Old and New London, A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. vol I
Thornbury, Walter
1872-78
Fleet Street (Northern Tributaries--continued).
Fleet Street (Northern Tributaries--continued).
[extra_illustrations.1.92.1] , originally a town house of the Lords Clifford, ancestors of the Earls of Cumberland, given to them by Edward II., was let to the students of law in the eighteenth year of King Edward III., at a time when might was too often right, and hard knocks decided legal questions oftener than deed or statute. Harrison the regicide was in youth clerk to an attorney in , but when the Civil War broke out he rode off and joined the Puritan troopers. | |
is the oldest Inn in Chancery. There was formerly, we learn from Mr. Jay, an office there, out of which were issued writs, called the appointment of which office was in the gift of the senior judge of the Queen's Bench. The Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord Chelmsford both at time practised in the County Court, purchased their situations for large sums, and afterwards sold them.
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The George Dyer mentioned by Mr. Jay was not the author of but that eccentric and amiable old scholar sketched by Charles Lamb in Dyer was a poet and an antiquary, and edited for Valpy nearly all the volumes of the Delphin Classics. Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually settled down in the monastic solitude of to compose verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour in into the , and was then fished out and restored , Lamb was never tired of telling. In the latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died in . | |
Coke, that great luminary of English jurisprudence, resided at for a year, and then entered himself at the Inner Temple. Coke, it will be remembered, conducted the prosecutions of both Essex and Raleigh; in both cases he was grossly unfeeling to fallen great men. | |
[extra_illustrations.1.93.4] [extra_illustrations.1.93.1] is memorable as being the place where [extra_illustrations.1.93.5] and other wise and patient judges sat, after the Great Fire of , to adjudicate upon the claims of the landlords and tenants of burned houses, and prevent future lawsuits. The difficulty of discovering the old boundaries, under the mountains of ashes, must have been great; and thick folio volumes of decisions, now preserved in the , tell of many a legal headache in [extra_illustrations.1.93.3] . | |
A very singular custom, and probably of great antiquity, prevails after the dinners at . The society is divided into sections--the Principal and Aules, and the Juniors or When the meal is over, the chairman of the Kentish Men, standing up at the Junior table, bows gravely to the Principal, takes from. the hand of a servitor standing by small rolls of bread, silently dashes them times on the table, and then pushes them down to the further end of the board, from whence they are removed. Perfect silence is preserved during this mystic ceremony, which some antiquary who sees deeper into millstones than his brethren thinks typical of offerings to Ceres, who taught mankind the use of laws and originated those peculiar ornaments of civilisation, their expounders, the lawyers. | |
In the hall is preserved an old oak folding case, containing the rules of the institution, now almost defaced, and probably of the reign of Henry VIII. The hall casement contains armorial glass with the bearings of Baptist Hicks, Viscount Campden, & c. | |
Robert Pultock, the almost unknown author of that graceful story, from whose flying women Southey drew his poetical notion of the Glendoveer, or flying spirit, in his wild poem of lived in this Inn, paced on its terrace, and mused in its garden. says Coleridge (in his ),
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The name of the author of was discovered only a few years ago. In the year Mr. Nicol, the printer, sold by auction a number of books and manuscripts in his possession, which had formerly belonged to the well-known publisher, Dodsley; and in arranging them for sale, the original agreement for the sale of the manuscript of by the author, to Dodsley, was discovered. From this document it appears that Mr. Pultock received , copies of the work, and --i.e., a set of proof impressions of the fanciful engravings that professed to illustrate the edition of the work--as the price of the entire copyright. This curious document had, been sold afterwards to John Wilkes, Esq., M.P. | |
Inns of Chancery, like , were originally law schools, to prepare students for the larger Inns of Court. | |
