City Companies

Hay, hay, the wythe Swan,By Gode’s Soule I am thy man,

this was the very first time that the English tongue was used at Court since the Conquest, and the White Swan made fashionable alanguage that has since spread all over the world.

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

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

Erected at ye sole Cost and Chargesof ye Parish of St. Peter’s CheapeAo. Dni. 1687.

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

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appearsHangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.

In Wood Street lived Launcelot Young, that master glazier of peculiar tastes who, finding the head of James IV., the King of Scots who was slain at Flodden Field, among a lot of oldrubbish in the lumber room of the Duke of Suffolk’s place at Sheen, took it home with him and kept it 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 a wealth of memories clustering about them, and the moment you dive into the narrow courts and passages off the beaten track, you will lose the sense of modernity. In the dark, queer little lanes, most of them with a public-house tucked away in some obscure corner, may be found the London of Dickens’ day, if of no earlier. And what romance in the odd names—Gutter Lane, by Wood Street, named after Gutheran the Dane, who lived here before the time of the Conqueror; Huggin Lane that unites them farther up, called after one Hugan or Hugh; Addle Street, where King Adel the Saxon had a mansion; Love Lane of dissolute memory.

“Thy famous Maire, by pryncely governaunce, withsword of justice thee ruleth prudently.”—Dunbar.

Wandering in Cheapside, I came across some massive emblazoned coats-of-arms over great doorways, and found they always announced the halls of the City Companies of London, those great mediæval trade unions that survive to-day—so taken for granted by theLondoner that few people remark their amazing existence.

Yet most of the real history of the old City is bound up with the tale of the rise to wealth and power of these great companies. They once numbered a hundred, and about seventy-six still survive. I see that in one recent guide-book the Pattenmakers are quoted as extinct, but though this ancient guild, founded in 1300, might be supposed to have received its deathblow a hundred years ago, when the improvement in the streets made pattens unnecessary, they are still made for country use and the company has recently renewed its vitality by association with the rubber boot and shoe industry.

I like the quaint names of the companies that are now no more. The occupation of the Bowyers and the Horners is fairly obvious, but who would guess that the Fletchers were makers of arrows, or the Lorriners makers of bridles and bits, and I leave you to discover the lugubrious meaning of the Worshipful Company of Upholders.

They were the trade unions of the Middle Ages, but they had this great difference, that they were a combination of the masters for the benefit of their particular industry, whereas now the trade unions are composed of the workmen, who combine for their own benefit even if it ruins the industry. Comparisons may be odious but they are inevitable. Our presenttrade unions, which seem to be growing almost as powerful as their forerunners, are exclusively concerned with the question of wages, but the guilds, whilst jealously guarding the privileges of their members and craftsmen, not only guaranteed a fixed wage, but administered even-handed justice as between master and men, and, more important still, insisted on a high standard of workmanship. Nothing but the best satisfied them, and they built up the tradition of English excellence which our present distaste for honest work puts us in a fair way to lose.

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

The City Companies were an autocracy, but, given the conditions of the time, they were a benevolent autocracy, and the guilds laid the foundations of the vast commercial wealthwhich has made London what she is. For centuries the Lord Mayor, their civic head, has been chosen almost always from amongst the members of the twelve great companies, and enjoys a prestige abroad only second to that of the king, as anyone who has lived in France can testify. Trade in England has always been honourable. The merchants of the Middle Ages belonged almost exclusively to families of good position; often they were younger sons of the landed gentry, for whom a commercial life, in days when there were no engineers, journalists, or bankers, was the usual opening if they did not go into the Church or Law. Whittington was the son of a Gloucestershire knight: Sir Thomas Gresham, that finest type of City magnate and honoured friend of Elizabeth, came of a good old stock and was educated at Cambridge. For centuries our kings and queens have been pleased to come to banquets in the Guildhall and the halls of the greater companies, though they might not nowadays look favourably upon that lord mayor with whom Charles II. dined, who became so drunk that when 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 would you find bodies of merchants, each with a vast revenue at its disposal of which it need give account to no man, using that wealth, generation after generation,

GUILDHALL

for the public good instead of for private profit? They spend it either in maintaining excellent schools or in generous gifts to various charitable 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 and generosity of the City merchant.

