hinder them from running into desperation or hopelessness. In St Giles's Church lie Chapman, the earliest and best translator of Homer; and Andrew Marvell, the wit and patriot, whose poverty Charles II. could not bribe. We are as sure to think of these two men, and of all the good and pleasure they have done to the world, as of the less happy objects about us. The steeple of the church itself, too, is a handsome one; and there is a flock of pigeons in that neighbourhood, which we have stood with great pleasure to see careering about it of a fine afternoon, when a western wind had swept back the smoke towards the city, and showed the white of the stone steeple piercing up into a blue sky. So much for St Giles's, whose very name is a nuisance with some. It is dangerous to speak disrespectfully of old districts. Who would suppose that the Borough was the most classical ground in the metropolis? And yet it is undoubtedly so. The Globe Theatre was there, of which Shakespeare himself was a proprietor, and for which he wrote his plays. Globe Lane, in which it stood, is still extant, we believe, under that name. It is probable that he lived near it: it is certain that he must have been much there. It is also certain that on the Borough side of the river, then and still called the Bank-side, in the same lodging, having the same wardrobe, and, some say, with other participations more remarkable, lived Beaumont and Fletcher. In the Borough also, at St Saviour's, lie Fletcher and Massinger in one grave; in the same church, under a monument and effigy, lies Chaucer's contemporary, Gower; and from an inn in the Borough, the existence of which is still boasted, and the site pointed out by a picture and inscription, Chaucer sets out his pilgrims and himself on their famous road to Canterbury. To return over the water, who would expect anything poetical from East Smithfield? Yet there was born the most poetical even of poets -Spenser. Pope was born within the sound of Bow-bell, in a street no less anti-poetical than Lombard Street. So was Gray, in Cornhill. So was Milton, in Bread Street, Cheapside. The presence of the same great poet and patriot has given happy memories to many parts of the metropolis. He lived in St Bride's Churchyard, Fleet Street; in Aldersgate Street, in Jewin Street, in Barbican, in Bartholomew Close; in Holborn, looking back to Lincoln's Inn Fields; in Holborn, near Red Lion Square; in Scotland Yard; in a house looking to St James's Park, now belonging to an eminent writer on legislation,* and lately occupied by a celebrated critic and metaphysician, † and he died in the Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, and was buried in St Giles's, Cripplegate. Ben Jonson, who was born "in Hartshorne Lane, near Charing Cross," was at one time "master" of a theatre in Barbican. He appears "The sun (which doth the greatest comfort bring Methinks the little wit I had is lost Since I saw you; for wit is like a rest For three days past-wit that might warrant be Till that were cancelled; and, when that was gone, The other celebrated resort of the great wits of that time was the Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, close to Temple Bar. Ben Jonson lived also in Bartholomew Close, where Milton afterwards lived. It is in the passage from the lomew's. Aubrey gives it as a common opinion, cloisters of Christ's Hospital into St Bartho that at the time when Jonson's father-in-law made him help him in his business of brickLincoln's Inn garden-wall, which looks upon layer, he worked with his own hands upon the Chancery Lane, and which seems old enough to have some of his illustrious brick-and-mortar still remaining. Under the cloisters in Christ's Hospital (which stand in the heart of the city unknown to most persons, like a house kept invisible for young and learned eyes) lie buried a multitude of persons of all ranks; for it was once a monastery of Grey Friars. Among them is John of Bourbon, one of the prisoners taken at the battle of Agincourt. Here also lies Thomas Burdett, ancestor of the present Sir Francis, who was put to death in the reign of Edward IV., for wishing the horns of a favourite white stag, which the king had killed, in the body of the person who advised him to do it. here too (a sufficing contrast) lies Isabella, wife of Edward II. And "She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, placed upon her bosom! a thing that looks like the fantastic incoherence of a dream. It is well we did not know of her presence when at school; or, after reading one of Shakespeare's tragedies, we should have run twice as fast round the cloisters at night-time as we used. Camden, "the nourice of Antiquitie," received part of his education in this school; and here also, not to mention a variety of others known in the literary world, were bred two of the most powerful and deep-spirited writers of the present day;* whose visits to the cloisters we well remember. In a palace