The Thames watermen have a plot set apart for themselves in St. Martin’s Churchyard. These amphibious and pugnacious beings were formerly notorious for their powers of sarcasm, though Dr. Johnson on a celebrated occasion put one of them out of countenance. In spite of coaches and sedan chairs--their horror in the times of the “Water Poet,” who must often have ferried Shakspere over to the Globe Theatre at the Bankside--they continued till the days of omnibuses and cheap cabs, rowing and singing, rejoicing in their scarlet tunics, and skimming to and fro over the Thames like swallows. There is a Westminster tradition of a waterman who pretended to be deaf, and who was much employed by lovers, barristers who wished to air their eloquence, and young M.P.s who wanted to recite their speeches undisturbed. In 1821 died Copper Holms, a well-known character on the river. He lived, with his wife and children, somewhere along the shore in an ark, which he had artfully framed from a West-country vessel, and which, coppers and all, cost him £150. The City brought an action to compel him to remove the obstruction. The honest fellow was buried in “The Waterman’s Churchyard,” on the south side of St. Martin’s Church.[451] In 1683 Dr. Thomas Tenison, vicar of the parish, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, lived in this street; he died at Lambeth in 1715. He founded in this parish a school and library. Though Swift did say he was “hot and heavy as a tailor’s iron,” he seems to have been one of the best and most tolerant of men, notwithstanding he attacked Hobbes and Bellarmine with his pen. He worked bravely during the plague, and was princely in his charities during the dreadful winter of 1683. It was he who prepared Monmouth for death, and smoothed Queen Mary’s dying pillow. He was a steady friend of William of Orange. Two doors from Slaughter’s, on the west side, but lower down, lived Ambrose Philips, from 1720 to 1724. Pope laughed at his “Pastorals,” which had been overpraised by Tickell. Though a friend of Addison and Steele, his sprightly but effeminate copies of verses procured him from Henry Carey the name of “Namby Pamby.” His “Winter Scene,” a sketch of a Danish winter, is, however, admirable. Ambrose Philips was laughed at for advertising in the _London Gazette_, of January 1714, for contributions to a _Poetical Miscellany_. He was a Leicestershire man, and chiefly remarkable for translating Racine’s “Distressed Mother.” When the Whigs came into power under George I. he was put into the commission of the peace, and made a Commissioner of the Lottery. He afterwards became Registrar of the Prerogative Court at Dublin, wrote in the _Free Thinker_, and died in 1749. Pope laughed at the small poet as-- “The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale for half-a-crown, Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains from hide-bound brains eight lines a year.”[452]