IT is curious that most of the great London architects should have come from Scotland. Among these the most distinguished are Chambers, the designer of Somerset House, Campbell, Rennie, Gibbs, and the Brothers Adam. All these have left their mark upon the great city. The Barry family were Irish; Pugin and Vanbrugh of foreign extraction; while Inigo Jones was a Welshman. Wren, however, outweighs the rest, and he was an Englishman.

Vanbrugh was an interesting character, and his scattered works abound in London and its suburbs. This brilliant man has scarcely obtained the full credit he deserves for his numerous and versatile gifts, for he adorned no less than five professions. He was soldier, dramatist, and manager; an architect and a herald to boot: to say nothing of his being a wit and a poet. His plays, “The Relapse,” “The Confederacy,” “The Provok’d Wife,” and “The Provok’d Husband” are among the works that no theatrical gentleman’s library should be without. His great mansions at Blenheim and Castle Howard are monuments of his skill, and his fables were considered by Pope to be superior to those of La Fontaine. In soldiering and management he was not so successful, though he was persuasive enough to obtain from the nobility and gentry £30,000 with which to build an opera-house in the Haymarket on the exact spot where Her Majesty’s Theatre now stands. When this theatre was finished hardly a word could be heard, and the voices of the actors had the effect of low undulating murmurings. The object of the designer, however, was to furnish an interior for both music and Italian opera; and it would pass the wit of our Phippses and Emdens to supply a building which would be equally suited for acting and singing.

It seems to be the fate of every architect of eminence who is favoured with a “commission” for some vast public building to suffer hardship and sordid treatment at the hands of the authorities. It was so with Wren, Barry, Street, and above all with Vanbrugh, who had to go to law with the Marlboroughs to obtain his fees. He was himself sued by the contractors and workmen, who could obtain no money from either the family or Government. The story of this persecution is to be found in the curious Vanbrugh papers. More curious is it to discover, as the writer did lately, that there is still standing in London his old mansion, the very first attempt he made, which (though dilapidated enough) seems still hale, stout, and strong. When it became known, about the year 1702, that the wit and dramatist had turned architect and had actually built himself a mansion in Whitehall, it became the subject of much ridicule; and Dr. Swift was merry on the shape and peculiarity of the new building.

It seemed unlikely that this “goose-pie,” amid all the vicissitudes of Whitehall, could have escaped demolition. But recently the writer of these notes came on a rather minute description of the place, drawn up in the year 1815. As it then appeared, it was a low, long building in three divisions, two stories high, with arched windows, three in each compartment. Further, the brothers Adam had taken it in hand, and added two wings or vestibules, projecting forward and decorated with their own peculiar “fan-like” ornamentation. This was satisfactory for identification; though no one of our generation was likely to recall such a structure in Whitehall. But almost at the first search it was revealed. There it stood flanking the Banqueting Hall in the shape of the dilapidated, gone-to-seed museum known as the United Service Institution. This was the original Vanbrugh “goose-pie” family mansion, answering in every point to the description, encumbered with the Adam additions, effective and not without merit. It is, however, in rather a squalid state; and it is safe to prophesy that in two or three years it will have disappeared. It is curious to think of the brilliant author of “The Relapse” living here nearly two hundred years ago.

Close as it is to Charing Cross, St. Martin’s Lane and the district about it still retain an old-fashioned air. At its very entrance we note one of the most effective and effectively placed buildings in London, the fine church, St. Martin’s, with its soaring and conspicuous steeple and stately portico. The levity of our time was never better illustrated than by the proposal to cut away the steps to gain a few feet of roadway, and it was actually gravely suggested and discussed whether it would not be the best course to remove the portico wholesale, and place it at the back of the church! From every direction, almost, the spire can be seen, and from every quarter the church forms a pleasing point of view. It was built by Gibbs, and its interior is in Wren’s peculiar favourite manner—a vaulted ceiling supported on columns, which, in their turn, support galleries, their bases being covered up by the massive pews.