on the site of Hatton Garden, died John of Gaunt. Brook House, at the corner of the street of that name in Holborn, was the residence of the celebrated Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brook, the "friend of Sir Philip Sidney." In the same street died, by a voluntary death, of poison, that extraordinary person, Thomas Chatterton "The sleepless soul, that perished in his pride." -Wordsworth. minds one of the spirit of the "Beggar's Opera." Button's Coffee-house, the resort of the wits of Queen Anne's time, was in Russell Street-we believe, near where the Hummums now stand. We think we recollect reading, also, that in the same street, at one of the corners of Bow Street, was the tavern where Dryden held regal possession of the arm-chair. The whole of Covent Garden is classic ground, from its association with the dramatic and other wits of the times of Digden and Pope. Butler lived, perhaps died, in Rose Street, and was buried in Covent Garden churchyard; where Peter Pindar the other day followed him. In Leicester Square, on the site of Miss Linwood's exhibition and other houses, was the town mansion of the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester, the family of Sir Philip and Algernon Sidney. In the same square lived Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dryden lived and died in Gerrard Street, in a house which looked backwards into the garden of Leicester House. Newton lived in St Martin's Street, on the south side of the square. Steele He was buried in the workhouse in Shoe Lane-lived in Bury Street, St James's: he furnishes a circumstance at which one can hardly help feeling a movement of indignation. Yet what could beadles and parish officers know about such a being? No more than Horace Walpole. In Gray's Inn lived, and in Gray's Inn garden meditated, Lord Bacon. In Southampton Row, Holborn, Cowper was a fellow-clerk to an attorney with the future Lord Chancellor Thurlow. At the Fleet Street corner of Chancery Lane, Cowley, we believe, was born. In Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, was the house of Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, the precursor of Spenser, and one of the authors of the first regular English tragedy. On the demolition of this house, part of the ground was occupied by the celebrated theatre built after the Restoration, at which Betterton performed, and of which Sir William Davenant was manager. Lastly here was the house and printing-office of Richardson. In Bolt Court, not far distant, lived Dr Johnson, who resided also for some time in the Temple. A list of his numerous other residences is to be found in Boswell.+ Congreve died in Surrey Street, in the Strand, at his own house. At the corner of Beaufort Buildings was Lilly's, the perfumer, at whose house the Tatler was published. In Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, Voltaire lodged while in London, at the sign of the White Peruke. Tavistock Street was then, we believe, the Bond Street of the fashionable world; as Bow Street was before. The change of Bow Street from fashion to the police, with the theatre still in attendance, re an illustrious precedent for the loungers in St James's Street, where a scandal-monger of those times delighted to detect Isaac Bickerstaff in the person of Captain Steele, idling before the coffee-houses, and jerking his leg and stick alternately against the pavement. We have mentioned the birth of Ben Jonson near Charing Cross. Spenser died at an inn, where he put up on his arrival from Ireland, in King Street, Westminster-the same which runs at the back of Parliament Street to the Abbey. Sir Thomas More lived at Chelsea. Addison lived and died in Holland House, Kensington, now the residence of the accomplished nobleman who takes his title from it. In Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, lived Handel; and in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, Gibbon. We have omitted to mention that De Foe kept a hosier's shop in Cornhill; and that on the site of the present Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, stood the mansion of the Wriothesleys, Earls of Southampton, one of whom was the celebrated friend of Shakespeare. But what have we not omitted also? No less an illustrious head than the Boar's, in Eastcheap-the Boar's Head Tavern, the scene of Falstaff's revels. We believe the place is still marked out by a similar sign. But who knows not Eastcheap and the Boar's Head! Have we not all been there time out of mind? And is it not a more real as well as notorious thing to us than the London Tavern, or the Crown and Anchor, or the Hummums, or White's, or What's-his-name's, or any other of your contemporary and fleeting taps? But a line or two, a single sentence, in an author of former times, will often give a value to the commonest object. It not only gives us a sense of its duration, but we seem to be look. ing at it in company with its old observer; and