Arthur St. John Adcock

“ I am more famed in heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; and these works are the delight and study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches and fame of mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us and with us according to His divine will, for our good.
“You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel—my friend and companion from eternity. In the divine bosom is our dwelling-place. ”

“ No need to hunt after topics when you are writing about London; they come to you. The air is full of them. The very names of the streets are cabalistic words. Once you know London, myriads of great spirits may be called from the vasty deep by sight or sound of such names as Fleet Street, Strand, Whitehall, Drury Lane, The Temple, Newgate Street, Aldersgate, Lombard Street, Cloth Fair, Paternoster Row, Holborn, Bishopsgate, and a hundred others. ”

“ Dear Sculptor of Eternity,—We are safe arrived at our cottage, which is more beautiful than I thought it, and more convenient.... Mr. Hayley received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. ”

“ Davies’s shop is kept nowadays by a Covent Garden salesman. Instead of being lined with books, it is filled with baskets of fruit and sacks of potatoes, and the parlour wall and that glass-panelled parlour door are thrown down, and parlour and shop are all one. But the upper part of the house remains practically unaltered, and with a little imagining you can restore the lower to what it was when these walls held the gruff rumbling of the Doctor’s voice, and looked down on the humiliation of Boswell under the roguish eyes of Davies and his pretty wife. ”

“ On the whole, if you compare their lives, you will realise that Leigh Hunt was by far the greater man of the two, even if Byron was the greater poet, and I am more than a little inclined to agree with Charles Lamb that even as a poet Byron was “great in so little a way. To be a poet is to be the man, not a petty portion of occasional low passion worked up in a permanent form of humanity. Shakespeare has thrust such rubbishy feelings into a corner—the dark, dusty heart of Don John, in the Much Ado about Nothing.” ”

“ A vain and envious fool is not mourned in that fashion.
“I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which were his,” writes Thackeray, “and passed up the staircase which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith—the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak door.” ”

“ I don’t think any man of letters has ever rented a house in Park Lane, except Disraeli, and he went there as a successful politician; such glorious thoroughfares are reserved to more respectable stock-brokers and company-promoters, whilst those whom the gods love are driven to seek refuge in the cheap and shabby houses of meaner streets. Half the squalid squares and byways of Soho are in reality vestibules and aisles of the Temple of Fame. Blake, as we have seen in a former chapter, lived in Poland Street; and in the same street lived Flaxman, and, later, Shelley. ”

“ Charles William Wallace, came over and did what our English students do not appear to have had the energy or enterprise to do for themselves—he toiled carefully through the dusty piles of documents preserved in the Record Office, and succeeded in unearthing one of the most interesting Shakespearean discoveries that have ever been made—a discovery that gives us vividly intimate glimpses of Shakespeare’s life in London, and establishes beyond question his place of residence here in the years when he was writing some of the greatest of his dramas. ”

“ You cannot stir the ground of London anywhere but straightway it flowers into romance. Read the inscriptions on the crumbling tombs of our early merchant princes and adventurers in some of the old City churches, and it glimmers upon you that if ever the history of London’s commercial rise and progress gets adequately written it will read like a series of stories out of the Arabian Nights. ”

“ Some months before his death, he was seen at the Royal Academy’s private view; then, tardily responding to a letter of friendly reproach that David Roberts had addressed to him at Queen Anne Street, he came to Roberts’s studio in Fitzroy Square. He was “broken and ailing,” and had been touched by Roberts’s appeal, but as for disclosing his residence—“You must not ask me,” he said; “but whenever I come to town I will always come to see you.” When Roberts tried to cheer him, he laid his hand on his heart and murmured, “No, no! There is something here that is all wrong.” ”

“ Well, if we ever do move, we have incumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer’s hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless. ”

“ Clement Danes Churchyard, in the Strand, is better than nothing, but it is too insignificant in appearance, and stands in the wrong place. Johnson is still so far removed from death that he is more alive to-day than when he was living, and Fleet Street, and the courts and alleys opening out of Fleet Street, are his proper kingdom. Other great spirits haunt the same ground, but he overshadows them all.
At one time or another during the later forty-seven years of his life Johnson had sixteen different addresses in London, and six of them were in Fleet Street byways. ”

“ CHARLES DICKENS
His rise out of poverty and obscurity into affluence and fame makes a more wonderful story than that of how Byron woke one morning and found himself famous. For Dickens had everything against him. He was indifferently educated, had no social advantages, and no influential friends behind him. In 1835 he was an unknown young author, writing miscellaneous stories and sketches for the papers; by the end of 1836 everybody was reading and raving of and laughing over Pickwick, and he was the most talked-of novelist of the hour. ”

“ Hurt and deeply mortified, a month later Hogarth satirised Churchill’s former connection with the Church and present loose living in a caricature which represented him as a bear wearing torn clerical bands, with ruffles on his paws, in one hand a pot of porter, and in the other a bundle of lies and copies of the North Briton. Garrick had heard that Churchill was making ready to issue that vitriolic satire of his, and hastened to beg him, “by the regard you profess to me, that you don’t tilt at my friend Hogarth before you see me. He is a great and original genius. ”

