Shaftesbury Avenue

“ Harrington Street, d'you know where that is, Shaftesbury Avenue. That's where you sleep. Number ten, it is. You can sleep there on Sunday night, if you like; that's just as you please, or you can send your box there on Monday. ”

“ THE NIGHT HOUSES OF THE HAYMARKET.
If any of the Bucks of the sixties were suddenly brought to life and placed in the centre of Piccadilly Circus, no labyrinth could more completely puzzle them than the structural alterations of to-day. Abutting on to where Shaftesbury Avenue commences was a dismal row of houses, with here and there an outlet into the purlieus of more dismal Soho; where the obstruction for the accommodation of flower-sellers now raises its useless head, another block of houses ran eastwards, dividing the present broad expanse into two narrow thoroughfares ”

“ Soho has always been the abode of the French immigrant. But Time, combined with a squabbling County Council, has affected even cosmopolitan London; and Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road have now opened up the more inaccessible haunts, rendering them more conventional, if less interesting. ”

“ Assisted by the advertisements in the daily press and a District Railway map of London, he had now charted out the whole of theatre-land, and had very nearly completed a most methodical survey thereof. He knew the name of every revue and musical comedy in London, and could have given points, in his familiarity with the features of professional beauty, to the average Flying Corps subaltern.
He crossed Trafalgar Square, and headed for the Shaftesbury Avenue district. A hurried reference to the map, in a quiet corner behind the National Gallery, confirmed him in his bearings. ”

“ The streets of Seven Dials attained a very unenviable reputation, and were the haunt of all that was vicious and bad. Terrible accounts of the overcrowding and consequent immorality come down to us from the newspaper [Pg 24] echoes of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The opening up of the new thoroughfares of New Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, have done much, but the neighbourhood is still a slum. The seven streets remain in their starlike shape, by name Great and Little White Lion Street, Great and Little St. ”

“ In 1884 he received the freedom of the city of London. In May 1885 he was presented with an address from old scholars of the ragged schools. In reply he declared that he would rather be president of the ragged schools than of the Royal Academy; but for himself he would only say that the feeling in his heart was, ‘What hast thou that thou hast not received?’
Shaftesbury retained a great part of the vigour both of his mind and body to very near the end of his life. The infirmities of old age showed themselves chiefly in gout and deafness. ”

“ SHAFTESBURY, a market town and municipal borough in the northern parliamentary division of Dorsetshire, England, 103 m. W.S.W. from London by the London & South-Western railway (Semley station) . Pop. (1901) 2027. It lies high on a hill above a rich agricultural district. The church of St Peter is Perpendicular; those of Holy Trinity and St James are in the main modern reconstructions. The borough is under a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. ”

“ It cannot be supposed that they were unaware of Shaftesbury's design of raising an insurrection in the city through agents more or less known to them. Thus when, during a visit to London in October 1682, Lord Russell accompanied Monmouth, Essex, and Sir Thomas Armstrong to the house of one Sheppard, a wine merchant in the city, where they found Rumsey and Ferguson, it is improbable that the sole or principal purpose was to taste Sheppard's sherry. ”

“ It is not only the vast scale of the street as measured by its width, which seems enormous when one looks at the sea of traffic, but which seems narrow when one looks at the towering buildings, nor the beauty of those buildings or the delicacy of their detail that give Fifth Avenue its peculiar character and interest. Without the great masses of well-dressed men and women which crowd its wide pavements all day long it would seem dull and heavy. ”

“ All England felt the force of that colossal character. To-day at that central point in Piccadilly where the highways meet and thronging multitudes go surging by, the English people have erected the statue of Shaftesbury—the fitting motto therefor; "The reforms of this century have been chiefly due to the presence and influence of Shaftesbury." If our generation is indeed held back from injustice and anarchy and bloodshed, it will be because Shaftesbury the peer, and Samuel, the seer, are duplicated in the lives of our great men, who stand forth to plead the cause of the poor and weak. ”

“ It bore neither name of place, nor date, nor any term of address, but commenced at once in a firm handwriting with these words:
"I have been more successful than I dared to hope.
"The Plot, as you will have heard, is shaking the country, Shaftesbury is the most forceful man in England, and no Papist is safe. There is no need for me to name the lords who have lately suffered. ”

“ He left one son, Anthony Ashley, the fourth earl of Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury was a man of lofty and ardent character, forced by ill-health to abandon politics for literature. He was liberal, though much fretted by the difficulty of keeping out of debt. He was resolved, as he tells his steward, not to be a slave to his estates, and never again to be ‘poorly rich.’ He supported several young men of promise at the university or elsewhere. He allowed a pension of 20l. ”