we are reminded at the same time of all that was agreeable in him. We never saw, for instance, even the gilt ball at the top of the College of Physicians, without thinking of that pleasant mention of it in Garth's "Dispensary," and of all the wit and generosity of that amiable man: "Not far from that most celebrated place,* Where angry Justice shows her awful face: Where little villains must submit to fate, That great ones may enjoy the world in state; There stands a dome, majestic to the sight, And sumptuous arches bear its oval height: A golden globe, placed high with artful skill, Seems, to the distant sight, a gilded pill." Gay, in describing the inconvenience of the late narrow part of the Strand, by St Clement's, took away a portion of its unpleasantness to the next generation, by associating his memory with the objects in it. We did not miss without regret even the "combs" that hung "dangling in your face" at a shop which he describes, and which was standing till the improvements took place. The rest of the picture is still alive ("Trivia," book iii.): "Where the fair columns of St Clement stand, Whose straitened bounds encroach upon the Strand; Teain follows team, crowds heaped on crowds appear, There is a touch in the winter picture in the same poem, which everybody will recognise : "At White's the harnessed chairman idly stands, And swings around his waist his tingling hands." The bewildered passenger in the Seven Dials is compared to Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. And thus we come round to the point at which we began. Before we rest our wings, however, we must take another dart over the city, as far as Stratford-at-Bow, where with all due tenderness for boarding-school French, a joke of Chaucer's has existed as a piece of local humour for nearly four hundred and fifty years. Speaking of the Prioress, who makes such a delicate figure among his Canterbury Pilgrims, he tells us, among her other accomplishments, that "French she spake full faire and featously;" adding, with great gravity— "After the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe; For French of Paris was to her unknowe." * The Old Bailey. A TALE FOR A CHIMNEY CORNER. A man who does not contribute his quota of grim stories now-a-days seems hardly to be free of the republic of letters. He is bound to wear a death's head as part of his insignia. If he does not frighten everybody, he is nobody. If he does not shock the ladies, what can be expected of him? We confess we think very cheaply of these stories in general. A story, merely horrible or even awful, which contains no sentiment elevating to the human heart and its hopes, is a mere appeal to the least judicious, least healthy, and least masculine of our passions-fear. They whose attention can be gravely arrested by it are in a fit state to receive any absurdity with their wits off; and this is the cause why less talents are required to enforce it than in any other species of composition. With this opinion of such things, we may be allowed to say, that we would undertake to write a dozen horrible stories in a day, all of which should make the common worshippers of power, who were not in the very healthiest condition, turn pale. We would tell of haunting old women, and knocking ghosts, and solitary lean hands, and Empusas on one leg, and ladies growing longer and longer, and horrid eyes meeting us through key-holes, and plaintive heads, and shrieking statues, and shocking anomalies of shape, and things which when seen drive people mad; and indigestion knows what besides. But who would measure talents with a leg of veal, or a German sausage? Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offences, particularly of blood and wounds. A child has a reasonable respect for a raw-head-and-bloodybones, because all images whatsoever of pain and terror are new and fearful to his inexperienced age: but sufferings merely physical (unless sublimited like those of Philoctetes) are commonplaces to grown man. Images, to become awful to him, must be removed from the grossness of the shambles. A death's head was a respectable thing in the hands of a poring monk, or of a nun compelled to avoid the idea of life and society, or of a hermit already buried in the desert. Holbein's "Dance of Death," in which every grinning skeleton leads along a man of rank, from the Pope to the gentleman, is a good memento mori; but there the skeletons have an air of the ludicrous and satirical. If we were threatened with them in a grave way, as spectres, we should have a right to ask how they could walk about without their muscles. Thus, many of the tales written by such authors as the late Mr Lewis, who wanted sentiment to complete his talents, are quite puerile. When his spectral nuns go about bleeding, we think they ought in decency to have applied to some ghost of a surgeon. His little grey men, who sit munching hearts, are of a piece with fellows that eat cats for