothing will be done amiss that serves to direct closer attention to his life. It was one of the best lives ever recorded in the history of literature. It was a life singularly pure, noble, and beautiful. In two qualities, sincerity and reticence, it was exemplary almost beyond a parallel; and those are qualities that literary character in the present day has great need to acquire. Gray was averse to publicity. He did not sway by the censure of other men ; neither did he need their admiration as his breath of life. Poetry, to him, was a great art, and he added nothing to literature until he had first made it as nearly perfect as it could be made by the thoughtful, laborious exertion of his best powers, superadded to the spontaneous impulse and flow of his STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 21 9 genius. More voluminous writers, Charles Dickens among the rest, have sneered at him because he wrote so little. The most colossal form of human complacency is that of the individual who thinks all other crea- tures inferior who happen to be unlike him- self. This reticence on the part of Gray was, in fact, the emblem of his sincerity and the compelling cause of his imperish- able renown. There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking ; and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. Gray has left only a few poems ; but of his principal works each is perfect in its kind, supreme and unapproachable. He did not test merit by reference to ill-formed and capricious public opinion, but he wrought according to the highest standards of art that learning and taste could furnish. His letters form an English classic. There is no purer prose in existence ; there is not much that is so pure. But the crowning glory of Gray's nature, the element that makes it so im- pressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church to muse upon it, was the self -poised, sincere, and lovely exalta- tion of its contemplative spirit. He was a man whose conduct of life would, first of 220 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. all, purify, expand, and adorn the temple of his own soul, out of which should after- ward flow, in their own free way, those choral harmonies that soothe, guide, and exalt the human race. He lived before he wrote. The soul of the Elegy is the soul of the man. It was his thought — which he has somewhere expressed in better words than these — that human beings are only at their best while such feelings endure as are engendered when death has just taken from us the objects of our love. That was the point of view from which he habitually looked upon the world ; and no man who has learned the lessons of experience can doubt that he was right. Gray was twenty-six years old when he wrote the first draft of the Elegy. He began that poem in 1742, at Stoke-Pogis, and he finished and published it in 1751. No visitor to this churchyard can miss either its inspi- ration or its imagery. The poet has been dead more than a hundred years, but the scene of his rambles and reveries has suf- fered no material change. One of his yew- trees, indeed, much weakened with age, was some time since blown down in a storm, and its fragments have been carried away. The picturesque manor house not far dis- STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 221 tant was once the home of Admiral Penn, father of William Penn the famous Quaker. 1 All the trees of the region have, of course, waxed and expanded, — not forgetting the neighbouring beeches of Burnham, among which he loved to wander, and where he might often have been found, sitting with his book, at some gnarled wreath of ' ' old fantastic roots." But in its general charac- teristics, its rustic homeliness and peaceful beauty, this "glimmering landscape," im- mortalised in his verse, is the same on which his living eyes have looked. There was no need to seek for him in any special spot. The house in which he once lived might, no 1 "William Penn and his children are buried in a little Quaker graveyard, not many miles away. The visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not omit a visit to Up- ton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope lived at Binfield when he wrote his poem on Wind- sor Forest. Upton claims to have had a share in the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was unquestionably his place of residence when he wrote it. Langley Marish ought to be visited also, and Horton — where Milton wrote " L'Allegro," " II Penseroso," and " Comus." Chalfont St. Peter is accessible, where still is standing the house in which Milton finished " Paradise Lost " and began " Paradise Regained " ; and from there a 6hort drive Avill take you to Beaconsfield where you may see Edmund Burke's tablet in the church and the monu- ment to "Waller in the churchyard. 222 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. doubt, be discovered ; but every nook and vista, every green lane and upland lawn and ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude is haunted with his presence. The night is coming on and the picture will soon be dark ; but never while mem- ory lasts can it fade out of the heart. What a blessing would be ours, if only we could hold forever that exaltation of the spirit, that sweet, resigned serenity, that pure freedom from all the passions of nature and all the cares of life, which comes upon us in such a place as this ! Alas, and again alas ! Even with the thought this golden mood begins to melt away; even with the thought comes our dismissal from its influ- ence. Nor will it avail us anything now to linger at the shrine. Fortunate is he, though in bereavement and regret, who parts from beauty while yet her kiss is warm upon his lips, — waiting not for the last farewell word, hearing not the last notes of the music, see- ing not the last gleams of sunset as the light dies from the sky. It was a sad part- ing, but the memory of the place can never now be despoiled of its loveliness. As I write these words I stand again in the cool and dusky silence of the poet's church, with its air of stately age and its fragrance of STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 223 cleanliness, while the light of the western sun, broken into rays of gold and ruby, streams through the painted windows and softly falls upon the quaint little galleries and decorous pews ; and, looking forth through the low, arched door, I see the dark and melancholy boughs of the dream- ing yew-tree, and, nearer, a shadow of rip- pling leaves in the clear sunshine of the churchway path. And all the time a gentle voice is whispering, in the chambers of thought — " No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode : (There they alike in trembling hope repose) , The bosom of his Father and his God." 224 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. XVIII. AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. AMONG the many deep-thoughted, melo- dious, and eloquent poems of Words- worth there is one — about the burial of Ossian — that glances at the question of fitness in a place of sepulchre. Not always, for the illustrious dead, has the final couch of rest been rightly chosen. We think with resignation, and with a kind of pride, of Keats and Shelley in the little Protestant burial-ground at Rome. Every heart is touched at the spectacle of Garrick and Johnson sleeping side by side in Westmin- ster Abbey. It was right that the dust of Dean Stanley should mingle with the dust of poets and of kings ; and to see — as the present writer did, only a little while ago — fresh flowers on the stone that covers him, in the chapel of Henry the Seventh, was to feel a tender gladness and solemn content. Shakespeare's grave, in the chan- cel of Stratford church, awakens the same AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 225 ennobling awe and melancholy pleasure ; and it is with kindred feeling that you linger at the tomb of Gray. But who can be content that poor Letitia Landon should sleep beneath the pavement of a barrack, with soldiers trampling over her dust ? One might almost think, sometimes, that the spirit of calamity, which follows certain persons throughout the whole of life, had pursued them even in death, to haunt about their repose and to mar all the gentleness of association that ought to hallow it. Chat- terton, a pauper and a suicide, was huddled into a workhouse graveyard, the very place of which -r- in Shoe Lane, covered now by Farringdon Market — has disappeared. Ot- way, miserable in his love for Elizabeth Barry, the actress, and said to have starved to death in the Minories, near the Tower of London, was laid in a vault of St. Clement Danes in the middle of the Strand, where never the green leaves rustle, but where the roar of the mighty city pours on in con- tinual tumult. That church holds also the remains of William Mountfort, the actor, slain in a brawl by Lord Mohun ; of Nat Lee, ' ' the mad poet ' ' ; of George Powell, the tragedian, of brilliant and deplorable memory ; and of the handsome Hildebrand p 226 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. Horden, cut off by a violent death in the spring-time of his youth. Hildebrand Horden was the son of a clergyman of Twickenham and lived in the reign of William and Mary. Dramatic