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The following brief account of a few of the things that have interestedme in London is not intended for the use of the inveterate sightseer,for whom so many admirable and complete fingerposts to the study of oldLondon have been written, by such experts as Mr. Bell, Mr. WilfredWhitten, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Ordish and Mr. Hare. It is meant for thepeople who do not realise one-eighth of the stories packed into thestreets of London, the city which, as Sir Walter Besant, that greatLondon lover, once said, has an unbroken history of one thousand yearsand has never been sacked by an enemy. For, in talking about theextraordinary beauty of London, I became aware of a vast public who haveeyes and see not, who thoroughly dislike the idea of sight-seeing yetacknowledge their pleasure in a chance discovery madeen route to teaat the Ritz,—people who are appalled at the very idea of entering amuseum. Then there are the travellers who say vaguely that when they canfind time they really mean to see something of London, but they turntheir backs on the greatest city of the world without having seen muchmore than{vi} Bond Street, because they are obsessed by the idea that tosee London requires some occult store of knowledge and energy, and theireyes are sealed to the interest and beauty that lie around their path.Finally there are people like the old lady who, when she heard I waswriting a book about old London, asked with astonishment, “Is thereanything old left in London?”

I hasten to add that I have not tried in the following pages to tell ofevery interesting place or even of all there is of interest in theplaces visited,—only enough, I hope, to make people go and see forthemselves and have the pleasure of discovering the rest. I am notafraid that if they once go to the Chapter House they will miss any ofits beauties: my dread is lest they fail to go there, from the vision ofa plethora of things they think they have no time to see. For I wantmore than anything else to prick the curiosity of the travellers up anddown the streets of the city who miss so much pleasure that they mighthave so easily, because they are not alive to all the interesting andunexpected things that wait for their coming just round the corner.

A little further afield there are so many other treasures waiting to benoticed,—Hogarth’s pleasant house in Chiswick, that, like many anotherLondon visitor, I am promising myself to see the first time I have afree Monday, Wednesday or Saturday;—Eltham, with its{vii} sunk gardensurrounding the remains of the old palace of the English kings, whereJohn of Eltham, Edward II.’s son, was born;—Southwark, with itscathedral and the remains of the Marshalsea Prison that not everyoneknows how to find;—and Islington, with the Canonbury Tower and thehouse in Duncan Street, No. 64, where Lamb lived for four years. Butthese I must leave regretfully for another day.

In conclusion, I should like to express my thanks to theMontrealGazette and to theDaily Express for permission to reprint one or twosketches which originally appeared in their pages, and to all thosefriends for whose kindly help and encouragement I am much indebted.{viii}

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

UNNOTICED LONDON

CHAPTER I

CHELSEA

If a hurried traveller had only time to roam about one of the Londonboroughs I think he should choose Chelsea, because in that small area ofhouses built along a mile and a half of the Thames riverside there ismuch that is typical of quite different phases of London life, from thesixteenth century to the present day.

It lies between the Kings Road and the Embankment, beginning at LowerSloane Street—Chelsea Bridge Road, and is reached by the districtrailway to Sloane Square Station or by the No. 11 bus passing theStrand, Trafalgar Square and Victoria: by Nos. 19 or 22 from Hyde ParkCorner, and from Kensington by the 31, with its terminus at LimerstonStreet, and by the Nos. 49 and 49a.

Perhaps the reason why this quarter has always been beloved is becausewhile other districts{2} have had their moment of fame and now live ontheir past in somnolent content, Chelsea has fallen in and out offashion with a fine carelessness and has always guarded the creativegift of dwellers of all ranks, so that the name of the little villagehas been famous for such a diversity of things as literature andcustards, art and water-works, china and buns, horticulture andlearning.

There is something cosy and charming about the name Chelsea, a good oldAnglo-Saxon word that once meant, “The Gravel Isle, Chesel-sey.” It hasnot become quite so unrecognisable as its neighbour Battersea, but ithas no more just cause for converting into “sea” the ey that meansisland with which it once ended. But you cannot lay down stern rules fora name that has taken the bit between its teeth like Chelsea. It startedits career in the Domesday Book as Chelched, and by the time it got tothe sixteenth century Sir Thomas More is dating a letter to Henry VIII.“At my pore howse in Chelcith.”

Of the two Thomases whose memory pervades Chelsea, Sir Thomas More isperhaps the most lovable. His son-in-law once said of him: “whom insixteen years and more, being in his house conversant with him, I couldnever perceive as much as once in a fume.”

It is in Roper’sLife that you read how his neighbours loved him withreason. Once, when he had been away on a mission to Cambrai in{3} 1528, hewent to report to the King at Woodstock, and then heard that part of hishouse and barns in Chelsea had been burnt. He had no thought of his ownloss, but sent to comfort his wife and tell her to find out the extentof his neighbours’ loss and indemnify them as far as possible.

There have been many other saintly men whom one reveres, but surely nonewith such wide sympathies. He entertained Erasmus with learned talk, buthe also entertained John Heywood the playwright and Court jester. He waswise, but he was also witty, and of which modern philosopher could it betold “that when an interlude was performed, he would make one among theplayers, occasionally coming upon them with surprise, and withoutrehearsal fall into a character, and support the part by hisextemporaneous invention and acquit himself with credit.”

Dear Sir Thomas More of delectable memory—it is good to come acrosssigns that you still live in English hearts, even if they take the formof stucco decorations on a Lyons tea house in Carey Street.

It was Sir Thomas More who first made Chelsea the fashion, though an oldManor house that stood near the church had many lordly owners beforeHenry VIII. bought it and, following More’s example, built himself thebig country mansion of which there are still traces in the basements ofthe houses on the corner of{4} Cheyne Walk and Oakley Street. The King isalso said to have had a hunting lodge near by and part of it stillexists at the end of Glebe Place in a small rather dilapidated building.

Sir Thomas More had built his house on the site of the present BeaufortStreet and it stood there till Sir Hans Sloane, the Chelsea BaronHaussmann of that day, pulled it down in 1740. The lovely gardens wentdown to the river. Henry VIII. used to come and dine here, and walk withhis arm round the neck of the friend he afterwards brought to the block,and here More received his other famous friends, among them Erasmus, andHolbein, who stayed with him for three years, painting many portraits.

It is pleasant to think that the spirit of More’s hospitality livedagain during the war and curiously enough at this very place and in oneof his own houses. For though his country home was destroyed, his townhouse, Crosby Hall, built as the great town mansion of Sir John Crosby,a merchant prince, in 1466, was brought from Bishopsgate piece by piecein 1910, and four years later the marvellous timbered roof looked downon the groups of Belgian fugitives that were sheltered there.

If you ask the porter at More’s Gardens, a big block of flats on thenorth-east corner of Battersea Bridge, for the key of Crosby Hall, hewill unlock a door in an ugly hoarding facing the embankment, close toChelsea Old Church.{5}

You step through it into a remote space where a mediæval building standsin the midst of the little rock gardens planted by the Belgian refugeesto while away their anxious, tedious hours. Many men have passed throughthe old hall since Sir John Crosby built it, for at different times ithad belonged to the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), Sir Thomas More,his son-in-law William Roper, and various ambassadors and nobles. In1609 it was the home of that Countess of Pembroke whose charms evokedfrom William Browne the epitaph so often attributed to Ben Jonson:

One wonders what they would all have thought of these latest comers tothe old mansion which carried on the English tradition of hospitality sowell that the poet among the visitors wrote, and you may see his wordson a brass tablet opposite the fireplace:

The reconstitution of Crosby Hall was never finished; first because ofthe death of King Edward, who took a great interest in the{8} scheme, andthen owing to the war; but there it stands, its perpendicular lines,mullioned windows and oriel and the wonderful oaken roof making it oneof the best examples that remain to us of fifteenth-century domesticarchitecture.

Queen Elizabeth as a child stayed at her father’s manor house here, andlater, as a girl of thirteen, she is said to have lived for a time atSir Thomas More’s house, when it had passed into the hands of herstepmother, Catherine Parr.

The charming Georgian houses of the Cheyne Walk of to-day carry on thetradition of the beautiful Chelsea homes of those times, such asShrewsbury House which stood on the west side of Oakley Street before itwas pulled down in 1813. It was owned by the husband of the famous Bessof Hardwicke, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who guarded Mary Queen of Scots inher captivity.

The delightful little houses in Paradise Row with their dormer windowsand tiled roofs were pulled down only a few years ago. Pepys said thatone of them was “the prettiest contrived house that ever I saw in mylife.” Ormonde Court now reigns in their stead, so there is no traceto-day of the little house in Paradise Row that the fair but frailDuchesse de Mazarin, niece of Anne of Austria’s Cardinal Prime Minister,rented from Lord Cheyne when she had fallen on such evil days that heraristocratic{9} guests used to leave money under their plates to pay fortheir dinner. She was not the only favourite of Charles II. to have asummer home in Chelsea. Nell Gwynne lived at the Sandford Manor Houseand the route by which the Merry Monarch rode to visit her is stillcalled the King’s Road.

I hesitate to tell that Nell Gwynne’s very house is still in existencefor fear of taxing too much the ready courtesy of the occupants, twomembers of the staff of The Imperial Gas Works Co., owners of theproperty, who divide the house between them.

My kindly guide had disquieting doubts as to whether Nell ever reallylived there, but he admitted that a thimble, unquestionably hers, and amasonic jewel belonging to the King, were found in the house when it wasbeing repaired. Thimbles are not usually associated with the memory of“pretty witty Nellie,” but the Chelsea air may have moved her toindustry. At all events there is the Jacobean house, shorn now of itstop story to lessen the weight on the bulging walls, and with its brickcarving but faintly seen under successive coats of rough plaster. Butnot even the Queen Anne door can destroy the picture any livelyimagination may summon of the nonchalant Nell tripping up and down thesame staircase to be seen to-day, its design of six steps and a doorrepeated to the top of the house, belying the legend that Charles oncerode his pony up the stairs. The{10} walnut trees Nell planted havedisappeared, but what is left of the old house stands in a pleasantgreen hollow, an oasis in the acrid surroundings of a gas factory, thepaling of which separates it from the outside world not a stone’s throwfrom unsuspecting passengers on a No. 11 bus.

Joseph Addison lived for a time in the old Manor House, and two of hisletters, written to the Lord Warwick whose mother he afterwards married,describe the bird concerts in the neighbouring woods.

If anyone wants to know exactly what the place looked like in NellGwynne’s day, a very interesting account of it may be found in a bookwritten by a French London-lover, calledFulham Old and New. It is nowout of print, but may be consulted at the Fulham Public Library, reachedby any of the buses travelling westward along the Fulham Road.

All this is ancient history, of which there is little trace to-day. Theshades of Sir Robert Walpole, Dean Swift, Fielding and Smollett, andgood Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father, who was organist of Chelsea Hospitaland buried in its now closed cemetery, may still haunt Chelsea; but theactual homes of the people of living memory make a more vivid appeal.Chelsea still keeps up the reputation of being the haunt of famouspeople. Unlike the inhabitants of the Paris Latin Quarter, artists andpoets who have once breathed her air do not remove to more{11} fashionableMayfair streets when they have “arrived.”

And what a brilliant band of them were found in the Chelsea of thenineteenth century! Meredith wroteThe Ordeal of Richard Feverel atNo. 7 Hobury Street; Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their youth in theold rectory in Church Street when their father was rector of Chelsea OldChurch; George Eliot moved her household gods to No. 4 Cheyne Walk, thebeautiful house where Daniel Maclise, the early Victorian painter, hadlived, only three short weeks before her death; and Cecil Lawson, thepainter ofThe Harvest Moon in the Tate Gallery, lived at No. 15.

A volume might be written about Cheyne Walk alone; those pleasantred-brick houses with their wrought-iron railings were the homes of someof the greatest geniuses of the Victorian age. Turner lived at 118 forthe four years before his death in 1851: Rossetti lived at No. 16 withSwinburne and W. M. Rossetti. Meredith had some idea of joining thisménage, but recoiled at the sight of Rossetti’s oft-quoted poachedeggs “bleeding to death” on cold bacon very late in the morning. He paida quarter’s rent and decided to live by himself. The Rev. Mr. Haweis wasa later tenant of this famous house, which, in spite of populartradition, has no connection with Catherine of Braganza. Mrs. Gaskell,the authoress ofCranford, was born at No. 93. Whistler spent{12} twelveyears at No. 96, and here he painted the portraits of his mother andCarlyle.

The painter had many Chelsea houses, from 101 Cheyne Walk, where helived for four years from 1873, to the White House in Tite Street whichhe built, and, after his quarrel with the architect, adorned with atruly Whistlerian inscription, now removed, “Except the Lord build thehouse, they labour in vain that build it. This house was built by Mr.X.”

William de Morgan and Leigh Hunt lived in Chelsea, but the man whosememory is the most vivid of all this brilliant group was Thomas Carlyle.His house at 24 Cheyne Row is a memorial museum open to any visitor onthe payment of one shilling, sixpence on Saturday. The house is keptexactly as it was in the days which Mr. Blunt has so charminglydescribed in his bookThe Carlyles’ Chelsea Home.

I can tell no more about it except from hearsay, for the terribleloneliness of Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges and of Balzac’s inthe Rue Raynouard in Paris dissuaded me from visiting any more housesturned into museums of their owners’ belongings.

I would rather go to the Chelsea Hospital, that is very much alive withthe presence of remarkably long-lived old men: one of them lived till hewas 123 years and another to 116. They think nothing there of merecentenarians—they even tell you of one pensioner who had served foreighty-five years and married at the{13} age of 100. They think that was amistake on the whole, but they are secretly proud of it, and also of thelady warriors—one of them had the domestic-sounding name of HannahSnell—who lie buried in the old churchyard among their comrades.

Visitors can see the hospital every week-day from 10 till dusk, exceptfor an hour from 12.45 to 1.45, and they may attend the chapel serviceson Sunday at 11A.M. and 6.30, when the pensioners in their bravescarlet coats remind one of Herkomer’s picture. My advice to you, if youwant to see Chelsea Hospital really well, is to enlist one of thepensioners as guide. He will show you the old leather black-jacks, andGrinling Gibbons’ statue of Charles II. in a toga, and the colonnades ofthe old Wren building, so fine in its severe simplicity—and the flagsin the chapel, so filmy now with age that they look as if a breath ofwind would blow them to pieces—and the old portraits and many otherarresting things. But what he will like best to exhibit will be thefragments of the bomb that hit one of the buildings during an air-raid.He won’t allow you to hold on to the belief that Nell Gwynne hadanything to do with the foundation, but he will tell you a lot ofinteresting details about the regulations of the Hospital—how verylittle like an institution it is, and you will leave the building withan added respect for Charles II.

After strolling about Chelsea one’s mind{14} turns with insistence to thethought of buns, “r-r-rare Chelsea buns,” as Swift wrote to Stella.There is now nothing left but the name of Bunhouse Place, at the cornerof Union Street and the Pimlico Road, of the famous shop where 100,000buns used to be sold of a Good Friday Eve one hundred and forty yearsago, and where the Georges and their Queens used to drive to fetch theirbuns. It was taken down in 1839, but the fasting sightseer—being inChelsea and not in Bloomsbury or Bayswater—can easily find other placesto stay his hunger. If he does not belong to the decorative sex—thephrase is Mr. Wagner’s, not mine—he will doubtless follow that veryknowledgeable guide and betake him to the “Six Bells,” 195 King’sRoad—a short distance from the Chelsea Town Hall, and there find thecomfort that attracts its artistclientèle.

There are other restaurants that are much frequented by the artists ofthe quarter:—the “Blue Cockatoo,” in Cheyne Walk, near Oakley Street,and the “Good Intent,” 316 King’s Road, and a new and yet moreattractive one on the corner of Arthur Street with the enticing name of“The Good Humoured Ladies.”

Chelsea is full of interesting shops. The Chelsea Book Club is on theEmbankment by Church Street—its delights must be sampled to berealised—and next door there is a queer handmade toy shop calledPomona—why Pomona?

Across the road is Chelsea Old Church, with{15} its highseventeenth-century tower. To me its interior is the most satisfying inLondon. The spirit of ancient days dwells there, untouched by moderncurrents of unrest, and in the tranquil beauty there is no jarring note.Sir Thomas More was one of its celebrated parishioners—you may see hismonument and the epitaph he wrote himself.

What a pleasant, kindly, independent spirit had this great Chancellor,who donned the humble surplice of a parish clerk and sang in the choirunperturbed by the remonstrances of even so great a personage as theDuke of Norfolk. I always liked the tale of how the latter came to dinewith Sir Thomas in Chelsea and “fortuned to find him at the church inchoir with a surplice on his back singing, and as they went hometogether arm in arm, the duke said, ‘God’s Body, God’s Body, my LordChancellor, a parish clerk—a parish clerk! You dishonour the King andhis office!’ And Sir Thomas replied mildly that he did not think theduke’s master and his would be offended with him for serving God hisMaster or thereby count his office dishonoured.”

I love Chelsea Old Church better than any other London church. It hasnothing of the heavy solidity that smacks of broadcloth and thick goldwatch-chains. The congregation on a summer Sunday evening might be metwith in any village in England. The very altar has no pomp ofembroidered frontal and massive{16} ornaments; it looks almost like aJacobean dining-room with its simple oaken table and dignified chairs oneither side.

The church is filled with enchanting old treasures—chained Bibles andold monuments to the great dead who worshipped there, but I cannot findit in my heart to catalogue them for you as if it were a museum. Enterthose dim walls and see for yourself, and you will love it as did thatlover of England from across the sea whose epitaph is not the leastamong the beautiful things of Chelsea Old Church:

In memory of Henry James, Novelist
Born in New York, 1843. Died in Chelsea, 1916
Lover and interpreter of the fine
amenities of brave decisions and generous
loyalties: resident of this parish, who
renounced a cherished citizenship to give his
allegiance to England in the first
year of the Great War.

In other churches with their solemn balconies and air of chillemptiness, it is difficult to imagine the things that have happenedthere in other days. But in Chelsea Old Church, which somehow alwaysseems peopled with friendly ghosts and never lonely, one can almost seeHenry VIII. being married secretly to Jane Seymour before the publicceremony, and hear the cadence of Dr. John Donne’s voice as he preachedthe funeral oration of the woman he had immortalised inThe AutumnalBeauty.

I think of all the great people who lie buried here the most fascinatingis this Lady Danvers, George Herbert’s mother, whose “great and harmlesswit, cheerful gravity and obliging behaviour,” attracted so many friendsand among them Dr. Donne. She must have been an adorable mother. Isometimes wonder if the care of her ten children ever made her late forchurch, and if it were some memory of his boyhood days that made hersaintly son write with the cheerful gravity he may have inherited,

Mrs. Herbert came to live in Chelsea when she married Sir John Danvers,after she had “brought up her children carefully and put them in goodcourses for making their fortunes.” Danvers House, where she and herhusband lived, gave its name to Danvers Street, at the corner of whichCrosby Hall now stands.

The Chelsea Physic Garden

One of the things I like best in Chelsea is the old herb garden, theChelsea Physic Garden, that makes a home of peace with its base on theEmbankment and the western angle at the{18} beginning of Cheyne Walk andthe end of the Royal Hospital Road, once called the Queen’s Road inhonour of Catherine of Braganza, Charles II.’s Queen.

My friendship with the garden is based on no intimate acquaintance, fornot to every one is it given to pass the iron gates that guard itsfragrant stillness. If you would do more than gaze through the iron barsat this enchanted space that dreams away the year round undisturbed, youmust write to the Clerk of the Trustees of the London ParochialCharities, 3 Temple Gardens, E.C.4, and ask for a ticket of admission tothe most ancient Botanical Garden in England.

Once you have taken the trouble to secure this card you may stroll alongthe paths of the Chelsea Physic Garden that are much as they were whenEvelyn went there on 7th August, 1685, to visit “Mr. Wats, keeper of theApothecaries’ Garden of Simples at Chelsea,” and admire the innumerablerarities there, the “tree bearing Jesuit’s bark, which had done suchwonders in Quartan agues.”

The Apothecaries’ Society laid out the garden about two hundred andfifty years ago. They leased the ground at that time, but later on SirHans Sloane gave them the freehold with one of those quaint conditionsattached that lend a refreshing grace to a legal transaction.

The Apothecaries had to despatch 2000 specimens of distinct plants,grown in the garden{19} well dried and preserved and sent in batches of 50,every year to the Royal Society. One would like to know what the RoyalSociety did with them, but the most interesting things in history are sooften left out.

In 1899 the garden was handed over to the Trustees of the LondonParochial Charities, who maintain this delectable if deserted Londoncorner for the teaching of botany and for providing opportunity andmaterial for botanical investigation.

Perhaps it was the attraction of the Physic Garden that influenced thechoice of the Huguenot market gardeners who settled in Chelsea when theywere driven from their own country by the Revocation of the Edict ofNantes in 1685. It startled me to find that at the time when England wasmerry, the Guilds were every bit as dictatorial as the Trades Unions areto-day. More so, in fact, for while a goodly percentage of our workersand nearly all our waiters are now said to be foreigners, none of theforeign workmen of the seventeenth century were allowed to carry ontheir trades in London and compete with their English confrères.

So the hatters went to Wandsworth and the silk mercers to Spitalfields,and the nurserymen chose the village of Chelsea lying two miles out ofLondon along the river bank.

Their spirits may still hover among the perfumed beauty of the annualChelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is{20} held inthe grounds of the Chelsea Hospital once a year at the end of May or thebeginning of June, when the delicate loveliness of the flowers attractsan immense number of garden lovers.

And now to tell you how to reach the Chelsea Hospital, the Flower Showand Ranelagh Gardens.

I have never been able to discover whether the extreme reluctance of theBritish to give a detailed address is due to a naïve belief thateveryone is born into this world with an intimate knowledge of thetopography of London, or to a malicious delight in puzzling theignorant, but I have a deeply-rooted conviction that the maze was anEnglish invention. So to the stranger bewildered by the laconic“Chelsea” on the cards of admission to the Flower Show I would say thatit is reached either by the District Railway to Sloane Square stationand then a short walk down Sloane Street to Pimlico Road, or by the 11or the 46 bus that stops at the corner of Pimlico Road and Lower SloaneStreet.

The Flower Show is one of the most charming events of the London season.In no other city in the world may you see anything like this meeting ofthe great brotherhood of gardeners of every social rank gathered toadmire the gorgeous achievements of the grand masters of the art ofgrowing flowers; where peeresses humbly consult horny-handed experts andfrivolous young men reveal unsuspected enthusiasms for blue aquilegias.{21}

The adjacent Ranelagh Gardens are often called Chelsea Hospital Gardens,perhaps to avoid confusion with the grounds of the Ranelagh Club atBarnes. They are closed to the general public during the three days ofthe Flower Show, so if you go to see the flowers you have the added andunexpected pleasure of wandering through the green glades of Ranelaghundisturbed by the shouts of the Pimlico children.

There are no flowers in these gardens, but they have a peculiar charm oftheir own. There is none of the flatness of Hyde Park—the undulatingpaths and quaint bosquets belong to another day when powdered courtierspursued fair ladies in the pleasure gardens that were so much thefashion. The story of Ranelagh is bound up with the history of theGeorgian period. There is not a book of memoirs but mentions this famouspleasure resort. Walpole said of it, “Nobody goes anywhere else;everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he sayshe has ordered all his letters to be directed there.”

It is quite true that everybody went there. Johnson, whom I find as hardto keep out of the description of any part of London as Mr. Dick foundit to keep King Charles’s head out of his memorial, was very fond ofgoing to Ranelagh. Boswell says that, to the remark that there was nothalf a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing Ranelagh, he answered, “No,{22}but there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in nothaving seen it.”

There is little left of the actual gardens where Johnson, Sir JoshuaReynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Walpole, the beautiful Duchess ofDevonshire, the King of Denmark, the Spanish ambassadors and the entireEnglish Court used to take part in the merry-making, but you may be surethey all walked up the broad avenue of trees that once shaded thebrilliant scene. In the seventeenth century the property belonged toViscount Ranelagh, an Irish nobleman by whose name the gardens are stillcalled.

When the estate was bought by a syndicate after his death a huge rotundawas built with boxes all round. It must have been something like theAlbert Hall, and every night the place was filled with fine ladies andwits, rubbing shoulders with all classes of society come to gaze at theattractions and listen to the music. The vogue of Ranelagh lasted manyyears and only ended when the rotunda was pulled down at the beginningof the nineteenth century.

Every now and then one meets pessimistic creatures, usually artists, whoshake their heads and say that Chelsea is going to the dogs—by whichthey mean that all the old studios are being taken by speculators withthe intention of converting them into flats.

But the Chelsea of to-day is as charming as it ever was. There are justas many famous inhabitants. Sargent, Derwent Wood, Augustus{23} John, GlynPhilpot, Wilson Steer and many another well-known genius, all livewithin sound of the “Six Bells” and some studios must have been savedfrom the speculator judging from the number of Chelsea addresses in thisyear’s Academy catalogue.{24}

CHAPTER II

KNIGHTSBRIDGE TO SOHO

Knightsbridge

Few people think of connecting the name of Knightsbridge with anythingless modern than the big departmental shops, the Barracks or the cosyhouses on the fringe of Mayfair and Belgravia.

Yet there was a town of Knightsbrigg in the fourteenth century, inEdward the Third’s day, when the Black Prince and his knights must oftenhave crossed the Westbourne stream by the bridge built just where theAlbert Gate now stands. Mr. Davis in hisHistory of Knightsbridgegives as the origin of the name the story that “in ancient time certainknights had occasion to go from London to wage war for some holypurpose. Light in heart if heavy in arms, they passed through thisdistrict on their way to receive the blessing awarded to the faithful bythe Bishop of London at Fulham. For some cause or other, however, aquarrel ensued between two of the band, and a combat{25} was determinedupon to decide the dispute. They fought on the bridge which spanned thestream of the Westbourne, while from its banks the struggle was watchedby their partisans. Both fell, if the legend may be trusted; and theplace was ever after called Knightsbridge in remembrance of their fatalfeud.”

Walking down the Brompton Road from the Knightsbridge Tube station it isdifficult to realise that not a hundred and fifty years ago “the streamran open, the streets were unpaved and unlighted, and a Maypole wasstill on the village green.”

Yes, a few hundred years ago, on that very triangle of green grass yousee to-day outside Mr. Tattersall’s big gateway, diagonally facing theKnightsbridge Tube station, men and maidens danced round the maypole onthe Knightsbridge village green.

