SOME LITERARY LANDMARKS

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14235, 4 December 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

SOME LITERARY LANDMARKS

BY MRS. I.KO MYERS.

Perhaps tho faded romance of dead-and-gone celebrities, blown like the roses of yesteryear into the dust of the nebulous Past, may not revivify your imagination nor appeal to your reverence. I do not know. But to me there was no square, no edifice nor church nor shadow of London town, but helped to visualise and make real the bridge of events which binds Past with Present, and across which glide those ghost« of great ones in. the dramaof human history.

Was it Gladstone—at least it is eafe enough to say sowho pointed out that the latest born of all aesthetic tastes is a

taste for mine? . . . London is elo-

quent in real ruins. They tell her story. Everywhere the old life has stamped its memories. You have out to stand at the corner of any of the squares to invoke the shades—some lovely, some" grotesque, all tragic in the.last analysis— haunt the dwfllingplaces of to-day. It is difficult to detach and wrench yourself free from the hum and hustle of today and fall to dreaming on the old days; but it is just this sudden mental plunge from Present to Past which seizes you in the vortex of that prodigious London. It is this which fascinates and obsesses you.

There in an Oxford-street mundane shop, cornering Holies-street, you buy a mundane shirt-blouse, add suddenly, deliriously realise that on this very spot Byron—the sentimental idol of your salad days— born! Blouses, laces, lingerie fade and melt away into lost distances, out of which looms that vain, reckless figure, with its romantic head and flowing tiethat vivid, impulsive, over-loved poet-adventurer.

Up Kensington way, sequestered from the turmoil and traffic in the historic shadows of its beautiful park, stands " Holland House," a. picturesque Elizabethan pile, whose walls can wake the echoes of political intrigues and of many celebrated m poetry, painting, and philosophy. For nearly two and a-half centuries "Holland House" has been the favourite lveort of wits and beauties, of scholars, painters, poets, and statesmen. In this delightful circle every talent, every accomplishment, every art, every science had its place. Here flourished an AngloSaxon Salon, brilliant and inspiring. . . . . The last debate was discussed in one corner raid the last comedy in another; while Wilkie gazed with admiration on Reynolds' Baretti; while Mackintosh turned over Thomas Aquinas to verify a quotation; while Talleyrand related his conversation with Barras at the Luxembourg, or His ride with Lannes over the fields- '.'.» Austerlitz.

" Holland House," says Macaular, " can boast of a greater number of inmates, distinguished in political and literary history, than any other private dwelling in England." .. ,

Here lived Addison, in the middle of the eighteenth century, after his marriage with the Countess Dowager of Holland and Warwick. And there is a tale told of Addison's escape from his termagant Countess when he walked to the White Horse Inn, and there " enjoyed his favourite disha fillet of veal—his bottle, anil, .perhapsa friend." Addison died in " Holland House," having addressed to the dissolute Earl of Warwick thesf solemn words: " I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian can die." ;

i In this "brave old house" lived Charles I .J-ii».v4 Fox, sou tbctiCTt .Lord Hollands and the greatest debater; it is said, that the world has ever heard. ... In the quaint old garden, near an arbour, can be i read this couplet:

Here Roger* sat. and here forever dwell With me those " Pleasures" which he sang ho well.

A vague, romantic atmosphere, " trailing clouds of glory," envelops the places of base metal, indeed, is the soul that lies unmoved in their contemplation. So too must you feel when you stand in the shadow of the house in Salisbury Square where Samuel Richardson wrote "Pamela" and printed "Clarissa Harlowe" and his other books—for here the modern English novel had its birth.

