Charles Mackay.

Once upon a time, as the charmed books tell, there was a mountain covered with stones, of which each particular flint or pebble had been, "upon a time," a live and sentient man or woman.

The stones lay, with no attribute of life except a power to appeal in such wise to passers-by as to compel them to remain. But there came, one happy day, a beauteous maiden with a pitcher full of the Water of Life, and she, sprinkling the precious fluid over the stones, transformed them again into animated creatures of flesh and blood—"a great company of youths and maidens who followed her down the mountain."

As I take my walks in London-town, I think of that story and long for a pitcher of the magic Water of Life.

For if imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole, and if, as biologists tell us, the whole of our mortal tissue is unceasingly being shed and renewed, every brick and stone in London pavement, church, inn, and dwelling-house must have in it some part of human greatness; for the flower of Britain's brain and valour, the heroes of her most glorious service and achievement—poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, statesmen, soldiers, scientists, explorers—the greatest of those who have "toiled and studied for mankind," have lived in London.

Milton used to thank God that he had been born in London. Shakespeare acted in Blackfriars and near London Bridge; his wit flashed nightly at the Mermaid; in the shadow of Whitehall, he broke his heart for Mary Fitton; and here he wove the magic of his plays.

That is the consideration which makes London's enchantment so irresistible. Here is the actual, visible scene of the most momentous deeds of our history, of the most memorable episodes in our country's fiction, and of the workaday, toiling, rejoicing, and sorrowing of the greatest of our English brothers and sisters.

At Charing Cross the statue of Charles I. on his Rabelais horse faces the site of the scaffold "in the open street," on to which the king stepped one morning through a window of his palace of Whitehall. Pepys saw General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered at Charing Cross, he (Harrison) "looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition." And he gravely adds that Sir Harry Vane, about to be beheaded on Tower Hill, urgently requested the executioner to take off his head so as not to hurt a pimple on his neck.

Trooper Lockyer, a brave young soldier of seven years' service, though only twenty-three years old, having helped to seize General Cromwell's colours at the Bull in Bishopsgate, was shot in Paul's Churchyard by[61]
[62]
[63] grim Oliver's orders. His crime was that he was a Leveller or early Socialist, "with hot notions as to human freedom, and the rate at which millenniums are obtainable. He falls shot in Paul's Churchyard on Friday, amid the tears of men and women," says Carlyle, Paul's Cathedral being then a horse-guard, with horses stamping in the canons' stalls, and its leaden roof melted into bullets. On the following Monday the corpse having been "watched and wept over" meantime "in the eastern regions of the City," brave Lockyer was buried "at the new churchyard in Westminster":—

The corpse was adorned with bundles of Rosemary, one half stained with blood. . . . Some thousands followed in rank and file: all had sea-green and black ribbon tied on their hats and to their breasts; and the women brought up the rear.

How actual and visible and present they are, as one stands on the spots where these great events were transacted! And such histories has nearly every street and every ancient building. London is not paved with gold. It is paved with the glory of England's mighty dead.

The name is Legion of the eminences whose last cumbrous clog of clay is buried here.

In Westminster's venerable and beautiful Abbey, where I saw Gladstone buried last June, I can look on the bury-hole of Edward the Confessor, King of our remote Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and one of the prime founders of English liberties; I see the tomb of that butcher Edward who subdued Wales and overthrew Scotland's Wallace; here, too, is the grave of the third Edward, who, by his raiding and stealing, laid the foundations of England's glorious commerce. Here, under his Agincourt helmet, lies the valiant dust of Falstaff's Prince Hal, and of three other Royal Henrys. Bloody Mary rests from her fiery rage; Mary Queen of Scots is united in death to her terrible foe, Elizabeth of England; and two Stuart Kings repose uncomplainingly by the side of William of Orange.

From these crumbled majesties I turn with reverence to aisles hallowed by the mould of Darwin, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Macaulay, Livingstone, Garrick, and Handel.

Beneath St. Paul's great dome my gratitude can tender homage to the names of Titanic Turner, Reynolds, Landseer, Napier, Cornwallis, Wellington, and Nelson.

Think what a procession if all these could be sprinkled with the Water of Life! If to each fragment of noble dust in this huge, unshapely, and overgrown wilderness of masonry, one could call back the soul that sometime quickened it, what a great city, in Walt Whitman's sense, would London be!

Every town cherishes the sacred memory of its own particular great man, but London bears in its bosom intimate and familiar tokens of them all. The city and its neighbourhood for miles round are marked with historic and literary associations. The place is all composed of great men's fame and chapters of world-history. London Clay is made of London's Pride, and London Pride grows in the London Clay.

Not a quarter, not a suburb is free of hallowed associations.

Within half an hour's stroll from my home at Highgate I can visit the pleasaunce of which Andrew Marvell wrote—

I cross the threshold of the adjoining house, and stand within the actual domicile of staid Andrew's improper neighbour, Mistress Nell Gwynne. It was from a window of this house she threatened to drop her baby, unless her Merry Monarch would there and then confer name and title on him; and thus came England into the honour and glory of a ducal race of St. Albans.

When Nell Gwynne looked up from that signally successful jest, she may have seen, across the street, the two houses wherein, a few years before, had dwelt the stern Protector of the Commonwealth and the husband of his daughter, Ireton. I wonder what she thought of old Noll!