I have a special weakness for that three-cornered grass plot. Peoplepass it every day and look scornfully at it—if they look at all. No oneknows that it is all that is left of a piece of Merrie England. Littleby little it has been pared away. The last maypole was taken down at theend of the eighteenth century, and the watchhouse and pound that Addisonmentions in theSpectator disappeared about a quarter of a centurylater. The little bit of green has watched the evolution of the tinychapel of the Elizabethan lazar-house that once existed near by into thestately and uninteresting{26} Holy Trinity Church, and the gradual rise ofthe immense departmental shops to take the place of the village silkmercers of yesterday.

There is a tradition that part of the green was once used as a burialground in the time of the Great Plague, but since there is no record ofthis gruesome fact, I refuse to believe it.

Tattersall’s

One was brought up to believe in the country Sunday after-dinnerinspection of property, where unlucky week-end visitors are paraded toadmire their host’s corn and cattle, but I have often wondered what theEnglish nation did with itself when in town of a Sunday afternoon. Iknow now. They go to Tattersall’s and look at the horses to be sold nextday. Tattersall’s on a fine Sunday afternoon in the season is like a bigreception by a not too exclusive hostess. Pretty young girls in charmingfrocks make the tour of the stables with their menfolk, and veryhorsey-looking people try to persuade their neighbours that they know asmuch about horses as the more unobtrusive individuals at whose nodgrooms fly to strip their charges for inspection.

Since Richard Tattersall, the last Duke of Kingston’s training-groom,opened his auction mart when his patron died in 1773, and founded{27} hisfortunes by buying Highflier for £2500, Tattersall’s has grown into anational institution with a world-wide reputation. It still belongs tothe same family, but they moved in 1865 from Grosvenor Place to thepresent buildings, where every Monday all the year round the auctionstake place, and every Sunday in the season dukes and jockeys, horsedealers and country squires, society ladies and trainers’ wives, strollup and down admiring the horses.

Ely House

As you come out of the Tube station, the view of Dover Street with itsirregular skyline is a very modern one. It looks a rather dull,uninteresting place, given over to commerce and clubs, but like most ofthe Piccadilly and Pall Mall quarter, it is very reminiscent of theStuart period. The history goes back to the respectable date of 1642,when the Clarendon estate was cut up into Dover, Albemarle, Bond andStafford streets.

Out of Peckham, that haunt of the prosperous City man of those times,had come Sir Thomas Bond, the forerunner of the Messrs. Cubitt of 1921,with his syndicate, dealing death to historical associations andpossessing none of the delicacy of feeling that made John Evelyn turnhis head the other way when he drove by with Lord Clarendon the lateowner.{28}

Evelyn himself lived here, close to the house of Lord Dover, whose namewas given to the street. Pope’s friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Lady Byron,both lodged in Dover Street, but by far the most interesting house isNo. 37, a brick building of unobtrusive, classic simplicity, that has astory connecting it with the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

You might pass up and down Dover Street many times without noticing thesignificant bishop’s mitre, carved in stone halfway up the middle of thefaçade. This was once the distinguishing mark of the town house of thebishops of Ely that they bought in 1772 from the Government in exchangefor all claim on their Hatton Garden property in Ely Place. Nowadays onethinks of diamond merchants in connection with Hatton Garden, but inElizabeth’s day it was the Naboth’s vineyard that she coveted on behalfof her handsome Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. The bishops wereforced to grant him a lease for the rent of a red rose, ten loads ofhay, and ten pounds, the right to walk in their rival’s gardens wheneverthey chose, and to gather twenty baskets of roses every year.

The bone of contention brought no luck to anyone. Hatton was imprudentenough to borrow the money for improvements from his queen. She insistedon the bishops conveying the property to her till the sum should berepaid, and when one of them jibbed at carrying out the{29} terms of thissettlement, the Queen wrote him an Elizabethan epistle:

Sir Christopher Hatton was never able to repay his mistress’s loan. Itbroke his heart, says an old chronicler, and though the queen relentedat the end, and came to visit him, “there is no pulley can draw up aheart once cast down, though a Queen herself should set her handthereunto.” He died disconsolate, in his coveted palace of Ely, in 1591.

After all these vicissitudes, the diocese got back its property at theRestoration, but in 1772 they gave up all claim to it in exchange forthe mansion in Dover Street.

The latter is a stately house, with a long marble hall and staircase,and the bishops of Elizabeth’s day would doubtless be mildly surprisedif they knew that it is now used by the men and women belonging to theAlbemarle Club.

London Museum

Quite near Dover Street, if you only knew it, is the one place where youmay read the story of London spread out before you page by page betterthan anywhere else. But very few people can even tell you how to findit.{30}

I once saw Lancaster House called the Cinderella of Londonmuseums—perhaps because it is so charming and so neglected. It is nearno bus route nor railway station, yet this London Carnavalet is not sovery far from the Dover Street Tube station and either of the two routesby which it is reached from that point are delightful walks. You mayenter Green Park and stroll along the Queen’s Walk till you come to apassage-way to the left—not the first little narrow one where twopeople have to walk Indian file into St. James’s Place, but the second,that leads through a wider gateway, closed at 10 p.m., into Stable Yard.

Or else you can go down St. James’s Street, past the passage leadinginto the quaint little eighteenth-century courtyard of Pickering Place,towards St. James’s Palace with its beautiful old sixteenth-centurybrick gateway in Cleveland Row. Skirt the Palace to the right and youwill come to Stable Yard, and in Stable Yard is Lancaster House.

It is a stately place. Queen Victoria once said to the Duchess ofSutherland: “I come from my house to your palace,” but shorn of thegroups of chairs and tables and the stately company moving up and downthe magnificent staircase, the yellow and red marble walls seemcheerless and repellant.

Now and then a little white notice is pasted on the door with theannouncement that the museum, which is usually open on summer{31} Fridaysand Sundays from 2 to 6, and all other days from 10 to 6 and till 4o’clock in winter, will be closed to the public for an afternoon orevening. The Government are entertaining distinguished strangers in thespacious salons, and then Lancaster House lives again for a few hoursthe brilliant existence it had in the nineteenth century, when it wascalled Stafford House and the Duke of Sutherland dispensed splendidhospitality there.

Amusing tales of these political parties, and of the guests, and of manyother things, are told in Mr. Arthur Dasent’s delightfulStory ofStafford House, that is sold for a modest sum just inside the door.

In 1913 Lord Leverhulme bought the remainder of the lease that expiresin 1940, from the Duke of Sutherland, and handed it over to the trusteesof the London Museum to house the collection of London antiquities thenexhibited in Kensington Palace.

The name of Stafford House was changed to Lancaster House as acompliment to the King, who is Duke of Lancaster, and in memory of thegenerosity of a Lancashire man.

It is an entrancing place, where you can trace this great city’s historyfrom the time men used flints to the war that is too near for itssouvenirs to be anything but harrowing.

One may walk through the ages, from the Prehistoric room, through Roman,Saxon and Mediæval rooms, on the ground floor, and, then,{32} going up thegrand staircase, see how men lived in London in Tudor,seventeenth-century, Cromwellian and Charles II.’s days, and so on,through the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rooms, to the costume andRoyal rooms, where you pause dumbfounded before the going-away dress ofstiff white silk poplin embroidered with gold that Queen Mary wore theday of her wedding, 6th July, 1893.

Down on the ground floor, past the Temple Crusader with the Mestroviccountenance, in the west corridor, is the Gold and Silver Room, with thebeautiful jewellery that some bygone Jacobean jeweller buried in WoodStreet, perhaps when the menace of the Great Fire was upon him.

Of what happened to him there is no trace, and the lovely chains andrings lay buried for two and a half centuries. They may for all we knowhave been stolen and buried by thieves who met their end on Tyburn Treebefore they could enjoy their booty. Admirers of Lalique’s work in thePlace Vendôme will see how this unknown Englishman solved the sameproblems of the great French artist 250 years ago. The delicate enamelchains and lovely cameos and carved chalcedony and glass and onyx areprettier than many a jeweller’s stock to-day, and they must lookdisdainfully across at the case of heavy Victorian atrocities which ourgrandmothers wore so complacently.{33}

St. James’s Church

I do not remember ever seeing anyone cross the paved courtyard of St.James’s Church, Piccadilly, on a week-day, for though it was one ofWren’s favourites among the churches he built, and inside there is afont carved by Grinling Gibbons, it has an air of sanctimoniousrespectability that is not very alluring, but the font with its carvingof the Fall of Man, etc., is well worth seeing.

The Haymarket Shoppe

I have asked many people if they know where to find a perfect example ofan eighteenth-century shop, bow windows little flight of steps and all,a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus—and they look at me in blankastonishment.

Yet there it stands, at 34 Haymarket, two doors down from CoventryStreet on the left-hand side, its pot-bellied windows filled with quaintjars and bottles and more modern packages of the upstart cigarette, thathas ousted the honest snuff which was sold there for two hundred years.

It belongs to another day and generation, and through the old doorwaythe 20th-century passer-by can see the oaken shelves with their rows ofold wooden boxes and snuff jars that used to contain the “King’s MorningMixture,” as supplied to His Majesty King George IV.{34}

The old shop has had many royal customers, and going through thebeautiful Adam screen into the back room, one may be shown, if thecourteous proprietor is not too busy, the accounts of Queen Charlotte,who bought her snuff here for nineteen years of the Dukes of Cumberlandand Sussex and the Princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, who also indulgedin the best rappee.

Most of the great names of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England maybe found in these old ledgers. David Garrick and Inigo Jones werecustomers, and so were my Lord Halifax, Lady Shrewsbury and the Duchessof Grafton. Beau Brummell’s accounts lie, cheek by jowl as he would havethem, with those of the Earl of Dorchester and the Duke of Bedford, andthe long array of famous names of men and women to be found in theyellowing papers might well have served as a list of guests present atany brilliant political function of the time.

The snuff-taking of those days has passed with the lace jabots and thesilk knee-breeches, but the fashion died hard, and so recent a figure asLord Russell of Killowen was one of the last of the famous snuff-takers.The twentieth century turns up its nose at what it calls a disgustinghabit, yet it had its graces and was responsible for the creation of thebeautiful boxes and bottles now treasured as heirlooms.

The actual owners of this fascinating shop have carried on the businessin their family

since 1780, when the founder, M. Fribourg, retired. One of the presentpartners, Mr. George Evans, has written a delightful monograph on theOld Snuff House of Fribourg and Treyer, “At the Rasp and Crown, at theupper End of the Haymarket, London.” It is a charming book, filled withillustrations and reminiscences of the leisurely days before the arrivalof the departmental store, when an old-established firm had time to haveintimate courtly relations with its customers.

What Lord Petersham could now change his mind and return 216 pounds ofanything and be urbanely credited with £75 12s.; and do gratefulcustomers now make presents of gold-lined amboyna snuff boxes to marktheir satisfaction?

If they do, I am as ignorant of the fact as the ordinary pedestrian ofthe historical interest of the unnoticed shop he passes daily on his wayto Piccadilly Circus.

A King in Soho

Few Londoners can tell you where a king lies buried in Soho. Shelley mayhave been thinking of him when he gave his mad invitation to the oldlady in the Highgate bus, to “sit upon the ground and tell sad storiesof the deaths of kings,” but if so his knowledge is not shared by manypeople.{36}

If I have made you curious, walk along Coventry Street from PiccadillyCircus, leaving Leicester Square, that “pouting-place of princes,” onyour right, and turn up Wardour Street past Lisle Street and GerrardStreet that was fashionable in Charles II.’s day and where Dryden andBurke and Lord Mohun lived and where Johnson and Reynolds founded theLiterary Club that still exists in another meeting-place. Then, crossingShaftesbury Avenue, you will come to the old graveyard at the back ofthe church of St. Anne, which is now a playground and only open tillfour in the winter months and during the hours of service on Sundays. Onthe wall you will find a tablet to the memory of the unlucky Theodore,King of Corsica, who fled from France, a bankrupt, only to be seized onhis arrival in London and flung into the Fleet prison. “Near thisplace,” runs the inscription, “is interred Theodore, King of Corsica,who died in this neighbourhood Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leavingthe King’s Bench Prison by the Benefit of the Act of Insolvency. Inconsequence of which he registered his Kingdom of Corsica for the use ofhis Creditors.” To which Horace Walpole has appended the followingstanza:

The kindly soul who bailed out fallen Majesty{37} a fortnight before hisdeath and then gave him decent burial, was, according to the verger ofSt. Anne, an Italian candle merchant from Old Compton Street, on thesite of whose shop is now that excellent non-profiteering restaurantknown as Le Dîner Français. But I prefer, with the Blue Book, to thinkthat the Samaritan was a tailor, grown rich, perhaps, snipping theembroidered waistcoats of H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, when thelatter squabbled with his royal parents and removed in a pettish mood toLeicester House hard by.

The only other interesting things I could find in this old church werethe tomb of Hazlitt, immediately below King Theodore’s memorialstone,—the old wooden drain pipes, lately disinterred, that lie on theShaftesbury Avenue side of the church, and the tablet within, to thememory of “The Beloved Mother-in-Law.”

St. Anne’s was built in 1685, a significant year in the annals of thisneighbourhood. It was the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,which sent the Huguenots flocking to London, to take up their residencehere, and of the Battle of Sedgemoor, when the Duke of Monmouth, who hada mansion in the Square, used as his watchword the cry “So Ho!” andunconsciously christened the whole district.{38}

CHAPTER III

TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET

One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the waythe memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that youfeel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city andcrops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took youthrough that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discoverthat Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of thePetty Customs in the Port of London. You stroll through the littleCloisters in Westminster Abbey, of all places in the world, and some onetells you that Lady Hamilton once lived in the Littlington Tower, whenshe was servant to Mr. Hare and had no thought that she would everinspire a hero to great victories. You think that when you have seen SirThomas More’s tomb in Chelsea Old Church, and Crosby Hall near by, youhave exhausted the souvenirs of his life, but you find him again inWestminster Hall, where he was condemned to death—in the Deanery wherehe spent two months in charge of the Abbot of Westminster,—in Lincoln’sInn—in Milk Street in the City, where he was born, “the brightest starthat ever shone in that Via Lactea”—in the church{39} of St. LawrenceJewry where he lectured, and in the Tower where he died.

Dr. Johnson, of course, was ubiquitous. He went everywhere and usuallysaid something noteworthy about everything. One of the greatdifficulties in writing this book has been to refrain from quoting himtoo frequently, and Pepys is even worse. The kindly official in theClothworkers’ Hall (where I lunched once on a special occasion) said tome: “Samuel Pepys, Ma’am, Pepys the great Diarist—you may have heard ofhim,” and I felt like replying: “My good man, I have been with yourPepys through Chelsea—and in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where he wasmarried—I have seen his portrait at the Royal Society Rooms inBurlington House and his house in Buckingham Street—the church of St.Bride, where his birth was registered—St. Lawrence Jewry, where he wasdisappointed with Wilkins’ sermon—All Hallows, Barking, that, as hewrote on the 5th September, 1666, only just escaped the Great Fire—hisparish church of St. Olave’s, where he worshipped, and Hyde Park, wherehe used to go driving with his wife.”

The Strand

Of all delightful places to meet memories of famous bygone people, themost intriguing is{40} the Strand. A superficial glance at this modernbustling street shows little of the past still clinging about it. But alittle further on you will discover, if you look for them, a bit ofRoman London, a Renaissance chapel, a statue with a history, a lovelygroup of eighteenth-century houses, the water gate of a former finemansion on the riverside, and a church that links us to the time of theDanish invasion.

The Londoner would probably tell you that Piccadilly Circus is thecentre of his city; the historian, St. Paul’s; but to the foreigner, thevisitor from overseas, or to the Anglo-Indian back from the East, thecentre will always be Charing Cross.

It has been a starting-point for the traveller from the days when thelittle old village of Charing was used as a halting-place on the way tothe City or to the Royal Palace of Westminster. Probably that is thetrue derivation of the name; “La Charrynge” meant the Turning, the greatbend where the two roads met, but a prettier tradition derives its namefrom Edward I.’s dear queen (“chère Reine”). Another cross to her memoryonce stood here, the most beautiful of all those set up by the sorrowingking wherever her bier rested on its journey from Grantham toWestminster Abbey. Cromwell’s Parliament, with its passion fordestruction, pulled it down in 1647, and the column which now stands inthe courtyard in front of the station is only a memorial modelled{41} asfar as possible on the original design. It was set up by Barry aboutsixty years ago, but it is already so weather-beaten that many peopleare under the amiable delusion that it is the very cross erected in1291.

The exact position of the old cross is now covered by King Charles I. onhorseback, facing the scene of his death in Whitehall, and this statuehas had an even more adventurous history.

It was cast originally in 1633 and after the king’s execution it becameso unpopular that Parliament sold it to a brazier to be melted down.With an eye to the possibilities of the future that a diplomat mightenvy, this man cannily buried the statue and did a roaring trade withthe Royalists in relics supposed to have been made from the fragments.After the Restoration the statue quietly came to light again, and wasset up in its present position in 1674 with popular rejoicings. Itstribulations were not yet over. The day of the burning of Her Majesty’sTheatre, the sword, a real one of the period, that hung at the side, wasbroken off, and it has never been replaced.

Another curious thing about this statue lies in the absence of girths tothe saddle or trappings on the horse, and it is said that when thisoversight was pointed out to the sculptor Le Sueur, he was so overcomewith mortification that he committed suicide on the spot.

In the days when London was no bigger than{42} one of our second-rateprovincial towns, Charing Cross was its market square. Here stood thepillory, even as late as the beginning of the last century; here wereread the Royal proclamations, and here were the booths of the showmenwho dealt in giants and fat ladies,—it was here, too, that Punch madehis first appearance in England in 1666. Where the railway station nowstands was Hungerford Market, and Trafalgar Square occupies the yard ofwhat were once the Royal Mews, where the king’s falcons were kept tillthey were replaced by the king’s horses. It is rather odd that the word“mews” is now always associated with stables, for it once meant the pensor coops in which moulting falcons were kept (from the Frenchmuer—tomoult). Geoffrey Chaucer, who lodged at Westminster, was in his timeClerk of the King’s Works and of the Royal Mews.

Water Gates

People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spentif they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by,unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods,just because they may see them every day.

Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand,{43} is only a stone’s throwfrom Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historicmemories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot couldtell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its greystone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there!

It was built by my Lord Duke of Buckingham, that hated favourite ofJames and Charles the First, who cuts such a sorry figure in Englishhistory books and such a romantic one in the pages of Dumas. He was thefather of the extravagant, erratic George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,whom Scott describes inPeveril of the Peak, and Pope more pungently:

Lely painted a wonderful portrait of the son. It hangs in the NationalPortrait Gallery, but even more interesting is the Vandyck picture ofhim with his brother Francis, painted when they were boys, and latelybought for the National Gallery.

With his father murdered, and his property confiscated by theCommonwealth and given to General Fairfax, the duke solved his problemby marrying the General’s daughter and heiress, a solution for whichCromwell made him pay by a sojourn in the Tower, where he was anintermittent resident. But in spite of his wife’s fortune the man who,“was everything by{44} turns and nothing long” was obliged to sell themagnificent mansion that his father had re-built in 1625 on the site ofthe old York House.

The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in HenryVIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop ofYork, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who lovedthe place and only left it for the Tower.

In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulationthat the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names.They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the GeorgeTavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra ofsinging birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has beenrechristened York Place,—and now we are back in Buckingham Street.

The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year inVilliers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a housethere. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since SamuelPepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his wayto visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on thehouse to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty andClarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here.

The house opposite looks far more modern,{45} but within the very new outerwalls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses arepreserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, andelaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czarof all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in thesevery rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No.15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore thesefamous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the houseare the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield.

With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happyholiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose wenever had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubtthat is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem tocling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian,half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says:“He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught themthe art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sightof a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet andmade himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor andcommander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, andlives in their memory as the father of his country.{46}”

Ships and shipbuilding were his passion. He went to Holland and workedin the yards there as a mechanic, calling himself Pieter Timmermann,until he had mastered the manual part of his craft. Then he came toEngland to study the theory of shipbuilding. King William III. placedthe house in Buckingham Street, so conveniently close to the river, athis disposal, and invited him to Court when he felt inclined. But Pieterhated crowds and ceremonies and preferred to spend his days in hard workand his evenings drinking and smoking with boon companions.

At the end of a month, finding himself too far from the dockyards, hemoved to Deptford, and put up at Sayes Court, kindly lent to him by JohnEvelyn. He was a dreadful tenant. We all know how Evelyn loved hisgarden,—but the Czar and his rough crowd trampled the flower-beds andspoilt the grass-plots, and trundled wheelbarrows through the diarist’spet holly-hedge for exercise. “There is a house full of peoplerightnasty!” wrote Evelyn’s indignant servant to his master. They ate anddrank enormously,—eight bottles of sack after dinner were nothing toPieter, and listen to this for a breakfast menu for twenty-one persons:half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, threequarts of brandy, six quarts of mulled wine, seven dozen of eggs, withsalad in proportion.

the vast store of information that he afterwards used to such excellentadvantage, the Czar spent sailing on the river, and in the evening hewould repair with favoured members of his suite to a public-house inGreat Tower Street. The old tavern has been rebuilt, but the name “TheCzar of Muscovy,” and later “The Czar’s Head,” that it adopted as acompliment to its imperial visitor, is there to this day, and you maysee it close to the city merchant’s house at No. 34 that is noticed inanother chapter.

The “right nasty” people did not stay long, luckily for Evelyn’s peaceof mind, but returned to London for another month or two. Then sayinggood-bye to King William, who had certainly treated him very well, theCzar pressed into his hand a little twist of brown paper, in which wasfound a ruby valued at £10,000, and sailed away home for Russia, takingwith him no fewer than 500 English captains, scientists, pilots,gunners, surgeons, sail-makers, anchor-smiths, coppersmiths and thelike, all ready for adventure in the unknown, according to the traditionof their race.

To come back to the Strand. It is fairly certain that the rather heavyand unattractive stone archway and steps at the bottom of Essex Street(at the other end of the Strand) formed the water gate of old EssexHouse, once occupied by the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.

It compares very badly with the water gate{48} in Buckingham Street, whichwas designed by Inigo Jones in 1625, and built by Nicholas Stone themaster mason, who carved one of the lions on its frontage. The Londonclimate has blurred the outline of the arms of the Villiers family onthe south side, and the motto “Fidei Coticula Crux” on the north, andthe raising of the Embankment now prevents the waters of the Thames fromswirling round the old stone steps. No monarch had passed through thewater gate since the days of Charles II. until Queen Alexandra came toopen the new building in Buckingham Street in 1908. Its glory hasdeparted, but there it stands, useless, unnoticed and forgotten, yet howbeautiful!

The Adelphi

Retracing your steps up Buckingham Street, turn to the right along DukeStreet and John Street, and you will find yourself in the Adelphi, thatoasis of calm quiet so near the roar of the bustling Strand, wherefamous authors of the present day like to pitch their luxurious tents.Note the steep hill up which you climb. This is the roof of the archeswhich the brothers Adam built over the site of old Durham House in orderthat they might erect their elegant houses on a level with the Strand.You can still wander{49} in these vaults, if you are lucky enough to findan open gate; they are curious, and were once a fine rendezvous for evilcharacters.

The Duke of Buckingham’s names are not the only ones to be perpetuatedhere. The architects, Robert, John, James and William Adam, all hadstreets named after them, and they called the whole quarter the Adelphibecause they were brothers.

William Street has lately been rechristened Durham House Street, toremind us that the Adelphi was built on the site of Durham House, whereLady Jane Grey was born.

Probably the Adelphi will have to go some day, when a proper bridge forCharing Cross is built across the river here, but lovers of this littlebit of unspoiled Georgian London will miss its old-world charm anddignity.

St. Clement Danes

Nowadays, looking eastward up the Strand, the eye is caught by the twochurches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, standing isolatedin the centre of the roadway, whilst the traffic roars past on eitherside. In the Middle Ages you would still have seen St. Clement’s, thoughhalf engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses,with so narrow a passage between that coachmen{50} called it the “Straitsof St. Clement’s.” But on the site of St. Mary’s stood a maypole, onehundred feet high, dear to the heart of the city youth for themerrymakings that took place around it. Such giddy proceedings vexed thePuritans, who swept it away in an outburst of righteous indignation, butold customs die hard, and at the Restoration another and still lordlierpole was set up with royal approval, and dancing and junketings went onaround it for many a long day.

The church of St. Clement’s takes us back to very ancient history. Somesay that beneath it lie the bones of King Harold and other Danishinvaders. What is pretty certain is that the original church was built,after the expulsion of the Danes, by the few settlers who, havingmarried English wives, chose to remain behind, on condition that theydid not stir out of the strip of land that lay between the Isle ofThorney, now Westminster, and Caer Lud, now Ludgate.

Travellers from all over the world who have shared the common traditionsof childhood, feel a queer sense of kinship when they pass along theStrand and suddenly hear the old bells ringing out the familiar tune of“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.” The bells of thenursery-rhyme are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St.Clement’s, Eastcheap, which for centuries has been in the centre of thedried fruit trade.{51}

The bells were famous even in Shakespeare’s day. “We have heard thechimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” says Falstaff inHenry IV. Thosechimes are gone, but the present peal of ten bells, cast in 1693, is asfamous for its music.

One might write a whole history of church bells, from the time whenTurketul, Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in the ninth century,presented his abbey with the great bellGuthlac, and added six otherswith the rhythmic names ofPega,Bega,Bettelin,Barthomew,Tatwin andTurketul, to make a peal.

In the early monkish days they looked upon bells as the voices of goodangels: they were blessed and dedicated: the passing bell was tolled tokeep off evil spirits from the dead. Henry VIII., that ruthlessiconoclast, cared little for superstition, and in the generaldestruction of the religious houses hundreds of old bells were sold ormelted down. But the pious people of those days would point out how theBishop of Bangor, who sold his Cathedral bells, was shortly afterwardsstricken with blindness, and that Sir Miles Partridge won the JesusBells of St. Paul’s from King Henry at play and, proceeding to removethem and have them melted down, was hanged soon after on Tower Hill.

The bells of St. Clement’s were added after the church had been rebuiltin 1692, under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, who gave{54} hisservices for nothing in his usual generous-hearted way.

St. Clement’s is dear to all true Londoners as Dr. Johnson’s church. Youmay see the very pew where he sat, and there is something about thesolid, handsome structure that seems to fit the thought of the ponderousgreat man who worshipped there Sunday by Sunday, striving “to purify andfortify his soul and hold real communion with the Highest.” It is a fineand a prosperous church, and so richly endowed that at one time all thepaupers of the neighbourhood used to flock there for the sake of{55} whatthey could get. That they were well looked after, the carefully keptparish registers bear witness as far back as 1558. There are otherinteresting entries in the old registers. You may read of the baptism ofMaster Robert Cicill, the sonne of ye L. highe Threasurer of England,and of the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Mary Davies, the childheiress of Ebury Manor, who brought to her husband all those lands ofPimlico and Belgravia from whose rents the Dukes of Westminster draw thebulk of their colossal fortune. Her life story has been publishedrecently by Mr. Charles T. Gatty in his two-volumedMary Davies and theManor of Ebury.

