Gower Street

“ But, while the plain, nondescript brick houses of Gower Street and Baker Street still remain the prevailing type of London architecture, there is everywhere noticeable a tendency to improve and embellish the streets of the metropolis, to rebuild in a better or, at any rate, a more ambitious way. Travelling along the highway of Oxford Street, from ancient Tyburn to Tottenham Court Road, how many tall, new, and ornate house-fronts rise along the line on each side of us! ”

“ There were, however, honest men there, as everywhere else; and, although for the most part such people preferred to dwell nearer Mersham-street or immediately below the church, yet the scattered cottages further south were not altogether without inmates, who, having nowhere else to live, lived there.
John Gower was one of these, a respectable middle-aged man, who won his bread by the sweat of his brow, and was proud of the name of a Kentish labourer. ”

“ To inherit such a kingdom after five years of Gower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, and everything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth (and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed a small affair. ”

“ Gower would call it squalor.
The retail shops do a driving business in the avenue around the corner; on the curb, under a ragged locust-tree, is a canvas shed for horses, too busy to take their feed respectably in a stable; the brick police station is the only building having pretension to respectability. An ice-cream vender sells his wares openly on the street, in front of a hospitable barber’s—the processes of human life are open and avowed; great iron gas-retorts are seen above the roofs of the houses. ”

“ On the driver drawing in his horses, to allow a gentlemanly-looking man to pass, who was crossing Bloor West, at the head of St. George street, Mrs. Gower waking from her reverie, sees Mr. Buckingham.
"The compliments of the season, Mrs. Gower," he said, lifting his hat.
"The same to you. Whither bound?"
"To Holmnest."
"Then you had better come into the sleigh; 'there's room enough for twa.'"
"Thanks; with pleasure."
"Driver, you see the young lady ahead of us. I expect she is coming to my place. Just pick her up, please." ”

“ Lord Moira, the Constable of the Tower, was present when Sir Francis arrived at the fortress. As the soldiers who had escorted the Liberal member for Westminster to the Tower were returning to their quarters there was a collision between them and the mob, and on Tower Hill the military were obliged to charge the people, many being killed; two more people were killed in Fenchurch Street, whilst riots broke out in several places in the metropolis. Burdett’s imprisonment lasted for ten weeks, he being set at liberty when Parliament was prorogued on the 21st of June. ”

“ Constant quarrels and disputes, however, arose on the subject of the boundaries between the City and the Lieutenant of the Tower, until the charge of Tower Hill was finally vested in the City. In the view of the Tower and its surroundings, to which I have so often referred, made by Haiward and Gascoyne in 1597, the scaffold is shown standing some76 distance to the north of Tower Street: its site is now a pleasant garden, the place of execution being recorded by an inscription on a tablet placed on the grass plot within the railings. ”

“ Like most fecund mothers, like nature herself, her luxuriance is somewhat slatternly, her exuberance has burst its stays. Here and there our manners, our conventions, trim a hedge or two; but everywhere the forests, and even at our feet, the weeds, grow wild. Fifth Avenue, and its short purlieus, is the home of society; but elsewhere in the island of Manhattan humanity lives, unkempt, full of sap—that great humanity which has made Mrs. Gower, and which she so studiously avoids. For she lives in society; and perhaps has never thought that it is on humanity she lives. ”

“ He was still performing the service of the Mass, when the mob burst into the Chapel, seized him at the altar, hurried him across the moat to Tower Hill, where a vast multitude of those who had been unable to press into the fortress greeted his appearance with a savage yell. His head was struck off on the spot where so many famous men have since perished with more seemly circumstance. The Treasurer Hales suffered with him, and their two heads, mounted over London Bridge, grinned down on the bands of peasants who were still flocking into the capital from far-distant parts. ”

“ The life of the world was Mrs. Gower’s book; she made her own drama; any starveling in a garret could have the other kind. But that earliest pleasure was indeed divine. She had met the enemy, and made them hers. And how the dowagers had scowled at her, at first! The haughty Vans, the poor and lofty matrons of the old manorial families of New York, exemplary, unapproachable, Presbyterian. She had routed them with a flirt of her fan; she had dared their feudal armor with her bared fair breast. ”

