I pass the populous housesIn terrace or street or square,I hear the rattle of chariotsAnd the sound of life on the air;And up at the curtained windows,Where the flaming gaslights glow,I see 'mid the flitting shadowsOf the guests that come and go,The paler and dimmer shadowsOf the ghosts of the Long Ago.
I pass the populous housesIn terrace or street or square,I hear the rattle of chariotsAnd the sound of life on the air;And up at the curtained windows,Where the flaming gaslights glow,I see 'mid the flitting shadowsOf the guests that come and go,The paler and dimmer shadowsOf the ghosts of the Long Ago.
Charles Mackay.
Once upon a time, as the charmed books tell, there was a mountain covered with stones, of which each particular flint or pebble had been, "upon a time," a live and sentient man or woman.
The stones lay, with no attribute of life except a power to appeal in such wise to passers-by as to compel them to remain. But there came, one happy day, a beauteous maiden with a pitcher full of the Water of Life, and she, sprinkling the precious fluid over the stones, transformed them again into animated creatures of flesh and blood—"a great company of youths and maidens who followed her down the mountain."
As I take my walks in London-town, I think of that story and long for a pitcher of the magic Water of Life.
For if imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole, and if, as biologists tell us, the whole of our mortal tissue is unceasingly being shed and renewed, every brick and stone in London pavement, church, inn, and dwelling-house must have in it some part ofhuman greatness; for the flower of Britain's brain and valour, the heroes of her most glorious service and achievement—poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, explorers—the greatest of those who have "toiled and studied for mankind," have lived in London.
Milton used to thank God that he had been born in London. Shakespeare acted in Blackfriars and near London Bridge; his wit flashed nightly at the Mermaid; in the shadow of Whitehall, he broke his heart for Mary Fitton; and here he wove the magic of his plays.
That is the consideration which makes London's enchantment so irresistible. Here is the actual, visible scene of the most momentous deeds of our history, of the most memorable episodes in our country's fiction, and of the workaday, toiling, rejoicing, and sorrowing ofthe greatest of our English brothers and sisters.
At Charing Cross the statue of Charles I. on his Rabelais horse faces the site of the scaffold "in the open street," on to which the king stepped one morning through a window of his palace of Whitehall. Pepys saw General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered at Charing Cross, he (Harrison) "looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition." And he gravely adds that Sir Harry Vane, about to be beheaded on Tower Hill, urgently requested the executioner to take off his head so as not to hurt a pimple on his neck.
crossSTRAND CROSS, COVENT GARDEN, &c.Anno 1647.
STRAND CROSS, COVENT GARDEN, &c.Anno 1647.
STRAND CROSS, COVENT GARDEN, &c.Anno 1647.
Trooper Lockyer, a brave young soldier of seven years' service, though only twenty-three years old, having helped to seize General Cromwell's colours at the Bull in Bishopsgate, was shot in Paul's Churchyard bygrim Oliver's orders. His crime was that he was a Leveller or early Socialist, "with hot notions as to human freedom, and the rate at which millenniums are obtainable. He falls shot in Paul's Churchyard on Friday, amid the tears of men and women," says Carlyle, Paul's Cathedral being then a horse-guard, with horses stamping in the canons' stalls, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. On the following Monday the corpse having been "watched and wept over" meantime "in the eastern regions of the City," brave Lockyer was buried "at the new churchyard in Westminster":—
The corpse was adorned with bundles of Rosemary, one half stained with blood. . . . Some thousands followed in rank and file: all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and to their breasts; and the women brought up the rear.
The corpse was adorned with bundles of Rosemary, one half stained with blood. . . . Some thousands followed in rank and file: all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and to their breasts; and the women brought up the rear.
How actual and visible and present theyare, as one stands on the spots where these great events were transacted! And such histories has nearly every street and every ancient building. London is not paved with gold. It is paved with the glory of England's mighty dead.
The name is Legion of the eminences whose last cumbrous clog of clay is buried here.
