IHAVE so often insisted that East London must be regarded as a city of many crafts—the working-man’s city—that it may seem contradictory to call attention to another aspect. That part of East London with which we have been most concerned is the densely populated part lying north of the river and including all that part west of the river Lea as far north as Dalston, Clapton, and Hackney, and east of that river, including Bow, Stratford, Walthamstow, Wanstead, Forest Gate, Bromley West, and East Ham and Barking. It includes, in a word, very nearly all the ancient villages and hamlets whose names may be found upon the map. But there is a fringe, and there are extensions. When one emerges at last from streets which seem to have no end, when the nightmare of a world which is all streets, with never a field or an orchard or a hillside left, begins to break, when it is cleared away, as an ugly dream by the daylight, by the reappearance of trees and large gardens and wide roads, then we discover the fringe. Part of Stoke Newington, part of Stamford Hill, a small part of Tottenham, part of Snaresbrook, belong to the fringe. Here we get roads lined with trees, villas with trees in front gardens, modern churches built all after the same half-dozen patterns, in true proportions, correct and without inspiration; here we get windows filled with flowers, and here presently we get houses well apart and a wealth of creepers and of flowering shrubs; which means that the breath of the crowded City is left behind.

But there are further extensions; the suburbs of East London are not confined within the limits of the map of London; they stretch out far afield, they include Chigwell and Chingford and Theydon Bois, and all the villages round Epping Forest. Dotted about everywhere in this extension are stately houses with large gardens and grounds, the residences of the manufacturers and the employers, not those of the small trades of East London, where the master is often but one degree better off than the employee, but those of the factories and the works; theirs is the capital invested; theirs is the enterprise; theirs the wit and courage which have made them succeed; theirs is the wealth. This extension is a delightful place in early summer; it is full of trees; there are old churches, and there is “the” forest—the people of East London always speak of “the” forest, for to them there is no other. It is, also, a part of London very little visited; it is, to begin with, somewhat inaccessible; one who would visit it from the West End has to get first into the City. In the next chapter we will discourse on what may be seen by the curious who would explore the forest and its surroundings. Let us return to my group of villages.

To the American, and to most of my own people, the names of Stoke Newington, Hackney, Stepney, Mile End, and the rest are names and nothing else; they awaken no more memories than a list of Australian or American townships. Let me try to endow these names with associations; I would make them, if possible, venerable by means of their association with those who have gone before. The suburban life of London belongs essentially to the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In the former only the wealthy had their country, as well as their town, houses; in the latter there have been no town houses left in the City at all, and the whole of the people who every day carry on their business in the City have now their suburban residences.

The introduction and the development of the suburban life effected a revolution in the City. It destroyed the social side of the City by the simple process of driving out all the people. When the citizens lived over their offices and their shops they belonged to a highly sociable and gregarious City, its society having no kind of connection with the aristocratic side of the west, and its gregarious nature preserving due respect and distinction to City rank and position. Every man had his weekly club and his nightly tavern. Here, with his friends of the same street or the same ward, he discussed the affairs of the day. He was a politician of advanced and well-defined views; he confirmed, by many a commonplace uttered with solemnity, his own and his friends’ prejudices; the use of conversation, when men read nothing more than was provided by an elementary press, was mainly the development and the maintenance of healthy prejudice. This was all the amusement that the good man desired—how great was the interval between two of John Gilpin’s pleasure jaunts? “Twice ten tedious years!” Wonderful! To be sure, he had his City company, and its dinners were events to be remembered. The City madams had their card-parties; for the Élite there was the City Assembly. For those who wanted pleasure there were the gardens—Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone, Bagnigge Wells, any number of gardens.

The daily work, the business done on ’change, the counting-house, the shop, all this formed part and parcel of the family life; it was not cut off and separated as at present: from his counting-house the merchant went to his “parlor”—it was under the same roof—when dinner was called. And all the year round he slept under the same roof over his place of business.

