England -- Description and travel; Literary landmarks -- England; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Homes and haunts -- England
adjacent to the room in which she lodged during nearly eight months, at
the last of her wasted, unfortunate, but gentle and noble life. [That
room was in the house of Thomas Brydges, brother and deputy of Sir John
Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower, and its windows command an
unobstructed view of the Tower green, which was the place of the block.]
It could serve no good purpose to relate the particulars of those
visitations; but nobody doubts them--while he is in the Tower. It is a
place of mystery and horror, notwithstanding all that the practical
spirit of to-day has done to make it trivial and to cheapen its grim
glories by association with the commonplace.
¹ Many of these relics have since been disposed in a different
way.--Raleigh was incarcerated in various parts of the Tower, in the
course of his several imprisonments.
CHAPTER IV
RAMBLES IN LONDON
All old cities get rich in association, as a matter of course and
whether they will or no; but London, by reason of its great extent, as
well as its great antiquity, is richer in association than any modern
place on earth. The stranger scarcely takes a step without encountering
a new object of interest. The walk along the Strand and Fleet Street, in
particular, is continually on storied ground. Old Temple Bar still
stands (July 1877), though "tottering to its fall," and marks the
junction of the two streets. The statues of Charles the First and
Charles the Second on its western front would be remarkable anywhere, as
characteristic portraits. You stand beside that arch and quite forget
the passing throng, and take no heed of the tumult around, as you think
of Johnson and Boswell leaning against the Bar after midnight in the
far-off times and waking the echoes of the Temple Garden with their
frolicsome laughter. The Bar is carefully propped now, and they will
nurse its age as long as they can; but it is an obstruction to
travel--and it must disappear. (It was removed in the summer of 1878.)
They will probably set it up, newly built, in another place. They have
left untouched a little piece of the original scaffolding built around
St. Paul's; and that fragment of decaying wood may still be seen, high
upon the side of the cathedral. The Rainbow, the Mitre, the Cheshire
Cheese, Dolly's Chop-House, the Cock, and the Round Table--taverns or
public-houses that were frequented by the old wits--are still extant
(1877). The Cheshire Cheese is scarcely changed from what it was when
Johnson, Goldsmith, and their comrades ate beefsteak pie and drank
porter there, and the Doctor "tossed and gored several persons," as it
was his cheerful custom to do. The benches in that room are narrow,
incommodious, penitential; mere ledges of well-worn wood, on which the
visitor sits bolt upright, in difficult perpendicular; but there is,
probably, nothing on earth that would induce the owner to alter
them--and he is right.
Illustration: "Approach to Cheshire Cheese."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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