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

Of course the great civic event of the year is the well-known and oft-described procession and the banquet given on the 9th November by the new lord mayor, chosen on Michaelmas Day, and the sheriffs to the members of the Cabinet and other distinguished guests. No women are permitted to be present and to hear the important political speeches often made at these dinners, but there are other times when their presence is tolerated. I have seen the big wooden figures of Gog and Magog in the gallery of the great hall look down on a recruiting meeting early in the war—on the gatheringof one of those organisations that now and then are the temporary guests of the City Corporation, and on the ceremony of presenting the Freedom of the City to an overseas Prime Minister.

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

Coming out of the Guildhall on the left is the passage leading to the Museum and the Library. The latter is a fascinating place, with less red tape about consulting the books than in any other place of the size in London. You simply write your name and the book you want on a slip of paper, and the affair is done. If you seek information on a certain point, and do not know where to find it, the courteous director and his no less willing staff take the greatest trouble to help. I went there lately on such a quest, and book after book was produced for me by three assistants till the director in charge, who had evidently been doing some private research on my behalf, appeared triumphantly with the volume that gave the solution to my problem. It is a long, pleasant room, as indeed all book-lined rooms must be, with seven book-lined bays on either side. The collection contains about 200,000 volumes, besides many manuscripts. If you are a Shakespearean enthusiast you will find there among its rare treasures, the first, second andfourth folios of Shakespeare’s plays and a document bearing Shakespeare’s signature.

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

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

The history of the guilds is such a long one that their beginning is lost in Time’s mist. Mr. Muirhead says that “the chief object of their foundation was to afford religious and temporal and social fellowship, and trade supervision and help to the members of their fraternity or mystery,”—but they were not incorporated till the reign of Edward. Most of their halls date from the days of Henry VIII., when, grown rich and powerful, they looked about them for a home and were glad to buy from the avariciousking the houses of fugitive monks or favourites fallen into disgrace. But property so acquired was doomed to perish, and in the Great Fire of 1666 the ancient halls, almost without exception, were burnt 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 cellar full of oyle,” says Pepys, who was a Master of the company. They have a fine collection of gold plate only used at state banquets, with a gold tray presented by Pepys in 1677 and also an immense loving-cup richly chased, that is now shown in a glass case on the sideboard, as it began to show signs of much handling.

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

One at least, the Merchant Taylors’, the largest hall of all, which faces Threadneedle Street, stands as originally erected, with its little crypt beneath it, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, for though the roof and walls were damaged by the Great Fire, the main building is still intact. This is a rich and proud company, with its income of £60,000 a year, and its fine gallery of royalties and distinguished personages, numbering many kings among its freemen. Yet not so proud as the Mercers’, first on the list, which will not admit visitors to itshall in 87 Cheapside. Whittington and Sir Thomas Gresham were mercers. Within the walls is kept the famous Legh cup (1499), always used at City banquets and supposed to be one of the finest pieces of English mediæval plate in existence. The chapel adjoining the hall, whose handsome front, erected immediately after the Great Fire, you may inspect at any rate, is on the site of Thomas à Becket’s house.

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

The halls of the Goldsmiths’ and the Fishmongers’ Companies have so many mediæval relics that they well repay a visit, and a card of admission is usually granted on application. The Goldsmiths are in Foster Lane, Cheapside, just behind the G.P.O., and amongst their plate you may see the cup from which Queen Elizabeth is said to have drunk at her coronation. In the Court Room is an old Roman altar, found when the present foundations were dug. The Goldsmiths still keep their ancient privilege of assaying and stamping all articles of goldand silver manufacture in Great Britain, just as the Fishmongers still have the less remunerative right to “enter and seize bad fish.” The hall of this guild is, appropriately enough, on the banks of the river, just at the north end of London Bridge, and in one of the rooms is a chair made out of the first pile driven in the construction of Old London Bridge, said to have been under the water for 650 years.

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

Stationers’ Hall is the headquarters of the Royal Literary Fund for assisting Authors in Distress, and among their treasures are the daggers used by Col. Blood and his accomplice when they tried to steal the crown jewels in Charles II.’s reign.

Most of the bare facts about the other chief companies can be found in any London guide-book, but if a reader wants to know more of these interesting survivals of the day when the craftsman loved his craft, he will find a detailed account in Mr. P. H. Ditchfield’sThe City Companies of London, 1904, and Mr. George Unwin’sThe Gilds and Companies of London.

“Yet London lacks not poetry,She has her voices, whose deep tonesAre human laughter and human moans,And all her beauty, all her glory,Spring from or blend with man’s strange story.”Maxwell Gray.