In Westminster's venerable and beautiful Abbey, where I saw Gladstone buried last June, I can look on the bury-hole of Edward the Confessor, King of our remote Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and one of the prime founders of English liberties; I see the tomb of that butcher Edward who subdued Wales and overthrew Scotland's Wallace; here, too, is the grave of the third Edward, who, by his raiding and stealing, laid the foundations ofEngland's glorious commerce. Here, under his Agincourt helmet, lies the valiant dust of Falstaff's Prince Hal, and of three other Royal Henrys. Bloody Mary rests from her fiery rage; Mary Queen of Scots is united in death to her terrible foe, Elizabeth of England; and two Stuart Kings repose uncomplainingly by the side of William of Orange.
Here mighty troublers of the earth,Who swam to sov'reign rule through seas of blood;The oppressive, sturdy, man-destroying villains,Who ravag'd kingdoms, and laid empires waste,And in a cruel wantonness of powerThinn'd states of half their people, and gave upTo want the rest; now, like a storm that's spent,Lie hushed.
Here mighty troublers of the earth,Who swam to sov'reign rule through seas of blood;The oppressive, sturdy, man-destroying villains,Who ravag'd kingdoms, and laid empires waste,And in a cruel wantonness of powerThinn'd states of half their people, and gave upTo want the rest; now, like a storm that's spent,Lie hushed.
From these crumbled majesties I turn with reverence to aisles hallowed by the mould of Darwin, Dickens, Thackeray,Browning, Macaulay, Livingstone, Garrick, and Handel.
Beneath St. Paul's great dome my gratitude can tender homage to the names of Titanic Turner, Reynolds, Landseer, Napier, Cornwallis, Wellington, and Nelson.
Think what a procession if all these could be sprinkled with the Water of Life! If to each fragment of noble dust in this huge, unshapely, and overgrown wilderness of masonry, one could call back the soul that sometime quickened it, what a great city, in Walt Whitman's sense, would London be!
Every town cherishes the sacred memory of its own particular great man, but London bears in its bosom intimate and familiar tokens of them all. The city and its neighbourhood for miles round are marked with historic and literary associations. Theplace is all composed of great men's fame and chapters of world-history. London Clay is made of London's Pride, and London Pride grows in the London Clay.
Not a quarter, not a suburb is free of hallowed associations.
Within half an hour's stroll from my home at Highgate I can visit the pleasaunce of which Andrew Marvell wrote—
I have a garden of my own,But so with roses overgrown,And lilies, that you would it guessTo be a little wilderness.
I have a garden of my own,But so with roses overgrown,And lilies, that you would it guessTo be a little wilderness.
I cross the threshold of the adjoining house, and stand within the actual domicile of staid Andrew's improper neighbour, Mistress Nell Gwynne. It was from a window of this house she threatened to drop her baby, unless her Merry Monarch would there and then confer name and title on him; andthus came England into the honour and glory of a ducal race of St. Albans.
When Nell Gwynne looked up from that signally successful jest, she may have seen, across the street, the two houses wherein, a few years before, had dwelt the stern Protector of the Commonwealth and the husband of his daughter, Ireton. I wonder what she thought of old Noll!
The houses stand there yet, substantial, square, their red brick "mellowed but not impaired by time."
The "restored" Charles had had the corpses of over a hundred Puritans, including Admiral Blake's, and that of Cromwell's old mother, dug up from their graves and flung in a heap in St. Margaret's Churchyard; he had hung in chains on Tyburn gallows the disinterred clay of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw.I wonder he was not prompted to pull down these dwellings of his father's "murderers." He must have seen them often. Their windows overlooked the garden of his light-o'-love.
Didsheintercede to have them preserved? As I linger there, I like to think so.
Still within a half-mile circle of my home, on the same Highgate Hill whereon stand the houses of Nell Gwynne and Ireton, I can show my children the "werry, indentical" milestone from which—ita legenda scripta—Dick Whittington was recalled by the sound of Bow Bells.
At the top of Highgate Hill, and on the slope of another hill where a man (since dead in the workhouse) saved Queen Victoria's life, stands the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived. Here, and,it is said, in a little inn near by, he entertained such company as Shelley, Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and—surely not in the little inn?—Carlyle.
Coleridge lies buried in the churchyard hard by, and in Highgate Cemetery I find the graves of George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens' daughter Dora, Tom Sayers the prize-fighter, and Lillywhite the cricketer.
Harry Lowerison has a way of teaching children by taking them to see the streets and monuments of London; and I can think of no more interesting or promising mode of instruction.
For in these scenes English history is indelibly and picturesquely written, back to the date of our earliest records.