“ Dr. Macaulay supposes Gower to have been a dealer in wool, with the natural dislike of the Londoner for foreigners. The jealousy of the Lombards which he expresses has every appearance of being a prejudice connected with rivalry in commerce. ‘I see Lombards come,’ he says, ‘in poor attire as servants, and before a year has passed they have gained so much by deceit and conspiracy that they dress more nobly than the burgesses of our city.’ [60]
John Gower at one time lived at Southwark, and in St. Saviour’s Church his tomb still stands. ”

“ John Gower was too wise a man to hesitate. Had he done so, he knew well enough that he would be suspected of having knowingly harboured the crones, and of being in league with them, a suspicion which would have ruined him for ever in his native parish, and probably driven him from the county.
So he bade Mary mind the house, and keep Jane and Billy at home, and then he set off at best pace with Firminger down the road in the direction of the cottage of the crones. ”

“ The autumn is already advanced, and our friends who met at Summerford have returned to the neighbourhood of London. The days of damp and fog have arrived. All nature looks sullen and lustreless. As Gower gazes through the streaming pane on the narrowed dripping landscape, he sometimes tries, as sunny Persia and the Sufis recur to him, to transform the slope before his windows into an eastern valley. ”

“ Gower, looking in vain for the English newspaper, seated herself comfortably to read the report of the Board of Trade dinner to the Honorable Joseph Chamberlain.
Miss Crew entered, robed for the winter streets. "Good-bye, Mrs. Gower; I shall not be late."
"Au revoir; give Mrs. Tremaine my love; and say, as the Dales may return from New York this evening, I found it impossible to leave; and be sure and wear your over-shoes: our streets are in their usual winter break-neck condition. I do hope the new Council will enforce the by-law." ”

“ At the outset of the war, London was at the mercy of a riotous mob, headed by the redoubtable Cade, who had assumed the name of Mortimer. The charge of the Tower had been confided to Lord Scales and Sir Mathew Gough. Lord Saye, who was at this time Lord High Treasurer, was a prisoner in the Tower, an Order in Council having placed him there, as a means, it was hoped, of pacifying the rioters, who, however, attacked the fortress from the Southwark side of the river, aided by Cade and his followers, but retreated at nightfall across London Bridge. ”

“ Three weeks before Blood made his attempt, he had called at the Martin Tower disguised as a clergyman, “with a long cloak, cassock, and canonical girdle.” He was accompanied by a woman whom he represented as his wife. The lady requested permission to see the Regalia, but soon after being admitted to the Tower complained of “a qualm upon her stomach,” and old Talbot Edwards, who had been an old servant of Sir Gilbert’s, and had been placed by him in charge of the Regalia, called to his wife to look after the soi-disant Mrs Blood. ”

“ Fancy a part of New York City—Gotham, the cold, the selfish, the unneighbourly, the indifferent—in which [Pg 281] everyone knows everyone else and takes a personal interest in them too; where distances are slight and pleasant, where young men in loose shirts with rolled-up sleeves, or girls hatless and in working smocks stroll across Sixth Avenue from one square to another with as little self-consciousness as though they were meandering down Main Street to a game of tennis or the village store! ”

“ I noticed it particularly coming from the Reform Club the other night."
"We all notice how quiet our streets are at night, and after your London and New York City, we must seem to you as if we had taken a sedative," said Mrs. Gower, taking his arm to the dining-room; "but where is Miss Crew, Mr. Dale?" ”

“ Lord Feltre stood in the framing of it—a welcome sight. The ‘monastic man of fashion,’ of Gower’s phrase for him, entered, crooning condolences, with a stretched waxen hand for his friend, a partial nod for Nature’s worshipper—inefficient at any serious issue of our human affairs, as the earl would now discover.
Gower left the two young noblemen to their greetings. Happily for him, philosophy, in the present instance, after a round of profundities, turned her lantern upon the comic aspect of his errand. ”