The houses stand there yet, substantial, square, their red brick "mellowed but not impaired by time."

The "restored" Charles had had the corpses of over a hundred Puritans, including Admiral Blake's, and that of Cromwell's old mother, dug up from their graves and flung in a heap in St. Margaret's Churchyard; he had hung in chains on Tyburn gallows the disinterred clay of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. I wonder he was not prompted to pull down these dwellings of his father's "murderers." He must have seen them often. Their windows overlooked the garden of his light-o'-love.

Did she intercede to have them preserved? As I linger there, I like to think so.

Still within a half-mile circle of my home, on the same Highgate Hill whereon stand the houses of Nell Gwynne and Ireton, I can show my children the "werry, indentical" milestone from which—ita legenda scripta—Dick Whittington was recalled by the sound of Bow Bells.

At the top of Highgate Hill, and on the slope of another hill where a man (since dead in the workhouse) saved Queen Victoria's life, stands the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived. Here, and, it is said, in a little inn near by, he entertained such company as Shelley, Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and—surely not in the little inn?—Carlyle.

Coleridge lies buried in the churchyard hard by, and in Highgate Cemetery I find the graves of George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens' daughter Dora, Tom Sayers the prize-fighter, and Lillywhite the cricketer.

Harry Lowerison has a way of teaching children by taking them to see the streets and monuments of London; and I can think of no more interesting or promising mode of instruction.

For in these scenes English history is indelibly and picturesquely written, back to the date of our earliest records.

I stood one day in Cannon Street, when a passing omnibus-horse chanced to slip. The vehicle swerved across the asphalt, and, to complete the catastrophe, the horse fell.

Then, hey, presto! in the twinkling of an eye, the street was blocked with a compact mass of "blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and brown cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty red iron clanking on paintless carts, high white wool packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on the brass harness, gleaming from the carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle."

A bustling, shuffling, pushing, wriggling, twisting wonder! One moment's damming of the stream had caused such a gathering as Imperial CÆsar never dreamt of.

I was pushed back against the wall, and then observed that I stood by the London Stone—a stone which "'midst the tangling horrors of the wood" by Thames side, may have been drenched with the human gore of druidical sacrifices. Captives bound in wicker rods may have burned upon its venerable surface to glut the fury of savage gods.

That stone stood here when Constantine built the London Wall around the "citty."

It was here when, upon an island formed by a river which crept sullenly through "a fearful and terrible plain," which none might approach after nightfall without grievous danger, King Sebert of the East Saxons built to the glory of St. Peter the Apostle that church which is known to our generation as Westminster Abbey.

The London Stone stood when Sebert built a church on the ruins of Diana's Temple, where now stands St. Paul's Cathedral. London was built before Rome, before the fall of the Assyrian monarchs, over a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

Who knows? Where I stood, old Chaucer may have stood to see his Canterbury Pilgrims pass. Falstaff, reeling home from Dame Quickly's Tavern with his load of sherris-sack, may have sat here to ponder on his honour. Shakespeare may have leaned on the old milestone as he watched the Virgin Queen's pageant to Tilbury Fort in Armada times. Through James Ball's and Jack Cade's uprising, through the Wars of the Roses, the Fire of London, the Plague, the Stuart upheaval, and Cromwell's stirring times—through all these the London Stone stood, "fixed in the ground very deep," says Stowe, "that if carts do runne against it through negligence the wheels be broken, and the stone itself unshaken." And now it links the bustle and roar of modern London with the strife out of which London grew, and keeps our conceits reminded of the forefathers who lived and fought in Britain here to make the way more smooth for us.

Ere cabs or omnibuses were; ere telephones, telegraphs, or railways; ere Magna Charta; before William the Conqueror brought our ancient nobility's ancestors over from Normandy—London knew this stone.

It has endured longer than any king, it has survived generations and dynasties of monarchs. "Walls have ears," they say, and Shakespeare "finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, and sermons in stones."

What a tale would he tell that could find the tongue of the London Stone!

Think of all the men and women who have passed it, seen it with their eyes, felt it with their hands; the millions of simple, faithful, anonymous people who have cheerfully slaved, and bled, and died, to help—as each according to his lights conceived—the honour, safety, and well-being of his country.

We have paid homage to the celebrated dead: what about those that have done their duty and have received neither fame nor monument? Their blood, too, cries out to me from the paving-stones of London.

But thanks to the efforts of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and Mr. Walter Crane, London is at last in a fair way to pay homage also to these unsung and unhonoured heroes of lowly life.

During the Jubilee of 1887 Mr. Watts urged that cloisters or galleries should be erected throughout the country and frescoes painted therein, to record the shining deeds of the Democracy's great men and great women. Such a Campo Santo is now being prepared in the new Postmen's Park in Aldersgate Street, and one of the first frescoes to be painted there by Mr. Crane will commemorate the valiant act of one Alice Ayres, a young nurse-girl who rescued her three young charges from a burning house, she herself perishing in the flames.

When I go to Paris, my favourite pilgrimage is to the Mur des FÉdÉrÉs in the PÈre-la-Chaise Cemetery, where the last of the Communists were mowed down by the mitrailleuse.

My sincerest worship of the dead in London will be tendered in the Campo Santo of the Postmen's Park, and I hope one day to pay my homage there to the memorial of Trooper Lockyer.