I stood one day in Cannon Street, when a passing omnibus-horse chanced to slip. Thevehicle swerved across the asphalt, and, to complete the catastrophe, the horse fell.
Then, hey, presto! in the twinkling of an eye, the street was blocked with a compact mass of "blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and brown cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty red iron clanking on paintless carts, high white wool packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on the brass harness, gleaming from the carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle."
A bustling, shuffling, pushing, wriggling, twisting wonder! One moment's damming of the stream had caused such a gathering as Imperial Cæsar never dreamt of.
I was pushed back against the wall, and then observed that I stood by the London Stone—a stone which "'midst the tanglinghorrors of the wood" by Thames side, may have been drenched with the human gore of druidical sacrifices. Captives bound in wicker rods may have burned upon its venerable surface to glut the fury of savage gods.
That stone stood here when Constantine built the London Wall around the "citty."
It was here when, upon an island formed by a river which crept sullenly through "a fearful and terrible plain," which none might approach after nightfall without grievous danger, King Sebert of the East Saxons built to the glory of St. Peter the Apostle that church which is known to our generation as Westminster Abbey.
The London Stone stood when Sebert built a church on the ruins of Diana's Temple, where now stands St. Paul's Cathedral. London was built before Rome, beforethe fall of the Assyrian monarchs, over a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Who knows? Where I stood, old Chaucer may have stood to see his Canterbury Pilgrims pass. Falstaff, reeling home from Dame Quickly's Tavern with his load of sherris-sack, may have sat here to ponder on his honour. Shakespeare may have leaned on the old milestone as he watched the Virgin Queen's pageant to Tilbury Fort in Armada times. Through James Ball's and Jack Cade's uprising, through the Wars of the Roses, the Fire of London, the Plague, the Stuart upheaval, and Cromwell's stirring times—through all these the London Stone stood, "fixed in the ground very deep," says Stowe, "that if carts do runne against it through negligence the wheels be broken, and the stone itself unshaken." And nowit links the bustle and roar of modern London with the strife out of which London grew, and keeps our conceits reminded of the forefathers who lived and fought in Britain here to make the way more smooth for us.
Ere cabs or omnibuses were; ere telephones, telegraphs, or railways; ere Magna Charta; before William the Conqueror brought our ancient nobility's ancestors over from Normandy—London knew this stone.
It has endured longer than any king, it has survived generations and dynasties of monarchs. "Walls have ears," they say, and Shakespeare "finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, and sermons in stones."
What a tale would he tell that could find the tongue of the London Stone!
Think of all the men and women whohave passed it, seen it with their eyes, felt it with their hands; the millions of simple, faithful, anonymous people who have cheerfully slaved, and bled, and died, to help—as each according to his lights conceived—the honour, safety, and well-being of his country.
We have paid homage to the celebrated dead: what about those that have done their duty and have received neither fame nor monument? Their blood, too, cries out to me from the paving-stones of London.
Alas for men! that they should be so blind,And laud as gods the scourges of their kind!Call each man glorious who has led a host,And him most glorious who has murdered most!Alas! that men should lavish upon theseThe most obsequious homage of their knees—That those who labour in the arts of peace,Making the nations prosper and increase,Should fill a nameless and unhonoured grave,Their worth forgotten by the crowd they save—But that the Leaders who despoil the earth,Fill it with tears, and quench its children's mirth,Should with their statues block the public way,And stand adored as demi-gods for aye.
Alas for men! that they should be so blind,And laud as gods the scourges of their kind!Call each man glorious who has led a host,And him most glorious who has murdered most!Alas! that men should lavish upon theseThe most obsequious homage of their knees—That those who labour in the arts of peace,Making the nations prosper and increase,Should fill a nameless and unhonoured grave,Their worth forgotten by the crowd they save—But that the Leaders who despoil the earth,Fill it with tears, and quench its children's mirth,Should with their statues block the public way,And stand adored as demi-gods for aye.
But thanks to the efforts of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and Mr. Walter Crane, London is at last in a fair way to pay homage also to these unsung and unhonoured heroes of lowly life.