chronicles say that he was possessed of great talents as an actor, and of remarkable personal beauty. He was stabbed, in a quarrel, at the Rose Tavern ; and after he had been laid out for the grave, such was the lively feminine interest in his handsome person, many ladies came, some masked and others openly, to view him in his shroud. This is mentioned in Colley Cibber's Apology. Charles Coffey, the dramatist, author of The Devil upon Two Sticks, and other plays, lies in the vaults of St. Clement ; as likewise does Thomas Rymer, historiog- rapher for William III. , successor to Shad- well, and author of Fazdera, in seventeen volumes. In the church of St. Clement you may see the pew in which Dr. Johnson habitually sat when he attended divine service there. It was his favourite church. The pew is in the gallery ; and to those who honour the passionate integrity and fervent, devout zeal of the stalwart old champion of letters, it is indeed a sacred shrine. Henry Mossop, one of the stateliest of stately act- AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 227 ors, perishing, by slow degrees, of penury and grief, — which he bore in proud silence, — found a refuge, at last, in the barren gloom of Chelsea churchyard. Theodore Hook, the cheeriest spirit of his time, the man who filled every hour of life with the sunshine of his wit and was wasted and degraded by his own brilliancy, rests, close by Bishop Sherlock, in Fulham churchyard, — one of the dreariest spots in the suburbs of London. Perhaps it does not much sig- nify, when once the play is over, in what oblivion our crumbling relics are hidden away. Yet to most human creatures these are sacred things, and many a loving heart, for all time to come, will choose a conse- crated spot for the repose of the dead, and will echo the tender words of Longfellow, — so truly expressive of a universal and reverent sentiment — " Take them, Grave, and let them lie Folded upon thy narrow shelves, As garments by the soul laid by And precious only to ourselves." One of the most impressive of the many literary pilgrimages that I have made was that which brought me to the house in which Coleridge died, and the place where he was buried. The student needs not to 228 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. be told that this poet, born in 1772, the year after Gray's death, bore the white lilies of pure literature till 1834, when he too entered into his rest. The last nineteen years of the life of Coleridge were spent in a house at Highgate; and there, within a few steps of each other, the visitor may be- hold his dwelling and his tomb. The house is one in a block of dwellings, situated in what is called the Grove — a broad, embowered street, a little way from the centre of the village. There are gardens attached to these houses, both in the front and the rear, and the smooth and peaceful roadside walks in the Grove itself are pleasantly shaded by elms of noble size and abundant foliage. These were young trees when Coleridge saw them, and all this neighbourhood, in his day, was but thinly settled. Looking from his chamber window he could see the dusky outlines of sombre London, crowned with the dome of St. Paul's on the southern horizon, while, more near, across a fertile and smiling valley, the gray spire of Hampstead church would bound his prospect, rising above the ver- dant woodland of Caen. 1 In front were 1 " Come in the first stage, so as either to walk or to be driven in Mr. Gilman's gig, to Caen wood and AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 229 beds of flowers, and all around ne might hear the songs of birds that tilled the fra- grant air with their happy, careless music. Not far away stood the old church of High- gate, long since destroyed, in which he used to worship, and close by was the Gate House inn, primitive, quaint, and cosy, which still is standing to comfort the weary traveller with its wholesome hospitality. Highgate, with all its rural peace, must have been a bustling place in the old times, for all the travel went through it that passed either into or out of London by the great north road, — that road in which Whittington heard the prophetic summons of the bells, and where may still be seen, suitably and rightly marked, the site of the stone on which he sat to rest. Here, indeed, the coaches used to halt, either to feed or to change horses, and here the many neglected little taverns still remaining, with their odd names and their swinging signs, testify to the discarded customs of a bygone age. Some years ago a new road was cut, so that its delicious groves and alleys, the finest in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope's favourite composition walk, when with the old Earl." — Coleridge to Crabb Robinson. Highgate, June 1817. 230 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. travellers might wind around the hill, and avoid climbing the steep ascent to the vil- lage ; and since then the grass has begun to grow in the streets. But such bustle as once enlivened the solitude of Highgate could never have been otherwise than agree- able diversion to its inhabitants ; while for Coleridge himself, as we can well imagine, the London coach was welcome indeed, that brought to his door such well-loved friends as Charles Lamb, Joseph Henry- Green, Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth, or Talfourd. To this retreat the author of "The An- cient Mariner" withdrew in 1815, to live with his friend James Gilman, a surgeon, who had undertaken to rescue him from the demon of opium, but who, as De Quincey intimates, was lured by the poet into the service of the very fiend whom both had striven to subdue. It Was his last refuge, and he never left it till he was released from life. As you ramble in that quiet neigh- bourhood your fancy will not fail to con- jure up his placid figure, — the silver hair, the pale face, the great, luminous, changeful blue eyes, the somewhat portly form clothed in black raiment, the slow, feeble walk, the sweet, benignant manner, AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 23 1 the voice that was perfect melody, and the inexhaustible talk that was the flow of a golden sea of eloquence and wisdom. Coleridge was often seen walking there, with a book in his hand ; and the children of the village knew him and loved him. His presence is impressed forever upon the place, to haunt and to hallow it. He was a very great man. The wings of his imagina- tion wave easily in the opal air of the high- est heaven. The power and majesty of his thought are such as establish forever in the human mind the conviction of personal immortality. Yet how forlorn the ending that this stately soul was enforced to make ! For more than thirty years he was the slave of opium. It blighted his home ; it alienated his wife ; it ruined his health ; it made him utterly wretched. u I have been, through a large portion of my later life," he wrote in 1834, "a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languor, and manifold infirmities.' ' But back of all this, — more dreadful still and harder to bear, — was he not the slave of some ingrained perversity of the mind itself, some helpless and hopeless irresolution of character, some enervating spell of that sublime yet pitiable dejection of Hamlet, which kept him for- 232 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. ever at war with himself, and, last of all, cast him out upon the homeless ocean of despair, to drift away into ruin and death? There are shapes more awful than his, in the records of literary history, — the ravaged, agonising form of Swift, for instance, and the wonderful, desolate face of Byron ; hut there is no figure more forlorn and pathetic. This way the memory of Coleridge came upon me, standing at his grave. He should have been laid in some wild, free place, where the grass could grow above him and the trees could wave their branches over his head. They placed him in a ponderous tomb, of gray stone, in Highgate church- yard, and in later times they have reared a new building above it, — the grammar- school of the village, — so that now the tomb, fenced round with iron, is in a cold, barren, gloomy crypt, accessible indeed from the churchyard, through several arches, but grim and doleful in all its sur- roundings ; as if the evil and cruel fate that marred his life were still triumphant over his ashes. ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. 233 XIX. ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. IN England, as elsewhere, every historic spot is occupied ; and of course it some- times happens, at such a spot, that its asso- ciation is marred and its sentiment almost destroyed by the presence of the persons and the interests of to-day. The visitor to such places must carry with him not only knowledge and sensibility but imagination and patience. He will not find the way strewn with roses nor the atmosphere of poetry ready-made for his enjoyment. That atmosphere, indeed, for the most part — especially in the cities — he must himself supply. Relics do not robe themselves for exhibition. The Past is utterly indifferent to its worshippers. All manner of little obstacles, too, will arise before the pilgrim, to thwart him in his search. The mental strain and bewilderment, the inevitable physical weariness, the soporific influence of the climate, the tumult of the streets, 234 ON J* AF.NET BATTLE-FIELD. the frequent and disheartening spectacle of poverty, squalor, and vice, the capricious and untimely rain, the inconvenience of long distances, the ill-timed arrival and consequent disappointment, the occasional nervous sense of loneliness and insecurity, the inappropriate boor, the ignorant, gar- rulous porter, the extortionate cabman, and the jeering bystander — all these must be regarded with resolute indifference by him who would ramble, pleasantly and profit- ably, in the footprints of English history. Everything depends, in other words, upon the eyes with which you observe and the spirit which you impart. Never was a keener truth uttered than in the couplet of Wordsworth — " Minds that have nothing to confer Find little to perceive." To the philosophic stranger, however, even this prosaic occupancy of historic places is not without its pleasurable, be- cause humorous, significance. Such an observer in England will sometimes be amused as well as impressed by a sudden sense of the singular incidental position into which — partly through the lapse of years, and partly through a peculiarity of ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. 235 national character — the scenes of famous events, not to say the events themselves, have gradually drifted. I thought of this one night, when, in Whitehall Gardens, I was looking at the statue of James the Second, and a courteous policeman came up and silently turned the light of his bull's-eye upon the inscription. A scene of more incongruous elements, or one sug- gestive of a more serio-comic contrast, could not be imagined. I thought of it again when standing on the village green near Barnet, and viewing, amid surround- ings both pastoral and ludicrous, the column which there commemorates the defeat and death of the great Earl of Warwick, and, consequently, the final triumph of the Crown over the last of the Barons of England. It was toward the close of a cool summer day, and of a long drive through the beau- tiful hedgerows of sweet and verdurous Middlesex, that I came to the villages of Barnet and Hadley, and went over the field of King Edward's victory, — that fatal, glo- rious field, on which Gloster showed such resolute valour, and where Neville, supreme and magnificent in disaster, fought on foot, to make sure that himself might go down 236 OX BARXET BATTLE-FIELD. in the stormy death of all his hopes. More than four hundred years have drifted by since that misty April morning when the star of Warwick was quenched in blood, and ten thousand men were slaughtered to end the strife between the Barons and the Crown; yet the results of that conflict are living facts in the government of England now, and in the fortunes of her inhabitants. If you were unaware of the solid simplicity and proud reticence of the English char- acter, — leading it to merge all its shining deeds in one continuous fabric of achieve- ment, like jewels set in a cloth of gold, — you might expect to find this spot adorned with a structure of more than common splendour. What you actually do find there is a plain monolith, standing in the middle of a common, at the junction of several roads, — the chief of which are those leading to Hatfield and St. Albans, in Hertfordshire, — and on one side of this column you may read, in letters of faded black, the comprehensive statement that ' ' Here was fought the famous battle be- tween Edward the Eourth and the Earl of Warwick, April 14th, anno 1471, in which the Earl was defeated and slain." 1 1 The words "stick no bills" have been added, just below this inscription. ON BARNET BATTLE-FLELD. 237 In my reverie, standing at the foot of this humble, weather-stained monument, I saw the long range of Barnet hills, mantled with grass and flowers and with the golden haze of a morning in spring, swarming with gorgeous horsemen and glittering with spears and banners ; and I heard the venge- ful clash of arms, the horrible neighing of maddened steeds, the furious shouts of on- set, and all the nameless cries and groans of battle, commingled in a thrilling yet hideous din. Here rode King Edward, intrepid, handsome, and stalwart, with his proud, cruel smile and his long yellow hair. There Warwick swung his great two-handed sword, and mowed his foes like grain. And there the fiery form of Richard, splendid in bur- nished steel, darted like the scorpion, deal- ing death at every blow ; till at last, in fatal mischance, the sad star of Oxford, assailed by its own friends, was swept out of the field, and the fight drove, raging, into the valleys of Hadley. How strangely, though, did this fancied picture contrast with the actual scene before me ! At a little distance, all around the village green, the peaceful, embowered cottages kept their sentinel watch. Over the careless, strag- gling grass went the shadow of the passing 238 ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. cloud. Not a sound was heard, save the rustle of leaves and the low laughter of some little children, playing near the monu- ment. Close by and at rest was a flock of geese, couched upon the cool earth, and, as their custom is, supremely contented with themselves and all the world. And at the foot of the column, stretched out at his full length, in tattered garments that scarcely covered his nakedness, reposed the British labourer, fast asleep upon the sod. No more Wars of the Roses now ; but calm retire- ment, smiling plenty, cool western winds, and sleep and peace — " With a red rose and a white rose Leaniug, nodding at the wall." A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 239 XX. A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. ONE of the most impressive spots on earth, and one that especially teaches — with silent, pathetic eloquence and solemn admonition — the great lesson of contrast, the incessant now of the ages and the in- evitable decay and oblivion of the past, is the ancient city of Canterbury. Years and not merely days of residence there are essen- tial to the adequate and right comprehension of that wonderful place. Yet even an hour passed among its shrines will teach you, as no printed word has ever taught, the measureless power and the sublime beauty of a perfect religious faith ; while, as you stand and meditate in the shadow of the gray cathedral walls, the pageant of a thousand years of history will pass before you like a dream. The city itself, with its bright, swift river (the Stour), its opulence of trees and flowers, its narrow, winding streets, its numerous antique buildings, its 24O A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. many towers, its fragments of ancient wall and gate, its formal decorations, its air of perfect cleanliness and thoughtful gravity, its beautiful, umbrageous suburbs, — where the scarlet of the poppies and the russet red of the clover make one vast rolling sea of colour and of fragrant delight, — and, to crown all, its stately character of wealth without ostentation and industry without tumult, must prove to you a deep and satis- fying comfort. But, through all this, per- vading and surmounting it all, the spirit of the place pours in upon your heart, and floods your whole being with the incense and organ music of passionate, jubilant devotion. It was not superstition that reared those gorgeous fanes of worship which still adorn, even while they no longer consecrate, the ecclesiastic cities of the old world. In the age of Augustine, Dunstan, and Ethelnoth humanity had begun to feel its profound and vital need of a sure and settled reliance on religious faith. The drifting spirit, worn with sorrow, doubt, and self-conflict, longed to be at peace — longed for a refuge equally from the evils and tortures of its own con- dition and the storms and perils of the world. In that longing it recognised its A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 24 1 immortality and heard the voice of its Divine Parent ; and out of the ecstatic joy and utter abandonment of its new-born, passionate, responsive faith, it built and consecrated those stupendous temples, — rearing them with all its love no less than all its riches and all its power. There was no wealth that it would not give, no toil that it would not perforin, and no sacrifice that it would not make, in the accomplish- ment of its sacred task. It was grandly, nobly, terribly in earnest, and it achieved a work that is not only sublime in its poetic majesty but measureless in the scope and extent of its moral and spiritual influence. It has left to succeeding ages not only a legacy of permanent beauty, not only a sublime symbol of religious faith, but an everlasting monument to the loveliness and greatness that are inherent in human na- ture. No creature with a human heart in his bosom can stand in such a building as Canterbury cathedral without feeling a greater love and reverence than he ever felt before, alike for God and man. On a day (July 27, 1882) when a class of the boys of the King's School of Canterbury was graduated the pres- ent writer chanced to be a listener to Q 242 A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. the impressive and touching sermon that was preached before them, in the cathe- dral ; wherein they were tenderly admon- ished to keep unbroken their associations with their school-days and to remember the lessons of the place itself. That counsel must have sunk deep into every mind. It is difficult to understand how any person reared amid such scenes and relics could ever cast away their hallow- ing influence. Even to the casual visitor the bare thought of the historic treasures that are garnered in this temple is, by itself, sufficient to implant in the bosom a mem- orable and lasting awe. For more than twelve hundred years the succession of the Archbishops of Canterbury has remained substantially unbroken. There have been ninety-three "primates of all England," of whom fifty-three were buried in the cathe- dral, and here the tombs of fifteen of them are still visible. Here was buried the saga- cious, crafty, inflexible, indomitable Henry the Fourth, — that Hereford whom Shake- speare has described and interpreted with matchless, immortal eloquence, — and here, cut off in the morning of his greatness, and lamented to this day in the hearts of the English people, was laid the body of Edward A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 243 the Black Prince, who to a dauntless valour and terrible prowess in war added a high- souled, human, and tender magnanimity in conquest, and whom personal virtues and shining public deeds united to make the ideal hero of chivalry. In no other way than by personal observance of such memo- rials can historic reading be invested with a perfect and permanent reality. Over the tomb of the Black Prince, with its fine re- cumbent effigy of gilded brass, hang the gauntlets that he wore ; and they tell you that his sword formerly hung there, but that Oliver Cromwell, — who revealed his icono- clastic and unlovely character in making a stable of this cathedral, — carried it away. Close at hand is the tomb of the wise, just, and gentle Cardinal Pole, simply inscribed "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord" ; and you may touch a little, low mausoleum of gray stone, in which are the ashes of John Morton, that Bishop of Ely from whose garden in Holborn the straw- berries were brought for the Duke of Glos- ter, on the day when he condemned the accomplished Hastings, and who "fled to Richmond," in good time, from the stand- ard of the dangerous Protector. Standing there, I could almost hear the resolute, 244 A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. scornful voice of Richard, breathing out, in clear, implacable accents — " Morton with Richmond touches me more near Than Buckingham and his rash-levied num- bers." The astute Morton, when Bosworth was over and Richmond had assumed the crown and Bourchier had died, was made Arch- bishop of Canterbury ; and as such, at a great age, he passed away. A few hundred yards from his place of rest, in a vault be- neath the Church of St. Dunstan, is the head of Sir Thomas More (the body being in St. Peter's, at the Tower of London), who in his youth had been a member of Morton's ecclesiastical household, and whose great- ness that prelate had foreseen and prophe- sied. Did no shadow of the scaffold ever fall across the statesman's thoughts, as he looked upon that handsome, manly boy, and thought of the troublous times that were raging about them? Morton, aged ninety, died in 1500 ; More, aged fifty-five, in 1535. Strange fate, indeed, was that, and as inscrutable as mournful, which gave to those who in life had been like father and son such a ghastly association in death ! 1 1 St. Dunstan's church was connected with the Convent of St. Gregory. The Roper family, in the A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 245 They show you the place where Becket was murdered, and the stone steps, worn hollow by the thousands upon thousands of devout pilgrims who, in the days before the Reformation, crept up to weep and pray at the costly, resplendent shrine of St. Thomas. The bones of Becket, as all the world knows, were, by command of Henry the Eighth, burnt, and scattered to the winds, while his shrine was pillaged and destroyed. Neither tomb nor scutcheon commemorates him here, — but the cathe- dral itself is his monument. There it stands, with its grand columns and glorious arches, its towers of enormous size and its long vistas of distance so mysterious and awful, its gloomy crypt where once the silver lamps sparkled and the smoking censers were swung, its tombs of mighty warriors time of Henry the Fourth, founded a chapel in it, in which are two marble tombs, commemorative of them, and underneath which is their burial vault. Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas More's daughter, ob- tained her father's head, after his execution, and buried it here. The vault was opened in 1835, — when a new pavement was laid in the chancel of this church, — and persons descending into it saw the head, in a leaden box shaped like a beehive, open in front, set in a niche in the wall, behind an iron grill. 246 A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. and statesmen, its frayed and crumbling banners, and the eternal, majestic silence with which it broods over the love, ambi- tion, glory, defeat, and anguish of a thou- sand years, dissolved now and ended in a little dust ! As the organ music died away I looked upward and saw where a bird was wildly flying to and fro through the vast spaces beneath its lofty roof, in the vain effort to find some outlet of escape. Fit emblem, truly, of the human mind which strives to comprehend and to utter the meaning of this marvellous fabric ! THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 247 XXI. THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 1882. NIGHT, in Stratford-on-Avon — a summer night, with large, solemn stars, a cool and fragrant breeze, and the stillness of perfect rest. From this high and grassy- bank I look forth across the darkened meadows and the smooth and shining river, and see the little town where it lies asleep. Hardly a light is anywhere visible. A few great elms, near by, are nodding and rus- tling in the wind, and once or twice a drowsy bird-note floats up from the neighbouring thicket that skirts the vacant, lonely road. There, at some distance, are the dim arches of Clopton's Bridge. In front — a graceful, shapely mass, indistinct in the starlight — rises the fair Memorial, Stratford's honour and pride. Further off, glimmering through the tree-tops, is the dusky spire of Trinity, keeping its sacred vigil over the dust of Shakespeare. Nothing here is changed. The same tranquil beauty, as of old, hallows 248 THE SHRINES OP WARWICKSHIRE. this place ; the same sense of awe and mys- tery broods over its silent shrines of ever- lasting renown. Long and weary the years have been since last I saw it ; but to-night they are remembered only as a fleeting and troubled dream. Here, once more, is the highest and noblest companionship this world can give. Here, once more, is the almost visible presence of the one magician who can lift the soul out of the infinite weariness of common things and give it strength and peace. The old time has come back, and the bloom of the heart that I thought had all faded and gone. I stroll again to the river's brink, and take my place in the boat, and, trailing my hand in the dark waters of Avon, forget every trouble that ever I have known. It is often said, with reference to memo- rable places, that the best view always is the first view. No doubt the accustomed eye sees blemishes. No doubt the supreme moments of human life are few and come but once ; and neither of them is ever repeated. Yet frequently it will be found that the change is in ourselves and not in the objects we behold. Scott has glanced at this truth, in a few mournful lines, written toward the close of his heroic and beautiful THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 249 life. Here at Stratford, however, I am not conscious that the wonderful charm of the place is in any degree impaired. The town still preserves its old-fashioned air, its quaintness, its perfect cleanliness and order. At the Shakespeare cottage, in the stillness of the room where he was born, the spirits of mystery and reverence still keep their imperial state. At the ancient grammar- school, with its pent-house roof and its dark sagging rafters, you still may see, in fancy, the unwilling schoolboy gazing upward ab- sently at the great, rugged timbers, or look- ing wistfully at the sunshine, where it streams through the little lattice windows of his prison. New Place, with its lovely lawn, its spacious garden, the ancestral mulberry and the ivy-covered well, will bring the poet before you, as he lived and moved in the meridian of his greatness. Cymbeline, The Tempest, and A Winter's Tale, the last of his works, undoubtedly were written here ; and this alone should make it a hallowed spot. Here he blessed his young daughter on her wedding day; here his eyes closed in the long last sleep ; and from this place he was carried to his grave in the chancel of Stratford church. I pass once again through the fragrant 250 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. avenue of limes, the silent churchyard with its crumbling monuments, the dim porch, the twilight of the venerable temple, and kneel at last above the ashes of