[extra_illustrations.1.94.1] did not derive its name from the manufacture of Newgate fetters. Stow, who died early in the reign of James I., calls it from the Norman-French word (idle person, loafer), perhaps analogous to the even less complimentary modern French word blackguard. Mr. Jesse, however, derives the word from the Norman (defaulter), asif the lane had once been a sanctuary for skulking debtors. In either case the derivation is somewhat ignoble, but the inhabitants have long since lived it down. Stow says it was once a mere byway leading to gardens ( If men of the Bobadil and Pistol character ever did look over the garden-gates and puff their Trinidado in the faces of respectable passers-by, the lane at least regained its character later, when poets and philosophers condescended to live in it, and persons of considerable consequence rustled their silks and trailed their velvet along its narrow roadway. | |
During the Middle Ages slumbered, but it woke up on the breaking out of the Civil War, and in became unpleasantly celebrated as the spot where Waller's plot disastrously terminated. | |
In the year of the war between King and Parliament, the Royal successes at Bath, Bristol, and Cornwall, as well as the partial victory at Edgehill, had roused the moderate party and chilled many lukewarm adherents of the Puritans. The distrust of Pym and his friends soon broke out into a reactionary plot, or, more probably, plots, in or both of which [extra_illustrations.1.94.2] , was dangerously mixed up. The chief conspirators were [extra_illustrations.1.94.3] , the former Waller's brother-in-law, a gentleman living in , near the end of , and a secretary to the Commissioners of the Queen's Revenues; the latter an eminent citizen, well known on Change. Many noblemen and Cavalier officers and gentlemen had also a whispering knowledge of the ticklish affair. The projects of these men, or of some of the more desperate, at least, were--() to secure the king's children; () to seize [extra_illustrations.1.94.4] and other members of Parliament specially hostile to the king; () to arrest the Puritan Lord Mayor, and all the sour-faced committee of the City Militia; () to capture the outworks, forts, magazines, and gates of the Tower and City, and to admit Cavaliers sent from Oxford by a pre-arranged plan; () to resist all payments imposed by Parliament for support of the armies of the Earl of Essex. Unfortunately, just as the white ribbons were preparing to tie round the arms of the conspirators, to mark them on the night of action, a treacherous servant of Mr. Tomkins, of , overheard Waller's plans from behind a convenient arras, and disclosed them to the angry Parliament. In a cellar at Tomkins's the soldiers who rummaged it found a commission sent from the king by Lady Aubigny, whose husband had been recently killed at Edgehill. | |
Tomkins and Challoner were hung at the end of . On the ladder, Tomkins said :--
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Challoner was equally fatal against Waller, and said, when at the same giddy altitude as Tomkins, & c. | |
Waller had a very narrow escape, but he extricated himself with the most subtle skill, perhaps secretly aided by his kinsman, Cromwell. He talked of his of his repentance, of the danger of letting the army try a member of the House. As Lord Clarendon says: In the meantime he bribed the Puritan preachers, and listened with humble deference to their prayers for his repentance. He bent abjectly before the house; and eventually, with a year's imprisonment and a fine of , obtained leave to retire to France. Having spent all his money in Paris, Waller at last gained permission from Cromwell to return to England. says Clarendon, The body of the unlucky Tomkins was buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, . | |
According to Peter Cunningham, that shining light of the Puritan party in the early days of Cromwell, was a leather-seller in , having a house, either at the same time or later, called the near Crane Court, at which place his son, a great speculator and builder, afterwards resided. Barebone (probably Barbon, of a French Huguenot family) was of those gloomy religionists who looked on surplices, plum-porridge, theatres, dances, Christmas pudding, and homicide as equally detestable, and did his best to shut out all sunshine from that long, rainy, stormy day that is called life. He was at the head of that fanatical, tenderconscienced Parliament of which Cromwell convened from among the elect in London, after untoward Sir Harry Vane had been expelled from at the muzzles of Pride's muskets. Of Barebone, also, and his crochety, impracticable fellows, Cromwell had soon enough; and, in despair of all aid but from his own brain and hand, he then took the title of Lord Protector, and became the most inflexible and ablest monarch we have ever had, or indeed ever hope to have. Barebone is heard of in local history as preaching in , together with Mr. Greene, a felt-maker, at a conventicle in , a