a wager. Stories that give mental pain to no purpose, or to very little purpose compared with the unpleasant ideas they excite of human nature, are as gross mistakes, in their way, as these, and twenty times as pernicious: for the latter become ludicrous to grown people. They originate also in the same extremes, either of callousness, or morbid want of excitement, as the others. But more of these hereafter. Our business at present is with things ghastly and ghostly. A ghost story, to be a good one, should unite as much as possible objects such as they are in life with a preternatural spirit. And to be a perfect one-at least, to add to the other utility of excitement a moral utility-they should imply some great sentiment; something that comes out of the next world to remind us of our duties in this; or something that helps to carry on the idea of our humanity into after-life, even when we least think we shall take it with us. When "the buried majesty of Denmark" revisits earth to speak to his son Hamlet, he comes armed, as he used to be, in his complete steel. His visor is raised, and the same fine face is there; only, in spite of his punishing errand and his own sufferings, with A countenance more in sorrow than anger." When Donne, the poet, in his thoughtful eagerness to reconcile life and death, had a figure of himself painted in a shroud, and laid by his bedside in a coffin, he did a higher thing than the monks and hermits with their skulls. It was taking his humanity with him into the other world, not affecting to lower the sense of it by regarding it piecemeal, or in the framework. Burns, in his "Tam o' Shanter," shows the dead in their coffins, after the same fashion. He does not lay bare to us their skeletons or refuse,— things with which we can connect no sympathy or spiritual wonder. They still are flesh and body, to excite the one; yet so look and behave, inconsistent in their very consistency, as to excite the other. "Coffins stood round like open presses, Which showed the dead in their last dresses: And, by some devilish cantrip sleight, Each, in his cauld hand, held a light.” Reanimation is perhaps the most ghastly of all ghastly things, uniting as it does an appearance of natural interdiction from the next world with a supernatural experience of it. Our human consciousness is jarred out of its self-possession. The extremes of habit and newness, of commonplace and astonishment, meet suddenly, without the kindly introduction of death and change; and the stranger appals us in proportion. When the account appeared the other day in the newspapers of the galvanised dead body, whose fea tures as well as limbs underwent such contortions that it seemed as if it were about to rise up, one almost expected to hear, for the first time, news of the other world. Perhaps the most appalling figure in Spenser is that of Maleger (" Faery Queene," book ii., c. 11): "Upon a tygre swift and fierce he rode, That as the winde ran underneath his lode, Mr Coleridge, in that voyage of his to the brink of all unutterable things, the "Ancient Mariner" (which works out, however, a fine sentiment), does not set mere ghosts or hobgob. lins to man the ship again, when its crew are dead; but reanimates, for a while, the crew themselves. There is a striking fiction of this sort in Sale's "Notes upon the Koran." Solomon dies during the building of the Temple, but his body remains leaning on a staff, and overlooking the workmen, as if it were alive; till a worm gnawing through the prop, he falls down. The contrast of the appearance of humanity with something mortal or supernatural, is always the more terrible in proportion as it is complete. In the pictures of the temptations of saints and hermits, where the holy person is surrounded, teased, and enticed, with devils and fantastic shapes, the most shocking phantasm is that of the beautiful woman. To return also to the "Ancient Mariner." The most appalling personage in Mr Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" is the spectre-woman, who is called Life-in-Death. He renders the most hideous abstraction more terrible than it could otherwise have been, by embodying it in its own reverse. "Death" not only "lives" in it, but the "unutterable" becomes uttered. To see such an unearthly passage end in such earthliness, seems at the moment to turn commonplace itself into a sort of spectral doubt. The Mariner, after describing the horrible calm, and the rotting sea, in which the ship was stuck, is speaking of a strange sail which he descried in the distance. "The western wave was all a-flame, "And straight the sun was flecked with bars (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered, With broad and burning face. "Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) "Are those her ribs, through which the sun Did peer, as through a grate? "Her lips were red, her looks were free, But we must come to Mr Coleridge's story with all our imagination upon us. Now let us put our knees a little nearer the fire, and tell a homelier one about life-in-death. The groundwork of it is in Sandys's "Commentary upon Ovid," and quoted from Sabinus.