Chapel Royal of the Savoy

From St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s it is but a few minutes’ walk backalong the Strand to the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, that once served allthe district, but it is now perhaps the tiniest parish in London west ofTemple Bar. There it stands in its quiet graveyard, all that is left toremind us of “the fayrest manor in England.” The old palace of the Savoywas built by Simon de Montfort, that “Cromwell of the Middle Ages,” onland granted by Henry III. to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, forwhich the said Peter had to pay the not very exorbitant rent{56} of threebarbed arrows. Afterwards it came into the possession of the Dukes ofLancaster. Here it was, in 1357, that the Black Prince, riding on alittle black hackney, brought his prisoner King John of France, whostayed here, with brief intervals, till his death, as nobody seemed ableto raise the money for his ransom. And here lived John of Gaunt, withhis numerous household, not least of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer. Latercame Henry IV., who annexed the manor, and since his time it has alwaysbelonged in a particular manner to the reigning house.

Nothing is left, though, to tell of it, save the chapel, which was begunby Henry VII. in place of a more ancient one fallen into decay,—andthat strange judicial survival, the Court Leet with view of Frankpledgeof the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. Few people know that once a yearthe jury of the Court, headed by the Beadle with his silver-topped andcarved staff of office, solemnly makes the round to inspect the boundarymarks of the Manor. One is in Child’s Bank, another on the Lyceum stage,one in Burleigh Street, one by Cleopatra’s Needle, another in MiddleTemple Lawn, where many scuffles have taken place in the past betweenthe jurymen and indignant Benchers and officers of the Inns of Courtconcerning the question of trespass. The Court itself, which dates backto Saxon days, sits annually about Easter time, and still does “what isusually{57} called everybody’s business, and nobody’s business,” as aformer High Bailiff wrote.

The old Roman Bath in Strand Lane is a little beyond St. Clement Dane’s,and next to the Tube station. That belongs to a later chapter, but ashort way further, on the same side of the road, is another bit ofunnoticed London.

Prince Henry’s Room

Prince Henry’s room is one of those charming links with the past thatlie unnoticed in the path of thousands who never stop to heed the story.At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the LawCourts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you seean eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobeanroom, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignifiedatmosphere. The Council of the Duchy of Cornwall is supposed to haveonce met here regularly and I believe that from time to time PrinceHenry’s room is now used for the meetings of various associations, butif you visit it any day between ten and four you will almost certainlyfind no one to disturb the ghosts of bygone cavaliers but the warveteran who passes his days there ruminating on the delinquencies ofhistorians.

The house is one of the oldest in the City. It{58} was built in 1610, theyear that Henry, the elder son of James I. of England, was createdPrince of Wales; and the room is known as Prince Henry’s room. Look atthe lovely Jacobean art of the panelling on the west wall, and thedecorated plaster ceiling, where in the centre you will find the deviceof this lamented “prince of promise,” who died at the early age ofeighteen.

Most people say, “Prince Henry!who was Prince Henry?” and very fewconnect the name with that little known prince who steals like a shadowacross the pages of our history books. But his memory deserves to bekept green if only for the reason that he was a true friend to SirWalter Raleigh, that unfortunate Victim of petty-minded James. After oneof his visits to Raleigh in the Garden House of the Tower, Prince Henrysaid: “No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.” A stainedglass window sets forth his titles in old French,

He was in many ways the prototype of our own Prince of Wales and heldalmost as high a place in the affections of his people. He waseverything that a king’s son should be. He was handsome, well-grown andathletic; he was scholarly{59} and brilliant, having all James’ love oflearning without his folly and effeminacy. If he was a paragon oferudition, he also loved the practical side of shipbuilding, and heliked to give and receive hard knocks in the miniature tournaments thathe organised at Whitehall, when he and his friends would engage thewhole evening in mighty battles with sword and pike. And in addition toall this he seems to have had the generous mind and temper of the trulygreat. It is no wonder that his untimely death evoked a cry of mourningthroughout England.

He was playing tennis, threw off his coat and caught a mortal chill.Everything that the doctors of that day could do was done. They evenapplied pigeons to his head and a split cock to his feet. Sir WalterRaleigh, who loved the youth, sent from his prison in the Tower therecipe of a potent “quintescence”; it did more good than the pigeons orthe split cock, but could not save him. Prince Henry died in 1612, whennot quite nineteen years of age.

The Temple

I know of a public school and university man who has lived all his lifein London and protests that he has never seen Westminster Abbey: thereare certainly hundreds of people who have never seen the Temple.

It would be a marvel to me that anyone should leave London withouthaving wandered at least once in those courts, if I had not taken solong to find my own way there. One knows vaguely that it is a charmingplace, but going there is postponed for thatfata morgana, a day ofleisure, that recedes as it is approached, and time passes and the trainwhistles and steams slowly out of Euston or Victoria, leaving behind oneof the very loveliest corners in old London,—so easy to reach it onehad but tried.

You have only to turn through the old gatehouse that Wren built in 1684to wander about in another world,—a world where it is possible toimagine dear Charles Lamb moving among his guests on a Wednesdayevening, with Mary hovering in the background, or Goldsmith giving thoserackety supper parties at No. 2 Brick Court that disturbed his studiousneighbour Blackstone.

Few places in London are so filled with the memories of brilliantEnglishmen as the Temple. If you want to know all about when and where{61}

they lived, go to the wigmaker who conducts the Temple affairs from hislittle shop in Essex Court, and he will provide you with Mr. Bellot’sfascinatingStory of the Temple.

Expert sightseers of course know all about it. They will tell you thatLamb was born in No. 2, Crown Office Row, and that Thackeray lived atNo. 19; that Goldsmith died at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane,and that Johnson’s Buildings are on the site of Dr. Johnson’s rooms inInner Temple Lane, and if you share their predilections you can go andpeer at the actual bricks that have once sheltered these great men. Butif you want to feel the real spirit of the place, unhampered by gazingat any particular pile of bricks and mortar, go to the old Temple Churchon a Sunday morning.

Take any bus along the Strand past Temple Bar, where Dr. Johnson used tosay that if he stationed himself between eleven and four o’clock, everysixth passer-by was an author,—and go through the second entrance tothe Temple called Inner Temple Lane. Or else take the Underground to theTemple and, walking along the Embankment, go up the Essex Street stepsand turn into the Temple courts by the first gate you find open, even ifthat means going round into Fleet Street.

The service in the Temple is an unforgettable revelation. There is noreason why psalms should not be sung in every Anglican church{64} in theworld as they are sung in the Temple, but no one seems to have thoughtof it, except the Temple choirmaster, who has trained his choristers tosing the words as if they had a profound meaning.

Has anyone ever found fitting phrases to describe the peculiar beauty ofthe Temple Church, with its carved Norman porch, that twelfth-centuryRound Church, where nine recumbent Crusaders rest in peace, and gleamingmarble pillars support both the choir and the Round? It must be seen tobe believed, but I pity the traveller who leaves London without seeingit.

In the courts of the Temple there lie embalmed so many stories of somany ages, that everyone finds what suits his fancy. You may wander asSpenser did among

Or you may choose a century later and go to York and Lancastrian times,and listen to Suffolk saying:

It seems a pity that the Temple authorities do not so far unbend as tosubscribe to the pretty legend by re-planting the gardens with red andwhite roses. It would give immense pleasure to countless transatlanticvisitors, whose history books are fairly impartial on York andLancastrian questions.

Then there are all the memories of gallant Elizabethan days, when thequeen came and dined with the benchers in the great Middle Temple HallandTwelfth Night was first performed here. It was by his dancing atone of the famous revels that the handsome youth Christopher Hattonfirst attracted the notice of Elizabeth, a moment when as our allieswould say he lost a good chance of remaining quiet. The Hall is shown tovisitors before twelve o’clock and after three on week-days and afterchurch on Sundays. Peter Cunningham says the roof is the best piece ofElizabethan architecture in London.

What feasts they had there in the days when lawyers had time to makemerry. Here is the account of one old chronicler:

It sounds very cheerful and amiable, but it is difficult to imagine ourmodern lawyers passing round the hearth singing a carol.

I suppose that the three best-loved dwellers in the Temple were OliverGoldsmith, Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, and none of them were lawyers.Johnson was living in No. 1 Inner Temple Lane when Topham Beauclerk andMr. Langton knocked him up at three in the morning to see if he could bepersuaded to finish the night with them, and he came out with a poker,and his little black wig on, and said when he understood their errand,“What, is it you, you dogs, I’ll have a frisk with you.”

The story of Goldsmith’s tenancy of the Temple reminds one of the talestold of Balzac, whose tastes and weaknesses he shared. Always infinancial difficulties, as soon as he made a little money he boughtquantities of clothes and furniture and ran into debt to his tailor,perhaps for the very red velvet coat with lace ruffles that you may seeto-day in the London Museum at Lancaster House. Goldsmith had many{67}London lodgings and only came to the Temple in 1764. When he died thereten years later the staircase of this improvident, extravagant geniuswas crowded with the poor he had managed to help. No one seems to knowexactly where he lies buried in the Temple churchyard.

Lamb was a true child of the Temple as he was born there. It may beheresy, but I have always wished he had not called it “the most elegantspot in the metropolis”; he loved it more than that, as all readers ofThe Old Benchers of the Inner Temple know well.

No one leaves the Temple without pausing in Fountain Court, where RuthPinch used to meet Tom. It is by far the most charming of all the courtsof the Temple. “I lived in Fountain Court for ten years,” wrote ArthurSymons, “and I thought then and I think still, that it is the mostbeautiful place in London.{68}”

CHAPTER IV

ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER

Having amused myself many times in Paris by hunting up the pieces of theold wall that Philippe Auguste built before he departed to the Holy Landon one of his Crusades, I set out one day to see how much remains of thewall the Romans built round London.

I discovered some bits of it, but I discovered a great many other thingsin the process.

There is very little left of the city that the old Romans called Augustaand the older Britons Llyn-Din—that some say means “the Lake Fort” andsome “The Hill by the Pool.” In the Guildhall and London museums thereare statues and vases and ornaments and mosaic pavements belonging tothose times, but in the city streets there are hardly any traces to-dayof the Roman occupation. Watling Street, a piece of Roman road thatstill bears an Anglo-Saxon name, runs citywards from the back of St.Paul’s, but that may better be reached from Cheapside. Most of the Romanwall that remains is now below ground level. The best places to see whatis visible are in St. Olave’s, Hart Street; at Trinity Place, TowerHill; at{69} Barber’s bonded warehouses in Cooper’s Row; and at The RomanWall House at No. 1, Crutched Friars, a new building whose plans werealtered by the Sadlers’ Company so as to preserve a good specimen of theold wall in one of the basement rooms.

I began my search for Roman remains in Strand Lane, which lies next doorto the Strand station on the Holborn tube, and can be reached either bybus along the Strand or by District train to the Temple, whence you gouphill up Arundel Street and, turning to your left along the Strand,find it after two or three minutes’ walk. Half-way down the littlewinding passage that once led to the waterside there is on the left adingy sign, “The Old Roman Bath.”

The English reputation for liking cold baths must have been a legacyfrom the Romans. Time was when the venerable cold spring bath was useddaily. David Copperfield had many a cold plunge in it when he was livingin Peter the Great’s house at the lower end of Buckingham Street. Butnow it is only open from 11 to 12 on Saturday mornings to the veryoccasional visitor who turns aside to look at this 2,000-year-old relicof the London of the past.

As in the Frigidarium of the Cluny Museum in Paris, it seems as if onesteps back into the world as Julius Cæsar knew it, across the thresholdinto the little vaulted chamber where the waters from the spring, oncefamed for miraculous cures, flow through the marble walls{70} of theidentical bath used by our Roman conquerors. The Romans contentedthemselves with a brick lining that still exists under the marble slabs,but the latter have an interest of their own, for they came from thefamous bath built in the Earl of Essex’s house near by, which Queen Bessherself is said to have been the first to use. The spring comes from theold Holy Well, that gave its name to Holywell Street, on the North sideof the Strand, a street destroyed to make room for Kingsway and Aldwych.

There is a Roman bath of a different kind underneath the Coal Exchangein Lower Thames Street, but on your way to this from the Temple station(or bus 13 from the Strand), get out at Cannon Street, where in a sortof cage against the wall of St. Swithin’s Church, directly opposite thestation, is the very oldest relic in the whole of the city ofLondon,—London Stone, the stone that the Romans set up to mark thecentre of the city; the starting point from whence they marked the milesalong their branching highways. As long as history has been written inthis land, there has been mention of London Stone. Do you remember how,inHenry VI., Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself King of theCity, striking his staff against the block? Once it was a big pillar andset on the other side of the way, but famous stones are seldom allowedto rest in peace, and time, the weather, and clumsy mediæval cart-wheelshave chipped and worn it to its present size.{71}

Now take the train again, or another 13 bus, and go on to the Monument,where King William IV. stands on the very spot where Falstaff and PrinceHal made merry at the “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. Going down by thebeautiful column which Sir Christopher Wren built to commemorate theGreat Fire, hard by where it started in Pudding Lane, turn to your leftin Lower Thames Street opposite the church of St. Magnus, and walk alongthis unattractive causeway till you come to the Coal Exchange with itsCorinthian porch. You will find the porter through a door up theside-street of St. Mary-at-Hill. Do not go on Monday, Wednesday orFriday afternoons, for those are marketdays or whatever the correct termis on Coal Exchanges, and, as that most agreeable porter{72} explained tome: “We found it didn’t do, Ma’am; for when the genelmen on the Exchangesee me taking a lady or genelman or it might be a party down below intothe cellar, they naturally says to me ‘What for?’ And when I say ‘Romanbath,’ they say ‘Roman bath, Jones! Did you say Roman bath? You don’tmean to say there’s a Roman bath below and me here forty years and neverknow it!’ And down they goes with all their friends, all equallysurprised, and business gets neglected. That’s how it is, Ma’am.”

Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone towish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturdayafternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweatingchamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaboratesystem of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in theStrand.

The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, wasonly built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two moreunexpected links with the past. I am indebted to Messrs. Thornbury andWalford for pointing out that the black oak used in the woodwork is partof a tree, four or five centuries old, that was discovered in the RiverTyne, and the blade of a dagger in the shield of the City arms is madeof wood from a mulberry tree that Peter the Great planted when he workedas a shipwright in Deptford Harbour.{73}

Turning up St. Mary’s-at-Hill into Great Tower Street, I found, nearlyopposite All Hallows, Barking, a prosperous merchant’s house stillstanding practically untouched, as it was built a year or two after theGreat Fire. At No. 34, an ordinary-looking archway leads into acourtyard fronting a perfect example of the home of a wealthy citizen ofCharles II.’s time. A flight of steps leads up to the doorway, fromwhich you catch a glimpse of panelled walls and noble staircase. Thecounting-house is on the right, and upstairs are the living rooms wherethe merchant lived with his wife and family and servants, in the fashionof those times. They entertained, too, after the day’s work was done,for amongst the private papers still treasured here is one complainingof the excessive noise of carriages and coaches turning in the cobbledcourtyard at night.

It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-centuryperpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see theNorman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of thelitany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory ofWilliam Thynne and his wife.

This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in WestminsterAbbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefeclerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first editionof the entire works of Chaucer. Both of them are{74} descendants of thatJohn of the Inn whose soubriquet became the name of the Bath family.

All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of theseventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerfullady,—one of the four abbesses who was a baronessex officio, and sheheld the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share ofmen-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eightmiles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of thenunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived theGreat Fire and is still intact.

Turning your back on the old church, and walking up Seething Lane, wherePepys went to live in 1660 and kept his diary for nine years, you cometo St. Olave’s Church on the corner of Hart Street, where his prettyyoung wife was buried. Church manners have vastly changed since Pepys’day. When a bomb from an avion fell just outside the Verdun Cathedralone Sunday morning, two months before the big attack, no one turned hishead except one little acolyte, who couldn’t resist a surreptitious grinat his comrade in the front pew. But listen to Pepys:

The church of St. Olave’s has a proud history. There are records of theparish in Henry I.’s day, and in 1283 of a church dedicated to St. Olaf,an exiled Norwegian. The present building dates from about 1450. It isone of the eight existing churches that escaped the Great Fire.

The mid-Victorian Vandals who filled up the marble crypt, and removedthe old galleries and square pews, with their candlesticks, havemercifully left the fine roof intact, and St. Olave’s possesses a numberof quaint Elizabethan treasures. On the door there is one of the fewremaining sanctuary knockers used by a fugitive from justice if hewanted to claim sanctuary protection: on four of the six bells in thechurch peal is engraved “Anthony Bartlet made mee 1662.” The crown onthe weather vane is supposed to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabethin 1554 when she gave silken bell-ropes as a thank-offering for herrelease from the Tower, and on the front of the organ gallery are thewrought-iron hat-stands with which the clergy of those days emphasisedtheir protest against men wearing their hats in church.

The beautifully wrought iron sword-stands are used to this day when theLord Mayor and Sheriffs attend an official service at St. Olave’s.{76} Theold church has been intimately connected with the navy since the dayswhen the Admiralty lodged in Mark Lane and Crutched Friars, and it isstill the parish church of the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, whocome humbly on foot,via Catherine Court and Seething Lane, to theannual special service on Trinity Sunday, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, asMaster, making his pilgrimage like the rest.

But for the ordinary visitor who has no part in these ceremonialhappenings the great interest of St. Olave’s lies in the memoriesconnected with its greatest parishioner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretaryto the Admiralty.

The fame of hisDiary has rather obscured Pepys’ well-meritedreputation as an admirable and faithful public servant at a time whenthese qualities were rare. He was living at the Navy Office in SeethingLane in 1666, and it is thanks to his sagacity in ordering all theworkmen from the Royal Dockyards to blow up the intervening houses thatSt. Olave’s, Hart Street, Allhallows Staining, and Allhallows Barkingwere saved from the Great Fire.

Pepys and his pretty wife are both buried in their parish church of St.Olave’s. Mrs. Pepys died when she was only twenty-nine, and though hehad teased the jealousy of “my wife, poor wretch,” Pepys ordered herbust to be carved, not in the usual profile, but with the lovely headturned so that he could see

There are other interesting things to be seen at St. Olave’s: thedoorway to the old churchyard that Dickens-lovers will recognise fromhis description in theUncommercial Traveller, the carved pulpit andquaint vestry and several fine old monuments, and, as I mentionedbefore, part of the old Roman wall.

If you have no passion for discovering bits of ancient walls, there areother more beautiful things near the bottom of Seething Lane. One ofthem is very new, so new that when I saw it all the scaffolding had notbeen removed from the buildings at its base—I mean the great tower ofthe Port of London Authority. I hear that Sir Joseph E. Broodbank hasjust written a fascinatingHistory of the Port of London, that willwaken everyone who has three guineas to spare to the interest ofLondon’s immense docks and the organisation that has power over seventymiles of the Thames. The beautiful tower of the new buildings, with itsfine groups of statuary, is worth a special pilgrimage to see. It is notvery far from Trinity House, that unique institution that, as Mr.Cunningham says, has for its object “the increase and encouragement ofnavigation, the regulation of lighthouses and sea marks, and the generalmanagement of matters not immediately connected with the Admiralty.”

The Guild of Trinity House was founded in 1529 by Sir Thomas Spert,Henry VIII.’s{78} Controller of the Navy and commander of the magnificentfour-master, theHarry Grace de Dieu, which took the King to Calais onhis way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. You can see exactly what itlooked like in the picture of Henry VIII.’s embarkation at Dover thathangs in Hampton Court Palace.

One of the delusions I have had when hastening through the streets ofLondon filled with excitement at the thought of seeing some ancientplace associated with more colourful days than our own, was caused byMr. Wagner’s enticing account of the Crooked Billet in his fascinatingbook on old London inns.

Alas, the Crooked Billet, at the eastern extremity of Tower Hill, hasnothing left of its former magnificence. The panelled walls and carvedchimney-pieces have been ruthlessly taken away,—some say to that bourneoverseas whither pass so many treasures of the Old World it affects todespise. There is nothing left but the sordid dirty rooms of slumtenements, with here and there the remains of a fine ceiling and a fewwall cupboards. The old building that was once a royal palace, and sincethe days of Henry VIII. has been a lordly inn, has fallen into the stateof drab degradation that is the forerunner of the pick and shovel of thedémolisseur. Only the rich façade remains to remind the passer-by ofits vanished glories!{79}

The Tower

Having wandered so long in its neighbourhood, let me hurriedly make theshamefaced confession that I share Richard III.’s opinion about theTower and that I have never seen it. I have skirted it, I have gazedinto its asphalted moat, I have looked with awe on its battlementedtowers,—but I have never crossed the drawbridge.

To me it is the storehouse of mistakes—a place redolent with the memoryof bygone blunders—where the great men of the nation, like Sir ThomasMore, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent,beautiful{80} things like the little Princes and Lady Jane Grey, were doneto death. There must surely be left something of Lady Jane’s agony whenshe saw the headless body of her young husband carried past her on themorning when she knew that she too was to die—something of thesickening sense of injustice that great men like Raleigh and More musthave felt as their doom approached.

Of course, for less squeamish people there is an unending interest inthe historical and architectural features of the Tower. It is open everyweek-day from ten to six in summer and ten to five in winter, and onSaturdays the fees to the White Tower and the Jewel House are notnecessary. It is staffed by a constable, a lieutenant, a residentgovernor and about 100 yeomen warders called Beefeaters, all of whichinformation, as well as the fact that the best way to reach it is fromMark Lane station on the Underground, is writ large in Mr. Muirhead’sexcellent Blue Book on London.

Writ more small are tales that almost make me want to go and see formyself the place where Charles d’Orleans, the royal French poet, whowrote such haunting songs as “Dieu qu’il la fait bon regarder,” was helda prisoner for fifteen long years. Other things it seems besides murdershappened in the Tower,—Henry the Eighth made two of his marriages here,James the First lived here for a time (a fact that does not mitigate mydistaste for the Tower), and{81}

Charles the Second slept here the night before his coronation in 1661.No monarch has done that since his day. Then, if guide-books may bebelieved, there are hundreds of things in the armouries and weapon roomand small-arms room, the cloak on which Wolfe died in far-off Quebec, aGrinling Gibbons carved head of Charles the Second, and armour andweapons of every period.

Most of these historic places are sepulchres of bygone crimes, but theTower has known tragedy within its walls in these latter hideous years,for nearly a score of our enemies were put to death there in the GreatWar.

One or two of them were brave men, serving their country even as weserved ours; one likes to think that they were treated as such. Thestory of Carl Lody has already been published, but I give it againbecause it redeems some of the Tower’s tragic history.

I believe he had asked to be allowed to testify to the fair and justtreatment he had received, and when the last moment came the German saidto the Provost-Marshal: “I suppose you wouldn’t care to shake hands witha spy?” The Englishman replied without hesitation, “I am proud to shakehands with a brave man.{84}”

CHAPTER V

ROUND ABOUT CHEAPSIDE

Cheapside and Fleet Street have points of resemblance, for they are bothnarrow highways to the City, crowded and bustling and full of history,but Fleet Street, in spite of its literary associations, has not muchattraction. Something of the mud of the old Fleet Ditch still seems tocling about it, some taint of disreputable Alsatia in Whitefriars, oncethe haven of roystering thieves and cut-throats, very different from thehive of grandiose newspaper offices that it is now.

But in Cheapside it is easy to call up memories of noisy apprentices andbusy trafficking. Here is the home of the true Cockney, born within thesound of those bells of Bow Church that still chime as cheerfully aswhen Dick Whittington heard them from Highgate Hill, or when theysummoned dilatory citizens to bed at nine o’clock. The very name evokesthe idea of buying and selling, even if one does not know that the oldword “chepe” means a market. It was once the shopping centre of the Cityof London, and the names of the streets branching{85} off on either side,Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane and the rest, are the names of thevarious commodities that were sold there. Friday Street was so calledfrom the fish to be bought there on a Friday. Round about, in IronmongerLane, Bucklersbury, and most of the streets on the northern side, busyartisans worked at their trades, and if we think it a noisy thoroughfarenowadays, what must it have been when it was paved with cobblestones andthronged all day long with an endless stream of horsemen, carts andcoaches, vociferating porters, citizens cheerful or quarrelling as thecase might be, sellers calling their goods on either hand, and the bellsof innumerable churches, priories and religious houses clangingincessantly to prayer. Always there was something going on in Chepe—atournament to see, with stands set up at the side of Bow Church, orpageants, cavalcades and processions passing by. The London youth ofthose days had a diverting life. Read what Chaucer says of the prenticein Edward III.’s reign:

We have most of us read in our history books of the “beau geste” ofQueen Philippa, wife of Edward III., in saving the lives of theburghers{86} of Calais; this seems to have been a habit that started earlywith her. In 1330, just after the birth of the Black Prince, atournament was held in Cheapside to celebrate the event, and a finewooden tower erected to accommodate the young queen and her ladies. Nosooner had they mounted than it collapsed. There was much screaming anda scene of terrible confusion, from which they all emerged, however,more frightened than hurt. The king was so enraged that he ordered theinstant execution of the careless workmen, but Philippa, who might wellhave been even more annoyed, at once flung herself on her knees andpleaded for their pardon until the king forgave them.

But “Safety first” was a motto with King Edward, he wanted no morewooden scaffoldings. A stone platform was built, just in front of theold church of St. Mary-le-Bow (making it extremely dark on the streetside), from which he and his court could view the tournaments with mindsat peace; for centuries this was the regular royal stand, whenever therewas a procession or other fine doings in the City. Look at Bow Church,that glory of Cheapside, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and, in thestone gallery running round the graceful steeple, you will see how, evermindful of tradition, he commemorated this fact when he built his newtower to flank the pavement adjoining the site of the old grand-stand.