Shakespeare. What majesty in this triumphant rest ! All the great labour accomplished. The universal human heart interpreted with a living voice. The memory and the imagina- tion of mankind stored forever with words of sublime eloquence and images of immor- tal beauty. The noble lesson of self-con- quest — the lesson of the entire adequacy of the resolute, virtuous, patient human will — set forth so grandly that all the world must see its meaning and marvel at its splendour. And, last of all, death itself shorn of its terrors and made a trivial thing. There is a new custodian at New Place, and he will show you the little museum that is kept there — including the shovel- board from the old Falcon tavern across the way, on which the poet himself might have played — and he will lead you through the gardens, and descant on the mulberry and on the ancient and still unf orgiven vandal- ism of the Rev. Francis Gastrell, by whom the Shakespeare mansion was destroyed (1759), and will pause at the well, and at the fragments of the foundation, covered THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 25 1 now with stout screens of wire. There is a fresh and fragrant beauty all about these grounds, an atmosphere of sunshine, life, comfort and elegance of state, that no observer can miss. This same keeper also has the keys of the guild chapel, opposite, on which Shakespeare looked from his win- dows and his garden, and in which he was the holder of two sittings. You will enter it by the same porch through which he walked, and see the arch and columns and tall, mullioned windows on which his gaze has often rested. The interior is cold and barren now, for the scriptural wall-paint- ings, discovered there in 1804, under a thick coating of whitewash, have been removed and the wooden pews, which are modern, have not yet been embrowned by age. Yet this church, known beyond question as one of Shakespeare's personal haunts, will hold you with the strongest tie of reverence and sympathy. At his birthplace everything remains unchanged. The gentle ladies who have so long guarded and shown it still have it in their affectionate care. The ceil- ing of the room in which the poet was born — the room that contains "the Actor's Pillar" and the thousands of signatures on walls and windows — is slowly crumbling 252 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. to pieces. Every morning little particles of the plaster are found upon the floor. The area of tiny, delicate iron laths, to sustain this ceiling, has more than doubled since I last saw it, five years ago. It was on the ceiling that Lord Byron wrote his name, but this has flaked off and disap- peared. In the museum hall, once the Swan inn, they are forming a library ; and here you may see at least one Shakespear- ean relic of extraordinary interest. This is the MS. letter of Richard Quiney — whose son Thomas became in 1616 the husband of Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith — asking the poet for the loan of thirty pounds. It is enclosed between plates of glass in a frame, and usually kept covered with a cloth, so that the sunlight may not fade the ink. The date of this letter is October 25, 1508, and thirty English pounds then was a sum equivalent to about six hundred dollars of American money now. This is the only letter known to be in exist- ence that Shakespeare received. Miss Caro- line Chataway, the younger of the ladies who keep this house, will recite to you its text from memory — giving a delicious old- fashioned flavour to its quaint phraseology and fervent spirit, as rich and strange as the THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 253 odour of the wild thyme and rosemary that grow in her garden beds. This antique touch adds a wonderful charm to the relics of the past. I found it once more when sit- ting in the chimmey-corner of Anne Hatha- way's kitchen ; and again in the lovely little church at Charlecote, where a simple, kindly woman, not ashamed to reverence the place and the dead, stood with me at the tomb of the Lucys, and repeated from memory the tender, sincere, and eloquent epitaph with which Sir Thomas Lucy thereon commemo- rates his wife. The lettering is small and indistinct on the tomb, but having often read it I well knew how correctly it was then spoken. Nor shall I ever read it again without thinking of that kindly, pleasant voice, the hush of the beautiful church, the afternoon sunlight streaming through the oriel window, and — visible through the doorway arch — the roses waving among the churchyard graves. In the days of Shakespeare's courtship, when he strolled across the fields to Anne Hathaway' s cottage at Shottery, his path, we may be sure, ran through wild pasture- land and tangled thicket. A fourth part of England at that time was a wilderness, and the entire population of that country 254 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. did not exceed five millions of persons. The Stratford-on-Avon of to-day is still pos- sessed of some of its ancient features ; but the region round about it then must have been rude and wild in comparison with what it is at present. If you walk in the foot- path to Shottery now you will pass between low fences and along the margin of gardens, — now in the sunshine, and now in the shadow of larch and chestnut and elm, while the sweet air blows upon your face and the expeditious rook makes rapid wing to the woodland, cawing as he flies. In the old cottage, with its roof of thatch, its crooked rafters, its odorous hedges and climbing vines, its leafy well and its tan- gled garden, everything remains the same. Mrs. Mary Taylor Baker, the last living de- scendant of the Hathaway s, born in this house, always a resident here, and now an elderly woman, still has it in her keeping, and still displays to you the ancient carved bedstead in the garret, the wooden settle by the kitchen fireside, the hearth at which Shakespeare sat, the great blackened chim- ney with its adroit iron " fish -back " for the better regulation of the tea-kettle, and the brown and tattered Bible with the Hatha- way family record. Sitting in an old arm- THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 255 chair, in the corner of Anne Hathaway' s bedroom, I could hear in the perfumed summer stillness, the low twittering of birds, whose nest is in the covering thatch and whose songs would awaken the sleeper at the earliest light of dawn. A better idea can be obtahied in this cottage than in either the birthplace or any other Shake- spearean haunt of what the real life actually was of the common people of England in Shakespeare's day. The stone floor and oak timbers of the Hathaway kitchen, stained and darkened in the slow decay of three hundred years, have lost no particle of their pristine character. The occupant of the cottage has not been absent from it more than a week during upward of half a century. In such a nook the inherited habits of living do not alter. " The thing that has been is the thing that shall be," and the customs of long ago are the customs of to-day. The Red Horse inn is in new hands now (William Gardner Colbourne having suc- ceeded his uncle Mr. Gardner), and it seems brighter than of old — without, however, having parted with either its antique furni- ture or its delightful antique ways. The old mahogany and wax-candle period has 256 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. not ended yet in this happy place, and you sink to sleep on a snow-white pillow, soft as down and fragrant as lavender. One im- portant change is especially to be remarked. They have made a niche in a corner of Washington Irving' s parlour, and in it have placed his arm-chair, recushioned and pol- ished, and sequestered from touch by a large sheet of plate-glass. The relic may still be seen, but the pilgrim can sit upon it no more. Perhaps it might be well to en- shrine "Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre" in a somewhat similar way. It could be fas- tened to a shield, displaying the American colours, and hung up in this storied room. At present it is the tenant of a starred and striped bag, and keeps its state in the seclu- sion of a bureau ; nor is it shown except upon request — like the beautiful marble statute of Donne, in his shroud, niched in the chancel wall of St. Paul's cathedral. 