Takethat chilly-sounding gateway, the Marble Arch, as apoint de départfor a walk some idle afternoon, and I will show you what I found the day I turned my back on it. It looks as bored by its inactivity as Théophile Gautier’s Obélisque; perhaps it regrets the days when it faced Buckingham Palace and feels it came down in the world when it was moved to its present position some seventy years ago.

And that, too, is another indignity. Very many people ask why the Marble Arch is stranded all by itself, like a rock from which the flood has receded. The reason is as simple as most utilitarian things. The press of traffic at the Marble Arch was so great that the space had to be widened. It would have been too costly a matter to move the Marble Arch back, so the park railings were moved and the Arch left high and dry, no longer a gateway but only an object of interest.

I grant you that at first sight the Oxford Street and Holborn of to-day have a blatantly modern look. There is little to remind one in the kaleidoscopic vista of badly-dressed shop windows, gaudy buildings and dingy offices, that Roman soldiers once tramped along this very road. It took about a thousand years from the time that Agricola recalled his Roman legions from England for the discomfort of the Holborn mudholes to become unendurable, and for Henry V. to follow in 1417 the earlier example of his FrenchconfrèrePhilippe Auguste and cause the king’s highway to be paved at his expense. The paving does not seem to have been 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, shared in the royal benefit, for from 1196 to 1783 condemned criminals were brought in carts from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Tree. Everyone has heard of the famous gallows, but few people know that the exact spot where it stood is marked to-day by a triangular stone set in the roadway, almost opposite the beginning of the Edgware Road. A bronze plate on the railings of the Park, on the other side of the road, commemorates the fact, but if both stone and plate elude you, the friendly policeman who is always on duty here will point them out.

From the Marble Arch to Holborn there is nothing to look at but interminable shops tillyou come to the quaint old houses of Staple Inn, as disdainfully out of keeping with their vulgar surroundings as an orchid would be in an onion bed.

“I went astray in Holborn through an arched entrance,over which was Staple Inn.”—Hawthorne.

Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with the façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a magician’s carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shilling and sixpence, a delightful little history of this “fayrest Inne of Chancerie,” where Johnson lived after finishing hisRasselasin a week to 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 carved oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. At the back of thePatent Offices that make the southern boundary of Staple Inn is Took’s Court—the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby ofBleak Houselived—once a place of those curious semi-prisons called sponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailiff for the landlord.

Staple Inn

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

“Whene’er through Gray’s Inn porch I strayI meet a spirit by the way;I roam beneath the ancient trees,And talk with him of mysteries;He tells me truly what I am—I walk with mighty Verulam.”

Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that few of London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in the Gray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, and it is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on the Central London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens more freely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped hisEssaysin your pocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the very garden that he made. Bacon was once Treasurer of Gray’s Inn and he interested himself in the laying out of “the purest of human pleasures” that he found there. Gray’s Inn Gardens used to be as fashionable a place for a walk as Hyde Park is to-day. Pepys the Chatterer related the doings of numberless people when he wrote: “When church was done my wife and I walked to Gray’s Inn to observe fashions of the ladies, because of my wife’s making some clothes.” Pepys must have gone there very often, for two months later the frivolous Secretary wrote: “I was very well pleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk in Gray’s Inn Walks.”

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

GRAY’S INN HALL

The Hall is the oldest and most beautiful thing in Gray’s Inn. Queen Elizabeth once came to a banquet here, and it was here that theComedy of Errorswas first performed. The old Inn hashad many famous names among its members, the Sydneys, Cecils, Bacons, etc., and a man no less distinguished in another circle, Jacob Tonson, had his first bookshop just inside Gray’s Inn Gate.

The old bookseller and publisher’s name has a very modern interest, even for 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. The people who go out to Ranelagh of a fine afternoon to drink tea and watch the polo, are following the footsteps of the members of the famous Kit-Cat Club founded in 1700, it is popularly supposed as an outcome of the dinners Tonson offered to his patrons. The club, of which Tonson became secretary, consisted of thirty-nine members—authors, wits and noblemen—their portraits hang in the halls of the Ranelagh Club to-day.

Tonson published for Addison and Pope, and was the first man to print cheap editions of Shakespeare. He had innumerable friends, and his portrait shows him as a genial creature who must have merited the description of him, written in 1714, that I found inOld and New London:

“While in your early days of reputation,You for blue garters had not such a passion;While yet you did not live, as now your trade is,To drink with noble lords and toast their ladies,Thou, Jacob Tonson, were to my conceiving,The cheerfullest, best, honest fellow living.”