When I last went into Bow Church I chatted{87} with the lady who wasengaged in scrubbing the floor, and she told me the curious fact that inthis English church in an English city, with its memories stretchingthrough the ages (for it is built on the site of a much older one andyou may still see the fine old Norman crypt), the Russians in Londonwere then assembling, Sunday by Sunday, for a service in their ownritual, St. Mary’s congregation amiably going to another church near by.The City Churches that were missed so sorely, after the Great Fire, bythe merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, apprentices, with their families,maids and servants, who lived all round about them and dutifullyworshipped there, now stand empty and neglected. Here and there, as inthe tiny fourteenth-century church of St. Ethelburga’s in BishopsgateStreet, the magnet of eloquent wisdom and sincerity draws men and womenfrom all over London to worship, so that the seats are never empty, butin the majority of the City churches, a perfunctory service connotes aperfunctory congregation of caretakers and their wives, inhabitants of aquarter that is only populated in the working week-day hours. The besttime to see any of the City churches is at the lunch hour, when they aresure to be open. In many of them short musical services are then held. Iknow few odder sensations than to walk in the City on a Sunday morningand hear all the sweet bells of the fifty-odd churches calling to prayerin the{88} silence of the solitary streets. Practical people would pull thehalf of them down and devote the money from the sale of their sites toother much-needed religious purposes. But, even if these little churchesno longer serve their original object, they are still shrines of thepast, each one with some special memory, some special charm, and typicalall together of a great phase of English architecture.

There is little of this past now actually left in busy Cheapside, exceptNo. 37, of which I shall speak presently, two tiny houses at the cornerof Wood Street, the handsome seventeenth-century façade (restored, ofcourse) of the Mercers’ Chapel at the corner of Ironmonger Lane at theLower Bank end, and No. 73 opposite, that was built by Wren for SirWilliam Turner who was Lord Mayor in 1668. It is still known as the OldMansion House.

Probably it was his own house and he went on living in it till hisdeath. Where, then, did the lord mayors stay officially during theirterm of office from that time till the present Mansion House was builtin 1739? I am indebted to Mr. Leopold Wagner for supplying the answer byshowing me the way to one of the most fascinating spots in the City.This third old Mansion House still exists, but in a corner so obscure,so tucked away, that I have passed within a stone’s throw of it a dozentimes and never had the least suspicion of its existence.

It is at No. 5, Bow Lane, hard by Bow Church,{89} in a narrow passage, witha sign directing you, if you are fortunate enough to see it, toWilliamson’s Hotel. Follow the passage and you will find yourself remotefrom the world, with the quaintest old creeper-clad Restoration houseimaginable surrounding three sides of the courtyard. Yet this quiet spotwas once the hub of civic life,—there is a stone let into the charminglittle octagonal-shaped parlour (now called the reading room) that issupposed to mark the very centre of the City. Here for a few years thelord mayors after Sir William Turner dwelt in state, and here cameWilliam III. and Mary to dine, and give, as a memento of their visit,the handsome iron gates, now much corroded and covered with thick greenpaint, through which you seek the entrance.

Later on, in the early seventeen hundreds, the original Williamsonstarted his hotel. It would have been described as “high-classresidential,” had they known those terms, for in those days, whencountry squires and their families came up to town, they found the Cityas convenient a centre as anywhere. The forty bedrooms, the long salon,now a bar, where you may see, still hanging on the wall where it hasbeen for centuries, an ancient map of London Bridge,—the pleasantrambling up-and-down passages, with their deep embrasures andwindow-seats, the low-ceilinged coffee-room with its only bell-pullmarked “Boots,” and{90} elegant little parlour where now no ladies eversit,—all speak of a past of consequence.

But nowadays, apart from the birds of passage who pass a night in thehuge station caravanserais, does anyone put up in the City? Only a few“commercials,” such as I saw lunching at Williamson’s, on the veryexcellent “ordinary” of lamb, green peas, new potatoes, cauliflower,cherry tart and cheese, winding up with coffee, liqueur and a fat cigar,over which they discuss the latest prices, and the latest sporting news.Williamson’s, in fact, does not cope with modern notions—“Take it orleave it” is their motto. The all-invading business girl has not yetdared to put her nose in here—she would probably create a revolution ifshe did. But if you want to get right back into the atmosphere ofDickens, in a place where electric bells, smart waitresses, music,flappers and foolish ideas of the value of time are not, conscript afriend and take a meal at the Old Mansion House.

Coming out into Bow Lane, on the right, at the opposite corner whereWatling Street crosses it, you will find the Old Watling Restaurant, oneof the first houses built in London after the Great Fire: a verydelightful example of its kind, with its dormer windows and heavy-beamedceilings.

In Cheapside, at No. 37 at the corner of Friday Street, where Messrs.Meakers carry on a business appropriate enough to the shop thattradition{91} assigns to John Gilpin, is another house that claims, on theinsufficient evidence of an undated cutting from theBuilder, to havebeen standing even before the Fire.

Everything goes to refute this story. The very beautiful staircase datesfrom the Restoration period, the brickwork is similar to that of otherbuildings erected at this time, but, more than this, it is quite certainthat the house stands on the site of the older “Nag’s Head,” a tavernwith an overhanging timbered structure, that may be seen in a print ofCheapside showing the procession to welcome Marie de Medici when shecame in 1638 to visit her daughter Henrietta Maria. The sign on thefrontage now is no Nag’s Head, but a Chained Swan, once the heraldicbadge of King Henry IV., but debased, like so many other noble devices,to become the sign of a hostelry. Innkeepers were fond of calling theirhouses after the swan, for this poor bird has always had an undeservedreputation for being fond of strong drink; on the other hand, it holds aspecial place in English history, for when Edward III., jousting atCanterbury in 1349, put on his shield the device of a white swan withthe motto:

this was the very first time that the English tongue was used at Courtsince the Conquest, and the White Swan made fashionable a{92} language thathas since spread all over the world.

At the sign of the “Chained Swan” is certainly the most interestinghouse in Cheapside. Quite probably it was really the first to be erectedin the City after the Fire, as it is a four-storied house of someimportance.

Cross the road to Wood Street, and, if you look through the railings atthe back of the two diminutive shops that are shadowed by the great andfamous plane-tree, you will see that they are built of the same redbrick as No. 37 and bear a tablet with this inscription:

Erected at ye sole Cost and Charges
of ye Parish of St. Peter’s Cheape
Ao. Dni. 1687.

The owners of these little houses are forbidden by their leases to add asecond story, so the tree remains, bringing a breath of the country toCity dwellers, reminding them of Wordsworth’s thrush, whose habit ofcontinuous singing used to amaze my childhood:

In Wood Street lived Launcelot Young, that master glazier of peculiartastes who, finding the head of James IV., the King of Scots who wasslain at Flodden Field, among a lot of old{93} rubbish in the lumber roomof the Duke of Suffolk’s place at Sheen, took it home with him and keptit till it lost its novelty.

When I said that there is little to remind one of the past in Cheapside,I forgot the churches that crop up round every corner. They have awealth of memories clustering about them, and the moment you dive intothe narrow courts and passages off the beaten track, you will lose thesense of modernity. In the dark, queer little lanes, most of them with apublic-house tucked away in some obscure corner, may be found the Londonof Dickens’ day, if of no earlier. And what romance in the oddnames—Gutter Lane, by Wood Street, named after Gutheran the Dane, wholived here before the time of the Conqueror; Huggin Lane that unitesthem farther up, called after one Hugan or Hugh; Addle Street, whereKing Adel the Saxon had a mansion; Love Lane of dissolute memory.

City Companies

Wandering in Cheapside, I came across some massive emblazonedcoats-of-arms over great doorways, and found they always announced thehalls of the City Companies of London, those great mediæval trade unionsthat survive to-day—so taken for granted by the{94} Londoner that fewpeople remark their amazing existence.

Yet most of the real history of the old City is bound up with the taleof the rise to wealth and power of these great companies. They oncenumbered a hundred, and about seventy-six still survive. I see that inone recent guide-book the Pattenmakers are quoted as extinct, but thoughthis ancient guild, founded in 1300, might be supposed to have receivedits deathblow a hundred years ago, when the improvement in the streetsmade pattens unnecessary, they are still made for country use and thecompany has recently renewed its vitality by association with the rubberboot and shoe industry.

I like the quaint names of the companies that are now no more. Theoccupation of the Bowyers and the Horners is fairly obvious, but whowould guess that the Fletchers were makers of arrows, or the Lorrinersmakers of bridles and bits, and I leave you to discover the lugubriousmeaning of the Worshipful Company of Upholders.

They were the trade unions of the Middle Ages, but they had this greatdifference, that they were a combination of the masters for the benefitof their particular industry, whereas now the trade unions are composedof the workmen, who combine for their own benefit even if it ruins theindustry. Comparisons may be odious but they are inevitable. Ourpresent{95} trade unions, which seem to be growing almost as powerful astheir forerunners, are exclusively concerned with the question of wages,but the guilds, whilst jealously guarding the privileges of theirmembers and craftsmen, not only guaranteed a fixed wage, butadministered even-handed justice as between master and men, and, moreimportant still, insisted on a high standard of workmanship. Nothing butthe best satisfied them, and they built up the tradition of Englishexcellence which our present distaste for honest work puts us in a fairway to lose.

For in this matter we compare badly with our forefathers. Their ruthlessmethods might well be copied in this age of the meretricious and shoddy.In 1311 there was a bonfire in Cheapside (at the instance of theHatters’ and Haberdashers’ Company) of forty grey and white and fifteenblack “bad and cheating hats,” which had been seized in the shops ofdishonest traders, and other defective goods were publicly burnt in thesame place from time to time, but so rarely as to show how high was theusual standard of trade honesty. Nowadays, such seizures would providealmost enough fuel to tide us through another coal strike.

The City Companies were an autocracy, but, given the conditions of thetime, they were a benevolent autocracy, and the guilds laid thefoundations of the vast commercial wealth{96} which has made London whatshe is. For centuries the Lord Mayor, their civic head, has been chosenalmost always from amongst the members of the twelve great companies,and enjoys a prestige abroad only second to that of the king, as anyonewho has lived in France can testify. Trade in England has always beenhonourable. The merchants of the Middle Ages belonged almost exclusivelyto families of good position; often they were younger sons of the landedgentry, for whom a commercial life, in days when there were noengineers, journalists, or bankers, was the usual opening if they didnot go into the Church or Law. Whittington was the son of aGloucestershire knight: Sir Thomas Gresham, that finest type of Citymagnate and honoured friend of Elizabeth, came of a good old stock andwas educated at Cambridge. For centuries our kings and queens have beenpleased to come to banquets in the Guildhall and the halls of thegreater companies, though they might not nowadays look favourably uponthat lord mayor with whom Charles II. dined, who became so drunk thatwhen the king got up to leave he rushed after him and dragged him back,good-naturedly protesting, “to finish t’other bottle.”

The old power of the guilds has gone, but in what other country wouldyou find bodies of merchants, each with a vast revenue at its disposalof which it need give account to no man, using that wealth, generationafter generation,

for the public good instead of for private profit? They spend it eitherin maintaining excellent schools or in generous gifts to variouscharitable objects, or in subscriptions for the advancement of science(the City Companies are responsible for the City and Guilds Institute),but in whatever they do they uphold the best traditions of integrity andgenerosity of the City merchant.

The centre of all this civic activity is the Guildhall. From OxfordCircus a tube to the Bank or any bus along Holborn takes you alongCheapside and past King Street, at the end of which you see theGuildhall. If you start from the neighbourhood of Charing Cross anytrain to the Mansion House brings you to Queen Victoria Street, out ofwhich Queen Street, a few minutes’ walk to your right, leads throughdirectly to King Street.

Of course the great civic event of the year is the well-known andoft-described procession and the banquet given on the 9th November bythe new lord mayor, chosen on Michaelmas Day, and the sheriffs to themembers of the Cabinet and other distinguished guests. No women arepermitted to be present and to hear the important political speechesoften made at these dinners, but there are other times when theirpresence is tolerated. I have seen the big wooden figures of Gog andMagog in the gallery of the great hall look down on a recruiting meetingearly in the war—on the gathering{98} of one of those organisations thatnow and then are the temporary guests of the City Corporation, and onthe ceremony of presenting the Freedom of the City to an overseas PrimeMinister.

The hall is open to the public at the usual hours, 10-5.30, so go in andnod to Gog and Magog and look at the fifteenth century two-light windowin the south-west corner—the only old one in the hall.

Coming out of the Guildhall on the left is the passage leading to theMuseum and the Library. The latter is a fascinating place, with less redtape about consulting the books than in any other place of the size inLondon. You simply write your name and the book you want on a slip ofpaper, and the affair is done. If you seek information on a certainpoint, and do not know where to find it, the courteous director and hisno less willing staff take the greatest trouble to help. I went therelately on such a quest, and book after book was produced for me by threeassistants till the director in charge, who had evidently been doingsome private research on my behalf, appeared triumphantly with thevolume that gave the solution to my problem. It is a long, pleasantroom, as indeed all book-lined rooms must be, with seven book-lined bayson either side. The collection contains about 200,000 volumes, besidesmany manuscripts. If you are a Shakespearean enthusiast you will findthere among its rare treasures, the first, second and{99} fourth folios ofShakespeare’s plays and a document bearing Shakespeare’s signature.

Naturally the library rather specialises on books about London, and themuseum in the basement beneath (entered from Basinghall Street) isnearly filled with London relics—Roman antiquities, mediævalshop-signs, some of the lovely Jacobean jewellery found in Wood Street,the rest of which is in Lancaster House, instruments of torture fromNewgate, and many other things that tell of the City life in mediævaldays.

Round about and within a few minutes’ walk of the Guildhall cluster thehalls of the City Companies. The most important in the order ofprecedence are the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths,Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintnersand Clothworkers. Their halls are not supposed to be open to the generalpublic, but it is possible to see most of them on application.

The history of the guilds is such a long one that their beginning islost in Time’s mist. Mr. Muirhead says that “the chief object of theirfoundation was to afford religious and temporal and social fellowship,and trade supervision and help to the members of their fraternity ormystery,”—but they were not incorporated till the reign of Edward. Mostof their halls date from the days of Henry VIII., when, grown rich andpowerful, they looked about them for a home and were glad to buy fromthe avaricious{100} king the houses of fugitive monks or favourites falleninto disgrace. But property so acquired was doomed to perish, and in theGreat Fire of 1666 the ancient halls, almost without exception, wereburnt to the ground. “Strange it is to see Clothworkers’ Hall on fire,these three days and nights in one body of flame, it being the cellarfull of oyle,” says Pepys, who was a Master of the company. They have afine collection of gold plate only used at state banquets, with a goldtray presented by Pepys in 1677 and also an immense loving-cup richlychased, that is now shown in a glass case on the sideboard, as it beganto show signs of much handling.

The halls were rebuilt afterwards,—some, like the Vintners’ in 68 UpperThames Street, and possibly the Haberdashers’ in Gresham Street, byWren,—but by the beginning of the eighteen hundreds most of them seemto have fallen into such disrepair as to require rebuilding again.

One at least, the Merchant Taylors’, the largest hall of all, whichfaces Threadneedle Street, stands as originally erected, with its littlecrypt beneath it, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, forthough the roof and walls were damaged by the Great Fire, the mainbuilding is still intact. This is a rich and proud company, with itsincome of £60,000 a year, and its fine gallery of royalties anddistinguished personages, numbering many kings among its freemen. Yetnot so proud as the Mercers’, first on the list, which will not admitvisitors to its{101} hall in 87 Cheapside. Whittington and Sir ThomasGresham were mercers. Within the walls is kept the famous Legh cup(1499), always used at City banquets and supposed to be one of thefinest pieces of English mediæval plate in existence. The chapeladjoining the hall, whose handsome front, erected immediately after theGreat Fire, you may inspect at any rate, is on the site of Thomas àBecket’s house.

Close by in Prince’s Street, opposite the Bank of England, is the hallof the Grocers, once called the Pepperers, a guild with advanced notionsfor the Middle Ages, for they apparently believed in the equality ofwomen. The wives of the Grocers were members as well, and were evenfined if they were absent from the banquets for any avoidable reason.“Grocer” is one of those words that have grown less honourable withtime, for a grocer formerly meant one who dealten gros (wholesale).

The halls of the Goldsmiths’ and the Fishmongers’ Companies have so manymediæval relics that they well repay a visit, and a card of admission isusually granted on application. The Goldsmiths are in Foster Lane,Cheapside, just behind the G.P.O., and amongst their plate you may seethe cup from which Queen Elizabeth is said to have drunk at hercoronation. In the Court Room is an old Roman altar, found when thepresent foundations were dug. The Goldsmiths still keep their ancientprivilege of assaying and stamping all articles of gold{102} and silvermanufacture in Great Britain, just as the Fishmongers still have theless remunerative right to “enter and seize bad fish.” The hall of thisguild is, appropriately enough, on the banks of the river, just at thenorth end of London Bridge, and in one of the rooms is a chair made outof the first pile driven in the construction of Old London Bridge, saidto have been under the water for 650 years.

The hall of the Stationers’ Company in Paternoster Row was stone-faced amere 121 years ago, but the attics still have horn-paned windows andpart of it was built before the Great Fire. Visitors are shown the halland the old relics, and every good American likes to see thecompositor’s stick that Benjamin Franklin used when he came to London asa journeyman printer and lived in Bartholomew Close.

Stationers’ Hall is the headquarters of the Royal Literary Fund forassisting Authors in Distress, and among their treasures are the daggersused by Col. Blood and his accomplice when they tried to steal the crownjewels in Charles II.’s reign.

Most of the bare facts about the other chief companies can be found inany London guide-book, but if a reader wants to know more of theseinteresting survivals of the day when the craftsman loved his craft, hewill find a detailed account in Mr. P. H. Ditchfield’sThe CityCompanies of London, 1904, and Mr. George Unwin’sThe Gilds andCompanies of London.{103}

CHAPTER VI

ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN

Take that chilly-sounding gateway, the Marble Arch, as apoint dedépart for a walk some idle afternoon, and I will show you what I foundthe day I turned my back on it. It looks as bored by its inactivity asThéophile Gautier’s Obélisque; perhaps it regrets the days when it facedBuckingham Palace and feels it came down in the world when it was movedto its present position some seventy years ago.

And that, too, is another indignity. Very many people ask why the MarbleArch is stranded all by itself, like a rock from which the flood hasreceded. The reason is as simple as most utilitarian things. The pressof traffic at the Marble Arch was so great that the space had to bewidened. It would have been too costly a matter to move the Marble Archback, so the park railings were moved and the Arch left high and dry, nolonger a gateway but only an object of interest.{104}

I grant you that at first sight the Oxford Street and Holborn of to-dayhave a blatantly modern look. There is little to remind one in thekaleidoscopic vista of badly-dressed shop windows, gaudy buildings anddingy offices, that Roman soldiers once tramped along this very road. Ittook about a thousand years from the time that Agricola recalled hisRoman legions from England for the discomfort of the Holborn mudholes tobecome unendurable, and for Henry V. to follow in 1417 the earlierexample of his Frenchconfrère Philippe Auguste and cause the king’shighway to be paved at his expense. The paving does not seem to havebeen kept in good repair, for the garrulous Pepys says, 250 years later,that the king’s coach was overturned in Holborn.

Travellers along Holborn, at the other end of the social scale, sharedin the royal benefit, for from 1196 to 1783 condemned criminals werebrought in carts from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Tree. Everyone has heardof the famous gallows, but few people know that the exact spot where itstood is marked to-day by a triangular stone set in the roadway, almostopposite the beginning of the Edgware Road. A bronze plate on therailings of the Park, on the other side of the road, commemorates thefact, but if both stone and plate elude you, the friendly policeman whois always on duty here will point them out.

From the Marble Arch to Holborn there is nothing to look at butinterminable shops till{105} you come to the quaint old houses of StapleInn, as disdainfully out of keeping with their vulgar surroundings as anorchid would be in an onion bed.

Staple Inn

Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of theroar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway withthe façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where thenoise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade ofthe plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without thegate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on amagician’s carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shillingand sixpence, a delightful little history of this “fayrest Inne ofChancerie,” where Johnson lived after finishing hisRasselas in a weekto pay for the expenses of his mother’s funeral.

When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,”go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carvedoaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbonsclock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leaveStaple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk gardenthat is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. Atthe back of the{106} Patent Offices that make the southern boundary ofStaple Inn is Took’s Court—the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby ofBleakHouse lived—once a place of those curious semi-prisons calledsponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailifffor the landlord.

Took’s Court is a sordid enough place now, and some of it may soondisappear, but it has a vicarious interest because Sheridan spent someof the last years of his life in a sponging-house here.{107}

Gray’s Inn

Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that fewof London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in theGray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, andit is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on theCentral London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens morefreely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped hisEssays in yourpocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the verygarden that he made. Bacon was once Treasurer of Gray’s Inn and heinterested himself in the laying out of “the purest of human pleasures”that he found there. Gray’s Inn Gardens used to be as fashionable aplace for a walk as Hyde Park is to-day. Pepys the Chatterer related thedoings of numberless people when he wrote: “When church was done my wifeand I walked to Gray’s Inn to observe fashions of the ladies, because ofmy wife’s making some clothes.” Pepys must have gone there very often,for two months later the frivolous Secretary wrote: “I was very wellpleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk inGray’s Inn Walks.{108}”

Times have changed and fine ladies are no longer allowed to walk inGray’s Inn Gardens, unless indeed they have relations among the bencherswho are complaisant in the matter of keys.

The Hall is the oldest and most beautiful thing in Gray’s Inn. QueenElizabeth once came to a banquet here, and it was here that theComedyof Errors was first performed. The old Inn has{109} had many famous namesamong its members, the Sydneys, Cecils, Bacons, etc., and a man no lessdistinguished in another circle, Jacob Tonson, had his first bookshopjust inside Gray’s Inn Gate.

The old bookseller and publisher’s name has a very modern interest, evenfor the London visitor who never turns the pages of Pope or Walpole,because his house at Barn Elms is now used as the Ranelagh Club. Thepeople who go out to Ranelagh of a fine afternoon to drink tea and watchthe polo, are following the footsteps of the members of the famousKit-Cat Club founded in 1700, it is popularly supposed as an outcome ofthe dinners Tonson offered to his patrons. The club, of which Tonsonbecame secretary, consisted of thirty-nine members—authors, wits andnoblemen—their portraits hang in the halls of the Ranelagh Club to-day.

Tonson published for Addison and Pope, and was the first man to printcheap editions of Shakespeare. He had innumerable friends, and hisportrait shows him as a genial creature who must have merited thedescription of him, written in 1714, that I found inOld and NewLondon:

Tonson moved from the Gray’s Inn Gateway in 1712 to his more celebratedbookshop in the Strand that stood on part of the present site ofSomerset House. I hear that another old landmark connected with thisprince of publishers is doomed to disappear, for the Upper Flask, inHeath Street, Hampstead, that was known in Tonson’s day as the “UpperBowling Green House,” used as the summer quarters of the Kit-Cat Club,may have to give way to the new buildings of some philanthropicinstitution.

Gray’s Inn takes its name from the Grays of Wilton. There is a documentregistering the transferring in 1505 of the “Manor of Portpoole,otherwise called Gray’s Inn” from Edmund Lord Gray of Wilton to a Mr.Denny. The public, alas, are never admitted to the Gardens, but anyvisitor may see the Hall on a week-day between the hours of 10 and12.15.

Hatton Garden

Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn are not the only old-world souvenirs to befound in prosaic Holborn. A little further east, on the left-hand sideas one strolls towards the City, lies another sordid street whose nameis redolent of Elizabethan romance.

Hatton Garden, named after the quee{111}n’s handsome chancellor and now thehaunt of the diamond and pearl merchant, and also of organgrinders andice-cream vendors, is built on the site of the gardens of Ely Palace,the town house of the Bishops of Ely whose story is noted on anotherpage. Round the corner is Ely Place, the most astonishing little squarein London.

If you pass this spot on the stroke of the hour after ten o’clock on asummer’s evening, you may well rub your eyes and wonder if time has beenrolled back and you are suddenly living in the London of two centuriesago. For the iron gates of the little place are closed, and out of thetiny porter’s lodge in the middle comes an important person with agold-laced hat, who solemnly makes the tour of the square, crying fiveor six times, “Past ten o’clock and all’s well!”

The crying of the hours by the night watchman is not the only custom ofthis old-world corner, so carefully guarded by the commissioners inwhose hands the rights of Ely Place are vested. The little square, nowgiven over to law offices and business premises, was once a “sanctuary,”a place where law-breakers could take refuge and where the civilauthorities had no right of arrest. To this day the caretakers who formthe bulk of the resident population of Ely Place are inordinately proudof the fact that they are independent of police protection, having theirown standing army of three porters,{112} who take eight-hour turns inguarding the tranquillity of their self-contained domain.

They even have a public-house of their very own, for in the tiny passagethat connects Ely Place with Hatton Garden is a dim little inn ofdubious antiquity, that takes its name of the “Mitre” from the carvedstone mitre set in the façade which once formed part of the old palaceof the bishops of Ely. The innkeeper is very proud of the remains of aMethuselah of a cherry-tree now incorporated in one corner of the house.You can see the whitewashed remains of the tree that may have shadedgood Queen Bess if you peer through the left-hand corner window.

At ten of the clock the iron gate leading into Hatton Garden is dulyfastened, and the “Mitre” is closed to the outside world.

I have kept the best and most amazing of the treasures of Ely Placeuntil the last.

Walk down the left-hand side of the square to the far corner, and youwill find your way into one of the most beautiful things in London,—athirteenth century chapel practically intact. It is so beautiful that ifit were necessary to pay a high entrance fee or write for cards ofadmission, it would probably be the Mecca of every artist andantiquarian. But since it is in London, prodigal of such treasures, andanyone may walk in and look at its beauty undisturbed at any hour, St.Etheldreda’s Chapel is only known to a few people.{113}

It was built in the last decade of the thirteenth century by a certainBishop de Luda, as the chapel for Ely House, the town residence of thebishops of Ely.

John of Gaunt took refuge here and must have heard mass within thesevery walls. Shakespeare reminds us, inRichard II., of John of Gaunt’sdeath in Ely House, and it was in these cloisters that Henry VIII. firstmet with Cranmer. Queen Elizabeth’s chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton,worshipped here till his unlucky tenancy of Ely House was ended by hisdeath in 1591, and so did his nephew’s imperious widow, the famous LadyHatton who married and flouted Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer andrival of Bacon for her hand.

It was at “Elie House in Holborne” in the reign of James I. that thelast mystery play was represented in England, before the SpanishAmbassador Gondemar, who was a next-door neighbour to Ely Palace. Thelater history of the chapel may be briefly told. When the bishopsfinally sold the property to the Crown in 1772 and betook themselves toDover Street, it was bought by an architect who preserved the chapel forthe use of the residents of the houses he built in Ely Place. Afterwardsit passed through several hands, being finally bought by the Fathers ofCharity from the Welsh Episcopalians in 1871. When the work ofrestoration was finished, St. Etheldreda’s, the only pre-Reformationplace of worship restored to the{114} Roman Catholic Church, was reopened onSt. Etheldreda’s Day, the 23rd of June, 1876.