A hundred and fifty years ago the people began to leave the City; the wealthiest merchants went first; then the less wealthy; finally the shopkeepers and the clerks; the private houses were converted into offices and warehouses and chambers; the old City life absolutely vanished. Everything disappeared; the club, the tavern, the card-parties, the assembly, the evenings at Vauxhall—all were swept away. The life of the City man was cut in two, one half belonging to his office in the City, the other to his suburban villa, with the night and three or four of the waking hours. He took breakfast at eight; he went off after breakfast, catching an early omnibus; he returned at six or seven; he dined; he sat for an hour or two; he went to bed. No life could be duller; of social intercourse the suburban resident had little or none; visiting was limited; at rare intervals there were evenings with a “little music”; dances were few and far between; the old circles were broken up and no new ones formed; the occupation and social position of neighbors were not known to each other. For amusements the girls had their slender stock of accomplishments; the sons, whenever they could, ran up to town and got into mischief; and the pÈre de famille, not knowing or suspecting the narrowness and the dullness of his life, solemnly sat after dinner with a book in his hand or took a hand at cribbage, and went to bed at ten. There were no theaters, no evening entertainments, no lectures even, no concerts, no talk of amusements. As the evangelical narrowness was widely spread over all the London suburbs, if a young man spoke of amusements he was asked if he could reconcile amusement with the working out of his own salvation. The church, or the chapel, was in itself the principal recreation of the ladies. They found in religious emotions the excitement and the interest which their narrow round of life failed to supply.

As for the theater, it was natural that, with such views as to amusement, it should be regarded with a shuddering horror. No young woman who respected herself would be seen at a theater. However, it was quite out of the question, simply because the theater was inaccessible.

Such has been the suburban life of London for a hundred years, so dull, so monotonous, so destitute of amusement. So lived the residents of Hackney, Clapton, and Stoke Newington before their quiet dullness was invaded by the overflowing wave—irresistible, overwhelming—of the working swarms.

This side of London life deserves to be studied more attentively; it accounts for a great many recent events and for some of the governing ideas of Londoners. This, however, is not the place; let it suffice to pay it the tribute of recognition.

It is now fast passing away. New forces are at work; the old suburban life is changing; the rural suburb has become a large town, with its central boulevards, shops, and places of resort; there are theaters springing up in all the suburbs; there are concerts of good music; there are art schools; there are halls and public dances; there are late trains connecting the suburb with the West End and its amusements; there are volunteer corps, bicycle clubs, golf clubs, tennis clubs, croquet clubs, amateur dramatic clubs; above all, there is the new education for the new woman; whatever else she may do or dare, one thing she will no longer do: she will no longer endure to be shut up all day in a suburb left to the women and children, and every evening, as well as all day, to be kept in the house, with no gaiety, no interests, no pursuits, and no companions. In all these ways the dull suburban life has been swept away, and a new social life, not in the least like that of a hundred years ago, is being established and developed.

Let us pass on to the memories and associations of these hamlets. They are of two kinds—those which appeal to all who belong to this country by descent and inherit our literature and call our great men theirs as well, and those which appeal to ourselves more than they can be expected to do on the other side of the Atlantic. I propose to speak more especially of the former class. It will be seen that the memories of the past belong peculiarly to the history of Nonconformity, but I shall be able to connect East London with many persons distinguished in literature, art, science, and politics. East London has also its eccentrics. And it has its villains.

Let us, however, consider one or two of these places separately, and note certain things worth visiting in those streets where no traveler’s foot ever falls.

Hackney, to begin with, is a very ancient place; the manor belonged to the Knights Templars for about two hundred years; a house, now taken down, used to be shown as the Templars’ Palace. It was an ancient house, but not of the thirteenth century: it probably belonged to the reign of Henry VIII. On the suppression of the Templars the manor was given to the Hospitallers, whose traditional house was also shown till about sixty years ago, when it was destroyed. This house was also the traditional residence of Jane Shore, one of those women who, like Agnes Sorel and Nell Gwynne strike the imagination of the people and win their affections. Even the grave and serious Sir Thomas More is carried away by the beauty and the charm of Jane Shore, while the memory of so much beauty and so many misfortunes demands a tear from good old Stow. The name of a street—Palace Road—preserves the memory of the house.

