Idle Hours in a Library. William Henry Hudson
Kepler, and Galileo, by the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus, Jenkinson, Willoughby, Drake. National feeling was strong; the national pulse beat high. Yet, in spite of Protestantism and an open Bible, it was essentially a pagan age; in spite of its Platonism and Euphuism, a coarse and sensual one. You had only to scratch the superficial polish to find the old savagery beneath. Your smiling and graceful courtier would discourse of Seneca and Aristotle, but he would relish the obscenest jest and act his part in the grossest intrigue. Your young gallant would turn an Italian sonnet, or “tune the music of an ever vain tongue,” but within an hour he might have been found in all the blood and filth and turmoil of the cockpit or the bear-ring. The unseemliest freedom prevailed throughout society—amidst the noble ladies in immediate attendance upon the queen, and thence all down the social scale. Laws were horribly brutal, habits revoltingly rude. All the powerful instincts of a fresh, buoyant, self-reliant, ambitious, robust, sensuous manhood had burst loose, finding expression now in wild extravagance, indulgence, animalism, now in great effort on distant seas, now in the mighty utterances of the drama; for these things were but different facets of the same national character. Still, with all its gigantic prodigality of energy, with all its untempered misuse of genius and power, the English Renaissance kept itself free from many of the worst features of the Spanish and Italian revivals. It was all very well for Benvenuto Cellini to call the English “wild beasts.” Deep down beneath the casuistry and Euphuism, beneath the artificiality and the glittering veneer, beneath the coarseness and the brutalism, there was ever to be found that which was lacking in the Southern character—a stern, hardy, tough-fibred moral sense, which in that critical period of disquietude and upheaval formed indeed the very sheet-anchor of the nation’s hopes. It must never be forgotten that it was this age of new-found freedom, and of that license which went with it like its shadow, that produced such types of magnificent manhood as Raleigh, strong “the fierce extremes of good and ill to brook”; as Spenser, sweetest and purest of poets and of men; as Sidney, whom that same Spenser might well describe as “the most noble and virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry”; as Shakspere, whom, all slanders notwithstanding, we, like his own close friends, still think and speak of as our “Gentle Will.”
Such, so far as we are able to sum them up in a few brief sentences, were some of the salient characteristics of the great age of the Virgin Queen—an age, as Dean Church has said, “of vast ambitious adventure, which went to sea, little knowing whither it went, and ill-provided with knowledge or instrument”; but an age of magnificent enterprise and achievement, none the less. And now it is for us to follow down into some of the details of their private, every-day existence the men and women who, to use a suggestive phrase of Goethe’s, were the citizens of this period, and whose little lives shared, no matter in how small and obscure a way, in the movements and destinies of the large world into which they were born.
Just a quarter of a century before Queen Elizabeth’s death, a proclamation was issued, reciting that her Majesty foresaw that “great and manifold inconveniences and mischiefs” were likely to arise “from the access and confluence of the people” to the metropolis, and making certain stringent provisions with a view to keeping down the population of the city. This enactment is useful as showing us that even at that early date—as later on, in the time of Smollett—the enormous growth of London was held to be matter for alarm. London was indeed increasing rapidly in extent, population, wealth, and power; and Lyly was hardly guilty of extravagance when, in his “Euphues,” he wrote of it as a place that “both for the beauty of building, infinite riches, variety of all things,” “excelleth all the cities of the world; insomuch that it may be called the storehouse or mart of all Europe.” Yet we are most of us probably unable without much effort to realize how different was the English metropolis of Elizabeth’s time from the metropolis of the present day.
We have to remember, in the first place, that the London with which we are now concerned was a walled city, and that the territory which lay within the walls—that is, the metropolis proper—represented but a very small portion of what is now included within the civic area. Newgate, Ludgate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, and Aldersgate, still mark out and perpetuate by their names the narrow lines of those protecting walls which held snug and secure the mere handful of folk of which London was then composed. At nine o’clock in the evening, when Bow-bell rang, and the voices of the other city churches took up the curfew-strain, the gates were shut for the night, and the citizens retired to their dwellings under the protection of armed watchmen who guarded their slumbers along the walls. Westward from Fleet Street and Holborn, beyond which so much of modern London lies, the city had not then penetrated.
Within and about the walls there were many “fair churches for divine service,” with old St. Paul’s in their midst—the Gothic St. Paul’s of the days before the great fire; and many prisons to help the churches in their philanthropic work. Open spaces were very numerous; trees were everywhere to be seen; fields invaded the most sacred strongholds of commercial activity; conduits and brooks (whereof Lamb’s Conduit Street to-day carries a nominal reminiscence) flowed through every part of the town. The narrow, straggling streets ran hither and thither with no very marked definity of aim; for county councils had not as yet come into existence, and metropolitan improvements were still hidden in the womb of time; and so unsanitary were the general conditions that they were seldom free from epidemic disease. Cheap, with its old cross just opposite the entrance to Wood Street, was a famous spot for trading of all kinds; but there were other localities which had their specialized activities. St. Paul’s, for instance, was the acknowledged quarter for booksellers, as indeed it has continued to be down to the present time. Houndsditch, like the Houndsditch of to-day, and Long Lane in Smithfield, abounded in shops for second-hand clothing—fripperies, as they were called. “He shows like a walking frippery,” says one of the characters in “The City Madam”; while it was in the latter place that Mistress Birdlime in “Westward Ho” speaks of “hiring three liveries.” In St. Martin’s-le-Grand clustered the foreign handicraftsmen of doubtful character, who manufactured copper lace and imitation jewellery; and Watling Street and Birchin Lane were the haunts of the tailors. Then, again, it was in Bucklersbury that the grocers and druggists most did congregate. “Go to Bucklersbury and fetch me two ounces of preserved melons,” says Mistress Tenterhook in “Westward Ho.” Fleet Lane and Pie Corner were so famous for their cook-shops that Anne in “The City Madam” might well exclaim, when the porters enter with their baskets of provisions, that they smell unmistakably of these localities; while to Panyer Alley repaired all true lovers of tripe. Even religious opinions had their special homes. Bloomsbury and Drury Lane, for example, were favorite haunts of Catholics; and the Puritans were particularly strong in Blackfriars. This explains the words put by Webster into the mouth of one of his characters: “We are as pure about the heart as if we dwelt amongst ’em in Blackfriars,” and Doll Common’s description of Face, in “The Alchemist,” as—
“A rascal, upstart, apocryphal captain,
Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust.”
And through all this jumble of wealth and dirt, away past the suburbs and into the open country beyond, ran “the famous River Thames”—the “great silent highway,” as it has been called—fed by the Fleet and other forgotten and now hidden streams, and bearing upon its majestic current its hundreds of watermen, its boats, its barges, and its swans. It was spanned by a single bridge, of which Lyly speaks enthusiastically in his “Euphues,” and which is described by the German traveller, Paul Hentzner, as “a bridge of stone, eight hundred feet in length, of wonderful work. It is supported,” this writer continues, “upon twenty piers of square stone, sixty feet high and thirty broad, joined by arches of about twenty feet diameter.” And he adds, touching in a brief sentence upon a characteristic of its structure which must seem particularly curious to modern readers: “The whole is covered on each side with houses, so disposed as to have the appearance of a continued street, not at all of a bridge.”
But if the difference between to-day and three centuries ago is striking enough within the city walls, still more striking does it become as we pass beyond the gates. Fleet Street, where Dr. Johnson was presently to enjoy watching the ceaseless ebb and flow of the great tide of human life, was still suburban; Chancery Lane, with its wide gardens on the eastern side and Lincoln’s Inn enclosure on