St. Sepulchre’s

A little further along Holborn, in Giltspur Street, you come to the oldChurch of St. Sepulchre, where we meet again the Tyburn prisoners.Everybody who has heard theBeggar’s Opera (and who has not?) willremember the picture Polly Peachum draws of Macheath on the road toTyburn: “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovelythan the nosegay in his hand.” It was at St. Sepulchre’s that theamorous highwayman would have got his nosegay, on the steps of thechurch, for an old benefactor had left money to provide flowers forevery criminal going to be hanged. It was St. Sepulchre’s bell thattolled the hour of their hanging, and another legacy provided for anadmonition and prayers for the condemned.

There are more cheerful memories connected with the old church. There isa mention of it in the twelfth century records. It was rebuilt in themiddle of the fifteenth century—the south-west porch still remains athing of beauty—and after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire in1666, Wren practically rebuilt the church with its four weathercocks,whose{115} differences of opinion about the wind gave rise to the saying ofHowell: “Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes ofSt. Sepulchre’s tower.”

Two very noteworthy Elizabethans lie buried in St. Sepulchre’s, one ascholar, the other a brilliant adventurer. The former was Roger Ascham,the queen’s tutor, and the latter, Captain John Smith, “sometimeGovernor of Virginia and Admiral of New England,” of Pocahontas fame.Captain Smith’s adventures in America have rather overshadowed hisearlier exploits. Mr. Walter Thornbury, in his wonderfulOld and NewLondon, tells that he fought in Hungary in 1602, and in three singlecombats overcame three Turks and cut off their heads, for which andother equally brave deeds Sigismund, Duke of Transylvania, gave him hispicture set in gold with a pension of three hundred ducats, and allowedhim to bear three Turks’ heads proper as his shield of arms. Pocahontas,who you remember found the English climate too much for her, lies buriedin the parish church of St. George, Gravesend. In 1914 the Society ofVirginian Dames placed two stained glass windows to honour her memory.

Stone Effigies

Not the least of the quaint things that the seeing eye may note inLondon streets are the small statues and reliefs that give an oddvariety to some of the houses.{116}

At No. 78, Newgate Street, five minutes’ walk from St. Sepulchre’s, andon the same side of the road, is a bas-relief (probably an oldshop-sign) of a giant and a dwarf. These were William Evans and SirJeffery Hudson, freaks whom it pleased Charles II. to keep about him atthe Court, as readers ofPeveril of the Peak will remember.

Just opposite is Panier Alley, so called from the basket-makers who oncelived here. On the left, cased in glass in order to preserve it from theweather, is a somewhat battered effigy of a fat boy sitting upon apanier, and, underneath, this inscription:

It was put up a few years after the Great Fire, that landmark in thehistory of the City. I am told its claim is not strictly founded onfact, and that part of Cannon Street is a few feet higher, but one wouldlike to believe the cherub.

Another bas-relief of a fat boy, at the corner of Cock Lane, even nearerto St. Sepulchre’s, I mention in another chapter, and there is a quaintold vintner’s sign of an infant Bacchus on a barrel, to be found at thejunction of Liverpool Street and Manchester Street, in the ratherdepressing vicinity of King’s Cross. It is believed to be the only oneof its kind left in London.

CHAPTER VII

DOWN CHANCERY LANE

Lincoln’s Inn Fields

The charming rustic-sounding name of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is known toeveryone—did not Mr. Tulkinghorne live there?—but few people strayinto the old square except those who are at odds with their neighboursand come to consult the men of law living there, as they did in Dickens’day. The habitués come from Kingsway through Great Queen Street orSardinia Street—the stranger takes the Piccadilly Tube to HolbornStation and, turning to the right along High Holborn, follows the firstpassage on the south side of the street that almost manages to concealitself behind a protruding house.

This narrow winding Little Turnstile, and the Great Turnstile, a shortdistance farther along, are the only entrances from the north toLincoln’s Inn Fields. An ugly lane, connecting these two passages andparallel with Holborn, is dignified by the disconcerting name ofWhetstone Park. To-day it is only a row of stables,{118} but Milton once hada lodging in one of the houses, that were always squalid andmalhabitées, as Dryden’s plays attest.

Coming out of the tortuous Little Turnstile, you enter the spacioussquare of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The very name is alluring enough to makeanyone want to go there, but there is nothing about the gardens to-dayto show that they are among the oldest in London. They are as trim andwell cared for as if they had been laid out yesterday. “Well cared for”means that all the pleasant green lawns and shady plane-trees arejealously railed off from the public, who loll somnolently on the manybenches, their back turned to the lovely green oasis. It does not occurto any of the Fields’ frequenters to turn some of the seats round, sothat they will have a more refreshing view than the dusty asphalt of thewide paths or the uninspiring sight of the slumbers of the unemployed,some of whom look as if they had slipped out of the frames of theHogarth pictures in the Soane Museum.

It must be confessed that the interest of Lincoln’s Inn Fields lies notso much in the gardens—modernised out of every semblance of theirseventeenth-century appearance—as in the beautiful old housessurrounding them—noble, dignified mansions some of those on the westside, built by Inigo Jones and once owned by Milords of Lindsay, Somersand Erskine. At the South Kensington Museum there is a{119}

wonderful panelled staircase, a perfect specimen of its kind, thatformerly graced the hall of No. 35.

Lindsay House, now Nos. 59 and 60, one of the Inigo Jones houses, wasbuilt for the Earl of Lindsay, who died fighting for Charles I. atEdgehill. Peter Cunningham says that it was called Ancaster House whenthe fourth earl was created Duke of Ancaster, and that he sold it to theproud Duke of Somerset—I do not know why Mr. Cunningham insists on hispride in italics—who married the widow of the Mr. Thomas Thynne whosemurder by Count Koenigsmarck is so dramatically portrayed on his tomb inWestminster Abbey.

No. 66, at the corner of Great Queen Street, was once occupied by theDuke of Newcastle, George II.’s prime minister.

We have travelled far searching for freedom in the last 250 years andone would like to know how the Wellsian attitude is regarded by theghost of the creator of this old house—the Marquis of Powis, who builtit in 1686, before he was outlawed by William and Mary because of hisloyalty to James II. He probably chose the site because it was near thechapel of the Sardinian Ambassador—the oldest Roman Catholic chapel inLondon—where the Roman Catholics used to go when they were deprived oftheir churches, and where Fanny Burney was married in 1793. It wasremoved, unluckily, in 1910.

There have been poets, too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before the men oflaw took possession.{122} Milton and Thomas Campbell lived at No. 61 andLord Tennyson at No. 58, where, you remember, Mr. Tulkinghorne ofBleakHouse had his rooms.

It is a house also haunted with memories of Nell Gwynne, for she hadlodgings here and gave birth to the first Duke of St. Albans, while shewas still acting in the nearby theatre in Portugal Row!

This Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre stood just at the back of the RoyalCollege of Surgeons, on the south side of the square. Three theatrescalled the Duke’s Theatre were successively built on the same spot. Thefirst one was a pioneer in its way, for it was here that regular stagescenery was introduced in England and that women’s parts were firstplayed by women. The ubiquitous Pepys was a regular frequenter of thetheatre, and duly recorded his meeting with Nell Gwynne and that here hesawHamlet played for the first time.

Though it is seventy-three years since the last theatre was taken downto enlarge the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and there isnothing to be seen of it to-day, I like to keep its memory green becauseit was here, on the night of January 29th, 1728, nearly two hundredyears ago, that Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, sang herselfinto the heart of the Duke of Bolton, when John Rich produced Mr. Gay’sBeggar’s Opera. It ran for sixty-two nights in one season and made“Gay rich and Rich gay.{123}”

Soane Museum

There is one museum in London that I do not want to call a museumbecause in some ways it is so unlike one. Very few people ever go there.It is like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. If you shut your eyes atthe south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and try not to notice thetentacular Lyons that unblushingly intrudes its smug modern shopfrontinto this old-world square, but stroll through the gardens to the northside, you will see the Soane Museum at No. 13. This is one of the mostcurious and neglected corners I have found in London. There arepriceless things here like Hogarth’sRake’s Progress, but for everyhundred visitors who go to the National Gallery of British Art to seetheMarriage à la Mode only one comes to this quaint caravanserai ofall sorts of objects.

Sir John Soane must surely have been the most agreeable bricklayer’s sonwho ever made his fortune as a great architect and had a pretty taste inart. You have only to look at his portrait by Lawrence, one of the lastthat great painter finished, to see what a kindly, benevolent man hewas. Why, oh why, did he exact that his collection should remainunaltered! I know that the guide-books all extol the ingenuity{124} withwhich so many things have been fitted into a small space, but if onlyone could sweep away the superfluous and unnecessary and rearrange thehouse like a perfect specimen of a home of the period, with the greatpictures hung to the best advantage in the largest rooms and thebasement reserved for the sarcophagus in its present place, with thebest of the larger treasures that would be incongruous in the upperrooms! As it is, you must diligently hunt for what you want to see, forthe delightful catalogue is more useful as a souvenir than a presenthelp in finding anything.

There are things of human interest, like the watch Queen Anne gave toSir Christopher Wren, or the pistol that Peter the Great collared from aTurkish Bey in 1696, that Alexander I. gave to Napoleon at Tilsit in1807, and that Sir John Soane provokingly says he purchased under verypeculiar circumstances—or the flamboyant jewel of Charles I. foundamong the royal baggage after the battle of Naseby—or Rousseau’sautograph letter—or those exquisite old books of Hours richlyilluminated and written with such patient skill by some old Flemish monkfive hundred years ago.

But the jewels of this unnoticed casket are the pictures. The courteousguardians, who all look like retired librarians, show with a certainmelancholy pride the way to the tiny room where hang Turner’s finepainting ofVan Tromp’s Barge and two of his water-colours,{125} Watteau’sLes Noces, and the greatest treasures of the whole collection,Hogarth’s pictures ofThe Rake’s Progress and the four big canvases ofThe Election.

Besides all this there are wonderful Flemish wood carvings andmanuscripts, and, in the crypt, the interesting three-thousand-year-oldtomb of Seti I., King of Egypt, whose inscriptions Sir John did not liveto see deciphered.

There was an air of wistfulness about the place. It had been arrangedwith so much loving care, and so few people profit by it though thereward of going is great.

Perhaps Sir John Soane did not want anybody but art-lovers to see hiscollection, or he would surely not have closed it to the public onSaturday, Sunday and Monday all the year round and for the entire monthsof September, December, January and February. It is true that studentsand other visitors may apply to the curator for admission at othertimes, and foreigners are admitted on presentation of their visitingcard on any day except Sunday and Bank Holidays, but what Londoner, withricher collections open every day in the week, could be expected toremember the capriciousness of the guardians of Sir John Soane’streasures, who are like the suburban hostess announcing her receptiondays as first and third Tuesdays and fifth Friday? In despair ofremembering when the good lady was at home, you would never call on her.No, if you want to see the Hogarths,{126} my advice is to wrap yourself inthe cloak of a foreigner and present your card at the door of thisneglected London museum between the hours of ten and five.

Lincoln’s Inn

Lincoln’s Inn Fields are bordered on the east side by Lincoln’s Inn, butI like better to approach the old squares by the brick gatehouse inChancery Lane. It is the oldest part of Lincoln’s Inn, and a very fineexample of Tudor brickwork. The Sir Thomas Lovel who built it in 1518put his own arms over the gateway, never dreaming that when his namewould mean nothing to the passer-by, the name of a bricklayer, one BenJonson who worked, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, atthe adjoining buildings about a hundred years later, would need no coatof arms to preserve his memory. People like Mr. Muirhead, who see thingsin the light of cold reason, argue that in 1617 Jonson was forty-fourand already famous, so he had probably laid down the trowel,—but Iprefer to believe old Fuller, who said Ben Jonson helped in the buildingof the new structure in Lincoln’s Inn.

There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since thethirteenth century{127}—the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Innand Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll intheir shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London whereyou can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery andrecapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thoughtincompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things.

One old chronicler says: “There is both in the Inns of Court and theInns of Chancery, a sort of academy or gymnasium where they learnsinging and all kinds of music, and such other accomplishments anddiversions (which are called revels) as are suitable to their qualityand usually practised at court. All vice is discouraged and banished.The greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in thoseInns of Court—not so much as to make the law their study but to formtheir manners.”

I have no predilection for the legal profession, being, like most of mykind, filled with amazement at the lack of logic and the crassinconsequences that attend the administration of justice in any country.In fact I have a fellow-feeling for Peter the Great, who knew his ownmind and had no herd opinions. When he was taken into Westminster Hall,he inquired who those busy people were in wigs and black gowns. He wasanswered, “They are lawyers.” “Lawyers?” said he, with a face ofastonishment. “Why, I have but two in my whole dominions,{128} and I believeI shall hang one of them the moment I get home.”

I suppose in no country in the world is the study and practice of thelaw surrounded with such debonair amenities as in London. Who would notbe a lawyer, since that profession is the Open Sesame to shady gardens,lodgings in history-haunted rooms, and a prideful possession in suchrare buildings as the Church of the Knights Templars?

Lincoln’s Inn takes its name from a thirteenth century Henry de Lacy,Earl of Lincoln, who had a mansion in Chancery Lane near the firstchurch of the Knights Templars. His arms are carved over the brickgateway, separated from those of the builder, Sir Thomas Lovel, by theroyal arms of England. None of the existing old buildings are later thanTudor times.

The old Inn has had many illustrious members, lodgers and visitors.Oliver Cromwell used to come here to see Thurloe, his secretary ofstate, who lived at 24 Old Buildings, and there is the story of how henearly killed a young clerk he found apparently asleep when he had beenplotting with Thurloe to seize Prince Charles. Thurloe dissuaded him bypassing a lighted candle before the young man’s eyes to prove he wasreally asleep, and the clerk lived to warn the prince, who when hebecame king paid several visits to Lincoln’s Inn. Both Pepys and Evelynrecord his presence at the “revels,” when learning was encouraged by{129}indulgence in dancing. In the Admittance Book are the signatures ofCharles II., the Duke of York, Prince Rupert and the Duke of Monmouth,written in 1671.

Dr. John Donne and Sir Thomas More were both connected with Lincoln’sInn. Dr. Donne laid the foundation-stone and preached the consecrationsermon of the chapel that Inigo Jones designed in 1623, since sodisastrously restored. It is built on arches, so you can walk aboutunder the Gothic roof, as Pepys said he did “by agreement” on the 27thof June, 1663, but you will not see the six seventeenth-century windows,for they were shattered by an explosion in October, 1915.

Sir Thomas More has a more intimate connection with the Inn, for hisfather and grandfather held the office of butler and steward, and fortheir long and faithful services were rewarded by admission into theSociety of Lincoln’s Inn and by the much-prized office of Reader.

The wonderful law library is now housed in the new red-brick hall,decorated with Watts’ fresco of “The Lawgivers of the World,” but theold hall built about 400 years ago is still in use, though it, too, hassuffered from the hands of the restorer.

Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shadedgardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be verypretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.{130}

I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarterto nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapeland when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bellused was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596.

Record Office

Coming out into Chancery Lane once more and turning down towards FleetStreet, you will see on your left a huge grey building in Tudor style,where once stood the House of the Converts.

It was called by that name when Henry III. founded a House in 1232 toreceive converted Jews. I hardly like to tell you that the present nameis the Record Office. It is too pompous and official-sounding, andperhaps that is why people pass the House of the Converts neversuspecting the presence of the entrancing, memory-evoking things within.

You enter the enchanted room by descending a short flight of stonesteps, after going through a forbidding portal and along a green swardinto a modern grey building in one of the very busiest of the Londonstreets.

You will know why I call it an enchanted room as soon as you see thebeautiful chapel-{131}like precincts named the House of the Converts nearly700 years ago, before it was used from Edward III.’s time as the Chapelof the Rolls.

The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirableTorrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and thedelicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane.Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the littlefigures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughterborn on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “apretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl ofDevonshire, in the year of grace 1608.

There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that isopen to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in theweek except, alas, Saturday or Sunday.

You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the veryfew documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, orread the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir WilliamCecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-Englishsometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.”

For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, ofwhose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowingpaper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You willfind the cry of{132} Sir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of HisHighness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at thebattle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life andI want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I canwrite no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. AtArnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to QueenAnne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortnessof breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so michgrace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.”

The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power tobreathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-feltappeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace,mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostratpoor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-oldWilliam of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to theirfickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of warbetween France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage toRichard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardiefamily whose proud device was:

Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging toanother age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bullacarved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths andautobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I havekept till the last.

One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions ofa vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. NotevenLittle Arthur could dispel the prodigious respect and awe onefelt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sinsare recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secretsatisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat,brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’sNorman love for exact accounts.

The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminsterand were only moved to the Record Office in 1839.

Nevill’s Court

A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of themost curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, whichis the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34,close{134} to the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage calledNevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldestbits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaperland are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens.They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queerlittle wooden houses with their high gables that you may see inCollingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (Ithink it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside thechurch, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when theThames washed right up to their doorsteps.

At No. 6 Nevill’s Court, secluded in its walled garden, is a bigseventeenth-century house, which must once have been inhabited bycitizens of wealth and position. It is extraordinary that Time and theVandal have left it still intact. I think the reason must be that theyhave never been able to find it, like those other old houses in WardrobeCourt near St. Paul’s, whose whereabouts certainly ought to be set as aproblem in a London taxi-driver’s examination.

But before seeking the house, there is something to notice in Nevill’sCourt. The main entrance to the Moravian Chapel is in Fetter Lane, atNo. 33. I once went to the service there at three o’clock on a Sundayafternoon under the influence of the story of the messenger sent whileBradbury was preaching, to announce{135} Queen Anne’s death and the safetyof the Protestant succession. I hoped to find something to remind me ofthe chapel’s great age: it is the oldest place of Protestant worship inLondon, going back to Queen Mary’s day, when persecuted Protestants aresupposed to have met in the sawpit of the carpenter’s yard on this site.

Down the long, narrow passage, I found a bare, uncompromising chapel,with a high, wooden pulpit, that I looked at with more respect than itsugliness warranted, remembering that Baxter had preached here in 1672,and that John Wesley and Whitefield had addressed crowded congregationsduring the year Wesley spent with the Moravians between the time that heleft the Church of England and the founding of the Methodist persuasionin 1740. The boundary line between St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and St.Dunstan’s in the West is just in front of the pulpit, so the preacherand his congregation are in different parishes.

The chapel has been used by the Moravian sect since 1738, and as theirlease does not expire for about another 250 years, it is not likely tochange ownership, in spite of the dwindling congregation.

It has been so many times restored and rebuilt that one gets a muchbetter idea of the antiquity of the building from the back entrance inNevill’s Court, for this is the only part that could possibly haveexisted before the Great Fire.{136}

Clifford’s Inn

Between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane is the entrance to Clifford’s Inn,the oldest of all the Inns of Chancery. In January, 1921, big flauntingnotice-boards announced that Clifford’s Inn would be sold by auction,but no immediate purchaser was found, and this quiet corner is stillunmolested, though by the time this book is printed it may have receiveditscoup de grâce from the pickaxe.

Go and look at it while you may. It was founded in 1345 and takes itsname from a certain Robert Clifford of Edward II.’s reign. Sir EdwardCoke, the great Elizabethan lawyer, was a member of Clifford’s Inn andleft it for the Middle Temple in 1572.

Some of the Inn survived the Great Fire, and in the crazy-looking littleold hall the judges sat who decided the many boundary disputes afterthat catastrophe. At the moment it is the headquarters of some society“duquel je ne sçais pas le nom.”

Samuel Butler lived at No. 15 Clifford’s Inn for thirty-eight years, andmany an admirer of the genius of the man who wroteErewhon andTheWay of all Flesh has made a pilgrimage to the quiet corner hidden awaya few yards from bustling Fleet Street.{137}

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHARTERHOUSE AND ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S

In days of old, when London’s present meatmarket was the fashionablejousting-ground of the time, the knights and squires used to ride toSmithfield up a road still called Giltspur Street, either from thearmourers who dwelt there, or from the jingling of the champions’ spursas they clattered by.

Any Holborn bus will take you to the corner of St. Sepulchre’s where thedismal bell tolled the passing to Newgate of the condemned criminals. Onthe right side of Giltspur Street is St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, thatsurvived the Great Fire only to be rebuilt in 1730. The history of thisgreat London hospital goes back eight hundred years, for it belonged tothe Priory, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s father persuaded Henry VIII. torefound the institution in 1546.

There was once a naïve inscription under the statue of the fat boy whosestone image is still to be seen at the corner where Cock Lane joinsGiltspur Street, on the left. At this point, once{138} known as Pye Corner,the Fire of London was stopped in 1666 by blowing up the houses, and thewriting underneath the figure of this extremely obese youth reminded thepasser-by that “the Great Fire ... was occasioned by the sin ofgluttony.” I do not know what authority there was for this allegation.Whoever was responsible for the tablet probably had running in hismuddled head the names of Pye or Pie Corner and Pudding Lane in ThamesStreet where the conflagration started. The fact that it was from thehouse of a baker that the flames first spread may likewise haveinfluenced him, though it is unusual to be gluttonous on bread alone.

The Fire gave the moralist good cause for thought. It was an event sotremendous, so far-reaching, so overwhelming, that it is strange thatthe history books of England do not linger over its significance. For inless than a week practically every landmark that went to make up themost interesting old mediæval city in the world was swept away. Theancient cathedral of St. Paul’s, 89 churches, 4 city gates, 460 streetsand 13,200 houses perished in the flames. With the exception, perhaps,of the burning of Rome, there has never been so terrible a fire. Pepyswept to see it.

Everyone lent a hand; even King Charles came down from Whitehall andworked hard{140} beside his meanest subject—doing something useful for oncein a way. But it was a case of saving what one could and fleeing. Somestacked their treasures in the churches (the booksellers of PaternosterRow stored their books in St. Paul’s), but of the churches nothing wasleft. Some buried their valuables underground and perhaps recovered themtwo years afterwards, when the last of the rubbish was cleared away. Bythe end of that fatal September the whole of the large district ofMoorfields, north of the city, was one vast camp of the homeless, andthere they stayed in shacks and shelters till the city was rebuilt, muchas the unfortunate people of devastated France were living during theyears of the Great War.

The trade of London ceased for a time; there were no shops, themerchants had lost their goods, the warehouses were gutted, all recordsof debts and commercial transactions were destroyed, there were noschools, no almshouses.

Yet in four short years the English, with the same dogged energy thatthey were putting recently into the making of trenches and dugouts, hadpractically rebuilt their capital city. The churches, of course, took along time to finish; the beautiful and numerous halls of the CityCompanies were not replaced in a day, but nearly 10,000 houses were up,and since those seventeenth-century workmen were just Englishmen, withno foreigners at hand to tell them to{141} “ca’ canny,” everything was in afair way to completion.

As for Sir Christopher Wren, that amazing architect who stamped theimpress of his genius on the great city as we know it, who shall givehim enough honour? He designed and erected over forty public buildings,amongst them the lovely and unique cluster of churches that lie aroundSt. Paul’s, yet for this work he was rewarded by the miserable salary of£100 a year, with £200 a year for the rebuilding of the great cathedral.

St. Bartholomew the Great

Opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is Smithfield, new and blatant, andsmelling hideously of raw meat. Take courage and go on northwards, forin a few minutes you will come to the most wonderful old church inLondon—older than any other except the chapel in the White Tower. Thereis something about the almost primitive simplicity of its massive stonepillars that carries one back more directly to the times of the Normanconquerors than a thousand long descriptions gathered from historybooks.

What you see is only the choir and transept of a much larger churchbuilt for the Priory of St. Bartholomew by the founder Rahere in orabout the year 1102. His tomb is on the left{142} as you enter, and high upon the right is the lovely oriel window where Prior Bolton, who died in1532, could sit or kneel at his ease, without even the trouble of comingdownstairs from his house, and look down into the church he did so muchto rebuild and restore.

St. Bartholomew’s has had a turbulent history. There is the dramaticstory of Archbishop Boniface of Lambeth Palace, a Savoyard who took itinto his crafty head that he would like{143} to annex the offertory of St.Bartholomew’s. On a certain Sunday morning he set out from Lambeth, witha train of attendants with mail armour under their robes. Thedescription of what happened is delicious in Matthew Paris’s words, asquoted by Stowe:

But in spite of Henry III.’s refusal to see the outraged sub-prior andhis loyal canons they had their revenge in time.

The final result of that little Sunday morning jaunt of ArchbishopBoniface was that he was obliged to build the chapel of Lambeth Palaceabout the year 1247 as a penance for having tried to encroach on theright of the holy Prior of St. Bartholomew’s.

The quaint gateway by which one enters the scene of the exploits ofthese energetic churchmen adds a special charm to the place. The timbersof the old Elizabethan house above it were only discovered in 1915, whensome of the tiles that long concealed them were loosened.{145}

St. John’s Gate

Not very far away, stretching across St. John’s Lane, on the other sideof Smithfield and the Charterhouse Road, is another gate, dating from1504, with the arms of Prior Docwra, Who built it, above the archway.This was once the south entrance of the great Priory of the KnightsHospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, one of the richestand most powerful of the religious houses that spread over London in theMiddle Ages. With the exception of this gate and of the Norman crypt inthe church of St. John adjoining (the keys are at the caretaker’s, 112Clerkenwell Road), nothing is left of that great monastery that thepeople grew to hate for its pride. When Wat Tyler led his band ofpeasants to burn and pillage, they burnt and pillaged with special zestthe manors of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, wherever they foundthem, and particularly the priory in London, incidentally beheading theGrand Prior. The buildings rose again and lasted till the reign ofEdward VI., when they were blown up and pulled down and some of thestone used to build the Somerset House of the day.

But the old gate still stands, austere and{148} turret-crowned, and we maystill “behold it with reverence,” like Dr. Johnson. The modernrepresentatives of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which devotesitself to ambulance and hospital work and did admirable service in thewar, went back in 1887 to live within its ancient walls.

There are many things of interest in the gatehouse that make the troubleof writing to the secretary of the Order for permission to see themworth while. There are relics from Malta and Rhodes, an Elizabethanchimneypiece in the chancery, and other souvenirs, but the coffer thatcontains these treasures is more interesting than anything it holds, andthat every passer-by may see.

The Charterhouse

Coming back to Charterhouse Street and turning to the left, fiveminutes’ walk will bring you to Charterhouse Square, where you can findone of the most lovely and gracious things in all London.