place always renowned for its heterodoxy. The thoughtless Cavaliers, who did not like long sermons, and thought all religion but their own hypocrisy, delighted in gaunt Barebone's appropriate name, and made fun of him in those ribald ballads in which they consigned rednosed Noll, the brewer, to the reddest and hottest portion of the unknown world. At the Restoration, when all was [extra_illustrations.1.95.1] , the street boys, always on the strongest side, broke poor Barebone's windows, though he had been constable and commoncotincilman, and was a wealthy leather-seller to boot. But he was not looked upon as of the regicide or extreme dangerous party, and a year afterwards attended a vestry-meeting unmolested. After the Great Fire he came to the Appeal Court about his house, which had been burnt over the heads of his tenants, and eventually he rebuilt it. | |
In Irving's there is a curious account, taken from an old pamphlet entitled
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The tumult alluded to is thus described:
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of the pleasantest memories of is that which connects it with the schooldays of that delightful essay-writer, Charles Lamb. He himself, in of Hone's chatty books, has described the school, and Bird, its master, in his own charming way. | |
Both Lamb and his sister, says Mr. Fitzgerald, in his Memoir of Lamb, went to a school where Starkey had been usher about a year before they came to it--a room that looked into Bird is described as an who taught mathematics, which was no more than
Bird and Cook, he says, were the masters. Bird had He then describes the ferule--
This is in Lamb's most delightful vein. So, too, with other incidents of the school, especially Lamb recollected even his copy- and could look back with In the evening was a short attendance of girls, to which Miss Lamb went, and she recollected the theatricals, | |
97 | and even being performed by the young gentlemen.
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The Starkey mentioned by Lamb was a poor, crippled dwarf, generally known at Newcastle in his old age as the butt of the street-boys and the pensioner of benevolent citizens. In , when he had been an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, Newcastle, for years, the poor old ex-usher of the school wrote a humble little pamphlet of only pages, upon which Hone good-naturedly wrote an article which educed Lamb's pleasant postscript. Starkey, it appears, had been usher, not in Lamb's own time, but in that of Mary Lamb's, who came after her brother had left. She describes Starkey running away on occasion, being brought back by his father, and sitting the remainder of the day with his head buried in his hands, even the most mischievous boys respecting his utter desolation. | |
That clever but mischievous advocate of divine right and absolute power, [extra_illustrations.1.97.1] | |
| was lodging in when he published his He was not there, however, in , at the Restoration, since we are told that on that occasion he was standing at the door of Salisbury House, the mansion of his kind and generous patron, the Earl of Devonshire; and that the king, formerly Hobbes's pupil in mathematics, nodded to his old tutor. A short duodecimo sketch of Hobbes may not be uninteresting. This sceptical philosopher, hardened into dogmatic selfishness by exile, was the son of a Wiltshire clergyman, and he saw the light the year of the Armada, his mother being prematurely confined during the panic of the Spanish invasion. Hobbes, with that same want of self-respect and love of independence that actuated Gay and Thomson, remained his whole life a tolerated pensioner of his former pupil, the Earl of Devonshire; bearing, no doubt, in his time many rebuffs; for pride will be proud, and rich men require wisdom, when in their pay, to remember its place. Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for, Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound translation of He sat at | |
98 | the feet of Galileo and by the side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in he associated with Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with honoursby Cosmo de Medici. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools he lost on Parnassus. His translation of Homer is tasteless and contemptible. In mathematics, too, he was dismounted by Wallis:and others. Personally he had weaknesses. He was afraid of apparitions, he dreaded assassination, and had a fear that Burnet and the bishops would burn him as a heretic. His philosophy, though useful, as Mr. Mill says, in expanding free thought and exciting inquiry, was based on selfishness. Nothing can be falser and more detestable than the maxims of this sage of the Restoration and of reaction. He holds the natural condition of man to be a state of war--a war of all men against all men; might making right, and the conqueror trampling down all the rest. The civil laws, he declares, are the only standards of good or evil. The sovereign, he asserts, possesses absolute power, and is not bound by any compact with the people (who pay him as their head servant). Nothing he does can be wrong. The sovereign has the right of interpreting Scripture; and he thinks that Christians are bound to obey the laws of an infidel king, even in matters of religion. He sneers at the belief in a future state, and hints at materialism. These monstrous doctrines, which even Charles II. would not fully sanction, were naturally battered and bombarded by Harrington, Dr. Henry More, and others. Hobbes was also vehemently attacked by that disagreeable Dr. Fell, the subject of the well-known epigram,--
who rudely called Hobbes The philosopher of , who was short-sighted enough to deride the early efforts of the Royal Society, though they were founded on the Strict inductive Baconian theory, seems to have been a vain man, loving paradox rather than truth, and desirous of founding, at all risks, a new school of philosophy. The Civil War had warped him; solitary thinking had turned him into a cynical dogmatiser. He was timid as Erasmus; and once confessed that if he was cast into a deep pit, and the devil should put down his hot cloven foot, he would take hold of it to draw himself out. This was not the metal that such men as Luther and Latimer were made of; but it served for the Aristotle of Rochester and Buckingham. A wit of the day proposed as Hobbes's epitaph the simple words,
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Hobbes's professed rule of health was to dedicate the morning to his exercise and the afternoon to his studies., At his rising, therefore, he walked out and climbed any hill within his reach; or, if the weather was not dry, he fatigued himself within doors by some exercise or other, in order to perspire, recommending that practice upon this opinion, that an old man had more moisture than heat, and therefore by such motion heat was to be acquired and moisture expelled. After this he took a comfortable breakfast, then went round the lodgings to wait upon the earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable strangers, paying some short addresses to all of them. He kept these rounds till about o'clock, when he had a little dinner provided for him, which he ate always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after dinner he retired to his study, and had his candle, with or pipes of tobacco, laid by him; then, shutting his door, he fell to smoking, thinking, and writing for several hours. | |
At a small coal-shed (just of those black bins still to be seen at the south-west end) in , Dr. Johnson's friend, Levett, the poor apothecary, met a woman of bad character, who duped him into marriage. The whole story, Dr. Johnson used to say, was as marvellous as any page of Lord Macaulay, in his highlycoloured and somewhat exaggerated way, calls Levett Levett, however, was neither a quack nor a doctor, but an honest man and an apothecary, and the list of his patients is entirely hypothetical. This simple-hearted, benevolent man was persuaded by the proprietress of the coal-shed that she had been defrauded had to lie close to avoid the gaol. Not long afterwards his amiable wife ran away from him, and, being taken up for picking pockets, was tried at the , where she defended herself, and was acquitted. Dr. Johnson then, touched by Levett's misfortunes and goodness, took him to his own home at Bolt Court. | |
It was in a house on the east side of this lane, looking into Fleur-de-Lys Court, that (in ) | |
99 | Elizabeth Brownrigge, midwife to the St. Dunstan's workhouse and wife of a house-painter, cruelly illused her female apprentices. Mary Jones, of these unfortunate children, after being often beaten, ran back to the Foundling, from whence she had been taken. On the remaining , Mary Mitchell, the wrath of the avaricious hag now fell with redoubled severity. The poor creature was perpetually being stripped and beaten, was frequently chained up at night nearly naked, was scratched, and her tongue cut with scissors. It was the constant practice of Mrs. Brownrigge to fasten the girl's hands to a rope slung from a beam in the kitchen, after which this old wretch beat her or times in the same day with a broom or a whip. The moanings and groans of the dying child, whose wounds were mortifying from neglect; aroused the pity of a baker opposite, who sent the overseers of the parish to see the child, who was found hid in a buffet cupboard. She was taken to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and soon died. Brownrigge was at once arrested; but Mrs. Brownrigge and her