St. Martin’s Lane is a far more interesting street than might be supposed, being full of strange Hogarthian memories. Bishop Horsley told the antiquary so oddly named “Rainy-day Smith,” that he had often heard his father describe the time when St. Martin’s Church was literally “In the fields,” and when there was a turnpike leading into St. Martin’s Lane. Mr. Smith wrote this over sixty years ago, and there have been enormous changes since then. There are two curious little lanes or passages turning out of it on the right hand as you go up, one of which bears the name of “May’s Buildings, 1739,” in faint characters. This was built by a gentleman of that name, whose house is still to be seen at No. 43, a sausage shop, a striking and elegant piece of brick-work, though unpretending. It was thus that it struck “Rainy-day Smith,” fifty years ago, who was much praised in his day for “his attention to old houses.” He says that Mr. May’s house “consisted of two pilasters supporting a cornice; and it is, in my opinion, one of the neatest specimens of architectural brick-work in London. The site of the White Horse livery stables was originally a tea-garden; and south of it was a hop-garden, which still retains that appellation. The extensive premises, No. 60, were formerly held by Chippendale, the most famous upholsterer and cabinet-maker of his day, to whose folio work on household furniture the trade formerly made constant reference. It contains in many instances specimens of the style of furniture so much in vogue in France in the reign of Louis XIV., but which for many years past has been discontinued in England. However, as most fashions come round again, I should not wonder if we were to see the unmeaning scroll and shell-work, with which the furniture of Louis’s reign was so profusely incumbered, revive; when Chippendale’s book will again be sought after with redoubled avidity, and, as many of the copies must have been sold as waste paper, the few remaining will probably bear rather a high price.”[1] Another house that always attracts attention is the one numbered 96, and which deserves notice for its artistic doorway—certainly one of the most effective in London for its flowing style of carving and elegant design. It is now a cloth shop, but Mr. Smith describes it as being in his day “one of the oldest colour-shops in London, and has one of the very few remaining shop-fronts where the shutters slide in grooves. The street-door frame is of the style of Queen Anne, with a spread-eagle, foliage, and flowers, curiously and deeply carved in wood, over the entrance, similar to those remaining in Carey Street and in Great Ormond Street. The late Mr. Powel, the colourman, and family inhabited it; and I have heard him say that his mother for many years made a pipe of wine from the grapes which grew in their garden, which at that time was nearly one hundred feet in length, before the smoke of so many surrounding buildings destroyed their growth. This house has a large staircase, curiously painted, of figures viewing a procession, which was executed for the famous Dr. Misaubin, about the year 1732, by a painter of the name of Clermont, a Frenchman, who boldly charged one thousand guineas for his labour; which charge, however, was contested, and the artist was obliged to take five hundred. Behind the house there is a large room, the inside of which Hogarth has given in his Rake’s Progress, where he has introduced portraits of the doctor and his Irish wife.”

Passing on beyond St. Martin’s Lane, we enter that curious street dedicated to bird and dog fanciers and frame makers, Great St. Andrew Street, but which in truth popularly ranges itself under the designation of “The Dials.” We stop before a mouldy shop, No. 42, whose window is filled with as disagreeable a category of objects as was found in the establishment of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet—skulls, jaw and thigh bones, skeletons of monkeys, stuffed birds, horns of all kinds, prepared skins, and everything unpleasant in the anatomical line. When Dickens was busy with his Mutual Friend, a confrÈre—Mr. Wilkie Collins, I think—described to him a strange character, a bird-stuffer—and “articulator” of bones and skeletons—and the idea so “tickled” the writer that he at once put in “Mr. Venus,” the intimate of Wegg. This original character excited much attention; and a friend of the great writer, as well as of the present chronicler, Mr. C. Kent, passing through this street, was irresistibly attracted by this shop and its contents—kept by one J. Willis. When he next saw Mr. Dickens he said, “I am convinced I have found the original of ‘Venus’;” on which said Mr. Dickens, “You are right.” Anyone who visits the place will recognize the dingy gloomy interior, the articulated skeleton in the corner, the general air of thick grime and dirt.