“ He wore a superb dress, a pale-coloured silk coat edged with silver lace, and was accompanied by grenadiers, and horse and foot guards, his carriage being followed by some of the coaches of members of his family, and his hearse, which was also drawn by six horses. The streets were so crowded to see this unusual sight, that it took the procession three hours to reach Tyburn from the Tower. Lord Ferrers went out of the world in a far more becoming manner than he had lived in it. ”

“ In 1208 the Welsh and English inhabitants who had frequent cause to complain of their treatment, received each a charter, in similar terms, from King John, who also visited the town of Swansea in 1210 and in 1215 granted its merchants liberal privileges. In 1283 a number of de Braose’s tenants—unquestionably Welshmen—left Gower for the royal lordship of Carmarthen, declaring that they would live under the king rather than under a lord marcher. ”

“ Suddenly Venus stood by me, and I fell upon my knee and prayed her to do me grace. ‘What is thy name?’ she said, as if in game. ‘John Gower,’ I replied. ‘I have read thy bill,’ she said, ‘in which thou hast complained to Nature and to me. Nature is mistress where she will, and I excuse thee for following her law: but as for what thou sayest, that I am bound to relieve thee, because thou hast served in my Court, I will give thee medicine that will heal thy heart, but perchance it will not be such as thou desirest.’ (2301-2376.) ”

“ In this eventful year, Jacobite Johnson was quietly engaged on his Dictionary. Aloof from the fray, he could not forbear flinging a stone on an ex-Jacobite who had ratted. When he came to the word ‘renegade,’ he remembered Lord Gower’s abandonment of the old Jacobite interest, for place at Court; and his prejudice prompted him to make Lord Gower infamous for ever, by adding his name to the vocabulary of slang. ‘When I came to the word renegade,’ he said to Boswell, ‘after telling that it meant “one who deserts to the enemy; a revolter,” I added, “sometimes we say a Gower.” ”

“ Chichester, turning her thin shoulders, that always have some queer sort of fascination in them, on Gower. She gives him a glance out of her blue-green eyes. She is enjoying herself immensely, in spite of the day, being quite alive to the fact that Captain Marryatt is growing desperate, and that old Miss Gower, whom Tita has insisted on asking to her house party, is thinking dark things of her from the ottoman over there.
"What's it good for, any way?"
"For the ducks," says Mr. Gower, who is always there. An answer to any question under the sun comes as naturally to him as sighing to the sad. ”

“ On descending at four p.m., to her cheerful drawing-room, Mrs. Gower has so far conquered her feelings as to cause a casual observer to say, she is quite happy, and at ease; for her dark red gown is becoming, and she has compelled her mind to dwell only on the pleasurable excitement of a re-union with her old friend, Mr. Cole; wondering also what he will think of her new friend, Mr. Blair. The air, redolent of hyacinths and roses, tells her he is in the drawing-room; and the color deepens in her cheeks as her heart throbs faster. ”

“ Up the carriage-road, in front, the sleigh containing our travelers drove. Good Mrs. Gower—who for many years had been Squire Erliston's housekeeper—alighted, and, passing through the long hall, entered a cheerful-looking apartment known as the "housekeeper's room."
Seating herself in an elbow-chair to recover her breath, Mrs. Gower laid the baby in her bed, and rang [Pg 44] the bell. The summons was answered by a tidy little darkey, who rushed in all of a flutter.
"Laws! Missus Scour, I's 'stonished, I is! Whar's de young 'un! Jupe say you fotch one from the city." ”

“ I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith."
"Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. ”

“ The most horrible of all sounds, the roar of a mob howling for blood, ever and again penetrated into the chambers of the Tower, where prelates and nobles ‘sat still with awful eye’ (Froissart) . The young King, from a high turret window, watched the conflagrations reddening the heavens. In all parts of the city and suburbs, the flames shot up from the mansions of those who had displeased the people. Far away to the west, beyond the burning Savoy, fire ascended from mansions in Westminster ”