People often bewail the passing of old London without knowing thatwithin this short distance from Holborn Circus they can see a perfectspecimen of a sixteenth-century nobleman’s house. There it stands, onlyneeding the addition of a little furniture of the period, that{149}

would never be missed from South Kensington Museum, and you could seeexactly how my Lord Howard lived when he entertained—and plottedagainst—his royal mistress three hundred years ago.

One does not like to think of the number of people who leave Londonwithout ever having seen the Charterhouse. It is one of the mostbeautiful places in all London, and its story is packed with romance,intrigue, adventure and benevolence.

The tale falls into three parts. It is begun by that gallant Hainaulter,Sir Walter de Manny, as the English called Walter, Lord of Mausny nearValenciennes, who came over to England in the train of Philippa ofHainault.

According to Froissart he was a “very gentil parfyte knighte,” and whenhe saw the ghastly heaps of dead bodies of plague-stricken people lyingin the streets in 1349, he bought from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital apiece of land called No Man’s Land and caused the dead to be decentlyburied there. Their bodies at rest, he had thought for their souls, andon March 25, 1349, he laid the foundation-stone of a chapel where therelations might pray for their dead. Twenty years later Sir Walter Mannylaid another stone, that of the first cell for the Carthusian monks hebrought over from France. The wives and sisters of the dead had prayedso long in the chapel that the right could not be taken from them, sofor once the strict{152} Carthusian rule was relaxed and a special place wasset apart for the womenkind to come and pray.

Sir Walter Manny died in 1372. He was buried at the foot of the step ofthe great altar in the chapel that may be seen to-day, and in theCharterhouse his Carthusian monks prayed according to the tenets oftheir faith for a hundred and sixty-five years more before the lastprior, John Houghton, having been hung on Tyburn Tree, and many of thebrothers tortured, the rest submitted to the king’s will. The House ofthe Salutation of the Mother of God in the Charterhouse near London wasdissolved shortly afterwards.

The second phase of the Charterhouse story is a very different one.Twice during the following years it was prepared for the coming of afair queen, whose head was bowed on Tower Hill instead of in the oldchapel.

Charterhouse was granted to that wily old courtier, Sir Edward North, in1545, and eight years later he “conveyed” it to John Dudley, Earl ofNorthumberland, the father-in-law of Lady Jane Grey. The Earl ofNorthumberland never wanted it for himself, as he had already DurhamHouse in the Adelphi, but there was his son Guildford with his fairyoung wife to be lodged fittingly. So he brought up much furniture fromKenilworth and stored it hard by, little dreaming that his bold planswould miscarry and that he would die on Tower Hill a{153} year before thechildren whose home he had planned shared the same fate.

North was granted the Charterhouse again by Queen Mary, and whenElizabeth came to the throne in 1558 she stayed six days there beforeher coronation.

Three years later she paid the old house another visit, but North diedin 1564 and Charterhouse passed into the hands of crafty, brilliant,fickle Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk.

Once more Charterhouse, now known as Howard House, was to be preparedfor a royal mistress, and in a royal manner.

The new owner, buoyed with hopes of a marriage with Mary, Queen ofScots, began to put his new house in order. He added the screen in thegreat hall and the “Tarrass Walk,” the lovely tapestry room, theduchess’s withdrawing-room and the magnificent great staircase.

On the 6th of August, 1568, Elizabeth came in state from Hampton Courtto Howard House, to pay a visit to her disloyal servant, alreadyplotting against her and arranging the duchess’s salon for her rival.The air was thick with intrigue, and by the autumn the rumour of themarriage with Mary had reached Elizabeth. Norfolk denied it, but a yearlater the truth came out, and he spent some time in the Tower,{154} to bereleased, under surveillance, when the Black Death threatened thatdistrict.

He had learned no lesson. Either a devouring ambition or the attractionof the most fascinating woman in Europe lured him on. Plots andcounterplots were hatched in the long gallery that now forms part of theupper-story quarters of the Master and Registrar of Charterhouse. Mary’semissaries were seized—one of them, called Bailly, has carved thelesson these events taught him in the Beauchamp Room in the Tower—andthe luckless queen was betrayed in her turn, even as Elizabeth had been,by the man who so short a time before had decorated the Charterhouse toreceive her as a bride.

He told, like a coward, the place where her cipher was hidden under atile in the Charterhouse, but nothing could save his own neck, and hefollowed his father and his two girl cousins, Anne Boleyn and KatherineHoward, in June 1572.

The next owner of Howard House, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was onlya boy of fifteen when he inherited his father’s property, but he was ofsterner stuff, for he refused to abjure the Roman Catholic faith he hadembraced, even to see his wife and children, before he died, worn out,and under sentence of death, in 1595. Elizabeth had kept him prisoner inthe Beauchamp Tower for ten years, and it

was there, in 1587, that he carved the words, “The more suffering forChrist in this world, so much the more glory with Christ in the life tocome.”

He had lived very little at the Charterhouse, and when it passed intothe hands of his half-brother Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, thefortunes of the old house changed with the advent of the great EnglishAdmiral who could swear with truth “’Fore God I am no coward,” when hewas admiral of the squadron at Flores in the Azores, “and the littleRevenge ran on right into the heart of the foe.”

Lord Thomas Howard was one of the honoured, trusted servants ofElizabeth, and she came once more in 1603, not long before her death, topay him a visit in the Charterhouse.

In a few months James I. came there, even as she had done, to spend thedays before his coronation as the guest of the son of the man who hadbeen his mother’s false suitor.

But brave Lord Thomas Howard was building a new house at Audley End, andneeding money he sold Howard House for £13,000 to Sir Thomas Sutton. Thebrilliant days of the Charterhouse as a nobleman’s mansion were at anend—another chapter was concluded and the third phase of the story wasto begin.

Sir Thomas Sutton, the new owner, was the Lord Rhondda of the sixteenthcentury. He was a Lincolnshire man with a wide knowledge of men andthings, whose military profession{156} never prevented his having a keen eyefor business. He made a large fortune before he died in 1611, leavingthe provision to found a hospital for eighty impoverished gentlemen anda school for forty boys, under the name of the Hospital of King James inCharterhouse.

There was much discussion, “about it and about,” before Sir ThomasSutton’s chosen trustees could carry out his wishes. James I., true sonof his father Darnley, had to be placated by apourboire of £10,000,and even Bacon, jealous at not being among the trustees, tried tobelittle the bequest and advise that the money should be used for hismaster’s benefit instead of for the poor. Sir Edward Coke, Lady Hatton’shusband, steered the hospital through the shoals that surrounded itslaunching and the more dangerous peril of the king’s genial idea thatthe Charterhouse revenues might fitly be used to pay for his army. TheCharterhouse was founded, and for three hundred years the school hasproduced great Englishmen and the hospital harboured men who have foundthat in the evening of a working life the stars do not always appear.

Among the Charterhouse scholars have been the bearers of great namessuch as Lovelace and Crashaw, Addison and Steele, John Wesley, Sir HenryHavelock, Thackeray, Leech, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Lord Alverstone andmany others. The school was removed in 1872 to Godalming, and thebuildings were taken over{157} by the Merchant Taylors’ Company for theirboys’ school.

The hospital for the poor brothers no longer harbours eighty men. Theirnumber is reduced to sixty owing to the depreciation in the value of SirThomas Sutton’s land and the fact that since the Charterhouse has alwaysbeen considered a wealthy foundation no further bequests have ever beenmade to bring the number once more up to the four score of the founder’sintention.

That, briefly told, is the dramatic tale of the Charterhouse. You willreadily believe it all if you take the District Railway to AldersgateStreet and go and see the Charterhouse for yourself. Its beauty isunimpaired by time. The Guesten Hall where the poor brethren take theirmeals, the great sixteenth century carved staircase, the chapel whereColonel Newcome sat, the false duke’s arcade, and the old gatehouse—allare there and many more things to recall the most dramatic pages ofEngland’s history.{158}

CHAPTER IX

A STROLL IN WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER

Dr. Johnsononce said, “Why, sir, Fleet Street has a very animatedappearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at CharingCross.”

Certainly Charing Cross is the best of all starting-points for exploringexpeditions, and by Charing Cross I mean the south-east corner ofTrafalgar Square.

From there you may wander along the Strand, or north into Bloomsbury, orthrough Cockspur Street into the realms of Mayfair, or southward to theThames, and in every direction there are unnoticed stories to be found.

United Services Museum

One day I turned my back on Charing Cross to go to St. Margaret’sviaWhitehall, blissfully unconscious of the fact that it happened to beSaturday and that the church closes its doors every day at 4 p.m. andfor all day on Saturdays.{159}

At the corner of the Horse Guards Avenue I paused undecided, havingtaken months to summon up courage to pass the giant at the entrance tothe United Services Museum!

He snorts with such a supercilious sniff at the would-be visitor thatyou have to remember it may possibly be only the good-natured contemptof one service for another, and that the Orion’s figurehead may reallybe elevating his nose at the Horse Guards across the way, on which Inotice that Spencer Compton, 8th Duke of Devonshire (b. 1833, d. 1908)also bends a grave and somewhat disapproving eye from his elevatedstatue in the middle of the road.

Mr. Street, in his deliciousGhosts of Piccadilly, says, “There isever a Devonshire filling his eminent position, calm, retiring,imperturbable, and never an amusing thing to tell of any one of them,”and this statue tells you to believe him.

To come back to the United Services Museum—a thing that far too fewpeople do, for it is one of London’s many buried treasures—don’t bemisled by any optimistic guide-book that tells you the admission issixpence. That is only true on Saturday afternoon; at other times youpart with a shilling unless you are a soldier or sailor in uniform, orone of the many troops of schoolchildren that are admitted free everyweek.

There are myriads of things to delight any childish heart—cunninglycontrived models of ships, plans of battles, the actual walking-stick{160}and snuff-box of Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell’s sword, the verybugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade, a room devoted tosouvenirs of Lord Wolseley, and rows of other treasures with heroicstories of brave men.

I have yet to find a museum without a Napoleonic souvenir, and herethere is a startling one—“Marengo’s” skeleton. You are so engrossed bythe relics of General Wolfe and Nelson and Wellington and other heroes,that you almost forget what you came to see—the Old Banqueting Hallwhere they are lodged, the beautiful Palladian structure that InigoJones built in 1622—all that is now left of the old palace ofWhitehall.

The nine ceiling paintings that Rubens did at Charles I.’s request lookas fresh as if they had been painted yesterday, having been restored toomany times. Rubens got £3000 for them, while Wren only received £100 ayear for rebuilding all the City churches and £200 a year for rebuildingSt. Paul’s—but Wren was an Englishman and Rubens a foreigner.

The Banqueting Hall was all that James I. accomplished of the greatpalace he meant to let Inigo Jones build for him in Whitehall, and justoutside the hall Charles I. met his death, a short distance from thestatue where

eleven to see the guard relieved at the Horse Guards, now the office ofthe C.I.C. of the Home Forces.

On the king’s birthday, June 3rd, the Trooping of the Colour at theHorse Guards is an unforgettable pageant.

The English have not, like the French, the courteous custom of salutingtheir flag, but on this occasion every civilian head is bared as thedrums beat and swords flash, and the uplifted colours are borne slowlyround the parade ground to the strains ofGod Save the King and theold regimental marches, played by the band of the Life Guards in theirmagnificent uniforms.

Westminster Abbey

Even more than of the British Museum I feel that it would be animpertinence to speak of Westminster Abbey as a London corner unnoticedby Londoners,—and yet I have known people who have left London and goneback across the seas with never a thought for the cloisters nor a“memorie” of Jane Lister, “dear childe,” who lies buried there, peoplewho may have perfunctorily “done” the Abbey with a guide but have neverlingered there at the uncrowded hours till the exquisite beauty{162} of itsmany corners has become a possession they can carry away with them.

I can make no attempt to point out the manifold interest of the Abbey,but there are certain places that I love that I would not willingly letanyone miss.

There is no need to write of the interior. No one was ever known to missthe Poets’ Corner, or the Coronation Chair, or Henry VII.’s Chapel, orthe Chapel of Edward the Confessor, but I have known people who visitedWestminster Abbey and missed seeing the Chapter House.

To miss seeing that thirteenth-century octagonal room is a calamity. Itis not only very beautiful, with a beauty that reminds you at once ofthe Sainte Chapelle, but there is an atmosphere about it that takes youback through the centuries to the time when Simon de Montfort was layingthe foundations of constitutional government, and the first parliamentof twenty-three barons, one hundred and twenty ecclesiastics, twoknights from each shire and two burghers from each town met in this veryroom.

The House of Commons was born within these grey walls nearly five and ahalf centuries ago, when the Commons were told to go to “leur ancienneplace en la maison du Chapitre de l’Abbeye de Westminster.” The membersmet here till they moved to the Chapel of St. Stephen, within the wallsof Westminster Palace, in 1547.

and charters that should have been removed to the Record Office with therest of the public records that were stored here since Elizabethan days,and look instead at the faint fourteenth-century mural decoration ofChrist surrounded by the Christian virtues. Even the unsightly casescannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of theshaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows,filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to bemodern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory ofthat great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley.

When Edward the Confessor about 1050 built the first round Chapter Houseon this spot for his Benedictine monks to transact the business of theirmonastery, they little thought to what varied uses it would be put. Thepresent octagonal room has seen the age-long struggle of the people fortheir liberties. It was damaged in the Civil Wars and suffered fromrepairs in the eighteenth century. It has had its painted wallsconcealed by unsightly cupboards, when the public records were storedthere. It has housed the Domesday Book till it and the records wereremoved in 1862, and now that it has been restored as nearly as possibleto its old beauty, it exists, spacious and dignified as ever, to remindthe passing visitor of the value of tradition and the history of a greatnation.

A few steps farther along the cloister is another less well-knowncorner, the Chapel of{166} the Pyx—not so ecclesiastical a chamber as itsounds, “pyx” meaning only a chest or box where the standard ofreferences for testing the coins of the realm used to be kept. Nowadaysthey make these tests at the hall of the ancient Company of Goldsmiths,at the corner of Foster Lane and Gresham Street.

Long ago the king’s treasure was kept here, and only the king and myLord Chancellor and the Abbot of Westminster had the keys, a fact thatwas very inconvenient when a robbery occurred, as at least one abbotfound to his cost. He and forty of his monks saw the inside of the Towerin consequence, but punishment was not always so light, as the pieces ofhuman skin still to be seen nailed to the door will show.

Inside the seven-locked door with its gruesome lining, that is onlyopened to visitors on Tuesdays and Fridays, you find a low vaulted roomsupported by rounded Romanesque arches on thick short pillars, and astone altar—the earliest in the Abbey.

After leaving the Chapel of the Pyx, stroll along the Norman cloister tothe left, past the Norman undercroft, where, if you have a mind to pay asmall fee to the verger in the Poets’ Corner, you can see any day in theweek the quaint effigies that used to be carried at royal funerals.Through the dark entry you come to the Little Cloister, a part of theold monastery, that ought only to be seen on a hot summer’s day, for inthe winter-time it is dreary and{167} your thoughts tend to turn to the smugingratitude that allowed the woman Nelson loved to die in poverty,—forshe once lived in the tower built by Abbot Littlington and originallythe bell tower of the church.

Turn back through the south walk of the Great Cloister and come into theDeanery Yard.

It is customary to write to the dean for permission to see the JerusalemChamber, but, if you go without this formality and he happens to beabsent, the caretaker will show it to you and tell quite unique storieswhich I will not steal his thunder by repeating.

You go through the sixteenth-century Jericho Room first, and it too isinteresting, with its linenfold deal panelling. It is the ante-room tothe Jerusalem Chamber, and is now used as a sort of vestry room for thecathedral. In the Jerusalem Chamber, as every schoolboy knows, KingHenry IV. died in 1413. I refuse to quote Shakespeare on this occasion.It is a fine fourteenth-century cedar-panelled room, and the lightthrough fragments of very ancient glass in the windows shines on earlyseventeenth-century tapestries and a very old mediæval portrait ofRichard II. It is a gracious place, but when the authors of the RevisedVersion of the Bible worked here in 1870, it failed to inspire them withthe same sense of the beauty of words that made their predecessorsproduce the finest literature in the world.

Many famous men have lain in state in the{168} Jerusalem Room before theirinterment in the Abbey—Congreve and Addison were both honoured in thisway, and that seventeenth-century poet-diplomatist, Matthew Prior, whowas so esteemed by Louis XIV. that he sent him a bust by the greatCoysevox. With one of those piquant inconsistencies that enlivenhistory, Nance Oldfield, Mrs. Bracegirdle’s rival, also lay in state inthe Jerusalem Chamber before she was buried in the Abbey. Mrs.Bracegirdle lies in front of the entrance to the Chapter House, butNance Oldfield was the only actress honoured by burial within the Abbeywalls.

The Jerusalem Chamber was originally the drawing-room of the Abbot ofWestminster, and in James the First’s day a banquet was given here tothe French Ambassadors who came over to arrange the marriage of PrinceCharles and the daughter of Henri IV.

Ashburnham House

Coming out of Dean’s Court and passing through the gateway in the eastside of Dean’s Yard, you find another enticing and little-known cornerin Westminster School in Little Dean’s Yard.

Every monastery had to have its school, so{169} the monks of St. Peter’sstarted theirs—the forerunner of the Westminster School or St. Peter’sCollege founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1560. Ben Jonson went to schoolhere, and so did George Herbert and Dryden and Cowper and Southey,Hakluyt ofVoyages fame, and Wren and Locke and Warren Hastings andmany other famous men I do not know, including Prior.

The school sergeant at the lodge will show the Edward III. College Hall,with its minstrel gallery and oaken tables made from the beams of theSpanish Armada. Forty years ago the school annexed Ashburnham House,another interesting unnoticed corner that can be seen any Saturdayafternoon, on application to the hall porter. This charming house wasbuilt in the seventeenth century by Webb, a famous disciple of InigoJones. Alas, his celebrated staircase is given over to dust and spiders,and only restored to a semblance of its former beauty on stateoccasions, such as Founders’ Day in November or at Christmas, when theboys perform their well-known Latin plays.

There are many interesting things about the school and the buildingsthat I leave untold, so go and see for yourself this quiet backwater ofLondon.{170}

St. Margaret’s Church

St. Margaret’s Church, open till four except on a Saturday, isinteresting not only for its architectural beauty, but for its manyassociations, and since 1916 it has had a deepened interest for theBritish Dominions beyond the Seas, as it was then created their parishchurch.

Pepys, who simply refuses to be left out of anything, was married hereto his pretty wife, of whom he was so proud that she need not have beenjealous of Mrs. Knipp.

In the chancel lies Sir Walter Raleigh, buried in St. Margaret’s afterhis execution in front of Westminster Palace in 1618. Admiral Blake liesin the churchyard, and there is a fine window in his honour on the northside.

The celebrated east window has had a career that is not without itscomic side. It was originally sent over to England by Ferdinand andIsabella of Spain as a betrothal gift to Prince Arthur, the eldest sonof Henry VII., with whom they had arranged the marriage of theirdaughter Catherine.

Before the window arrived the bridegroom had died, and Henry VIII., whomarried the bride, did not want a window with a portrait of PrinceArthur and Catherine. He sent it to{171} Waltham Abbey, and from that timeits history is a moving one.

At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot sent the window toNew Hall in Essex, later bought by the Villiers family, who buried it.At the Restoration General Monk set it up again till its next owner tookit down, and had the window packed away in a case till he found apurchaser for fifteen guineas. In 1758 the churchwardens of St.Margaret’s bought back the window for four hundred guineas, but itstroubles were not ended.

The Dean and Chapter of Westminster thought the window a superstitiousimage, and it was only after a lawsuit lasting seven years that thechurchwardens were allowed to keep their window.

As usual, I have not told of half the beauty and interest of thisfifteenth-century parish church, only of enough, I hope, to make areader go and discover the rest for himself, but let him take thought togo before four o’clock and not on a Saturday.{172}

CHAPTER X

MUSEUMS

British Museum

Iam rather diffident about putting any name on this chapter, for no onewould ever think of calling the British Museum an unnoticed place. Ithas what the newspapers call a world-wide reputation. Its very namesmacks of solid worth with nothing unexpected about it. It is aninstitution looming large and august, its massive masonry dominatingBloomsbury as its reputation does the universe, and absorbing anunending queue of earnest-minded people intent on storing their mindswith knowledge.

And yet, every time my frivolous feet have strayed through that solemnportico, I have longed to tell the thousands of people who never dreamof coming so far north as Great Russell Street, W.C. 1, of unexpectedthings they could find there if they would. I remember as a small personbeing made to recite the names of the seven wonders of the world, and Iused to repeat solemnly, “The Temple of Mausolaus at Halicarnassus—thePyramid of Cheops{173}—the Lighthouse of Alexandria—the Colossus ofRhodes—the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis—the Statue of Jupiter atOlympus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus”—with a considerable amountof annoyance that I could never hope to see these ancient splendours.When I found the remains of two of them in the British Museum, I felt,like the Queen of Sheba, that the half had not been told to me, andsince that first moment of delighted surprise how many unexpected thingsI have found there which make me long to say to all the unwitting Londonvisitors, “Don’t be put off by the solemnity of its name and thedistance from Bond Street, but go, only go, and you will be rewarded.”

The proper way to make friends with a museum, as with people, is to getto know it slowly, or its very excellences will give you a surfeitedmemory. I once avoided the beautiful old Cluny Museum in Paris for manyyears, because I had been oppressed by the fact that it contained 11,000objects of interest. No one had shown me how to ignore their number andget to love the very walls of Cardinal Jacques d’Amboise’s statelyhouse, by never crossing the sunny courtyard to see more than one sortof exhibit at a time.

I think this plan is even more applicable to the British Museum, thatgreat collection, partly bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane and opened to thepublic in 1759. There are two things the hurried visitor can do so as tocarry{174} away the possession of a definite memory of one phase of thetreasures contained in the vast building in Great Russell Street. He maychoose to go there at the hours of 12 or 3P.M. and follow one of thetwo expert lecturers who conduct people each day to see a differentgroup of exhibits and listen to their story. (Lists of these lecturesare given at the door.) Or he may choose for himself the sort of thinghe finds most interesting and sternly traverse the other rooms intentonly on the objects of his choice. In either case he is luckier than thevisitors in the early days of the museum’s existence, who were herded incompanies of only fifteen for a two hours’ visit.

To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardiansaid, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction ofthe mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like amodern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or inthe room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that roseand fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differnowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Streetto-day.

Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’sLibrary—a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warmbrown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books.

Into this spacious room come all sorts of people—small boys inknickerbockers anxious{175} to consult the postage stamp collections,artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-centurymanuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions ofShakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the humaninterest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “mabonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”

But when I am fancy-free, and come to the British Museum, perhaps withonly an hour to spare and no very definite idea about what I want tosee, I choose one of two courses. Either I spend the entire hour inwalking briskly through the galleries and taking a sort of bird’s-eyeview of the different kinds of treasures that the museum guards, withoutmaking an attempt at intimacy with any one of them—or I turn to theleft of the big entrance hall, pass through the Roman and Greco-Romanrooms and spend the whole time in the western wing, because there I cansee the art of three great nations of the ancient world and the greatestof all the museum’s treasures—the Elgin Marbles. In the galleriessurrounding them are the stupendous sculptures of Egypt and Assyria;statues of the Egyptian kings who lived 3000 years ago; colossal bulls,human-headed, that once guarded the gate of the palace that belonged tothe father of one Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who “came up against allthe defenced cities of Judah and took them,” and fragments from his owngreat palace of Nineveh.{176}

come into one’s mind, for the bas-reliefs show the effect of the fire ofthe Babylonians and Medes when they destroyed “Nineveh that great city”in 609B.C., yet they survived and the city is as dust! What a peoplethey must have been, the folk who built the Lycian tombs, you can seebest when you are half-way down the steps into the Mausoleum room, wherelie the tremendous fragments of one of the seven wonders of the ancientworld—the tomb that his wife and sister built for Mausolos, Prince ofCaria, in a little town in Asia Minor some 2275 years ago.

Traces of another of the seven wonders are in the Ephesus room, whereremains of the vast Temple of Artemis, “Diana of the Ephesians,” aregathered, and this room leads to the greatest wonder of them all, thepediment groups of statues from the Parthenon at Athens, that most of uscalltout court the Elgin Marbles.

I believe that a great many people have a vague idea that Thomas Bruce,seventh Earl of Elgin, did a little “scrounging” when he was Britishambassador to the Porte in 1801, and that our possession of thesesculptures is due to a mixture of luck and audacity.

It is really due to the common sense, artistic{177} perception andgenerosity of a statesman who at great inconvenience and a cost tohimself of £70,000, only half of which sum he later received from theEnglish Government, removed the treasures that were daily beingdestroyed by the Turkish bombardment and that, but for his action, wouldhave been irretrievably lost to the world.

One does not need to be an artist nor learned in artistic lore to feelthe peculiar charm of the Elgin Marbles. I have seen quite ignorantpeople approach them with unseeing eyes and some flippancy about theirmutilation on the lips, but after a few minutes’ contemplation,something of the calm beauty of the pose, the benignant sweep of thedrapery, damp with the sea-spray, the mystery of those nostalgicfigures, penetrates the onlooker and the work of Pheidias and hiscraftsmen has wrought its spell.

Now and then the official lecturer tells the story of what they had intheir minds when they carved those noble statues, carved every inch ofthem, even the parts they thought would never again be seen by any humaneye once they were placed on the pediment of the Great Temple, and youcome away feeling that your eyes have been opened to a great beauty andthe truth of it sinks into the soul.

It is not possible in these brief notes to mention more than a very fewof the unnoticed treasures in the British Museum. As the old portersaid, there is something to interest everyone.{178}

If you search you may come across the manuscript of Rupert Brooke’simmortal sonnet, the toys small children played with 2000 years ago,Mrs. Delany’s curious paper flowers in the students’ room of the printcollection and many, many other things to draw you there.

Foundling Hospital

Not far from the British Museum is the Foundling Hospital in GuilfordStreet. One hears of it vaguely as an orphan asylum where the childrenwear quaint costumes that may be seen at the service in the chapel onSunday mornings, when the singing attracts many visitors.

But there are more reasons than that to take you to this corner off thebeaten track of the West End. For one thing, it may not be there verylong. Already there are rumours that the Foundling Hospital may be movedto the country and one more link with eighteenth-century London besnapped.

Institutions as a rule are about as dull to see as to live in, but theFoundling Hospital is an exception. Handel, Hogarth and Dickens all gavetangible proof that they loved the place, and people from all over theworld come to see{179} it, attracted either by the reputation of the choir,the fame of the pictures in the museum, or the pathetic interest of thechildren, who indeed look merry, healthy little creatures.