1 1 A few effigies are all that remain of old St. Paul's. The most important and interesting of them is that shrouded statue of the poet John Donne, who was Dean of St. Paul's from 1621 to 1631, dying in the latter year, aged 58. This is in the south aisle of the chancel, in a niche in the wall. You will not see it unless you ask the privilege. The other relics are in the crypt and in the church- yard. There is nothing to indicate the place of the grave of John of Gaunt or that of Sir Philip Sidney. Old St. Paul's was burned September 2, 1666. THE SHRIXES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 257 One of the strongest instincts of the Eng- lish character is the instinct of permanence. It acts involuntarily, it pervades the national life, and, as Pope said of the universal soul, it operates unspent. Institutions seem to have grown out of human nature in this country, and are as much its expression as blossoms, leaves, and flowers are the ex- pression of inevitable law. A custom, in England, once established, is seldom or never changed. The brilliant career, the memorable achievement, the great char- acter, once fulfilled, takes a permanent shape in some kind of outward and visible memorial, some absolute and palpable fact, which thenceforth is an accepted part of the history of the land and the experience of its people. England means stability — the fire- side and the altar, home here and heaven hereafter ; and this is the secret of the power that she wields in the affairs of the world and the charm that she diffuses over the domain of thought. Such a temple as St. Paul's cathedral, such a palace as Hampton Court, such a castle as that of Windsor or that of Warwick, is the natural, sponta- neous expression of the English instinct of permanence ; and it is in memorials like these that England has written her history, R 258 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. with symbols that can perish only with time itself. At intervals her latent animal ferocity breaks loose — as it did under Henry the Eighth, under Mary, under Cromwell, and under James the Second, — and for a brief time ramps and bellows, striving to deface and deform the surrounding struc- ture of beauty that has been slowly and painfully reared out of her deep heart and her sane civilisation. But the tears of human pity soon quench the fire of Smith- field, and it is only for a little while that the Puritan soldiers play at nine-pins in the nave of St. Paul's. This fever of animal impulse, this wild revolt of petulant impa- tience, is soon cooled ; and then the great work goes on again, as calmly and surely as before — that great work of educating man- kind to the level of constitutional liberty, in which England has been engaged for well- nigh a thousand years, and in which the American Republic, though sometimes at variance with her methods and her spirit, is, nevertheless, her follower and the con- sequence of her example. Our Declaration was made in 177(3 : the Declaration to the Prince of Orange is dated 1689, and the Bill of Rights in 1G28, while Magna Charta was secured in 1215. THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 259 Throughout every part of this sumptuous and splendid domain of Warwickshire the symbols of English stability and the relics of historic times are numerous and deeply impressive. At Stratford the reverence of the nineteenth century takes its practical, substantial form, not alone in the honour- able preservation of the ancient Shake- spearean shrines, but in the Shakespeare Memorial. That fabric, though mainly due to the fealty of England, is also, to some extent, representative of the practical sym- pathy of America. Several Americans — Edwin Booth, Herman Vezin, M. D. Con- way, and W. H. Reynolds among them — are contributors to the fund that built it, and an American gentlewoman, Miss Kate Field, has worked for its cause with excel- lent zeal, untiring fidelity, and good results. (Miss Mary Anderson acted — 1885 — in the Memorial Theatre for its benefit, present- ing for the first time in her life the charac- ter of Rosalind. ) It is a noble monument. It stands upon the margin of the Avon, not distant from the church of the Holy Trinity, which is Shakespeare's grave ; so that these two buildings are the conspicuous points of the landscape, and seem to confront each other with sympathetic greeting, as if con- 260 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. scious of their sacred trust. The vacant land adjacent, extending between the road and the river, is a part of the Memorial estate, and is to be converted into a garden, with pathways, shade-trees, and flowers, — by means of which the prospect will be made still fairer than now it is, and will be kept forever unbroken between the Memo- rial and the Church. Under this ample roof are already united a theatre, a library, and a hall of pictures. The drop-curtain, illustrating the processional progress of Queen Elizabeth when ' ' going to the Globe Theatre," is gay but incorrect. The divis- ions of seats are in conformity with the inconvenient arrangements of the London theatre of to-day. Queen Elizabeth heard plays in the hall of the Middle Temple, the hall of Hampton Palace, and at Green- wich and at Richmond ; but she never went to the Globe Theatre. In historic temples there should be no trifling with historic themes ; and surely, in a theatre of the nineteenth century, dedicated to Shake- speare, while no fantastic regard should be paid to the usages of the past, it would be tasteful and proper to blend the best of ancient ways with all the luxury and ele- gance of these times. It is much, however, THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 26 1 to have built what can readily be made a lovely theatre ; and meanwhile, through the affectionate generosity of friends in all parts of the world, the library shelves are con- tinually gathering treasures, and the hall of paintings is growing more and more the imposing expository that it was intended to be of Shakespearean poetry and the history of the English stage. Many faces of actors appear upon these walls — from Garrick to Edmund Kean, from Macready to Henry Irving, from Kemble to Edwin Booth, from Mrs. Siddons to Mary Anderson. Prominent among the pictures is a spirited portrait of Garrick and his wife, playing at cards, wherein the lovely laughing lady archly discloses that her hands are full of hearts. Not otherwise, truly, is it with sweet and gentle Stratford herself, where peace and beauty and the most hallowed and hallowing of poetic associations garner up, forever and forever, the hearts of all mankind. In previous papers upon this subject I have tried to express the feelings that are excited by personal contact with the relics of Shakespeare — the objects that he saw and the fields through which he wandered. Fancy would never tire of lingering in this 262 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. delicious region of flowers and of dreams. From the hideous vileness of the social con- dition of London in the time of James the First Shakespeare must indeed have re- joiced to depart into this blooming garden of rustic tranquillity. Here also he could find the surroundings that were needful to sustain him amid the vast and overwhelm- ing labours of his final period. No man, however great his powers, can ever, in this world, escape from the trammels under which nature enjoins and permits the exer- cise of the brain. Ease, in the intellectual life, is always visionary. The higher a man's faculties the higher are his ideals, — toward which, under the operation of a divine law, he must perpetually strive, but to the height of which he will never abso- lutely attain. So, inevitably, it was with Shakespeare. But, although genius cannot escape from itself and is no more free than the humblest toiler in the vast scheme of creation, it may — and it must — sometimes escape from the world : and this wise poet, of all men else, would surely recognise and strongly grasp the great privilege of solitude amid the sweetest and most soothing ad- juncts of natural beauty. That privilege he found in the sparkling and fragrant THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 263 gardens of Warwick, the woods and fields and waters of Avon, where he had played as a boy, and where love had laid its first kiss upon his lips and poetry first opened upon his inspired vision the eternal glories of her celestial world. It still abides there, for every gentle soul that can feel its influ- ence — to deepen the glow of noble passion, to soften the sting of grief, and to touch the lips of worship with a fresh sacrament of patience and beauty. THE ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE. April, 1892. — A record that all lovers of the Shakespeare shrines have long wished to make can at last be made. The Anne Hatha- way Cottage has been bought for the British Nation, and that building will henceforth be one of the Amalgamated Trusts that are guarded by the corporate authorities of Strat- ford. The other Trusts are the Birthplace, the Museum, and New Place. The Mary Arden Cottage, the home of Shakespeare's mother, is yet to be acquired. 