Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
by the spectacle of rotting and desiccated heads of traitors exposed here. They were tardy in the abolition of object-teaching in Christian England. There were solid oaken gates with real hinges and bars at Temple Gate. When the sovereign paid a visit to the city she was reminded of some agreeable passages between one of her predecessors and the London lords of trade, by finding these closed. Her pursuivant blew a trumpet; there was an exchange of question and reply; the oaken leaves swung back; the Lord Mayor presented his sword to our gracious and sovereign lady, the queen, who returned it to him with an affable smile, and the royal coach was suffered to pass under the Bar. More object-teaching!
From Temple Gate to Temple Gardens was a natural transition. These famous grounds formerly sloped down to the Thames, and were an airy, spacious promenade. Now, one smiles in reading that Suffolk found it a “more convenient” place for private converse than the “Temple Hall.” A talk between four gentlemen of the rank of Plantagenet, Suffolk, Somerset and Warwick, in the pretty plat of grass and flowers, fenced in by iron rails, would have eavesdroppers by the score, and the incident of plucking the roses be overlooked by the gossips of fifty tenement-houses. But the area, sadly circumscribed by the encroachments of business, is a sightly bit of green, intersected by gravel walks, and in the season enlivened by the flaming geraniums that not even London “blacks” can put out of countenance. We really saw rose-trees there in flower, the following August.
In one particular, and one only, the knowledge and zeal of our Scotchman were at fault in the course of our Bohemian expedition. I have said that Baedeker’s excellent “Hand-book for London” was in the printer’s hands just when we needed it most. Therefore we searched vainly in St. Paul’s Churchyard for Dr. Johnson’s Coffee-house, where Boswell hung upon his lumbering periods, as bees upon honeysuckle; for the site of the Queen’s Arms Tavern, also a resort of the literati in the time of the great Lexicographer. We were mortified at our ill-success, chiefly because we ascribed it to the very lame and imperfect descriptions of these places which were all we could offer the Average Britons of whom we made inquiry. We were in no such uncertainty as to the Chapter Coffee-house in Paternoster Row; Mrs. Gaskell had been there before us and left so broad a “blaze” we could hardly miss seeing it.
“Half-way up (the Row), on the left hand side, is the Chapter Coffee-house. It is two hundred years old, or so. … The ceilings of the small rooms were low, and had heavy beams running across them; the walls were wainscoted breast-high; the staircase was shallow, broad, and dark, taking up much space in the centre of the house. This, then, was the Chapter Coffee-house, which, a century ago, was the resort of all the booksellers and publishers; and where the literary hacks, the critics, and even the wits, used to go in search of ideas, or employment. This was the place about which Chatterton wrote, in those delusive letters he sent to his mother at Bristol, while he was starving in London. ‘I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there.’ Here he heard of chances of employment; here his letters were to be left.”
Here the Brontë sisters, visiting London upon business connected with “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” stayed for two days, resisting the invitation of their publisher to come to his house.
Charlotte’s biographer had gone on to draw for us with graphic pen a scene of later date:
“The high, narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row. The sisters, clinging together on the most remote window-seat, could see nothing of motion or of change in the grim, dark houses opposite, so near and close although the whole breadth of the Row was between. The mighty roar of London was round them, like the sound of an unseen ocean, yet every foot-fall on the pavement below might be heard distinctly in that unfrequented street.”
When we made known our purpose to the guide, who, by this time, had taken upon him the character of protector, likewise, he was puzzled but obedient. He got down at the mouth of the crooked Row and begged permission to do our errand.
“The horse is pairfectly quiet, and there’s quite a dreezle comin’ on.”
This was true. The fog that had seemed dry so long, was falling. The uneven, round stones were very wet. But why not drive down the street until we found the house we were looking for?
He rubbed his grizzled, sandy hair into a mop of perplexity.
“The way is but strait at the best, as ye may pairceive, leddies, and it wad be unco’ nosty to meet a cab, or, mayhap, a four-wheeler in some pairts.”
We primed him with minute directions and let him depart upon the voyage of discovery, while we leaned back under the projecting hood of the carriage, sheltered by it and the queer, wooden folding-doors above our knees, from the “dreezle,” and speculated why “Paternoster” Row should be near to and in a line with “Amen” and “Ave Maria” corners. What august processional had passed that way, and pausing at given stations to say an “Ave,” a “Paternoster,” a united “Amen,” left behind it names that would be repeated as long and ignorantly as the Cross of “Notre Chère Reine” and “La Route du Roi” are murdered into cockney English? That led to the telling of a dispute Caput had had one day with a cabman, who, by the way, had jumped from his box on the road to Hyde Park corner to say: “No, sir, we’re not at H’Apsley ’Ouse yet, sir! But I fancied it might h’interest the lady to know that the pavement we are a-drivin’ over at this h’identical minute, sir, h’is composed h’entirely of wood!”
“We have hundreds of miles of it in America, and wish you had it all!” retorted Caput, amused, but impatient. “Go on!”
Having seen Apsley and Stafford Houses, we bade the fellow take us to a certain number on Oxford Street. He declared there was no such street in the city, and jumped down from his seat to confirm his assertion out of the mouths of three or four other “cabbies” at a hackstand. A brisk altercation ensued, ended by Caput’s exhibition of an open guide-book and pointing to the name.
“Ho! hit’s Hugsfoot Street you mean!” cried the disgusted cockney.
As I finished the anecdote our Scot returned, crestfallen. He did not say we had sent him on a fool’s errand, but we began to suspect it ourselves when we undertook the quest in person. We were wrapped in waterproofs and did not mind the fine, soaking mist, except as it made the strip of flagging next the shops slippery, as with coal-oil. Paternoster Row retains its bookish character. Every second shop was a publisher’s, printer’s, or stationer’s. Everybody was civil. N. B.—Civility is a part of a salesman’s trade in England. But everybody stared blankly at our questions relative to the Chapter Coffee-house, although the very name fixed it in this locality. One and all said, first or last—“I really carn’t say!” and several observed politely that “it was an uncommon nasty day.” One added, “But h’indeed, at this season, we may look for nasty weather.”
One word about this pet adjective of the noble Briton of both sexes. It is quite another thing from the American word, spelled but not pronounced in the same way, and which, with us, seldom passes the lips of well-bred people. An English lady once told me that a hotel she had patronized was “very clean—neat as wax, in fact, and handsomely furnished, but a very-very nasty house!”
She meant, it presently transpired, that the fare was scant in quantity, and the landlord surly. Whatever is disagreeable, mean, unsatisfactory, from any cause whatsoever, is “nasty.” When they would intensify the expression they say “beastly,” and fold over the leaf upon the list of expletives.
We did not find our coffee-house, nor anybody who looked or spoke as if he ever heard of the burly Lichfield bear or his parasite, of Chatterton or Horace Walpole, much less of the Rowley MSS. or the sisters Brontë! Nor were we solaced for the disappointment by driving three miles through the mist to see The Tyburn Tree, to behold an upright slab, like a mile-stone, set upon the inner edge of the sidewalk at the western verge of Hyde Park. A very disconsolate slab, slinking against the fence as if ashamed of itself in so genteel a neighborhood, and of the notorious name cut into its face.
CHAPTER III.
Spurgeon and Cummings.