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

Gray’s Inn takes its name from the Grays of Wilton. There is a document registering 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 any visitor may see the Hall on a week-day between the hours of 10 and 12.15.

“My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn,I saw good strawberries in your garden there.”Richard III.

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

Hatton Garden, named after the queen’s handsome chancellor and now the haunt of the diamond and pearl merchant, and also of organgrinders and ice-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 another page. Round the corner is Ely Place, the most astonishing little square in London.

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

The crying of the hours by the night watchman is not the only custom of this old-world corner, so carefully guarded by the commissioners in whose hands the rights of Ely Place are vested. The little square, now given over to law offices and business premises, was once a “sanctuary,” a place where law-breakers could take refuge and where the civil authorities had no right of arrest. To this day the caretakers who form the bulk of the resident population of Ely Place are inordinately proud of the fact that they are independent of police protection, having their own standing army of three porters,who take eight-hour turns in guarding the tranquillity of their self-contained domain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was at “Elie House in Holborne” in the reign of James I. that the last mystery play was represented in England, before the Spanish Ambassador Gondemar, who was a next-door neighbour to Ely Palace. The later history of the chapel may be briefly told. When the bishops finally sold the property to the Crown in 1772 and betook themselves to Dover Street, it was bought by an architect who preserved the chapel for the use of the residents of the houses he built in Ely Place. Afterwards it passed through several hands, being finally bought by the Fathers of Charity from the Welsh Episcopalians in 1871. When the work of restoration was finished, St. Etheldreda’s, the only pre-Reformation place of worship restored to theRoman Catholic Church, was reopened on St. Etheldreda’s Day, the 23rd of June, 1876.

“Here lies one conquered that hath conquered kings.”Epitaph to Capt. John Smith, 1631.

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

There are more cheerful memories connected with the old church. There is a mention of it in the twelfth century records. It was rebuilt in the middle of the fifteenth century—the south-west porch still remains a thing of beauty—and after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666, Wren practically rebuilt the church with its four weathercocks, whosedifferences of opinion about the wind gave rise to the saying of Howell: “Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of St. Sepulchre’s tower.”

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

Not the least of the quaint things that the seeing eye may note in London streets are the small statues and reliefs that give an odd variety to some of the houses.

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

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

When ye have sought the citty round,Yet still this is the highest ground.August the 27th, 1688.

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

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

LINCOLN’S INN

“London, Michaelmas term lately over, and the LordChancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”—Dickens.

Thecharming rustic-sounding name of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is known to everyone—did not Mr. Tulkinghorne live there?—but few people stray into the old square except those who are at odds with their neighbours and come to consult the men of law living there, as they did in Dickens’ day. The habitués come from Kingsway through Great Queen Street or Sardinia Street—the stranger takes the Piccadilly Tube to Holborn Station and, turning to the right along High Holborn, follows the first passage on the south side of the street that almost manages to conceal itself behind a protruding house.

This narrow winding Little Turnstile, and the Great Turnstile, a short distance farther along, are the only entrances from the north to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. An ugly lane, connecting these two passages and parallel with Holborn, is dignified by the disconcerting name of Whetstone Park. To-day it is only a row of stables,but Milton once had a lodging in one of the houses, that were always squalid andmal habitées, as Dryden’s plays attest.

Coming out of the tortuous Little Turnstile, you enter the spacious square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The very name is alluring enough to make anyone want to go there, but there is nothing about the gardens to-day to show that they are among the oldest in London. They are as trim and well cared for as if they had been laid out yesterday. “Well cared for” means that all the pleasant green lawns and shady plane-trees are jealously railed off from the public, who loll somnolently on the many benches, their back turned to the lovely green oasis. It does not occur to any of the Fields’ frequenters to turn some of the seats round, so that they will have a more refreshing view than the dusty asphalt of the wide 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 the Hogarth pictures in the Soane Museum.