During the Jubilee of 1887 Mr. Watts urged that cloisters or galleries should be erected throughout the country and frescoes painted therein, to record the shining deeds of the Democracy's great men and great women. Such a Campo Santo is now being prepared in the new Postmen's Park in Aldersgate Street, and one of the first frescoes to be painted there by Mr. Crane will commemorate the valiant act of one Alice Ayres, a young nurse-girl who rescued her threeyoung charges from a burning house, she herself perishing in the flames.
When I go to Paris, my favourite pilgrimage is to the Mur des Fédérés in the Père-la-Chaise Cemetery, where the last of the Communists were mowed down by the mitrailleuse.
My sincerest worship of the dead in London will be tendered in the Campo Santo of the Postmen's Park, and I hope one day to pay my homage there to the memorial of Trooper Lockyer.
There hath been great sale and utterance of wine,Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine,In every country, region, and nation,But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation;And the Bore's Head, near London Stone,The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known;The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head,And many like places that make noses red;Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry,And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree;The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange,King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range;The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand,Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan.
There hath been great sale and utterance of wine,Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine,In every country, region, and nation,But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation;And the Bore's Head, near London Stone,The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known;The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head,And many like places that make noses red;Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry,And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree;The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange,King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range;The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand,Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan.
(Newes From Bartholomew Fayre; an undated, anonymous black-letter poem.)
"Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century, "was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns."
The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum, sometimes too the Theatre.
The wives and daughters of tradesmen collected here to gossip, and, strange as it now seems to us they came here, too, to picnic. An old song of the period describes a feast of this sort, and tells how each woman carried with her some goose, or pork, the wing of a capon, or a pigeon pie. Arrived at the tavern, they ordered the best wine. They praised the liquor, and, under its inspiriting influence, discussed their husbands, with whom they were naturally dissatisfied; and then went home by different streets,perfidiously assuring their lawful masters that they had been to church.
This evidence is useful and seemly to be here set down, as indicating the true origin of habits for which much undeserved censure has been in these later days inflicted upon mere imitators.
The men, whose chiefest fault has ever been their too great readiness to follow the women, fell insensibly into the habit, and have been there ever since.
tavernCOURTYARD OF AN OLD TAVERN.
COURTYARD OF AN OLD TAVERN.
COURTYARD OF AN OLD TAVERN.
And what a glorious time they have had of it! To recall only Fuller's description of the "wit combates" between Shakespeare's "quickness of wit and invention" against Ben Jonson's "far higher learning," and "solid, but slow performances," at the historic Mermaid; and Beaumont's rapturous praise in his epistle to Jonson of the banquet of wit and admirableconversation which they had enjoyed at the same place!
Oh to have been at the Mermaid on the night when Jonson had been burnt out at the Bankside Globe! or on the night of Shakespeare's first performance before Elizabeth—when he had first, perhaps, set eyes on Mary Fitton!
All the wits of that age of giants were wont to assemble, after the theatre, at the Mermaid, the Devil, and the Boar. Exuberant Fletcher and graver Beaumont would "wentle" in from their lodging on Bankside, wearing each other's clothes, and wrangling perhaps about their plots—a habit which on one occasion caused them to be arrested, a fussy listener having heard them disputing in a tavern as to whether they should or should not assassinate the king. Poor, drunken, profligate Greene, and hisdebauched companions, Marlowe and George Peele,—all of whom ended their riotous courses with painful and shameful deaths,—are sure to have lurched in on many a razzling night. Regular visitors, too, were "Crispinus" Dekker, and his friend Wilson the actor, whom Beaumont mentions as a boon-companion over the Mermaid wine:—
Filled with such moisture, in most grievous qualmsDid Robert Wilson write his singing psalms.
Filled with such moisture, in most grievous qualmsDid Robert Wilson write his singing psalms.
From Whitehall, with "their port so proud, their buskin, and their plume," would swagger in Raleigh, Surrey, Spenser, and others of the wits from Elizabeth's ruffling Court. Drummond of Hawthornden came here at least once on a visit to Ben Jonson; but this must have been after Shakespeare had deserted the festive board for the crested pomp of a gentlemanly life at Stratford,"coming up every term to take tobacco and see new motions."
Sombre John Webster would be here sometimes, sometimes Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Lilly, Thomas Heywood, William Rowley, Day, Wilkins, Ford, Camden, Ned Drayton, Fulke Greville, Harrington, Edmund Waller, Martin, Morley, Selden, the future Bishop of Winchester,et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!