son, disguising themselves in Rag Fair, fled to Wandsworth, and there took lodgings in a chandler's shop, where they were arrested. The woman was tried at the sessions, and found guilty of murder. Mr. Silas Told, an excellent Methodist preacher, who attended her in the condemned cell, has left a curious, simplehearted account of her behaviour and of what he considered her repentance. She a great deal of religion, and stood much on the goodness of her past life. The mob raged terribly as she passed through the streets on her way to Tyburn. The women especially screamed, and threw stones and mud, pitiless in their hatred. After execution her corpse was thrust into a hackney-coach and driven to Surgeons' Hall for dissection; the skeleton is still preserved in a London collection. The cruel hag's husband and son were sentenced to months' imprisonment. A curious old drawing is still extant, representing [extra_illustrations.1.99.1] . She wears a large, broad-rimmed gypsy hat, tied under her chin, and a cape; and her long, hard face wears a horrible smirk of resigned hypocrisy. Canning, in of his bitter banters on Southey's republican odes, writes,--
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In (an offshoot of ), in - (Queen Anne), at the house of his father, a master tailor, was born a very small poet, Paul Whitehead. This poor satirist and worthless man became a Jacobite barrister and protégé of Bubb Doddington and the Prince of Wales and his Leicester Fields Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the . He appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, thatheld its obscene and blasphemous orgies at Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a villa on Twickenham Common, where Hogarth used to visit him. Ii Whitehead is ever remembered, it will be only for that splash of vitriol that Churchill threw in his face, when he wrote of the turncoat,-- It was this Whitehead, with Carey, the surgeon of the Prince of Wales, who got up a mock procession, in ridicule of the Freemasons' annual cavalcade from to Haberdashers' Hall. The ribald procession consisted of shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps, in carts drawn by asses, followed by a mourning-coach with horses, each of a different colour. The City authorities very properly refused to let them pass through , but they waited there and saluted the Masons. Hogarth published a print of which is coarse, and even dull. The Prince of Wales, with more good sense than usual, dismissed Carey for this offensive buffoonery. Whitehead bequeathed his heart to Earl Despenser, who buried it in his mausoleum with absurd ceremonial. | |
At , formerly -, , lived that very indifferent poet but admirable miniature-painter of Charles II.'s time, Flatman. He was a briefless barrister of the Inner Temple, and resided with his father till the period of his death. Anthony Wood tells us that having written a scurrilous ballad against marriage, beginning,-- his comrades serenaded him with the song on his wedding-night. Rochester wrote some vigorous lines on Flatman, which are not unworthy even of Dryden himself,--
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We find Dr. Johnson quoting these lines with approval, in a conversation in which he suggested that Pope had partly borrowed his from Flatman. | |
says Smith, in his
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This Moravian chapel was of the original conventicles where Divine worship was permitted. [extra_illustrations.1.100.1] preached here in , and Wesley and Whitefield also struck great blows at the devil in this pulpit, where Zinzendorfs followers afterwards prayed and sang their fervent hymns. | |
Count Zinzendorf, the poet, theologian, pastor, missionary, and statesman, who gave the Moravian body a vital organisation, and who preached in to the most tolerant class of all Protestants, was born in Dresden in . is ancestors, originally from Austria, had been Crusaders and Counts of Zinzendorf. of the Zinzendorfs had been among the earliest converts to Lutheranism, and became a voluntary exile for the faith. The count's father was of the Pietists, a sect protected by the king of Prussia, the father: of Frederick the Great. The founder of the Pietists laid special stress on the doctrine of conversion by a sudden transformation of the heart and will. It was a young Moravian missionary to Georgia who induced Wesley to embrace the vital doctrine of justification by faith. or a long time there was a close kinsmanship maintained between Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the Moravians; but eventually Wesley pronounced Zinzendorf as verging on Antinomianism, while Zinzendorf objected to Wesley's doctrine of sinless perfection. In Zinzendorf gave an asylum to families of persecuted Moravian brothers, and built houses for them on a spot he called Hernhut ( ), a marshy tract in Saxony, near the main road to Zittau. These simple and pious men were Taborites, a section of the old Hussites, who had renounced obedience to the Pope and embraced the Vaudois doctrines. This was the formation of the Moravian sect. | |