It must be confessed that the interest of Lincoln’s Inn Fields lies not so much in the gardens—modernised out of every semblance of their seventeenth-century appearance—as in the beautiful old houses surrounding them—noble, dignified mansions some of those on the west side, built by Inigo Jones and once owned by Milords of Lindsay, Somers and Erskine. At the South Kensington Museum there is a

LINCOLN’S INN GATEWAY

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

Lindsay House, now Nos. 59 and 60, one of the Inigo Jones houses, was built for the Earl of Lindsay, who died fighting for Charles I. at Edgehill. Peter Cunningham says that it was called Ancaster House when the fourth earl was created Duke of Ancaster, and that he sold it to the proud Duke of Somerset—I do not know why Mr. Cunningham insists on his pride in italics—who married the widow of the Mr. Thomas Thynne whose murder by Count Koenigsmarck is so dramatically portrayed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

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

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

There have been poets, too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before the men of law took possession.Milton and Thomas Campbell lived at No. 61 and Lord Tennyson at No. 58, where, you remember, Mr. Tulkinghorne ofBleak Househad his rooms.

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

This Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre stood just at the back of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the south side of the square. Three theatres called the Duke’s Theatre were successively built on the same spot. The first one was a pioneer in its way, for it was here that regular stage scenery was introduced in England and that women’s parts were first played by women. The ubiquitous Pepys was a regular frequenter of the theatre, and duly recorded his meeting with Nell Gwynne and that here he sawHamletplayed for the first time.

Though it is seventy-three years since the last theatre was taken down to enlarge the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and there is nothing to be seen of it to-day, I like to keep its memory green because it was here, on the night of January 29th, 1728, nearly two hundred years ago, that Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, sang herself into 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.”

“Thus the great city, towered and steepled,Is doubly peopled,Haunted by ghosts of the remembered past.”London Poems.

There is one museum in London that I do not want to call a museum because 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 at the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and try not to notice the tentacular Lyons that unblushingly intrudes its smug modern shopfront into this old-world square, but stroll through the gardens to the north side, you will see the Soane Museum at No. 13. This is one of the most curious and neglected corners I have found in London. There are priceless things here like Hogarth’sRake’s Progress, but for every hundred visitors who go to the National Gallery of British Art to see theMarriage à la Modeonly one comes to this quaint caravanserai of all sorts of objects.

Sir John Soane must surely have been the most agreeable bricklayer’s son who ever made his fortune as a great architect and had a pretty taste in art. You have only to look at his portrait by Lawrence, one of the last that great painter finished, to see what a kindly, benevolent man he was. Why, oh why, did he exact that his collection should remain unaltered! I know that the guide-books all extol the ingenuitywith which so many things have been fitted into a small space, but if only one could sweep away the superfluous and unnecessary and rearrange the house like a perfect specimen of a home of the period, with the great pictures hung to the best advantage in the largest rooms and the basement reserved for the sarcophagus in its present place, with the best of the larger treasures that would be incongruous in the upper rooms! As it is, you must diligently hunt for what you want to see, for the delightful catalogue is more useful as a souvenir than a present help in finding anything.

There are things of human interest, like the watch Queen Anne gave to Sir Christopher Wren, or the pistol that Peter the Great collared from a Turkish Bey in 1696, that Alexander I. gave to Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, and that Sir John Soane provokingly says he purchased under very peculiar circumstances—or the flamboyant jewel of Charles I. found among the royal baggage after the battle of Naseby—or Rousseau’s autograph letter—or those exquisite old books of Hours richly illuminated and written with such patient skill by some old Flemish monk five hundred years ago.

But the jewels of this unnoticed casket are the pictures. The courteous guardians, who all look like retired librarians, show with a certain melancholy pride the way to the tiny room where hang Turner’s fine painting ofVan Tromp’s Bargeand two of his water-colours,Watteau’sLes Noces, and the greatest treasures of the whole collection, Hogarth’s pictures ofThe Rake’s Progressand the four big canvases ofThe Election.

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

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

Perhaps Sir John Soane did not want anybody but art-lovers to see his collection, or he would surely not have closed it to the public on Saturday, Sunday and Monday all the year round and for the entire months of September, December, January and February. It is true that students and other visitors may apply to the curator for admission at other times, and foreigners are admitted on presentation of their visiting card on any day except Sunday and Bank Holidays, but what Londoner, with richer collections open every day in the week, could be expected to remember the capriciousness of the guardians of Sir John Soane’s treasures, who are like the suburban hostess announcing her reception days as first and third Tuesdays and fifth Friday? In despair of remembering when the good lady was at home, you would never call on her. No, if you want to see the Hogarths,my advice is to wrap yourself in the cloak of a foreigner and present your card at the door of this neglected London museum between the hours of ten and five.

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