What a galaxy! what a feast!
It is well for your peace of mind, my good wife, that the Mermaid and its company have vanished into the dark immensity. How long would I wait, and cheerfully, for so much as a peep through the window at that glorious company!
Dryden claims that the Mermaid did not receive such pleasant and such witty fellowsin the reigns of Bess and James as did the Royal Oak, the Mitre, and the Roebuck after the Restoration; but to me the haunts of Wycherley, Otway, Villiers of Buckingham, Wilmot of Rochester, and the periwigged bucks and bloods and maccaronies in velvets and lace of Charles the Second's dissolute Court, are, as compared with the Falstaffian Taverns of the Shakespeareans, but dull and dry dens.
So, if you will, of your grace, excuse the pun and the hasty skip, we will give these pretty gentlemen a miss, and jump at once into a fresh chapter and an account of a curious experience that once upon a time came in a tavern to me.
O Caledonia! stern and wild,Meet nurse for a poetic child.
O Caledonia! stern and wild,Meet nurse for a poetic child.
Scott.
At last I was alone. The landlord, douce man, could stand no more; his conversation had been large and ample up to midnight, and had indeed left a fair remainder to spread a feast for solitude; but for the last two hours he had done nothing but alternately yawn and doze.
Now, thank goodness, he had gone, and I could read in peace.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us—Bacon'sEssaysand Donnelly'sCryptogram!—in the parlour of a shabby old inn! Was mine host, then, of a literary turn? Ay, I had noted his gushing praise of Burns and Walter Scott; and, by the way, what was it he said about Shakespeare's visit to Edinburgh? He had shown me a letter in a book: I had been too intensely bored by his trowelled praise of Scottish lochs, Scottish mountains, haggis, parritch, usquebaugh, and Scottish poetry, to pay much heed—but yes, this must be it. Drummond'sSonnets, and here evidently was the letter, signed by Ben Jonson, indorsed "to my very good friend, the lairde of Hawthornden":—
Master vill,quhen we were drinking at my Lordis on Sonday, you promised yat you would gett for me my Lordis coppie he lent you of my Lord Sempill hisinterlude callit philotas, and qhuich vill Shakespeare told me he actit in edinburt, quhen he wes yair wit the players, to his gret contentment and delighte. My man waits your answer:So give him the play,And lette him awayeTo your assured friendand loving servand,Ben Jonson.From my lodging in the canongait,Mrch the twelft, 1619.
Master vill,
quhen we were drinking at my Lordis on Sonday, you promised yat you would gett for me my Lordis coppie he lent you of my Lord Sempill hisinterlude callit philotas, and qhuich vill Shakespeare told me he actit in edinburt, quhen he wes yair wit the players, to his gret contentment and delighte. My man waits your answer:
So give him the play,And lette him awayeTo your assured friendand loving servand,
So give him the play,And lette him awayeTo your assured friendand loving servand,
Ben Jonson.
From my lodging in the canongait,
Mrch the twelft, 1619.
So here also had Shakespeare anticipated me? Had he been to Edinburgh too?
I might have known: but lo! I grow so used to our resemblances, I almost cease to notice them.
Donnelly too! I had never seen his book before—though I have taken keen interest in the subject ever since Delia Bacon arose in—well, the land where they do raise Bacon—and found Shakespeare out.
Could it indeed be true that Shakespearewas an ignorant impostor, whose business it was to hold respectable gentlemen's horses at the stage-door of the theatre, instead of which he wickedly suborned the Lord High Chancellor of England to write his plays for him, and the same with intent to deceive?
To make sure, I read a few pages of Donnelly.
Even that failed to convince me: the more I read, the more I didn't know.
I saw Shakespeare'sWorkson the bookshelf, and reached the volume down. It opened at theSonnets.
Ah! what exquisite music! But—what was this?
Yourname, from hence, immortal life shall have,ThoughI, once gone, to all the world must die.
Yourname, from hence, immortal life shall have,ThoughI, once gone, to all the world must die.
Again in Sonnet XXXVIII.—
If my slight muse do please these curious days,The pain bemine, butthineshall be the praise.
If my slight muse do please these curious days,The pain bemine, butthineshall be the praise.