says [extra_illustrations.1.100.3] , The chapel in which Baxter officiated in is that between Nevil's Court and , once occupied by the Moravians. It appears to have existed, though perhaps in a different form, before the Great Fire of London. Turner, who was the minister, was a very active man during the plague. He was ejected from Sunbury, in Middlesex, and continued to preach in till towards the end of the reign of Charles II., when he removed to . Baxter carried on the Tuesday morning lecture till the . The Church which then met in it was under the care of Mr. Lobb, whose predecessor had been Thankful Owen, president of College, Oxford. Ejected by the commissioners in , he became a preacher in . says Calamy,
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At No. , is an Independent Chapel, whose minister was Dr. Thomas Goodwin, - --troublous times for Dissenters. Goodwin had been a pastor in Holland and a favourite of Cromwell. The Protector made him of his commissioners for selecting preachers, and he was also resident of Magdalen College, Oxford. When Cromwell became sick unto death, Goodwin boldly prophesied his recovery, and when the great man died, inspite of him, he is said to have exclaimed, which is no doubt a Cavalier calumny. On the Restoration, the Oxford men showed Goodwin the door, and he retired to the seclusion of . He seems to have been a good scholar and an eminent Calvinist divine, and he left on Puritan shelves ponderous folio volumes of his works. The present chapel, says Mr. Noble, dates from | |
101 | , and the pastor is the Rev. John Spurgeon, the father of the eloquent Baptist preacher, the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. |
The disgraceful disorder of the national records had long been a subject of regret among English antiquaries. There was no certainty of finding any required document among such a mass of ill-stored, dusty, unclassified bundles and rollsmany of them never opened since the day King John sullenly signed Magna Charta. We are a great conservative people, and abuses take a long time ripening before they seem to us fit for removal, so it happened that this evil went on several centuries before it roused the attention of Parliament, and then it was talked over and over, till in something was at last done. It was resolved to build a special storehouse for national records, where the various collections might be united under roof, and there be arranged and classified by learned men. The stone of a [extra_illustrations.1.101.5] was therefore laid by Lord Romilly on , and slowly and surely, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, the walls grew till, in the summer of , all the new Search Offices were formally opened, to the great convenience of all students of records. The architect, Sir James Pennethorne, has produced a stately building, useful for its purpose, but not very remarkable for picturesque light and shade, and tame, as all imitations of bygone ages, adapted for bygone uses, must ever be. The number of records stored within this building can only be reckoned by These are Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy's own words. There, in cramped bundles and rolls, dusty as papyri, lie charters and official notices that once made mailed knights tremble and proud priests shake in their sandals. Now--the magic gone, the words powerless--they lie in their several binns in strange companionship. Many years will elapse before all these records of State and Government documents can be classified; but the small staff is industrious, Sir Thomas Hardy is working, and in time the Augean stable of crabbed writings will be cleansed and ranged in order. The useful and accurate calendars of Everett Green, John Bruce, & c., are books of reference invaluable to historical students; and the old chronicles published by order of Lord Romilly, so long Master of the Rolls and Keeper of the Records, are most useful mines for the Froudes and Freemans of the future. In time it is hoped that all the episcopal records of England will be gathered together in this great treasurehouse, and that many of our English noblemen will imitate the patriotic generosity of Lord Shaftesbury, in contributing their family papers to the same Gaza in . Under the concentrated gaze of learned eyes, family papers (valueless and almost unintelligible to their original possessors), often reveal very curious and important facts. Mere lumber in the manor-house, fit only for the butterman, sometimes turns to