Standing alone in its vast churchyard crammed with monuments, mostly illegible, of dead citizens all forgotten long ago, stands a monument for which we ought to be deeply thankful. They pulled down the old church, but they preserved the tower. It is a tower of singular beauty, the one ancient thing that is left in Hackney. Beneath the feet of the visitor on the east side lie the bones of the buried Templars, proud knights and magnificent once, beyond the power of the bishop, rich and luxurious; with them the dust of their successors, the Knights Hospitallers, and now all forgotten together. In another part of the churchyard they erected a singularly ugly new church—a capacious barn. Outside the churchyard the tower looks down upon a crowded and busy thoroughfare, the full stream of life of this now great town of Hackney. Omnibuses and tram-cars run up and down the street all day long; there is an open market all the year round, with stalls and wheelbarrows ranged along the pavement; a railway arch spans the street, the frequent train thunders as it passes the Templars’ tower; the people throng the place from six in the morning till midnight. In many towns I have watched this stream of life flowing beside the gray survivals of the past; nobody heeds the ancient gate, the tower, the crumbling wall; nobody knows what they mean; the historical associations enter not at all into the mind of the average man; even amid the ruins of Babylon the Great his thoughts would be wholly with the present; he has no knowledge or understanding of the past; his own life is all in all to him; being the heir of all the ages, he takes his inheritance without even knowing what it means, as if it grew spontaneously, as if his security of life, his power of working undisturbed, the peace of the City, his freedom of speech and thought and action were given to mankind like the sunshine to warm him and the rain to refresh him. Yet the presence of this venerable tower should have some influence upon him, if only to remind him that there has been a past.

One who walks about an English town of any antiquity—most of them are of very considerable antiquity—can hardly fail of coming from time to time upon a street, a place, a square, a court, which takes him back two hundred years at least, or even more, to the time of the first George, or even to that of Charles II. Sometimes it is a single house; sometimes it is a whole street. In this respect, one or two of the East London suburbs are richer than those of the west or the south because they are older. Hackney and Stoke Newington, Stepney and Tottenham, were villages inhabited by wealthy people or noble people when the suburbs of the south were mere rural villages, with farms and meadows among their hanging woods.

There are two such places which I have found in Hackney. The first is a wide and open place, not a thoroughfare for vehicles; it may be approached by a foot-path through Hackney churchyard. It consists of a row of early eighteenth century houses on the south side, and another row of houses, probably of late eighteenth century, on the north. There is nothing remarkable about the place except its peacefulness and its suggestion of authority and dignity. You may frequently find such places adjoining old churches. It is as if the calm of the church and the tranquillity of the churchyard overflowed into one at least of the streets beside it. The clergy who used to live in this claustral repose have left this memory of their residence; in such a place we look up and down expecting to see a portly divine in black silk cassock, full silk gown, white Geneva bands, and wig theological, step out into the street and magisterially bend his steps toward the church where he will catechize the children.

The second place is also on the east of Hackney church; it is a long and narrow winding street, called magnificently the High Street, Homerton. It contains three great houses and many small ones, mostly old; in spite of its name, which conveys the suggestion of a town, it is a secluded street, remote from the ways of man; it might be a street of some decayed old town, such as King’s Lynn or Sandwich; there are no children playing in the road or on the door-steps. Half way down the street stands a church, the aspect of which proclaims it frankly and openly as belonging to the reign of the great George, first of the name. It was a place of worship simply, without special dedication or presentation to any religious body; it has been sometimes a chapel of ease to the parish church; sometimes it has been an independent chapel, having a service of its own. There it has stood since the year 1723, testifying to possibilities in the way of ugliness which would seem like some dream of architecture, fantastic and visionary, impossible of achievement. Yet it somehow fits in with the rest of the street; the ugliness of the chapel is not out of harmony with the street, for the early eighteenth century claims the houses as well as the church. All should be preserved together among the national monuments as a historical survival. This, it should be said, was how they built in the twenties of the eighteenth century.