“ The sharp rise to what was the old summit and to the modified hill of the present does not begin until Thirty-third Street is reached. But there is perceptible a grade of a kind as soon as the Avenue leaves the northern line of the Square. Today it is a slope in transition. Here and there the change has been wrought. A modern structure reaches superciliously skyward. Beside it and below it the buildings of yesterday give the impression of feeling acutely conscious of their impending doom. They know. Their race is almost run. ”

“ A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and leisure. ”

“ He lived in times when the public had little or no authentic information about the proceedings of members of the Government or of Parliament, when errors in judging public men were more easy than now, and when venal pamphleteers, poets, and play-writers drove a profitable trade in libels on public men.' Shaftesbury not only fell into the hands of political enemies, but his political tergiversations rendered his vindication difficult for his friends. A young man of twenty-one at the commencement of the Civil War, his life ran parallel with the events of that eventful period ”

“ He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of "George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor. ”

“ It was their type of house that was accepted for the neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings. ”

“ Nothing could be less true of Lord Shaftesbury. While the direction of a score of great charitable undertakings rested on him, and his study was flooded with reports, Bills before Parliament and letters by the hundred,—he would remember to perform all sorts of little kindnesses to individuals having no special claim on him; and never by any chance did he omit an act of courtesy. No more perfectly high-bred gentleman ever graced the old school; and no young man, I may add, ever had a fresher or warmer heart. ”

“ Of all the blocks in the stretch of tradition that carries the Avenue up to Fourteenth Street, the richest in interest is, naturally, that which lies immediately north of the Square. Dividing this block in two, and running respectively east and west, are Washington Mews and MacDougall Alley. When Fifth Avenue was young and addicted to stately horse-drawn turnouts, it was in these half streets that were stabled the steeds and the carriages. ”

“ Shaftesbury, after the dissolution [50] of the Royal Parliament, being accused of entering into a conspiracy against the King, found himself within the gloomy walls of London Tower. His spirits and wit did not forsake him; and when accosted by one of the Popish lords, whom he had been instrumental in sending there not long before, he replied, “that he had been lately indisposed with an ague, and was come to take some Jesuit’s powder.” Everything which ingenuity, prompted by malice, could suggest was done to injure in public estimation the late popular nobleman, and to prejudice his trial. ”

“ The witnesses against him were chiefly the very men who had been his informants regarding the pretended Irish plot. Shaftesbury, who had in vain requested to have his accusers face to face (ib.) , defended himself; he was in the end committed to the Tower on the charge of high treason, in conspiring for the death of the king and overthrow of government. He was taken to the Tower by water, and in the evening was visited there by Monmouth, Grey, and others of that party. ”

“ To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material development. ”

“ If the next generation of those who are born to rank and power are educated, in the words of Fenelon, to consider these things "as a ministry," which they hold for the benefit of the poor, the problem of life in England will become easier of solution. Such are Lord Shaftesbury's views, and as he throws them out with unceasing fervor in his conversation and conduct, they cannot but powerfully affect not only his own circle, but all circles through the kingdom. Lady Shaftesbury is a beautiful and interesting woman, and warmly enters into the benevolent plans of her husband. ”

“ Many other amusing details of his domestic economy may be found in Shaftesbury's character, which was first printed in Dr. Leonard Howard's ‘Collection of Letters and State Papers,’ 1753; it was reprinted in the ‘Connoisseur,’ No. 81, 14 Aug. 1755 (Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, i. 25) . Dr. Drake (who printed it in Hone's ‘Everyday Book,’ ii. 1624) has omitted some disparaging remarks which Shaftesbury added. Shaftesbury lived near Hastings's residence, and, as a firm adherent of the parliamentary cause, was perhaps prejudiced against the sportsman's character. ”

“ In a place and an age that had achieved a well-rounded and balanced culture, we should expect to find the same spirit expressed in the simplest cottage and the grandest public building. So we find it, for instance, in the humble market towns of the Middle Age: there is not one type of architecture for 15th-century Shaftesbury and another for London; neither is there one style for public London and quite another for domestic London. ”

“ The flight and death of Shaftesbury struck a terror into the whig party; many gave up the cause in despair, others of a timid nature went over to the enemy, and others, spurred on by their indignation, rushed forward into more rash and fatal projects; and at this moment one of the extraordinary revelations took place, which rapidly brought to the gallows and the block nearly the whole of Shaftesbury's agents, coadjutors, and colleagues, including lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney. ”

“ My acquaintance with him began in Exeter Hall, at a Sabbath service held to reach the non-church going classes. With one or two others we knelt together in a small side room to invoke a blessing on the service in the great hall, and he prayed most fervently. The Earl of Shaftesbury was not only the author of great reformatory legislation in Parliament, and the acknowledged leader of the Low Church Party in the Established Church. He was also a leader of city missions, ragged schools, shoe-black brigades, and other organizations to benefit the submerged classes in London. ”