264 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. XXII. A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. I must become a borrower of the night, For a dark hour or tivain." — Macbeth. MIDNIGHT has just sounded from the tower of St. Martin. It is a peaceful night, faintly lit with stars, and in the region round about Trafalgar Square a dream-like stillness broods over the darkened city, now slowly hushing itself to its brief and troubled rest. This is the centre of the heart of modern civilisation, the middle of the greatest city in the world — the vast, seething alembic of a grand future, the stately monument of a deathless past. Here, alone, in my quiet room of this old English inn, let me meditate a while on some of the scenes that are near me — the strange, romantic, sad, grand objects that I have seen, the memorable figures of beauty, genius, and renown that haunt this classic land. A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 265 How solemn and awful now must be the gloom within the walls of the Abbey ! A walk of only a few minutes would bring me to its gates — the gates of the most renowned mausoleum on earth. No human foot to- night invades its sacred precincts. The dead alone possess it. I see, upon its gray walls, the marble figures, white and spectral, star- ing through the darkness. I hear the night- wind moaning around its lofty towers and faintly sobbing in the dim, mysterious spaces beneath its fretted roof. Here and there a ray of starlight, streaming through the sumptuous rose window, falls and lin- gers, in ruby or emerald gleam, on tomb, or pillar, or dusky pavement. Rustling noises, vague and fearful, float from those dim chapels where the great kings lie in state, with marble effigies recumbent above their bones. At such an hour as this, in such a place, do the dead come out of their graves ? The resolute, implacable Queen Elizabeth, the beautiful, ill-fated Queen of Scots, the royal boys that perished in the Tower, Charles the Merry and William the Silent — are these, and such as these, among the phantoms that fill the haunted aisles ? What a wonderful company it would be, for human eyes to behold ! And with what 266 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. passionate love or hatred, what amazement, or what haughty scorn, its members would look upon each other's faces, in this mirac- ulous meeting ? Here, through the glim- mering, icy waste, would pass before the watcher the august shades of the poets of five hundred years. Now would glide the ghosts of Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, Beau- mont, Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Addison, Prior, Campbell, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan, Newton, and Macaulay — children of divine genius, that here mingled with the earth. The grim Edward, who so long ravaged Scotland ; the blunt, chivalrous Henry, who conquered France ; the lovely, lamentable victim at Pomfret, and the harsh, haughty, astute victor at Bosworth; James with his babbling tongue, and William with his im- passive, predominant visage — they would all mingle with the spectral multitude and vanish into the gloom. Gentler faces, too, might here once more reveal their loveliness and their grief — Eleanor de Bohun, broken- hearted for her murdered lord ; Elizabeth Claypole, the meek, merciful, beloved daugh- ter of Cromwell ; Matilda, Queen to Henry the First, and model of every grace and virtue ; and sweet Anne Neville, destroyed — as many think — by the politic craft A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 267 of Gloster. Strange sights, truly, in the lonesome Abhey to-night ! In the sombre crypt beneath St. Paul's cathedral how thrilling now must be the heavy stillness ! No sound can enter there. No breeze from the upper world can stir the dust upon those massive sepulchres. Even in day-time that shadowy vista, with its groined arches and the black tombs of Wellington and Nelson and the ponderous funeral-car of the Iron Duke, is seen with a shudder. How strangely, how fearfully the mind would be impressed, of him who should wander there to-night ! What sub- lime reflections would be his, standing beside the ashes of the great admiral, and think- ing of that fiery, dauntless spirit — so sim- ple, resolute, and true — who made the earth and the seas alike resound with the splendid tumult of his deeds. Somewhere beneath this pavement is the dust of Sir Philip Sidney — buried here before the de- struction of the old cathedral, in the great fire of 1666 — and here, too, is the nameless grave of the mighty Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. Shakespeare was only twenty-two years old when Sidney fell, at the battle of Zutphen, and, being then resi- dent in London, he might readily have seen, 268 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. and doubtless did see, the splendid funeral procession with which the body of that heroic gentleman — radiant and immortal example of perfect chivalry — was borne to the tomb. Hither came Henry of Hereford — returning from exile and deposing the handsome, visionary, useless Richard — to mourn over the relics of his father, dead of sorrow for his son's absence and his country's shame. Here, at the venerable age of ninety-one, the glorious brain of Wren found rest at last, beneath the stu- pendous temple that himself had reared. The watcher in the crypt to-night would see, perchance, or fancy that he saw, those figures from the storied past. Beneath this roof — the soul and the perfect symbol of sublimity ! — are ranged more than four- score monuments to heroic martial persons who have died for England, by land or sea. Hsre, too, are gathered in everlasting re- pose the honoured relics of men who were famous in the arts of peace. Reynolds and Opie, Lawrence and West, Landseer, Tur- ner, Cruikshank, and many more, sleep under the sculptured pavement where now the pilgrim walks. For fifteen centuries a Christian church has stood upon this spot, and through it has poured, with organ strains A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 269 and glancing lights, an endless procession of prelates and statesmen, of poets and war- riors and kings. Surely this is hallowed and haunted ground ! Surely to him the spirits of the mighty dead would he very near, who — alone, in the darkness — should stand to-night within those sacred walls, and hear, beneath that awful dome, the mellow thun- der of the bells of God. How looks, to-night, the interior of the chapel of the Foundling hospital ? Dark and lonesome, no doubt, with its heavy gal- leries and sombre pews, and the great organ — Handel 1 s gift — standing there, mute and grim, between the ascending tiers of empty seats. But never, in my remembrance, will it cease to present a picture more impressive and touching than words can say. Scores of white-robed children, rescued from shame and penury by this noble benevolence, were ranged around that organ when I saw it, and, in their artless, frail little voices, sing- ing a hymn of praise and worship. Well-nigh one hundred and fifty years have passed since this grand institution of charity — the sacred work and blessed legacy of Captain Thomas Coram — was established in this place. What a divine good it has accom- plished, and continues to accomplish, and 270 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. what a pure glory hallows its founder's name ! Here the poor mother, betrayed and deserted, may take her child and find for it a safe and happy home and a chance in life — nor will she herself be turned adrift without sympathy and help. The poet and novelist George Croly was once chaplain of the Foundling hospital, and he preached some noble sermons there ; but these were thought to be above the compre- hension of his usual audience, and he pres- ently resigned the place. Sidney Smith often spoke in this pulpit, when a young man. It was an aged clergyman who preached there within my hearing, and I remember he consumed the most part of an hour in saying that a good way in which to keep the tongue from speaking evil is to keep the heart kind and pure. Better than any sermon, though, was the spectacle of those poor children, rescued out of their helplessness and reared in comfort and affection. Several fine works of art are owned by this hospital and shown to visi- tors — paintings by Gainsborough and Rey- nolds, and a portrait of Captain Coram, by Hogarth. May the turf lie lightly on him, and daisies and violets deck his hallowed grave ! No man ever did a better deed A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 27 1 than he, and the darkest night that ever was cannot darken his fame. How dim and silent now are all those narrow and dingy little streets and lanes around Paul's churchyard and the Temple, where Johnson and Goldsmith loved to ramble ! More than once have I wandered there, in the late hours of the night, meet- ing scarce a human creature, but conscious of a royal company indeed, of the wits and poets and players of a far-off time. Dark- ness now, on busy Smithfield, where once the frequent, cruel flames of bigotry shed forth a glare that sickened the light of clay. Murky and grim enough to-night is that grand processional walk in St. Bartholo- mew's church, where the great gray pillars and splendid Norman arches of the twelfth century are mouldering in neglect and decay. Sweet to fancy and dear in recollection, the old church comes back to me now, with the sound of children's voices and the wail of the organ strangely breaking on its pensive rest. Stillness and peace over arid Bunhill Fields — the last haven of many a Puritan worthy, and hallowed to many a pilgrim as the resting-place of Bunyan and of Watts. In many a park and gloomy square the watcher now would hear only a rustling of 272 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. leaves or the fretful twitter of half -awakened birds. Around Primrose Hill and out toward Hampstead many a night-walk have I taken, that seemed like rambling in a desert — so dark and still are the walled houses, so per- fect is the solitude. In Drury Lane, even at this late hour, there would be some movement ; but cold and dense as ever the shadows are resting on that little graveyard behind it where Lady Dedlock went to die. To walk in Bow Street now, — might it not be to meet the shades of