“ Here in the dimly-lighted studio, around the blazing fire, used to assemble the men of distinction or promise in literature and art whom the magnetism of Rossetti’s individuality collected around him. Here Rossetti himself used, though rarely, to read aloud, with his voice of indescribable power and clearness, and with a bell-like utterance that still dwells in the mind, passages from the poems he admired; and here, more frequently, some young poet, encouraged by his sympathy, which to all earnest effort in art was overflowing and inexhaustible, would recite his latest sonnet. ”

“ Why, even the egregious Boswell has to admit that “Goldsmith, however, was often very fortunate in his witty contests, even when he entered the lists with Johnson himself.” And once, when Johnson observed, “It is amazing how little Goldsmith knows; he seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than any one else,” Reynolds put in quietly, “Yet there is no man whose company is more liked”; and the Doctor promptly admitted that, saying, “When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer their inferior while he is with them, it must be highly gratifying to them.” ”

“ Flaxman was not, like Blake, a born Londoner, but his family came from York, and settled down in London when he was six months old. His father had a shop in New Street, Covent Garden, where he made and sold plaster casts. Flaxman emerged from a sickly childhood, and developed into a sufficiently wiry and energetic man, though he remained feeble in appearance, so high-shouldered as to seem almost deformed, with a head too large for his body, and a queer sidelong gait in walking. ”

“ Whenever I have adventured into [Pg vi] any general biography, or expressed any personal opinion, it has been merely with the object of adding so much of history and character as would serve to fill in the outline of a man’s portrait, give it a sufficient fulness and colour of life, and throw into clear relief the space of time that he passed in some particular house that can still be seen in a London street. ”

“ The year after Gainsborough’s coming to London, Sheridan’s Rivals was produced at the Covent Garden Theatre, to be followed two years after by The School for Scandal. Before he was out of his twenties Sheridan had finished his career as a dramatist, turned to politics, and was one of the most brilliant of Parliamentary orators, still remaining principal proprietor of Drury Lane Theatre. All his life he was living beyond his income, borrowing, getting into debt, and dodging duns and bailiffs with the gayest imperturbability. ”

“ And on the 21st November 1817, Lamb also writes to Dorothy Wordsworth: “Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I thought we never could be torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now ’tis out, and I am easy. We never can strike root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of gardener’s mould, and if they take us up from it, it will cost no blood and groans, like mandrakes pulled up. We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. ”

“ Plenty of unpleasant things have been said about London, but never by her own children, or such children of her adoption as Johnson and Dickens. Says Hobbes, who was born at Malmesbury, “London has a great belly, but no palate,” and Bishop Stubbs (a native of Knaresborough) more recently described it as “always the purse, seldom the head, and never the heart of England.” Later still an eminent speaker, quoting this fantastic dictum of Stubbs’s, went a step further and informed his audience that “not many men eminent in literature have been born in London” ”

“ The Mermaid rose on Cheapside with a side entrance in Friday Street, and of evenings when no business took him to the theatre, or towards midnight when he was on his way home from it, Shakespeare often turned aside into this famous meeting-place of the immortals of his generation. Everybody is familiar with those rapturous lines in Beaumont’s letter to Ben Jonson, “written before he and Master Fletcher came to London with two of the precedent comedies, then not finished, which deferred their merry meetings at the Mermaid;” ”

“ But his letters and essays are full of his love of London. “I don’t care much,” he wrote to Wordsworth, “if I never see a mountain. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with dead Nature.... I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy in so much life.” Again, “Fleet Street and the Strand,” he writes to Manning, “are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw.” ”

“ Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison had carried his fame throughout the kingdom and beyond it, and were drawing rapturous admiration and tears of sentiment from countless admirers in France as well as in England; and, as befitted a man of his means and eminence, he had supplemented his house off Fleet Street with a country residence at Parson’s Green, where he died in 1761. Down to 1754, however, his country house was The Grange, at North End, Fulham, then a pretty, old-world spot,—“the pleasantest village within ten miles of London.” ”

“ Thackeray had wanted to get away to some seaside place where he could set to work on his new book, and had asked his mother, who was going to Brighton, if she could not get a house for £60 that would have three spare rooms in it for him. “As for the dignity, I don’t believe it matters a pinch of snuff. Tom Carlyle lives in perfect dignity in a little £40 house at Chelsea, with a snuffy Scotch maid to open the door, and the best company in England ringing at it. It is only the second or third chop great folks who care about show.” ”

“ I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime, thinking all hours lost that were not spent in his studies.” There are a good many stories told of his eccentricities and absent-mindedness. He would ride through London in his coach with one arm out of the window on one side and one out on the other; he would sometimes start to get up of a morning and sit down on his bed, absorbed in thought, and so remain for hours without dressing himself; and, when his dinner was laid, he would walk about the room, forgetting to eat it, and carelessly eat it standing when his attention was called to it. ”

“ London folks would draw aside, he continues, “as the great writer—who seemed always to be walking a match against Thought—strode on, and, looking after him, say, ‘There goes Charles Dickens!’ The towering stature, the snowy locks, the glistening spectacles, the listless, slouching port, as that of a tired giant, of William Makepeace Thackeray were familiar enough likewise but, comparatively speaking, only to a select few. He belonged to Clubland, and was only to be seen sauntering there or in West End squares, or on his road to his beloved Kensington.... ”