Its story is almost too well known to need repetition: Aseventeenth-century sea-captain, living during the latter half of hislife in Rotherhithe, was distressed by the sight of deserted children hesaw on his way to and from the city. It took good Captain Thomas Coramseventeen years of hard work to turn his dream of a well-endowedhospital for deserted children into a reality, but in 1739 he got aroyal charter and a house was opened for them in Hatton Garden. TheFoundling Hospital, as we know it, was begun in 1742.

Hogarth has painted a wonderful portrait of the founder, and looking atthe cheerful benevolent face one can understand why he wrote, “Theportrait I painted with the utmost pleasure and in which I particularlywished to excel was that of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital.”The kindly eyes that Hogarth drew were forever seeing something to bedone for his fellow men, for the Foundling Hospital was only one of theold sea-captain’s philanthropies, to which he literally gave away all hehad. In his old age, when he was asked if he would mind accepting apension collected from his friends, he said quite simply, “I have notwasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed inself-indulgence or vain expenses, and am not{180} ashamed to confess that inthis my old age I am poor.” He accepted a pension of a little more than£100, and is buried in the vaults under the Foundling Hospital Chapel.That is the story of Thomas Coram, whose statue is at the entrance gateand whose name is remembered in Great Coram Street and Little CoramStreet.

The best time to see the hospital is at the Sunday morning service ateleven o’clock, and the easiest way to reach it is by the tube toRussell Square. Turn to the right on leaving the tube and walk downGrenville Street and Guilford Street, and the Foundling Hospital will beseen to the left.

Go up to the gallery if you want to see the children seated on each sideof the organ, dressed in the quaint costume that has never altered sinceit was decreed by the founder.

Dickens, who loved the hospital and had a seat in the chapel during theten years he lived in Bloomsbury, makes Mrs. Meagles say inLittleDorrit:

But the rules of the Foundling Hospital have changed since ThomasCoram’s time. Only the children of known mothers are now received, and{181}

if later in life the mother marries and can prove that she is able tosupport her child, she can claim it again. The children are neverallowed to be adopted. They are sent to foster-mothers in the countrywhen first received, and only come to the hospital when they are six.The girls with few exceptions are trained for domestic service and theboys as regimental bandsmen, if they show talent, or they areapprenticed to different trades when they are fourteen.

There is something infinitely touching in the sight of these rows ofsmall creatures, chanting with their trained treble voices, “Let menever be confounded,” when life had confounded them at its very gates.But seeing them later on, as every Sunday morning visitor is allowed todo, happily eating their dinners in their pleasant rooms, it is obviousthat the life of the little brown-coated boy or white-capped girl inThomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital has many things in its favour. One maycompare their lot with that of more sophisticated children in the Londonslums, for whom it is necessary to have a society for their protectionfrom the parents who have ill-treated over 100,000 in England in thelast year.

One does not ordinarily associate a foundling hospital with the finearts, but, as I said before, this is an exception. Hogarth not onlypainted the founder’s portrait and one or two other pictures that hegave to the hospital, but he persuaded his friends to do likewise. SirJoshua{184} Reynolds gave a portrait of Lord Dartmouth, Gainsborough a viewof Charterhouse, Kneller a portrait of Handel, and the exhibition ofthese gifts, including a beautiful cartoon of Raphael’sMassacre of theInnocents, was a forerunner of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy.The pictures alone are worth going to Guilford Street to see. Some ofthem are in the picture gallery with the cases holding tokens that inthe old days before 1760 used to be left to identify the foundling. Inthe board-room, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful roomsin London, hangs Hogarth’sMarch to Finchley, of which I believe thereis a copy in the ugly “Adam and Eve” public-house, built on the site ofthe “Adam and Eve” Inn of the picture, at the corner of the TottenhamCourt Road and Euston Road.

The tale of how the hospital came to get the picture is rather quaint.Hogarth painted soldiers marching to Finchley in a state that theirFrenchconfrères would call “débraillés.” He then asked George II.to buy it, but that monarch—the last English king to go intobattle—was so enraged at this presentation of his soldiers, that heindignantly refused, and Hogarth, not being able to dispose of thepicture elsewhere, issued lottery tickets for it. About sixty ticketswere left on his hands, so he gave them to his favourite hospital, whichwon the picture, and there it is to-day.

The careful training of the child choir, and{185} the choice of a musicalcareer for the boys whenever possible, is only carrying on one of theearliest traditions, for Handel rivalled Hogarth in his interest and hisgifts to the Foundling Hospital. He used to conduct performances of theMessiah in the chapel to crowded audiences, and as he induced theperformers to give their services, the proceeds that he handed oversometimes amounted to nearly £1,000. In a glass case is carefullypreserved the gift the great master bestowed on the hospital of the MS.of his oratorio, and near by is the autograph copy of the number ofGood Words containing the story Dickens wrote about the FoundlingHospital.

In the secretary’s room is a fine old Jacobean oak table but latelyretrieved from the kitchen premises where it had been in use forcenturies.

South Kensington Museum

One of the nicest things about the South Kensington Museum is the livelyway it keeps in touch with what happens to be interesting Londoners atthe moment.

Is there a loan exhibition of Spanish pictures at Burlington House, atonce everything Spanish that the Museum possesses is gathered togetherso that the different phases of Spanish art may be conveniently noted,and there is nearly{186} always some extra little exhibition of specialinterest, either in celebration of the centenary of some great artist orto introduce the work of some foreigner of outstanding merit likeMestrovic.

The lectures given here daily by expert guides at 12 and 3 p.m. wouldprobably be crowded if they cost a guinea. With that curious apathytowards what is not expensive that is one of our less pleasingattributes, only a few people take advantage of these pleasant scholarlytalks. If they were known to be very exclusive and costly, the thousandsof excellent people with modest incomes and no occupation who live inBloomsbury and Earl’s Court boarding-houses, would sigh for theprivilege of sharing these hour-long strolls through the museum, whenthe lecturer gives no disconnected account of individual objects butdeftly traces the development of the art of different countries andages, illustrating his teaching by the treasures under his care.

I think this apathy is largely due to lack of initiative andimagination, as well as to the aforesaid deeply-rooted idea that whatcosts nothing cannot be worth much. I have found so many people who havenever heard of these lectures that another cause of the small attendancemay be that the news of their existence is not sufficiently widelyspread.

There is, alas, no one at Claridge’s or the Ritz or the Savoy to tellmothers who bring their girls over here to buy clothes and do the{187}theatres, that there is also a way open to them to gain something thatwill still be theirs when the memory of the play has faded—in mostcases let us hope so—and the clothes have been cast aside—since no onenowadays wears clothes long enough to wear them out.

The South Kensington Museum is the finest museum of applied art in theworld. That is why it is the Mecca of students who come here to studyand draw inspiration from the lovely things fashioned by our forefathersin gold and silver and bronze and leather, in silk and lace and preciousstones, in the furnishings and decorations of the houses and persons ofother times and other nations. There are paintings and sculpture aswell: the Raphael cartoons are one of the glories of the place.

There is something, indeed, to appeal to everyone’s taste in this mostmarvellous museum. For the little schoolgirls who seem to throng theplace in cohorts, in the charge of apathetic teachers, there are thedolls and dolls’ houses that their great-grandmothers played with—theformer as delicately waxen and elegantly dressed as any to be foundto-day. Furniture lovers may study here the finest specimens of everyperiod, from the handsome Jacobean chairs and settles that harmonise sowell with the background of panelled walls and decorated ceilings takenfrom old English houses, to the marvellous ornate escritoires, toilettables and gilt couches of French royal palaces. There is{188} lessformality about the English furniture, but it was not more comfortable;and the heavy projecting carvings even on the back of the littlechildren’s chairs may well have been the reason for the erect bearingsused for odious comparisons in one’s youth. They say that the beds ofour forefathers were comfortable. That may be true, but they werecertainly depressing, and the state bed from Boughton House,Northampton, in which William III. slept, with its dingy hangings andhorrible hearse-like plumes, reaching into the lofty roof, makes youthankful for the airier ideas of to-day.

For book-lovers there are upstairs the old, old missals and books ofhours, illuminated with such skill and patience by monks in mediævalmonasteries—some with colours almost as perfect, the ink as black, thepaper as white as when they were first executed in the twelfth andthirteenth centuries. As marvellous, and perhaps even more exquisite asworks of art, are the slender Persian volumes, love-poems and prayers,inscribed in delicate characters of the East, with pictures of shahs andhouris, and leather covers, so wonderfully embossed and inlaid andbeautifully coloured that no description could give the faintest idea oftheir perfection.

Even people who are not musicians love the gallery where musicalinstruments of the past stand silent in their cases: guitars thattroubadours in parti-coloured hose twanged dolorously to theirlady-loves; virginals belonging to Queen{189} Elizabeth and that otherElizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who was a daughter of James I.; theharpsichord that Handel bequeathed to George II.; the great harp of thefamous blind Welsh harper. Zithers are there, and other instruments ofcunning workmanship, lovely to see and with names as melodious as thesounds they once gave forth: dulcimers and clavicords, lutes andceteras, pandores and clavecins. Here are the spinets of ourgrandmothers, and what must be the veritable father of the hurdy-gurdy,and a little pianino made by Chappell more than one hundred years ago,so small that you could carry it about from place to place.

Then there is the jewellery—bracelets, girdles, necklaces, earrings,rings chosen and worn by “Flora la Belle Rommaine” and her sisters ofother ages and countries, but so like, both in design and execution, thework of the modern goldsmith.

There is an interesting and beautiful collection of the peasantjewellery of continental countries—wonderful gilt crowns of Russian andNorwegian brides and curious rings of gigantic size and significantnames, charm rings, motto rings, incantation rings, iconigraphic rings,Gnostic rings and rings with all sorts of devices.

These are only a tithe of the treasures in the Victoria and AlbertMuseum that can easily be reached by District Railway and Inner Circleto South Kensington Station or by the Piccadilly Tube and the BromptonRoad.{190}

Wallace Collection

People say vaguely, “The Wallace Collection? Oh, yes, I really must gosome day; I’ve heard of it so many times,” and the “some day” recedesand London is left behind and that most delightful place remains unseen.

And yet this treasure-house is so easy to reach. The shopper at Debenhamand Freebody’s need only turn up Duke Street at the corner where WigmoreStreet embraces Lower Seymour Street, and there is Manchester House atthe far side of Manchester Square.

If you have only a short time to spend there, give it all to the Frenchpictures. They are thepièce de résistance of the Wallace Collection,gathered by two men who loved France and spent most of their livesthere. The story of the Hertfords who made the Wallace Collection isalmost as interesting as anything in their house. The first Marquess ofHertford had thirteen children, and the portraits he asked Reynolds topaint of two of his daughters (Nos. 31 and 33) were the nucleus of thecollection. The second marquess only added Reynolds’ “Nelly O’Brien” andthe Romney “Perdita.”

His son was the celebrated Marquess of Hertford whose meteoric careerenlivened the first half of the last century—the original of both{191}Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne and Lord Beaconsfield’s Coningsby, whosewealth, wit and reckless egoism provided food for gossip for many ayear. It was for him that Decimus Burton built St. Dunstan’s in Regent’sPark, and he filled it withobjets d’art of all kinds, and a number ofpictures, chiefly of the Dutch school.

His son, Richard Seymour-Conway, fourth Marquess of Hertford, spent hislife in amassing, with the help of Sir Richard Wallace, the collectionthat is now the property of the British nation. M. Yriarte, a French artexpert who knew this eccentric nobleman well, published an account ofhis curious life in thePall Mall Magazine for September 1900, but itis not possible to give the details now.

Sir Richard Wallace inherited his wealth and his pictures. His name islegendary here in England, but in Paris it is a household word, forevery thirsty street urchin calls the graceful bronze drinking fountainshe put all over the city “un Vallace.”

M. Francisque Sarcey, who never met Sir Richard Wallace, has expressedin the dedication of hisLe Siège de Paris something of the feelingParisians had for this Englishman who stayed in the city, sharing theirperils and discomforts and proving his sympathy by immense gifts.Luckily for us, his friendship did not induce him to leave the HertfordCollection to France. He had always shared his fathe{192}r’s passion forcollecting, and began to buy pictures as a young man. The Corot,Rousseau’s lovelyForest Glade, and the enchanting fresco on plasterof aBoy Reading by the Milanese artist Foppa, are among the works hebought.

To come back to the French pictures: there is no example of Chardin’swork (to see “Le Bénédicité” you must go to the Louvre), but there areeight pictures by his pupil Fragonard, and if the Louvre has “The MusicLesson,” Hertford House has the “Gardens of the Villa d’Este.”

I think the Fragonards must be seen if there is time for nothing else;not because Fragonard is a greater artist than the others, but becausehis work may be better studied here than in his own country.

There is a lovely interior of Fragonard’s in the National Gallery, and a“Lady with a Dog” in the Tennant Collection, 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, but Iam informed that the present occupiers of the Glenconner mansion do notfollow the generous custom of the owners in admitting the public onWednesdays and Saturdays from two to six.

The eccentric Marquess’s statement, “I only like pleasing pictures,”perhaps accounts for the number of Greuze canvases—over a score; butthe collection is particularly rich in eighteenth-century Frenchpainters—Largillière, Watteau, Nattier, Lancret, Vernet, Van Loo,Boucher, etc.{193}

If you have time for two visits, spend the second with the Dutchpictures, where the Rembrandt portraits almost console me for theabsence of Vermeer’s. One must go to the National Gallery to see the“Lady at the Virginal.”

Among the fifty-seven artists represented, there are many old friends,Frans Hals, Brouwer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Terborch, Wouverman withhis inevitable white horse, six of the excellent Ruysdaels—that somehownever give me as much pleasure as Metsu’s charming pictures—Hobbema,the Flemish Teniers, and eight Rubens (he is more likeable here than inthe Louvre).

Of course there are numberless other treasures. A very completecatalogue will tell you all about them, but I hope I have made you wantto go and buy that catalogue.

Geffrye Museum

I have never met anyone who knew of this Benjamin among museums—it wasonly opened the year the war came upon us—except the man of learningwho told me that, tucked away in the heart of the manufacturing districtof Shoreditch, there was a wonderful collection of period furniturearranged in an old almshouse.{194} So one day I climbed into a 22 bus atPiccadilly Circus and asked the conductor to discard me at the GeffryeMuseum in the Kingsland Road. We travelled for miles along streets whereevery second shop seemed to be a cabinet-maker’s, and then stoppedconveniently at the very gate of the quiet, spacious courtyard whereelderly people were taking the air on the old oak benches. It was pastsix of the clock on a warm evening in June, but a misguided guide-bookhad said the museum was open till eight in summer.

That halcyon arrangement disappeared with the fashion of the eight-hourday, and the museum now closes at six o’clock like its olderconfrères. It is also closed on Sunday morning and all Monday.

The people who used to live in the fourteen quaint little brickalmshouses have been transferred to a building in the country, and theLondon County Council has bought this property for their museum from theIronmongers’ Company, from whose seventeenth-century “Master,” SirRobert Geffrye, it takes its name. It is a fascinating place; like arather badly arranged old curiosity shop. There are old staircases—onefrom Boswell’s house in Queen Street is the most beautiful—and lovelypanelled rooms and all sorts of things that demonstrate how beautifulinterior decoration was before the age of machine-made furniture.

There is a charming room from New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and many otherinteresting{195} exhibits including a beautiful lacquered Chinese palanquin,but what I liked best were the fragile, unbelievable wood carvings ofGrinling Gibbons.

If there were nothing else to see in the Geffrye Museum, it would beworth while to go to look at what a master hand can do with a block ofwood. Evelyn thought Grinling Gibbons “the greatest master both ofinvention and rarenesse of work that the world ever had in any age.”

I had cherished the mistaken belief that Gibbons was an Englishman forso long that it was with regret I found that this great artist was bornin Rotterdam and only came to England in 1667 when he was twenty-fouryears old.

It is many long years since I was first shown some of Grinling Gibbons’marvellous work—so many that only the effect it had on me remains,while the date and place have gone from me. I never willingly missseeing what his hand has carved, and if any reader of these pages is inthe habit of coming to London often and making friends on each trip withanother of the men of genius who have given the city its proud record, Ican tell them where they may study the wizardlike work of this mastercraftsman and great artist.

The most magnificent piece of work he carved is in the choir of St.Paul’s, but there are long festoons of flowers in St. Mary Abchurch, inAbchurch Yard, off Abchurch Lane, a turning{196} out of Cannon Street. Inold St. Mary Abchurch you will also find a wonderful painted dome by SirJames Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, whose house in Dean Street,Soho, has only lately been pulled down. St. James’s, Piccadilly, thatsuave building that breathes mid-Victorian portliness, broadcloth andself-satisfaction, has a lovely marble font carved by Grinling Gibbons,but the cover was stolen. Later research has destroyed the widely-spreadbelief that Grinling Gibbons carved the pedestal for King Charles I.’sstatue in Trafalgar Square, but over the mantelpiece in the vestry ofSt. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, between Great Tower Street and Lower ThamesStreet, you will find another carving.

The rest I will leave you to hunt out for yourself. Some of it is inunlikely places, one of them not a hundred miles from Clifford’s Inn. Ido not know if there is any trace of the pot of flowers Grinling Gibbonscarved when he lived in Belle Sauvage Court on Ludgate Hill, and whichWalpole said “shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches thatpassed by.”

He lived for forty-three years in Bow Street, Covent Garden. The housefell down, says an old record, in 1701, “but by a genial providence noneof the family were killed,” and they seem to have propped up theirhouse, for they went on living there till Grinling Gibbons died in1721.{197}

CHAPTER XI

PARKS

Hyde Park

The London parks certainly do not deserve the epithet “unnoticed,” but Ihave met few people who knew anything about their story. Foreignerscoming to London for the first time always exclaim at their beauty, butthe Londoners take them as a matter of course, and hardly anyone stopsto inquire their history or even the reason for their names. Yet much ofthe city’s history is bound up with that of the parks, and their storyis a mirror of the changing fashions of London.

Hyde Park, for instance—that vast space of 390 acres in the very heartof the city, enjoyed by prince and plutocrat and pauper with equalfreedom so long as they keep on their feet, for the rule of the roadwayis not so democratic—what a tale it could tell of the brave sights ithas seen since it was first enclosed in 1592! Before Charles I.’s timethe park, that took its name from the Manor of Hyde, was only to be{198}enjoyed by the king and court, who hunted and hawked there; but inStuart days there were foot and horse races and drives and merry-making.It has always been a favourite haunt of Mayfair. Evelyn used to “takethe aire in Hide Park,” very annoyed at having to pay one shilling andsixpence for the privilege, and so did Pepys, obviously gratified thathis wife attracted attention. De Gramont, the witty observer of CharlesII.’s court, is quoted as saying: “Hyde Park everyone knows is thepromenade of London—the promenade of beauty and fashion.”

In the days of Charles II. all the world went to the Ring, a circularcourse of about 350 yards laid out by the Merry Monarch, between theRanger’s Cottage and the present tea-house. How fashionable the drivewas Pepys tells us when he says: “Took up my wife and Deb and to thepark, where being in a hackney and they undressed, was ashamed to gointo the Tour but went round the park and so with pleasure home.”

In those days there was a cake-house, where cheese-cakes, syllabub andtarts were sold—refreshments probably more attractive than those ofto-day.

Places of refreshment might so easily add enormously to the amenities ofthe London parks and gardens if good food, attractively and quicklyprovided, could be obtained. Nature has furnished an exquisitebackground for a{199} sylvan meal, but anyone who has ordered tea at one ofthese places carries away a regret for what might have been. Perhapsthat is why it has never been fashionable to take tea in the park sincethe Georgian days when people stood on chairs to see the beautiful MissGunnings pass by.

The latest fashions were always worn first in Hyde Park. The daring ofany Parismannequin at the Grand Prix pales before the effect made bythe Lady Caroline Campbell of George III.’s reign, who “displayed inHyde Park the other day a feather four feet higher than her bonnet.”

In Victorian days the smart world strolled on the south walk betweenHyde Park Corner and Alexandra Gate, but to-day that is given over tothe curious strata of society, vomited up from a volcanic war, that nowfill the stalls in the theatres and the restaurants that used to callthemselves exclusive.

Fashion is slowly retiring—first to the part of the park opposite ParkLane and then to the northern side opposite Lancaster Gate. Perhaps itis making the tour, and when the profiteer and his family havediscovered that they are in sole possession of this south-east part ofthe park, they will move off and the wheel will turn once more.

Why the big statue close to Hyde Park Corner is called the AchillesStatue is one of London’s mysteries for which there is no more reasonthan the nursemaid had when she familiarly desig{200}nated Watts’ “PhysicalEnergy” in Kensington Gardens as “The Galloping Major.” “Achilles” is acopy of one of the horse trainers of the Monte Cavallo in Rome. The Popegave the cast, the Ordnance Department gave the metal of the cannontaken in the battles of Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse and Waterloo, andthe women of England subscribed £10,000 to this memorial of the IronDuke and his comrades-in-arms. Where Achilles comes in, I do not know.

Each of the great London parks is associated with some special Englishsovereign. Charles II. is the godfather of St. James’s Park; Regent’sPark, like Regent Street, was planned for the glorification of the manwho was afterwards George IV.; Battersea is associated with PrinceAlbert the Good, and we owe Kew to the Princess Augusta, mother ofGeorge III.

Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens owe their allegiance to Queen Caroline,George II.’s queen. It was she who converted the ponds and theWestbourne stream into the fifty acres of water of the Serpentine which,now derived from the Thames, feeds the ornamental water in BuckinghamPalace Gardens and St. James’s Park. The king thought she was doing itall out of her own purse and smiled at all her schemes, little dreamingthat with Walpole’s aid she was letting him in for some £20,000—a facthe only discovered after her death.

Unfortunate Parisians, who are obliged to skirt the Tuileries gardens,closed inexorably at{201} seven o’clock on a summer evening, envy theLondoner who may enjoy the leafy cool of his parks till long after dark,the carriage entrances not being closed till midnight.

You may see an extraordinary number of quite different phases of Englishlife in Hyde Park. There are the loafers, including the errand boys andthat mysterious class of people who seem to have nothing to do in lifebut “invite their soul” at eleven o’clock of a fine morning. Unless theyare content with a bench, the peace has made this feat more expensivethan it used to be, for when the price of everything else was happilyfalling, the rusty individual who was wont to interrupt true lovers’conversations by heartlessly demanding a penny, was suddenly inspired todouble the price of the chairs that have been hired in the park for thelast hundred years.

Then there is the gallant sight of Rotten Row, named from the Route duRoi that William III. used when he rode from Whitehall to Kensington.The present Rotten Row was made by George I. when he wanted a shortercut through the park. The best time to see the riders is the earlymorning, and the bathers have to get up still earlier if they want toplunge into the Serpentine, for the bathing is over at 8.30 a.m.

In the afternoon the Hyde Park orator comes into his own and the wholeof the Marble Arch corner turns into a factory for letting off steam. Itis let off by the partisans of different religions{202} who vociferate sideby side, each demonstrating that his particular set of tenets is theonly means to salvation. It is let off by socialists and communists andbolsheviks, and everyone who fancies he can alter the existingconditions to his own advantage,—and behind all these fiery-tonguedspeechmakers stand the placid good-natured policemen who look on withall the indulgence of a kindly nurse towards a fractious child,answering an amused inquiry with a paternal: “It don’t ’urt anyone andit does them a power of good to get it off their chests!”

Among the phases to be noticed are the picnic parties who come to thepark prepared to make a day of it, and the children of every class ofsociety, and the nursemaids whose very name reminds one of his Majesty’sforces both military and naval, who are also ardent patrons of the park.

There are many minor points of interest,—the queer little dogs’cemetery near the Victoria Gate on the north side, the dell, asub-tropical garden near the east end of the Serpentine not far from thefountain with the charming Artemis statue—but the most delightful wayto see the park at its very best is to go there in the early morningcarrying a picnic breakfast and take a boat at the boathouse south ofthe rangers’ lodge. I have always envied the park ranger who lives inthis mansion. The first of his race was appointed by Henry VIII. at theprincely salary of sixpence a day, but when this was{203} objected to by theGovernment economy enthusiasts of that time, it was reduced tofourpence.

The tiny stone cottages of the keepers, with the classic architecturethat makes them look so ridiculously important, are not really thesmallest houses in London. I think that honour must surely belong to theporter’s lodge at the Fetter Lane entrance to the Record Office, unlessyou count as a house No. 10, Hyde Park Place. Though it certainly has astreet door all to itself, it has only one room.

The park authority, so careless when it is a matter of eating anddrinking, is careful to provide more artistic pleasures for the HydePark crowds. Bands play there on many summer evenings—the announcementsare made in the Press—and now and then the League of Arts arranges anentertainment, when thousands of people flock to see the Morris dancingor some old play performed with a background of green trees.

Kensington Gardens

Henry James once expressed the opinion that the view from the bridgethat crosses the Serpentine where Hyde Park joins Kensington Gardens hasan “extraordinary nobleness,” and there is something indescribablybeautiful and unexpected about it. The grey buildings in the distancelook like some palace of the{204}fata morgana over the shimmering water.I do not know if Sir James Barrie is responsible for the feeling thatyou would not be surprised at anything that might happen in KensingtonGardens. Who would be bold enough to assert that when the last child hasleft the Peter Pan statue the squirrels do not come and play with theirstone brothers? Kensington Gardens are the paradise of the child and theflower lover. There are ugly things in it, of course, like the AlbertMemorial, though everyone does not think it ugly: I was once startled athearing that souvenir of Victorian taste fervently admired by somefellow bus passengers. But the Serpentine, and the Round Pond on a sunnymorning when the fleet is engaged in serious manœuvres—and the BroadWalk: Wren’s orangery—the lovely sunk garden with its pleached walk oflime trees with the avenue Queen Caroline planted—and above all, theFlower Walk in the sunlit air after a shower,—if visitors to Londonhave time for nothing else they should carry away a memory of KensingtonGardens.

Green Park and St. James’s

Walking along Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner on the “sulky” side, asMr. Street calls it in his charmingGhosts of Piccadilly, many{205}

people wonder at the meaning of the ledge on the curb of the pavementnearly opposite the entrance to 128, Piccadilly. It owes its existenceto a benevolent old clubman who, from his comfortable window armchair,noticed the porters bearing heavy burdens on their backs and toiling upthe slope of Piccadilly. The ledge was fixed at the right height, sothat they might rest their burdens without unfastening them.