leaves of gold when submitted to such microscopic analysis. It was such a gift that led to the discovery of the Locke papers among the records of the nobleman above mentioned. The pleasant rooms of the Record Office are open to all applicants; nor is any reference or troublesome preliminary form required from those wishing to consult Court rolls or State papers over years old. Among other priceless treasures the [extra_illustrations.1.101.2] contains the original, uninjured, [extra_illustrations.1.101.3] , [extra_illustrations.1.101.1] compiled by order of William, the conqueror of England. It is written in a beautiful clerkly hand in close fine character, and is in a perfect state of preservation. It is in volumes, the covers of which are cut with due economy from the same skin of parchment. Bound in massive board covers, and kept with religious care under glass cases, the precious volumes seem indeed likely to last to the very break of doom. It is curious to remark that London only occupies some or pages. There is also preserved the original Papal Bull sent to Henry VIII., with a golden seal attached to it, the work of Benvenuto Cellini. The same collection contains the celebrated Treaty of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the initial portrait of Francis I. being beautifully illuminated and the vellum volume adorned by an exquisite gold seal, in the finest relievo, also by Benvenuto Cellini. The figures in this seal are so perfect in their finish, that even the knee-cap of of the nymphs is shaped with the strictest anatomical accuracy. The visitor should also see the interesting Inventory Books relating to the foundation of Henry VII.'s chapel. | |
The national records were formerly bundled up any how in the Rolls Chapel, the White Tower, the Chapter House, , Carlton Hide in , the State Paper Office, and the Prerogative Will Office. No knew where anything was. They were unnoticed--mere dusty lumber, in fact--useless to men or printers' devils. Hot-headed Hugh Peters, during the Commonwealth, had, in his hatred of royalty, proposed to make great heap of them and burn them up in . In that way he hoped to clear the ground of many mischievous traditions. his desperate act of Communism that toughheaded old lawyer, [extra_illustrations.1.101.4] , opposed tooth and nail. | |
102 | In he wrote a pamphlet, which he called and in this work he very nobly epitomizes the value of these treasures; indeed, there could not be found a more lucid syllabus of the contents of the present Record Office than Prynne has there set forth. |
[extra_illustrations.1.102.1] and [extra_illustrations.1.102.2] were contemporaries, and lived, it is said, for some time opposite to each other in . morning the latter happened to call upon his brother bard about breakfasttime, but was told by the servant that his master was gone to breakfast with the Earl of Pembroke. said Otway, Accordingly he called about the same hour.
said Otway, and, actuated either by envy, pride, or disappointment, in a kind of involuntary manner, he took up a piece of chalk which lay on a table which stood upon the landing-place, near Dryden's chamber, and wrote over the door,-- The next morning, at breakfast, Dryden recognised the handwriting, and told the servant to go to Otway and desire his company to breakfast with him. In the meantime, to Otway's line of he added,-- When Otway arrived he saw that his line was linked with a rhyme, and being a man of rather | |
103 104 | petulant disposition, he took it in dudgeon, and, turning upon his heel, told Dryden
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A curious old book, a for malt worms, . George I., thus immortalises the patriotism of a tavern-keeper in :--
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Footnotes: [extra_illustrations.1.92.1] Clifford's Inn [extra_illustrations.1.93.4] The hall of Clifford's Inn [extra_illustrations.1.93.1] Gateway, Clifford's Inn [extra_illustrations.1.93.5] Sir Matthew Hale [extra_illustrations.1.93.3] Clifford's Inn [extra_illustrations.1.94.1] Fetter Lane [extra_illustrations.1.94.2] Waller, the poet [extra_illustrations.1.94.3] Tomkins and Challoner [extra_illustrations.1.94.4] Mr. Pym, Colonel Hampden [extra_illustrations.1.95.1] ablaze with bonfires to roast the Rumps [extra_illustrations.1.97.1] Hobbes of Malmesburby [extra_illustrations.1.99.1] Mrs. Brownrigge in the condemned cell [extra_illustrations.1.100.1] Baxter [extra_illustrations.1.100.3] Baxter [extra_illustrations.1.101.5] magnificent Gothic building [extra_illustrations.1.101.2] Record Office [extra_illustrations.1.101.3] Domesday Book [extra_illustrations.1.101.1] Celebration of the 800th Anniversary of Domesday Book [extra_illustrations.1.101.4] Prynne [extra_illustrations.1.102.1] Dryden [extra_illustrations.1.102.2] Otway |