If we leave Hackney and walk north we find ourselves in the village of Clapton, more suburban than Hackney, but not yet rural. Clapton lies along the western valley of the river Lea, which here winds its way at the bottom of a broad, shallow depression. There is one spot—before the place was built over there were many spots—where one may stand and, in the summer, when the sunshine lights up the stream, gaze upon the green meadows, the mills, the rustic bridges, the high causeways over the marshes, and the low Essex hills beyond. The Essex hills are always far away; there is always one before the traveler; if he stands on an eminence he sees them, like gentle waves of the heaving ocean, across other valleys, and I would not affirm that this is more lovely than any other; indeed, one knows many valleys which are deeper and more picturesque, planted with nobler woods, shadowed by loftier hills. Yet look again. You remember the lines—

Mark how exactly the view fits the lines, and how the lines fit the view. This is as it should be, for good old Isaac Watts stood often here and gazed upon that scene; the swelling flood was the winding river Lea; the sweet fields lay before him in living green. That is why I have brought you to this place. Dr. Watts might have stood here at another season, when a low, white mist hung over the sweet fields and obscured the swelling flood, and when the Christian knew not what lay between him and the everlasting hills beyond, where he fain would be at rest.

He lived not at Clapton, but at Stoke Newington, on the west of Clapton. If we could have seen this suburb seventy years ago! But the place is overgrown and overcrowded; workmen’s houses cover its gardens like a tangle of ugly weeds. Still there is one place left which it will please you to visit; on the map of 1830 it is the only street in the village. It is called Church Street; you enter it from the high road running north; it promises at the outset to be common, mean, and without dignity or character. Patience! we pass through the mean part and we emerge upon a Street Beautiful. It consists of houses built of that warm red brick which, as Ruskin has pointed out, grows richer in color with age; they are houses of the early eighteenth century with porches and covered with a wealth of creepers; the street has associations of which I will speak presently. Meantime, it is delight enough merely to stand and look upon it. The street ends with two churches. Happier than Hackney, Stoke Newington has been able to build a new church, and has not been obliged to pull down the old one. You see the new church; it is in the favorite style of our time, perhaps as favorable a specimen as can be found; in a word, a large, handsome, well-proportioned church. It was good that such a church should be built, if only to show that when Stoke Newington passed from a small rural village to a great town it did not outgrow its attachment to the Anglican faith. The old church could no longer accommodate the people; a new one therefore was built, a church urban, belonging to a great population beside the other. The old church is not dwarfed by the new; happily, the broad road lies between; it is a charming and delightful village church, standing among the trees and monuments of its churchyard. It has been patched, repaired, enlarged; it is, I dare say, a thing of patchwork—an incongruous church; yet one would not part with a single patch or the very least of its incongruities. There is Perpendicular work in it, and Decorated work; there is also nondescript work. They did well to keep it standing; it is a venerable monument; its spire is much humbler than that of its splendid successor, still it points to heaven; it has what the other will never have, the bones of the villagers for two thousand years; and still, to admonish the men of to-day as of yesterday and the day before, over the porch hangs the dial, with the motto, “Ab Alto”—“From on High,” that is, “cometh Safety, cometh Wisdom, cometh Hope” in the language of the ancient piety.

I have spoken of the intimate connection of these villages with Nonconformity. The Nonconformist cause was very strong among the better class of London merchants during the hundred and fifty years from 1650 to 1800. Hackney and other places in this part of the London suburbs are occupied to a large extent by their country houses. When the Act of Uniformity was passed and the Nonconforming ministers were ejected, many of them were received by the merchants of London in their country houses, and when the Conventicle Act of 1663 forbade the Nonconformists to frequent any place of worship other than the parish church, it was in their private houses at Hackney and other suburbs that the merchants were able, unmolested, to worship after their own consciences.

Before this, however, there had been Puritan leaders in the place. Two of them were regicides. On the east of the tower in Hackney churchyard stood until recently a chapel or mortuary chamber built by one of the Rowe family and called the Rowe Chapel. There was a Sir Thomas Rowe (or Roe), who was Lord Mayor of London in 1568; he married the sister of Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded the Royal Exchange; his son was also lord mayor in his time, his grandson, Sir Henry Rowe, built this chapel. Among the descendants was one Owen Rowe, citizen and haberdasher, a fierce partizan—in those days every one was a partizan and every one was fierce. He was colonel of the Green Regiment for the Parliament, so that he could fight as well as argue. Owen Rowe, unfortunately for himself, was one of those who took a leading part in the trial and execution of the King, being a signatory to the warrant for that execution. After the Restoration he surrendered, and by an act of clemency, of which Charles was sometimes capable, he was not executed, but sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower of London for the rest of his days. He died in the December following, and was buried in this chapel.

