The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with him, and I will not
conceal from him that Duke Street, down a stretch of which I looked,
because the wife of Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred
there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses as any in
London. It was distinctly a relief, after paying this duty, to pass,
in Leadenhall Street, the stately bulk of India House, and think of the
former occupying the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in
compensation for coming so late to his work there. It was still better
when, by an accident happier than that which befell us at St. Catherine
Cree's, we unexpectedly entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street
to the church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New-Yorker's
interest from the picturesque fact that Henry Hudson and his ship's
company made their communion in it the night before he sailed away to
give his name to the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to
help the Dutch found the Tammany régime, which still flourishes at the
Hudson's mouth. The comprehensive Cunningham makes no mention of the
fact, but I do not know why my genealogist should have had the misgiving
which he expressed within the overhearing of the eager pew-opener
attending us. She promptly set him right. “Oh, 'e did _mike_ it 'ere,
sir. They've been and searched the records,” she said, so that the
reader now has it on the best authority.
I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assurance, the
sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces of Early English
architecture, and its look of being chopped in two; its intense quiet
and remoteness in the heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its
pew-opener mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which
pervade all old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may
not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as
the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the
city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or closing, and
the crowds thinned or thinning in their footways and wheelways, so that
we got from point to point in our desultory progress, incommoded only by
other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind.
History, of people and of princes, finance, literature, the arts of
every kind, were the phantoms that started up from the stones and the
blocks of the wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every
step. As I have already tried to express, it is always the same story.
London is too full of interest, and when I thought how I could have gone
over as much ground in New York without anything to distract me from
what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts
almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me
from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any
ignorance less dense would have found impassable with memories.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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