Green Park was once much larger than its present sixty acres or so, butGeorge III. took some of it in 1767 to enlarge the gardens of oldBuckingham House. It is now the happy hunting-ground of the gentlemenwho love to lie full length on the grass—the not inconsiderable army ofpeople who would dread communism if they ever thought about anything,and would bitterly regret under any other régime the halcyon days whenthe out-of-work dole of a benevolent government of bourgeois permittedthese free Britons to lounge at peace.

Their presence is perhaps the reason why the Green Park is not afashionable rendezvous, like Hyde Park, although some of the greatLondon houses, Stafford House, Bridgewater House, Spencer House, etc.,border it on the east side. The wrought iron and gilded gates bearingthe Cavendish crest and motto that were formerly used as the entrance toDevonshire House have now been placed in Green{208} Park opposite thebuilding they guarded so long. These beautiful old gates have had achequered history. Seven generations ago, in the eighteenth century,they began their existence at Turnham Green, where they guarded theapproach to the house of the second Lord Egmont and bore the arms of thePerceval family. The house changed owners and was pulled down, and in1838 the gates were bought by the sixth Duke of Devonshire for hisChiswick house. They stayed there for fifty-nine years, before they cameto spend a brief quarter of a century watching the ebb and flow ofPiccadilly.

The Duke of Devonshire already had beautiful gates at Chiswick when hebought these, for the Earl of Burlington who got the house in 1727 andwhose daughter and sole heiress married a Duke of Devonshire, was also aconnoisseur in gates, and had begged a beautiful pair of Inigo Jonesdesign from Sir Hans Sloane, who did not appreciate them. When they werebeing moved, Pope wrote:

Green Park has another gate, part of which I am sure is unnoticed, forhow many people know that in the Wellington Arch at the top ofConstitution Hill, at the upper end of the{209} Green Park, sixteenpolicemen and an inspector have their happy home. Their special task isto direct the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, no easy matter in the seasonor when the king and queen and other notabilities come driving out totake the air. From their bedroom in the Arch they can climb on to thewide flat top, and under the shadow of the splendid group of Peace inher flying chariot, look over a wonderful vista of park and palace andhighway.

St. James’s Park

What would old Lenôtre, Louis XIV.’s court gardener, who laid out St.James’s Park, think if he could see his handiwork to-day? He would makea witty jest of it, perhaps, for he was a charming old man of aguileless simplicity that made him beloved of everyone, even in the mostartificial court in Europe. Charles II. invited the famous Frenchlandscape gardener, who had created Versailles out of a sandhill, tocome and transform the swampy meadow that adjoined the palace HenryVIII. had fashioned out of the twelfth-century Lepers Hospital,dedicated to St. James the Less, which has given its name to the palaceand park.

St. James’s has always been a very royal park since the days when theyoung Princess{210} Elizabeth rode through it from her father’s new palaceto the court at Whitehall, attended “with a very honourable confluenceof noble and worshipful persons of both sexes.” Charles I. took his lastwalk through it on his way to the scaffold in Whitehall. Charles II.spent much of his time playing with his dogs and feeding his ducksthere, and he planted some of the oaks from the acorns of the royal oakat Boscobel. His aviary on the south side is still remembered in thename of Birdcage Walk, and the tradition is carried on by the aquaticbirds that again haunt the ornamental water as before the war.

I always loved, too, the reply of Walpole’s father to Queen Carolinewhen she asked how much it would cost to close St. James’s Park for theroyal use and he answered, “only three crowns, Madam.{211}”

Regent’s Park

Regent’s Park to most people spells the Zoo, the place where one may seethe best menagerie in the world. It is the successor of Marylebone Park,a royal hunting-ground until Cromwell’s day. It was laid out in itspresent style after 1812 by Nash, the man who designed Regent Street,and named after the Prince Regent, who thought he would build a countryhouse here.

It is so far removed from Mayfair that its glories have been neglected,but now that fashion has drifted north of Hyde Park and even Bloomsburyis having its recrudescence, Regent’s Park may wake up any day and finditself famous. It is beautifully laid out and tended, and garden loversfrom other lands will like it immensely if they take a tube to BakerStreet and spend an hour or so there, either boating on the lovely lakeor walking in the gardens.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, enclosed by a circular walk, are reached fromYork Street by a road running north between Bedford Women’s College andthe Toxophilite Society (which ordinary people are content to call theArchery Club). It is only open to the general public on Mondays andSaturdays on payment of one shilling.{212}

On this west side of the park is St. Dunstan’s Lodge, the home of Mr.and Mrs. Otto Kahn, who gave their house for some years to the late SirArthur Pearson for his hostel for the education of the blind.

It was once the home of the Marquess of Hertford, who was the originalof Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne inVanity Fair

Battersea Park

Battersea Park is another of London’s lovely gardens. It takes its namefrom the old parish and manor of Battersea, a gradual corruption of thePatricesy or Peter’s Isle, by which it was known in Domesday Book asbelonging to the Abbey of St. Peter at Westminster.

There is nothing very interesting historically about the park, as it wasonly laid out in 1852, on Battersea Fields, the scene of a duel in 1829between the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Winchelsea, but it isone of the favourite parks of London and the only one that fringes theborders of the Thames. It has a lovely sunk garden, that is a dream ofbeauty in the summer time, and letters are always appearing in thepapers about the birds that nest among its trees. Four of the 188 acresare laid out as a sub-tropical garden. There is a lake with{213} rowingboats to hire, and arrangements are made for cricket and other sports.

If the park has no history, one can find curious bits of old Londonquite close to it by turning out of the west gate and asking the way toChurch Road, off the Battersea Bridge Road, and near the river. Firstthere is the old church of St. Mary’s, ugly enough in itself, but it waswhere William Blake was married, and where Turner used to sketch thewonderful effects on the Thames. Lovers of quaint epitaphs will find adelicious one composed by himself to the famous Henry St. John, LordBolingbroke, who “was Secretary of State under Queen Anne and in thedays of King George I. and King George II. something more and better.”

Lord Bolingbroke was a true Battersea man, for he was born there in 1678and died in 1751. His second wife, who shares the honour of hismonument, was a niece of Madame de Maintenon. Battersea has been closelyconnected with the St. John family for four hundred years, though theysold their manor to the Spencers in 1763. A bit of it may still be seenin the adjoining flour mills, where, I believe, it is possible to seethe wonderful ceiling and staircase, and the lovely cedar-panelled roomoverlooking the river, where Pope wrote hisEssay on Man.{214}

Kew Gardens

Kew is too far afield to be called unnoticed London, but it is the mostwonderful of all the London gardens and so easy to reach that to miss itwould be a matter for perpetual regret.

Anyone can tell you the way to get there: either from Waterloo to KewBridge, when you will have to walk across the bridge to get to the mainentrance of the gardens, or by the District Railway to Kew Gardensstation, or by tram from Hammersmith.

There is so much to see there that over-much direction destroys thegreatest pleasure of finding out what you like best, and everyone hashis own opinion as to what time of the year the gardens are mostbeautiful. The poet loves “Kew in lilac-time,” the lover of gorgeouscolour goes down to see the regiments of tulips, massed as they arenowhere else outside Holland. Kew in rhododendron and azalea time oughtnot to be missed, but I think the loveliest sight of all is Kew inbluebell time, when it looks as if a bit of the sky had fallenearthwards on either side of the Queen’s Walk, and in the middle of thewilderness you come across the deserted little ivy-clad cottage, the seaof blue sweeping up to the very door to which no pathway now leads.

It was once the Queen’s Cottage, built by{215} George III. for QueenCharlotte, in the days when they led the domestic existence that FannyBurney described in herDiary; but no one now uses it and it standsthere with a mute air of resignation at its fallen fortunes, littledreaming how much its unexpected beauty adds to the pleasure of thediscoverer of this lovely corner.

Kew, like the other parks, had its royal origin. Its founder was thePrincess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the wife of Frederick Prince of Wales,who, eight years after her husband’s death, interested herself in thelaying out of the exotic garden at Kew that was the nucleus of the vastcollection of 24,000 different varieties of plants.

Kew has always been beloved by artists. Sir Peter Lely had a house atKew Green and Johann Zoffany the painter, whose fame has so lately beenaugmented by the publication of his life and memoirs, lived in ZoffanyHouse at Strand-on-the-Green, a delightful old-world riverside villageclose to Kew Bridge. He is buried in the early eighteenth-century churchof St. Ann, where Gainsborough also lies.

And now come back to London and I will show you a Lilliputian park I amsure you have never noticed. It is so tiny; long ago it was thechurchyard of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, dedicated to that kindlypatron of all travellers, but now it is a charming retreat with anadditional attraction that I leave you to discover, and because it is soclose to the General Post Office it is always called The Postman’sPark.{216}

There are other lovely unnoticed oases of green round about London town;Brockwell Park with its fine old walled garden, and Dulwich andSouthwark. Their tales must wait for another time, for now it onlyremains for me to say with Pope:

INDEX

“Achilles” Statue,199,200
“Adam and Eve” public-house,184
Adam, the brothers,48,49
Addison,10,25,109,156,168
Adelphi,48,49
Admiralty, old home of,76
Albert Memorial,204
Albert, Prince,200
All Hallows, Barking,73,74
Anne, Queen,124,135
Apothecaries’ Society,18
Ascham, Roger,115
Ashburnham House,169
Augusta, Princess,200,215

Bacon, Sir Francis,107,113,156
Barking, Convent of,74
Battersea Manor,213
Baxter,135
Bedford, Duke of,34
Beggar’s Opera,114,122
Bells of St. Clement’s,50,53,54
Bess of Hardwicke,8
Bible, revisers of,167
Birdcage Walk,210
Black Prince,24,56,86
Blackstone,60
Blake, Admiral,170
Blake, William,213
Bolingbroke, Lord,213
Bond, Sir Thomas,27
Boniface, Archbishop,142,144
Botanic Gardens, Royal,211
Bracegirdle, Mrs.,168
Brompton Road,25
Brooke, Rupert, MS. of,178
Browne, William,7
Brummell, Beau,34
Buckingham, Dukes of,43,44
Buckingham Street,42-46
Buns and Bunhill Place,14
Burke,36
Burney, Dr.,10
Burney, Fanny,10,121,215
Butler, Samuel,136

Campbell, Lady Caroline,199
Campbell, Thomas,122
Caroline, Queen,200,204,210
Carthusian Monks,151,152
Catherine of Braganza,11,18
Cellini, Benvenuto,133
Charing Cross,40-42,158
Charles I.,210;
statue of,41,160,196
Charles II.,9,13,83,96,116,128,129,139,198,200,209,210
Charlotte, Queen,34,215
Charterhouse:
as mansion,148,151-5;
as school and hospital,155-7;
features,157
Charterhouse scholars,156
Chaucer,38,42,56,73,85
Cheapside,84,85,90-93
Chelsea:
Belgian refugees,4,7;
buns,14;
Burney, Dr.,10;
Carlyle’s house,12;
Charles II.,9,11;
Cheyne Walk,8,11,12;
communications,1,20;
Crosby Hall,4,7,8,17;
Danvers, Lady,17;
famous inhabitants,10-12,22,23;
Flower Show,19,20;
Gwynne, Nell,8-10,13;
Hospital and pensioners,10,12;
James, Henry,13,16;
King’s Road,9;
More’s Gardens,4;
More, Sir Thomas,2-4,7,8,15;
Old Church,14-17;
Paradise Row,8;
Physic Garden,17-19;
Ranelagh Gardens,21,22;
restaurants,14;
Sandford Manor House,9,10;
shops,14;
studios,23
Chesterfield, Lord,21
Church bells, lore of,53,75,84
Churches:
All Hallows, Barking,73,74;
Bow,84-87;
Chelsea Old Church,14-17;
Holy Trinity, Knightsbridge,26;
Moravian Chapel, Nevill’s Court,134,135;
St. Anne’s, Soho,36,37;
St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield,141-4;
St. Clement Danes,49,50,53-55;
St. Clement’s, Eastcheap,50;
St. Ethelburga’s,87;
St. Etheldreda’s Chapel,112-14;
St. James’s, Piccadilly,33;
St. Margaret’s, Westminster,170,171;
St. Mary-le-Strand,46;
St. Mary’s, Battersea,213;
St. Olave’s,74-77;
St. Supulchre’s, Holborn,114,115,137;
Temple,63,64
Cicill, Master Robert,55
City churches,87,88,93
City Companies,93-102:
Bowyers,94;
Clothworkers,99,100;
Drapers,99;
Fishmongers,99,101,102;
Fletchers,94;
Goldsmiths,99,101,102,166;
Grocers,99,101;
Hatters and Haberdashers,95,99,100;
Horners,94;
Ironmongers,99,194;
Lorriners,94;
Mercers,99,100,101;
Merchant Taylors,99,100,157;
Pattenmakers,94;
Salters,99;
Skinners,99;
Stationers,102;
Upholders,94;
Vintners,99,100
City Guilds and their halls,99-102
Clifford’s Inn,136
Coal Exchange,71,72
Cockney, true home of,84
Coke, Sir Edward,113,136,156
Collingwood Street,134
Commons, first meeting-place of,162
Congreve,168
Coram, Captain Thomas,179-80
Court Leet,56,57
Cranmer, Archbishop,79,113
Cromwell, Oliver,128,160
“Crooked Billet” inn,78
Curfew at Lincoln’s Inn,130
“Czar’s Head” tavern,47

Davies, Mary,55
Delaney, Mrs.,178
De Montfort, Simon,162
De Morgan, William,12
Devonshire, Duchess of,22
Devonshire House gates,207,208
Dickens,178,180,185
Dickensian London,45,67,69,77,93,106,117,122
Domesday Book,2,133,165
Donne, Dr.16,17,129
Dorchester, Earl of,34
Dover Street,27,28,29
Dryden,36,169
Durham House,48,49,152
Dutch pictures,191,193

Ebury, Manor of,55
Edward III.,85,86,91
Elgin Marbles,175-7
Eliot, George,11
Elizabeth, Queen,8,28,29,65,70,75,101,108,153-5,209
Ely, Bishops of,28,29
Ely Place, an old-world corner,111,112
Erasmus,4
Essex, Earl of,47,132
Evans, William,116
Evelyn, John,18,27,28,44,46,47,128,198

Felton, Lavinia,122
Fielding,10,45
Fire, the Great:
devastating effects,138,140;
Evelyn’s account,138,139;
origin,138;
Pepys and,76,100,138;
rapid reconstruction,140,101
Fleet Street,57,58,84
Flemish carvings,125;
MSS.,124,125;
pictures,193
Flowers for criminals,114
Foundling Hospital,178-80,183-85
Fragonard, pictures by,192
Franklin, Benjamin,102
French pictures,192
Furniture,187,188,193,194

Gainsborough,184,215
Garrick, David,34
Gaskell, Mrs.,11
Gaunt, John of,56,113
Geffrye, Sir Robert,194
George I.,210
George II.,184,189
George III.,207,215
George IV.,33,200
Gibbons, Grinling, carvings by,13,33,83,105,160,195,196
Giltspur Street,114,137
Gog and Magog,97,98
Goldsmith, Oliver,22,60,63,66,67
Grafton, Duchess of,34
Gray’s Inn,107-10
Gresham, Sir Thomas,94,101
Greuze, pictures by,192
Grey, Lady Jane,49,80,131,138,152
Grosvenor, Sir Thomas,55
Guildhall,97,98;
Library,98,99;
Museum,99
Gwynne, Nell,9,10,13,122

Halifax, Lord,34
Hamilton, Lady,38
Handel,178,184,185,189
Hatton, Christopher,28,29,65,113
Hatton Garden,28,29,110,111,179
Haweis, Rev. H. R.,11
Haymarket Shoppe,33,35
Hazlitt,37
Henry III.,130,144
Henry IV.,91,167
Henry VIII.,3,4,16,53,77,78,80,99,100,113,132,170,209
Henry, Prince of Wales,58,59
Herbert, George,17,169
Hertford, Marquesses of,190,191,212
Heywood, John,3
Hobbema, pictures by,193
Hogarth,123,125,178,179,183,184
Holbein,4
Holywell Street,70
Horse Guards,159,161
House of the Converts,130,131
Howard, Lord Thomas,155
Howard, Philip,154,155
Howard, Thomas,153
Hudson, Sir Jeffrey,116
Huguenots,19,37
Hume, David,45
Hungerford Market,42
Hunt, Leigh,12
Hyde Park orators,201,202

Inns of Court,126,127

James I.,58,80,155,156,160
Jewellery collections,189
Jewellery, Jacobean,32,99
Johnson, Dr.,21,22,36,39,54,63,66,105,148,158
Jones, Inigo,34,48,118,121,129,160,169,208
Jonson, Ben,7,126,169

Kew Gardens, seasons of,214
Kingsland Road,194
Kingsley, Charles and Henry,11
Kit-Cat Club,109,110
Kneller,184
Knights Hospitallers of St. John,147,148
Knightsbridge,24-26
Knockers, sanctuary,75

Lamb, Charles,60,63,66,67
Lambeth Palace,144
Lancaster House (London Museum),29-32
Lawson, Cecil,11
Lectures, museum,174;
their value,186
Legh Cup,101
Leicester House,37
Lely, Sir Peter,215
Lenôtre,209
Leverhulme, Lord,31
Libraries:
Guildhall,98,99;
King’s,174,175;
Lincoln’s Inn,129
Lincoln’s Inn:
entrance,126;
history and features,128-30
Lincoln’s Inn Fields:
gardens,117,118;
houses,118,121,122;
theatre,122
Lindsay House,121
Loafers, park,201,207
Lody, Charles,83
London Bridge, relics of,89,102
London Parochial Charities,18,19
London Stone,70
Lord Mayor, prestige of,96;
procession and banquet,97
Lovel, Sir Thomas,126,128

Maclise, David,11
Manny, Sir Walter,151,152
Mansion Houses,88-90
MSS., illuminated,124,188
Marble Arch,103
Mary, Queen, going-away dress of,32
Mary Queen of Scots,8,131,153,154,175
Maypoles,25,50
Mazarin, Duchess de,8,9
Medici, Marie de,91
Mercers’ Chapel,88
Merchant’s House, seventeenth century,73
Meredith, George,11
Mews, Royal,42
Milton,118,122
“Mitre” Inn,112
Mohun, Lord,36
Monmouth, Duke of,37,129
Monument,71
More, Sir Thomas,2-4,7,15,38,79,80,129
Museum houses,12
Museum, how to see,173
Museums:
British,172-178;
Geffrye,193-96;
Guildhall,99;
London,29-32;
Royal College of Surgeons,122;
Soane,123-26;
South Kensington,118,185-89;
United Services’,158-60;
Wallace Collection,190-93
Musical instruments,188,189

Napoleonic souvenirs,124,160
Nash,211
Nevill’s Court,133-35
Norfolk, Duke of,15
North, Sir Edward,152,153

Oldfield, Nance,168
Old Watling Restaurant,90
Orleans, Charles d’,80

Panier Alley,116
Parish registers,55
Parks:
Battersea,212,213;
Brockwell,216;
Green,207-9;
Hyde:
dogs’ cemetery,202;
life,199,201,202;
lodges,202,203;
music and dancing,203;
mysterious statues,199,200;
past and present,197-99;
Serpentine,200,201;
Kensington Gardens,203,204;
Kew Gardens,214,215;
Postman’s,215;
Regent’s,211,212;
St. James’s,209,210
Paving of London,104
Pearson, Sir Arthur,212
Pembroke, Countess of,7
Pepys,8,39,44,74,75,76,77,100,104,107,122,128,129,170,198
Persian MSS.,188
Peter Pan Statue,204
Peter the Great,45-7,72,124,127,128
Petersham, Lord,35
Philippa, Queen,85,86
Pickering Place,30
Plane tree, Wood Street,92
Pope,28,109,208,213,216
Port of London Authority’s tower,77
Prince Henry’s Room,57,58
Princes, the Little,80
Prior, Matthew,168,169
Punch,42
Pye Corner,138

Queen’s Cottage, Kew,214,215

Raleigh, Sir Walter,58,59,79,80,132,170
Ranelagh Club,21,109
Ranelagh Gardens,21,22
Raphael cartoons,184,187
Record Office treasures,130-33
Refreshments, park,198,199
Reynolds, Sir Joshua,22,36,183,184,190
Richard II.,132,167
Roman baths,57,66,69,70,72
Roman London,68-70,72,77
Romney,190
Roper, William,2,7
Roses, York and Lancaster,64,65
Rossetti, the brothers,11
Rotten Row,201
Rousseau,45,124
Royalty and parks,200
Rubens, paintings by,160,193
Russell, Lord, of Killowen,34
Russians in Bow Church,87

St. Bartholomew’s Hospital,137
St. Dunstan’s Lodge,212
St. James’s Palace,30
St. John’s Gate,147,148
Savoy Chapel Royal and Manor,55,56
Sayes Court, Deptford,46
Sculpture in British Museum,175-7
Seething Lane,74,76,77
Serpentine bathers,201
Shakespearean London,53,64,65,70,71,110,113,167
Shrewsbury, Lady,34
Sidney, Sir Philip,132
Sloane, Sir Hans,4,18,173,208
Smith, Captain John,115
Smithfield,137,141
Snuff-takers,33,34
Soane Museum, peculiarities of,123-26
Soane, Sir John,123-25
Soho, a king’s grave in,35,37
Spenser,64
Stanley, Dean,165
Staple Inn, Holborn,105,106
Steele, Sir Richard,44,156
Stone effigies,115,116,137,138
Strand,40,42,47,49
Strand Lane,57,69
Street names, lore of,85,93
Sutherland, Duke of,31
Sutton, Sir Thomas,155,156
Swan, device and sign,91,92
Swift,14
Symons, Arthur,67

Tattersall’s,26,27
Temple:
Church,63,64;
entrances,60,63;
Fountain Court,67;
Hall,65;
memories,60,63,64-67
Tennant Collection,192
Tennyson, Lord,122
Thackeray,63,156,191,212
Thornhill, Sir James,196
Thynne, Thomas,121
Thynne, William,73,74
Tonson, Jacob, publisher,109,110
Took’s Court,106
Tower of London,79,80,83
Trade unions, past and present,94,95
Trafalgar Square,42
Trinity House,76-78
Turner,11,124,213
Turner, Sir William,88,89
Tyburn,104,114,152
Tyler, Wat,147

Wallace, Sir Richard,191
Walpole, Horace,10,21,22,36,109,196,200,210
War relics of the services,160
Wardrobe Court,134
Water Gates:
Buckingham Street,43,48;
Essex House,47
Watling Street,68,90
Watteau,125
Watts’s “Lawgivers” fresco,129;
“Physical Energy” statue,200
Webb,169
Wellington Arch,208,209
Wesley and Whitefield,135
Westbourne Stream,24,25,200
Westminster Abbey:
Chapel of the Pyx,165,166;
Chapter House,162,165;
funeral effigies,166;
Jericho Room,167;
Jerusalem Chamber,167,168;
Little Cloister,166,167
Westminster, Dukes of,55
Westminster School,168,169
Whistler,11,12
Whitehall Palace, remains of,160
Whittington,84,96,101
William III.,46,89,121,188
Williamson’s Hotel,89,90
Window, east, of St. Margaret’s,170,171
Wolsey, Cardinal,132
Wonders, World’s, in British Museum,176
Wood Street,32,92,93
Woodwork, old,72
Wren, Sir Christopher,33,53,54,60,71,86,88,100,114,124,141,160,169,204

York House and its tenants,44
Young, Launcelot,92,93

Zoffany, Johann,215
Zoological Gardens,211

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First Edition		March 1922
Reprinted		May 1922,May 1923

	PAGE
Cheyne Row	Frontispiece5
Crosby Hall	5
The Old Snuff House	facing 34
Water Gate, York House	facing 46
St. Clement Danes	51
Dr. Johnson’s Pew, St. Clement Danes	54
The Temple Church, The Round	61
London Stone, Cannon Street	71
The Tower of London. Byward Tower	facing 76
The Tower of London	79
Traitors’ Gate, Tower of London	81
Guildhall	facing 96
Staple Inn	106
Gray’s Inn Hall	108
Lincoln’s Inn	facing 117
Lincoln’s Inn Gateway	119
Rahere’s Tomb in St. Bartholomew’s Church	142
Church of St. Bartholomew the Great	145
St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell	149
The Charterhouse from the Square	facing 154
United Services’ Museum	facing 160
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey	163
Foundling Hospital	181
Peter Pan Statue in Kensington Gardens	205

	UNNOTICED LONDON
	BY E. MONTIZAMBERT WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
	1923 LONDON & TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

CHAP.		PAGE
I.	Chelsea	1
I.	The Chelsea of Sir Thomas More—Crosby Hall—Cheyne Walk—Sandford Manor—Chelsea Hospital—Buns—Chelsea Old Church—The Physic Garden—Ranelagh.
II.	Knightsbridge to Soho	24
II.	Tattersall’s—Ely House—London Museum—St. James’s Church—The Haymarket Shoppe—A King in Soho.
III.	Trafalgar Square to Fleet Street	38
III.	The Strand—Charing Cross—Water Gates—The Adelphi—St. Clement Danes—Savoy Chapel—Prince Henry’s Room—The Temple.
IV.	Round about the Tower	68
IV.	Roman Baths—London Stone—Great Tower Street—All Hallows, Barking—St. Olave’s—Roman Wall—Port of London Authority—Trinity House—The Crooked Billet—The Tower.
V.	Round about Cheapside	84
V.	Bow Church—The Old Mansion House—The Old Watling Restaurant—37, Cheapside—Wood {x}Street—The City Companies—The Guildhall.
VI.	Round about Holborn	103
VI.	Tyburn—Staple Inn—Tooks Court—Gray’s Inn—Hatton Garden—Ely Place—St. Sepulchre’s—Panier Alley.
VII.	Down Chancery Lane	117
VII.	Lincoln’s Inn Fields—Soane Museum—Lincoln’s Inn—Record Office—Moravian Chapel—Nevills Court—Clifford’s Inn.
VIII.	The Charterhouse and St. Bartholomew’s	137
VIII.	Pye Corner—St. Bartholomew’s the Great—St. John’s Gate—The Charterhouse.
IX.	A Stroll in Whitehall and Westminster	158
IX.	Whitehall—United Services Museum—The Abbey Cloisters—The Chapter House—Ashburnham House—Jerusalem Chamber—St. Margaret’s.
X.	Museums	172
X.	British Museum—Foundling Hospital—South Kensington—Wallace—Geffrye.
XI.	Parks	197
	Hyde Park—Kensington Gardens—Green Park—St. James’s Park—Regent’s Park—Battersea—Kew.
	Index	217

William Howard,	—Churchwardens.
Jeremiah Taverner,