And in the next:—
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?And what is't but mine own when I praisethee?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?And what is't but mine own when I praisethee?
Curious, surely. What could these lines mean?
And again:—
My life hath in this line some interest.
What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to solve the mystery?
By Jove! herewasa discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell the words
"Mistress Mary Fitton";
and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybodyknows, is the Dark Lady of theSonnets, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot, and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death—Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!
Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication ofPassages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton. The perfect anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly accentuated line in the whole of theSonnets, was therefore something more than curious.
I next took the entire passage:—
But be contented: when that fell arrestWithout all bail shall carry me away,My life hath in this line some interest,Which for memorial still with me shall stay.
But be contented: when that fell arrestWithout all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,Which for memorial still with me shall stay.
After an hour's wrestling I had extracted from the letters forming these four lines, these words:—
"Learn ye that have a little wit ytFrancis Bacon these lines to Mistress Mary Fitton, Elizabeth's maid of honourat Whitehalle, hath writt."
"Learn ye that have a little wit ytFrancis Bacon these lines to Mistress Mary Fitton, Elizabeth's maid of honourat Whitehalle, hath writt."
But the anagram was imperfect. Several letters included in the words of the sonnet, remained unused in my anagram.
It was maddening to arrive so near success, to touch it as it were with one's, finger tips, yet fail for a few foolish trifling alphabetic signs.
Desperately, frantically, I struggled to complete and perfect the anagram; but the more I juggled with the letters, the more bewildered, mazed, and helpless I became.My blood was a-fire, my head a horrible ache, my brain a whirling tornado of dancing vowels and consonants.
The excitement, if still fed and unsatisfied, must lead, I felt, to brain fever or madness.
I tore myself from the intoxicating pursuit, and fell, restless, sleepless, yet painfully weary, upon the couch beneath the window.
It was a wild winter's night, and the view outside was full of "fowle horror and eke hellish dreriment." The cordon of turrets girding the city bulged eerily through the heavy gloom like limbs of a skeleton starkly protruding through a lampblack shroud. A beam of lurid moonlight uncannily lit up a distant stretch of bluff, stern crags, and nearer spectral foreground of towers, gables, and bartisans.
Deep down in the hollow, dismal and desolate, under a sky of raven's feathers,glowered murder-stained Holyrood, congenial to the night. The solitary glimmer on the thunder and battle-scarred Castle Rock, looked like a match held up to show the darkness.
The melancholy patter of the rain, and the discordant creaking and rattling of an iron shutter and rusty hinge, made music harmonious to the scene.
The air of the musty room added to the contagious heaviness. In vain I stretched the astral sceptre of the soul upon the incorporeal pavement of conjecture. Nothing came of it, except that I slipped off the couch. I was too restless to think. Even the dog, on the rug at my feet, uneasily twitched and growled in his sleep.
Suddenly, I became conscious of a creepy chill; my head, by some impulse foreign to my volition, was raised from its meditativepose; and in the spluttering, dying beam of the lamp's light, I beheld an Apparition.
A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered (no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads, shone horridly.
My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair standing up round his neck like a frill.
He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror, issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the sofa.
For my part, I believe I may say I was not afraid, but intensely excited. I felt that somethingwas about to be revealed to me; this was the reason why my hand trembled so as to knock Shakespeare, Bacon, and Donnelly in one commingled heap of fallen glory to the floor.
I was curious, fascinated, and highly wrought.
The wild and fitful little shape bewilderingly wriggled and flickered in the light, and his ghast and fixed eye was painful to endure. Yet I felt that we two had not met without reason. Instinct told me we should do business.
He was the jerkiest and perkiest little figure I had ever clapped eyes on. He bore his head with confident, nay impudent, erectness; his arms waved like a windmill's; and his shapeless little legs straddled all over the place in a succession of purposeless leaps and flings and prancings.
So quick and fidgety were his movements that it was not easy to catch the details of his dress; but I saw that his tartan was a spider's web, to whose check the slimy snail had imparted a variety of hue unknown to Macgregor or Macpherson; his bonnet was a flowering thistle; his philabeg was made of the beards of oat-florets; his buckle was a salmon's scale; and a blade of finest rye dangled proudly by his side.
