ROUND LONDON ON A HOLIDAY

Otago Witness, Issue 2623, 22 June 1904, Page 78

ROUND LONDON ON A HOLIDAY

Bx Constance Clyde.

It is the best — the only — time to see the aity as apart from its citizens who have swarmed to Hampstead Heath or still farther afield for the Easter hoilday.

In, these long, silent, half-empty streets one can walk side by side with the mighty dead without jostling agairut the blank, abstracted face of the twentieth centuiy. One may loiter in dark, sullen Bread street with Milton, or walk through sordid, workaday Holbom with the shade of that unhappy "marvellous boy" who here occupied the attic in which he was found selfmurdered. In Fleet street one is besieged iby shades of the knee-breech .period : b-ut Jaaturally an amorphous, untidy figure shoves all aside with scant ceremony. '' Come, let ,Tl3 walk down Fleet street," and Johnson Jeads the way, Goldsmith, not to mention JBoswell, following meekly behind. It would take a volume to give every association this narrow, unbeautiful- thoroughfare has with /these three names; but one must notice the Cheshire Cheese Tavern, where the '•author of "'Eassolas" and the writer of ■-" The Vicar of Wakefiald " met for the first ,'time. The doctor, to the surprise of everyone, was arrayed with some degree of neatners 'and due regard to the virtues of soap and ,water. He explained how, having heard that Goldsmith excused his own bad dressing on the score of th» master's sartorial deficiencies, he was determined on this cora^ion to set him a good example. Off Fle«t street, amongst other small branchings, is Shoe (Showell) lane, where long ago vs ere composed tho two immortal lines of which no one seems to remember the remainder : I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more, wrote the young and beautiful j)oet before departing for the war. However, Lucy to whom the lines were addressed loved sorneono else mare, for Lovelace returned only to find her fche bride of another, who neither fought nor wrote poetry, but merely stayed at home and bided his chance.

"A big house to lodge Christ in" was the ideal of England's youngest and gentlest monarch when Bridewell, an old palace, was transformed, into a woikhous-e in 1553. Could he have looked to the future as we to the past, and heard the criee, "Oh! good Sir Robert, knock," with which, when Sir Eobert Clayton was governor of the gaol, refractory prisoners under the lash would beseech him to bring his hammer down on the table as a signal for punishment to cease ! " Oh ! good Sir Robert, knock" was the taunt whispered in many an ex-prisoner's ear whea suspected of having seen the inside of Bridewell Prison in an unofficial capacity.

Assassinations, duels, intriguer are in the history of theso dark streets and allejs, where now is waged the sterner warfare of hard, incessant industrial strife. In the churches, where (aa Dickens expresses it) one breathes dead citizens from the fiagEtones at our feet, one can picture tho discovered murderer and the hunted criminal

flying to the altar rails and claiming sanctuary; but I better like to look 011 these newer institutions, such a3 the Peabody's Homes, and the various refuges and asylums frher© those that have broken the laws of competition and have fallen out of tho industrial march may claim sanctuary too and be as safo from the " lean wolf hunger as their ancestors from the bloodhounds of justioe.

For Demos luv= h.s ancestors 113 well as any lord of the manor ; and hi? ancestral seats, are they not Newgate, Clerkenwell. pjid every workhcu«o and gaol that London does not like to boast of! Certainly the worker has his own history in London. The recalcitrant noble .vac beheaded at th^ Tower; but th& humble sea, pirate was hung in chains at TVappuig Old Stair", and thus achieved an -equ..l s.'^oric.y.

South of Biockfriars BnJiC* ens co- :cs to the region of mean respectability; but with i background of historical a^ccations dealIng mostly Avith rel-'gion both of Cathohc *nd Puritan days. In a So-ithwark Surrey :hapol, for instance, 0..0 1* show 11 the placo uhoro Rowland Hill, tho fiimou& Noucou-

fonnist, dropped a Bible on someone snoring beneath him, with the words, "If you won't hear the Word of Gcd you shall feel it." They do not sleep in churches nowadays ; they have taken to the free libraries instead, where, frankly dirty and uncompromisingly a sloven, the London workman stretches his arms over equally dirty literature and breathes audibly till the librarian interferes. A dirty pane of glass separates the men members from the ladies' room, where women (also noi too clean) nod grubby bonnets over Fashion or the Lady's Field. However, these dreary places of amusement are not open on holidays. The powers that be (and it is to be hoped won't be long) ordain that it is better tho citizens should go to the publichouse.

Finsbury is a district that enjoys a little notoriety at the present moment o\i ing to the dissemination of Mormon doctrines in its Town Hall, which has been photographed extensively in consequence. The preacher is a descendant of Brig-ham Young, and his object is to allure England's suiplrs womanhood to Utah, where, in spite of observations to the contrary, polygamy sti'l seems to be the fashion. However, Finsbury mauhood objected, and nearly created a riot in its anti-Mormon demonstration the other day. As one walks through these streeis, ako half-empty this Eastor Monday, one wonders if these indignant Finsburyites are inspired by the tradition tl.at should make maiden celibacy particularly honoured in the district. I read in a volume dealing with old London that Finsbury got its name from a certain Count Fines, who went to the crusades, charging his daughters not to marry till he returned. The ladies obeyed, and, as their father never returned, remained single to the end. One became a nun; the other, as the phrase goes, "opened a well," to which women came from afar off to wa,;h. At length the King came back from the crusade.*, bringing the count's heart, he having fallen in battle; but the daughters still retained their celibacy, and the placo was named after them.

Coming towards the ciiy, within fight of the mystic grandeur of St. Paul's, one feels added to the old associations of the building that quite modern interest which attached to it since a twentieth-century flying machine circled almost round its dome not so long ago. Another attempt with this machine is to be made in a few weeks, ifc is paid. Whereat one's mind flies back to the legend of Bladud, the British prince, who is fabled to have discovered tEe healing waters of Bath. It is ako stated that he met his death throttgh trying to fly from his palace roof by means of a pair of wings that he himself had invented. Thus through London legend jostles history, and the past and the present meet at every turn.