The other regicide of Hackney was John Okey, one of the Root and Branch men. He was a very turbulent Parliamentarian; he was of humble origin, beginning, it is said, as a drayman; he had no education, but he developed military genius of a kind and became a colonel of cavalry under Cromwell. After the Restoration he fled to Germany, where he might have continued in security to the end of his days, but being tempted to venture into Holland was there arrested by the English minister, Sir George Downing, and brought over to England with two other regicides, Miles Corbet and John Barkstead. Pepys records the event. It is astonishing that Sir George Downing should have done this, since he owed everything he had in the world to the favor of Cromwell. However, it was done, and on March 16, 1662, Pepys says that the pink Blackmore landed the three prisoners at the Tower. He adds that the Dutch were a long while before they consented to let them go, and that “all the world takes notice of Sir George Downing as a most ungrateful villain for his pains.” A month later, on April 19th, Pepys goes to Aldgate and stands “at the corner shop, the draper’s,” to see the three drawn on their way to execution at Tyburn. “They all looked very cheerful and all died defending what they did to the King to be just.” While at Hackney, Okey lived in a house called Barber’s Barn, formerly the residence of Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, and mother of Lord Darnley, husband of Alary Queen of Scots, a curious little fact which connects Hackney with Queen Victoria, Darnley’s descendant. The regicide’s estate was confiscated, but his widow got permission to retain Barber’s Barn, where she lived till her death. Okey himself was buried somewhere in Hackney churchyard.

Let us turn to more pleasing associations. In the village of Hackney during the Commonwealth there lived a certain Captain Woodcock. Among his friends was the Protector’s Latin secretary, John Milton, a person of very great consideration. John Milton in 1656 was a widower, but he was not a man who could live without the society of a wife. Captain Woodcock’s daughter, Catharine, pleased the Latin secretary; they were married on November 12, 1656, and she died on October 17th in the following year.

But there are other Cromwellian associations with Hackney and Stoke Newington. The American visitor to London would do well to give a day to a quiet ramble in this quarter, once so sturdy in its Puritanism and independence.

Leading out of Church Street, Stoke Newington, there is a place called Fleetwood Street. This street covers the site of an Elizabethan house which was once the residence of Colonel Fleetwood, Cromwell’s son-in-law. His second wife, Bridget Cromwell, however, did not live in this house, because Fleetwood got it, after her death, with his third wife, Lady Hartopp. He was left unmolested by the government at the Restoration, and died in this house in 1692. He lies buried in the Nonconformist cemetery of Bunhill Fields.

Another member of the Cromwell family, Major Cromwell, was a resident of this quarter. He was the son of Henry, and the grandson of the Protector. He married, in 1686, Hannah, eldest daughter of Benjamin Hewling, whose sons suffered for joining Monmouth. One of her children, at least, was born at Hackney. This was Richard, who became an attorney and solicitor in chancery. It is pleasant to record that when this Richard married the wedding was solemnized in the chapel of Whitehall, in memory of his great grandfather’s occupation of the palace.

I have already mentioned Isaac Watts as a resident in this part of London. He was born at Southampton in 1674. At the age of sixteen he was placed under the care of the Rev. Thomas Rowe of London, and chose the calling of a Nonconformist minister. For five years he was tutor in the family of Sir John Hartopp, Colonel Fleetwood’s stepson, at Stoke Newington; he there became acquainted with Sir Thomas Abney, whilom Lord Mayor of London. He preached for ten years in London, under the Rev. Dr. Chauncey. Then an attack of fever prostrated him, and he was obliged to give up preaching altogether for the rest of his life. He was invited by Sir Thomas Abney to his house at Theobald’s, where he stayed till Sir Thomas’s death. He then removed with Lady Abney to her house at Stoke Newington, where he remained an honored guest, or rather one of the family, until his death in 1748. He was a painter as well as a poet, and until the house was pulled down certain paintings on the walls were shown as his.