In full view of St. Martin’s Lane, and next to where the old Northumberland House stood, stood the house that was remarkable as having been the first that was numbered in London. Readers of old letters will notice with surprise how readily a person’s residence was found by the post; “To Mr. Sterne, in ye Pall Mall,” was sufficient. This seems almost a mystery.

In the London churchyards there is plenty to interest the explorer, but it may be doubted if anything could be more tragically romantic than is offered by two memorials, found in two old churchyards—separated by one easy half-hour’s walk. The moralist will find profit, and a curious meditation over the instability of things, in his visit to these two interesting spots. Standing on that ill-shaped open place, the former Regent’s Circus, and looking along the bend of the new Shaftesbury Avenue, we can see the blackened and ungainly steeple of old St. Anne’s Church in Soho, now unexpectedly revealed by the clearances and “demolitions.” This clumsy, eccentric object seems to take the shape of a vintner’s cask perched airily on a spire, and must be pardoned to the memory of Wren, as one of those architectural freaks in which he occasionally indulged when invention failed him. To the same class belonged those extraordinary obelisks and other devices which he has placed on some of his towers. The church is a very old and interesting one, dating from 1686, and looks out on Dean Street. It has attained a sort of celebrity from its musical services; and the Princess of Wales and other distinguished persons are often found in the congregation. The old rectory, where, up to the present incumbency of Dr. Wade, the rector used to reside, stands where it did, beside the church, its rows of ancient windows having a cheerful prospect of the churchyard; but the actual rectory is in the quaint Soho Square. The churchyard is a very large forlorn piece of ground opening upon Wardour Street, and it was taken in hand some years ago by the improvers and spoilers. The tombstones were all collected together and laid down neatly as a sort of pavement, the rest planted with grass. It is now given over to a large colony of fowls, which pick up a livelihood and enjoy a sort of rus in urbe there. One would have thought these measures were preparatory to throwing open the place as a recreation ground; but the gates remain fast locked, and the public may not enter now.

On the outside wall of the church are seen two tablets, which arrest the attention; one to the memory of Hazlitt, of an extraordinary kind, setting forth his peculiar opinions; the other to an actual genuine king, who, after his abdication, died in England. The king’s coffin was placed in the vaults beneath, where the clerk recollects seeing it many years ago. But among the other bizarre proceedings which marked the course of the “improvements,” the vaults were completely filled up with sand, and the contents, as it were, obliterated. The inscription, which is the work of Horace Walpole, runs:—

His story is sad, romantic, and perfectly true; for he was a real crowned king and adventurer. His name was Newhoff, and he had figured in many capitals in many countries, making himself useful to the smaller potentates, and had finally succeeded in impressing the Corsican insurgents with the idea that he was a personage of power, and could find them assistance. They were tempted by his offers to lead them. One morning he arrived in a ship laden with cannon and other stores, and landed arrayed in Eastern dress and attended by black servants. Received with acclamations, he was duly crowned, lived in a palace, put himself at the head of an army, and fought battles.

Soon, however, his supplies failing him, he went away to raise money in Holland, but did not succeed. He then came to London, was arrested by his many creditors, and thrown into the King’s Bench. He took advantage of “the Act,” and registered his crown for the benefit of his creditors. On his liberation he did not know where to go, and went in a chair to the Portuguese Minister’s, whom he did not find at home. The fallen king, literally not possessing a sixpence in the world, was charitably taken in by a Soho tailor, fell ill the next day, and died; his coffin and interment were paid for by this worthy tradesman, who said he wished for once to have the credit of burying a king.