Waller and Wycher- ley and Betterton, who lived and died there ; to have a greeting from the silver-tongued Barry ; or to see, in draggled lace and ruffles, the stalwart figure and flushed and royster- ing countenance of Henry Fielding? Very quiet now are those grim stone chambers in the terrible Tower of London, where so many tears have fallen and so many no- ble hearts been split with sorrow. Does Brackenbury still kneel in the cold, lonely, vacant chapel of St. John ; or the sad ghost of Monmouth hover in the chancel of St. Peter's ? How sweet to-night would be the rustle of the ivy on the dark walls of Hadley church, where late I breathed the rose-scented air and heard the warbling thrush, and blessed, with a grateful heart, A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 273 the loving kindness that makes such beauty in the world ! Out there on the hillside of Highgate, populous with death, the star- light gleams on many a ponderous tomb and the white marble of many a sculptured statue, where dear and famous names will lure the traveller's footsteps for years to come. There Lyndhurst rests, in honour and peace, and there is hushed the tuneful voice of Dempster — never to be heard any more, either when snows are flying or "when green leaves come again." Not many days have passed since I stood there, by the humble gravestone of poor Charles Harcourt, and remembered all the gentle en- thusiasm with which, five years ago (1877), he spoke to me of the character of Jacques — which he loved — and how well he re- peated the immortal lines upon the drama of human life. For him the "strange, eventful history ' ' came early and suddenly to an end. In that ground, too, I saw the sculptured medallion of the well-beloved George Honey — " all his frolics o'er " and nothing left but this. Many a golden mo- ment did we have, old friend, and by me thou art not forgotten ! The lapse of a few years changes the whole face of life ; but nothing can ever take from us our memo- 274 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. ries of the past. Here, around me, in the still watches of the night, are the faces that will never smile again, and the voices that will speak no more — Sothern, with his sil- ver hair and bright and kindly smile, from the spacious cemetery of Southampton ; and droll Harry Beckett and poor Adelaide Neilson from dismal Brompton. And if I look from yonder window I shall not see either the lions of Landseer or the homeless and vagrant wretches who sleep around them ; but high in her silver chariot, sur- rounded with all the pomp and splendour that royal England knows, and marching to her coronation in Westminster Abbey, the beautiful figure of Anne Boleyn, with her dark eyes full of triumph and her torrent of golden hair flashing in the sun. On this spot is written the whole history of a mighty empire. Here are garnered up such loves and hopes, such memories and sorrows, as can never be spoken. Pass, ye shadows ! Let the night wane and the morning break. THE WORKS OF William Winter. SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. WANDERERS : A Collection of Poems. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. {In the Press.) OLD SHRINES AND IVY. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. (/« the Press.) THE PRESS AND THE STAGE: An Oration. Delivered before the Goethe Society, at the Bruns- wick Hotel, New York, January 28, 1889. 8vo, Cloth, $1.50. " The supreme need of this age in America is a practical conviction that progress does not consist in material prosperity, but in spiritual advancement. Utility has long been exclusively worshipped. The welfare of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To that worship these pages are devoted, with all that im- plies of sympathy with the higher instincts, and faith in the divine destiny of the human race." — From the Preface to Gray Days and Gold. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. (1) WORKS BY WILLIAM WINTER. Two New Volumes, UNIFORM WITH SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND and GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. Shadows of the Stage {Shortly). Old Shrines and Ivy {In the Press). " Mr. Winter has long been known as the foremost of American dramatic critics, as a writer of very charm- ing verse, and as a master in. the lighter veins of English prose." — Chicago Herald. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. (2) SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. "... It was the author's wish, in dwelling thus upon the rural loveliness, and the literary and historical associations of that delightful realm, to afford sympa- thetic guidance and useful suggestion to other Ameri- can travellers who, like himself, might be attracted to roam among the shrines of the mother-land. Tempera- ment is, the explanation of style; and he has written thus of England because she has filled his mind with beauty and his heart with mingled joy and sadness; and surely some memory of her venerable ruins, her ancient shrines, her rustic glens, her gleaming rivers, and her flower-spangled meadows will mingle with the last thoughts that glimmer through his brain when the shadows of the eternal night are falling and the ramble of life is done." — From the Preface. " He offers something more than guidance to the American traveller. He is a convincing and eloquent interpreter of the august memories and venerable sanc- tities of the old country." — Saturday Review. " The book is delightful reading." — Scribner's Monthly. " Enthusiastic and yet keenly critical notes and com- ments on English life and scenery." — Scotsman. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. (3) GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. CONTENTS. Classic Shrines. Haunted Glens and Houses. The Haunts of Moore. Old York. Beautiful Bath. The Lakes and Fells of Wordsworth. Shakespeare Relics at Worcester. Byron and Hucknall Torkard. Historic Nooks and Corners. Up and Down the Avon. Shakespeare's Town. Rambles in Arden. The Stratford Fountain. Bosworth Field. The Home of Dr. Johnson. From London to Edinburgh. Into the Highlands. Highland Beauties. The Heart of Scotland. Elegiac Memorials. Sir Walter Scott. Scottish Pictures. Imperial Ruins. The Land of Marmion. At Vesper Time. This book, which is intended as a companion to Shakespeare's England, relates to the gray days of an American wanderer in the British Isles, and to the gold of thought and fancy that can be found there. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. (4) GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. PRESS NOTICES. "Mr. Winter's graceful and meditative style in his English sketches ha- recommended his earlier volume upon (Shakespeare's) England to many readers, who will not need urging to make the acquaintance of this companion book, in which the traveller guides us through the quiet and romantic scenery of the mother- country with a mingled affection and sentiment of which we have had no example since Irving's day." — The Nation. " As friendly and good-humoured a book on English scenes as any American has written since Washington Irving." — Daily News, London. "Much that is bright and best in our literature is brought once more to our dulled memories. Indeed, we know of but few volumes containing so much of observation, kindly comment, philosophy, and artistic weight as this unpretentious little book." — Chicago Herald. " They who have never visited the scenes which Mr. Winter so charmingly describes will be eager to do so in order to realize his fine descriptions of them, and they who have already visited them will be incited by his eloquent recital of their attractions to repeat their former pleasant experiences." — Public Ledger, Philadelphia. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. (5) WANDERERS ; BEING A Collection of the Poems of William Winter. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. "But it has seemed to the author of these poems — which of course are offered as absolutely impersonal — that they are the expression of various representative moods of human feeling and various representative aspects of human experience, and that therefore they may possibly possess the inherent right to exist." — From the Preface. " The verse of Mr. Winter is dedicated mainly to love and wine, to flowers and birds and dreams, to the hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted repertory of the old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative; his confessed aim is to belong to ' that old school of English Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and simplicity the garment.' " — Saturday Review. " The poems have a singular charm in their graceful spontaneity." — Scots Observer. "Free from cant and rant — clear cut as a cameo, pellucid as a mountain brook. It may be derided as trite, borne, unimpassioned; but in its own modest sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful, and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing which receives the seal of over-hasty approbation." — Athe7icenm. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. (6) H 313 85 ^ : Mm\ x^ • V » xV ♦. ' a\^ <> °o *°* S> SdM£'. ^** , LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HI ■..■■■■■■ a ill 11 II ■ ■ ■ ml L mm