A more sturdy and combative Nonconformist was Daniel Defoe, also a resident of Stoke Newington. The site of his house survives in a small street named after him. He was born at Cripplegate, just outside the walls of London. He was sent to school at Newington Green, so that he was more or less connected with this quarter all his life. The school was kept by one Murton, and among his school-fellows was Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles. Defoe came to live in Stoke Newington early in the eighteenth century. It was here that he wrote “Robinson Crusoe” and his novels. His house has long been pulled down, but a large part of his garden-wall still stands.

Matthew Henry, the commentator, lived at Hackney for some time. Among Nonconformists we must not forget Mrs. Barbauld. Her husband, Rougemont Barbauld, of French descent, was Unitarian minister at Newington Green. Unfortunately, his mental powers declined, and in a fit of insanity he threw himself, or fell, into the New River. Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Dr. Aikin, lived also at this time at Stoke Newington. Mrs. Barbauld removed to his house and died there. She is buried in the churchyard of the old church. There are many better poets than Mrs. Barbauld, but her memory should survive for one little scrap in which for once she is inspired, and speaks, as a poet should, out of the fullness of heart common to all humanity.

Also in Church Street, Stoke Newington, lived Isaac Disraeli, author of the “Curiosities of Literature” and the “Quarrels and Calamities of Authors.” This estimable and amiable writer died in 1848. His son, Lord Beaconsfield, born here in 1805, was educated in a private school in the neighborhood until he was articled to a lawyer. He belonged, therefore, essentially to a middle-class family; he was not wealthy by birth, but he was not poor; he had the advantage, or the reverse, of being a Jew by descent and a Christian by conviction. To the former fact he owed much of his intellectual powers, to the latter the possibility of rising to the highest distinction and responsibility that the state has to offer, because at the outset of his career even the beginning would have been impossible to one of the ancient Hebrew faith.

The philanthropist John Howard was also a native of Hackney. He belonged, like so many others of the place, to the Nonconformists. His father was an upholsterer in the City, and he himself was at first made apprentice to a wholesale grocer. He was, however, unfitted for that kind of work, and as soon as he could he bought himself out. This is not the place to enlarge upon the work accomplished by this extraordinary man. After being a prisoner of war in France he became wholly possessed with one resolution—to reform the management of prisons. How he traveled through Great Britain first and the continent afterward, how he published reports which revealed the plague spots called prisons all over Europe, is matter of common fame and history.

I think that my claim for these suburbs, that they were a stronghold of Nonconformity, has been proved by these associations. There are, however, more. Everybody has read “Sandford and Merton,” both that of Mr. Thomas Day and the other, equally instructive, of Mr. Burnand. Thomas Day belonged by residence to Stoke Newington. His house is still pointed out. In Clapton, on the other side of the high road, lived and died an amiable and accomplished novelist, Grace Aguilar. Here was born a philanthropist, also among the Nonconformist ranks, the late Samuel Morley. Here was born another Nonconformist, the late Sir William Smith, editor of so many classical and antiquarian dictionaries and other aids to learning.

Enough of Nonconformists. Let us turn to other associations. Stoke Newington is connected with the name of Edgar Allan Poe. It was here that he was at school, where he was brought over by the Allans as a child. The house still stands; it is at the corner of Edward’s Lane, which runs out of Church Street. Let us hope that the eccentricities of this wayward poet were not due to the influences of Nonconformist Newington.

In the churchyard of Hackney may be seen the tombs and monuments of certain members of the AndrÉ family. The unfortunate Major AndrÉ was born at Hackney. His history is well known; our American visitors have been taught to think that Washington’s act, severe indeed, was just and warranted by the facts of the case. That will not stifle the regret that a soldier of so much promise should have met with such a death. The time has gone by, or should have gone by, when the name of AndrÉ called forth bitterness and recrimination.