Another strange being was laid in the vaults, but only temporarily, in the year 1804. This was the eccentric Lord Camelford, whose adventures and intemperance were always exciting attention. He was shot in a duel by Captain Best, reputed the best shot in England, which was the odd reason given by his antagonist for meeting him. “Six quarts of blood,” we are told, were found in the cavity of his chest. All the denizens of Soho crowded round Mr. Dawes’s shop in Dean Street to see the crimson-velvet coffin, adorned with cherubim of silver and “wrought gripes,” as it lay in the St. Anne’s vaults, until the strange provision of his will could be carried out. It seems he had once passed many hours at a romantic spot by a lake in the Canton of Berne, where there were three trees. A sum of £1,000 was left to the proprietor, and he directed that his body should be transported thither and placed under one of the trees. There was to be no monument; he only wished “the surrounding scenery to smile upon my remains.”

Here also rests the beautiful maid of honour, Mary Bellenden, to whom the Prince of Wales showed his devotion, which was of an extravagant kind, by taking out his purse and counting his money. “If you go on counting your money,” said she, “I will run out of the room.” This beauty was secured by Colonel Campbell, later Duke of Argyll. Her royal admirer had made her promise that she would let him know whenever she made her selection; but she forgot, or omitted purposely, to do this. She thus incurred his bitter dislike; and whenever her duties compelled her to attend at Court, which she did with some alarm, this gracious person always took care to whisper some ill-natured speech. She did not live to share her husband’s honours, and now sleeps in the well-sanded vaults of the old Soho church.

Now taking flight across London to “the Marble Arch” and to the Queen’s Road, we reach the old Bayswater burying-ground, where it is assumed that one of our great humorists lies buried. It is not, however, generally known that there are well-founded doubts as to whether Yorick’s “dust” is to be found beneath his headstone, and whether the “mortal coil” he shuffled off in Bond Street has not been sacrilegiously transported away.

Sterne the recherchÉ, the friend of wits and nobles in Paris as well as London, died on March 18, 1768, in mean lodgings, No. 41 Old Bond Street, a silk bag maker’s. Mr. Loftie, however, believes that the house was No. 39B, now Messrs. Agnew’s. The Shandean gave up the ghost piteously enough, abandoned by his family, and by a strange chance a footman, sent by a convivial party to inquire “how Mr. Sterne was,” arrived almost exactly at the moment of dissolution, and saw him pass away. This person was one James Macdonald, “own man” to Mr. “Fish” (so nicknamed) Crauford, a person of fashion; and he has recorded this curious incident in his valet-memoirs.

Now, this departure of poor Yorick was disastrous enough. His whole career, indeed, was one of eccentric gambadoes on his hobby-horse; but he never reckoned that after his death, yet another grimly grotesque chapter was to be added to his Shandy record. It was hard enough that so jocund a person should die so miserably—or, as he might have thought it, die at all; and there was a hideous contrast between the crowd which the viveur was always secure of, and this sad desertion.

But the funeral was in keeping. It might have been expected that a Canon of York, one holding the curacy of Coxwold, would have had many mourners; but the English humorist was attended to the grave by—how many will it be supposed?—two mourners! One was Becket, who published the defunct’s works; the other, old Sam Salt, one of Elia’s Benchers, a Shandean in his way, though why he attended seems as mysterious as why the others stayed away. This humble cortÈge took its way to the old burying-ground near Tyburn, and there, on the west side, poor Yorick’s remains were duly consigned to the earth.

More than a year passed away, when, in July, 1769, a strange report got into the papers: “It is rumoured that the body of Mr. Sterne, the ingenious author of Tristram Shandy, which was buried at Marylebone, has been taken up and anatomized by a surgeon at Oxford.” This must have astounded Hall-Stevenson and other jovial Shandeans. It was likely enough to be true. The meanness of his burial, the beggarly account of mourners, was a plain hint to the resurrection-men that here was a subject not likely to be watched or inquired after. The remains were certainly “lifted” and disposed of, like the late Mr. Gamp’s, “for the benefit of science.”