"Ye'll know me the noo if ye'll speir lang enoo," he squealed ironically when I had stared for some moments. "Gape and glower till your lugs crack, but ye canna' alter the fact that a' great men are Scots. Burrrns was Scottish, and Allan Ramsay, and Blair, and Thomson, Smollett, and Hume, and Boswell, and Adam Smith, and Stewart, and Hogg, and Campbell; and ay, Sir Walter Scott, Tam Carlyle, and Lord Brougham; andChalmers, and Brewster, and Lyell, and Livingstone, and Macbeth, and McGinnis; Macchiaveli, the Maccabees; and Macaronis, the Macintoshes and Macrobes; and what reason hae ye to suppose that the author of Shakespeare'sPlayswas an exception?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said, "but—er—have I had the pleasure of meeting you before?"
"Bah!" said he, hastily dancing a strathspey, "ma fute is on ma native dew, ma name is Roderick; I am," he continued, drawing himself up to the full height of his figure, which was about six inches, "I am the Speerit o' Scottish Literature."
"Oh, I know you now," I said, "you're the spirit men call the Small Scotch."
"Where will ye find the Small Scotch that's fu' sax inches in height?" answered Roderick, with asperity.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," I said. "But I didn't ring for you, did I?"
"I'm no slave o' the ring," proudly answered Roderick, as he broke into the opening steps of a complicated sword-dance. "I came of my ain sweet will, just to improve your mind."
"That's very kind," said I; "will you take a chair, or a tumbler?"
The Spirit hissed angrily, as if a small soda had been poured over him, and I prudently abstained from further interruptions.
As some of my readers are perhaps less fluently acquainted with the Scotch than myself, I take the liberty of translating into English the conversation which ensued.
The Spirit began by asking whether I regarded Shakespeare as the greatest poet that ever lived, or as the meanest sweater that ever exploited the gifts of the helplesspoor—meaning in this case Francis Bacon.
I responded that I didnotthink Bacon a man of that sort.
"Well," continued the Spirit, "do you think that a man who could scarcely write his own name could writeHamlet?"
"It is a nice point," I said.
"Very well," said the Spirit, dancing a series of fantastic Highland flings in the unsubstantial air, and turning a double somersault at the finish; "if, as everybody admits, Bacon was one of the blackest scoundrels that ever lived, his mind could not have conceived the noble philosophy to which his name is attached. And if Shakespeare, as the signature to his will shows, could scarcely write his own name, he could not have written his ownPlays."
"Same again," said I.
"Besides which," continued the Spirit, "neither Shakespeare nor Bacon was a Scotsman."
"That settles 'em," quoth I.
"Now, look at here," continued the Spirit, aggressively shaking his forefinger under my nose; "whoever wrote Shakespeare'sPlaysmust have written Shakespeare'sSonnets."
"Undoubtedly," said I.
"And theSonnetswere dedicated by the publisher to 'W. H.,' who is styled 'the onlie begetter of these ensuingSonnets.'"
"Well?"
"The publisher must have known who the author was."
"Very likely."
"And in referring to the 'onliebegetter,' he clearly implies that the authorship was claimed by many, and in furnishing no more than the initials of 'the onlie begetter,' heindicates that the real author had reasons for concealing the authorship."
"That may be so."
"Well, why should a man desire to conceal his authorship of such exquisite sonnets—sonnets of whose surpassing excellence he himself is so convinced that he writes—
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this,
—unless theSonnetscontained matter likely to bring him into trouble? For instance, if a man had, in the fervour of his youth, poured out such warm expression of his love as theSonnetscontain, and very earnestly desired, later on in life, to marry another lady, he might be anxious then that the authorship of theSonnetsshould be temporarily forgotten. But Bacon never did marry. And Shakespeare married young, and deserted his wife; and she survived hisdeath. Therefore, no such motive for secrecy could have affected Bacon or Shakespeare."
At this point of his inductive reasoning, the Spirit paused for effect: he looked for all the world like a picture I had seen in theStrand Magazine.
"Ah!" I said, "I know you now; you are Sherlock Holmes, the detective."
At which he was so indignant that he angrily pirouetted himself right out of sight. But he re-appeared almost immediately, and went on as if nothing had happened:—
"Having proved to you that neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote his own works, I will now proceed to tell you who wrote them."
"What! The lot?"