One more note to connect suburban East London with America. In the year 1709 a great number of refugees—Palatines, Swabians, and others—came over to England, being driven out of their own country by the desolation of war. There were between six and seven thousand of them, all, or nearly all, being quite destitute. The Queen ordered a daily allowance of food to be bestowed upon these unfortunates, and tents were put up for them in various parts round London. The parish of Stoke Newington possessed at that time a small piece of ground, which was lying unoccupied. The parishioners undertook to build four houses on this field, and to receive twenty persons from the refugees. Other parishes offered to do the same. Finally, however, the government disposed of them. The Roman Catholics were sent back to their own country; the Protestants were settled, some in Ireland and the rest in the American colonies. A few went to Carolina; the rest, twenty-seven hundred in number, were shipped to New York, where they arrived in June, 1710. They were allotted ten acres of land to each family. Most of them, however, for reasons of some dissatisfaction, removed to Pennsylvania, where they settled, and where their descendants, it is said, still preserve the history of their misfortunes and their emigration.

The history of these suburbs is unlike that of any other part of London. From the middle of the seventeenth century until far in the nineteenth they were rural retreats; a few houses were clustered about a church; a meeting-house stood here and there; upon the whole place, on the faces of the residents, was the stamp of grave and serious religious thought and conviction; grave and serious Nonconformist divines or grave and serious merchants of the City professing Nonconformity walked about its lanes and among its gardens. As recently as the thirties they retained this character. The map of 1834 shows fields and pasture and garden where there is now a waste of brick and mortar; the little stream known as Hackney Brook meandered pleasantly through these fields; Stoke Newington, though it could boast so many distinguished natives and residents, consisted of one long street, mostly with houses on one side only, and a church. The place is now entirely built upon; a few of the old houses remain, but not many, and the old atmosphere only survives in places which I have indicated, such as Sutton Place, High Street, Homerton, and Church Street, Stoke Newington. And I fear that to the visitor, to whom these associations are not familiar, there is no dignity about these streets other than is conferred by the few surviving mansions.

We have seen that the suburb of Hackney is connected with Queen Victoria by the early residence there of Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots. There is, strangely, another house connecting this suburb with the Queen by another ancestress. Darnley was the father of James I; the Princess Elizabeth, known afterward as the Queen of Bohemia, was the daughter of James. Elizabeth had twelve children; the youngest, Sophia, was the mother of George I. Elizabeth lived for a time at Hackney, in a house called the Black and White House near the church—it is now destroyed; the house had formerly been the residence of Sir Thomas Vyner, Lord Mayor of London.

There are still more associations. Hackney is, in fact, richer in memories of this kind than any other suburb of London. Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Thomas More belong to American as well as English history, both of them because they precede the colonial time and the former because he foresaw the boundless possibilities of America and attempted to found a colony there. Tradition—a vague tradition only—assigns to Sir Walter a residence in Hackney. History points with certainty to Sir Thomas More’s connection with the place. His daughter Cecilia married one George Heron, son of Mr. Thomas Heron, Master of the jewel house to Henry VIII. The family house was a mansion, long since pulled down, on Shacklewell Green, and hither Sir Thomas must have come to visit his daughter.

All Americans who visit London go to see the Charter House. It is one of the really ancient and beautiful things still left standing. One can make out the disposition of the buildings, the cloisters, refectory, chapel, and cells of the Carthusian monks. One can also study the more recent buildings which converted the monastery into an almshouse and a school. The transformation was effected by Thomas Sutton.

This excellent person, the son of a country gentleman, filled many offices during a long life of over eighty years. He was Master of the Ordnance to Queen Elizabeth; he became, at the advanced age of fifty, a citizen of London, joining the Girdlers’ Company, and married the widow of one John Dudley, lord of the manor of Stoke Newington. On her death he removed to Hackney, living in a great house which you may still see standing at the present day, one of the very few old houses remaining. It is a house with a center and two wings; formerly there was a large garden behind it. Sutton died in 1614, only a few weeks after signing deeds by which he endowed the Charter House with his estates for the maintenance of eighty almsmen and a school of boys. The foundation still exists; they have foolishly removed the school; the almsmen remain, though reduced in numbers. Colonel Newcome, as of course you remember, became one of them.