And down Holborn, sordidly commercial as it is to-dav, tread softly, those who love and live, for* here is hallowed ground. In a tragic garret in Brooke-street died the boy poet, Chatterton. Penniless, -starving, too proud to eat the meal his landlady offered him, he locked himself in his garret, lore up his later poems, and poisoned himself with arsenic. Rich in romance, in the tinsel triumph and the grim tragedy of {lie Game of Life are the squares of London. . . . In j Berkeley Square—still fashionable—the great Lord Clive, creator of our Indian Empire, slandered and censured and sunk in the " Slough of Despond" and of opiumindulgence, committed suicide with a razor. His house, now the residence of his descendant, the Earl of Powis, is the only London mansion whose hall-door bears the owners name engraved on a brass platea custom once very popular with aristocratic residents, but now confined to members of the professions. On many doors the quaint iron-work and the torch-extinguishers remain as eloquent reminders of the past. In Cavendish Square lived Romney, and when the rivalry between him and Sir I Joshua Rcynolds'was at its height the latter used to refer to him as " the man in Cavendish Square." I Leicester Square, now a harlequinade of | motley streets, is the most historically interesting of all. Here, in cycles of change, have lived Royalty, plutocracy, Bohemia. The square derives its name from Leicester House—"the pouting place of Princes"— so called when George 11. (then Prince of Wales), having quarrelled with his father, set up an■ opposition court; an example dutifully followed -bv his son Frederick, father of George 111. Here, also, stood "Saville House," where Peter the Great was entertained in 1698. . . * • Here William* Hogarth had his studio and breathed his last; and after his death his house was occupied by Kosciusko, the Polish patriot, and, later, by the Countess of Giuccioli, beloved of Byron. The most celebrated resident of Portman Square was that very original woman, Mrs. Montague. Here the author of the " Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespere" had her literary breakfasts and her " Bluestocking Parties," and here, on May Day, she entertained the chimney sweeps, and here she died In 1800. . . . From this j quarter we draw the origin of the term " Blue-stocking," now slowly receding in these suffragette days into the limbo of the past. This society originally consisted of Mrs. Montague, Mrs. Vesey, Mrs. Carter, Lord Lyttelton, Admiral Boscawen, Horace Walpole, and Mr. Stillingfleet. To" the latter this constellation of talent owed the whimsical appellation of " Bas-bleu." For Mr. Stillingfleet being somewhat of a humorist in his habits and manners, .and negligent in his dress, literally wore blue stockings. So scintillating was his conversation that his absence at any time was felt to be a great loss, so that the remark became common, "We can do nothing without the Blue-stockings!" Hence the meetings of these brilliant friends were' styled "The Blue-stocking Club" and the ladies who attended them "blue-stockings." Thus by svmbol a cult was created. . . Dr. Johnson often joined them, and the" lively Miss Monckton, afterwards Countess of Cork, was the last brilliant spark. Red Lion Square, so named after a famous Holborn hostelry, was the home of the benevolent and somewhat eccentric Jonas Hanway. He should be called the " Father of the Umbrella," for he was the first man who ventured to walk the streets of London with an umbrella over his head, and after persevering for some. 30 years, despite the jeers of pedestrians and of hackney-coachmen, he lived to eec his -own

practice generally adopted. . . . He was, indeed,' an intrepid pioneer, a courageous innovator, nobly deserving the tablet to his memory in Westminster Abbey, among heroes of less and greater courage. To-day imagination fails in picturing the Londoner without his umbrella; he seems to have been born with it, a sort of prehensile attachment, like the tail of our common Simian ancestor.

Jonas Hanway was also a devotee of the art of conversation. Would he were reincarnated here and now! The principal rooms in his house were most interestingly decorated with emblematical devices and pictorial suggestions, in order "to relieve the vacuum in social intercourse Bridge, you will see, was yet undiscovered. Like Airs. Montague, he, too, was an unwearying friend to chimney-sweeps. He also befriended and gave generously to pauper infanta and unfortunates, and was the first to advocate solitary confinement and milder punishments for prisoners. A many-sided, very human man. And so do old houses and localities, with their storied associations, grown real and revivified; lure you in London. . . . Come, let us pierce into the past, jumping th? mere chronological trifle oi six centuries, and traverse the places made memorable by Chaucer, father of English poetry, and "the well of English undefiled." . . _• Thus is he labelled, hut to the modern his rhymed tales need to be read with a glossary and bant brows. Chaucer wrote in the dialect of the south-east midlands— that is, of London— this in the course of time became the literary language of London. . . . .The mutations of our speech can scarcely be said to have left Chaucer's well of (archaic) English imdefiled."

Crowing London Bridge, you find yourself in grimy Southwark, and here, down the Borough* High-street, is the site of the old "Tabard Inn," whence the Canterbury Pilgrims, as described by Chaucer, set out. As late as 1602, it is recorded, a sign swung on a beam across the wad bore this inscription: "This is the hostelry where Sir Jeffry Chaucer and the nine-and-twenty pilgrims lav in their journey to Canterbury, Anno 1383." f .

Near by, across intersecting busy streets, stands Southwark Cathedral, the, finest mediaeval church in London after Westminster Abbey its interesting records of more than a thousand years are interwoven with rnanv literary reminiscences. Gower, Chaucer, Bunvan, Goldsmith, and Johnson were intimately connected with this parish and church. A glorious stained glass window commemorates Geoffrey Chaucer— bard and scholar, soldier and courtier— middle panel depicting the Canterbury Pilgrims setting out from the old Tabard Inn for the 6hrine of St. Thomas. . . . St, Saviour's Cathedral, Southwark, is truly classic ground; around and within its walls cluster literary associations of the deepest interest, its proudest memory being that of William Shakespere. Chronicles state he resided near the Bear Garden in Southwark; and here, too, stood the Globe Theatre, where the Immortal William began his dramatic career by holding the horses of gentlemen. The dramatic series of stained-glass windows is a unique possession which no other church in the world can show. These five windows, beautiful in ! workmanship and full of inspiration to the beholder, have been placed in the Cathedral in honour of its distinguished parishioners -Shakespere, Massinger, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Alleyn: brilliant exponents of the drama in "the spacious days of great Elizabeth" and James I. So might one multiply the local© of literarv pilgrimages to "the cradle of great minds'and the mausoleums of their earthly tenement. . . . Their -ardent spirits make a mighty appeal. Pausing in their shadow, to-day. a detached ;„ yet reverent modern, vou a/e the wiser, t lie * loftier, '\M richer in thought—the heir of all the Sages! ■ ' ' ■ ":