"Certainly. The similarity of thought in Bacon'sEssaysand Shakespeare'sPlaysprove that they were written by the same man. That man, as you may see by the legal knowledge betrayed alike in thePlaysand theEssays, must have studied the law. But if he wrote all the books which I attributed to him, he could not have had time to practise it. Moreover, in the atmosphere of the law courts a man could have preserved neither the exquisite sweetness nor the human grandeur of the so-called Shakespeare'sPlays."
"There's something in that," said I.
"Very well," continued Roderick, curveting so swiftly that even as one foot touched the floor the other seemed to be kicking the ceiling, "we have now established these facts:—
"First, that the initials of the author of the so-called Shakespeare'sPlaysare 'W. H.'
"Secondly, that he had an intensely painfullove affair in his youth, and married another woman in his later years.
"Thirdly, that he was a lawyer by education but not by practice.
"Now, who was he? We have yet more evidence to aid us in identifying him. There's Spenser's plaint that 'our pleasant Willy,' 'the man whom Nature's self had made to mock herself and truth to imitate,' had been 'dead of late,' and 'with him all joy and merriment.' We have also the lines in theSonnets:—
Make but my name thy love and love that still;And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will.
Make but my name thy love and love that still;And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will.
The first name of 'W. H.,' therefore, is Will. And this Will had great trouble at one period of his life, which silenced all his joy and merriment. Again I ask you, Who was the man?"
And the Spirit, bubbling and shaking with eagerness, peered anxiously into my face.
"What great Scotsman of that great period," he continued, screaming rather than speaking, "was brought up to the law and abandoned it for the pursuit of literature and poetry? was driven nearly to distraction by the loss of a mistress whom he loved more dearly than life? went abroad to seek solace, and, returning after many years, married another lady? wrote and left extant in his own name, sonnets which are acknowledged to be perfect models of sweetness and delicacy, sonnets which have never been eclipsed since his death? who was the Scottish poet, friend of the London actors; friend of Ben Jonson; the man who has left on record in British literature the report of his conversations with Jonson; the manwho, as you have to-night seen by your landlord's letter, knew Shakespeare and lent him plays which are not known now by the names they then bore—come, come, man, who is this W. H.? Cannot you guess it even now?"
"William of Hawthornden?"
"Of course, of course," the Spirit cried. "Look you, now, how plain it is. William Drummond of Hawthornden was tinged with the conceits and romances of the Italian school, as was the author ofRomeo and Juliet. He wrote histories, as did the author ofThe History of Henry VII., attributed to Bacon; as did the author of the historical plays, attributed to Shakespeare. He wrote many reflections on Death, as did the author of theSonnetsand thePlays. And who but a Scotsman, I would like you to tell me, could have furnished the localcolour and the Scottish character to the tragedy ofMacbeth?"
"Why, man, it's as plain as a pikestaff. The greatest Englishman that ever lived was naturally a Scotsman. The greatest genius of any clime or time was William Drummond of Hawthornden."
And, in the frenzy of his exultation, Roderick leaped high again into the air, turned seventeen somersaults in succession, and, alighting upon my nose, danced a wild Highland fling of triumph and defiance.
It was certainly very plausible—as plausible, at least, as any argument that I had heard in support of the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare'sPlays. I was almost persuaded: then a difficulty occurred to me.
"But," I said, "Drummond of Hawthornden was not born till 1585, and someof Shakespeare'sPlaysappear to have been produced before 1593."
"Well," answered the Spirit, carelessly sticking his sword into my nose and sitting on it, "what has age to do with genius? Has not another poet said, 'He was not of an age, but for all time'? Besides, the Scottish are a precocious people and byordinar'. And furthermore, who told you that Drummond was born in '85?"
"English history says so."
"English history!" answered the Spirit, with a sneer; "try Scotch."
"But," I still objected, "if Shakespeare wrote nothing, why did Ben Jonson, who knew him well, praise his wit and his 'gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped'?"
"Well," said Roderick, "and who saidthat Shakespeare wrote nothing? I only said he did not write Shakespeare'sWorks. But he wrote other poetry—poetry which everybody knows—poetry as familiar in every child's mouth as butterscotch. There is nothing finer of its kind."
"It is strange," I muttered, "that I have never heard of it."
"What?" cried the Spirit, "never heard of 'Little Jack Horner'?