Enough of great men. Let us speak of smaller folk who have distinguished themselves each in his own way.

It is given to few to achieve distinction by ways petty and mean and miserable, or bold and villainous. These suburbs can point to one or two such examples, adduced here on account of their rarity. Perhaps the most illustrious of the former was a certain hermit. His name was Lucas; he belonged to a West Indian family; he became a man of Hackney only when he was buried in the churchyard. His house was about thirty miles north of London; on the death of his mother he became suddenly morose; he shut himself up alone in the house; he refused all society; he barricaded his room with timber and lived by himself in the kitchen, where he kept a fire burning night and day, wrapped himself in a blanket, slept upon a bed of cinders, and neither washed nor cut his hair nor shaved, but remained in this neglected condition, which he seems to have enjoyed greatly, after the manner of hermits, for twenty-five years, when he died. He lived on bread, milk, and eggs, which were brought to him fresh every day. He was an object of great curiosity; people came from all parts to gaze upon the hermit; he was very proud of a notoriety which he would probably have failed to acquire by any legitimate efforts; and he conversed courteously with everyone. He was found in a fit one morning, after this long seclusion, and was removed to a farmhouse, where he died the next day.

We may revive the memory of John Ward, formerly of Hackney, as a specimen of the villainous resident.

His career was chequered with coloring of dark, very dark, and black shade. He began life in some small manufactory; he wriggled up, and became a member of Parliament; he was prosecuted for forgery, he was pilloried, he was imprisoned, and he was expelled the House of Commons. He was also prosecuted by the South Sea Company for feloniously concealing the sum of £50,000. He suffered imprisonment for this crime. He is held up to execration by Pope:

He added to his villainies a kind of pinchbeck piety, that perverted piety which manifests itself in beseeching the Lord to be on his side in his money-getting. The following is, I imagine, almost unique as a prayer.

“O Lord, thou knowest that I have nine estates in the City of London and likewise that I have lately purchased an estate in fee simple in the county of Essex: I beseech thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and earthquakes: and as I have a mortgage in Hertfordshire, I beg of Thee likewise to have an eye of compassion on that county and for the rest of the counties Thou mayest deal with them as Thou art pleased. O Lord, enable the bank to answer all their bills, and make all my debtors good men.

“Give prosperous voyage to the Mermaid sloop, because I have insured it: and as Thou hast said that the days of the wicked are but short, I trust in Thee that Thou wait not forget Thy promise, as I have purchased an estate in reversion, which will be mine on the death of that profligate young man Sir J. L.”

Such a prayer would seem to argue some mental twist; but strange are the vagaries of the pinchbeck pious.

Two more villains, and we make an end. The first of them was the bold Dick Turpin. Have the achievements of Dick Turpin crossed the ocean? Surely they have, if only in the pages of the “Pickwick Papers,” where Sam Weller sings part of a song written in praise of the highwayman. The verses are generally believed to be by Charles Dickens himself, but that is not so. They are by James or Horace Smith, or both, the authors of the “Rejected Addresses,” and are the two opening stanzas of a long poem. Dick Turpin lived for a time at a house in Hackney Marsh, near a tavern and a cockpit, and passed for a sporting gentleman free with his money. Few highwaymen were so successful as the gallant rider of Black Bess, and very, very few arrived, as he did, at the age of thirty-four before undertaking that drive to Tyburn Tree, which was the concluding act in his profession. Indeed, the grand climacteric for a highwayman seems to have been twenty-four.

The other villain for whom Hackney blushes was a native of Homerton. This was none other than the famous “Jack the Painter,” who formed the bold design of setting fire to all the dockyards in the country. The story of his attempt in Portsmouth Dockyard, and of his failure and trial, forms one of the most singular chapters in the criminal history of the last century. He was executed in 1776, and his body hung in chains on the shore near Portsmouth for a great many years. I have myself conversed with persons who could remember the gibbet of Jack the Painter, and his blackened, tarred remains dangling in chains. But they were old men, and they were seafaring men. And when the mariner grows old his memory lengthens and strengthens and spreads.