* A gentleman of Bavaria, of a noble family, was so afflicted at the death of his wife, that, unable to bear the company of any other person, he gave himself entirely up to a solitary way of living. This was the more remarkable in him, as he had been a man of jovial habits, fond of his wine and visitors, and impatient of having his numerous indulgencies contradicted. But in the same temper, perhaps, might be found the cause of his sorrow; for, though he would be impatient with his wife, as with others, yet he loved her as one of the gentlest wills he had; and the sweet and unaffected face which she always turned round upon his anger might have been a thing more easy for him to trespass upon while living, than to forget when dead and gone. His very anger towards her, compared with that towards others, was a relief to him, and rather a wish to refresh himself in the balmy feeling of her patience than to make her unhappy herself, or to punish her, as some would have done, for that virtuous contrast to his own vice. But whether he bethought himself, after her death, that this was a very selfish mode of loving; or whether, as some thought, he had wearied out her life with habits so contrary to her own; or whether, as others reported, he had put it to a fatal risk by some lordly piece of self-will, in consequence of which she had caught a fever on the cold river during a night of festivity; he surprised even those who thought that he loved her by the extreme bitterness of his grief. The very mention of festivity, though he was patient for the first day or two, afterwards threw him into a passion of rage; but, by degrees, even his rage followed his other old habits. He was gentle, but ever silent. He ate and drank but sufficient to keep him alive, and used to spend the greater part of the day in the spot where his wife was buried. of the burial-ground, when he was accosted by the mild voice of somebody coming to meet him. "It is a blessed evening, sir," said the voice. The gentleman looked up. Nobody but himself was allowed to be in the place at that hour, and yet he saw with astonishment a young chorister approaching him. He was going to express some wonder when, he said, the modest though assured look of the boy, and the extreme beauty of his countenance, which glowed in the setting sun before him, made an irresistible addition to the singular sweetness of his voice, and he asked him, with an involuntary calmness and a gesture of respect, not what he did there, but what he wished. "Only to wish you all good things," answered the stranger, who had now come up; "and to give you this letter." The gentleman took the letter, and saw upon it, with a beating yet scarcely bewildered heart, the handwriting of his wife. He raised his eyes again to speak to the boy, but he was gone. He cast them far and near round the place, but there were no traces of a passenger. He then opened the letter; and by the divine light of the setting sun, read these words: "TO MY DEAR HUSBAND, WHO SORROWS FOR HIS WIFE. "Otto, my husband, the soul you regret so is returned. You will know the truth of this, and be prepared with calmness to see it, by the divineness of the messenger who has passed you. You will find me sitting in the public walk, praying for you-praying that you may never more give way to those gusts of passion, and those curses against others, which divided us. "This, with a warm hand, from the living "BERTHA." Otto (for such, it seems, was the gentleman's name) went instantly, calmly, quickly, yet with a sort of benumbed being, to the public walk. He felt, but with only a half-consciousness, as if he glided without a body. But all his spirit was awake, eager, intensely conscious. It seemed to him as if there had been but two things in the world-Life and Death; and that Death was dead. All else appeared to have been a dream. He had awaked from a waking state, and found himself all eye, and spirit, and locomotion. He said to himself once, as he went, "This is not a dream. I will ask my great ancestors to-morrow to my new bridal feast, for they are alive." Otto had been calm at first, but something of old and triumphant feelings seemed again to come over him. Was He was going there one evening in a very he again too proud and confident? Did his melancholy manner, with his eyes turned to-earthly humours prevail again, when he thought wards the earth, and had just entered the rails * The Saxon Latin poet, we presume, Professor of Belles-Lettres at Frankfort. We know nothing of him except from a biographical dictionary. them least upon him? We shall see. The Bavarian arrived at the public walk. It was full of people with their wives and children, enjoying the beauty of the evening. Something like common fear came over him, as he went in |