Mr. Edmund Malone, who had much of his friend Boswell’s taste for small gossip, tells us that he had heard that the body was sent to Cambridge, and sold to a surgeon there for dissection. He adds, that a friend of Sterne’s, coming in during the operations, told him that he at once recognized the features. This was the last outrage that poor Yorick could have dreamed of—worse than what befell his own Slawkenbergius, or the sufferers by the famous Tagliacotian operation. Yet there seems little reason for doubting Malone’s account.

There is a third version, which supplies even the name of the anatomist—one Mr. Charles Collignon, B.M. of Trinity, who died in 1785, and who on this occasion had invited some amateur anatomists to see him operate on “a subject” just received from London. After the recognition it was too late to suspend the dissection, which had nearly been completed. It is added that the friend of Mr. Sterne fainted away.

So far the tale seems supported. But there is a further bit of evidence, such as it is. In a copy of the Sentimental Journey the owner has written a curious note to the effect that “the Rev. Mr. Green told me that, being at Cambridge a short time after, he saw the skeleton, and had the story confirmed to him by the Professor himself.” Yorick, therefore, besides suffering the original indignity, would seem to have been regularly anatomized or “articulated,” according to the science of Mr. Venus. It might be worth inquiring whether any such skeleton is preserved in the Cambridge museums, private or public.

The ghastly story is further supported by the fact that at the time the rifling of graves was a regular practice, and the Tyburn burying-ground was a favourite locale for such depredations; so much so that only a few months before it had been guarded by watchers and a stout mastiff-dog. “This burial-ground,” says Mr. Hutton, in his useful Literary Landmarks, “is situated between Albion and Stanhope Streets. Sterne’s memorial, a high but plain flat stone, stands next the centre of the west wall, under a spreading, flourishing old tree, whose lower branches and leaves almost touch it.” The explorer will find in the burying-ground a headstone and flourishing inscription set up by strangers—for the widow and daughter were left in extreme poverty, and had to be relieved by a subscription made on the York racecourse. Two Freemasons, signing themselves “W. and S.” furnished this tribute:

Near this Place lies the Body of
THE REVEREND LAURENCE STERNE, A.M.
Died September 13, 1768,
Aged 53 years.
Ah! molliter ossa quiescant.

And they added at foot, that although he “did not live to be a member of their society, yet, as all his incomparable performances evidently prove him to have acted by rule and square, they rejoice in this opportunity of perpetuating his high and irreproachable character to after ages.”

Nearly every portion of this effusion is inaccurate or untrue. His body did not lie there; he was fifty-seven, not fifty-three; he died in March, not September, and on the 18th, not on the 13th. His head was not “sound”; his worth was “sullied”; and acting “by rule and square” was about the last thing we would give our Shandean credit for. It will be noted that the words are “near this place,” so that it does not mark the spot of interment.

Under these circumstances there would be a certain hollowness and uncertainty attending any form of memorial in this particular spot. On the other hand, it must be said that the existing stone—a wretched thing, with its wretched inscription—would not have been set up by the two Freemasons if such painful rumours were abroad. The very preparation of the stone would have occupied some weeks or months.

Many years ago the writer suggested that a memorial should be placed in York Minster, of which cathedral Sterne was prebendary. The Dean was favourable to the project, as also was his Grace of York. A few subscriptions were obtained, notably from the late Mr. Carlyle and Lord Houghton, but beyond this there was little encouragement. This project might now be revived, as there is a taste or craze for recording monuments. It may be added that Sterne’s “Eliza” is entombed with all the honours in Bristol Cathedral, a “very elegant piece of statuary” (vide local guide books) marking the place. It says that in this lady “genius and benevolence were united.” So they were in her less fortunate admirer, for whose cenotaph might be prepared a simple medallion on the minster wall, with the short inscription, “Alas, poor Yorick!”